Valerie Casey, Senior Vice President and Chief Design Officer, Walmart 
In conversation with: Alan Murray, Chief Executive Officer, FORTUNE 


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Designing A Regenerative Company 

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Brainstorm Design 2022 - Designing A Regenerative Company 


three years ago walmart, which as you heard from brian's introduction is the world's largest company by revenue announced its goal of becoming a regenerative regenerative company, one that works uh to restore renew and replenish in in addition to preserving our planet. In the words of its Ceo doug McMillon to help combat the climate crisis, the giant retailer also aims to reach net zero carbon emissions by virtue of its Oh I'm sorry by 2040 by virtue of its global footprint and involvement in myriad supply chains. The beast from benton ville has tremendous influence. Uh We're going to ask how design thinking is helping the company achieve its ambitious goal. Oh I'm sorry community cards, please welcome to the stage. Yeah, Valerie, Casey, Senior Vice President and Chief Design Officer of Walmart in conversation with 14 Media Ceo Allen Murray. Sorry about that. Valerie thank you so much for being here and thanks to the co chairs for letting me do this interview because I'm I'm I'm really excited about it. We're going to get to the regenerative company. But I first want to ask you, I mean I've looked at your background a lot of it was in social impact, environmental impact, how in the world did you end up at walmart? This is a question that I have been asked many many times because I spent about 15 years of my career in the design agency world. So I. D. O. Pentagram frog design and then was doing different things internationally for about 10 years um as well as working at Samsung in product actually. Um And um I the way I came to walmart um was quite interesting. I moved to America when I was small and we never lived near at walmart, so we didn't grow up with that typical kind of people said, oh yeah, you know, we could always go to the walmart and pick up, that wasn't part of my my kind of lived experience. Um but I was very involved in the World Economic Forum and I would run all of these workshops and design thinking sessions for lots of people at Davos and other places. Um and I was in this forum with different C level executives. Um and this woman was over in this area talking about her company and talking about innovation and it was so it was so different than the way I had heard about innovation being discussed before, and it involved thinking about associates, which is the name that we give to employees. It involved thinking about the planet and involves thinking about how to be more competitive in the marketplace. And I quietly turned to the person next to me and I said, where did she say she worked? And she said, oh she works at walmart, and I said, no, no, no, that person. And just because I couldn't possibly fathom that this was walmart. And literally that day I went home, I rang up somebody who I knew worked at walmart and he said, actually, we have this project and you'd be perfect for it. Four days later I was in Pentonville and um about six months later I took on the role to kind of bring together the design teams that had been sort of sprinkled throughout the organization and turned it into something. So it wouldn't, it was not in my consideration set, but I I kind of came into it realizing that so when you got there four years ago you feel like it was already a design forward company? No, no, no. I think that, you know, at the time it was, you know, it's kind of some of the reflections, I think many of us have right design is appreciated but it's it's it's often thought of just on the surface design curious. Yeah, exactly. Design curious or maybe even before that and you can start to see that when you bring designers together to do things that are more significant around the thinking rather than just the decoration. Um you can actually get some significant business impact. And I think actually on that, that front when I joined and I brought the teams together. One of the first things I realized that we could do was speaking the lingua franca of the organization, which as you can see from it's still being the fortune one by revenue, right that the what the lingua franca of the company is all of these measurements. So how much does this feature due to bring customers in? How much GM v how much conversion, how much cP contribution profit. And so one of the first things that we did every single quarter, we meticulously across our entire portfolio took every single feature and measured it and it could have been moving a button up in the page, it might be a new feature, it might be a new product and we produced a quarterly impact report and we just sent it out and just said this is what design can do. And after about 345 quarters we ended up not having to do that report anymore because people saw that design was not a decorative nice to have. It was actually a business level. So before we get to the regenerative company, give us one example of how you were able to do that use metrics and drive change because walmart is that it's just a massive organization. It is one of the largest companies in the world, the largest by revenue. So give us an example of how you were able to use a design process to change driver change of the organization. We have so we have imagined this and I have never heard of the beast from Bentonville and be discussed before. There was interesting way to bring me out. Thank you. Uh we're among friends here. You know, it feels like a little like a high school reunion. Um, but one of the things that um, that we have is about 1.4 million associates. So all the associates who work, whether it's in the front end, checking you out or doing inventory or the back of the house supply chain. So 1.4 million associates and throughout the 60 years of the company, all of the tools and services that they used had been built independently and they had been built with the best intentions, right? How do we help people make, you know, do their jobs in a better way? But as a result, there were literally over 100 products that somebody who was coming on as a shift worker might have to learn how to use if they were coming to work in the store. So you're talking about dozens and dozens of hours of training that could be averted if you actually consolidated, got rid of some of those things and then actually created and applied a design language so that as soon as you learned how to use and this was a philosophy. As soon as you learned how to use the newly redesigned walmart app, you could use any tool or service to be an associate at wal mart because our associates are also customers. So we brought in this concept of consumer grade tools for everyone. Got rid of the idea that an enterprise approach where you have a captive audience and well, they probably don't need design as much as as customers do. Um got rid of that and created this continuous set of patterns and interactions. And then what we did was we co created with Associates, we said, what's the thing that frustrates you the most? Well, obviously the thing, one of the things that frustrates people the most um is having to walk all the way to the back of the store to check in for their shift. So how do we, could we bring in a digital way to check in? Another thing is that, and you probably any of them who shops at walmart probably as experiences if someone doesn't know the answer, they'll say, hey, hey joe, Where was that? Where was that toy? Or where was that, where our vacuums again? Or do you remember where that is? There was sort of this informal kind of exchange of information. So we just created a simple push to talk the way that they could communicate with each other. How can we get people to more easily change their shifts? And we basically built about a half a dozen core features that the Associates said that had never been built. It was the thing that all helped them feel kind of a better sense of efficacy. So it didn't impact their ability to perform on measures that we were actually looking at. But God, it really made them feel like they wanted to work at walmart. Yes. So what's, so that's building? So we built that app and shifted and we're on the sixth version of it? That's awesome. And and that's that's building great apps, but when you start talking about the regenerative company, you're kicking it up A level, you're really talking about changing all the fundamental business processes of the company so that it is focused on sustainability goals as the design lead. How do you do that? Yeah, well this is that kind of that other definition of design, where design moves past surface and it moves past, just kind of thinking about human centeredness and starts to apply to how can we communicate new concepts and create the conditions for change to occur. So, I think just just to take a beat there, because regeneration is a term that I think is a little bit newer to a lot of people and you heard the definition that Doug has given for it, but the way that I think about it is basically doing well, committing to doing well for the planet and people as a business strategy. And if you think about it in context of some of the other terms that we understand like green and sustainability, think about green as kind of mitigating negative impacts, sustainability is getting to you know, net neutral, you know, not doing any worse, but not doing any better. And regeneration is actually moving from an extractive mentality to an additive mentality. And another thing we talked about a lot, which is core to the philosophy is adding value for stakeholders, not just shareholders, and that sounds like a little bit of like corporate talk, but the when you back it up with thinking about how to think about Associates getting education. So we started college um for less than a dollar a day and now it's college free tuition and books for any associate at wal mart. Um and that really helps create this effect throughout communities. Um Another thing is Being in local communities and providing the kind of level of health care. We introduced the $4 generics Um and building facilities donated billion dollars um a year um from the Walmart Foundation to local communities and then it goes on from there. So you heard mentioned before about getting to zero waste by 2025, that's only three years from now. Right in 2030 project gigatons is removing a gigatons of emissions Um with the help of our suppliers, so then it doesn't just become Walmart, the largest company in the world, but all of the suppliers that participate in this help to remove emissions and then finally, 100% renewable by 2035. So it's so huge, it's such an enormous culture change. I mean, Sam Walton's view of the company, his strategy for the company was pretty simple, he articulated it pretty clearly, he was out there to get inputs, every costs including labor costs as low as possible so that he could charge the lowest possible price of the consumers period. It was all about the financial numbers. Now, you're adding all these other stakeholders. You know about taking care of the, the employee and the employee's career and, and taking care of the planet? How do you get an organization that was trained totally on the financials to take? Excuse me, take into account all these other stakeholders? Well, this is this is that the nub of this conversation is that people think you can either and I think it's two fold, you can either have experience or you can have efficiency. You can either have sustainable sustainability or regeneration or a positive business. And what we're saying is that actually all of them have to do with creating efficiency and more sort of a significant and meaningful way to to reach. So they don't conflict know they are actually the same thing. And I even, um, you know, we think about bringing in the concept of regeneration feels like you then become the conscience of the organization. But it's not that you're the conscience of the organization or the conscience of the industry. It's that we, what we're really trying to do is actually create a competitive position Where if we take these actions, we can influence others to take those actions and we have already. And where does design fit in that massive cultural change process. So, we set out back in 2005 with the Katrina reaction and when Walmart was on the cover of every newspaper in 2005 for being on the ground before fema and doing a lot of philanthropic efforts to help New Orleans recover from Katrina. Um that was the beginning of this, this approach and doug re dug our Ceo Doug McMillon kind of re upped the game in saying we should push regeneration. So we're not doing enough. But this philosophy of how can you do good at scale and climate change is real, is the company's position since 2000 and five. So we've done these things in the supply chain, we've done these things with partners, we've done these things in local communities, but the work that we're doing now that design is leading and really helping to reinforce is how do you create the conditions and give associates the tools so that they are able to imagine those futures because there isn't a playbook for the kind of work that we want to do. There is kind of this notion that people have these great ideas. So we're putting, we have re factored all of our design thinking training to be regenerative design thinking where you're not just thinking about building empathy for the individual, but you're really thinking about the individual, the community and the planet every single thing we do and then all of our and we we are, you know, very much um, at the table, we are creating, we have these design sprints and innovation sprints where we are imagining all of the strategic areas of the company, we are articulating through design. We're showing what it would look like and how it would manifest for an associate or a supplier or customer. And then we are bringing those principles of our generation into that so that there's never a chance where you're trying to add something later, but you're actually preemptively doing it last very quick question because everybody in this room is trying to do what you're doing, which is drive change in large organizations using the principles of design thinking, what's your advice? Best piece of advice to them? It has to be a brief one. The first one is bi curious, we're often asked to be the expert, don't be the expert, bi curious. Listen, I'd say the second thing is um, to see the connections and articulate the connections only. We, I think of the design community is especially talented at being able to see things that other people don't see how they fit together. And I think the last thing is around servant leadership, which is a big philosophy of walmart definitely worth reading about if you don't, you don't know this concept, but it is all about enabling people and to the point that was made before about talent and retention, we have to focus on on how people are thinking about their well being, how they think about um, the context in which they live in their happiness and all of those things instead of just saying, hey, there's just lots of people that execute on this plan, so really being more inclusive and leading from behind in a way that is much more supportive and the next day. And then I think we've got great advice, Valerie, Thank you. That was fascinating conversation. Thanks very much.