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00:00    I’m going to hit record and see what happens. Alright. How does that sound at synth? When I came in, I apparently I have like a custom sound for me. Like I came in and went, went like a little sin thing. I think of other people. Cause the thing I did the other day had four people and I think they all get assigned a different sound, I think. Right. And I think they, I don’t know if this is recording the video to actually, um, okay. You’re not going to use the video though. Are you gonna use the video? No. No. Um, well, we’ll see. Okay. I don’t think, I don’t think it does. I think it’s only audio. Okay. Alright. So I’m gonna do a little intro. Um, what can try and do it in sort of in one site, if there’s anything you go, Oh, hang on a second.  
00:38    Let me, let me just start again with that. That’s fine. Um, just, uh, you know, how podcasts work, right? So we don’t, so you will be going back and cleaning things up or edit. We will clean up things if there’s a stumble or anything you want to repeat. So just say, Oh, hang on a second. Let me just do that again. That’s fine. But you know, the less we do that, the quicker it gets done. Um, and then, uh, I don’t know what happens at the end of squat costs. Did you have to wait? Yeah, I do have to wait. Yeah, there’s a compression on my side and then you get a little thing that says up the files on your side. Okay. Okay, cool. All right. Um, and then, uh, I’ll do an intro and then I’ll welcome you. And the other thing is just, uh, at the end, I’ll ask you where people can find you and stuff, you know?  
01:21    Sure. Alright. Ready to go? Right. Okay. Hi and welcome to power of 10. A podcast about design operating at many levels, zooming out from thoughtful detail through to organizational transformation and on to change in society and the world. My name is Andy Pauline. I’m a service design and innovation consultant trainer, coach, educator, and writer. My guest today is Jim callback and author speaker and instructor in design customer experience and strategy. Jim has worked for many large companies who you’ve heard. Oh, I’ll try that again. Jim has worked with many large companies who you will have heard of and is currently head of customer experience at mural, the world’s former. What do you call it? I cut that bit out and then I’m going to put it back in actually the leading online whiteboard, right. Jim has worked with many large organizations. Jim has worked with many large companies who really are, I can’t say that what you will have heard of. Okay. I’m just gonna say large companies. So yeah. Jim has worked with many large companies and is currently head of customer experience at mural. The world. I’ve got to have to put it in. Sorry. I can’t, I can’t switch the leading online whiteboard. Okay. Let’s play it back in. Cause I think I should probably say that.  
02:36    Okay. My guest today is Jim callback and author speaker and instructor in design customer experience and strategy. Jim has worked with many large companies and is currently head of customer experience at mural. The leading online whiteboard is the author of designing web navigation of mapping experiences. And most recently the jobs to be done. Playbook Jim, welcome to power of tin. Thanks for having me, Andy. Great to be here. So just in your job at mural, you must be having an interesting time right now we’re talking just in the sort of middle of April. I’m still in the midst of coronavirus crisis.  
03:14    Yeah, it is absolutely interesting here. You know, when you have a crisis like this, which is almost unparalleled in the world, um, some people will do really poorly, you know, business wise and others might actually benefit from it. We’re, uh, we’re lucky to be on that other side, um, where we’re actually, um, seeing a lot of interest in our business. Of course, first and foremost, we also believe we can help. We can help people collaborate better, uh, remotely. But you know, in terms of, in terms of our business, I think we’ve never been more relevant with the sense of urgency on that. And we’re really stepping up to try to meet the demand.  
03:49    Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine. I can imagine it’s also been, you know, whatever plans you had for scaling have kind of just gone crazily compressed into, can we do this in the week and not the next day  
04:00    On, on all fronts tech, technologically hiring revenue. I mean, everything has just been hyper compressed and we’re trying to keep up, you know, we are, we are a startup, but um, we’re, we’re handling it pretty well. I think as a company and, you know, guts got everybody’s scrambling and working on the weekends, but we’re, we want to be there for people. We want to be there for our existing customers and for others who are reaching out newly to us,  
04:22    That’s interesting. You are going through the sort of startup to established within a kind of very short amount of time.  
04:27    Yeah, it’s interesting. You know, I joined the company five years ago, um, and we were kind of just entering our teenage years so to speak, you know, and you know, I’ve been saying, you know, just to kind of summarize the effect that the COVID virus situation has had on our companies, like we’re adults overnight now. Like, like, you know, and I don’t, I don’t think we’ll ever go back, like even, even after the situation loosens up with the lockdowns and things like that, we will forever, our trajectory has been catapulted into a different orbit.  
04:57    Yeah. It’s interesting. I mean, for a lot of people, um, you know, there’s a, there’s a lot of talk about, you know, what’s going to happen when we go back and stuff. I read a thing yesterday, which was 9%, only 9% of people in the UK. One thing is to go back to the way they were. So it’s, it’s hard to imagine that you’re going to ever get back to a situation where someone says, you know what, I’ve got some life stuff I need to sort out. I’d really like to work a couple of days a week at home or their employer to say, no, that’s not really possible, you know?  
05:24    Right, right. Exactly. Yeah, no, I think it is a little bit at the art of possibility in terms of team collaboration and productivity. It’s, it’s been a big test. Can we do this? And I think that’s proven out and, um, I think there will be a realization on the other side of it where you don’t have to travel or you can have a work from home Friday and, um, and you know, uh, attitudes like that will, will pervade. I, I believe I did see a study that, you know, it’s all kind of guests right now, but they were saying, you know, on the other side of this, that, uh, they, they predict that 5% of workers will be remote on the other side. So just the opening up of possibility of remote workers is going to increase. They, they put a 5% number on that. I’m not sure where they got that from, but basically there will be, there will be everlasting stickiness. Yeah.  
06:10    Yeah. I, I, it’s definitely going to change the way people think about possibilities and a bunch of stakeholder, uh, case studies there. And I think also there’s this, we were just talking just before the call that in a, you guys are, must’ve gone through, but so is everyone else this idea of what, you know, as a remote work, you might have been an edge, you know, circled edge case. Right. Which I know someone, a lot of people have been stopping using that language and talking about stress cases instead. And now because everyone is, uh, everyone’s an edge case, which it actually, you realize why the edge case versus stress case kind of terminology makes such a difference because we’re in a stress case. And I’m guessing you guys must’ve found out quite a lot of stuff on sort of stress cases, but also all the businesses kind of using this stuff,  
06:51    Right? No, no, absolutely. Um, you know, for me overall, I I’ve been in, in, in remote work for awhile. Now my previous company was Citrix. The makers of go to meet meeting teleconferencing solution. And then, um, you know, now here at mural, I’ve been looking at the remote condition and, you know, in general for nearly a decade now. Um, and you know, my, my, my position was always, it’s not an either or it’s, it’s really about momentum and flexibility and agility as an organization that, you know, you don’t have to be in person and you can do the remote, but that doesn’t necessarily replace the, the in person, uh, collaboration. Right. And now, now with this, like, like we were saying, you know, this, this stress test kind of, kind of showed that, um, showed that, uh, it is possible. And I, and I, I hope my hope is that that continuum then kind of, kind of sticks around that, that people realize that it is a viable option, but the relevancy of what I was working on eight years ago in terms of how do we approach remote work is it’s now it’s, it’s overwhelming.  
07:52    Cause it’s hideaway. I, can’t the number of posts. I think you have one Andy tips, tips on remote sessions and it’s all this it’s coming out of the woodwork. And it’s just, it’s thrilling to me to see everybody talking about it.  
08:04    Well, you are the first person where however many years ago it was who said to me, well, one thing one was, you know, if, if, if one person is, um, you know, on video, everyone’s on video, even if the rest of them are already in the state, same, remember a very clear about this idea of, um, you know, being careful and inclusive about the people who are effectively trapped in the mushroom on the table. Right. And it’s so easy for the room to end up having a conversation with each other and go, Oh yeah. And by Jim, by the way, Jim, is that, and there’s that. And then, um, but also this idea that, um, you know, organizations take care sometimes, um, great care about the physical workspaces and yet the virtual workspaces it’s as if it’s a kind of covered under the stairs and, you know, really kind of neglected.  
08:51    Now, of course, all those companies are finding out, um, the, of having invested in that, and it’s not just the technology, it’s also the sort of, um, the muscle memory and the kind of, um, etiquette and the way of working that everyone’s used to, or not, you know, everything from everyone turns their mikes off when they go into the call through to kind of other stuff, I guess you, I mean, you must see all of that kind. And you remember you talking about that? Yeah. I call it the digitally defined workspace and you know, there’s been a lot of attention on the physical office environment with being bagged chairs and free catering and all that kind of stuff. And that’s fantastic. And, and th the kind of the notion  
09:30    There is you want to have a positive employee experience because that’s going to lead to a positive customer experience. But then you look at the digital workspace where we actually spend more of our time, most of our time collaborating, and it’s not only neglected. It’s just, sometimes it’s just a pile of tools that I teach people, provide access to without any instruction on how they fit together, all the etiquette. I mean, it’s all for me, it’s all about etiquette. I’ve also always said, Andy, that, um, our tools are actually far better than our muscle memory and our skills at using them for, for remote collaboration in particular. And that we can do a lot more than our tools allow for a lot more than we’re actually doing. And I think that’s exactly what we’re learning right now. We’re kind of pushing, everybody’s kind of pushing the boundaries of that. So my hope is that this digitally defined workspace will actually kind of, kind of come together and then businesses will realize, Oh yeah, that’s not just the soft skill that needs to be hard-coded in our attention as well, too.  
10:26    Yeah, it’s interesting. Isn’t it? I mean, all that stuff about, you know, here’s your, here’s my hack on my video, you know, remote working hack or your zoom hack, it’s really kind of hacks what they are. They are kind of, uh, Oh, they’re like this <inaudible> no, there’s a book of etiquette where it says, you know, it look someone in the eye when you shake their hand and all that kind of stuff that, you know, you actually sometimes get, you know, I guess people get taught in business school, but you get taught for your whole life. Yeah. Um, and, and this sort of face to face, or we’re talking, uh, at the moment we can see each other, a video chat. This isn’t a skill. Well, it probably is. I guess it is, will be for my daughter’s generation, but it’s not a skill otherwise that agree.  
11:07    We actually embarked on a project. And I think I might’ve kicked it off to some degree, at least steered it in, in a direction here at mural around etiquette. And what I’d like to do is kind of codified, codify, all those little things you tweeted about one, that’s actually a pet peeve of mine at the end of the call. What’s the, what’s the etiquette at the end of the call, because there’s this moment of free second pause where you’ve said goodbye, but you’re still looking at each other. Yeah. And I think there’s a simple, you had a, you had a nice a solution there too. My solution is make sure you move your mouse to the close button before you say goodbye, goodbye, click. Right. But you know, like there’s a, and we’re all experiencing all these little things. The thing about remote collaboration that makes good remote collaboration is when everybody has the same sensibility towards the etiquette. So, uh,  
11:54    And it takes a little bit of practice. And I think that’s what we’re all getting practiced right now. So my hope is not only that remote, remote collaboration is, is more prevalent, but it’s also smoother. And of course we’re gonna mute. And you know, that, that those kind of common sense has been instilled across a larger population.  
12:12    You know, there’s this thing you said just now, which is, you know, the technology is as if you know, that companies have it’s as if they’ve just got all this technology in it’s, it would be the kind of physical equivalent of, we’ve got a bunch of computers and, and tables and chairs in that room over there, that’s your office, but you’re going to have to kind of build it yourself and work out how it works, um, rather than here’s your working space. And this is how we do things around, um, and how we work together is a nice kind of segue into jobs to be done, I guess, because it’s sort of largely the different spit, you know, in some ball, not largely, but it’s one of the differences between the two, which is, it’s not a part of tools, but there’s a need here that we’re, we’re addressing. So, um, you, you start the book, I’m talking about kind of what introduction and all sorts of understanding jobs to be done with a kind of, bit of a, um, his history of jobs to be done to. Um, so I’m going to ask you the question I’m guessing you’ve been asked over and over again, which is what’s the jobs job to be done that the book is there to satisfy.  
13:12    Yeah, no, that’s a great, that’s a great question. And I thought about this a lot. I think there are, there are, there are a couple of jobs, but for me overall, the main job of the jobs to be done book was to present the field, which does have a decades long history, um, in a way that is not too theoretical, uh, twos that a practitioner couldn’t grab onto and then a related job to be able to apply it as well to, um, Clayton Christianson, who is generally credited from any modern perspective of jobs to be done as kind of the founder of jobs to be done theory, um, did just that he created a theory. It was a theory without practice. Um, and other people took that up and actually created a practice around it. Um, but it was either very large and monolithic or <inaudible> in some way.  
14:07    Um, and I, for me under, you’re going to understand the theory if you have, if you do it, if you, if you, if there’s a practice with it, so yes, you can read about it, but I think you’re going to go do it and then go back and say, ah, that’s what they were talking about with the theory. So what I wanted people to have that aha effect with a practical application of it so that they could understand that theory. So the real job was to kind of break it down into a place where people could, could actually go out and do something so that they could grasp it.  
14:37    There’s a bit in it, which I highlighted, which you saying in the introduction is most distinctions between strategy and execution are meaningless, um, which I really liked. So, so, um, so, um, I think it’s partly to do particularly with my kind of experience, but, um, unpack that a little bit more.  
14:55    No, sure, sure. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s highly indirectly influenced by Roger Martin who I think we know from, you know, his design thinking in the business world kind of, uh, uh, anchoring design thinking in the business world. Um, and he’s, he’s written about, about this topic as well, too, the, the misinterpretations of those words, and it might be, it might be semantic, um, the difference between strategy and execution, but, you know, if you think about a hierarchy of strategy, right? So you have corporate strategy, but if I’m an individual contributor, you got to break that down to business unit strategy to product line strategy, to product strategy, to maybe within that, there’s another strategy, right? So that one, one layers strategy is the other layer is execution, right? So, so in the first place, there’s a, there’s a hierarchy. And then when you start looking at it, it’s like, well, everything is execution and everything is strategy in an organization and that’s how Roger Martin poses it. But he basically says that it’s about decision making that anybody who’s making a decision as they’re doing their job is actually making a strategic decision. So therefore execution has a strategic decision making component to it, as well as an execution decision-making component. And there’s therefore it’s two sides of the same coin. And they’re one in the same.  
16:11    Yeah. I mean, I was talking before about the kind of differences human levels, and that are kind of very, as much as music to my ears, but I think also this idea, I mean, one of the things that’s always bugged me about design thinking in the way it’s sort of come to be understood, which should say is that this, you know, at least two thirds, if not more of the thinking being done during design happens during their designing. Right. Um, and, and that bit sort of gets overlooked. And I think it’s often then bolted on as we, Oh, we did a design thinking workshop for a couple of days, and now, now we’re just going to execute the way we always execute. Um, and you said you set this up quite differently in the, in the book. And in fact, that’s the thing that you, you say, uh, around the book that, uh, jobs to be done current kind of work at multiple levels in multiple disciplines.  
16:57    Yeah, yeah, no, I th I mean, again, you know, it’s kind of the job of the book was to make jobs thinking. And I apologize for using that word. I couldn’t think of a better word any than jobs thinking. Um, and I don’t want that to be a blessing by the way. That’s just how I, how I see it. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a mindset, right? It’s not a, it’s not a theory and it’s not a patented method or, you know, trademark method that it’s a way of thinking. And for me, that’s the real power of it is there’s a shift. Sometimes there’s like a one 80 shift where you explicitly and intentionally remove yourself, your brand, your product, your solution from the equation, so that you get this kind of pure bare bones understanding of the problem in and of itself. Um, which leads to what I’ve been calling recently as an out of body experience out of body experience, meaning that, you know, companies, organizations are really good at looking at their markets and talking to the markets through the lens of their own brand and solution, right?  
17:55    Oh, consumer buy my product, it’s consumed this right customer journey map. It’s a story. It’s their own story, actually, customer journey map, very selfish document, by the way, Andy, it’s basically, it’s basically our own story of our own go to market strategy, right. But w what jobs helps us do, and it’s not the only thing that does this by the way, but what jobs the jobs to be done does is helps us see it completely the other way around, right. Again, again, explicitly. And that’s the out of body experience that I think a team or an organization can get from jobs thinking it’s just struck me that we are talking about this, um, because we both know what it is, but maybe you could take a step back and actually explain what, what is jobs to be done for anyone who’s listening to this. And doesn’t really kinda know because, um, there is a dance between the kind of methodology, if you like, and the mindset, which I think you just kind of talked about.  
18:45    Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, so jobs to be done, I think is a perspective that looks at individuals, not customers or consumers, but it looks at individuals as goal seeking actors in the world. That’s kind of the core of the, of the perspective. And I do see it as a perspective, um, and the, the goals that they have, I refer to them as objectives. Um, I have a process around them, so it’s not just a task. It’s not, you know, picking up a pencil on your desk. It’s something that has a process around it. And I, I refer to that as an objective that has a process that we can, that we can understand, um, at, from, from, from the individual’s perspective, in order for an organization to have a better insight into innovation opportunities, into better, uh, insight into opportunities for improvement as well, too.  
19:39    So it’s most clear, I think when you give an example, can you, can you give an example to sort of explain, um, the shift from one to the other? Sure. Um, so, uh, you know, I give, I give this little example, uh, in the book that I’m actually trying to work with right now, because I want to have a very clear explanation of, of what jobs are in general. And by the way, I want to say, it’s not a job, like a career, the word job. And I know in different languages, that’s problematic for instance, in German, which does have the word job, uh, which means a career it’s, that’s not what it refers to. So a synonym of a job to be done would be an objective that’s that, that someone has, right. And it’s also not the job. It’s also not your job.  
20:22    Um, I have this little exercise at the beginning of my workshops, where I have people write job statements and they start saying what they would do to provide a solution for the problem that I present to them. It’s also not your job as a solution provider. It’s purely from the individual’s perspective, what they want to get done. Um, and, uh, it gets a little bit complicated because there’s, I think you might appreciate this there’s levels of hierarchy or which you can look at you, which you can look at jobs, right? There are, there are smaller jobs and bigger jobs in the field. They talk about small jobs and big jobs. And then there are aspirations above that as well, too. So you have to fight with granularity, but you can basically define a job at any level that you want to innovate. The first question is, what, at what level do you want to innovate?  
21:07    Right? And then, and then, and then you can compartmentalize a statement around a job, for instance, get energy in the morning, right? If I want to get energy in the morning, we can think about solutions that, that fulfill that job and coffee comes to mind. Right? So if, if we’re, if we’re a coffee manufacturer, we might want to, we might want to think about how we can tweak sales of coffee with branding and get a different bean and stuff like that. But we could also say, Hey, people want to get energy in the morning. And by doing that, we re, we have this out of body experience that allows us to then ask, well, what else gives people energy in the morning? Um,  
21:45    So you, I mean, one of the things that’s interesting when they’re formulated, right? And so you have this instructor where said, it’s a verb plus object, plus a clarifier is just how simple they are. Right. So if I can read an example out, so you have a kind of, you know, I’m wrong and kind of don’t do this, but do it like this. One of them was, um, the job wrongly described was searched by a key word for documents in the database. And you say, what do you know? That includes a specific method, key word search, and the technologies that documents in database and actually the job to be done is retrieve content. Correct? Yeah. Or, you know, uh, people prefer to attend meetups and conferences that are nearby and you just attend an event is, is the job to be done, right?  
22:27    Yeah, it is. Deceivingly simple. And also deceivingly hard to get that, to frame it the absolute right way, an example that I’ve been using recently in my talks and workshops, Andy is, uh, the, the, the answer to the question. Why did the chicken cross the road, Dina? Do you do this in the UK? Is that a joke in the U S  
22:46    There is a <inaudible> jacket.  
22:50    Okay. Is the, you know, to get to the other side, by the way, the first time I used that example, I was in Germany and Frankfurt, Andy, and nobody knew the answer to that question. And I realized I outed myself as an American with that example. Um, but it is that simple. So, so what jobs does, like I was saying it, if there’s a forcing function where you force, you force yourself and your team and your organization to focus on the core objective with a process around it that you’re trying to solve for first. So you want to find that first, why did the chicken cross the road to get to the other side? Do we really understand how chickens get across the road to the other side? And we can map that out. And there’s a language around how I would describe a chicken crossing the road and guess what has nothing to do with my brand or my customer journey map, or my existing product. It’s just that then in another step we can layer on to that things like emotion and aspirations and the solution and the brand come after that. But what job says is that opportunities for innovation and improvement come from fundamentally fulfilling that job first, and then you can add the other aspects of assumptions and biases of our brand on top of it after that.  
23:58    Right. Yeah. And you actually, um, I was talking with Lou down, um, about their book, uh, good services and talking about this idea that, you know, well, one thing was that, um, the writing in the book services are what users or customers say they are your brand or your services is whatever the user says it is. Um, and nothing the other way around. But the other idea, we talked a bit about, uh, sort of wow moments in my kind of dislike in general for this idea of well moments. Um, the, uh, and you say in the, in the book as well, you know, if you don’t get the, the functional bit at the job, right, you don’t, you basically don’t earn the right to do the kind of emotional bit, or I should just go for the emotional job, um, and fail to actually deliver the functional job. You kind of just failed entirely, right?  
24:47    Yeah. That, uh, that that’s the rule of thumb. I do. I do present that as more or less, a hard rule in the book. However, I personally been in situations where you wonder if that’s actually the case and I’ve talked to other people where they don’t wholly buy into that. Um, I think though, from the jobs perspective, though, that would be your starting point. You would believe that to be true, that I need to know how did chickens cross the road first, before I try to make an emotional appeal to the chickens, to get them to cross the road back.  
25:15    I think there’s a trade off. And I think the most glaring example of that is, is kind of operating systems, right? Kind of windows versus Mac or Android versus iOS in that you there’s a balance between, or there’s a trade off between the two that you make a, we know you’re not going to sacrifice some kind of functional thing for some other kind of emotional thing. Um, and I think that probably happens in, in all sorts of things. Um, you know, it happens when people with cars or it happens, it happens in quite a lot of physical products as well.  
25:46    Agree. And here, here’s the point. I’ll kind of reiterate now that you set that context up, that trade off will happen, but it happens in a specific order that you first look at the functional job, then you smack that up against all of those emotional aspirational and brand aspects. And then you make the trade offs not the other way around. So in that sense jobs to be done, it’s, it’s a, it’s almost a, it’s a process that you need to start there and then do those other compromises or, uh, uh, diag diagnosis afterwards. But you might let in that  
26:19    Kind of trade, you might let the emotional side kind of win if you like.  
26:22    Oh, great, great. Yeah, no, you absolutely can. And I have a great example of this, where I was working for a provider of online women’s fashion. And I don’t know if you’ve ever worked in online’s women’s fashion. I learned a lot, it was eye opening, and we were looking at things like jeans, which I didn’t realize were so, so, so problematic in terms of fit, but the space is wholly emotional and about personal brand and how you look like there’s this social and emotional jobs that go along with on online women’s fashion. But the, the key problem that we identified in part using a little bit of tubs, thinking that I injected there was do the jeans fit, right? So it was a functional job that we, that was going to be the wow effect or the thing that we knew we had to solve first. Right? So even in, even in spaces where I thought, no, no, this is all about, you know, uh, aspirations and, and appeal and things like that. It actually did come back to a functional job that we needed to solve first.  
27:20    So let’s talk about the hierarchical nature of this, cause you should have got this kind of micro job, little job, big job, and then aspiration, obviously the, it kind of triggered the whole zoom levels thing in my head. Um, I have to admit, and if, if Nate is listening to this he’ll well, no, I was sort of a, um, quite a jobs to be done skeptic, uh, in the early days. In fact it was him who kind of converted me. And partly because we were working on a project where, um, we, well, there was research scope creep. So that was one thing where we went from what should have probably been about so 20 or 30 interviews to about a hundred. Um, and so we had a, kind of a real synthesis problem with it. Um, obviously one of the things that jobs to be done is good for is synthesizing.  
28:06    Um, and it was very, very hard to work out. What level of abstraction or what level of kind of job, I guess, uh, are we going to sort of synthesize this in, because it felt like the further up you went the less, um, it’s not that you couldn’t group the staff into jobs, but those jobs became less useful for a design team because they were things like, um, uh, uh, be seen as an expert in the community or something, which is why, how much can we, how much can we kind of influence that? And so certainly I’ve found for kinda design teams, a couple of layers down levels down where we’re sort of more useful, cause it was something much more sort of concrete that they could actually design artifacts for. What are your kind of views on, on this?  
28:55    I think that’s it. I think that’s exactly the, the issue that jobs to be done addresses is what, what’s your unit of analysis and at what level can you realistically have agency? Uh, and I think sometimes, and I’ve done this, I’m guilty of this, Andy. I don’t know if you’ve ever done it, where you go into a, you know, a, a session, a workshop of some kind, and you’re swinging for the fences, as we’d like to say in the U S you know, just blue sky innovation and you are trying to, you know, make people feel like an expert. You know, that’s a great aspiration that you have, but you make widgets. You know what I mean? Um, so, so where where’s the agency, and then you walk out of that room with a wall full of post it notes, and everybody goes back to their day job.  
29:36    Uh, the example that I like to give is actually a quote from Theodore Levitt that actually people like Clayton Christianson to come up with jobs to be done. And you’ve heard this before too, is people don’t want a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole, right? Yeah. And I just had this on, on LinkedIn where people then started ripping it apart, say, no, they want to hang a picture. No, they want a better home life. And if you can, so Josh, he does not a game of five whys because if you play that game, then a job to be done is happiness, love and self actualization all the time. Love self actualization and happiness are not great places to innovate, right. And particularly not if you’re a drill manufacturer or drill bit manufacturer, right. If I’m a drill bit manufacturer, maybe I want to make better holes in the wall.  
30:19    Um, but you know, how far, how far what’s my reach of agency that I can actually innovate around. And what I like to do is find, find the thing that’s comfortable. So you can take your team of designers and find the thing that’s like super obvious for them to solve and then stretch it and go up one level and say, we’re going to solve that level up. That’s where I try to come in on, okay, this is using jobs to be done as a framing mechanism. This is where we’re going to innovate, right. But if you go too high, then you’re just, you’re you lose gravity. You’re just floating in outer space. You know,  
30:50    I mean, I had this feeling that we were, it was like a skimming stone, you know, we ended up, uh, either we would have had to have tripled the amount of synthesis time to really drill deep into each one and have a kind of massive set of jobs to be done that we could then, um, uh, work from. Or, um, you end up kind of with this. I mean, that’s the, that’s the paradox of research, right? The more research you have with qualitative research, the more you have, if you don’t stretch the synthesis time at the other end, if you’ve got fixed amount of time to do that in, you end up going shallow. And so ironically, you think you’re getting more when in fact you kind of get less insight because you can’t go as deep. Um, and I think that, uh, that was the kind of the struggle we had.  
31:36    There’s the opposite thing though. I mean, you were talking about, about kind of lifting a team up is actually to kind of bring people down a level two. And, and, um, I think a lot of Ali’s loved clients I’ve kind of worked with in teams. I’ve worked with, they do start a little bit too high sometimes, which is, you know, we want to be the number one. And it comes from that, that company centric point of view, right. Which is, Oh, we want to be the number one customer experience in whatever it is, you know, telcos or mobile phone purchasing or whatever it is. And that’s, um, and that’s part of the problem that that’s such a kind of broad thing, and it sort of misses the misses the point.  
32:12    I agree. And if you look at the solutions of those companies and how well they satisfied their core job, the thing, the functional thing that people actually trying to get done with their solution, in most cases, there are gaps there and opportunity for growth actually come from filling those gaps or extending, extending that core job rather than putting layers and layers of assumptions bias brand. And you go on top of it, right? And those things are often it’s kind of  
32:38    Vanilla boring. That’s the  
32:40    Thing. I think there’s a bit of this point when people always think innovation is this kind of, um, really exciting thing actually, it’s, you know, it’s not this thing, this daily thing that I work with is really frustrating and tedious. I wish someone would make it a bit better. Um, there was a, um, a bit you talk talking about, cause the people telcos are the classic kind of churn case. There’s a famous thing in, um, jobs to be done about jobs, interviews and switch interviews. Can you, can you talk about that? Cause you talk about it in the discovery bit. Yeah, sure. Um, there, I mean there are a couple of different schools of thought around jobs to be done and practitioners have developed, you know, one approach versus another approach. Um, and I think, uh, jobs interviews, as I described them and switch interviews kind of fit firmly in, in to, to PR PR PR leading camps or schools of thought around jobs to be done.  
33:34    Um, the first jobs interview is you’re, you’re obviously working for an organization, so you need to scope the field, the frame of, of research, right? So if you work for an insurance company, you’re not going to talk to people about how they listen to classical music, right? You, you need, you need to have some frame of reference before going into those interviews and that’s, that’s your business, your business motion. Like what, what field are you in? Right. So you need to do that kind of framing. And then also from within that, trying to frame our priority, trying to frame the level of altitude that you’re going to be targeting as well too, before you go into those interviews. But after that, you’re not talking about a product or solution or anything like that, you’re really just framing the interview, starting from which direction am I pointed out as an organization.  
34:21    It doesn’t even have to be a business. And then in a, in a much more bottom up way, trying to interview people about what they’re doing independent of a solution or product, right? So it’s kind of moving, moving forward or bottom up. Um, the switch interview is basically saying most of us have products and services on the market already. So I can, I can use that to reverse engineer back to the product, right? So what I’m going to do is say, when did you adopt or acquire that product and went through questioning, and this isn’t rocket science, if you’ve ever done contextual inquiry or any kind of qualitative interviews, you might read this and say, I’ve been doing this. And the answer is, yeah, you have just use, use, use your interviewing sensibilities. Um, but what you’re looking for in a switch interview is you’re starting from that point where, um, they adopted or acquired something and try and go back to moments before that. What’s the thought before the thought before the thought until you get to what’s called the first thought, and from there you can deduce what the actual job was. So for me, it’s like one, one building up and the other kind of reverse engineering back. But the, the idea in both of those is that you’re going to get to this unfettered job description of what they were actually trying to do that underlying objective that people had.  
35:33    So, um, we’ve been sort of talking about, um,  
35:37    Using  
35:38    Their, their sort of research end of things. Um, and, and, uh, using jobs to be done as a way as a different lenses or a waiter as a lens or a way of looking at that. Um, and the nice thing is it does work at those different levels, whether it’s kind of strategy, or it could be a kind of technical thing, or it could also be obviously a kind of UX or service design thing. Let’s go down the other end, which is about testing hypothesis with it. So because obviously, and depending on how, how much there’s a kind of iterative process going on and a kind of loop going back, loop back, going on for design teams. At some point, someone will have done the synthesis and a team will have decided these are the, these are what we think the jobs to be done are. Um, obviously those are also, um, best guesses and as you start to validate them, so tell me how it can be useful in, in that, um, validation end of things.  
36:31    Sure. Um, well, first of all, I think, I think some of the techniques in, from jobs to be done can be very helpful in coming up with a hypothesis or a theory, I should say where to start testing right at what, where are the, where are the weak points? If we just take the functional job, for instance, let’s say we take the job of a chicken crossing the road or getting energy in the morning. Right. I could map that out in, in steps and then, um, use it as a diagnostic tool to come up with a collective theory that the team buys into that says, Oh, here’s a, here’s a weak point. And here’s a weak point. And we’re going to try to come up with solutions. Um, for those weak points, those then become the inputs for something like a lean experiment. We believe that if we in, you know, if we, uh, notify the chicken about oncoming traffic, more that there’ll be less likely to get run over by it, right?  
37:24    Whatever that iPod, this is, statement achieve their job, their job quicker. Right? So, you know, we, we would pick a moment there that would then be the input into experimentation. I think the other thing too is through jobs interviews, for instance, what you can look for our success criteria. And that’s the interesting thing about jobs to be done for me is that it actually separates the process from the desired outcomes or the steps from the needs. So what we can actually do is then look at those needs or the desired outcomes that we’ve extracted from our research as measures of success for the experiment as well, too. Um, and give an example. So if a chicken we’re trying to cross the road that desired outcome might be, um, to, uh, to, to, um, you know, increase the speed at which the chicken can cross the road. So then speed, uh, becomes a success metric for the chicken in determining whether a solution from an experiment or otherwise would, would be the best, uh, fit for them that that addresses an unmet need right now that might be super obvious, but the jobs, uh, the jobs process actually is very thorough and uncovering a complete set of desired outcomes that you can then try to prioritize and then hold those up against your solution and say, does this help with the speed of crossing the road?  
38:53    Yeah, I thought that that bit was really nice that she has this kind of reading. There’s some of my colleagues ex-colleagues in, in Australia, um, have this whole kind of, um, measuring impact thing. And, and one of the things that they do, sorry, hang on, sorry, I’ll start that again. You know, that bits, um, was really nice. Cause I think one of the things that I, I remembered when was my, my ex colleagues in Australia and they had just kind of had this nice kind of a way of measuring impact, um, for the, the work that Fjord does. Um, and it had that kind of mix that you talk about actually very early on. So when you’re talking about those different types of jobs, when you’re saying, well, hang on, you’ve got, you’ve got the, um, you know, the sort of functional part of the job, but you’ve got also these emotional jobs.  
39:37    And then you’ve got these kind of, um, related jobs. They’re those, all those extra bits, all become criteria by which you can, that you can measure, right? So you can say, well, yes, I can, I’ve achieved this job. And I feel more confident or more trusting in that or not. So those, there are some nice qualitative things that you can measure, but there’s other stuff around, um, I guess their, their adjectives and adverbs around, you know, a job that I, I want to achieve this because you also talk about the importance of context, right? So this, when I’m doing this in this context, um, uh, you know, I want to be able to do this. And so, you know, it could be, I can now do this quicker or I, I get my job done quicker or better or whatever. And those are all measurable things. And all the way through the book, you talk about, you take that sort of discover, define, and design and so forth, but each time you put value behind it. So what was the, I’m going to ask this of naive question, if you like, what was the idea behind putting the word value, discovering value, defined value, designing value, delivering value, rather than just, you know, discover, define design.  
40:45    Yeah, it’s a good question. And it, uh, it’s tricky as well too, because value, um, you know, you were talking about this before is what the, what the individual perceives, right? Yeah. We, we don’t, we don’t create value. People perceive value. Right. So, so I, I w I, I crossed a fine line there, but, uh, yeah, I was asking myself and I think I talk about this in the introduction to the book. I was saying, what’s the job of an organization. And, you know, I’m pretty much focused on commercial organizations in the book, but it could be an educational institution or even a government. Um, you know, what’s the job, uh, of, of, of a business let’s say. Um, and I found this, uh, this blog post, uh, the author escapes my mind, my memory right now, uh, he’s, he’s fairly active on like the financial times and Forbes, but he was saying there’s basically four, four jobs that, uh, that a business, any organization has in order to grow.  
41:39    And that’s to discover where the, where the value is that they’re going to go after to define that then to create it and then to deliver it to the market. So, uh, he didn’t use those terms, but, uh, when I, when I read his four statements, I said, well, that’s, there’s four DS there as well, too. But, uh, going back to my answer on what’s the job of the book, I also want it to show that jobs will be done is pervasive throughout an organization at any point. And I didn’t want to present that as a, as a process. In fact, I use a figure eight to kind of show that’s different modes that every organization is in that simultaneously you’re in discovery mode, you’re in design mode, you’re in delivery mode. That kind of thing. I wanted to show that you could apply techniques from jobs to be done at any one of those points and at different levels of altitude as well, too. So for me, it was actually, you know, to be honest with you though, Andy that’s the long winded answer, the short winded answer is I needed a way to organize all of the places that I had. And it turned out to be a nice way to just have one chapter flow to the next chapter floated the next chapter.  
42:37    And so I’ve got a question about a writing question, which is at what point did you make that decision? How much of the manuscript had you got done or had done a first?  
42:46    I had that structural decision right. Way up front or early on, luckily. Um, and I think it, I think it works, it’s actually kind of irrelevant, you know, um, you know, I show and the word value. So back to your question, the word value is that that’s ultimately what an organization does. Right. But sometimes I’ll show that figure eight and workshops. And then I structure my workshop after that. And it’s, it’s, it’s just a rubric, it’s just an umbrella. You know, it doesn’t really do anything in and of itself,  
43:15    So that for people, cause it’s, there’s a podcast, but the figure of eight has those different stages, but it’s an infinite loop, right. It looks like the infinity sign in fact. And so, and you’re right, you know, everyone is doing any organization is, is doing all of those things all at once, which is often forget, forgotten. And cause I think organizations often mentally think of themselves as a, you know, as a, um, assembly line and there’s just stuff rolls off on the end, into people’s homes and you know, they get money. Um, and but one of the problem is I’m saying this in my experience. Cause when we were writing the service design book, it’s this very kind of, um, sort of fractal thing that it everything’s related to everything else. And one of the problems with a book is it’s linear. Right? And so you, in, in, in some respects, a kind of a website, it has the advantage in your hyperlinks. They allow you to write a kind of nonlinear book. And in it, you actually talked about this in the introduction, which is this isn’t a book too. It was in the introduction or in the forward, this, this isn’t a book to read on a transatlantic flight. And then not that anyone’s doing that right now, but to read on a flight and then you’re done, right. That is actually something gonna keep, keep coming back to  
44:24    Yeah, no, correct. It was my, it was my escaping, the, the two D or the linear nature of a. And how, how did, how do you escape that? Uh, luckily, I mean, you know, I’ve worked in like information architecture. I have a degree in information science and I’ve also written books before. I kind of knew that particularly the way I was approaching the book, which was small Lego blocks. I knew that if I didn’t have that going into it, that it would have been, I would have been halfway through it and, and just rewritten or restructured the whole thing. So I did it kind of intuitively I put a little bit of thought into how I’m going to structure the whole, the whole thesis of the book into one, into one cohesive thing. And then that, that appeared to me and it seemed, it just, it just kinda made sense, but, um, I, I, I urge people to not read too deeply into that.  
45:12    Um, they, you know, it is really just an organizing principle and that you are doing all of these things at the same time and there are levels of hierarchy that’s that’s about it. Yeah. But I mean, one thing is about that and I can imagine this is what happens in workshops, depending on who you’re talking to. Right. As you can kind of start anywhere and work your way around, um, around to it. So in fact, it’s interesting that you bring that up because one of the other things that I really liked about jobs to be done when I first came across it in 2003, um, was that it wasn’t coming from the design field. It didn’t have that weight loaded term of design attached to it. And it was coming from the business field and anybody can own it. Right. Um, and, um, you know, currently in my, in my current role, um, I manage a team of customer success managers.  
45:57    So, um, you know, involved in tangentially in customer success communities, and they’re talking about jobs to be done. And I gave a talk in September last year and it was something like jobs to be done for customer success, which starts on the other side of my loop. And it’s for a specific audience, you know what I mean? And then, you know, you see here marketing people, sales people that all kinds of disciplines around or an organization are latching onto jobs to be done. So I wanted to come up with a structure where, like you said, you can access it at any point, but you could also have any flavor of jobs to be done as well, too. Right. So you may know that like I rent generally about how products are actually services and especially digital products, aren’t products. Um, so for the thing I wrote the other day, I think I haven’t been a comment on your blog post was that I considered jobs to be done the ultimate, uh, proof that, uh, products are in fact services.  
46:51    I I’m, I’m on board with that. I’ll, I’ll say I’ll take that as well too. I’m also not dogmatic about my position around jobs to be done. I, I’m not, I’m not a consult, I’m not an active consultant of, you know, jobs to be done. I do have a lot of practical experience, uh, but I’ve been following the field long enough. And of course I’ve been following UX and service design as well, too. So I get your drift right away. And I would absolutely agree with that, but this is the most extreme version of a good service dominant logic is, you know, a bottle of water is actually a thirst quenching service. Right, right, exactly right. Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah. So you, you bring up a really good point, um, because a lot of existing disciplines, particularly from design and service design fields, they say, haven’t we been doing this haven’t we been doing this since, you know, Alan Cooper came up with gold directed design and goal-based personas and you know, isn’t contextual design don’t they talk about the same thing in the, in the book, contextual design, when, you know, contextual inquiry. And it’s like, yeah, it’s a, it’s, it’s the same, it’s the same mindset it’s, it’s wrapped up differently though. And I think that’s important because a customer success person, isn’t gonna pick up a 500 page book that has the word design on it. Find those pages that are relevant, extrapolate that to their field and then make it actionable.  
48:05    Yeah, no, that’s very true. No, and that’s the thing I think out of all the things that I kind of with a bit of a penny drop when I was reading the book that bit where you kind of talk about that at the beginning, it was like, ah, yeah, he’s right. I had not noticed it. And then I realized that and, and for, for anyone who’s, so I’ve just started, um, offering, um, design leadership coaching. And one of the things that comes up all the time, which you’re not taught in design score much of is, is basically having conversations with stakeholders. And then the further up you go in design, the less actual design work you do. And the difficulty comes from, you know, it’s rare that you’re sitting there going, this is a tough design problem to crack. It’s all the kind of people stuff.  
48:45    And it struck me how, um, how useful this is for people in that to think about how you can kind of reframe conversations. And I think you’re right, you know, language matters and words trigger all sorts of things and reactions, and they open people up or shut people down. And that, that was actually a, an insight in there that I thought was, uh, was very, very good. And, um, I really can recommend people and having a read of it. So listen, we’re coming up to time. I talked about, you know, this a designer working at many different levels of zoom from there, from the Em’s, uh, film. Uh, so I ask every guest what one small thing is either needs to be desperately needs to be redesigned and is overlooked, or is well designed and unknown, um, that has an outsized effect on the world.  
49:34    Right? Yeah. I haven’t been thinking of that while I was talking, because it was such an engaging conversation. Thanks again for having me here and the, but I do know that, you know, the, those small, those small moments matter right. That they can, they can make a big difference whether somebody is in or out and even be kind of even be life changing as well too.  
49:56    Can you think of an example of one? I mean, particularly right now, there might be a few.  
50:00    Yeah. Ah, um, so, um, I, I did this crazy project in 2017 and I’ve talked and written a little bit about it. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, uh, my story here in the, but, um, I was invited, uh, by an NGO and Abu Dhabi to lead a workshop, working with ex violent extremists. Um, and I actually did a mapping exercise to map their experience. So there, there were violent extremists who got out of the movement and we wouldn’t understand their process of getting out, uh, in particular what they did afterwards, how their life went on afterwards. So, and we threw stuff from my last book mapping experiences into the workshop, and it was great because here I am with violet X vinyl, an extremist in the room and NGO people and people from the state department in the U S using mapping experiences and sticky notes and design thinking and all that good stuff.  
50:50    But there, there were some very interesting conversations there about how do people get on the wrong trajectory as well, too. And it was things, things as simple as, you know, having afterschool programs for kids to give them some meaning like a karate class or something like that. And one of the, one of the former violent extremists who I’m now in contact with was saying that if he had, I think it was karate lessons, if his, if his parents could, could have continued paying for his karate lessons, he might not have become a violent extremist. That’s amazing. Isn’t it it’s like girls being able to have a safe pathway to school or something like that. Yeah, exactly. But the, the, the, the, the point at which that happened is minuscule. It’s totally small when you think of like, so to fight Al Qaeda or to fight ISIS, we need to do more after school programs.  
51:43    They, it almost doesn’t make sense. The logic doesn’t make sense, but it might be like, yeah, actually that’s a good, it’s a good thing. It’s a good example of what happens when you can a ladder up and think about the job, which is meaning. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And by an extremist organizations are really, really good at recognizing that people have a gap in meaning in their lives and filling that in that’s, that’s what it’s all about. That’s why, that’s how that happened. If you pre-fill that, that gap with something meaningful, karate lessons, music, lessons, whatever it might be. Right. Um, we have less hate in the world. I think so. I think so, too, that sounds like a good place to end. Where can people find you on the interwebs on the interwebs? You can go to my LinkedIn page and connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m happy to chat with people there. I love meeting people. If you find me on LinkedIn and then on Twitter at Jim callback, no.no space just at Jim callback. Um, I’m trying to be active, but you know how it is keeping up with it with the socials and they sometimes you get behind to out and you’re not in tick tock. Then I had live streaming or phonetics.  
52:51    Um, Jim, it’s been a great, thank you so much for being my guest on power of 10. My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Andy. Okay. I’m got to stop there. Thanks so much. That was great. Okay, good. We could have gone for it. I think I can hit stop here.