Leaders from design, innovation and talent explore the future of work

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Reimagining Creative Leadership

When the world went virtual in March 2020, design and <a href="https://www.frog.co/services/innovation-strategy" target="_blank" rel="noopener">innovation</a> teams moved into new tools and <a href="https://www.frog.co/work/designops-workshop" target="_blank" rel="noopener">remote working,</a> initiating a profound shift in what it means to be part of a creative organization. This change is still being felt today, and raises the question: what does the future of creative leadership look like?  
We gathered a group of experts in business, design, HR and talent acquisition to debate the ways that this shift has emerged, and to explore new strategies leaders can use to move forward. Now we’re revisiting this rich debate for reminders on how creative teams can evolve and enjoy human-centric collaborations today, tomorrow and beyond.  
Watch the panel below and read on for our top takeaways.

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Authentic: Leadership has many facets. Leaders must ensure their teams have the necessary resources, as well as confidence in themselves and what they’re doing. A key way to achieve both aspects is to maintain open communication. People want to connect: authentic bonds between leaders and teams results in increased trust, better working environments and stronger output. 
Purpose-led: Jenna Freed, from ACRES Capital, said that employees are increasingly seeking bigger purpose in their roles. Freed explained: “Within our organization, we are focusing on helping [employees] see themselves as part of something larger.” She added, “We are constantly challenging our leaders to be part of this as well.” 
Communicative: “High-performing, creative teams need autonomy,” noted People on Point’s Erika Duncan. “They also need to be ‘fed’ individually and as a team. A regular cadence of communication in person and virtually, as well as opportunities to physically connect one-on-one or in a group, is essential.” Duncan continued, “We all know–people don&#8217;t leave people. They leave jobs.”

These are the six strategies our panelists recommend for the road ahead: 

Rather than demand your place in the business, command your place within it. Go out and show your team what you can do, proactively demonstrating your skillset to your team and encouraging them to do the same.

Be at the top of your game

Getting to grips with collaborative tools is essential, especially for the success of hybrid and remote teams. Ensure your foundational tools and systems enable good flow and communication within the team—then periodically take the time to check in, reflect and troubleshoot.

Align on the fundamentals

Be intentional and set rituals that reinforce the behavior you want from your team. Encourage your team members across levels to respect the org’s values. A “lead by example” approach is crucial for success.

Embody the culture

Open the conversation between your team and HR. By bringing HR into the picture, when it comes to hiring prospective talent, HR will have an in-depth knowledge of workflow and needs. If you&#8217;re hearing feedback such as, “Our design team loves HR!” you&#8217;re doing something right.

Invite HR into the room

Getting to grips with the business as a whole will help put your work in context, and better enable you to bring new ideas to the table. Be intentional and set an example for how you want your team to show up in your organization.

Know the business

Five leading strategies for the future

Hosting the panel was an inspiring experience. All six incredible leaders focused on different variations of the same goal: ensuring that their teams felt inspired to do their best creative work for themselves, their organizations and their clients. That core will drive the future of creative leadership wherever it may lead. 
To learn more about how frog can help you lead your team towards doing its best work, <a href="https://www.frog.co/contact" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reach out to us.</a>
This article was written with input, suggestions and strategies from our panelists: 
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/ariccheston/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Aric Cheston</a>—Vice President, User Experience, PowerSchool 
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariela-sotomayor" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Mariela Sotomayor</a>—Sr. Director of Design, Loadsmart 
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/corymccruden/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Cory McCruden</a>—Managing Director, Technology, Banking, Wealth &amp; Asset Management, EY 
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenna-f-4029914/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jenna Freed</a>—Chief Human Resource Officer, People &amp; Infrastructure, ACRES Capital 
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/erika-duncan-0190ba9a/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Erika Duncan</a>—Co-Founder and Human Capital Advisor, People on Point 
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethkiehner/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Liz Kiehner</a>— Chief Growth OfficerChief Growth Officer, Nortal

Turi McKinley

Author

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A recent frog webinar shared why remote work matters now and looking into the future, as well as how companies can bring their teams together for creative, collaborative work sessions.

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9 Keys to Remote Collaboration

We are living in a historic moment. Elements of remote work that may have been only a small part of our business have become our everyday working reality. Even once we return to working in-person, the patterns we are setting today will transform the way we work moving forward. Now more than ever, we’ll need creativity and collaboration to succeed.
In this time of Coronavirus, we’ve shifted frog’s working tools to enable ongoing design at scale. We now have more than 60 programs running this way globally. We recently decided to host a webinar to share some of our experiences in working together even at a time of physical isolation.
During the webinar, we talked about collaboration and problem-solving in a remote context. We discussed the difference between an operational and creation mindset&#8211;and how both are necessary for a successful business. We also shared three collaboration methods often used in-person, which you can use remotely to good effect with commonly available online tools:
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<ul>
<li>‘Person in the Pit’ model to help you frame your session</li>
<li>‘Mental Excursion’ to help you keep a remote team engaged</li>
<li>‘Intrigue Selection’ to down-select with a growth mindset</li>
</ul>
In addition, we talked about how critical it is to establish a climate for your team that supports their creative performance. This is one in which everyone understands and supports the task they&#8217;re all after, everyone has each other’s back, and all believe they can find a solution. We then demonstrated how a team at frog recently used these tools and principles to solve a specific, pressing challenge many know all too well: working from home while helping children also “work” from home.
<a href="https://go.frog.co/en/en/remote-collaboration-problem-solving-webinar-recording">Watch the webinar recording</a> to hear the full discussion.

Throughout, attendees asked questions related to their biggest remote collaboration challenges. We received hundreds of compelling questions, on topics ranging from how to create the right remote work environment to how to manage team dynamics from a distance. There were far too many to go through during the webinar, but we still wanted to share a look at our responses to some of the key recurring question themes. 


Cris Perán (CP): Creativity is something we’re all born with. In fact, leading experts like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&amp;v=iG9CE55wbtY&amp;feature=emb_logo">Ken Robinson</a> and multiple studies support that all of us are born creative geniuses, but at a certain moment in our lives, we learn that being creative can bring unwanted consequences. This happens specifically within our educational systems where we are taught there’s only one answer to every exam question.
As a result, learning to be creative is rather an unlearning process more than anything else. Often when we feel people are not being creative around us during a session, it’s actually our fault, not theirs. People may feel worried that they are being tested to come up with the right answer, rather than feel free to be creative. As a member of the team, it’s your job to ensure all feel safe to explore in this context. Working remotely is of absolutely no consequence to your team’s creative potential, but you will need to adapt your process to the circumstances.

How can I instill a creative mindset and culture while working remotely?

Turi McKinley (TM): I think of design as making-based problem-solving, so I throw quite a wide net around how that translates into the digital world. Digital tools let us get to know our users, synthesize that learning into actionable insights that drive rich concepting, and then help us iteratively refine those concepts into viable solutions. However, just like a post-it note in your team room, or a white board in a meeting room, it’s not the tool itself that is valuable. It’s about how the team uses those tools to make things happen.
So, what changes for a traditional design team? Let’s assume that ‘traditional’ here means a team working together in a team room, engaging in regular collaboration and crit sessions, directly sharing work, and (hopefully) frequently engaging with their users in the process of designing something and making it real. With that definition, the main change now is in leadership. For the team leader and the program manager, how you curate tools and direct the group to capture insights will have a big impact on the ease and speed of this work.
This will require more planning and preparation to make it go smoothly. In a physical space, it’s quite easy to move, re-sort, build understanding and share to a group using just post-its and markers. In the digital world, different tools fulfill different needs. Some, like Excel, are great for capture, but don’t help groups ‘see and feel’ emerging knowledge. That’s where digital canvas tools like Miro or Mural can bridge the gap. Teams can decide when to literally zoom out together to see the big picture of affinity groups, and when to dive into the details.

How do traditional design methods translate into a completely digital environment?

CP: Technology has evolved wonderfully during the last decades. The quality of audio and video communication improves with every blink of our eyes. New ways of remote collaboration have emerged, whether they are over “traditional” formats like word processing documents or presentations, or via digital canvas tools like Miro or Mural. The reality is that there’s a tool for mostly every task and for every team. We have found that when engaging people to participate, it ultimately boils down to ensuring they CAN contribute and that their contribution is VALUED. Of course, they will also want their effort to be MEANINGFUL, so showing you’re actually doing something with the content of the session is also crucial.

How can I better engage my team during a remote work session? 

CP: Someone told me something once about trust: It takes a lifetime to build and a second to destroy it. And right he was. Especially if you’re a lead member of the team, but also if not, you have to give trust to receive it. For people to believe you really value their contribution, you need to really value their contribution.
There’s not much you can do about what people think about themselves, but you can show them what you think of them. If you assume value on everybody’s contribution and give them credit and recognition for it, eventually everyone will feel good about contributing in your sessions. This is assuming there are no hidden agendas or underlying conflicts within the team, which unfortunately is not uncommon. For those cases, we have answers, too, but they need to be considered on a case-by-case basis.

How do I build trust and encourage team members to do their best work during remote work sessions?

TM: Someone who is resistant has likely already had a bad experience with digital or remote work. Perhaps they were frustrated finding necessary information or have felt embarrassed by their inexperience. Re-engaging them can take both empathy and patience. I’m a fan of one-to-one conversations in situations like this. I try to remember my own learning curve and frustrations with the tools (ask my colleagues how I feel about Slack). You may find that the resistant person is aware that these new ways of work are needed, and that sharing their experience with someone is enough to tip the balance towards engagement.
For both the new and resistant participants, my recommendation is to assign someone on your team to become an internal expert on each digital tool so they can be live ‘customer support’ as needed. For example, in a recent workshop with a new client in the broadcast space, we used a digital canvas tool that was new to many of us. Miguel, an interaction designer at frog, committed to really learning the tool, and it was lucky that he did. When the key stakeholder kept getting lost on the board, zooming way out, Miguel knew about a specific product feature, the ability to jump to another user’s cursor, that brought everyone quickly back to the area in focus for the topic at hand. It was an enormous help for the stakeholder, and it really eased the tensions among the client team (and our team, too.)
Our ability as designers to ‘think like a user’ needs to be turned to how we can help our colleagues become comfortable using these new tools—and in the process we’ll end up improving our own ability as well.

How can I better support colleagues and clients who are new or even resistant to remote work styles and tools?

CP: I’m sad to report a collaborative session will need your full attention…and so will your child (eventually). So, what can you do? Set firm time restrictions for the session, and find a way for your children to be occupied. Better if it is something they really like and makes them happy so they don’t feel on the losing end of the deal (Pokémon is quite high in my house’s chart right now). 
Once your session is complete, be clear with your team that you will be dedicating your full attention back to home responsibilities. Half running the session while half being with your children will make everyone wholly unhappy—probably you most of all.

How can working parents and caregivers manage a collaboration session from a busy home? 

TM: To be effective, design teams need tools to support two broad activities: (1) working together and (2) designing and delivering great experiences customers love.
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<li style="font-weight: 400;">For working together, we need video communication to let us see each other and share in real time. Collaboration and documentation tools provide us the ability to communicate asynchronously and structure our knowledge. In addition, program and project management software help us know where to focus next.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">When designing and delivering great experiences, we need remote design research and user validation to enable us to know and interact with our users. We need digital canvas tools to give teams a place to think visually and explore ideas, as well as collaborative design and delivery platforms to make things real.</li>
</ul>
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There are many tools to address these needs. Overall, frog is tool-agnostic, though we do offer <a href="https://go.frog.co/en/en/remote-ideation-problem-solving-workshop">a focused workshop</a> to help you define the remote collaboration tools and processes that will work best for your environment.

What tools and resources are available to support remote ways of working and designing?

CP: Think in terms of outcome, team, process and tools. And in that order. Otherwise, you might be running a session for the wrong reasons or modifying something without the right people involved. Not every problem even needs a remote session—some challenges can be solved over email.

What practical, actionable advice can I use to conduct better remote collaboration sessions? 

TM: Kara Pecknold, Design Director at frog Munich, wrote a great piece for <a href="https://thenextweb.com/growth-quarters/2020/04/24/innovative-leaders-must-practice-radical-empathy-especially-in-times-of-isolation/">The Next Web</a> all about why leaders need to practice radical empathy during this time. In her article, she cites an example of how the frog team eased anxieties while collaborating remotely with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF; AKA Doctors without Borders). In addition, Matteo Penzo, Executive Director at frog Milan, recently gave a fully remote presentation on <a href="https://go.frog.co/en/en/remote-ideation-problem-solving-workshop">digital product delivery</a>.  
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<h6>What&#8217;s Next?</h6>
If you and your team are ready to come together with frog experts to solve real, pressing problems within your organization, we’re ready to help. Find out more about <a href="https://go.frog.co/en/en/remote-ideation-problem-solving-workshop">frog-led remote training workshops and strategic problem-solving sessions</a>. We also invite you to learn more about frog’s <a href="https://www.frog.co/services/org-activation">Org Activation</a> practice, a service that helps unleash the human potential in organizations.

What are some examples and frog case studies that relate to this style of remote collaboration? 

Your 9 Key Questions Answered

Cristóbal Perán

Albert Dang

Turi McKinley focuses on developing frog’s design research, participatory design and creative collaboration skills. She partners closely with companies seeking to develop new skillsets and capabilities for user centered design and innovation.

Cris has led innovation and R&amp;D teams for over 20 years, specializing In creative problem solving, as well as the development and launch of new products and services. His expertise involves setting up innovation models for businesses and organizations, fostering company culture, insight-led product and service design, and running inventive problem-solving projects.

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Over the past decade at frog, I’ve seen a fundamental shift in the way I work as a designer and researcher, and in what it means to be a creative agency: where we once designed to change customer behaviors, we now must design to impact both customer behaviors and the behaviors of our client companies.

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Building a Culture of Collaboration

This has required a mind shift in the way we work and the tools we use. For many frogs, this mind shift happens naturally as we seek to deliver successful work, but as a global team we’ve needed to take this shift at scale. Over the past several years, we have been evaluating the tools, techniques, and approaches common across successful programs to determine how creative teams can consistently and effectively impact a client’s ability to make a great vision take root within their organization.
There are many structural, organizational, and technical reasons a great idea may not come to market, and many have been written about elsewhere. I won’t rehash them here, but, as any designer or innovator who has seen a great vision stymied by a rigid internal structure knows, the quality of the insights, product, or service often are not enough to change set perspectives within an organization.
A strong culture of collaboration is one of the most consistent success factors among teams where a vision takes hold. As my teams work with clients today, we often help them build a culture of creative collaboration for great user experiences, at the same time we design that experience for the end user.
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<h2>Creative Collaboration for Great UX</h2>
As an anthropologist and design researcher, I see a culture of collaboration as the social fabric, connections, and shared understandings that make it possible for multidisciplinary teams to collaborate.
Let me ask you to pause here a moment to reflect on what defines the culture of your team today. Think about how you identify when someone is in your ‘tribe’ or know when they fall outside the shared set of beliefs and common purpose of your team.
For me, the culture of collaboration at frog is defined by things like our shared traditions – from Fancy Fridays, to how our global design research team supports each other when we start a new global program; to a shared sense of humor and a penchant to make above all else; to the willingness to work together, and to constantly reeducate ourselves about how each of our colleagues works best.
As you think about what contributes to the culture of your team’s collaboration—both the good and the bad—consider these four levers:
<ul>
<li>Values – What do we believe is important?</li>
<li>Goals – Why are we here?</li>
<li>Assumptions – What do we believe to be true?</li>
<li>Processes – How do we structure our relationships?</li>
</ul>
Each of these aspects support and reinforce each other within the organization. When one lever shifts, the others can prevent any attempt to change how things exist today.
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<h2>Success Factors for Driving Change</h2>
While working with a range of clients—from the large multinational engineering firms to humanitarian non-profits—we have seen several key trends that move all four of the culture levers: values, goals, assumptions, and processes.
Inspire: Having leadership that sets a clear vision for the future, which is both closely tied to the business goals and the new emphasis, is critical. Executive sponsorship opens doors and provides teams with permission to experiment with and evolve new approaches. There are many ways this future vision may be grounded – sometimes it is a market shift that challenges the company’s survival, or sometimes it is a compelling story of a single user that puts the need in immediate tangible context.
Inspiration is a significant driver for the Values and Goals levers. The key to inspiration, which many companies forget, is that it must be sustained and evolve with the other cultural levers over time.
Support: Organizational commitment tied to the company future is critical, but without a corresponding set of tools and tangible guidance that enables teams to experience a new way of working tied to that vision, it is hard for teams to believe in the change.
Support drives the Process lever and takes many forms, from a new lead for user experience or experiential training, to access to assets, or a competition for budget. The common factor is that it makes the vision tangible and invites others to engage with the vision.
Manifest: Both vision and tangible expressions provide a story and a way to make the story real, but for an organization to experience success, the new way of thinking must fully come to life. Usually the change is first manifested through pilot programs initiated to demonstrate profit or success, which are then expanded and further adopted through new processes.
For many organizations it is tempting to start with Manifest by bringing in a new set of processes as a forcing function to drive change. However, unless these new processes emerge with the support, language, and realities of the internal culture, they tend to feel foreign and often fail. Pilot programs that take a new Process and customize it to the host organization, integrating new Goals and exemplifying new Assumptions, are more likely to succeed than the wholesale adoption of new processes from outside.
Reflect: Designing great user experiences is fundamentally a reflective process of asking what works, why, and how can we improve. In our experience, organizational success is about building a functional and collaborative user experience for your own teams. Actively reflect on what worked, and drive continual learning and refinement of your own processes and approaches.
The work of reflection enables the project and leadership teams to quickly adapt as they examine how the cultural levers of Values, Goals, Assumptions and Processes are moving.
Together these success factors can empower design teams, as their work expands from a focus on the end user’s experience of a product to include the client’s capacity to own and lead with a product vision and new ways of working. At frog we’ve looked back over 40 years of design and innovation and reflected on the practices that work internally to get teams of disparate thinkers—with different goals, languages, and styles—to collaborate effectively. From these insights we generated a <a href="https://www.frog.co/work/frogthink" target="_blank" rel="noopener">toolkit of the best methods</a> and now use it with a range of clients to help them rethink how they work and collaborate. In the spirit of the success factors above, we continually reflect on how well it works.
Watch Turi present during the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RX9KSlBKI-M">UX Awards</a> earlier in 2015.
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Turi McKinley focuses on developing frog’s design research, participatory design and creative collaboration skills. She partners closely with companies seeking to develop new skillsets and capabilities for user centered design and innovation.
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frog’s strong design vision based on real urban needs makes it to market (mostly) unchanged



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The Evolution of a Smart City Hub

In today’s digital world, we’re used to products that launch weeks after the initial idea is born. It’s tempting to forget that the speed of launch is quite different in the world of products that live within the urban infrastructure, where a minimum viable product (MVP) must launch ready to withstand the noon-day heat in Las Vegas and the wintertime streets of Toronto for years to come. There are many challenges in making a product real while keeping the design vision intact. The concept must respond to the needs of the city as much as the needs of the citizen, and of the business that launches it.
While the name has changed many times over the five years of its evolution from concept to street corner, frog’s Beacon concept has stood the test of time, changing less than its name on the path to launch.

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<h2>Beacon: A concept for the city by citizens</h2>
As the contract for New York City’s street corner phone booths were nearing renewal, the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications opened a competition for innovative proposals for new urban infrastructure that would replace the payphone. A multi-disciplinary team of frog designers in the New York studio took this challenge to heart.
Having recently experienced the effects of Superstorm Sandy, the NYC team had personal experience with how the urban environment reacts in a crisis, and how the needs of the city, its citizens, and its communities can change dramatically. The team designed Beacon to be a resilient part of a dynamic city with multiple redundant power sources, such as solar, and the ability to provide service and community alerts through low-power top displays.
As proud New Yorkers, the team also took the city itself for inspiration in the design, echoing the landmark Flatiron building in the form, and the different levels of view to shape the design. Responding to the street-level needs of citizens, the design provided key services from calls to local data on the lower screen; and used the upper screen to provide advertising and heads-up information that could be controlled by the city whether it be for the Marathon or the next urban crisis.
The original concept created a nexus of connectivity for the smart city of the future—a hub that would bring communities together and provide services throughout the seasons of the City’s needs. Beacon was one of six finalists for NYC’s Reinvent the Payphone competition and was presented with the Mayor’s Award for Visual and User Experience.
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<h6>Palo and LQD Wifi</h6>
The initial concept caught the eye of LQD Wifi, a technology startup with the mission to make Smart Cities real through ubiquitous wifi. The LQD team had both a mission and a technology vision and sought a design partner to give the promise form. The functionality, design and thought behind frog’s concept were a perfect fit. Through our portfolio <a href="https://www.frog.co/services/ventures">frogVentures</a>, we invested our original design and subsequent work into the company, taking an equity position alongside the founders. Our joint team then embarked on a close partnership to bring the full hardware, software and service platform to market.
When building new businesses from the ground up, we use our <a href="https://www.frog.co/services/venture-design">venture design</a> approach that prioritizes business impact while optimizing time to market. Jumpstarting the commercialization work, LQD and frog rapidly developed a diverse range of new concepts to pressure-test the original Beacon concept. Ultimately, the group made the unanimous decision to proceed with only minor refinements to the original design to take advantage of new technology and commercialization opportunities. Renamed Palo, the detailed industrial design and engineering of the product got underway, with frog’s New York team frequenting the Long Island production facility to roll up their sleeves on the factory floor.
Concurrently, the team dove deep into the business and service model. They identified that Palo’s street corner real estate could support a more valuable network-access business model, permitting a departure from the original advertising-based model. The design grew in height to accommodate the new network features, the most dramatic form change in the evolution from Beacon to Palo. The touch-based digital ‘citizen’ experience was prototyped and developed in parallel as the hardware progressed into a robust, manufacturable outdoor communications platform.
In June 2015, Palo made its industry debut at the Intelligent Communities Forum summit in Toronto. The design made waves for the second time, and set new partnership conversations in motion that would reshape LQD Wifi—and the cities it was founded to serve. In early 2016, Palo beta units were installed as part of the Toronto Waterfront redevelopment project.
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<h6>The Verizon Digital Kiosk</h6>
In November 2016 it was announced that <a href="http://fortune.com/2016/11/15/verizon-wi-fi-kiosk-maker-lqd/">Verizon had acquired LQD Wifi</a> as a major step forward for their ‘Smart Cities’ strategy for urban infrastructure. This triggered the third name change for the design, as it became known as the Verizon Digital Kiosk &#8212; but the concept retained its physical and user experience design, and augmented a portfolio of other products including energy-saving street lighting, smart traffic control, and intelligent video solutions with its communications platform. Verizon launched a beta version of the Smart Cities initiative at the 2017 Super Bowl in New Orleans, debuting the Digital Kiosk as a way for event-goers to gain access to Super Bowl information and wifi for mobile devices.
The first permanent installations of the Digital Kiosk began in New Rochelle, NY in 2018, only five years after the initial concept was conceived. The kiosks will continue to roll out to cities across the US.
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<h6>Making Concepts Live in the Market</h6>
The core vision behind the Digital Kiosk is a device that serves the needs of cities and citizens through its multi-level design, and through redundant internal systems designed to survive the realities of street and digital life. This vision remained true through business model evolution, industrial engineering and manufacturing, and changing ownership and stakeholders. The design began with user empathy, an understanding of the urban context and a passionate belief that all kinds of design can evoke an emotional response. Because of the relative speed and iterative nature of this work, the project was selected by <a href="https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=55187">Harvard Business School as a case study</a> for their students to understand the value of venture design, and its application to complex systems of physical, digital and service design.
frogs live for these launch days, and through our team’s passion, our Ventures partnerships, and design craft we’re proud to see this concept take shape in the world.
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<h6>Palo Timeline:</h6>
<ul>
<li>2013 &#8211; A multi-disciplinary team in frog’s NY studio responds to the Mayor&#8217;s <a href="https://reinventpayphones.splashthat.com/">Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge</a> to imagine a new public utility for the payphone vendor agreements expiring in 2014. frog&#8217;s submits “Beacon,” which is selected <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/1672065/beacon-a-pay-phone-that-saves-lives-and-google-searches">as one of 6 finalists, also winning the best visual and user experience design award.</a></li>
<li>2014 &#8211; frog receives the IDSA IDEA Silver Award for the Beacon design. LQD, a wireless startup, partners with frog to bring the concept to market and develop an integrated network of 21st-century community-based tech hubs. Beacon is renamed Palo.</li>
<li>2015 &#8211; In only 18 weeks, LQD and frog built the business strategy and brand vision, refined the design, and developed the hardware. Palo was unveiled at the Intelligent Community Forum Summit in Toronto.</li>
<li>2016 – LQD is acquired by Verizon, with the intent to integrate Palo into their ‘smart cities’ strategy. Palo is renamed ‘Verizon Digital Kiosk’.</li>
<li>2017 &#8211; the Digital Kiosk is part of the Verizon installations for Super Bowl 2017.</li>
<li>2018– The first <a href="https://enterprise.verizon.com/products/internet-of-things/smart-cities-and-communities/digital-kiosk/">Digital Kiosks are installed in New Rochelle, NY</a></li>
<li>2019 – Digital Kiosks launch in cities across the US, including Seattle and Sacramento.</li>
</ul>

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Congratulations to the multidisciplinary team from frog, LQD Wifi and Verizon who made Beacon / Palo / Digital Kiosk a reality.
Special thanks to the original frog team who created Beacon: Brandy Bora, Kenny Chui, Jonas Damon, Michael Evashevski, Jinseok Hwang, Radis Jensethawat, Turi McKinley, Hans Neubert, Mayo Nissen, Ron Rosenman, Kajsa Westman, Elliot Winard, Adam Wrigley; to those who worked on the LQD Palo iteration: Alexandra Coym and Ethan Imboden; and to LQD Wifi team: Randy Ramusack, David Raabe, Tim Snyder, Alex Abelin, JM Fryback and Ryan Brown.

Ethan Imboden

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As Vice President &amp; Head of Venture Design at frog, Ethan Imboden oversees the firm’s work at the intersection of design and entrepreneurship. As part of his role, Ethan leads frogVentures™, which invests frog’s capabilities into shared-risk opportunities and ensures that frog’s portfolio companies start smarter, build faster and establish crucial design and strategy capabilities to support their growth.
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Turi Mckinley focuses on developing frog’s design research, participatory design and creative collaboration skills. She partners closely with companies seeking to develop new skillsets and capabilities for user centered design and innovation.
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Sometimes change works best from the middle out, rather than the top down. Hyundai U.S. affiliates worked with frog to reimagine their rules of play to foster meaningful collaboration and innovation.

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5 Strategies for When the Best Change Comes from Within

Sometimes change works best from the middle out, rather than the top down. Hyundai U.S. affiliates worked with frog to reimagine their rules of play to foster meaningful collaboration and innovation.
The truth is, there simply is no one-size fits all approach when it comes to facilitating change within an organization. Companies that embrace the crucial role of empowering internal leaders to design practical, long-term strategies for <a href="https://www.frog.co/services/org-activation" target="_blank" rel="noopener">organizational activation</a> often more quickly find solutions tuned to their culture than companies relying on external ‘best practice’ models.
Unlike adapting someone else’s model to fit, these middle-out strategies start with those deep within the company culture and build custom-fit solutions—as was the case for an informal team of eight leaders at Hyundai US affiliates, who partnered with frog to foster channels of collaboration and innovation across the US region.

<h2>Regional Silos Across Manufacturing Timeframes</h2>
Like many global manufacturing companies, Hyundai Motor Company maintains a distributed, lean organization with decision-making centralized in the parent company. This provides global scale and impact, and results in functional divisions in design, engineering, marketing and new ventures at the regional level, which all compete to shape strategies for their region.
While this competition traditionally surfaced the best ideas for the parent company, as the market has sped up in recent years, the duplication of effort and competing perspectives have limited the speed and scope of innovation for the US region, and resulted in few formal channels for communication across divisions at the regional level.
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<h2>Finding Time to Innovate In a Lean Organization</h2>
At Hyundai, a small group of leaders in the US region recognized that in order to innovate faster, they needed to collaborate across businesses and time horizons to develop a shared perspective on the evolution of their region. These individuals, most at the second tier of regional leadership, saw the value greater visibility and collaboration across the region could bring to innovate faster for their rapidly evolving market.
However, they faced challenges typical with structural silos:
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<li>“Not invented here” Ideas generated within one part of the organization lack clear alignment to the goals of other groups and are slow to be adopted.</li>
<li>“I’m too busy right now” Teams and people who have the right ideas and the right position to influence their organizations must rely on informal networks to create change beyond their functional areas and to shape future priorities with collaborators from other areas.</li>
<li>“It’s not on my roadmap” While market insights drive innovation throughout the company, the differing time-to-market horizons and organizational measures limited the ability to co-fund projects or align on a market perspective.</li>
<li>“My collaborator moved…” Smart individuals within matrix organizations often identify peers and collaborators across the business with whom they can make great things happen. However, the value in these informal networks can be diluted when people move on or are promoted.</li>
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In 2016, these diverse leaders met informally and committed to finding new ways to communicate and collaborate for the good of their region.

<h2>Creating Momentum and Getting It Done</h2>
Without definition or budget beyond their initial cross-division handshake, these leads committed to making time to collaborate for 12-months to determine if their belief in new value could be proven.
In the first month, the group formed the Collaborative Innovation Board (“CI Board”) and co-created a 12-month plan for collaborative innovation, with the partnership of frog’s <a href="https://www.frog.co/services/org-activation" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Org Activation</a> team. The Board met regularly to develop a shared perspective on the trends most likely to impact the US region across the time horizons of the different functions. Using these trends, they prioritized and funded three collaborative pilot programs seeking implementable innovation beyond the scope of any single functional division. These projects went beyond simply the next vehicle that Hyundai has to offer but extended to envisioning Hyundai as a mobility enabler for young and old, those with physical limitations, or those that can’t afford to purchase a vehicle.
After one year, the Collaborative Innovation Board is still meeting and has proven its worth. One pilot program has already enabled the US region to take leadership in a global Hyundai initiative, and another, set to launch in 2019, will provide in-market proof of the value of cross-business collaboration. Because of this collaborative effort, new lines of communication have opened within the organization and the Board is expanding its scope for the coming year.

<h2>5 Strategies for Launching Middle-Up Innovation</h2>
The strategies and lessons learned by the Collaborative Innovation Board and frog can help others shape similar change in their own organizations.
Strategy 1: Co-Creation Makes Change ‘Invented Here.’ 
Co-developing ideas, roadmaps and plans enables all parts of the business to have ownership and see their priorities at play within the solutions. Meeting biweekly in facilitated sessions, the CI Board shared strategies, aligned budgets, and ran pilot programs to stress-test and prove the success of the collaboration. By working together, each strategy and pilot were meaningful across the region.

Strategy 2: Third-Parties Make Time For Focus. 
To overcome the ‘I’m too busy right now’ challenge and to get an external perspective Hyundai’s CI Board partnered with frog as a neutral third-party to assess core needs and facilitate the co-creation of a 12-month plan for collaborative innovation. Having a third-party structuring and facilitating key meetings meant the leads could focus on implementing collaboration rather than creating process.

Strategy 3: Pilots Prove The Need To Be On The Roadmap. 
Creating pilot programs that explore new innovations showcase how collaboration across the business can create tangible benefits. This success builds momentum for broader change and proves to management, future teams and global leadership that looking beyond the silo helps the region succeed. With 2 of 3 pilots in the first year showing tangible value, Hyundai’s CI Board has been able to make their work more visible.

Strategy 4: Co-Funding. 
More often than not, the budget owner is the de facto leader of any initiative. By co-funding, you share ownership and encourage greater cross-functional engagement and alignment. The pressures of designing, engineering, marketing and selling cars—or any product—are immense and immediate. When attempting this kind of semi-formal change initiative, the tendency will always be for attention to drift back to immediate priorities.
In reflecting on their first year, the Hyundai CI Board decided that pilots in the second year must be funded by more than one group. This commitment of resources and integration into formal budgets is a strong signal that this new way of work is important.
Strategy 5: Recognize Persistent Champions And Formalize Relationships. 
These initiatives often hinge on the persistence and political savvy of a few people, often informally linked. Building internal leaders with ownership in the success of the initiative is crucial, as is creating a structure that will survive the departure or promotion of these champions. For the CI Board, even with a third-party supporting on-going interaction, getting persistent participation would have been much more challenging without one or two individuals fighting to make this happen. During the first year, one of the most engaged leaders took another opportunity outside of Hyundai. Because of the semi-formal board structure, the group was able to maintain momentum.

No matter what the existing company culture, there is always possibility to create change in order to open up new innovative opportunities and foster long-term value and growth. For Hyundai, their lean culture provided internal leaders with high expectations but also significant latitude to make strategic bets and shape their future. The Collaborative Innovation Board was born because they had the right people in the right company to shape a middle-out strategy for innovation and future market success. While change takes a long time to become fully part of any organizational DNA, this group has already proven that they have the potential to change their market, impacting how Hyundai does business on the global stage.
The strategies employed by Hyundai’s internal team are examples of the kind of organizational activation strategies possible when using design to make change. Whether it’s top-down or middle-out, human-centered design has the power to activate any organization to make the most of their teams in order to change markets and evolve for tomorrow.

Daniel Han

Turi McKinley focuses on developing frog’s design research, participatory design and creative collaboration skills. She partners closely with companies seeking to develop new skillsets and capabilities for user centered design and innovation. <a href="http://twitter.com/turisays" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@turisays</a>

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Daniel Han is an experienced product strategy manager with a demonstrated history of developing new products from concept inception, carrying through 5 year development cycle, and finally to launch. As Manager of New Business Innovation and Strategy at Hyundai Motor America, Daniel brings over 15 years of experience in Portfolio Management, Valuation, Strategic Planning, Business Strategy, and Product Marketing.

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