Thank you all for joining. Hello, my name is Andrew Webster. I'm with Experience Point. I'd like to officially welcome you to Experience Point's latest webinar, The Innovator's Journey. We're in conversation with Jeanne Liedtka. And before we get started, I would like to introduce myself, Andrew Webster. I lead our workforce transformation practice here at Experience Point. Really excited to be joined by Jeanne, who will introduce herself in a moment, and longtime friend, collaborator, colleague, Adam Billing. Adam, would you be so kind as to introduce yourself? Sure, hello everybody. So my name is Adam Billing. I'm the founder of TreeHouse Innovation which is a UK based design innovation consultancy. And as Andrew said, longtime friend and partner VP. And for the last year or so, we've been working with Jeanne Liedtka and her amazing author team of Karen Hold and Jessica Eldridge to take some of the lessons from the really groundbreaking research that they've been doing and translate those into tools, workshops, experiences that help people kind of bring this to life their world, in their work with their organizations and teams. So really thrilled to be here. And yeah, can't wait to hear all your questions and reactions later in the session. Thank you, Njeen. Well, I'm Jeanne Liedtka. I am a faculty member here at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business. I am a dyed in the wool old business person strategist who fell in love with design thinking and has just been fascinated with it ever since. And just thrilled to be here with Andrew and Adam to share with you some of what we've been learning and put in our new book. Thank you. So before we hear more and we're all excited to just want to run through a few housekeeping items to ensure your experience all is optimized. So we're going to be together for forty five minutes from end to end. The first twenty, twenty five minutes will be dedicated to key insights from the innovator's journey from Jeanne. In the remaining twenty to twenty five minutes, we'll have a bit of a fireside chat with Jeanne, Adam and I, and we'll prioritize questions from you. Actually, right before you all joined, we were saying to Jean how excited we were to hear from her and she mentioned how excited she was to hear from you all. So we're looking forward to the questions that you have and we would love for you to submit those questions. So as we're discussing, as Jean is presenting, please you can enter your questions in the Q and A tab here in Zoom or in chat if that's easier for you. You may have noticed there's a flashing red light in the upper corner of the screen. That indicates that this is being recorded and that's good because it means you'll be emailed a copy of this webinar to review at any time. Along with the webinar, you'll get the presentation. So for those of you that like to take notes, hopefully that eases the note taking burden just a little bit. You'll get a copy of this presentation and it will be made available on demand as well at experiencepoint dot com. So if you'd like to share this with any of your colleagues, this webinar, you'll be free to do so. With all of that being said, let's kick today's webinar off. I'm gonna hand it over to you to take it away, Jean. Thank you, Andrew. Well, I'm excited to be here with Adam. We've co created a lot of the things over the last year of working together and we're excited to share them with you. First, I'm gonna talk a little bit about our research. At Darden we've been doing research on design thinking for over ten years now. And in particular, we've been paying attention to the learner's journey. So this started in about two ten when we first created the design thinking course for our own MBAs. It's continued with the Coursera course, one of the original design thinking Coursera courses which has now registered upwards of three hundred and fifty thousand people which is just incredible. And it's continued with work that my co authors have done in Summer of Design which is a program for professionals in the DC area who want to learn design thinking while applying it to a social sector project. So throughout all of these interactions with all of these students, we've been focused on tracking the experience of the learner. We've used diaries. We've used diagnostic instruments like the DISC. We've asked people to pulse us on weekly check ins how they're feeling. And really that's the data that forms the underpinning of what I'm going to present to you now. It's this very personal story of the journeys of the innovators that we've been privileged to work with over the last ten years or so. So we've captured it all in a new book, which is hot off the press. Actually, it's not actually off the press yet, but we're hoping it's still hot. So it's due out hopefully in a few days that kind of captures everything we've talked about. Let me start by saying, okay, at some level we know a lot about design thinking. In particular, there's a very clear set of activities that regardless of whether you're using the double diamond or the four questions that we work with here at Darden or whatever methodology, we're looking at a set of activities that constitute design thinking. These begin with data gathering of course, then we look for insights. We establish design criteria or in some approaches, how might we questions. We generate ideas, we prototype them, we experiment. Very straightforward at some level. And a lot of our focus as educators has been on helping students to do a better job of these activities. What we found in our research though is behind those activities, almost hidden from view often is a set of experiences that the learners are having. And that in fact, in some ways it's the role of those activities to trigger those experiences because it is the depth of the learner's experience which produces the kind of design practice that allows us to achieve the really transformational outcomes of design thinking. And in part it does that by changing who we are. So much of our focus in design thinking is on designing for others. But what our research suggests to us is that we must first become someone new in order to create something new. And each stage of the process then has a role to play. And they begin with these doing activities, they move to these experience activities, and then finally, at a very personal level, we become someone new. As we progress through these stages of immersion, where we first immerse ourselves in the life of those we're designing for. Then in sense making, we make sense of all that data. We pull it out. We develop deep insights. Then we align. So much of design thinking is working across difference. That at some level we have to come together and we have to give up and let go of some of who we are and what we want in order to find higher order solutions together that we couldn't find alone. Once we've set that foundation of alignment and certainly here you'll notice that alignment precedes idea generation. Because of course we think of idea generation as brainstorming but idea generation is really about creating the conditions for emergence. Emergence is really to me the holy grail of design thinking. Emergence is where we come together with a group of people and we see together higher order solutions that literally none of us were capable of seeing alone. That's where the real payoff is. If the best of design thinking is brainstorming and everyone individually in their own little worlds writing things up on white boards and on post its, we'll never really achieve the transformational results of design. So once that emergence has occurs, then we move into what we usually think of as prototyping. But at a personal level is really much more. It's developing the ability to vividly see first in our own minds and then in the minds of the people we're designing for some new future that doesn't yet exist. So whether we're creating storyboards or videos or three d prototypes, right? What matters is not the prototyping itself. It's that enactment of a new world and making that new world feel so real that people can give us great feedback when we move into experimentation. In fact, I think that experimentation and learning and action are really where the to me forefront in design thinking education is. I think they've not received the amount of attention the front end of design has. And yet for me at least, the personal changes that we see in learners are every bit as profound as in the front end of design. That letting go of the fear of being wrong, developing a resiliency and adaptiveness, being able to listen critical feedback, take it in without defensiveness. All of these changes are critically important. So each of these phases of the design thinking contributes to changing who we are. Immersion helps us become empathetic and curious. And I'll talk a little bit about curiosity because again, I think that's another lesser recognized element of design thinking. Sense making leaves us moving from confused and overwhelmed by our data to confident and inspired that we can create new futures for those we're designing for. As we move into alignment, we find our collaborative selves and we agree to work together united by a common sense of the current reality of the people we're designing for rather than our own parochial current realities wherever we come from. Then we move into emergence and we become comfortable with difference. And I think this is again another critical contributor of design thinking that we haven't talked much about. I think in these days where diversity and inclusion is so important to us design thinking offers a toolkit for how to have inclusive conversations across whatever we define the difference as. Then finally, we learn how to bring things to life and then we learn how to be a learner. We move from knower to learner. And in a world of change, my favorite quote is the learner shall inherit the earth and the learner shall find themselves perfectly suited for a world that no longer exists. Let me give you an example of this just with the immersion stage to give you a little bit more detail about what this looks like and the core components of how we've addressed each of these phases in the book. So immersion starts with these activities and they're all very familiar to us. Ethnographic interviews, shadowing or mirroring, diaries, photo journals. Probably these are some of the most familiar to us immersion activities. The question is through what mindset do we perform those activities? And have this kind of symbiotic relationship between acting in new ways and thinking in new ways. We know that just because you go out and do a few ethnographic interviews, it doesn't mean that you've experienced immersion. And it doesn't necessarily come with that profound shift in our worldviews that immersion fully experienced does. So here we've just captured a few of those changes. We're moving from an egocentricity to an empathy. We're moving from a level of certainty that we all have the right answer, right, to an awareness of our personal biases. Especially for business people, I think the movement from detached and distant to emotionally engaged and curious at a personal level feels like a big shift and an important one. When we start to talk about change management, that emotional engagement is what provides the fuel for people to be willing to change their behaviors. We move from impatient, action oriented people who immediately wanna solve problems to a willingness to invest time to really stay in the problem and understand current reality. And then finally, and very importantly, we move from accepting the status quo definitions of the problem to treating the problem itself. Well, what's the science behind that? One of the things we wanted to do in this new book was to link the decades of social science to why design thinking works. Mean, we often pretend that design thinking is just a black box and no one really knows why it works the way it does. But organizational psychologists, cognitive psychologists, they've studied this even by evolutionary biologists have studied this and they understand well some of the underlying driving mechanisms. So for instance, mirror neurons, right? The question of is empathy innate? Do we all have the capability for empathy, for walking in the shoes of another? Scientists argue that mirror neurons are our biological basis for empathy. They fire the same neural pathways when we observe someone else going through something as though we were going through it. And they form that basis for empathy, which we all have. But merely because we have mirror neurons doesn't mean that we can overcome this kind of fear of engaging with each other. The fight or flight is very deeply embedded in our amygdalas, right? Our old prehistoric brains that helped us survive in the days of large predators. So we have to kind of short circuit that deep biological impulse to keep away from others if we really wanna emotionally engage. One of the things that does fear us is curiosity. And I've really enjoyed reading the research about curiosity lately. Curiosity turns out to play a huge role in creating the incentive for us to engage rather than avoid. Curiosity sets up this virtuous cycle where we're interested, so we're willing to learn. And then the more we learn, the more interested we become. And so nurturing curiosity is very important if we want a deep experience of immersion. And then finally, of course, cognitive psychology with Kahneman and Tversky on has helped us understand the many cognitive biases that plague our decision making processes and the way in which design thinking can quite explicitly tackle things like hypothesis confirmation bias. It's really critically important. So if we look at this mindset, one of the things that has been important to us in this research was finding actionable observable behaviors. For those of us who are educators and facilitators and who live in a world where we're trying to help people develop deep competencies, it's very important that we name those competencies so that we can measure them in order to know whether or not we're making the same kind of progress in our learning experience that we want to have. So we've looked at these mindsets and based on our observation of students over the years created a set of behavioral competencies that we call in a rather curious way, right? The minimum viable competencies. Now what are minimum viable competencies? It's kind of strange language, right? We obviously ripped it off for minimum viable product. And it comes from research we've done that looks at the ROI of design thinking. One of the interesting observations in our research looking at the ROI of design thinking is that if we compare the level of sophistication of the competency of the designer, person engaged in design thinking, the innovator, with the level of outcomes they're able to reach. And when we think of outcomes from fairly superficial to quite transformational, kind of the solving of the wicked problems we talk about. What's intriguing to us is that the competencies move in thresholds and it's attaining a threshold that determines what benefits from design thinking you're able to obtain. The most interesting finding there is that as we move people from beginners to what we've called an intermediate level of competency, there is a dramatic effect on the extent to which their use of design thinking produces a return on investment. What is equally intriguing is that in the movement from intermediate to expert level, we see no increase. This suggests to us that if we can help people reach this intermediate, this minimum level of competency in design thinking, we can in fact reap many of the benefits of design thinking and get a return on our investment. So that's why we've talked about these minimum viable competencies. Each of the phases has its own mindset movement and those movements in mindset we can trace to a set of behavioral competencies. And here in the emergent stage, you see we talk about a mindset of empathy and we immediately start to talk about how we listen. So there's a set of behaviors around listening. We talk about awareness and we begin to talk about the ability to identify our own biases, to ask good questions, right? For people to stay fully present, to look for opportunities rather than solutions. And then as we've talked before, to be critical and probe deeply for root causes of problems. So these minimum viable competencies, Adam will talk later, we've created a research based instrument around them. There's potential to use them in three sixty degree work. And I'm very excited about this idea that they will allow us pathway to design thinking competency in ways that we can demonstrate quite clearly. Now, we know that brain circuitry and biases aside, the stage of immersion, the willingness to fully embrace immersion can be very intimidating to people, particularly the non designers, the people I work with who often have backgrounds in science or medicine or business. Right? People who've been raised in a pretty linear model like myself, I'm an accountant by training and who've been taught there is one right answer. Stepping into the uncertainty, accepting the uncertainty, accepting that I'm entering a process where I don't have any idea what the answer may be is really challenging, right? Most of us like well defined problems and we like answers that are already visible at the start of the process. Design thinking provides neither of those. And so recognizing the difficulty of asking people to step into this level of uncertainty is really critical. We talked about listening before, overwhelmingly most of us have been taught to listen to judge not to understand. So there's some basic listening training we have to do. Being fully present. Most of us listen half heartedly through our own biases. Getting people to be fully present in their listening, their non biased listening to others. One of my pet peeves is someone who came out of a very analytic world is that we've been taught a definition of data that if it doesn't have numbers and quantitative things associated with it, it's not real data. And that design thinking is not data driven. Well, thinking is intensely data driven. In fact, for me it is the most directly data driven methodology for decision making. But it's a different kind of It's a qualitative data. And in the beginning of design thinking in the stage of immersion in particular, we're not trying to prove anything which is also what we've been taught data is supposed to do, right? We're trying to inspire more creative thinking directed at the people we're designing for. Just helping people to understand that difference of data as inspiration versus proof can be really important in freeing them to embrace design thinking. Finally, we all know our experiences make us the valuable people we are and they already also create a set of blinders that prevent our learning. So we need to be aware of all of these as we move into the process. But we can't give up because immersion matters so much. Immersion sets the foundation for the entire rest of the design thinking process. A failed experience of immersion, a superficial introduction to immersion will derail the rest of the process. We won't listen to open views in the same way. We won't understand hypothesis driven mentality. And again, I'm a big fan of hypothesis driven mentality in a changing world. We all need to learn how to formulate and test hypotheses. And in immersion, as we begin to appreciate the complexity of the human beings and how different they are than we, we begin to understand why we have to treat what we think we believe is true instead as a hypothesis. Finally, I think cultivating curiosity, asking good questions, we've talked about that. And most importantly, holding people in the problem. There's nothing harder than to hold action oriented business people, for example, in the problem. They want to immediately go to the solution. We're all about solving not wallowing around in the current reality. But it's that wallowing in the current reality that gives us the insights that allow us to do the breakthrough thinking. And just having a set of tools and a structure that holds people there and then acknowledging how hard it is to be held there is just incredibly powerful. So now here's the million dollar question, right? How do we better support this in others? How do we help people stay in the problem? Right? How do we help them be cognizant of whether they are fully present? How do we help them let go of getting it right? These are the basic things we need to accomplish, right? We have to create a methodology and a structure and a toolkit that treats the problem itself as a hypothesis and encourages people to experiment with different definitions of the problem and different scopes. We have to teach people how to listen, not half heartedly and through their own biases, but to really listen to the person who's sharing some truth with them. Anxiety that shows up as getting it right is in my experience with our students, one of the biggest impediments. Anxiety is a terrific blocker of fully experiencing anything. And as an instructor, I am aware that perhaps the most important thing I do for my students is to help them deal with their own anxiety, right? Design thinking is a mental game, right? And it's unproductive to worry about whether we will ever get a great answer, right? Now it is productive to worry about whether I'm interviewing the right people and whether I'm asking good questions and whether I'm having deep insights. So literally I give them a list of things. Here's what you're allowed to worry about during immersion and here's what you are not allowed to worry about. One is productive, one is not. Those of you who know me and have read my previous books know that I'm a structure junkie. Designers, I think have a different personality and often don't need structure. The people I work with, non designers, critically need structure. Structure equals safety. Structure reduces anxiety. Structure makes it okay to stay in the problem. There's a whole set of things that structure accomplishes for us early on in the learning process that makes it as counterintuitive as it sounds, people be creative by giving them more structure. I really think that's critical. That's been a key finding of ours. We have to keep pushing people to work more deeply, right? Again, we're used to one off, we get an answer, we're done, right? This idea of continually revisiting the data and pushing each other to go deeper and deeper and getting people to slow down to move faster. We live in a world that is dominated by this notion of efficiency and it's a false notion. It says the sooner we get to a solution, the better. But often if we rush, it turns out to be the wrong solution. So all of this has kind of come together and created an experience in immersion. Now, what really makes it tricky in our research is that everyone's not having the same experience at any stage of the process. So for about ten years now, we've used an instrument called the DiSC, which basically pulls out some underlying personality preferences for people. You see here the very different journey across the six phases that we've talked about by the different disc types, radically different journeys. So part of what we've tried to do in this book is to unpack that. Look at how that journey through design thinking, for instance, can largely be a very comfortable and pleasant thing for someone whose personality is that of an influencer. But for those who are analysts, can be painful a good deal of the way through the process. So leadership changes as well. When we're asked, what does it mean to lead a group going through design thinking? Well, at each stage of these processes, we have to do things like an immersion, make talking about emotions legitimate in organizations that often have not done that. We have to encourage people to become hypothesis driven, force them to prioritize and create clear design criteria, push back on early compromise. I think getting to higher order solutions, it is critical that people don't do what Herb Simon called satisficing, picking the least worst solution everyone will agree to. We have to demand prototypes as leaders and we have to demand experiments. And if we do all of those things, we will force in some ways a deeper experience and we will reap a set of benefits for the organization from design thinking. And to me, a set of benefits around discovering a more authentic self at a personal level. And so it's a win win. So with that, let me having talked a lot, the floor over to Adam for a minute to talk a little bit about the logistics of what we've created. Sure thing. Thank you, Jeanne. So yeah, this is a look at the assessment itself, which is a really important part of all this. Because, I mean, in our work at TreeHouse, we've worked with thousands of different leaders, individuals, teams, and we've observed that there's been that change. And we've felt it ourselves, know, we're kind of instinctively aware that this sort of transformation, this becoming that Jeanne has talked about is happening. But one of the things I think makes this research so important is the fact that this is taking a big step into measuring it, quantifying it, making tangible, and thereby making it something that we can improve and work on in a very kind of intentional and targeted way. So the way the assessment works, it's in beta. So you guys are among the first to have a glimpse of it. It's pretty exciting. So it's a series of questions that you go through and you ask about these specific behaviors, these minimum viable competencies that Jeanne was talking about. And it's a self assessment, three sixty on the way. But you complete a series of say forty or so questions, and then you receive a report that we can take a look at now. Kick over to the next slide. So the first thing that you get in the report is sort of this high level overview that shows how you scored in each of those main phases of a design process. So, you can see here for this person, you know, immersion alignment emergence, all very high. Imagining, you know, looks like those are as a group a bit lower. So, that's sort that first indicator of where they might want to look. And then it goes a level deeper. So here we've just pulled two pages out, one for the immersion piece and one for imagining. And as you'll see what we've got is a kind of deep dive into a bit more of what is happening in each of those phase, but then a breakout of those specific MVCs. So that the individual can see where they were strong, and then use that to take those forward into some personal development planning. So they can, as Jeanne said, kind of create that pathway to kind of intentionally improving and developing. So, it just gives people a lot more ability to kind of take control of their own development journey, in a way to make the impact that that development is having a lot more tangible. So, and as yeah, right there, think the, as I mentioned, this is brand new. There's a lot of development still ongoing. The sort of first workshop that we're gonna be doing that's sort of a deeper dive into this. We'll talk about this a bit later is happening on the tenth. Some more info on how to register for that if this has kind of whetted your appetite and you are curious to go little bit deeper, you'll have an opportunity to very, very soon. But yeah, with that guys, would really like to just kind of hand over back to Andrew and really to all of you to start hearing some of your questions about everything that you've just heard. Yeah, please, we'd love to see some of the questions you have start to come in the Q and A and in chat. Thanks, Adam. Thanks so much, Jeanne. Inspiring, thought provoking. I wish we had twenty times the amount of time we have right now. The first question that I was going to ask, now I hear it's going to be at least it depends on the output of the assessment or that persona, But it was really interesting you mentioned that level of competency as compared to level of outcomes. The biggest leap is moving from beginner to intermediate. That's where the big bump is. I was going to ask, now tell me if this no longer makes sense given what we just heard, but what are some of those big experiences that might help us migrate from beginner to intermediate, if there is a general way to answer that question? Well, I think it has to do with the depth with which the innovator is able to engage at each stage of the process. The MVCs are behaviours that people exhibit. And so the question is what experience do we give them that allows them to practice and gain confidence in those behaviours? So often in something like immersion, immersion is always interesting. I joke that my MBAs feel that they could run a major organisation five minutes after graduation. But when I tell them they have to go to the supermarket and interview people, they panic completely. So much of the emerging experience is just shoving people into the water right? And just doing it and then giving them guidance around the kind of questions they're asking, giving them a chance to kind of realize where their interview guides are working and not and pushing deeper. But it's all about the depth of that experience and it differs for every phase of design thinking. I think that's the complexity of it. Thank you and fascinating. And on immersion, so we need patients to immerse ourselves into a context, you made that clear several times, like we need to wallow in the current reality. There's a lot published out there about like one of the principles of design, we need a bias for action at points as well, And there's so many, it depends in here and some of those tensions, how do we learn into a mindset like that where here we need patients or we need to wallow with the problem, but at times we need the bias for action. How do we learn into those mindsets where flexibility is necessary? And I think that's one of the things that makes design thinking so complex to acquire as a deep practice, Andrew. We ask the opposite of people at different points process. So during the front end of the process, we ask people to become emotionally engaged with the people that they're designing for, right? Then we get to testing and we want them suddenly to be completely emotionally detached and objective, right? So subjective and emotionally engaged to detached emotionally and objective, right? And then we don't acknowledge that with people, right? We kind of pretend that we haven't just turned them one hundred and eighty degrees, right? So part of the power, I think, in our work right now, I think, is to build that self awareness. To be able to say to people, okay, we asked you to do this, yes. But now it's time to do the opposite of that for a while, right? And depending upon what happens, you may loop back and go get emotionally engaged again. But for us, just telling people that's happening to them, telling them it's okay, working to reduce their anxiety is tremendously important. Because what we also know is you have to pull people through the entire process. If people give up at some point, if it gets too messy during sense making and they stop at superficial insights, well then everything else isn't as good, right? Because you start with superficial insights, everything that follows is inferior to what could have been. So I think acknowledging how hard it is, specifically what's in the way at every level of the process, acknowledging that our personalities make some parts of the process easier or more difficult than others. That goes a long way I think in having people be willing to hold themselves in the discomfort. Thank you for that. And one of the big insights you shared is around safety, structure equals safety. So there's something meta here about empathizing with people that you're asking to empathize with as they're moving through dimensions of this process, empathize, recognize like, yes, this is difficult and I told you not to do that thing before but it's cool and you need to do it now. That's what you're experiencing is part of the process. I'm gonna have one more question. I have many more but we've got some great questions to address from our colleagues in the audience as well. But one more around that structure, structure equals safety and we can give people structure to reduce anxiety, that feels very valuable and we've heard from even design gurus in the past have said that, you know, it's not a process, real designers aren't beholden to these specific tools. What are your thoughts on that sort of attitude? Well, I think one of the criticisms that we've always heard from designers in business school is that we take a complex rich process and we make it linear and we make it tool driven. And we absolutely do. I signed up as guilty for that. We make it artificially linear because for learners, particularly those who've been raised in linear analytic type environments, we have to layer the complexity on. We can't hit them with tremendous ambiguity and then give them no guidance to get it through. One of the things I find valuable about the design thinking processes, who knows when they've got immersion right? Who knows when they've got their insights correctly or when their ideas Design thinking just shoves you along. It says, okay, maybe if you just were paralyzed here in insights forever, you'd get a little bit deeper. But you have to move on. You now have to translate those insights into design criteria. And if they really don't work, you can circle back and work on your insights. But now's the time to let go. And I think for anxious learners, that permission to be imperfect and to move to the next stage because, hey, we're in week six of class, which means everybody's supposed to be wrapping up their interviews and coming up with design criteria. I think it's just tremendously freeing for people. Yeah, Adam, I know we see that a lot. It's like that we don't know if our insights are right. Like that can be paralyzing for some folks. Absolutely, absolutely. And I think too, just echoing Jeanne's point on structure is just how, you know, as that experience deepens the kind of the sort of the training wheels and the guide rails of that structure come off and they do start to become those things that we do every day. But yeah, it's sort of starting there is a real challenge and that structure can be hugely beneficial. I know that's why with EP having worked with you guys for a long time, I know there is that very structured journey early on and then it's about enabling people to sort of fly free. Yeah, we like the Buckminster Fuller quote. I'm gonna miss quote him here, but something to the effect of, if you want to change someone's mindset or way of thinking, don't talk about a way of thinking, give them a tool, the persistent use of which will lead to new ways of thinking. Then you kind of have that freedom in a framework. But let's get to some of what are excellent questions here. Oh, sorry. I was just gonna add that I think sometimes we also undervalue the conversational tools, right? Simple things like turn taking. Simple things like not letting people debate. You know, we have a no debate rule in our class. If you start to debate, you gotta move on to something that you're not gonna debate about. These conversational rules, I think they are like the incredibly powerful kind of infrastructure of design thinking and why it works. And we often don't even count those as tools. We don't even recognize them. That's funny because that's the sort of tool that can be usefully applied whether or not you're running according to Hoyle and NDesign project. We've got a question from Leanne who asks, what are specific recommendations to move someone into immersion, especially a non designer? Well, I think it helps for them to understand what the journey looks like. So for those of us who are kind of need to know what the journey looks like and what the end looks like, We don't know what our solutions are, but we know the journey we'll be on. And so sometimes helping people understand that journey, acknowledging their discomfort, Right? Letting them practice interviewing each other in more low stakes formats. Right? Making sure that the projects they tackle and I'm a firm believer that all design thinking training should be project based. I don't think talking about the tools and not using it makes any sense at all. Right. Make sure, though, that the projects they they they undertake aren't wicked problems. I mean, the the whole notion that we should tackle wicked problems that we barely know the methodology, so they need to be containable. So I think we have to put a lot of controls around the nature of the problems, the amount of vulnerability that they experience. We have to acknowledge their anxiety. We have to coach them. I think coaches could be tremendously important here. We have to give them lots of feedback. Again, we have to build an infrastructure around them that deals with the reality of the sense of anxiety and vulnerability that most linear thinkers are going to experience during immersion. But then once it catches, there's no experience that is more obvious for instance in our student journals. The switch flips. They suddenly get it. They get inside the head of someone else and then that anxiety falls away. Right? And it's such an amazing experience to see that happen for people but it's sometimes a lot of pain getting there. Right, it is not only freeing once you've gotten there and exhilarating but it is you said it's important to forecast for people where we do have clarity, which is in the process, if not the solution that we'll arrive at. Even entering the pandemic, working with a range of folks, we saw those people that are confident in design in the process. They had some kind of immediate resilience entering in this period of ambiguity. They know at least how they were going to approach problems even if they had no idea where they were gonna And Andrew, I often joke that the reason why I've done the work I've done is because I'm an accountant by training. I'm one of those terrifying people, right? For people who are intuitively and naturally designers, I think it's hard to even comprehend how painful it is for those of us who are not, right? And now, of course, the balance of that is the wild exhilaration of finding out you too can be creative, right? But it takes a lot of empathy with our learners as they go through this process. And that could be very hard to understand for people for whom this is just a natural gift that they have. I'm gonna get us one more question. I know we're kind of at time but this is too interesting to move too quickly. And there are lots of questions. Thank you all for your questions. I know we are gonna share them back to you, Jean, as kind of part of just your where are people interested, so thank you all. Just one more question. A question about the MVCs for an individual, does one's personality play into it? And so the example given by Ray, for example, someone who is introverted, will they always score lower in some areas than an extrovert and vice versa? There's quite a few questions about kind of relating the competencies to discs and this one seems to capture a lot of It's interesting, I don't think it's anything as simple as introvert extrovert. We have had a lot of success with the disc instrument. It seems to capture people's ability to act in the face of uncertainty. I mean, a lot of the discomfort about design thinking is discomfort with uncertainty. So often what you're looking for in terms of different personality dimensions is less introvert extrovert. Extrovert. It's almost how much data do I need to feel comfortable acting? So you see some highly analytical people who need a lot of data to step into action. It's never enough. Prove it to me, prove it to me true to me. And then you've got your kind of drivers who are ready to act tomorrow on anything, just totally confident. And not only do those people traditionally not work well together, they both get into trouble for different reasons. Right? The driver doesn't think it through and the analyst never stops thinking it through. For me, beauty of design thinking is that it is both generative and analytical. And that it has places to play and creates a set of guidelines where the analyst and the driver can work together, not saying yes or no to each other, but surfacing assumptions testing them so that together they can get the data they need. Right, so no one's right in that scenario, the process brings them to tests and the data sort of Exactly. We are going to wrap shortly here. Just wanted to share what's coming up next. So let you know about a few upcoming events. Adam, can you tell us again what's happening June tenth? Sure, just very quickly. So it's basically a workshop that's a deeper dive into the minimum viable competencies. It's called Deepening Your Design Practice. And so we'll send through a registration link. If folks are interested, they can certainly sign up for that. Think about two hours long and that's happening on the tenth of June virtual event. And then right now, so now the book, Jean, we got the thirteenth of July, depending on when where you look, you get a different release date. What do you have any insights? Are people gonna be able to get it sooner or they wait until July? Amazon still is telling me that the copy of the book I myself had to personally buy is shipping June fourth. So sometime between this week and July thirteenth, I predict the book will be available. But when it will be available in that timeframe, hey, it's anybody's guess. The link is in there in chat. Please check it out, check out the workshop. And I'd also like to invite you all to visit Experience Point's blog called The Prototype. You'll find a range of relevant timely articles related to innovation and design thinking. That link will come up in chat shortly as well. You can follow us on Medium or even better, can get in touch with us personally. My email is up there. Don't hesitate to send me a note or Adam or Jeanne or connect with us on LinkedIn, we're happy to answer any questions you may have. Again, thank you very much for joining us, thank you for your questions, great to have you all here, looking forward to welcoming you at the next webinar. Adam, Jean, thank you so much as well, of course. Thank you, it's been our pleasure, bye bye.