Stephen Anderson Tells Todd About Implementing Visionary Ideas
Stephen P. Anderson, formerly Principal User Experience Architect for Sabre and currently Vice President of Design at Viewzi, will be speaking at MX San Francisco on how to get visionary ideas made into realities with George Lucas’ work on Star Wars as an example. Todd Wilkens recently had a conversation over e-mail about changing organizational culture and managing design teams.
Below is an excerpt, or you can read the full interview. Don’t forget to register for MX San Francisco — April 20-22 — and catch our special early bird pricing. If you register between today and March 31, you’ll get a free iPod shuffle.
Todd Wilkens [TW]: Well, Stephen, even though your talk is all about visionary ideas, let’s get the ball rolling with a practical question: What got you so interested in how visionary ideas get pushed through an organization? Why and how has this been relevant to you? What made this an itch you needed to scratch?
Stephen Anderson [SA]: As a consultant, you see a lot of really great ideas that, for whatever reason, never get implemented. Or when they do, there is little resemblance between what actually gets produced and the original concepts. In 2006, I moved from the world of consulting to become a UX director at a large, enterprise company. Needless to say, it was a real eye-opener. I think I went in with a rather naive faith in the power of prototypes and ‘leading with an inspiring product vision’. While I still value this approach, I quickly learned that there is much more to pushing visionary ideas through an organization.
For starters, if you want to bring a great product/service experience to market, you have to first change the company culture. This is basic — and critical. So many other forces are at play inside large organizations — competition, politics, procedure, history. It’s about much more than creating business value. In fact, the biggest shock for me was discovering how internal business units compete with each other in ways that hurt the larger organization.
Whether it’s UI design or a better business model, I think it’s fair to say that most people drawn to Design or UX are fairly idealistic, and see things as they should be. So, finding like-minded individuals in similar, frustrating positions, was an easy task. We all love to commiserate. And we’re all facing basically the same problems. I began taking notes on things that are working — where individuals or groups have been able to successfully push through change. The funny thing is, these aren’t just business problems. These are human problems. And they exist wherever you have a large number of people and enough history to create a ‘system’. Hollywood, Wall Street, Education. In different contexts, we re-create the same types of human problems.
Now Available: MX San Francisco’s Agenda
We’ve finalized the agenda for MX San Francisco: Managing Experience through Creative Leadership — April 20-22 — with some newly added speakers including Julie Peters, Brand Manager for Virgin USA and Nathan Shedroff, Program Chair, MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts. All registrants will receive complimentary copies of our keynote speakers’ books: Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick, and Chip Conley’s Peak.
Just a reminder that MX only comes around once a year: Register today and get early bird pricing (ask for a special room rate at the Mark Hopkins too). If you register between today and March 31, you’ll get a free iPod shuffle.
Catch a Sneak Preview of Dan Saffer’s New Book: Interactive Gestures
Following up on his first book, Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices, Dan Saffer is hard at work on his second book: Interactive Gestures: Designing Gestural Interfaces. You can catch a sneak peak and leave comments on a draft of the first chapter.
UX Intensive San Francisco a Hit — Next Stop Minneapolis
UX Intensive San Francisco was quite the event. If you couldn’t make it to San Francisco, be sure to join us at the next stop on our world tour: Minneapolis. UX Intensive Minneapolis — June 16-19 — will be our last US venue in 2008 before leaving for Europe. Register today for first tier early bird pricing and get an additional 15% off of registration with discount code “NEWS.”
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