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A bit about me.

I’ve been in experience design for about 17 years – about

99% of them with Habanero. For the last 10 years I’ve been

part of the management team but I’m just recently back from

a year of leave to travel with my family and decided to hit a

big ol’ reset button when I got back so now I’m back into

consulting and projects with our clients.

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00:02

So a bit about Habanero. We are a 60 person consulting firm

with three offices in Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto. We

started in Vancouver 20 years ago.

Our purpose is to help people and organizations thrive. And

a big part of thriving in the modern workplace is humanizing

technological experiences. We use a combination of design

thinking and great technical skills to do this for our clients.

Let’s jump into today’s session!

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Ok Design thinking and HR!

Now I realize that a lot of you are here to learn more about

how to use social media in your recruiting strategies, so I’ve

framed this session in terms of first what is design thinking,

some of its tools and then the two hands on examples at the

end of the session will be oriented around social media and

recruitment. These tools are very broad however, so if you

have other accountabilities in your role, you should be able

to see some other applications of them outside of social and

recruiting.

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00:03

Ok so first up, let’s establish what design thinking even is.

How many people are familiar with the idea of design

thinking?

At its simplest, it’s:

And I believe that as HR professionals, we’re in the business

of creating amazing experiences for our employees. Not

processes or procedures, but experiences. They make for

greater connection, learning and engagement, and ultimately

the strongest results. It’s a bit like planning a big party. Do

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you want your party to be a great process or experience?

Apply that to say, recruiting. Mostly we treat it like a process.

Go through these steps, get these results. But what if you

take something like recruiting and turn it into an experience…

instinctively that just sounds better. There’s science behind

this too:

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00:04

Focusing on just one of our brains happens all too often in

workplaces – namely organizations are all about process,

procedure and tools (again, a holdover from our industrial

era workplace management roots). Process, procedure and

tools are all geared towards meeting intellectual needs.

Emotion/instinct are consciously (or unconsciously)

overlooked as “nice to haves”. But by appealing to just 1/3 of

our brains, we are necessarily setting ourselves up for less

than optimized experiences, and therefore, adoption and

engagement.

As an aside, I think is what’s behind all the interest and focus

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around corporate culture. I think you can actually look at

culture and experience almost as synonyms in the

workplace… ok I’ll leave that there for you to mull over while I

push on into more on design thinking!

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00:06

design thinking puts people at the center of the process

rather than focusing on the solution or technology or process

first. This empathetic approach helps make the invisible

visible and when you pair that with the next pillar you can

expose more connections between processes and

experiences.

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00:07

One of the biggest differentiators of experience design from

other types of problems solving the altitude at which you

view the problem. In order to become better problem solvers,

we elevate our awareness to see the entire landscape. Now

we can see the interconnectedness of people, tools and

channels.

You can go after the root problem, not the symptom

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00:08

Experience design is about designing with people instead of

for them. By collectively creating something, it instills

accountability and ownership and a desire to see things

through.

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00:09

Prototyping and rapid experimentation – you have

permission to fail and learn from your mistakes because you

can come up with new ideas, get feedback and then iterate.

You need to be able to take (controlled) risks.

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00:10

There are challenges in using language to communicate

complex ideas and problems to many people in a consistent

way. Pictures, models, and infographics can often be much

more powerful in creating a shared understanding that

enables everyone to collaborate on problems together.

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00:11

So just to riff off this idea of being visual…

Let’s walk through some basics so you guys can become

sketching whizkids

1st -- sketching is great for suggesting, exploring,

questioning, provoking! It’s not high stakes like drawing

• Low pressure!

• Just about getting visual

• Be bold

• Use strong lines – don’t feather

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• If you don’t like your line, sketch another and

connect the two

• Better to have your lines go past each other than not

touch at all

• Turn your paper if you like

• Warm up – here are some basic things that you may find

come in hand as you start sketching more of your ideas

(even if it’s just in your own notebooks)

Ok, let’s say you have an experience you want to re-design.

Here’s a super high level view of what it might look like to do

that.

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• Start with “Seeing”

• Immerse yourself in the hearts and minds of your

employees – observe the current state of the

experience you want to re-tool

• Typical activities would include empathy maps, interviews,

workshops, in situ observation, external research (case

studies, competitive analysis)

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• Shape

• Draw some conclusions from what you’ve seen

and start to give your solution some shape. Start

wide and then narrow into what would be feasible,

engaging. Look for the experience gaps and

painpoints.

• Typical activities could include…

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00:19

Journey mapping.

This is a journey map of our onboarding experience (as

opposed to our onboarding “process”)

A journey map is reflection of a very specific current

experience over time and its highs, lows. It could be

considered a subset of your previous experience map (or

maps)

The maps can be organized in a number of ways, with

different focuses and outcomes, communication

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channels/touchpoints, a persona’s unique narrative, design

interface flow and emotional journeys across interactions.

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00:20

This is an experience map of the performance

management/manager lifecycle, from starting out with your

performance manager to parting ways (of some kind)

An experience map is a good place to start when you don’t

quite know the source of some particular friction. So for

instance, if you know you have more success recruiting for

some roles over others but you’re not sure why, this could be

a helpful way to start to structure what’s going on.

These are built off research of the audience in question –

interviews, workshops, in situ observations, surveys.

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You could use an experience map as a way to lay out what’s

happening now or possibly what you’d like to happen in the

future, so it’s quite versatile that way.

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• Create

• This is where you get to start trying out new

versions of your experience. You can sketch new

flows or experience maps. You can prototype or

pilot your experience in a safer, lower risk state

than a full on implementation

• You might use something like a blueprint as

another way of expressing what your new

experience might look like.

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Another great tool for visualizing what a future experience

could or should be is a blueprint. It uses a stage metaphor to

organize all of its information.

Blueprints include all the action items required, as well as the

colour commentary to bring the experience design to life.

It discusses actions, touch points between the experience

and the actors, what’s happening front stage and of course,

backstage. And it also covers the support systems (human,

physical and technical) that make the magic happen.

So – armed with all these experience design artefacts, you

can start to get into the design of the tools and processes

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required to bring this experience to life.

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• Learn

• Build in the ability to gather data on the solution

(analytics, feedback) and have a process to feed

that into your next iteration of your design

• Take what you learn and carry on in another loop.

That loop could be to improve on your prototype or

pilot or maybe it’s you moving into a large scale

implementation.

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00:25

Ok so that’s the quick overview of what design thinking is

and one way in which it can be used. I want to give you a

chance to try out a couple of the tools we like to use a lot

when we’re in the “shape” part of the process in one of our

projects.

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00:26

Has anyone come across an empathy map before?

empathy vs sympathy – one is to walk in another's shoes;

the other is an emotional response

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This is one version of an empathy map. Why you would

create one:

If you want to

• Deepen your understanding of the needs and wants of

your actors

• Determine their expectations of an experience

• Identify gaps and challenges with current experiences

• Understand relationships with people inside and outside

of their team

• Very specifically prioritize proposed features and

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functionality

So let’s think about a social media/recruiting scenario. You

can use this tool to get a little more into the hearts and minds

of your target candidates in order to shape your social media

strategy. The more insight you have of your candidates, the

better you’ll be able to shape your plan around what you want

to create, share, tweet and retweet. You’ll be in a better

position to understand the key messages, the employer

brand elements that you’ll want to call out, resonant

hashtags, how to work with your employees to get them to

support your efforts with content creation, sharing and re-

tweeting. You’ll be able to zero in on key LinkedIn groups.

And finally, you could even use this tool to learn more about

your team and gaps you may have that you need to fill to

bring your social media recruiting strategy to life.

Ok, so grab your blank piece of paper. This will be your

canvas for your notes you jot down.

Start to think about what you’ve heard and observed for

yourself about your candidates. Presumably you’d like to get

more in touch with the top performers you’re hoping to attract

and hire. Picture a recent top performer you’ve come in

contact with. You could think of one specific person or a

make a mental composite of a few top performers you’ve

met. Now start to work your way around the map – can be

methodical or just roll with what comes to mind.

What does this person

- Think and feel? What really counts to them. What are their

major preoccupations, worries, aspirations?

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- See? What’s the environment around them. Who are their

friends? What is the job market offering them?

- Say and do? What’s their attitude in public? What’s their

appearance like (what demographic are they). What’s

their behaviour towards others?

- Hear? What do their friends say? What do their

influencers say? In which venues do they say these

things?

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00:37

Ok so now you’ve tried out an empathy map. Next up is

something a little broader in scope; it’s a game for thinking

about an initiative.

This game is designed to reveal desirable and less-than-

desirable conditions so that you are prepared to move your

initiative toward success.

The metaphor for your initiative is that you’re going places!

Are you more of a bike or a boat sort of person? In the centre

of your blank page draw either a boat or a bike.

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Now, on your voyage there will be tailwinds, headwinds and

obstacles that could end your trip. So draw your headwind,

tailwind and rocky zones.

Frame your voyage with a title. For example, “how might we

use social media to attract the best engineering candidates?”

Write your title at the top of your page.

Now start to think about the things that will propel your

initiative faster, slow you down or stop you completely. One

idea per sticky and add them to your sketch.

Ready?

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00:43

To give credit where credit is due, at Habanero we get a ton

of inspiration from this book: Gamestorming. You can pick it

up or there’s TONS of stuff online. Just google

“gamestorming”.

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00:47

One last quick thing to throw at you.

Taking inspiration from Jon Lax and a talk he gave a little

while ago that he then …

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00:48

re-cast as a Medium article on “how to use a playbook”

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00:49

Who’s pretty familiar with the idea of playbooks as far as

sport goes?

Playbooks are used in sports because they allow coaches to

collect a huge array of plays, organize them according to

scenarios, and lay out the details of how the play is run, by

whom and when.

It’s the same with experience design playbooks.

A playbook lets you

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• Document and teach how you build things

• Provide shared language and understanding

• Understand the situations teams typically face when

building solutions and provide tools and methods that

have worked well or believed to work well based on past

experiences

Consider creating a space (virtual or physical) where you

collect the plays you like best, how you used them, share it

with your team and make it a living collection you can all

contribute to. We have a shared OneNote notebook that we

add and refine during all of our projects. As you use design

thinking techniques more and more (and possibly for more

than socialHR), it’s super handy to be able to collect your

plays and related learnings.

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00:49

Ok! So we’re at time and that was your super fast review of

design thinking, a couple of exercises and a way to start

collecting your go-to “plays”.

I hope this has been inspiring and please feel free to reach

out to me if you’d like to talk more about anything at all I’ve

brought up today!

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