Teacher’s Day Special with Shalu Umapathy
By: Sarthak Shambhat
Tags: Design Thinking, Work Culture, Social Impact, Creativity, Social Design

Our world is moving towards a series of advancements in every industry, with the wave of innovation in various products and systems. However, we tend to overlook one crucial development which is mandatory for an ecstatic development of humanity — the sector of Social Impact Design. It is the deep learning of the experiences of people who face intense human challenges; there is an intent to create a positive impact and promote a better living amongst people by revamping the traditional methods of practices.

In the 18th episode, we get into a conversation with Shalu Umapathy who leads as the Managing Director of New Ventures at IDEO. She shares with us her passion for working towards creating a social impact and how it eventually became a huge part of her professional journey as well. She also talks about how her learning through her work experience has helped her to get inspired and work selflessly, using the principles of Designeering to address the problems of the marginalized communities to create a positive impact.

Rohit Lalwani: At IDEO.org you do things with the team members to address the challenge of creativity on demand. What is your mantra for it? How do you handle creativity on demand? You go in for a client conversation and they expect you to come up with ideas, they expect you to come up with solutions. How are your teams always ready to come up with solutions?

Shalu: It’s a lot of pressure. If you are telling yourself you need to come up with some solution on the spot. I draw a lot of inspiration from thinking about analogous sectors because now I have worked in a bunch of different sectors, I say “This problem fits this type of category. How have I seen it play out in a different place?” and then that creates one idea that other people can piggyback off of. A big part for me is that I have learned to just be comfortable with my brain which works in its funny way. If something crazy comes up in my brain, just say it out loud, then my brain can move on to the next thing and maybe that crazy idea had something to do with the solution. They like connecting it to other content areas and then just trusting that.

Whatever comes to your brain is going to be helpful in some way, or it helps you move on to the next best idea.

Rohit Lalwani: Is there any systematic way that you work in terms of training your team members? To start coming up with solutions on demand. Are there any scientific methods that you apply for the same?

Shalu: It depends on what we’re talking about. If It’s a brainstorm, then that is a different type of thing, where you are just trying to be generative, get to quantity, do as many ideas as possible. But when you are designing a solution it is much more rigorous. It starts with research and insights that surface from that research, and then it leads you to an area of questions about what are the areas we still don’t understand that we need to use prototyping to help us navigate. Once you fill in the gaps in your knowledge then that helps you get to a point of view on the solution. I don’t think there’s ever been a situation where on the spot we just designed what the solution is. It is a very thoughtful process to go through all the different steps, to be able to get to a solution

Rohit Lalwani: Over the years IDEO has used design interventions to persuade companies to change. Can you tell us more about this? How do you organize design interventions so that companies can start changing?

Shalu: It is figuring out what the journey is that the different partners or clients have and many times they will come to us for something very specific, but by working with us, they realize that they need to go through their internal transformation or internal adoption of new mindsets and behaviors. Many times, those relationships thrive when the leadership at the organization is ready to say “Hey, we are stuck and we need some help” and by saying “I am ready to bring in someone to help me” That is the first step. After that, it is like how we show them enough about the design thinking process that they start to see how it can be so relevant to their organization and their strategy. Sometimes that could be designing a single project product or campaign or something like that and then eventually there could be like a much broader mindset and ideally, they start to build the capability in the house so that they don’t need to bring in organizations like us because they want to be able to do it themselves.

Rohit Lalwani: Moving from the methodology, at IDEO to the culture at which you follow at IDEO, “Play” is considered a very serious business, but work with clients which include NGOs, governments, commercial brands, teams engage in playful exercises from role-playing to collaborative work, problem-solving, and building physical prototypes. How do you go about building this culture?

Shalu: It originated from the legacy of IDEO and the whole idea of work can be played and that working with friends can do incredible things. That legacy over 40 years of experience has ingrained in all of our dna@ideoatideo.org. We bring it with us wherever we go, and that we can do it with confidence and ease. In serious organizations, they are relieved to be in a meeting where they don’t have to sit up so straight or where they blurt out the first thing that comes to their mind without thinking its playful exercises or things that are in our DNA, but then they are craved by the partners that we work with. It is really easy to bring it into new environments.

Unless you are going into a room where they don’t want you, that’s when play can feel a little bit silly or tough, everyone is just yearning for a moment to think differently and to just get a breath of fresh air.

Rohit Lalwani: At IDEO do you have someone like a chief of culture officer or play at work officer who keeps coming up with these interesting ideas to ensure that there’s always play at work? How do you keep this going?

Shalu: We try to distribute ownership of different parts of our culture and process. At ideo.org, we have a team called the digital collective. These designers from across all of our studios are thinking about what’s the next technology we want to work on? How do we want to approach it? What types of ideas can we bring as we move that forward? In San Francisco, it’s the X team, which is the experience team. That’s also a cross-section of people in that studio and they are all responsible for people’s experience when they come into the physical space of our studio. Virtually the experience for all of our team that’s distributed and working from home. By distributing that ownership, the pressure is not all on one person’s shoulders to solve all of culture.

Everyone has a little piece of it and they can be bold, take risks and try things out. Doing it in a team structure also eliminates that pressure for having to be a single person so that they are building off of each other’s ideas. Creativity and play have helped us.

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