[Music] Hello everyone so we are live from Itoday Summit live from Lausanne Switzerland so
thank you for being part of this summit we have an amazing guest who is with us in the in this
conversation so a few weeks ago was still searching for our perfect speaker to talk about ecology we
needed someone with a strong message someone uh with a lot of experience and someone uh because
right now in 2020 innovation has to be about sustainability so it’s very important so our friends
from swiss newspaper Le Temps reached out to us and proposed to invite Mr Paul Watson the founder of
sea shepherd and actually the co-founder of greenpeace in the 70s when I got the news I was just
speechless and yeah here it is paul is with us today so thank you so much for being here and today
I’m proud to welcome also Cedric Garoffé who is a journalist at Le Temps and who will host this talk
and introduce the legendary captain watson the defender of the oceans yeah please welcome cedric
thanks steph yeah I hand welcome to you all lot on high today I’m very pleased to offer you this
special moment with Paul Watson. Paul Watson you know him he is one of the greatest environmental
activists of our time he is also the founder of the siege effort conservation society and the
commitment of this organization is different concert and protect marine wildlife paul thank you very
much for for your participation for this moment it’s your turn would have a cartoon launch as we say
in french well thank you very much so I think we would like to hear about your journey with sea
shepherd and how um you know we can take baby inspiration as innovators well I established the sea
shepherd conservation society in 1977 I had previously been a director with the greenpeace
foundation but I was very frustrated with the fact that greenpeace was a protest organization I
thought we had to do more than that so I set sea shepherd up as an interventionist group we became
an anti-poaching organization and today we’re an international anti-poaching movement and our
approach is something I developed in the 70s which I call aggressive non-violence and we’re quite
proud of our record and that we’ve never caused an injury to anyone we’ve never sustained any
injuries but we have shut down hundreds of illegal operations through that direct intervention so
today we have the largest non-government navy on the planet uh we have ships off of africa off latin
america in the mediterranean in the caribbean uh intervening against poaching operations and quite
successfully right now one of our most important campaigns is in the vaquita refuge of the siacortes
in mexico or we’re working in partnership with the mexican government to prevent the extinction of
the vaquita porpoise and I’m quite confident that it wasn’t for our last seven years in the refuge
that the vaquita would now be extinct we’ve confiscated over 1200 illegal nets and we’ve managed to
keep the poachers out of the vaquita refuge it’s been a difficult campaign we got our drone shot
down we’ve been attacked numerous times but we stood our ground on that just this week we arrested
two chinese poaching vessels off of in the waters of gabon and so in the last year about 52 of those
52 poachers have been arrested in african waters what we did we developed in the last few years is
uh this system of partnerships with various governments where we provide the resources and the
volunteers and they provide the authority to to intervene and that’s worked out quite well this all
began back in well back in 2015 when uh we undertook the longest pursuit of a poacher in maritime
history with the pursuit of the uh ice fish poacher thunder from antarctica to the coast of uh
equatorial west africa and that was a 110-day pursuit which ended up with the thunder captain
sinking his own ship but what that did was put us into a partnership with interpol and various
governments that were involved and now I think we’re taken very very seriously by many of these
governments is that we can get things done that a lot of governments can’t because we can cut
through the red tape and directly intervene the other thing I’m quite proud of is uh to quite
contrary to the reputation that a lot of people think that we have we’ve never been convicted of a
felony crime we operate within the boundaries of law and we also operate within the boundaries of
practicality and right at the moment we have about a hundred volunteers on nine different ships that
are at sea and sea shepherd evolved from an organization into what is now a movement which is a good
thing because uh you know you can stop an individual like myself you can stop an organization but
you can’t you can’t stop movement so I think that’s a very healthy evolution and we’re getting
stronger all the time and more more and more successful so I think the other thing that we’re able
to do is uh inspire people because we um people join our crew and they get to understand that they
can make a difference that uh that they shouldn’t be deterred by criticism that uh that if you
harness courage and imagination to passion you can literally change the world and it doesn’t really
matter how you do that because the strength of an ecosystem is in diversity therefore the strength
of any movement has to be in diversity so whether that approaches litigation or education education
or activism it all points towards the same end so what people need to do is simply use their
abilities their skills and their experience and harness that the best way they can to make this a
better world because we all have different you know different ideas different approaches and
different talents that pretty much sums up I think you know what sea shepherd is today amazing
amazing um maybe can you tell us about just just you be just your beginnings at at shepherd and how
it was uh kind of breaching the rules and what can innovators do in 2020 well I began as an activist
when I was 11 years old protecting bieber’s from traps in eastern canada but when I was 18 I became
the youngest founding member of the greenpeace foundation and that was to oppose nuclear testing in
amc island which by the way was a wildlife preserve and that’s always been my concern is to protect
wildlife uh so when I left greenpeace in 1977 it was to establish a sea shepherd but what i’ve seen
over the last uh 50 years of course is the evolution of uh international conservation environmental
movement so we’re stronger than than ever I mean when I can you know look at the way things were
back in the 50s and 60s we’ve come a long way and there’s a lot of people who are involved now
especially a lot of young people and that’s one of the things that we’ve uh tried to do with sea
shepherds is to inspire young people that they that they can make a difference you know and how that
works is for instance back in 1981 I got a call from somebody in scotland and he said well they’re
killing gray seals up here in the orkney islands what are you going to do about it and I said well I
don’t know I’m on the other side of the planet the question is what are you going to do about it and
he said well what can I do and so we helped him put together a sea shepherd group and again they
were very enthusiastic uh they went up to the orkneys and uh literally walked up to the guys
shooting seals pulled the rifles out of their hands and threw the rifles into the ocean and got
arrested but got a lot of publicity in fact so much publicity that we raise the funds to buy that
island and that’s now a seal sanctuary so I think that the success in a movement is not only just
having the audacity to advance what you want to do but also a good understanding of the kind of
culture that we live in a media culture you have to understand how to utilize media to get your
message across and and and to make and to make a difference and that’s very important amazing so we
are getting a lot of questions for you actually paul so a question from a reader of Le Temps um
from gregoire so is kovi the good thing for the ocean the fishies what do you think well I don’t
know if it’s it’s a good thing I think on the negative side of it poaching increases during
epidemics the ebola uh problem off of africa illustrated that poaching went up on the increase on
the positive side worldwide fishing is down 10 percent overall about 20 in europe but I don’t you
know overall it doesn’t really make a difference but here’s the real problem with kovid is that
that’s just the first of many pathogens which are going to emerge as a direct consequence of climate
change and the destruction of biodiversity and and habitats we’re really going to be releasing new
zoonotic transmissions of viruses because of that when you destroy ecosystems you create an
imbalance where the viruses which are associated with various species especially species which are
being diminished or going extinct need somewhere to go and humans are a pretty um you know inviting
host I mean there’s eight billion of us so it’s quite attractive I think most people don’t really
understand the role of viruses in the ecology there it’s actually a good thing uh almost every
species plant and animal has viruses associated with it and they’re beneficial generally but the
problem is is when you reduce a species number or you diminish a habitat or an ecosystem you create
a situation where those viruses are going to jump to another species and that’s not really good for
the new host species because it has to develop a state of coexistence the virus doesn’t want to kill
the species but it takes some times to for the host to adapt to that virus and in the meantime
according a lot a lot of hosts die as a result I think we have to be aware of the fact that there’s
going to be more and more viruses emerging you know we’ve had sars we’ve had murres we had west nile
fever we’ve had hantavirus and these been relatively small compared to covet but there will be more
that are worse than covet and plus on the fact there’s also the problem of the release of pathogens
that ally have been lying dormant for 40 50 000 years in the permafrost and we have no understanding
as to what the impact of that is going to be so really what I’m saying is our diminishment of
species our diminishment of ecosystems is going to lead to more perilous uh problems that are going
to face all of humanity i’ve always said that the the conservation environmental movement is not
really about saving the planet I mean the planet’s not going in anywhere but it’s it’s about
humanity saving humanity from ourselves from our own arrogance and our own ignorance uh and if we
don’t do that we’re just simply not going to to survive amazing we have a question from fabrice yes
do you want to ask your question directly yes very inspiring and actually building on exactly what
you’re saying now I’m interested after your long career if you compare now to when you started your
career in activism are you more pessimistic or optimistic about the future of humanity on our planet
well i’ve never been optimistic or pessimistic you know I learned a lesson many years ago I was a a
medic during the occupation of wounded knee by the american indian movement that was in 1973. and we
were surrounded by 3 000 federal agents that were firing at us all night they had wounded 46 killed
two and I went to russell means it was the leader of the american indian movement I said uh you know
we don’t have any hope of winning here we’re vastly outnumbered the odds are against us so why are
we here and his answer has stayed with me all my life he said well we’re not concerned about the
odds against us we’re not concerned about winning or losing we’re here because this is the right
place to be the right thing to do in the right time to do it concentrate on what you’re doing in the
present and that will define what the future will be don’t worry about the future concentrate now
and that will that will make the difference we don’t know what the future is going to be but we can
contr and we can’t control it but we can control what we do today so everything we do today will
have consequences now sometimes it’s when people say it’s a little overwhelming they say well you
know it’s impossible to find a solution I mean the problems are so so difficult to overcome my
answer to that is that if you want to solve an impossible problem you need to find the impossible
solution and a good example at 1972 the very idea that nelson mandela would be president of south
africa was unthinkable and therefore impossible but yet that became possible so I think that all all
these problems are solvable through a combination of passion imagination and courage and also don’t
depend upon governments to uh to solve any problems they never have they never will usually
governments cause problems they don’t solve problems so we really have to look to the passion the
courage and the imagination of individuals or groups of individuals around the world that’s every
social revolution in the history of humanity has been carried out in that way not by government
slavery wasn’t ended in the u.s by abraham lincoln it was ended by people like wilberforce and
douglas women didn’t get the right to vote because of president wilson they got the right to vote
because of the suffering and the and the sacrifices of the supper jets and the same with the civil
rights movement and on and on and on so you know all change comes from ourselves not from from the
outside wait amazing we have a great question actually from berhad um hi paul um amazing to have you
here I’m I’m enjoying uh every word that that I’m hearing um I have a question that if you had
enough power as the president of the united states what primary action would you take to combat
climate change well the problem of course is we had enough power to be president united states you
wouldn’t be able to do anything because anybody becomes a world leader especially the president
united states is so indebted to the corporations and powers that be that they’re never going to
accomplish anything anyway uh so you know so you really can’t see any change coming coming from that
what we really need is a revolution uh in our culture the real problem is anthropocentrism the
entire human species is anthropocentric which means we only care about ourselves when we’re we’re
completely alienated from the natural world we don’t understand that if phytoplankton disappears in
the ocean tomorrow we all go extinct we’re totally dependent upon it that’s why I say if the ocean
dies we all die you know we have to understand that if we don’t learn to live in harmony with all
other species plants and animals uh then we’re not going to survive ourselves because there are
three basic laws of ecology the law of diversity that the strength of an ecosystem depends upon
diversity within it the law of interdependence that although those species are interdependent with
each other and the law of finite resources that there’s a limit to growth a limit to carrying
capacity and what our species is we’re doing is we’re stealing the carrying capacity from other
species and as their numbers diminish so does that diminish diversity and interdependence so if we
don’t adapt a biocentric point of view which by the way is the mindset of most indigenous cultures
then we’re not going to survive the good example of our anthropocentric point of view is that almost
all the world’s religions put human beings at the center and which we’re proclaiming ourselves as
the only important living thing upon this planet and I think that’s where if we don’t change that
attitude then we’re not going to have much of a future um you know what what is the world going to
be like if you’re an environmentalist or a conservationist you have to think of what’s the world can
be like in a thousand years a million years from now because everything we do right now will define
what it’s going to be the you know the planet will be here but the question is will we be here a
thousand years from now and that’s that that can only be determined by our actions right now in the
present amazing we have a question from lotto and the question is from caroline caroline sorry is it
possible to be a militant activist without doing any act of violence well that’s why I developed
this concept of aggressive non-violence being aggressive but at the same time being non-violent and
we’ve never injured anybody there’s a perception that we we were violent but that’s because anybody
who stands up to protect the environment is going to be perceived as being violent because of
whatever definition of violence is violence is opposing the status quo in the minds of mainstream
media and mainstream uh governments here’s a good example imagine walking into the city of mecca and
spitting on the black stone while your chances of getting out of the city alive are somewhat remote
you’re going to be torn to pieces for your active blasphemy or walk into jerusalem and take a
pickaxe to the wailing wall you’re not going to get very far before you get an israeli soldier’s
bullet in the back and nobody’s going to have any sympathy for you because you attack something
which is sacred yet every day we go into the most beautiful the most sacred uh cathedrals of the
natural world the rainforest of amazonia the great barrier reef off of australia we totally
desecrate these cathedrals with bulldozers and and mining and all the logging operations and
everything and nobody really stands up to defend them I mean if the rainforest if the coral reefs
were as sacred to us as a an old wall in jerusalem or a piece of meteorite in mecca we would
literally rise up and and and and defend them but we don’t do that because again we’re
anthropocentrically oriented we only value things which are are human oriented another good example
is a few years ago a ranger in zimbabwe uh shot and killed a poetry who’s about to kill a black
rhinoceros and human rights groups all over the world condemned him for doing this how dare you kill
a human being to protect uh an animal and his answer to that I think really illustrated our
hypocrisy said you know if I was a police officer in harare and a man ran out of barclays bank with
a bag of money and I shot him in the head in the street and killed him right there you’d pin a medal
on me and call me a hero so how is it that a bag of paper has more value than the future heritage of
this nation amazing um we have a question from le tom from axel actually and the question is how
digital pirates can help traditional pirates like you in the mission well of course we’re living in
uh you know modern technology with modern media and everything so of course there’s a lot that can
be accomplished in in that way the key I think to success always has been understanding and
controlling media when we developed greenpeace in the beginning it was because we were the first
organization to really understand the power of media you know we were listening to the teachings of
marshall mcluhan back then and the media is the message so you know with modern media as it
developed develops and evolves you have you know learning how to utilize that media and put it at
the service of of any movement is absolutely essential and it’s like you don’t evolve with the with
that media then you’re not going to survive so uh yes it you know there’s a lot that can be
accomplished through that through that understanding here’s a good example uh you know of how the
evolution of media works back in the 1950s or 60s if you wanted to get your point across it usually
took five or 10 minutes on television uh you know commercials lasted a lot longer because people had
to take the time to do it but now it’s evolved where everything gets down to very you know a lot of
information very little time so just three days ago I think our two days ago at the democratic
convention aoc was speaking and she was only given 90 seconds but she she said more in that 90
seconds and the more the older politicians said in like 25 30 minutes because she had she’s been
able to adapt and understand how to utilize that modern media tick tock whatever and everything and
so that’s very important that that that be uh that people learn to develop those uh ways of
manipulating and using the strategies of of evolving media yeah actually what happened the other day
with with trump with the meeting of trump kind of hacked by tick-tock users so we have a question
here from sabrina if you want to ask it live sure would be great hi paul it’s really impressing to
listen to you I would like to know um how can we empower teenagers to help us or to help us to save
the planet and the oceans what would you tell them I don’t think we have to empower teenagers at all
I think teenagers are doing a good job empowering themselves uh you know I i think that young people
should be free to develop their own movement that their own way of doing things and that’s happening
it’s happening very well you know everybody from greta thundberg to others I mean who are just
making a difference I’m seeing more and more involvement than say 20 30 years ago in that respect
one of our big problems I think uh traditionally has been you know I get this question all the time
what do what do we teach our children and my answer is always we don’t teach them anything just
listen to them I mean they they intuitively understand uh the world and we we remove that intuition
we remove their imagination we teach them how to be conformists I always said as an example back in
the 70s I had the opportunity to speak at a school at the height of indian reservation up in canada
in british columbia and we began with kindergarten then middle school and then the seniors and so
the kindergarten kids I said to them how many of you kids speak the height of language they all did
how many of you know anything about whales we didn’t have to say anything we just listened to them
talk about whales by middle school half of them spoke the language half of them were interested by
the time we got to the seniors nobody spoke the language and nobody cared about whales so what we
had done is taken all these beautiful intelligent children and turned them into complete morons
through the educational system you know I think that our educational system really should be
encouraging children’s imagination and their and their into intuition and having them come up with
their own answers we don’t have the answers obviously because our generations certainly have failed
in in in that respect but uh the one thing that the present young generation now has that we didn’t
have uh is a situation where they don’t know their future you know what is the future gonna be
what’s it to be like 10 years 20 years from now and everything that’s very uncertain uh you know at
least you know during the 50s 60s 70s we lived in probably the most materialistically uh
advantageous and free cultures there were that probably ever was or never will be and things have
changed a lot and uh certainly not not for the better we have a question from la tom from edouard
it’s a tricky one so how would you describe your relationship with greenpeace currently and do you
guys are in think do you share any information or any plans well we’re completely different I mean
greenpeace is a protest organization c shepherd’s an interventionist organization greenpeace
environmental organization we’re a marine conservation anti-poaching organization so two completely
different things all the original people from greenpeace are no longer with greenpeace in fact uh
many of them are with sea shepherd but you know so things changed when I left uh greenpeace it was
for many reasons but one of the main reasons was that I I’m not very big on protesting and you know
so that I i thought that it was a very submissive position to be in but our relationship with
greenpeace today is well there is no relationship but that’s fine because we have mo we have room in
this movement for literally thousands of organizations and you know the real strength of the
conservation environmental movement lies in grassroots groups small groups all over the world
addressing issues in their local ecosystems that’s where the real strength is you know these big
large organizations you know don’t do as much as collectively as all those small small groups that’s
one of the reasons c shepherd has stayed small we don’t do direct mail we don’t we’re not out on the
street asking for money we’re not doing telephone solicitations our budget is a fraction of what
greenpeace’s budget is because we’ve always felt that we should put our emphasis on volunteerism and
not developing a large bureaucracy which we don’t have and we want to keep it that way amazing we
have a question from axel maybe you want to turn your you’re not sure hi paul it’s great hearing you
and thanks for being here so here today is an innovation conference and my question is how
innovation shall serve your mission and do you think sustainability in general must be hacked well
you know sustainability is a that’s a word that was invented by grow harlem bruntland the prime
minister of norway during the 1990 uh or the 92 conference in rio de janeiro and basically what it
means today is business as usual under another name there is no sustainability there’s no such thing
as a sustainable fisheries no such thing as sustainable logging so you know we can’t hide behind
that word uh for for very much longer we have to really develop some real of some real revolutionary
ways of viewing how we live in relationship to the planet and but as long as we’re destroying other
species and destroying ecosystems and everything then that’s not going to not going to happen we
have to find alternative energy so we have to find ways of voluntarily reducing human populations
and taking care of people as well because the problem is is that we’re not just abusing we’re not
just abusing ecosystems we’re also abusing each other and all that’s being caused by by the decline
in in diversity and uh and interdependence thank you so we have a question from luton from graziella
how are you perceived by western countries russia japan the us so we know that friends has hosted
you for several years so can you tell a bit about your relationship with countries well sea
shepherds developed probably the first ngo to really develop uh partnerships with various
governments it started in 1999 with our partnership with the galapagos and the government of ecuador
and now we are in partnership with numerous african countries tanzania namibia gabon liberia santome
cape verde um gambia and also in latin america with colombia peru and ecuador and mexico and this is
working out really quite well because you know they give us the authority we give them the the the
resources you know last year we took 40 tons of marine debris off of coaster costa rica’s cocos
island this year we’re working with mexico and with the african countries to stop uh poaching we
have a team every year goes up to northern australia to work with the aboriginal community up there
to remove the the the debris from the turtle beaches and that uh so again you know we I think it’s
it’s good to develop those partnerships where and and when we when we can because one thing that
peop we can do that governments can’t do is we’re not bogged down by by red tape you know people
called us pirates over the years but I can say one thing about pirates pirates get things done they
cut right through the bureaucracy and that’s what we’re able to we’re able to do amazing that’s a
personal question do you speak any french uh on [Laughter] so we have a question from rita from
latino tbis and the question is what is the best result of all your fights the one that you are the
most proud of probably sorry I think the one I’m one thing I’m most proud of is the fact that we
turned sea shepherd an organization into an international movement uh that it isn’t dependent upon
myself as being like the leader of this that we have literally hundreds of leaders and captains and
officers and directors uh all taking the initiative and it’s uh through that kind of thing that I
think that that’s made us as strong as we possibly can be so making an international movement to me
is the thing I’m most proud of of course we’re also proud of the fact that we drove the ice poachers
out of the southern ocean we drove the japanese whaling fleet out of the southern ocean uh and and
we’re making progress on many many fronts and the fact that the vaquita porpoise has not gone
extinct is something we’re really quite proud of great um we have a question from betty blair from
Le Temps so I am an activist it’s very uh difficult for me to participate in action that save
animals because I see that animals are in pain so how do you react when you see animals dying in
front of you do you accept that I think you have to be detached that is uh you know you just can’t
allow your emotions to take over on that you have to be let’s be like a doctor uh you know one of my
crew members was actually well he is uh an emergency room surgeon and one of the best in the
hospitals and somebody asked them well what what’s your secret for being the best emergency surgeon
in the hospital he says I don’t like people and they said well why is that he says because I don’t
get emotionally involved and therefore I have a greater success rate you know it’s like fixing a car
really uh so in a way you have to be like that you know you have to go to not be distracted by the
fact that this whale is dying or the seal is being killed and focus on the objective which is which
is to stop the operation and not be sidetracked it’s difficult but it’s the only way I think that
you can successfully uh intervene it’s a very practical question from emmanuel hello um I wanted to
know what do you want us to do after this summit what do you want to leave us with the after this
session what is important to you for us to do next well of course I don’t want anybody to do
anything really that’s really it’s your initiative is what do you want to do what do you want to
accomplish uh what can you use your skills and ability to to make a difference because everybody has
different passions you know and when you apply yourself to that passion that’s what makes a
difference because of a man named david wingate the storm petrol in bermuda did not go extinct
because of diane fossey we still have mountain gorillas in rwanda so when one person devotes their
life uh to preventing the extinction of a species or protecting an ecosystem I can’t think of a more
noble legacy than anybody can can leave to the world than that and so really the question is what do
you want to do and how can you apply yourself to making uh making that a possibility we have a
question from jan are you here yeah I’m here hi guys thanks paul for uh joining us I was hoping to
see you with an eye patch and a parrot um but I can tell you that myself and the rest of my family
are big fan of what your organization is doing and I have a question regarding how you tackle the
problems that you are you want to solve so as an organization how do you choose and prioritize the
problem uh that the organization will tackle and how do you approach the solution to that problem
well like I said we’re no longer an organization we’re a movement and so therefore the the projects
are actually selected by the various peoples on the various fronts for instance sea shepherd in
france lamia samlami is the director for sea shepherd france and she looks at what what what can be
done within the bounds of practicality really so we’re trying to stop turtle poachers on the island
of maya we’re trying to stop the killing of dolphins in the in the bay of esque all of these
different things so really those projects are actually chosen by the the people in the various areas
of the world uh whether it be australia or south africa or or um costa rica or wherever people look
at what the problems are in their own backyards and choose that and then of course our ships which
uh are directed towards international campaigns come at requests so if it were requested to
intervene uh in liberia for example then then we do so so a lot of times it comes from a request and
a lot of times is looking at okay what is the problem and is it practical for us to intervene I mean
can we actually accomplish something by intervening and of course that goes a long ways towards us
taking action and we get a call a lot of calls a lot of what are you gonna do about this or what are
you gonna do about that like for instance I got a call the other day what are you gonna do about the
oil spill in mauritius well not much because you know we do have people there but what can you do
you know it’s it was an acting incredible stupidity that had happened and we all and what we have
been doing over the years is going to the beaches and cleaning up oil spills and everything and
always giving this warning over and over again that you know something has got to be done and of
course nobody listens uh the other day one of the directors of politicians I think from mauritius
said you know we couldn’t imagine we couldn’t imagine anything like this ever happening I’m going
why not it’s happened in france it’s happened in alaska it’s happened it happens all the time so why
aren’t you why are you now just getting around to saying we can’t imagine it what you have to
imagine is what can we do to make it not happen in the in the future that’s what they have to do but
again our species tends to adapt to things uh uh you know always too little it’s always too little
it’s too late and we have to start looking forward into saying oh you know how we gonna solve these
problems before they actually happen and unfortunately we’re not very good at and we’re not very
good at that and we don’t seem to be very good at learning at the from history or either all the
problems that we’ve had I mean we adapt constantly to diminishment uh you know as things become more
and more diminished we just accept that you know a species disappeared oh well that’s fine you know
who needs it that’s kind of the attitude you know if this is 1965 and I were to say to you uh you
know in 40 years you’re going to be buying water in plastic bottles and you’re going to be paying
more for that water than the equivalent amount of petrol or gasoline you look at me like who’s going
to be so stupid as to buy water and pay that much money for it but we’ve adapted to the diminishment
and now nobody even questions that that reality so we have to stop that adaptation to diminish which
back to actually served us quite well twenty thousand thirty thousand years ago but it certainly
isn’t of a benefit today uh we have a question from nadezh from Le Temps and very practical too what
are the needs of sheep of sea shepherds today well actually I would say we needs we don’t really you
know we have what we need um and we’re evolving where we can so we add another ship to the fleet
that’s great uh we have a lot of volunteers and we in fact we used to be in the early days hard to
get volunteers now the bad hard part is turning people away because we don’t have room but uh you
know getting you know the support for our operations of course is certainly important but we’re not
going to spend money uh to go after more money so what we like to say is we don’t go after
supporters we want our supporters to come to us because they have to understand that we’re a tool in
solving the problem but we don’t want to we don’t want to exploit the situation and develop a
bureaucracy and we’re not going to we’re not going to do that but people can get involved with sea
shepherd on many levels volunteering on the ships volunteering on shore or just being a financial
supporter great mathieu do you want to ask your question yeah sure sure hi paul it’s really great to
say he meeting you I was just questioning me trying to make the link with the corporate innovation
and especially as you said that you turn sea shipper organization into a movement so what are the
key elements or key milestones that you did to be able to transform your organization into a
movement well actually I would say that I would credit the japanese for uh for us being a movement
because back in 2012 japan came after us as an organization you know they put me on the interpol red
list trying to take me out personally they uh sued sea shepherd in the united states and uh we we
decided whoa you know that we’re very weak or vulnerable in this area so we decided that we would
become an international movement all the groups are separate entities because you can stop an
individual you can stop an organization you can’t stop a movement so yeah japan was able to stop us
in the united states through the courts eventually we we won but they were able to stop us but they
couldn’t stop sea shepherd australia they couldn’t stop france it couldn’t stop the uk couldn’t stop
germany so that is the real strength of a movement that you can it’s pretty hard to to dismantle it
um you know the perception by japan that I was actually the leader of this and that all they had to
do was take me out they certainly learned that that wasn’t true I’m not the leader uh there are many
leaders and again that’s an area of strength that we develop but it was probably because of that
attack on by by japan that uh that we moved in that direction which was a good thing so uh I look at
japan’s assault on us as a positive it was a positive development yeah positive so um which quality
so it’s from return from lawrence which quality of the human being will produce our future well as I
had mentioned earlier passion courage and imagination people need to harness their passion to their
courage and to their imagination and that is what changes the world and has always done so and in
every single social movement in history really and so yeah that’s all that’s all that’s really
needed it’s quite simple through those three virtues I have a final personal question you are very
busy man and thank you so much for for spending time with us why did you choose to to come during
i2d summit and to talk to innovators well I think because you invited me I do but I assume that a
lot of people are inviting you well I try to speak to you know anybody who’s interested in having me
speak so but also at the same time you know it’s good to encourage people to understand that no
matter what your what your skills are no matter what you’re involved in there’s room to make a
contribution towards a better a better future and uh so I think that we always should look for that
you know I’m doing if you’re do if you’re an educator if you’re a lawyer if you’re a writer or
you’re you know if you’re involved with you know i.t or whatever that there’s always ways that you
can contribute to making this a better planet and so in that way I’m sort of encouraging you know
that that kind of outlook great last question from Le Temps what do you think will be you will be
your your legacy after all these actions what will stay in history it doesn’t really matter uh
except that I think that you know the creation of sea shepherd as a movement I think will live long
after I will uh so but um so it’s never really gave much thought about that uh other than the fact
that sea shepherd is moving and it’s a growing movement amazing thank you so much for your time paul
I think cedric has something to say yes um thanks to all who ask for the participation football
thank you very much for this moment do you want to have something to conclude before we finish paul
do you have what sorry do you want to have something to conclude before we finish other than that at
the world uh at the united nations conference on the environment in paris I was uh invited to speak
about the oceans because for it was pretty much ignored at the time and you know someone said well
to go to an earlier question are you ever pessimistic about it and I said well no because you know
if you look at the history the history of major extinction events on this planet and we’re now
involved in the sixth major extinction event which is called the anthropocene what did all of those
major extinction events have in common well whether it be the permian extinction 250 million years
ago or the jurassic extinction 65 million years ago what they had in common was in 18 to 20 million
years it was a full recovery so no matter what we do right now 18 to 20 million years from now this
is still going to be a very beautiful planet the question is how long are we going to survive on it
and so that’s why I say if we’re if we’re going to have a future then we have to be activists we
have to be involved but don’t pretend that we’re saving the planet the planet’s going to do real
good without us probably much better and again we have to understand that we’re not all that
important I was taken to task a few years ago in the u.s on the fox network really because they said
that uh did you actually say that bees and fish and worms and plankton were more important than
people I said yes I said that and they said how can you say something so outrageous is to say that
worms and bees and trees and fish are more important than people I said well it’s quite simple
because they’re more important than people I mean ecologically they are they can survive without us
but we can’t survive without them we need them they don’t need us they operate they’re the crew
members that run the life support system on this planet we’re not crew members we’re passengers
we’re having a great time entertaining ourselves but we’re not crew members but what we are do is
we’re killing crew members and there’s only so many crew members you can kill before the machinery
begins to fall apart so if we’re going to survive on spaceship earth we’ve got to stop killing crew
members and let them get on with the work of maintaining the life support system on the planet thank
you so much paul thank you so much so inspiring thank you paul thank you today thank you thank you
so much you can unmute yourplease and clap – Captain Paul Watson! [Music] [Applause]

Hello everyone so for this next talk we needed to invite our good friend Surya
Vanka because he’s an outstanding design thinker he’s a powerful speaker and
yeah overall he’s such a great man he’s the founder of authentic design
president emeritus of the seattle festival design festival and he was the chair
of interaction the interaction week of ixd surya was also director of ux at
microsoft and professor of design at the university of illinois he’s the creator
of design swarms that is a method a lightweight design technique used by
businesses non-profits and education worldwide so he’s going to talk about that
of course and he has been running design forms in companies like amazon autodesk
deutsche bank or of course microsoft his work has appeared in a lot of
publications including tedx wired the bbc soya is the author of two books on
design and has thought design on every single continent on the planet but
antartica, so from seattle usa please welcome mr Surya Vanka

Thank you Steph uh hi everybody it is uh such a pleasure to be here and uh i
really want to thank steph for uh creating this great opportunity for all of us
to come together uh as uh step mentioned we are i’m calling reaching you from
seattle that’s a view uh not the exact view out of my window but close to that
you know maybe not quite luzon but not too bad either so uh in the next few
minutes what i want to share with you is some thoughts on solving problems at
scale and particularly using swarm creativity now i’ve got to say i am a little
bit uh overwhelmed because it’s such an honor to share the stage with one of
your heroes right i followed captain watson’s work since i was a student a
design student a long time ago and he you know it’s so amazing to be on the same
stage as him and also following that fantastic talk by katie but uh let’s go and
dive into it so as uh steph said i run a consultancy called the authentic design
i’m an industrial designer and an interaction designer and i worked in the world
of consulting and corporate design and academia so what i’m hoping to cover
today is to talk about some emerging problems of scale some of very large scale
and my contention is that there is something very powerful called swarm
creativity that helps us to take on these problems and then i want to talk about
this particular moment that we are in of covid where covet can be a laboratory
in which we create the new and that new that is emerging my contention that new
that’s emerging is really Design 4.0 so i’m going to have a some a smattering of
talks a thoughts and then i’m hoping we can have a conversation so that’s my
goal

so before i jump in i think it’s really important to start with what we believe
in so these are my beliefs my beliefs are all lives are equal and all people are
intrinsically created of course when i’m saying that i’m already challenging the
notion of a creative class that there is a certain minority of people who are
the creative class and saying it’s actually all humans are intrinsically
creative and i believe that when people can channel this creative power they can
do incredible things they can do incredible things for themselves for their
families for their communities for their towns their villages their countries
perhaps even for the world so there is this important thing called human
creativity but not everybody gets a chance to unleash their raw human creativity
and i think there’s a key and that key is this thing that a lot of us in this
room are familiar with the design thinking process it is this magical elastic
repeatable rigorous precise process that is the key that can unleash raw human
creativity and drive it towards outcomes that stick and so my own mission is to
unleash the design thinker in every person and every organization to help them
to create value for themselves and for others and this has always been true for
me to my entire career it’s been really about unlocking that potential and using
design to unlock potential and create value um as steph mentioned i spent a
bunch of time at microsoft and really there the work that i had the honor and
pleasure of leading and being part of was really to be able to use this process
this design thinking process to really drive lead participate uh collaborate in
the reinvention of a company that was using design i also during this time got
to do something else which is again been such a privilege in my life which is to
not only help drive the product but to help change the culture of the company to
help really bake some of these thinking mindsets behaviors methods into the core
of this company right and while i was there i had this one incredible experience
that really shaped me and shaped the way i think about design we had a new ceo
uh ceo satya nadella who had taken over and one of the key things satya was
saying was i want this very large technology company of 120 000 people i want us
to behave like a small startup so we need to use all those behaviors of agility
and design and do that and so he said we are going to change the way we do work
and one of the things that i want to do is yes i’m sorry like we’re wondering
are you sharing slides or not we don’t know oh my goodness oh my god i didn’t
get to step you oh my goodness i am so sorry i don’t know how that happened yeah
so yeah it’s the big green button yes that was lame i did hit the green big
green button but i don’t know what had happened there okay so yeah so so yeah
it’s telling us that uh don’t worry so yeah the message was still clear let’s
just do that again it’s okay saying that you are inspiring even without slide
all right thank you for your kindness in that and all right here we go and how
about i just uh so we don’t feel like we missed anything in the slides i’m just
going to show you the last couple of slides so here this is the first slide
really where i was talking about uh microsoft and then i talked about helping to
change the culture of microsoft my apologies everyone maybe it keeps it
interesting right so one of the incredible opportunity is it is it all good in
the slides yeah it’s perfect okay well we just lived a zoom moment uh all right
so one of the im incredible opportunities that uh i had with this new ceo uh
mission was really to question one of the core things that the company did was
to have an annual company meeting and satya was saying let’s do it with that and
let’s create a hackathon and a hackathon where everybody in the company comes
together and they hack so we said you know let it we’ll stop work for two days
and we will hack and so eventually what happened was 15 000 employees in 230
cities in 80 countries for 38 hours came together and worked on 3 000 hack
projects using a designerly process and an agile process and i got to be part of
the team that built this and for me this was an incredible moment where i had
such an epiphany because there were these projects that completely changed the
way i thought about innovation thought about design thought about agility and
there was one project in particular that really made me think and question uh
design and innovation and this was called the eye gaze project where there was a
small team of folks who were taking on this incredibly hard problem of how to
create something that would provide dignity and independence to somebody who had
als and to give them a way to be able to get around when they all the abilities
they had was the ability to move their eyes and this team did it they did it in
38 hours they did in 38 hours and what was so astonishing for me was to watch
that was not just this team but there are multiple teams that were creating such
results in this very short amount of time and for me having been part of many
innovation projects that go for two years two years or more and don’t really get
results to watch something show up so quickly it was amazing and as i reflected
on what was happening that there was a different set of behaviors where people
were coming at the problem from multiple different sides multiple disciplines
and they’re also watching each other and raising all boats and there was
something very different about the way that is happening when many teams helped
each other to raise what they were doing and i was personally getting very um
concerned like all of us and like uh captain watson was talking to us about this
particular moment they’re in that we find ourselves in this moment on the planet
what we could call the vuca moment right this moment of unprecedented volatility
unprecedented ambiguity unprecedented uh uncertainty change you know we have
never been at such a moment on this planet and i was really thinking about how
can one take some of these the magic of what i’ve seen in this swarm and be
taken outside because really you know this particular moment in history that we
stand at is unprecedented we find ourselves at a crossroad we are still at that
point where the windows open where there are two futures available to us there
is a dystopian future the dystopian future where we are overtaken by climate
change and all the various problems that face us and there’s still the window
open for a utopian future where we’re able to harness all the technology
creativity everything we’ve done for so many centuries to move to the place that
we want to be right but at this moment we don’t really know how this future is
going to unfold and so like all of us in this call this has been a preoccupation
for me and you know while i was working in the world of corporate i was also
getting very interested to look at how do i contribute to this you know because
if we look at what is happening in the world we live in a troubling time when we
look around we see a lot of challenges we see that there’s almost nothing left
pristine anymore in the natural environment we find plastic has found its way
into all our other neighbors on the planet those uh neighbors that paul watson
talked about they’re filled with plastic we are seeing continuities that of um
life that has been around for 50 60 million years going extinct the sixth major
extinction more than a hundred species are going extinct every week and all this
is turning around to come and bite us and we are also starting to see that you
know we are starting to see some real issues on the carrying capacity of the
planet we are about seven and a half billion we’re going very quickly to become
nine billion and we are starting to see that uh again as paul watson mentioned
you know we have finished we are we have the oil wars of the last century and
now the water wars are starting in this century and we are starting to see these
cities that have grown larger than countries so it’s you know it’s there’s some
bleakness there and these are some structural problems we’re seeing that the
very core of how we built our society around these consumer models are starting
to break down and never-ending growth is turning around biting us and you know
we are really having to question stuff so this is where we are right we’ve got
these thousands of wicket problems and we are faced with this particular moment
that we are at and so my uh interest and contention is so this thing of human
creativity this thing you know paul watson was calling it you know the three
things what did he mention he said passion courage and imagination imagination
human creativity that is the big thing on our side at this moment human
creativity and so how do we tap into it now i have a quarter of a century
unleashing the creativity of corporate teams of students of my clients and so on
so i was very interested how do we do that how can we use this thing called the
design thinking process to take this huge amount of creativity and actually turn
it towards outcomes the good news for us of course is that we have now turned
that into a heuristic a repeatable heuristic there’s a lot of we know that we
can go through a very systematic process and you’ve seen many of these
variations of this but we know we can go through this uh process and we can
guarantee results right the question is that you know this process right now is
really used by a minority it’s being used by a very small minority of folks who
self-select into something called innovation or design and so the hypothesis
here was is it really is there really a broader set of can everybody on the
planet actually benefit from this process and so i spent some time looking
around to see is there really human creativity and the answer is yes you know
the answer is a resounding yes because you know as i look around there lots of
cases around the world where this creativity is thriving and see these four
school girls that are nigerian none of them as a designer or a technologist but
they created this way of creating power from p turning urine into power right if
you look at this young man shubham banerjee who lives in the san francisco area
he saw a problem which you know that when folks don’t have vision they use
braille printers but braille printers cost about two thousand dollars or more
and he created one of the lego mindstorms for two hundred dollars and uh this is
the uh a young boy um richard turere a masai uh boy and like many maasai boys
his parents said you know uni in kenya uh can you go out and keep the cattle
safe from lions from being eaten and usually the way that is done is you put a
piece of poisoned meat the lions eat and that’s how your cows stay safe but
instead he said but richard’s saying i like lions and so he figured out a way to
rig up this contraption this uh guy who’s not gone to school he hasn’t heard
about design this contraption that he keeps um has blinking lights that keep
lines away so my point here really is so there is this creativity now the
question is how do you actually take this design thinking process and make it
available to everybody without having people having to go to design schools for
five years or seven years to do this and for me the breakthrough came when i was
traveling in australia i was in the middle of australia at the place where
there’s the oldest civilization the planet around this uh area called uluru and
this is the pittanjajara tribe who’ve been there for 25 000 years and they don’t
really have a written language but they have a thriving culture and that culture
is based on uh pictograms that are actually on that rock uluru the sacred rock
uluru and this is how wisdom is passed around problems are solved by sitting
around the rock and actually using a visual language what why that is important
is the visual is free language and is available to everybody and the second
thing is when cognition and creativity can get embodied outside in some way and
the visual becomes a great way then we can bring people very quickly to move
through creative processes so here was what i did with it i have created
something a map a process map of design called the design swarms map and in this
case this was something that is ten feet wide uh four feet high said you know if
we have this map can people who are completely nervous in design who don’t even
know there’s something called design could they use this map to solve their
problems and i live in seattle and there is a particularly hard problem in in
seattle where mayor declared an emergency which led homelessness among women
right and this was something that a lot of people had tried to solve and it was
really resisting uh solution so we took this map multiple maps got a few teams
together and then actually had folks who had previously experienced homelessness
over currently experienced homelessness to use these maps and they managed to
find a breakthrough solution to this particular problem in just a day and so
this was very encouraging that you can actually put this process out there and
people start using it and then i got the opportunity to start using this map in
a multiple different places and have others use this map to be able to take on
problems of cleaning up the water you know this is in new york to take on issues
or of water bone diseases this is in kenya looking at rainfall water harvesting
other places but the key thing that is emerging all of these places that when
there is an explicit representation of the process people that creativity just
naturally starts to come out and so this is kind of what it looked like when
people are working on these uh design swarms maps so the ideas are multiple
teams each of the museum app helping raise each other up by having this very
social process and this is what it looks like i discovered through a process
that through doing a bunch of this work and running many of these workshops that
there’s some problems that look like this where you have to do front-end
discovery other problems look like this which are a lot more about iteration and
then there’s some problems that look like this which are really complex hairy
problems right and a single map like this is not going to suit all of that so i
took that and turned it into a system kind of a lego kit of maps and now
depending on a profiling of problems if you got the shape of the problem you
could actually pick the right lego pieces as it were and piece them together to
create a problem-solving surface which could which could be as few as three maps
and those three maps would be something that run through the entire process in
just a day and so here you can see that you start with empathy and you end up
with solutions and this is what it looks like when these maps are filled out on
paper and to and the way the process uh works at this bare minimum uh process of
it is that people come together they form together they understand their
superpowers they bring just like that team who are creating the eye gaze project
what can you bring how can we enter the space with a sense of urgency to solve
the problem and bring different skills and then from there go to understand the
human that they are trying to serve and do that very quickly and use you know
very familiar methods but to understand and represent humans we are serving then
do a discovery through things like journey maps and channel understand
challenges understanding adaptations of what users do do an analysis of needs
extract the right kind of needs and from their defined goals this was a problem
where opioid addicts and front room physicians were working on the challenge of
how to prevent opioid addiction in ohio where somebody dies every 11 minutes
from the opioid crisis and then go through a systematic ideation process and
from that ideation process do some validation and eventually turn it and turn
the result into something that can be tested and can be pitched so that’s the
entire process and it was again i found that even this lego kit kind of approach
started to be very useful you could fly into some place this is where we’re
seeing mexico after the earthquake you could fly in do a very community based
designs forms workshop for very urgent problems have community members in this
case as a grandmother abuela wanna and her problems start to look at her
problems start to represent those using exactly the whole idea of journey
mapping and extracting needs defining goals defining um running ideation and all
of this is folks who have never come across design before but they are doing
this to solve problems and finally to be able to tap their creativity to come to
results and so it was you know such a privilege to be running this in corporate
to be running this for non-profits running in education and so on and then the
future happened covet happened and this became an interesting moment the future
changed almost overnight right suddenly we could no longer meet suddenly we were
locked up together and so this process which was about going into locations
creating a space where multiple teams came together with this paper-based
process to be able to solve problems it no longer was possible but also
something else is happening during kobe which is this extraordinary pouring of
global creativity around the world right we saw it everywhere we saw everyone
wanting to participate and the third thing that happened is of course we
suddenly got digitally all connected we got connected because we are on the same
networks using the same tools consuming the same content and we are for the
first time having this global pandemic our first global event and we also at
this time are globally connected and so this created all kinds of opportunities
and one opportunity was really to take this process of multiple teams together
working with passion to solve a problem and taking the design swarms process and
turning it digital uh using um one of our sponsors one of the sponsors for this
mural and miro and building it out on those so again folks are doing exactly the
same things that they were doing in various other uh workshops but the
difference here was i found i thought this would be a second cousin to the
workshops that i’m facilitating in person and i found actually that there are a
huge amount of advantages because when you’re working in physical space you have
to set up a room very carefully so folks have visibility to each other you have
to be careful how as a facilitator you manage the space how you take care that
large bodies don’t cover up a white board and that the big guy doesn’t push away
the little woman and you know standing from there but now when we have these
digital tools one of the things that happens is we can start to see invisible
leaders start to emerge in the process when everybody is it has visibility to
each other’s processes and so we can take the best of our sprint methods and the
best of these swarm methods and sort of move together other kinds of very
interesting things start to emerge which is now when multiple teams are working
together now we can start to see that teams can start to in a good way steal
ideas from each other start to build on ideas from each other so the social
process of not just a single team working through a process but multiple teams
in parallel working through it starts to get very very powerful because now that
we are not dealing with the constraints of physical space we start to get these
huge benefits of using the digital space we also start to see embodying happen
in a different way because now it’s possible to take knowledge and put it right
onto these surfaces we can put for example here’s a formula that we have of how
to write a perfect idea pitch right it’s represented right there or these are uh
ideas how to create a business model experience more technology more that people
can just drag and the beauty is that these start to become these living
repositories of knowledge you can also start to bake in certain values so this
is a design swarms process map on inclusive design and so here we see that
there’s not only doing of the work but also learning certain values
understanding how to recognize exclusion understanding what is an inclusive
persona so learning itself is now tied into this process very intrinsically not
just doing this is this amazed me i ran this in uh four hours with 12 school
kids uh who were taking on a problem with covid and in 12 hours and sorry in
four hours they actually came to solutions where they were doing things uh kids
from around the country were doing things like very sophisticated things like
doing ethical analysis of what they’re doing again this is the power of
embodying the uh knowledge into the canvases and having multiple groups work
together i found that to this process one of the powerful powerful things is how
we can start to convene global teams i see more of people around the world than
i see my neighbors today right i’m connecting it’s easier for me to connect six
thousand miles away than six feet away and so now we have this amazing
opportunity right off really having structured way that teams come inspire each
other form together and use these kind of approaches of swarm creativity the
same thing that is happening back there in that room with the igas project but
now at a global scale right now i’m engaged in a project with the this amazing
organization called the world design organization that is really initiated this
which is around reducing um violence against women focused on the asia-pacific
region working with the un and un women’s but here’s a beautiful thing this is a
two week long project it’s going on right now there’s tomorrow is a big
presentation there are over 100 participants they come from 37 countries there’s
six teams they’re 20 different facilitators and i have the honor of sort of
leading the entire facilitation process and pulling this together you know the
power of what we are seeing in this process you know which is going to have
incredible results is really this swarm creativity that we’re turning into
global swarms hungry to drive change hungry if we’ve given the opportunity and
now that our platforms have come to a point that we you know even if our
platforms are not fully baked they’re still kind of clunky still early but we
are able to kind of move the creative energies and with the right facilitators
really move towards solving problems so which brings us to this particular
moment which is very very interesting and you know again paul watson is talking
about you know the difference between change forcing change and movements i
believe a movement is starting then the movement that is starting is billions of
creative minds and now it is possible for billions of creative minds to take on
these thousands of millions of wicket problems we have so you know what is
important to notice here is change is not continuous change is discontinuous
there are entire decades where nothing much happens and then there are a few
weeks where entire decades happen we are in those weeks right now and as far as
design and innovation here is a change we are seeing if there’s design 1.0 which
was about changing you know design of communication products and then we went
into design 2.0 which is sort of in the world the corporate the idea of
organizational transformation and 2.0 3.0 we are moving to design 4.0 social and
planetary transformation and i believe the forces that drive that uh change are
and are really these notions of this organic swarm-like way that we worked where
multiple people work have visibility to each other we embody uh this kind of
working into these visible methods and that really puts us in a very in a place
of a lot of potential that we could be this design power planet taking on these
massive uh things um problems and just to sort of close on that you know they’re
really these huge problems that we have these problems of scale and so the thing
we have one of the ways that and the one that i believe in is this notion swarm
creativity and that this moment that we are in is such an important moment if we
pay attention you know i like what this there’s a hopi elder who talks about
this moment of kobe says you know you can do two things at this moment you could
think of this moment being a deep deep hole that we fall deeper every day or
this moment is a portal where we come out the other side and we come out the
other side stronger we come out and we don’t go back to the normal because an
old normal wasn’t that great anyway that we use this for this invention so and i
think in the context of what we’re talking about that thing that is happening is
design 4.0 is emerging at this point and with that i’d love to have a
conversation about this so i will go ahead and stop my share and hand it to
steph you know what you are so good uh so i definitely need to take you with me
when i go speak to the clients hey come hang out the places that you’re in i’ll
go anytime so sure so i have a personal question uh do you think that
governments or cities are ready to actually hire designers to fix big problems
like how is it in the us for example i think i think it is i think it’s starting
to happen i know we’re going to hear from kai a bit later kai is already engaged
in some of that right you know from the project with the eu end uh i’m engaged
in that i’m engaged with the city of seattle to create an inclusive city and we
are using sprint and swarm approaches to create an inclusive city you know we
have a brand new waterfront and because we have this big highway by the water
which got torn down and there’s a brand new waterfront we have this beautiful
waterfront and uh the city kind of saying let’s use design early approaches
let’s use print-like approaches let’s use form-like approaches to reinvent our
city with co-creation to make it more inclusive so we’ve got for example for
that you know we’ve got a vietnamese community of immigrants we’ve got a somali
refugee community and all that and we’re coming together and co-creating an
inclusive city great great so i will take some questions from the people in the
the room so we don’t have that much of time i know that serial has a question
for you are you here siri i am yes i’m here thank you very much um thank you
serena for this amazing talk my question is the following um i love the
presentation you’ve done about the swarm how do you actually um about i think
the main challenge today is always to go testing on the field it’s so easy to
spend so many hours to design design design getting more people to design ideas
but at the end the main problem remain always the same how do you how do you
actually uh tackle this this ultimate challenge at the end yeah there’s two
sides there excellent questions here you know because finally if what we do
doesn’t lead to outcomes then it’s a creativity exercise right which is fine but
that’s not what the moment needs the moment needs outcomes right there are real
problems that real real outcomes the windows closing right and so the two parts
do it right one is on the generative side and one is on the evaluative side
right so when we so typically the process has been designers create stuff and
then we create this thing this beautiful thing take it out put in the world and
say all right did i get it right right and then oftentimes no you didn’t get it
right and think okay i’ll go back and then i’m going to tweak it and i’ll put
out on the version did i get it right of course we’ve got a higher velocity as
we are starting to do these rapid experimentation but that’s a problem on the
generative side if we bring the people who are actually the beneficiaries the
humans who benefit from it we bring them into the process right we don’t
actually have to then model the humans and their needs because they’re already
in the process and that’s part of the swarms process is really co-creation right
that you can bring people into the process early and have them participate
because a process is no longer a mystery it’s explicitly defined so that’s on
the generative side and then there’s the evaluative side right so we all know of
mvps right that a great way of evaluating things is to create mvps go test them
with users i think in swarms what uh we use is what i call mbxs or minimum
viable experiences those story boards that i meant and show those are fully
testable instruments right so the cycle time is very very fast with this so in a
week you can go from starting from zero to in a week later having tested
something because you’re not even investing into mvp you can you can get a lot
back from just a narrative description because the beauty of these narrative
descriptions that are created by swarm teams is they have completeness check
right people who are going to the beneficiaries right there will be some folks
who help you create it and others who might not be in the room can very quickly
tell you whether it makes sense or doesn’t make sense did they answer your
questions here thank you perfect awesome thank you so much um i think we have
time for just one more question and uh thomas link has a great question for you
thomas do you want to to ask it hey syria thomas nice to see you here uh so i i
was wondering about scaling designing which is a great idea to solve problems
but we somehow come to current situation by design so how do you think do we
assure that scaling the design process and enabling even more people to solve
problems that we’re that is that is going to a better human condition so is
there something in us as our job that was one idea or is it about testing you
talked about testing yeah this is a this is this is an excellent question
because let me reframe uh that a little bit because i think it’s what you can do
so i went to design school in total with my undergraduate and my graduate i went
to design school for seven years right and that’s a lot of going to school to
learn this way of thinking these mindsets these behaviors these methods and so
right and obviously there is this notion of when you’re scaling design are you
saying that somebody can go for a one-day workshop or a two-day workshop and
then they’re going to gather this skill to be able to do that so there’s a real
problem how you scale the problem the dark side of the scaling is dilution and
we’re seeing that you know design thinking is an example of how that’s happening
right there is this people are often times as they are i took a one-day design
thinking class or a two-week design thing class i am a designer right no you
have got literacy that something exists in the world called design i think that
three different levels we have to talk about there is design literacy there’s
design mastery and there’s design fluency so there is to your second part of the
question is there a role for us yes facilitators have to be designed fluent
these processes don’t run un facilitated you still need a masterful design
thinker who’s also a masterful facilitator to create value right but you can
unleash the potential in a lot of people so it’s a really important question you
know because we don’t want to take something that is so sophisticated so
powerful and pretend that can be turned into a commodity this is the big
challenge design thinking and design doing there’s a lot of folks who have not
engaged in design doing who are somehow think uh by having become aware of
something called design thinking to mistake them to design thinkers and the
challenge of course lies that our discipline and our way of thinking does lives
in plain english or plain any other language doesn’t have a container of jargon
you won’t mistake reading an article about cardiology and say i’m a cardiologist
but you could read an article about design and say i’m now a designer i get it i
need to have empathy and then i need to create ideas and i need to do this so
that’s very core your question really cuts to the very core of what is the role
of designers as leaders so it’s a leadership question really how do we step up
to leadership of this global design project so did they answer your question
thomas yeah it would be great to continue this the discussion in networking
later on well i think we have the opportunity that’s lovely and and thank you
exactly setting up for a beautiful reason so yeah will you attend networking
later i will be there amazing so for uh thank you so much for that amazing
presentation so yeah it was really really uplifting and you know like we need
that positive energy and thank you so much for that so i would like a big round
of applause for surya in the news is that let’s go thank you folks apologies for
the beginning of the presentation great and uh we’re gonna have a very short
break and uh stay tuned for kai haley coming in few minutes [Music] [Music]

[Music] hello everyone so we are late sorry but we are so happy to welcome KaI Haley with us so
wait for it kylie she’s the head of ux methods and processes at Google wow! and her job is to create
and scale programs to enable the culture and mindsets that improve Google’s product quality she’s
one of the founders and lead of the Google screenmaster academy and she has trained hundreds of
scriptmasters at Google to drive innovation across Google’s diverse products or areas but Google has
also been impacted by COVID like just like you just like me and in this toolkit will share with us
how Google has quickly adapted the collaboration and innovation approach during this last month
shifting from working totally on site at Google and they went totally remote so please welcome from
San Francisco thank you I am so honored to be following such incredibly inspiring talks particularly
Surya’s who just came before me and you know what an incredible lineup of speakers so thank you all
for thank you so much Steph for putting this on and having me here today Steph is driving my slide
so just as a note for folks no backwards Steph all right we’ll get we’ll get this i promise so yes I
wanted to talk to you all today about you know how we’ve been fostering future-ready
cross-functional teams the team that I work on right now supports and grows the discipline of ux
across the company so when I first started at Google almost nine years ago now I was a visual
designer on the search ads team and I really struggled when I first joined Google because the ux
team was working very much in a silo and this was the same for the engineering teams and the product
management teams just stay right here while I give you guys all a little context if you can just
make me clear signs so I know I will i’ll just say next also how about that back in 2011 when I was
working on the search ads team we really did struggle to collaborate I didn’t have much access to
my engineers we didn’t sit in the same building I didn’t have visibility into the strategy that my
product managers were setting or the okrs and goal setting that they were doing and it’s really
hard to be effective at driving great products when you’re working in a silo and working alone so I
was lucky enough at that time to participate in what was our first innovation week which then
evolved to become our annual sprint week where we started trying on design sprint methods that we
were developing at that time and I discovered what an incredible framework this was for breaking
down these silos and bringing together you know all of these perspectives getting to the heart of
what is desirable what is feasible and what is profitable for the company so this really was the
beginning of a transformation in the way that I worked as well as the way that many Googlers were
working at the time and I became very inspired by this framework and methodology and started
training Googlers after that next slide what does it mean to be future ready and how does this
relate to cross-functional collaboration yes we all know cross-front control collaboration is
amazing it does unlock lots of great opportunities and potential when you’re able to get teams to
work together but being future ready it’s not about having a magic crystal ball that will allow you
to see into the future imagine my magic crystal ball on this slide it’s really a way of being an
approach to working next slide so I think about it as building organizations that are adaptable and
agile creating the teams that are able to pivot quickly and adapt to changing circumstances being
able to identify when you need to pivot as well as creating an environment that is safe for
experimentation so being experimentation oriented and that also then lends you to resilience so
when you run these experiments and they don’t work to be able to pick yourself back up to embrace
that failure and learn from it as you go and then of course inherent in all of this is navigating
complexity and we’re in ever more complicated times these days and you know that navigating
complexity is its own discipline that you can you know there are lots of great experts who speak
about this but in order to be able to design experiments that we’re going to learn from we really
have to have strong systems thinking and understand the factors that are involved that we’re dealing
with next slide please so many of these can be considered characteristics of a learning organization
and this is not a new concept peter’s saying popularized the concept of learning organizations back
in 1990 and a lot of these he picked out five characteristics six systems thinking personal mastery
mental models shared vision and team learning and these are all things that are you know really part
and parcel of being future ready Steph next slide please so our sprint master academy program and
our design sprints program really focuses on building these capabilities these characteristics and
infusing them in to our product development process so for example we help sprint masters with
building their own personal mastery and deep expertise they work hands-on with product teams to help
them create shared visions to help them learn as they go so all of these characteristics are really
infused into our product development process through the design sprint process and through these
critical sprint masters that we train to help lead teams through the process next slide please and
one example syria also shared an example of having to pivot and change due to these very
unprecedented times when we were all literally grounded back in march we really had to pivot quickly
we had critical sprints that were in flight that sprint masters were you know ready to get on a
plane to australia ready to get on on a plane to singapore you know to to work in person on you
know really important projects and we tended to think up until this point very much about design
sprints as an in-person activity we would rely on getting everyone in a room together and having all
of the benefits that come with working in person so we didn’t have that much expertise in this area
next slide please we had deep mastery at designs rinse as I mentioned and since 2014 when we started
the academy we trained thousands of uxers and we have an incredibly engaged community of 400 expert
sprint masters who are running sprints across all of Google’s product areas next slide please but
remote sprinting was pretty new to us we looked across the organization and we said hey who is
anybody doing this i’d run a couple out of necessity in general we kind of saw them as like last
resort but we realized this was something we were going to have to learn really quickly we’re going
to have to pivot our practice and then scale our learnings as as fast as we could next slide so in
order to do this we we took one small step was a small experiment and we said hey let’s get everyone
together you know with our first week in which we were required to work from home and you know
surfaced and invited the sprint masters who had been running remote sprints to share their their
expertise to share their learnings and this quickly turned into a platform and a weekly session
where we could bring in experts from outside and share as people were learning inside the resources
and tools and templates that they were building as they were rapidly transitioning their practice
from in person to virtual so we were able to amplify the knowledge that we were creating and and
and scale it you know across our 4 000 person organization next slide please and one of the things
that we discovered through this process was that we couldn’t we couldn’t just take our traditional
full day multi-day design sprint whether we were running three days or four days or five days we
couldn’t just translate this into the virtual environment and just hold a video a collaboration
session for for eight hours a day this just wasn’t humanly possible a couple sprint masters actually
did do it initially and found that it was not the most effective way to work not just for the
distribution of time but also for all the other demands on people’s lives and what they were going
through and still are continuing to juggle these days next slide please so we were doing and we
still are doing some where we distribute over time zones in shorter time sessions looking at how can
we you know set this up to be human and to to combat video conference fatigue but but what we
really discovered next slide please is that it’s about more than just distributing the time time is
operating really differently has been operating really differently for all of us when we’re you know
having to shift the way that we live and work into our homes and juggling things like homeschooling
and caregiving so we have less time but in the virtual environment we actually were discovering that
it was taking more time to do everything than we would find in person so a very interesting
contraction of time happening next slide please and we had to go kind of back to the beginning and
think about you know what what is the the what is the design sprint afforded us and in the past it
was really this container this brand a calling card that would get us in the door and allow us to
get everybody together in a room and then you know we would we could work it out once we got in the
room we would do a lot of advanced planning user research problem framing you know talking with our
stakeholders making sure that we’re using everyone’s time really effectively but sometimes next
slide please we would find that actually this is what we were doing when we got into the room we did
similar to some of surya’s wonderful illustrations a lot of the process ends up you know being
pivoting on in the moment while you’ve got all the important and the right people in the room to do
the work so we actually had to to step we had to look at what are our real goals and our very very
crisp goals for every session that we’re holding next slide please and i’ve been thinking about
this as this concept of atomizing the sprint what are what are the goals of each of the activities
in the sprint and how is that getting us towards a larger goal can we break break down that larger
goal in a way that we can make progress more effectively with people’s time next slide please so
this means really crisply focusing on the goals for each sprint per session and that’s not always
about product outcomes a lot of times it is but we would get benefits from getting everyone in a
room together like shared vocabulary knowledge sharing increased collaboration and sometimes you
wouldn’t set that out as the goal for the session but now we had to be even we have to be even more
intentional about designing these sessions for the needs of not just the product but also the people
next slide please we also had to get the tech and the tools right so the sessions would go smoothly
there’s always going to be something that goes wrong but we need to build the confidence in the in
the technology and a lot of that was getting comfortable what are with what are the different tools
I know a lot of folks have had many discussions about what are the tools to be used and what tools
are available but you know this was something that we had to onboard ourselves to very quickly next
like to please and as I mentioned designing for the the the humans that we’re bringing into the
sprint because really it is all about the people co-creating together building relationships and
connections together so that they can be more creative and collaborate and problem solve together
and recognizing when sometimes we really need that sprint to improve that the the the conversation
to improve the collaboration not just for the outcomes so this is something that maybe in the past
we kind of got for free when we would get together in person and now we’d have to spend more time
planning and prepping for it next slide please so the outcomes from our quick pivot earlier this
year was we developed these really quick reusable templates and tools for everyone across the
company to use and we allowed folks like the cloud ux team to you know better identify opportunities
to meet their customers needs with sessions focused on empathy mapping next slide and aligning a
team on the product mvp so not running the whole sprint all the way to the prototype and user test
but really narrowing in on what we need right now is to define those critical user journeys together
collaboratively and the Google health team did this earlier this year next slide mapping assumptions
to find gaps and understand what we don’t know the the Google classroom team used this this spring
as well to help you know the identify these gaps so they would know where to invest their resources
next slide please and there were teams even setting long-term visions and road maps in longer
sessions over multiple days and really looking at you know who needs to be involved in these
conversations how do we spread these out to get the outcomes that we need next slide please and even
some of these more softer benefits such as helping a team form helping a team create a shared vision
or a shared understanding of their value proposition and doing fun activities in tools like mural
next slide yes so with all this we were able to keep our team sprinting we were able to keep our
velocity and with we had over over 60 percent of our teams um actually continued to run sprints and
participate in sprints and one of the the questions in the chat is you know how could we be focused
on not in person on only in-person collaboration and I will say we have many different forms of
collaboration across the company design sprints are a specific type in which we really got the value
out of bringing people together synchronously but we use many different techniques for asynchronous
collaboration so I just want to make sure people get the picture that it’s not like we’re this was
the only method that we had or do continue to have we use lots of amazing Google tools for this for
asynchronous collaboration across the globe but one of the things that I mean we did end up finding
some great benefits you know to build on what syria was saying about this being a real opportunity
time we found that this did allow us to have even more engagement from engineering and product
because this became a relief from their um daily activities that they were doing an opportunity to
work in a different way we were able to include people that maybe couldn’t get on a plane and fly so
folks that have other restrictions in their lives and weren’t able to actually participate in person
so this really made it more inclusive as well as the this did working digitally you know could also
becomes a leveling ground and creating space for more quieter voices we found this to be a big
benefit that people are able to contribute more broadly across and then of course the sprint
documents itself when you’re um you know working in a digital tool and our sprint masters are have
been pretty happy about that there’s a lot of upfront work even more upfront work to design our
sessions but in the end we save some of that when we have to share and document and spread the
learnings from the sprint afterwards next slide and from here in addition to spread spreading and
scaling this across Google you know many sprint masters have also been contributing back to the go
back one more back to the community running sprints for things like the california public school
system we ran a five-team sprint to help the california schools determine figure out how to go back
to school with distance learning this fall we worked with the new york city public services group of
non-profits to increase access to employment opportunities and public services and we’ve had teams
working with focused on equity health research to improve access to health opportunities so lots of
great impact from the the increase in our skills remotely and virtually to be able to reach out
beyond the the confines of our of our own locales um and to pivot and continue to learn and grow as
an organization and thank you and thank you to the Google emojI team which is my next slide because
I love love the the beautiful emojis that they create Steph for driving thank you so much KaI of
course you can mute yourself and clapper amazing yeah so as I was trying to I was trying to follow
up on the slide like but it worked so I couldn’t follow the chat is there any question for KaI
maybe you can open your mic and ask the question directly so one person asked about the soft
benefits of in-person sprints in the chat I’m not sure if soft is the right word but it’s the what
happens when we do have time and we make time and space for conversations that don’t happen because
you’re you’re not always in the same office or you don’t have a chance to run into each other in the
in the kitchen or you know the water cooler as they say so we get that space and time for people to
share their perspectives and the collaboration methods really make room for those conversations as
well can I ask a question about I’m sure it’s secret but what are the topics of these prints are
they about products are they about the way you work now because of COVID can you disclose a little
bit about what kind of challenges you have yeah i mean historically we’ve used prints for all kinds
of things right we’ll use them to you know foundationally to improve our products and make our
products more user-centered but we also use them to improve processes so in terms of you know in
this time people have definitely turned to this methodology to help them figure out how do we better
you know support our employees at home how do we better communicate you can use the you know that
process to problem solver to co-create together solutions as well as defining product vision you
know improving your critical user journeys and things like that which tools was another question
that just popped into the chat do we use during sprints in in virtual sprints now we’ve been using a
variety of tools including mural as well as Google slides and Google drawing and of course meets and
and that’s you know for the collaboration we need a collaboration canvas for prototyping you know we
have all the standard prototyping tools that that teams will use for digital products so you know
it really is dependent on the the the problem space that you’re working in if you’re designing a
digital product versus a process versus a physical product [Music] sabrina do you want to ask your
question oh sure thank you hI KaI nice to thanks thanks for your talk I would have a question are
you other remote design spins have another impact to your solutions and products do you already have
an evidence about that so it’s a it’s an interesting question because you know we we always talk
about the impact of design sprints and how long does it take to see the evidence and so we are you
know five or six months into this right now and our launch timelines are you know relatively longer
than that but what i will say is the evidence that we’re seeing is around being able to maintain our
our velocity maintain the the speed at which we’re working which is one of the things that we we
rely on design sprints for alignment and shared vision but we also rely on it as a way a method to
make a a way to make decisions faster to get evidence and data to support you know or to make sure
that we’re investing in the right products so we are still able with remote testing and remote
design sprints to continue working in the way we would normally you know on the the similar
timelines hopefully that answers your question the evidence is coming the projects are being
launched yes yeah it’s exactly the same here you know even on shorter timelines it takes time to
really measure because you have what you get at the end of the week but there is what you get after
a month or years there is a question from sherun well pronounced appreciate hI el great to be here
I had the outside in question as an outsider let’s say we look at Google as let’s say digital first
digital only in everything and you gave us the impression a little bit that Google had to handle
let’s say the reality of going from all in-person sprinting and collaboration to a more virtual
style was that a surprise was it a wake-up call how is Google looking back at let’s say the notion
of having to change that way of working and being so in-person oriented being such a digital and
virtual company well I think it’s it’s less about being digital and virtual and more about being
global because as we can see here we’re all operating on different time zones and when you fly
somewhere you normalize your time zone we’re all there together we’re all working right now we can’t
ask people to work all night long so we actually have to converge at space or I mean time right so
we have to converge time and that was really where we found the big challenge less around you know
having the right tools because we were able to get up to speed and have the right tools and have the
processes to do the work and more comes comes down to the humans where we have people who have lives
in different places around the world and to bring them together in a way that it is respectful of
you know their work-life balance all of these are the things that I think are are much more
challenging to resolve than the the digital aspect or the the technology aspect of it it just comes
down to the fact that in order for me to you know get to be on for the first speaker this morning I
had to wake up at like 6am where it’s dark out and you know and so yeah no no I’m happy to I guess
I’m just saying that it’s it is a a moment where you you realize you know we we can overcome space
but we can’t always overcome time we have a question from mikhail or michael villamI yes [Music] my
question is more about how you manage your try to influence the difference in motivation from or the
implication of the participants during the during sprints especially now that they are they’re
trying to they’re going to remote I know some people are not really sometimes motivated at the
beginning and how do you try to [Music] let me see if I if I got the question how do you manage
people’s motivations in the sprint to get them to be engaged and influence their participation is
that what you’re yeah because sometimes you have people that are very motivated and they have
control remote or through a screen and some others really prefer the in person so you notice
different motivation between the two people so how do you do you have tips to manage yes actually
that was one of the areas that we we really did spend some time leaning into which is how do you
create a sense of connection and safe space virtually which is it’s a different than when you’re
doing it in person so trying to we’ve we’ve been training our sprint masters in virtual
facilitation methods mindfulness improv even to try to you know set the the space in virtually that
cree that creates a sense of safety for people to participate you know we also rely on each
person’s participation because in that’s one of the best things about the sprint process is it’s
very clear when you don’t contribute so each person has their turn each person has their ca their
their individual creation so we don’t actually struggle so much with that participation once you
set those ground rules but but but we you know there are folks who are less engaged that have can
be less engaged if they don’t have a really strong connection to the context of the sprint so the
other thing that we’ll do is make sure that everyone who’s participating and attending is is really
critical to the outcomes or you know really understands what their role is and a lot of times that
is helping to define their role for them and let them know what the expectations of them are when
you invite them to the sprint and I will often do that in advance when when we invite people in
does that answer your question great amazing we have a question from kate hello thank you KaI for a
great talk appreciate your your time and your expertise so my question is around how do how do
design sprints fit into the rest of your team’s road maps so when you’re getting these cross
functional people together like developers and data people they all have their different road maps
and plans so getting everybody to align to a sprint how how do you go about doing that yeah it’s a
great question and I I think over time we have gotten a better a better approach to it which is I
think really something to be thought of at a cultural level across the company there are specific
times in the year where people will say what we need to do is spread a sprint now because we’re
going to be doing our resourcing or we’re going to be doing our road mapping so we’ll actually find
an increase in requests for sprints usually towards fall planning when people are thinking about the
next year and they’ll bring everyone together to align on you know what is our vision going to be
for next year so we’ll set the sprints specifically in the calendar to influence those roadmaps so
rather rather than say randomly holding a sprint and then being like oh sorry the roadmap’s already
set and this is actually one of the things that we advise in our training is to always have a
conversation with the product team and understand the road maps already in place and and make sure
that that sprint is going to be pushing those goals forward and is being held at a time when the
outcomes will be actionable so we usually find at least in the beginning of the year and towards the
end of the year are kind of the hot spots for when people decide to run bigger sprints but there are
teams that work in more regular sprints that are maybe more iterative rather than vision long term
vision setting or roadmap setting so it again it also depends on the type of sprint that you’re
running and what the end goal of it is do you want to ask your question I I think you know the the
previous question was sort of similar to mine but I could just repeatedly see if there’s I could
address a topic from different angle is my sort of like my well concern with designer sprint is the
goal setting i’ve been in those design sprint workshops that clients we didn’t properly address the
goal that we want to achieve and it was absolutely a waste of time so how do you avoid such
situation like I mean I know it’s a big topic maybe like if you have like some you know hard-earned
tips to share very concert defining goals for the design experience that would be really valuable
for me thank you yeah one of my favorite relatively new tools is problem framing so even running a
shorter session in advance using some problem framing methods jay malone has a nice one from new
haircut and setting the time in advance of a longer sprint to bring together a couple of higher
level stakeholders to really frame the problem because i have certainly as you mentioned been in a
sprint where we didn’t do enough of that in advance and we didn’t have the right people in the
conversation when we started the sprint because we hadn’t narrowed the focus down early enough so if
you if you aren’t able to get a really clearly defined problem through stakeholder interviews and
conversations with your with your team actually hosting a short session can be really valuable
before you launch into a bigger sprint amazing jackie do you have a question for kay sure KaI thanks
for your time today I’m just wondering do the sprint masters sit as a centralized resource or are
they embedded in the product teams so they’re it’s an interesting model they’re embedded in the
product teams but they are encouraged and very frequently do run sprints for other product teams so
acting kind of like a centralized volunteer crew and one of the principles of Google which I really
love is embracing mobility and so people do move from one product to the next do you spend a couple
years working on photos and then feel like you know you’re really interested about math on maps or
something like that so our sprint masters are you know experts that get a lot of value from working
with other product teams this helps to build your relationships it helps to cross pollinate ideas
across the the organization and so it kind of becomes this added benefit to both the sprint master
and the product teams that they work with because they can be an outside they can bring an outside
perspective to the challenge often it can actually be quite hard to be a facilitator for in your own
product area and I think I see one about facilitating and taking part i’ll just jump onto that we
highly recommend that facilitators do not also act as sprinters in the sprint I personally have done
it myself and we have a number of sprint masters who are say the only ux designer on their team and
they’re asked you know to fill in for that resource it’s unfortunately it’s really hard to be a good
facilitator and a good participant at the same time so we generally recommend you don’t do that and
if you can recruit somebody to be that essential ux resource or or if it’s your team to recruit
another facilitator and that’s where our volunteer group really comes in handy if I need a sprint
run I can just email the group and say can somebody come help I need to participate in this one
great I have one last question is do running design sprint help you kind of recruit the right
profile at Google like is it making designers or people excited to be on sprints or engineers is it
a help for you is it let me just make sure i understand do people enjoy being on sprints is that uh
contribute to their job satisfaction yeah if it helps you to find the right profile that people want
to join Google because they can be part of sprints I think ultimately it is a better way of working
which is part of why I’m talking to all of you guys today because it’s really to change the way that
I work so having the that as a way of working and having people understand it as a way of working
helps when people come to Google because they’ll they’ll know that you know we have really great
ways of collaborating and we do encourage those relationships across those silos that I was
mentioning like 11 years ago we had really much more challenging silos than we do now we have
really strong ux support we have strong relationships with our engine product team so my hope is
that that is something that other people also look for and benefit from so the design sprint
process enables that and makes it a great place to work great thank you so much KaI for for
everything for your time for the presentation for going over the technical challenges we did it
thank you so much I’m asking everyone please unmute yourself big round of applause for Kai it’s
amazing to have you on board yeah thank you Steph will you stay during the the networking session? I
will be there amazing continue the conversation so so see you there in the room and we’re gonna
take a short break of half an hour so we meet at 30 plus and our next speaker is mr jake knapp who
is the creator of the design sprint at Google see you soon [Music]

For the second talk of the day I’m super proud to welcome Ramatoulaye Diallo. I met Rama last year
in iallo. I met Rama last year in Dakar senegal and during a workshop and when she came in the room
I was immediately impressed by her presence and her natural charisma She is one of these kind of
leaders. I already knew that she was the driving force of innovation in Africa but when I received
her bio while preparing the conference I realized exactly who she is. so Ramatoulaye A. Diallo is
the CEO of Orange money in Senegal and she’s the director of a mobile financial services of the
sonatel cluster across five countries her mission is to create services communities and products
that are used daily by millions of people in africa her career started on Wall street in the
traditional banking industry and later Rama has been a driving force and promoting inclusion
economic growth and entrepreneurship in Nigeria South Africa and of course Senegal, so from Dakar
Senegal make some noise for Rama Diallo!

Hi everyone – welcome thank you, Hi Steph very good to see you good to see everyone thank you all
right are we are we good with the sound and everything? – it’s it’s all good the crowd is yours.

– Excellent all right, So let me start this is a swiss event so we can’t afford to have any issues
with time we would not be on brand if we did that so um I’m extremely pleased to be here today thank
you staff for inviting me it’s a pleasure to share what my team and I do um in senegal and um also
you know talk a little bit about Orange money across the continent um but before that um you know i
will uh just let you know that I plan to kind of talk across a few slides um and um very quickly and
get to the point where we can actually engage and have a conversation and answer questions and and I
hope that some of you in the audience might even be able to share some some insights as far as um
designing and creating products for large numbers of people more specifically also for for the
african continent so I’m going to go ahead and share my presentation and slide through it quickly
let me know if there’s any issue but I’m just going to power through it otherwise um so steph let me
know if everything is good excellent so um so I want to talk about consumer driven innovation and
designing for impact impact for me I define as really touching the lives of people in a way that is
meaningful so answering real problems solving real issues or unearthing real opportunities and
making their lives easier um essentially as far as I’m concerned as much as possible across the
continent and obviously across the world every time possible so there are three um um the three sort
of parts of this presentation and it’s all about journeys that’s really the theme that’s inspired me
today we talk a lot about customer journeys and use cases as far as I’m concerned every use case is
a story and that’s where you know every product or every innovation really comes from you know you
um it’s 11 p.m you don’t have electricity you need to buy prepaid electricity which is a thing for
those of you who live in places that that get bills um we do have bills but prepaid electricity
prepaid phone credit is a very real thing across the continent we can talk a little bit more about
that so i’ll very briefly touch on my own journey because I think it’s relevant um to me being able
to talk about these issues to you um and by way of introduction we’ll focus on the mobile money
journey and then talk about obviously what is in my view hard to avoid which is where where to from
here given the incredible sort of change of direction or interruption we’ve had this year with covet
depending on how you look at it so for my personal journey just in in three short steps my formative
years were spent here in senegal where I was born and raised and I’m from senegal so i’ve kind of
come full circle speaking of journeys in coming back here about two and a half years ago to run
mobile money for ohange so having grown up in this environment culturally in every way possible I
went to the united states to finish essentially secondary school do my first second degrees and my
first job on wall street as well as in private equity so very much sort of fell in the bucket of
finance really early on but always with an eye on emerging markets so I was doing mna for mergers
and acquisitions for um financial services banks insurance companies in latin america then second
part of my early career um investing really around 2000 in what turned out to be really a lot the
beginning of the mobile uh revolution and you know some of the the older technologies so post
business school uh which uh was in 2004 I came back to the continent and very quickly that’s sort of
the last 15 years where i’ve worked in nigeria in south africa and then back to senegal and I can
really just summarize that as working on what I call useful technology tech for development tech
that actually cares um sovereignty for women that’s something that’s very important to me not just
for women as women but as consumers as decision makers a very important part of of this journey and
finance for growth so that’s these are the things that I’m interested in that I’m working on in
amplifying impact and in my current role I hope that that’s what I’m doing every day so um on to the
mobile money story as with all good genesis stories um so mobile money is a big sort of african
success story for for those of you who know this very well um just bear with me bear with the
redundant I thought it would be um interesting to just go back to beginnings and talk in more
slightly basic terms about what we do without assuming that everybody in the audience knows about
what mobile money even is because I think if you are in the first world um sort of all the time very
well banked with a bank account some of these things are not intuitive so we’ll come to that so
essentially from what I know this story started in the philippines as sort of a technology but
really vodafone brought it to kenya because they essentially noticed that their customers started
sending credit and having that credit being transformed into cash this is sort of the short part of
the story so clearly customers were already going ahead and trying to solve some of the some of the
problems they were having and what was the problem was basically getting cash from point a to point
b across our countries so that was you know 2007 in kenya since then mobile money in sub-saharan
africa these are the gsma end of 2009 numbers um so globally you know you can see that um you know
we were over a billion accounts and almost half of those were across the continent so when gsma
published this report they said that 2020 was going to be the year where we would be over the half
billion accounts in africa I’m pretty certain by now we have crossed that given the acceleration
really in digitization that we have seen with covet and we can come back to that so my point is we
are well over half a billion and and more than half of the mobile money activity across the world is
taking place on the african continent so specifically coming to ohange money we are now in 18
countries morocco being the latest at launch in january we’ve crossed 50 million customers and cross
20 million active users and these are the the users in the Orange sphere so empeza is well over you
know 30 i think 40 million customers um mtn is the other big player alongside empeza and orage in in
this field across the continent so all of that to say that even when you put all of them together we
are still probably under 200 million if I’m not mistaken you know maybe 250 million people so that
is still a relatively small percentage of the kind of of the of the population on this continent so
to me as much as this was launched in 2007 in kenya launched in cote d’ivoire for Orange money
specifically across the Orange footprint um in 2009 it’s still extremely young we’re at the
beginning of this story there are still far more pages to write than there are pages that have been
written in this story so what is it exactly I thought actually we should talk about this because i
many times realize um when people actually come here and use it they’re always a bit surprised or
they really realize they didn’t actually know what what it means to have your wallet inside your
phone um so essentially the most basic transactions are getting money into your phone essentially
and getting it out if you need it for for for cash transaction purposes and in order to make that
happen we have the most important part of the business as far as I’m concerned especially if you’re
starting and that’s the distribution network i mean so Orange has over 150 000 I mean it could be a
tiny kiosk on the corner of the street you know down my street there’s one actually more than one um
where you go give cash and it reflects pretty much automatically um in your account on your phone
and what do you do with it once the money is in your phone transfers are very big continue to be big
so intra-country inter-regional and international transfers of money going from point a to point b
are still the very heart of what we do that is the biggest need and remittances fall into that
people can pay bills and people can also make payments at merchants but the merchant payments aspect
of the business is one where we still have a long way to go as I always say cash is our biggest
competitor it’s not the other ones the other people in the market cash continues to be our biggest
biggest challenge on a day-to-day basis which is something important to keep in mind when we’re
talking about designing products and solutions that’s who we are up against in terms of being being
being reliable being quick uh maybe not as secure but easily you know sort of value easily uh it so
um just a few key points this is not exhaustive and we can talk a little bit more about why it’s
been an african success story i believe it’s because it was actually something that picked up on the
what the customer was already trying to do which is money from point a to point b and prior to that
they were going to motor parks and giving it to people and say go can you get to the village can you
give it to my mom or however they were getting money across they were very informal networks and
obviously the likes of western union were also here for more formal transfers so we’re solving a
problem addressing a very very basic need a very basic um sort of use case in a world where banks
were not able or willing to invest in in getting to the majority of the population as I said it was
very much driven by what the customer needed it spoke the customer’s language actually speaking of
the customer’s language interestingly enough when Orange money started the the ads were very techy
so to speak you know trying to explain what this means and with robots and and it wasn’t it wasn’t
moving um it wasn’t speaking to the customers until um there was really a change in the
communication strategy to be a lot more playful with a lot more humor with ambassadors that were
very relatable to the customer and with a very step-by-step approach so short humorous kits that
could really show people in real life situations showing people how does this thing actually work
and and actually going through some part or all all of the customer journey in a very humoristic way
and that’s where we broke um the communication barrier in terms of being able to then communicate
with the with the customer and that the customer driven design is also very much reflected I mean
steph talked about him meeting me and my team um when he came to iallo. I met Rama last year in
Dakar and he actually specifically came to work with us and and to work with also digital I think
some of my colleagues are are on this um are connected and they basically you know do an amazing job
working with the business teams with uh with the customer uh actually across the whole chain frankly
they work with everybody and does from design to actually implementing some of these products so
steph had come to really kind of help us on on one of the issues we we had a lot of um one of the
issues that was really key for us that we’re very close to coming to some conclusions about and and
the last point is very important today and it will continue to be extremely important and I think it
means above and beyond what it says on the slide you know so so inclusive design yes that it
cultivates proximity through the through our distribution network so very just next door to most of
our customers but also in the customer’s pocket right via the phone but I think inclusivity here is
also very important in the greater scheme of things because wherever you are sitting today you know
whatever you’re working on i dare say that you know if it’s something that’s going to last in time
it will eventually be used by or appropriated by people on this continent and given sort of the
trajectory of population growth I mean we are on track to add a billion people in 30 years so we’re
going to have at least a billion people I i believe the the projection is that half of the
population 30 is going to be under the age of 25 we actually have an incredibly young population as
it is so um overall you know and they we’ve seen it we’ve seen it with clovid they are very hungry
for um for for all things technology they’re very hungry to be a part of this global culture so
whatever you’re doing I dare say that they will have to be kept in mind so you know coming to covet
I i have this theory and feel free to challenge me later on i’ve been saying I’m a big cinephile so
i always say that every single movie is about one of two things either somebody goes on a journey or
a stranger comes to town so this particular kobe movie is definitely a stranger came to town this
year and came to town for all of us so um we are still living through it so some of the things that
i’ve put down are again this is not exhaustive um in terms of the impacts or you know how it’s
changing the world around us both in our business and and outside our business with our customers so
the very first thing is this you know sort of accelerated demand for governments ngos you name it
it’s like everybody woke up and it’s like we have to pay uh we we need to use cash’s payments we
need to pay salaries via Orange money we need this we need that and just an influx of demand some
customers that we’ve been chasing some merchants we’ve been chasing all of a sudden wake up and turn
to us and say why aren’t you moving fast enough um and you know obviously we don’t tell them well
we’ve been chasing you for two three years we take the business and try to make them happy so the
second thing that’s really interesting that’s happened is that the central banks who the regulator
being a very important part of our business relaxed some identification requirements and
identification is actually one of the heaviest hardest things to do on this continent for many
different reasons sort of outside the scope of this presentation but so they relaxed some of the
rules for about two three months because they really wanted to encourage as many people as possible
to sign up for mobile money use cash less contact less payments um and and also help in in in
stopping movement because we were either in a state of emergency depending on which country you’re
talking about or a lockdown of some nature of varying degrees of severity so when we when those
rules were relaxed we saw in the sign ups interestingly enough um just parity parity happened
naturally in the number of clients came to us so that really for us was such an interesting sort of
tiny bit of gold mine that we are hoping to continue to to understand better so that we can get to
parity in our global population where it’s clear that we have more male customers than than female
customers so this is these are some of the nuggets that have come out so far and then for the future
for us again this is not exhaustive but um you know I talked about identification for example I
personally think that you know ethical use of ai is going to be at the heart of what’s going to help
us crack this the good old-fashioned ways are filling forms bring your id let’s scan it um or even
you know let’s bring all that that entire process into a digital world is going to have to be a lot
more fluid again we are facing cash as a as a as a barrier as a competitor sorry um so we need to
get to being a lot more fluid make it as easy as possible for our customers to sign up or to
transact with us as much as possible um I think the next wave as I was saying earlier that mobile
money is so young the next wave is diversified product offering so we’re seeing now the rise of
credit but if you think about money in its very sort of old definition in terms of you know you earn
it or receive it somehow you spend it you invest it you give it um across that whole spectrum I
think we’re gonna have to digitize um in many in in different ways and at different speeds that
whole spectrum and obviously add insurance products etc etc so we have started that process but
there’s still a lot more to do um and I also believe that um that’s not going to be something that
the telcos um the likes of us in in mobile money within the telcos are going to be able to just do
on our own I think we’re going to have to rely a lot on partnerships which is why the ecosystem is
so incredibly important why why entrepreneurship is going to be a a key part of what’s going to
ultimately take mobile money you know from the half billion we’re crossing this year into the
billion and more users and really fluidify the customer journeys and obviously you know inclusion is
is at the heart I talked about it earlier in terms of being included in this in global design you
know thinking of africa and african africans as being um you know worthy customers that we that need
to be listened to and and incorporated and who also will be actors whether it’s african
entrepreneurs or people like myself who are in this ecosystem not only as participants but also as a
as a customer I’m a an Orange money customer um and I also you know as a mother care about where
this this world is going what are we what are we creating what are we what are we doing that’s going
to be um bequeathable to our children um if I’m not mistaken I think one of the speakers here
yesterday was talking about social design and and revolutionary design and really at the planetary
level and really taking our ambitions um global but you know in a very very inclusive way so to me
this is critical there’s no such thing as you know creating products just for for a particular part
of the world ultimately I think we’re going to have to answer um the the need the call of the
customer on this part so I’m going to end on uh one of my favorite poems and I’m going to claim
kavafi as african even though he is of greek origin but he spent most of his years in alexandria
egypt and did his best work there so I am going to um just appropriate him for this for this knee
for this for the needs of this session and just uh read the few bars you have in front of you of his
poem which I think is beautiful and illustrates where we’ve been but as i’ve said you know um the
journey ahead the pages to write are so much more exciting what is to come is definitely far more
luminous that what we’ve already gone through as exciting as that has been so steph I’m going to
stop here and i hope i was timely and stop the sharing and we can um perfect thank you so much Rama
if i mean yeah we I mean you could talk for the the whole the whole day about uh all of this this is
amazing uh I have a i have a question uh if you said that um your enemy is the cash is cash money
how did you welcome the kobe the kobe 19. i don’t know if welcome is the word [Laughter] i don’t
think anybody welcomed covet i think we all woke up and and it was like that that person who came
and didn’t call in advance and you know just rang your bell at 4 a.m and so you answered the door
and you had no choice but to let them in so um you know in the same it’s been the same shock it’s
been for everybody to be to be quite honest um both in in our individual lives but also across the
business um very disruptive clearly um you know sort of pushed everybody into who was able to into
working from home um but across the continent we have very informal economies and people with
activities that are very day-to-day so who literally couldn’t afford to sit home and work from home
like some of us so I think kovit was a huge both economic and sort of health shock as we know we
have a lot of issues with basic health care and our health systems it’s interesting I actually was
listening to the president of the world bank a couple of uh weeks ago talking about their response
uh to covet and he described it as three steps so one is saving lives secondly saving livelihoods as
much as possible and then third he called it protecting the future I actually really like that
expression because as far as he was concerned protecting the future was about education and basic
health care so when you come back to that framework you know saving livelihoods we found ourselves
as a continent and in many countries i think having to actually I think this applies to everybody
having to kind of find the right response between the economy and people’s health and and where do
you put um what’s the perfect approach or what’s the perfect mix temperature of this particular mix
of water and and I dare say I think we’re still continuing to try to figure it out because in
senegal in particular um it is um you know we still have more cases and we haven’t we’re not at that
point where we’re on the downward side where we can say we’re reopening the economy we’ve actually
had to reopen and as I said we have a lot of informal sector activity and um we we just can’t
prevent those people from earning their livelihoods so now we have to figure it out moving forward
great thank you so much next question is for hassan hi hi everyone thanks uh rama for your talk very
insightful and very inspiring so a quick introduction actually I’m based here in hong kong but I’m
originally from tunisia and I’m african so I know innovation i know innovation in africa is really
tough so my question to you rama is how your government in senegal is supporting you in your journey
of innovation um yeah that’s actually a great question and i um you know it’s interesting you’re
talking about the government I think when it comes to innovation or tech you know african countries
the more powerful actor is more is a regulator unless you’re thinking about government in a larger
sense including the regulator so in financial services specifically i mean the central bank is you
know second to god basically it’s it’s amazing the powers that they have it’s also understandable
because their job is to really keep the whole system the economy stable so stability is extremely
important to them so that’s why you know regulating all the actors is actually critical to them so
how are they so working with them i personally think is far more um we’ll have does have and will
continue to have far more of an impact on innovation and on what we can do and what others can do in
this sector i think that they have shown certainly a um a willingness to move with the times but
clearly technology just moves faster than everybody central banks included so we have to work with
them um we have to work with them and engage them and and and and communicate a lot with them in my
experience it’s really been about building relationships it’s been about explaining our goals and
what we’re trying to do and how it will answer the two questions they’re most interested in is how
do we grow financial inclusion and how do we keep the system stable um because obviously we’ve seen
what happens when financial crises hit um it’s not isolated it takes down entire countries or entire
systems there I say so they take their sort of policing role very seriously and frankly you know a
few years ago I think I i would have seen their role differently and as being too rigid but i do
understand now really um being here working on what I’m working on the importance of the role they
play so i would say to come to just answer your question very quickly that regulators have far more
of a role um to play in in in our part of the world um some of them are far more ahead than others
but we can’t afford to leave them behind so we’re gonna have to continue to work with them great
thank you so much uh next question is for sharon I’m trying to make it uh sound like dutch it sounds
very sexy as well i see a lot of questions and remarks about inclusive design so I think you’re
touching upon on a passionate topic with many people over here so I don’t want to repeat all the
questions but my question was more like that’s a really strong ambition to be fully inclusive in
design and where do you see currently the biggest challenge or gap that we need to bridge in order
to at least reach some levels of full inclusive inclusivity um it’s twofold I think the first thing
is just listening I mean it is such an underrated skill listening to the customer on the ground we
still we I live here we are here we are our own customers and I still think we need we can do more
in terms of listening to our customers observing our customer and and using doing that literally and
also listening better to the data that we’re getting from our customer what is it telling us what
story is it telling us where is the need where the pain points um even beyond the pain points that
they actually open their mouths and tell us about all the time whether it’s on social media or
directly so I think really that is at the heart uh it’s the starting point of of being able to be
you know a lot more inclusive in design um the second part uh that i also feel very passionate about
is you know which is why I was actually very excited as well when steph invited me to come and speak
and and just be a part of I today is that you know there has to be more of a bridge more people on
all sides uh whether in africa africans african living africa or africans living you know in in
somewhere else in the world and working like hassan for example tunisian who is working in in hong
kong if I remember hong kong or singapore but my point is we need to mix more we need to bring our
thoughts and our experiences to the tables where capital is being allocated because ultimately you
know the check determines what we innovate about and obviously where even decisions are made around
well what what problem are we gonna solve you know if you are a bunch of men around the table or a
bunch of um just you know african women around the table the problems that you’re going to talk
about or the opportunities you’re going to see are going to be different so how about we mix it up
so we are somebody to put more women in boardrooms not just boardrooms yes boardrooms but any table
any room let’s build the tables that are not built yet and invite other people to those tables it’s
so incredibly critical i always say we need more mosquito zapping apps fewer dog walking apps
nothing against you know dog owners and dog walkers but you know we have more mosquito issues around
the continent so you know this is you know thank you for the question you can see I’m just going on
and on but my point is this is actually so incredibly critical to what we’re going to build for the
future thank you do you want to ask yours yeah sure um I’m I come from middle east and I feel like
uh type of challenges that uh being people in medialis are facing sort of similar with uh with
people from african uh countries lack of resources uh water shortage uh just to name a few and um
you know from my own experiences I see a lot of young entrepreneurs passionate entrepreneurs wanting
to make a change and sort of like sometimes sometimes most often are being blocked by regulations by
lack of resources so um and and i’ve been really fascinated by this whole mobile payment system
which makes it really fast to transfer money from a to b with the with the ease of few you know uh
clicks so I I’m wondering if you have ideas or have plans to sort of like merge this wall towards
like a mobilized uh system for money transfer with the passion of uh african entrepreneurs who try
to solve problems are there ideas of finances ideas that’s come through uh the channels of social
media or any other channels that you are connected to these young entrepreneurs yeah I mean um thank
you thank you for your sort of comment slash question I mean the common part is incredibly relevant
um yes so essentially what I started even talking a little bit about what you’re describing which is
uh so you’ve got sort of the the bigger institutions in which bucket I would even put Orange or the
large fund managers etc etc and then you’ve got this world of entrepreneurs who see opportunities
who see problems they’re trying to solve so in some ways yes there are certain things for example
you know i’ll talk about iran because that’s what I know best there’s Orange digital ventures which
is an investment fund um that actually within the family of that fund even has an africa um sort of
dedicated pool of money that is there really to invest as the name you know indicates in businesses
across the continent not just in the countries where Orange is present um that address um some of
the relevant issues that you talked about just now so that’s one there are a lot of um you know sort
of there is Orange fab you know that’s all about finding smaller entrepreneurs um across the the
footprints and and giving them you know some mentoring some money um you know there are Orange
digital centers that are that have opened in a couple of different countries tunisia being one of
them hassan senegal being another one and the goal is to spread them everywhere and there are sort
of these homes of tech and innovation across the footprint so there are all these there’s a lot of
activity and not just by Orange by the way there are other institutions doing similar things trying
to put money trying to put mentorship trying to create and build and support the ecosystem but you
know clearly there’s still a lot more to do um and you know there’s certain governments that get it
more than others I think rwanda comes to mind off the top of my head where they are trying to
attract entrepreneurs by creating you know the infrastructure and the ecosystem both in terms of
talent and money that would attract them to come in and build or come and create and come and
innovate in rwanda with the idea that you know if they are able to create something um useful it can
then scale and and go to other countries so to your question it has started it is here it is
happening but clearly there’s still room for a whole lot more to be done for a whole lot more to be
done from a funding perspective from a um an idea perspective um and I do firmly believe that the
large institutions the big telcos are now going to be the only ones to solve all the problems so
this ecosystem is actually vital um ultimately for the customer and the quality products and
services that we’re going to be able to to give them will not just come from the brains within the
big institutions um it will actually be from the larger ecosystem so keep at it if you’re if you’re
one of them the herat next question matthias you want to ask yours matthias yeah sorry I was just
trying to admit yeah uh I’m just trying to ask you so how do you address inclusivity without being
exclusive so some people say that when you try to solve the problems of everyone you end up solving
no one’s problem so how do you get away of that and um towards your end goal without being exclusive
that’s a great question um and I see the wisdom in it I’m not sure yeah jerome said good question
great question even I’m not sure the I have the answer but i can certainly tell you um you know
extemporaneously what comes to mind i think you’re very right there is always the point at which you
know you we talk about focus right whether it’s you know I talk about it with my teams we talk to
entrepreneurs about that we’ll solve this you know tiny problem but I think perhaps what is useful
is that as you’re solving the problem at least try to solve a problem that you can see um being
helpful or ultimately being solvable for a large number of people so it can be a very narrow problem
um very specific problem but it could be a a this narrow and specific but widely shared problem so
that’s kind of how I how I see it but yeah you make a very good point because the point isn’t to
design something just sort of vanilla and passpartout um I think you know you you but it’s about
doing something specific but hopefully that can be useful for a larger number and and another way of
looking at it is when you’re choosing what to solve for is to look at something that is painful
that’s what I was saying mosquito zapping versus you know double me maybe that’s a bad example there
are a lot of dog owners and dogs but my point is maybe choosing a problem though specific but that
is widely shared all right thank you great syria thank you thank you for the talk um you started
actually with the story about the fact that um everything started in philippines before africa and
and customers were trying actually to solve the problem by themselves is that not like a good
typical point for all innovators uh present today just to like stop being in a room and trying to
think about what should be the next innovation but get out on the field and and have a look about
what customers are trying to solve even if it’s in another country because it gives you really a
clear indication of of what they need absolutely so this was back to my point about listening um but
you know if we’re going to bring all the senses in it’s about you know opening our eyes as well what
are your customers doing with you know is or is there something they’re doing that you may even
think of as a as a problem i’ll give you a concrete example that’s very live actually so you know in
on the streets in the cars you either you know these guys who sell stuff on the street so let’s say
you go to the fruit seller and you ask him to you know you buy some fruits and I would say 9.5 times
out of 10. if you tell them can I pair you with Orange money they will say yes but it’s interesting
they’ll ask you to do a transfer so you transfer the money and with the fees um for you know what
you would pay eventually to get the money in cash so he will ask you to include that for when at the
end of the day he wants his cash back for whatever he does so but we actually have a specific
product called merchant payments that addresses that but clearly if your merchant you know a bit
model a little bit copied at least until now on credit cards there’s a fee so there’s a cut there’s
a tiny cut well i think it’s tiny but clearly not tiny enough um that you know comes off the top so
the guy on the corner that cut he cares about it that much I know otherwise he would not be trying
to like circumvent it so for us you know I i tell my teams this is something we need to think about
do something about and think about if we’re really going to um scale and democratize merchant
payments beyond supermarkets to literally the guy on the street being willing to accept money as a
payment at least in the formal merchant payments because he’s accepting it just in a different way
so my point is this is a live example of our of of a customer in this case the merchant doing
something that he’s not kind of supposed to be doing but I think it’s telling us something about our
product and it’s pricing and and and that there’s still things for us to do yeah I try to explain
very quickly you know I i hope you know you understood sort of the difference between those two
things keep the eyes open I think that’s exactly keep the eyes and the ears open yeah thank you
thank you so much for the talk too you you’re welcome i I would like you guys to uh big a big round
of applause for Rama Diallo.  That was
amazing thank you so much for sharing will you be part of the networking sessions sorry will you
stay for networking tonight um it’s at 6pm I may not be able to well it’s at 6pm for me so I may not
be able to saturday so friday afternoon okay so and I totally have some family engagements I’m so
sorry but you know feel free to share um while I’m on social media or email or if you have more
questions that come up you know send them to me and you know I can find a way to get back to people
and keep the conversation going this was this was a lot of fun stuff thank you so much exactly where
can we find you online on twitter so on twitter I’m at tilly bo gold t-i-l-i-b-o and gold my gold um
same saying on on instagram tilibogold.rd on instagram um and uh as myself I guess well I’m not a
diallo on um on linkedin as well so feel free to to say hi and ask questions um and let’s let’s keep
in touch great thank you so much bye thank you great and we’re gonna have a break of 15 minutes uh
go drink something fresh beer or whatever and yeah we meet in 15 minutes for the talk of Jonas Vonlanthen about agile and Holacracy stay tuned [Music]