(00:02)You are listening to Humans aren’t Robots a series of conversations with designers and creative thinkers uncovering the human elements of teams in modern business practises. I’m your host as always Sam Davies, and we’re jumping back to a conversation I had last year at Pause Fest with Alistair Simpson. Alistair at the time, was the head of design at Atlassian, based out of California. He is now the VP of design at Dropbox, an interesting transition for him. One of the things that he had said during our conversation is that design is 90% communication and 10% doing the work, and that really rings true with me. He is a firm believer in designers needing to step up further into becoming business leaders and understanding more about business practises as opposed to just being accountable for design work and creative. Another great quote from Alistair was “Argue like you’re right, listen like you’re wrong.”
(02:10)That’s right, from the UK I went to Australia to now live in America.
(02:21)Where does your heart lie?
(02:25)I can say it’s definitely not in England, I haven’t lived there for nearly 20 years.
(02:32)Where did you grow up?
(02:33)The south coast in a small village in the middle of a forest called Sway. After university, went travelling around the world and then ended up back in Australia basically.
(03:30)But it’s nice to go home now and then. I took the kids home at Christmas and we went for walks in the forest and my son jumped in puddles literally had head to toe puddles. But yeah, it’s nice to go home.
(04:26)So now you’re at Atlassian, so what’s your role there?
(04:27)So I’m head of design for about half of our product team, so Trello, Confluence, a cloud platform which underpins all of our products and our growth team.
(04:40)So beautiful and at Pause talking about leading design teams.
(04:41)Yes, I was talking about the growth of the design team at Atlassian. And so when I joined, there was about 20 designers. Now the design organisations are not just design – design, organisation, research, content design product designers. It’s probably about 230 to 250 in that time that I’ve been there.
(05:09) Obviously the company’s been around over 20 years now, right? (05:10)About 17 years.
(05:20)So we use a bunch of your products in the studio. But it’s interesting for us because a lot of us are designers, visual designers. Like Trello I think it was a good example, obviously, prior to it being acquired by Atlassian had a very aesthetic was suited to people that were visual designers.
It’s interesting breaking out of that instead of going to a wider audience.
(05:49)Yes, I think, as with consumerization of the enterprise is happening and I think that’s part of the reason that we’ve scaled the design team at Atlassian. We recognise that we want to be an experienced led company.
(06:28)I think all of us are becoming more mature and the way we interact with digital platforms.
(07:01)That’s right. I think your expectation goes up right. Like if you’re a user of a ride hailing app like Uber or Lift in the US it doesn’t matter that it’s a ride hailing app. That’s now your expectation of how simple an experience should be because that experience in itself has removed the need to hail a cab, not know when it’s going to turn up, payment.
It’s compressed all those things into one kind of simple, intuitive user experience, but that’s just now the expectation for not just ride hailing, for anything that you interact with and touch. We often forget that in the true heart of every team is just humans and people, right? Obviously, we’re going to talk a little bit about today, but it’s people and humans, and they don’t really want to use any product. They’re trying to get a job done, and they’re trying to get that job done incredibly effectively and your tool is just a part of their day. They may dip into your tool, but then they may dip out of your tool into another tool. And so understanding and experience and to end agnostic of an individual product, I think, is incredibly important.
(08:32)But this idea of sort of digital platforms almost involved into most of our life now, and the ability to flow from one to the other seamlessly, and you almost want them to be transparent. Don’t you? They shouldn’t be getting in the way.
(08:45)That’s right, And I think, that in itself, is the future of teamwork is already kind of here. There’s a lot of people talking about what does the future of teamwork look like and what roles will be automated, etcetera, etcetera. But I think the future of teamwork is already here. What we need to be understanding is building in practises for individuals and teams so they can cope with the modern demands of work. And I think that’s incredibly important versus the tools.
(09:17)So you were talking about not creating stylos, do you want to give us some of the insights?.
(09:29)Yeah, maybe I’ll start at the end. It’s all about people in teams, really, at the heart of whatever you’re building, however larger or small you are in your scaling journey. It’s all about the people building your products and the people who are using your products, your customers really. Then the teams, I think, is important because, certainly I believe and Atlassian believes, that at the heart of every great thing that’s been built is a team not an individual, and it’s the team. The end is really when you scale, there’s lots of different things in that scaling journey but really at the heart of it are those people in teams, and you need to focus on them, internal and external.
(10:50) I certainly believe that the myth is that designers are only accountable for design work. The reality is that designers are business leaders and we have to understand the business.
We have to understand how we make money, we have to understand our customers. We have to understand everything end to end, and I think that’s incredibly hard but incredibly rewarding.
(11:10)What’s one of the so in terms of educating and empowering designers to have that sense of responsibility and accountability around their roles. How do you go about doing that at Atlassian?
(11:28)So again it comes back to practises. I think we’re already in the future of teamwork. And that future of teamwork is distributed. I no longer work with people side by side as we’re sitting here today. Most of the time I’m talking to people on a video call and so you’re in a distributed world working across disciplines. We’re working with engineers, product managers, designers, researchers, analysts, data scientists there’s more and more specialists coming in. And so we’re already in the future of teamwork. And so I think again it comes back to the practises that you need to build in to every individual that’s in your team. And it’s not about, I use the term practises deliberately, you need to give people frameworks and practises so they can break down a problem and go deep on a problem, not a rigid set of processes and efficiency things. Because every single problem that we solve at Atlassian and in many, many growing tech companies and many, many non tech companies they’re uncertain. I’ve never worked on exactly the same problem in my career. Everything is slightly different.
We’re in that world of volatility and uncertainty. We need to be building in resiliency and giving people and individuals in our teams the frameworks and practises so that they can deal with that, because that’s important.
(12:57)I spoke to Miles Orkin yesterday and he was talking about a sort of similar thing to you. We talked about that resiliency.
(13:41)Yeah, I think so. Resiliency is one word, but we often try to ignore some of the emotions that come with it. And I don’t think you necessarily can, because we’re all humans, and we all bring a point of view and we want to bring our full selves to work and that’s important, right? Like it’s an incredibly important aspect of how you want to be able to show up in the company and it’s just reality.
(14:30)You’re probably in a lucky position that the founders had those kind of values to begin with. But it’s harder to reverse engineer some of that stuff and existing businesses or corporate environments. I think like you, it comes from the team as well. It isn’t all just about leaders coming in and top down, saying here’s how you should behave at work. You need to have feelings otherwise that doesn’t work.
(15:10)That’s the thing you need your leaders at the top to be modelling the right behaviours that they want to see in the organisation. But then what often happens in that scenario is that when an individual in a team tries to model those same behaviours, then the rest of the organisation rejects that because that’s not how they’ve been taught to behave right. And so you really need to model that from top down. But then also, you need to give your employees, what I was just talking about, the practises and frameworks to allow them to kind of change their behaviours. And then all of that is kind of baked into making sure that you have this mythical, not mythical, but sorry, making sure that you have psychological safety in order to feel comfortable, to share how something’s made you feel or feel comfortable to fail in an organisation.
(16:23)I think that’s what’s really important is making sure there is that safety to share openly. If you’re having a problem on a project or if you’re gonna fail.
(16:34)That’s powerful on a human level for yourself to be able to do that. It’s powerful to be able to do that from a business perspective. I suppose it’s also a level of accountability where you feel you care about the stuff you’re doing, and you don’t want to fuck it up for the business.
(17:19)That’s right. You need to make sure that as you’re scaling, everybody in your business feels like an owner and that they feel accountable in the right way, not in a pressurised way, but they feel accountable for the customer and for the solution.
And if you can do that, then, as you said, people will go above and beyond and they will deliver great outcomes for customers. And that comes again down to how do you instill that? Certainly some of the ways that Atlassian have done is instilling our values. On day one at Atlassian people get to understand the company mission, to unleash the potential in every team, you get to understand our values and how they came about and why they’re important. Something you just said, it’s like one of our values is to be the change you seek. And so if you see something that you know is wrong, feel accountable to go and actually try and fix that thing, and I think that’s incredibly powerful within organisations.
(18:21)It really is. And I think when you see it coming from a colleague within the business as opposed to from management, it is actually more impactful.
(18:30)100% like that’s the thing. None of us should be consumers of the culture,we should be creators of the culture. And again whilst we have incredible values at Atlassian and we have an incredible culture, those cultures are really created by the people in the company and we certainly, something we talk a lot about, don’t want people to be culture fit. We want people to be culture add because if you get just culture fit, ultimately you’re going to get less cognitive diversity and less difference in thought in the room and then you’re going to get narrow outcomes, whereas what you actually want is to be having those difficult conversations. You want people to feel comfortable speaking up so that you can have the difficult conversation up front and get to a much better outcome for your customer. It’s powerful when it works
(19:24)Debate, is such a powerful tool in the design process, to have those dissenting points of view and to actually have those tough conversations early on in the piece, while you are problem solving.
(19:35)I think it’s critical. If you’re in a creative session and everybody is agreeing with one another, I get very nervous because I’m often wondering what is wrong with the solution? Why is everybody agreeing? What are we missing? That can be a sign of a problem where you don’t have enough diversity in the room to actually unpick the problem in the right way. And that’s certainly something that I think is important, if you feel like you’ve got to a solution very quickly, certainly in design process, then I always question it, and we ask the team to actually go back and really spend a bit more time in the problem phase to really unpack that because if we’re all just agreeing, then there’s probably something wrong. And as you said you’ll catch it later on in the project, when it much harder to undo,
(20:39)You encourage people to at least play Devil’s Advocate at that early stage to say there’s got to be something here.
(20:43)And again, talking of practises and frameworks, we publish online the Atlassian Playbook, it’s a free resource. Anyone could go download it. It’s a bunch of practises that we use internally and there’s a play in that Playbook called Disrupt. And what that is, is it’s aimed at the creative process.
And so practises are incredibly important and valuable in helping democratise design and helping everybody think more divergent early on in the process because that’s how you’re going to empower a large organisation. As you scale, you’re teaching them those different divergent thinking methodologies that practises, the frameworks that they can come back to when they have a different problem, because none of the projects and problems are ever exactly the same.
(21:57)You can’t just have that road map that’s just written there. That’s great that they’re probably available.
(22:03)They’re all publicly available. When I did last count, but this is a couple of years old, there were over 50 of them. There’s a really great one that I love around Team health monitor, which if you’re working on a project, it’s a very safe way.
Within 30 minutes, the team can self assess how they’re going against those 10 characteristics. The voting is simple. Thumbs up for we’re awesome, thumb sideways for we’re not doing great, thumbs down for we’re not very good at this. And then, very quickly you get a very easy heat map of where the team self assessed that they’re not as effective as they could be. What’s good about that is it’s a team health monitor, the team have done it, it’s not a manager appraising them.
(23:37)Yeah, you want to have that sort of adaptive cycle where you can actually go back and correct it.
(23:43)If you’re only getting feedback, either in a performance kind of sense or as a team, once every 12 months, how are you supposed to ever improve?
(24:12)As a leader in management roles or leadership roles, we often don’t get great feedback from our teams. How do you go about getting feedback from your teams? And I suppose, compiling that and learning?
(24:30)I’ll maybe start with my personal way that I like to get my feedback is, again something we touched on earlier, that psychological safety.
You need that because I spend time, basically humanising myself was a leader, so I share a lot quite openly. Every week I will share what’s top of mind, and that’s just a simple page of what I’m thinking about and things that I’ve talked about. I’m sharing things about myself every week, and I’m very open with sharing about my family. And so that’s all to try and humanise myself as a leader. So that people understand who I am, and I’m not just a manager’s manager or the boss of a boss. The reason to do that, coming to your point about feedback, is so that people feel a bit more comfortable giving me feedback. And so something I do with my direct reports every three months is I’ll send them a simple survey, which is asking them three simple questions around to tell me something that I’ve done well for you this quarter? Tell me somewhere where you’d like more support and then just basically anything else.
(25:56)So it’s very simple and I get them to share those results or that feedback with me, I’m not a robot and I want people to understand that I have areas that I’m trying to improve on, and that I need everybody else to hold me accountable to that. That’s the personal way of getting feedback. At Atlassian we’ve recently changed how we do feed back across the company so that we actually assess your performance inside of a team. Are you doing the job that you should be doing? But also, how are you helping make your team a better team and so that’s to try and get rid of just having brilliant individuals who are not necessarily good at contributing to a team environment. And then the third level is how are people performing against our values. Are they living and breathing our values day in, day out and again, that’s something that we have those conversations every quarter with our individual people that work for us. We talk openly about how they are performing on their individual basis and then against their team, and we kind of write those things down and share them with everyone.
(27:47)It’s great to have that level of transparency, and I think you are 100% correct that if the team can just see you as a human and also fallible and also learning right. There is that sense that the boss knows everything, but they definitely don’t think that you know that dichotomy there, to humanise yourself to the point where I am still learning as well.
(28:06)That’s right, I mean, the humanising, I think, is incredibly important, like the topic of my talk about scaling, and I think if you’re in a scaling company, it gets more important because before too long, you are literally the boss of the boss of the boss and whilst you may like, I’m just an individual, I’m a normal person, but somebody in my organisation doesn’t necessarily see me as that? You need to make the effort to humanise yourself, as you scale and then part of that humanising as you said it is showing that, hey, I’m not perfect, I have these things that I’m trying to get better at and please help me and I mentioned I share that back with my team every quarter. Open collaboration, open sharing of feedback is going to create better levels of accountability and then more trust in your teams. And then trust is really the cornerstone of any effective team
(29:27)Yeah, and they’re all trust building to have that transparency. I’ve heard you say before, that design is 90% communication, 10% work, explain that?
(29:36)That’s a personal belief and where that came from really is from my first job as a backpacker was in a call centre.
You have to actively listen. You have to communicate incredibly effectively and you have to be very empathetic to people. I think that really taught me early on in my career the importance of communication. I’ve seen many amazing designers produce amazing work. But then they’ve really failed at communicating the customer problem that they were trying to solve and how their solution solved that. One of the biggest things that I coach and counsel and mentor people on my team on, is that often the biggest thing that is going to help propel them in their career is effective communication and so effective communication comes about from actively listening, from working on your written communication to your verbal communication. And it’s not that you can get away with doing bad work. I don’t think you can. I just think that people often overlook the importance of effective communication in the modern workplace, because again, I mentioned the future of teamwork is here. I think design is 90% communication, then 10% doing the work. That 10% is incredibly important. I want to emphasise that.
(31:36)Outside of going to work in a call centre, how do you think people could improve those active listening skills?
(31:43)So there’s a really good quote – Argue like you’re right, listen like you’re wrong.
I think that is how you can improve your listening, by listening like you’re wrong. One of the other things that I’ve done, I’m a talker and I enjoy talking and socialising with people, but I’ve had that feedback that sometimes I can dominate a meeting. So one of the things that I’ve learned a number of years ago was to make sure that I’m creating space for people in that meeting. To create space, I don’t talk until I’ve been purposeful around being the last person in the room to speak. Often when somebody is communicating something, a good way to actually make sure that you’ve heard them is to pause and say, let me just replay what I think I heard. And then you replay what you think you heard in your own words. And then the person gets a really good opportunity to say no or yes or you missed this bit.
(33:12)I heard another great technique around, if people are having an argument, but it doesn’t need to be in that situation, forming a debate and then making people swap sides. So if you were debating one side of a debate, actually making me debate your side and seeing it from the other person’s perspective.
(33:26)That’s an amazing technique.
It’s like now you’re going to swap positions and you’re gonna argue for that, and you have to put yourself in that person’s shoes and actually see why, because again, it’s about reframing your own thinking and stopping you having that narrowness of thinking by forcing you to take a different position. And I think that’s a really good technique to use.
(34:07)Thank you so much. If you want to find out more about you or what you do is there somewhere online they find you?
(34:13)They can always find me on LinkedIn. I write on medium on the designing Atlassian publication. So yeah, it was a few places online they can find me. Thank you.
(34:27)Hey, everybody. This is Sam here again. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to PausFest for having us along last year and allowing us to have that conversation with Alistair. If you want to find Alistair, just Google him. He’s got a medium account as well as his LinkedIn. PauseFest is happening this year online digital. It is around about a month away, the first of the twelth of March. Tickets they’re still on sale now, so I just head to PausFest.com.au. As always, if you enjoyed the podcast, please share it amongst your friends and colleagues, be much appreciated and we’ll catch you next time. Cheers.
