Presenters: Kat Holmes, Senior Vice President, UX and Product Design, Salesforce 
Jessica Orkin, Chief Executive Officer, SYPartners 


Brainstorm Design 2022 - A Declaration Of Interdependence 

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Brainstorm Design 2022 - A Declaration Of Interdependence 


I hope you all enjoyed speaking with existing connections or making new ones during the break. The importance of our relationships informs our next conversation much has been said about the role of great individuals, whether in greek mythology or its founders of countries or corporations, their sense of destiny looseness and above all, independents are celebrated and identified as reasons for the success of the cause country or company they lead, but reality is usually different. Our next speakers believe that design requires and benefits the collective and that in our complex society we need complementary, diverse teams to identify problems and propose creative, inclusive solutions that move the needle. Please welcome kat Holmes, senior vice president of UX and product design at Salesforce in conversation with Jessica Orkin, chief executive officer of S. Y. Partners. Hello and thank you. Hey, hey Jessica. Um we are so honored to be here today and have this conversation with you and we wanted to start with a couple of personal stories and how we came to this topic and how we came to one another around this work. And um you know, for me, I um you know, I always knew early on I wanted to be an innovator and inventor, a pioneer, like my early heroes, they were all in that apple ed. Remember that one? Like here's to the crazy ones, the geniuses. Um I still cry, I want to watch it right? It just moves me and um through my career as an engineer, a designer. But I was getting my M. B. A. It's always felt like it's climbing this, pushing this um sorry my slides role of life, he jumped right into it so that individual that that lone genius kind of creating that change in the world and having that impact. And then as I was in my own career, as I continued to feel like I was, I was climbing, I was pushing in a way earning the right to lead, how I thought about it and in hindsight in many ways I was pushing to be seen often at times when I felt very invisible and all of those different environments in the world. And you know, one moment that I remember in my career it was a manager, I'll call him paul. Um my team at that time it arrived late to an event and paul says cat, I want to get your, you know, you should go get your team in a room and read them the riot act, totally unacceptable to be late. Ah I don't know what the riot act is, I have never been read it, I don't quite know what it entails, What I gathered is that paul wanted me to get these folks in the room and throw a temper tantrum to get them to do what I need. I wanted them to do what more so paul wanted them to do and as I did that and attempted that it was clumsy, it was terrible. It felt completely out of place and of course the team saw right through it right, They saw that that was me trying to be paul, right? And I promised myself in that moment that I would act in ways that was authentic to who I was and in that, you know, I didn't have to look far for models of that kind of leadership. My mom demonstrated that for me in my life, my aunties, I made sure I did my homework and got fed after school. Um my teachers who expanded the world for me, the community of leaders and and activists and movements that happened in the Oakland California, where I grew up all these different examples of leadership that, you know, right there for me. But what I have done is I had separate how I thought about how I need to show up and work from all of these examples of healthy mutual kinds of relationships that were affected in other areas of my life. I'm trying to bring that into how I thought about leadership. So my story actually begins on another coast um and quite different than cats. So I grew up the kid of two teachers of transcendental meditation in rural new Hampshire um on a dirt road in the trees. And my first educational experience was, and now I'm realizing it probably wasn't a school, it was actually probably just friends of my parents, uh fellow meditators, but my first experience was um learning in an intergenerational setting. Teachers did not have Mr and mrs, they were just fellow learners, kids of multiple ages, slightly running feral. Um, but I learned how to actually read and write by setting type and an old printing press. So we learned by doing and we learned collectively and collaboratively. We were a community that was supporting one another, enter public school at some point, kind of crashing into the realities of learning in a structured way, a hierarchical way. We're literally, each one of us were assigned a number. He knew exactly where you were in class. It was a winner take all mentality. It was competitive. Um it was killed the other one that taught me how to from a space of collectivism and interdependence. I learned how to become independent, I learned how to compete and I took that into my career over many years, which does not always create the kindest of interactions. I have spent my career actually unlearning those behaviors And it was not until arriving about 10 years ago, my partners where I found a community of fellow learners, fellow creators, fellow designers, in the business of designing vision futures and culture that actually restored connections between one another and leaned into interdependence versus just independent. Now this is not a binary. This is not an either or there is room and space for independence for hierarchy. For many of the ways that we've all learned how to be in the world, what cat and I are inviting us all into is what might interdependence and expanding the toolkit of ways of being with one another. Ways of designing companies, Ways of designing cultures, ways of designing products, services, interactions, teams. What might that look like? The pandemic, climate change, racial reckoning all of this has shown us we are in fact deeply interdependent. The things that we are facing now are much bigger than any one of us and a single team, any single company. But it's important I think for us to check in with ourselves because the stories and myths that Cat mentions the heroes that were brought up to revere, they are so deeply encoded enough. They shape how we lead, they shape how we act, they shape how we design. So I invite us and we will take 30 seconds so completely inadequate for the time. But this is in front of everybody just to reflect to a little bit of personal reflection. Right? Sketch. Think what does independence mean to you? What words come up do you think about that? What does interdependence mean to you? What words, thoughts and images come up when you think of that? What box do you operate more out of? Well, as Jessica said, this is certainly something we could spend very deep time on, but we're gonna share a little bit about what came up for Jessica and I as we were doing this together and we realized that we need to take a closer look, three kinds of shifts that happened between independence and interdependence and the first one being trussed. I'm going to share a quick reports analogy that hopefully, I think most, most folks have heard it's a bit risky for me using a sports metaphor on stage. Um, but I love, I do love the story of Michael Jordan's right? Like Michael Jordan joined the Chicago bulls and they were winning games. He was a star player. But it wasn't until Phil Jackson became coach in 1989 that they started winning championships. And it's because Jackson focused in on unifying the team as one team and rather than centering the plays around around Jordan's right And, you know, they went on to when they went on to win six championships subsequently. And you know, that that story for me triggers the question, you know, who do you trust and who do you interest? Who are the folks that you give the right work to the moments, key challenges? You know, do they play the same way that you do? Do they help you win? Right? And at what cost? And as we think about the shift between an independent mindset and the interdependence mindset here in the, in the visual, you know, think about trust in an independent mindset often there's a there's a protector for a savior. Somebody passed the ball to it's going to take it, take it down to the, but in our lives, you know, trust is formed is like a daily living practice, you know, the people you trust most you're in conversation with them frequently about the health of that trust in the same way, you know, trust in an interdependent and independent mindset is often defined by the rejection of others or the acceptance who's in who's out or being in contrast to something. Um and in an interdependent mindset, its really about recognizing ourselves and each other um finding that place of transparency, creating that and the authentic belonging that can come with it and we know when we feel that now the second shift that we're looking at is power. So an example here. So I'm also a writer, one of my heroes is Pellegrino Turri. I have his uh Patent drawing on my wall and um you know, Tori was Italian inventor, invented the first prototype of a typewriter in the 1940s and the 1830s. But what is little known is that he created that in partnership with the contessa Carolina fontana di Provenzano apologize, I didn't nail that totally, but they were very, very good friends with two of them and the contessa was blind and the very soul reason that they created that first prototype of the typewriter was so that she could offer her own letters when they were apart and wanted to communicate and I think about this story when I think about research in the ways that we engage stakeholders, the ways that we gain feedback on the evolution of our business, of our design, you know, who are those collaborators? What are the practices of that collaboration? Um what are the ways that we opened up for contribution? And what kind of contribution do we celebrate? Do we compensate kind of contributions? Do we credit, correct? So if you think about power of being derived often from the sense of hierarchy and position, um seniority in different ways, whether it's company or individuals. Yeah, Independent mindset kind of drives a sense of scarcity as well, how things need to be distributed fixed way. And the interdependence mindset, thinking about the relational capital that we're building every day where we're intentionally doing that with one another, certainly here and then how that spent when we think about different ways of framing the problems ahead of us and how that can actually create new kinds of abundance. Having a single authority for decision making and an independent mindset versus thinking about multi centered stakeholders where many different types of decisions can emerge. And uh favoring a single human lifetime is a trademark trait of an independent mindset as we see more and we've heard more here today and yesterday about favoring multiple lifetimes. What does it look like to look? Seven generations ahead expertise also is shifting the independent mindset privileges, knowledge and expertise as being recognized from without now I know there are many people in the medical profession here. I really want you to have diplomas and degrees and that expertise and standards. But there's also a shift to recognizing expertise um at the front lines, through experience, through the people who are having the day to day interactions with others. They hold wisdom, they hold knowledge, they hold solutions that inform the designs going forward. This is not a new idea, the innovation process um for many, many years and I'm sure everybody in this room has gone through. It actually goes out and collects insights from the front lines from people who are the direct users or customers. Um but it was often an extractive process. It was a way of gathering those insights, bringing them back into a centralized design process that then produced the answer or solution, what we're finding, working with our clients and particularly in retail hospitality and um companies that have people outside of headquarters and directly interacting with people in the world, is again tapping into their wisdom and involving them in the design process directly and the word co creation has been used multiple times today and yesterday I submit, we are very much at the beginning of what co creation actually looks like the design process and the ways in which we're used to engaging in it. I think it's going to be continued to radically shift as we keep going as we recognize expertise held by the many, not just a few. So we think about shifts and power trust shifts and power shifts and expertise. I want to leave you with a couple of questions. Beautiful questions to consider as you go back into your day, back into your team's, back into your company to the first who has the most to lose by a change you're considering, who has the most to gain. Just sit with that start recognizing the interconnections and interdependence. How can we engage unexpected expertise holders in that process? Who lightly consider um you who have you been overlooking? Who may you turn to? And then as cat began and that apple add that many of us grew up with and and love. But what are your go to stories of leadership and bold creativity? Do they celebrate the single hero? What are the stories that you tell yourself? What are the stories you tell your team? What values are encoded in those stories? They're the ones you want to be passing on? Are there other stories that we may bring into our repertoire as we think about ourselves as leaders, as we think about ourselves as designers creators? I really love that piece of thinking about it as an expanded toolkit. Alright, reflecting on what's there, reflecting on might be missing and then expanding from many different sources and as you know, we bring this back together, you know, it's it's just about constantly checking in with ourselves in those moments of just looking to what is the trust and power and expertise that already exists within the people that make our lives possible, right? In all the aspects. And in that this is where we start to design for interdependence. It's where we start to design for relationships that our mutual reciprocal healthy. And so, you know those myths, what are those myths in your days? What are the things that we tell ourselves that we tell our stakeholders? Um maybe knowingly or unknowingly and how those show up in different ways and in those moments when you see those, notice your body and notice your breath and in that place, that is where we can start to design with new and intentional declaration for our collective future. Thank you. Thank you.