Jason Bootle - Down time = up time - #NUX6 - @mrbootle

Jason has worked with many teams and designed many things for things like The Telegraph Bank of America Premier League and there's currently design and services for the Ministry of Defense Ministry of Justice even although Amod will be even cooler please give a warm afternoon welcome to Jason with his talk downtime obtained hello so why you are having lunch we installed all these devices in your chair so when the carbs start to kick in and you start to sleep they'll start buzzing wake you up but anyway so thank you so I'm in the kitchen and I'm making a pot of coffee and Chris this really tall guy who is the CEO for this startup and working for it bounds in he's a Jason and how are you and I'm like Chris I'm really busy hang on a second Jason everybody here is busy how are you so I had to go through London Victoria Station if you've ever gone through there to commute this is the commute to my startup and you know there's like people everywhere there's kind of tourists with bags and they're playing you got to kind of negotiate your way through it's a real task to get through from the concourse through to the troupe which was heading in and then when I get to the tube then I'd have to try and squeeze my way in to succeed and you know I'm a sweaty guy and I was trying not to swear on people and you know maybe kind of like and try and read and anyway the whole thing is my whole being all my energy all my cognitive powers are basically being kind of taken up trying to get from one point to another and I don't get a chance to do anything else you know and then all of a sudden Christmas comes along have you ever been in London and Christmas but it's amazing it's just like a good it's like that and you know I've got time to kind of I going through London Victoria Station all right cool hang on and you know it's great and all over thank you and then all of a sudden I'm like oh I've got time to think here I've got time to think about the things that I did yesterday that I did well and maybe there's more importantly the things I didn't do so well these thoughts are coming in our side amazing this is great and you know I kind of realize sometimes we're we're too busy sprinting we're too busy sprinting to find out actually how far we've traveled you know all our being is sort of caught up in this hustle and bustle this you know we've got to deliver this we've got this milestone we're agile you know yes is a good thing I mean hey we got lots of distractions yeah I have 237 and Counting pokemons thank you it's too easy you know we have these things in our pockets that buzz and you know and you know there's been a lot of conversation about this today and it's good this is healthy conversation because you know we're designing this stuff is this good you know we're actually helping people in the right way you know and and and the thing about phones and these devices is it doesn't matter there's a study done recently that even if it's in the room and it's turned off we're reducing our cognitive powers because we're aware of this thing that's demanding our attention is that good I think so you know and and we're addicted to this busyness you know like I say like Chris you know hey Chris I'm busy you know well we're all busy you know and it becomes this badge of honor and it becomes is this currency we trade yeah I mean I've worked in agencies as I'm sure some of you have and you know it's kind of like okay I'm gonna play that game of who's gonna stay the latest because if I'm here the latest I've done more work than you yeah what's with that silly you know we should be measuring on outcomes generally and you know as a result it was hard to get down time it's hard to get you know time with his space where we're away from distractions and amber mentions in her we are cyborgs video about you know how that how does a young generation know who they are when do you get a chance to actually go away and start to think about yourself I mean the Philosopher's that's what they did that was their gig they got away just to go away and think you know and you know even even this guy he's busy doing Dalai Lama things and that's the one the rule number one is you know we're all busy so this isn't an excuse okay don't let it be an excuse because we can change things yeah and if we're also busy how do we become better individuals how do we become better at our thing we do design develop product things whatever in research how do we become better how do our teams become better if we're all so busy yeah so I was working the startup I was working with these two guys so like Dave and Clive Dave was performance coach Sir Clive would would he was a rugby coach they won the World Cup boo as an Australian pissed me off they reminded me all the time Johnny bloody Wilkinson yeah 2004 so they they they did amazing things for the rugby England rugby team okay ha let's leave it at that yeah but what they did was they had a mission yeah and they had values and they had principles they didn't just want to be the best rugby team they wanted to be the best sporting team across all sports you know and they did an amazing job they won lots of trophies you know which included as well but um and they had this book each player had a book and they're you know they're part of their philosophy was to break down the sport into small chunks and and learner and have the principles they had principles around the plays and you know this is 2004 so the technology's there but we're integrating the technology they were learning things but they had a book who has principles in the end the teams they work with and the companies you work with they're amazing things you should have them you know we use them with this startup and it was great because they've been then become something that you know big that empower you and actually allow you to give you the freedom and take you away and and and help you decide things you know when when the you know I remembered Dave actually remembering when we come to a junction and a design decision point he was like oh no no we're going to do that one because that's the principle that we've agreed you know really important and you know one of the other things I learned from working with this startup was around the way athletes and coaches so I was working a lot with I didn't really tell you what it was I was working on did I so I was working on a platform for athletes and coaches right a learning and collaboration platform right so I spent a lot of time with athletes going up to love Pro Junction Olympians Paralympians rugby teams and so forth sporting teams and seeing how they learn yeah amazing stuff and what you find is that it doesn't matter if you're an athlete or you're an individual winning get better at something you're gonna go through these stages where you start off at ignorance and you kind of don't know what you don't know and then you move your way up to become a master you want to become the best you can be you know I wanted to become the best designer I can be unstuck on my journey I think you know but you kind of go through this stage of mistakes and confusion where you kind of know you you there's a lot of stuff you don't know yeah and then you start to get a stuff if you know what you don't know and then you get into that top level about mastery where it just becomes natural you get into the flow like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says in his book flow where you just don't have to think about it's a it's a muscle memory it's an amazing thing so that was really really good peaceful learning but there were three key things that I learned that athletes and coaches do right continuous learning continuous improvement hey that sounds familiar if you worked in agile deliberate practice and reflective practice yeah reflective practice so continuous learning you probably familiar with this yeah if you work and you want to improve you're building a product you iterate so forth well athletes you know what they've been doing this for a long time they do well yeah some of the people we were there had six week Sprint's if you will training programs where they wouldn't find they would do their exercises they would increase their muscle whatever there was but they'd have a focused goal they would iterate they would get together with their coaches they would get feedback and then they were tweak it and you know what it's a bit like build measure learn train analyze reflect so they would make sure they had this moment at the end of it where they would sit down and actually together and some of the elite coaches they won't sorry athletes will have several coaches like a biomechanics a strength and conditioning and we worked with one athlete who or who was doing juggling in that and it was a way of focusing them so if they're there were there were golfers so they were taking apart that they could actually focus their mind so that they were using juggling isn't amazing stuff but they would have this reflective thing I am and that six week training program involved routine right Monday to Friday was intensive workouts at the gym at the training ground you name it Saturday was a bit lighter Sunday they did nothing fantastic they had time off muscles need to repair so the brains yeah they had time to get in touch with loved ones they had time to hung out and watch some crummy TV or whatever you know what I mean they had time to think they had downtime because it was scheduled it was scheduled who shed jewels time for themselves yeah fantastic good can you tell me how you do it it's hard but you it's amazing if you can do it do it do it so the other thing about so working within teams of worked in a lot of agile environments and you do the ceremonies and you have stand up let's go stand up and you retros but we kind of fall into this trap of just doing them and not really challenging and thinking about what we do yeah so this start the startup I was in we were all kind of you know in that middle ground of the mastery we were kind of knew what we didn't know and stuff like that and we weren't very good at it and then I've cut to this place where we had this master who ran a scrum and he was Brynn and every time we had a retro he had thought about what we needed to learn from the previous week to talk about and how we could improve so we had a master within the team that could actually move his on and improve us you know amazing don't let retros become this drag this is an opportunity for people to learn and actually complain about the process improve it do something about it don't get stuck into this kind of routine of you know find find a master who can help you if you don't have it I think the other thing about that sort of continuous improvement with sports as they have measuring they can measure stuff now it's easy for sports because if you're not doing well you ain't winning trophies and you ain't getting personal bests but it's a bit harder when you're measuring teams yeah how do you how do you measure when a team is doing well and when they're not so some people will say okay well they stay the latest yeah and they're doing nice drawings well it doesn't really mean much it's about outputs but what else can you be measuring personal trainers use a what's called a smart goals so they look at small measurable attainable relevant to the goal that someone wants to do and time-boxed yeah so they have a mechanism by which they can measure and see if someone's it's achieving their goals yeah when I was actually moved on from the Ministry of Justice and I'll started at the home office but when I was at ministry justice justice there was a nice experiment where we were looking at team mood so every which way we would actually get a happiness quotient see how people were doing and the idea behind that was are there organizational decisions that are made they're going to influence the behavior and the happiness of a team and we'll high functioning teams what they were trying to do was organizational decisions will they influence high high high functioning teams really interesting idea the trouble was they were taking the measurement every two weeks it needed to be a bit higher but there's other things there's a company hyper Island I think they use dot voting systems so as people come in the door in the morning they put a dot vote to say like a like a traffic light how they're feeling yeah so you get kind of this mood of the of a team can change things and even with the rugby team they took mood Diaries because it's not just about how people are performing a were there's other factors which can change the way they feel and how what sort of input people can our outputs they can do and finally on the continuous learning here this really bugs me about modern offices is walls yeah wall space like walls are really important yeah open spaces there's been some studies done in this that people they find out how to concentrate in open spaces yeah so you've got noise disruption yeah fifty to sixty percent of people actually find the noise destruction really impacts their way of working and it unsettles them there's another study done in where was it now Auckland University you know people are about fifteen percent less productive you know in these Conoco walking working open spaces so what improvement can we do to our teams you know to make your teams more effective try and create some more wall space use whiteboards to kind of eke out a bit of an area where you can get that kind of seclusion and that area where you're all working together focused I went to one place where we you know and even I mean the other benefit of having wall space is that you can put your work up there for critique you know there's a spatial memory that you have from an environment and having wall space we leave these kind of memory crumbs yeah so everywhere we are there's there's little kind of details in this environments that we are that trigger memories so when you don't have walls you're less likely to get those memories yeah and that's really important less you've got the added benefit stakeholders seeing the stuff and just you know see the outputs of your work but this agency they got foam boards you know really like big foam boards and it was great so we had travel we'd put all our work on and we'd travel to a meeting and then we got oh this ain't gonna fit in the lift so I would go down the stairs that's fine so we're traveling with these big foam boards and then if you've ever read Dirk Gently it was kind of like this bit where you were trying to negotiate this huge big foam board through a stairwell yes so but that was good anyway yeah it was good so deliberate practice so so Anders Ericsson he wrote the book peak about expertise and high performance it's a great book and he kind of debunked that whole 10,000 hours myth so you can practice for 10,000 hours and you can still be right because if you're practicing the wrong thing you're gonna be rubbish you need to practice the right things right so we start off doing naive practice yeah you know you're a kid and you're learning piano and you just do this repetitive thing was moved on from there yeah and it's moved on for a purposeful practice yeah where you've got to focus you break it down into smaller chunks yeah and you take yourself out of your comfort zone yeah that's good that's productive that that's going to make you a better person deliberate practice is that Plus getting an expert because an expert will help you out and they will give you mental models which will help you get you on a closer path yeah and I was talking about the retros earlier you know it wasn't until I met jitan and I saw actually you know what this is what a retro can be like when you've got someone who's actually working it really hard and working the team really hard to get the best album yeah find an expert yeah that expert will give you motivation yeah there's intrinsic and extrinsic motivation yeah now intrinsic is I want to be the best person I want to do good things extrinsic yeah I need to pay the bills you know I don't want to look foolish whatever it might be yeah that expert will help you and motivate you and lift you up now a few years ago I realized I had some I wasn't good at a few things in my my career and the design I wanted to get better kind of articulating things and I wanted to get better at you know perhaps research was a bit weak on my side so I got myself a mentor I got I found someone in my community I found someone who I respected and I asked them I said look help me I want to get better the best thing I did yeah help me give me confidence and it feels that made me a better designer yeah I'll get a coach you know these are good things you know and I think the other thing about motivation is from a team perspective what motivates your team why are you why are you working where you are yeah we'll get you out of bed in the morning yeah ask yourself that question have you asked yourself that question so one of the things about learning and improving so Jared spool gave a talk about design as a team sport and and that and it says he's basically saying you know you're as you're as good as the work weakest person in your team yeah and that comes a bit from military and stuff like that and so how do you get better so you know this is a problem if you if you want high functioning teams and you want people to do really well how do you get better one technique is from medical industries to you learn something you do it through doing it you learn it you learn how to get better and then you try and teach it to someone so if you're really good at what you are I challenge you to be a mentor for somebody and just in fact like in the coffee break try and find yourself a mentor see if you can find someone who can you can mentor you know give back hey he'll I mean one of the things I wanted to do was to give back to the all the great speakers I've heard all the time and and by coming up here and speaking it challenges you to get better and to get your your knowledge clearer about what you know and what you don't know yeah how to improve yourself yeah you can start really small too so lightning talks five-minute talks one really good thing that they do in govern I don't know if it's exclusive to Ministry of Justice but they do a thing called show the thing so really simple everyday so routine number one on a Thursday it's three o'clock is show the thing so someone goes around with a klaxon going everybody everybody has to come try and come everybody comes so there's a real is someone's job to make to try and get everybody to come and then for there's three people five minute talks and they present the work they've been doing so you get people to articulate what they've been doing you also get people learning about what's going on in your organization and if you're a big organization it's really good to know what other people are doing so you don't have to do double up on the work so David brows with knows about deliberate practice and in fact he coined a phrase called marginal gains so rather than so you break down your sport into little chunks so if you want to get better at something so you say you want to get better ten percent it's it's much easier getting better 10 1% things than one 10% thing who would have thunk that and he caught it marginal gains and he was the coach for sky cycling team and he had a goal and a vision and they wanted to be the best cycling team they wanted to win the Tour de France in five years and they did it in - yeah - and they kind of you know they broke the sport down and traditionally cycling was all about the bike what improvements can we make to the bike yeah that's good we can make the tires you know thinner and stuff and then what can we do the athlete Wow we could pump them full of drugs maybe so they actually took a service design approach well I came I got a cyclist a cycling 200 kilometers a day then they carried and they took their their mattress and their pillows with them right so they could get a good night's a guaranteed good night's sleep they took their bed and their mattress with them amazing revolutionary no one ever thought of that but it helped them so they went outside of their sport they went what can we do outside of that yeah gray grandma cloth and Peter Taylor another kind of two coaches who did Derby and Nottingham Forest's they won a bunch of things including getting into Europe well no ordinary teams they did amazing things but the thing was they actually got players who had the skills but they would perhaps troubled individuals they had gambling or alcohol problems and they nurtured them so that what happened outside of the football pitch they looked at solving they looked at improving these things much like you know was talking about earlier with the mood what happens with when people come to work you know I certainly know what it was like coming into work after brexit and stuff like that it wasn't nice and that affects people's output understanding these things you can make differences to your team and a lot of these things you know there's a behavior change yeah and it's hard changing behavior I know firsthand yeah BJ Fogg talks about he's a behavioral scientist from Stanford and he talks about there's three ways of changing behavior yeah you have an epiphany you change your environment we take baby steps yeah and he developed this model basically said you know if you you've got high motivation and you've got a high ability and you've got a trigger to do something you're more likely to change behavior yeah it'll take about 30 days for a habit to become a new behavior yeah and I tried this I'm my dentist keeps on telling me to floss my teeth so I played around with this experiment and and and it was great I actually did it for a bit okay them to that so this thing tiny habits so you start with an anchor yeah this is this is this is cool this works you start with an anchor so for me I brush my teeth yeah I want to create a new behavior I want to start flossing my teeth and I celebrate it right so the thing was I brush my teeth and my new behavior was I'll brush or floss a tooth it was too hard for me yeah I I couldn't do it regularly enough to make it a habit so and okay let's change it now - I'll get the floss and I'll open the lid and I'll close it and then I'll celebrate it whoo yeah yeah so I've just had a whole bunch of dopamine flow through my body now by doing that I can feel the goosebumps yeah yeah that dopamine is giving me a feel good factor yeah and it's also producing serotonin yeah which is also helping me and it's starting to create a neural network that that's serotonin I can relate to that and I can start to build this network where my body actually starts to not distinguish between an existing memory or an existing happening or a memory it starts to blow that so you start to do that and you find and you tweak this this is an experiment yeah it's good trouble is I went to bed too late and then by the time I go to bed I just wanna brush my teeth and go to bed so you know you got to play around with these things so but I will say the last thing on that is that what are the tiny things you can do within your team and as individuals yeah it's nice having a little bit silence for a moment ponder things sorry reflective practice so deliberately spending time to look back yeah so there's a guy called Donald Schon who wrote this book about the reflective reflective practitioner and there's two kinds of reflection yeah you got your on in action stuff here this is thinking on your feet yeah teachers do this yeah any departments do this doctors nurses they're assessing in situation they're making judgments they're looking back they're reflecting on it to make decisions to go forward yeah amazing stuff yeah god bless the NHS reflecting on action navel-gazing I call it you know some people might call it a stir foofie foofie stuff isn't it you want to do that for so this is thinking through your experiences discussing journaling getting up in front of people and talking about things talking with colleagues whatever it might be spending time thinking about things yeah and I suppose the thing is it's about getting when you when you get to you if you if you're starting off on this on action you kind of want to get to a point where you can do it in action yeah I mean that certainly that's been the goal for me too I get to that level of expertise and mastery that I know the things that I can assess stuff when I'm in in the point when I'm in a research session and and and someone we're talking to comes up with something and you go wow okay Oh douche yeah yeah that's where we want to head to it's a no priority for shown is around practical knowledge over theory yeah do the thing do the thing get out the building all that stuff yeah um I love Chris Coleman yeah this is his weight he was Wales manager maybe still is I'm not sure but Wales had an amazing euros 2016 and they beat Belgium 3-1 no one would have thunk England were already out hey I'm Australian I can't help it yeah but he have a listen to this what's happened if you know are you not afraid to dream but you know I'm afraid to fail you know about success I'm not free and then we don't again I can't say every now and again because this has never happened to me but I'm enjoying it yeah I wasn't able to get good audio for that for my BBC friends thank you so dream work hard don't be afraid to fail yeah don't be afraid to fail they played an amazing tournament because they played with the freedom they knew what they had to do and if they made a mistake it didn't seem to matter they just I had to focus they had the vision they had the mission they had the purpose they knew what they were doing don't be afraid to learn I would say yeah it's not about failing it's about learning yeah don't be afraid to learn yeah I remember being in a boardroom with a VC guy and he was not being very nice at all about the work we were doing and I knew I had the answers but I choked I couldn't recall them yeah and I learned from that because then I went and did a memory school thing so I had tools that I could actually use to actually recall things in those sort of situations and yeah hey this is hard you know you know I'm standing up here and I'm probably one of the worst people to talk about reflective practice because I find it hard to do but I know I should be doing it I know I should be doing it more yeah I know it you know I have demands in my life you know I have things things are going on yeah but it's this is important yeah and one of the things that I actually find really good I work yeah I have my own company I have family and I find out I have too many things going on and I use this technique quite a bit called working work work and progress yourself Salim very Ani came up with this in his decision hats book and it's really good five minutes is all it takes five minutes write a list of all the things you've got going on yeah write them down and what value there are and then write in another column all the things you can do to get the value and get it closed yeah to get it moved on yeah and then just start with the first two and get them done so you can free up yourself try and free up some of your time I found this work for me and I'll kind of coming to the end here and you know my epiphany came when I was walking to my commune and I had space and time and then there's been some research on walking and you probably hear a lot about how some great leaders like to go for walks to make big decisions and they've done some studies into it as well and there's there's evidence to show that this is it improves people's creative output yeah it doesn't matter where you walk you could probably get a treadmill in your office and and and it would actually make a difference but the thing about walking is it can get you away from all those distractions I've been having walking meetings with people which is really nice and just remember I mean we live in England so the weather ain't great there's no such thing as bad weather it's bad clothing yeah that's from my Canadian friend Chris yes thanks Chris so your creative outputs but you can increase it by 60% through walking yeah credible so to wrap up define your purpose what it why why are you doing the things you're doing what what are your goals what are your vision what are your principles ya know why you're doing the things what motivates you yeah yeah what motivates you you're obviously motivated to come here today and thank you very much yeah schedule things yeah put it in a diary block out a space of time in your diary that's me time yeah start creating tiny habits do the 1% things yeah focus on the little baby steps make baby steps to make the improved bigger things happen find an expert if you can maybe you'll be lucky today and you'll find someone that you like you want to you want to get some help from and then re-evaluate regularly yeah and you know I've mentioned a few things it's not about the tools there's plenty of different things around it's about the process and just keep trying persist yeah thank you one quick point we've Jason obviously mentioned a mentor program or at least mentors their work and I have just tweeted out a link to an article that I wrote about creating a mentor program at the DWP so if you are interested in how do I even do that as an individual or as a team please do check that I we've got any questions send me a message one I think important question because it's all it seems to be always there what do you think causes the fear and of being afraid to feel creates the fear of being afraid what what is the fear of being a film yeah feeling why does that keep cropping up in the first place why isn't it the positive pin over outlook yeah I had I had a slide in my deck about failure and it had Joe Hart in the middle and yeah I mean I think the thing is I think when people fail it's kind of easy for people to point the finger that is they become a scapegoat there's certainly a culture within many of the organizations and I think kind of kraid said we're waiting for them to die out you know I mean I think it's got to change I mean sure it's important you don't want to you don't want to fail for the sake of fail and I think that's the whole thing about failing fast I think the message being skewed the whole point of finding out where you're going wrong is so you can learn to get better so I think the message has been skewed and as a result it just seems companies and organizations don't sort of back people up when they do get it wrong to help them to support them and say okay what did you learn how can we avoid this in the future yeah so basically piece of advice is to do the opposite and actually kind of help promote the fact that failure is not a bad thing and you can't actually learn from it I think that everybody can actually kind of progress in the way is that Jason's talked about at all I think I led to that as well the whole point of purposeful practice and deliberate practice is about taking yourself out of your comfort zone as well and you know if you feel that if you fear you're gonna fail you're taking yourself out of your comfort zone and the experience you get from that is going to be greater than probably the what the outcome that will happen as well because I think we all tend to I know I do sometimes you make things bigger than they are in your own head than what the reality might be yeah thank you very much [Applause] you

Channel: northernux

Views: 106

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: usability, user experience, ux, nux, conference, design, nux6

Id: m2h9hCcb4jY

Length: 39min 7sec (2347 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2018