Harriet Wakelam, Director of Human Centred Design at IAG, grew up in a prototyping household. Her industrial designer father would line up eight kettles on the kitchen bench and ask her to choose one kettle to make a cup of tea.
“It was a prototyping household,” she explains, simply. Those early life lessons now inform the career she’s made helping banks, Australia Post and now an Insurance monolith innovate.
Hear how …
John: Today I’m in Melbourne where I’m joined by Harriet Wakelam—the Director of Human Centred Design at the massive insurance business that is IAG. Harriet is a Design Specialist with experience across financial services, fintech, insurance, and health. She’s worked with NAB, Australia Post, Medibank, and some of the UK’s biggest banks as well. Today we’re going to hear from one of the best in the industry. Harriet, welcome to Customers Matter.
Harriet: Thank you.
John: Your passion is obviously making complex things simple, understanding behavior, and making real innovative experiences that enhance people’s lives. How did that come to be the focus of your career?
Harriet: That’s a long story, but it starts with my dad being an Industrial Designer. I grew up in a household where there would frequently be eight kettles on the bench in the morning, and we’d be asked why we chose a specific kettle to make a cup of tea. All my friends would be given various hair dryers or other items. We were brought up with a curious mindset as to why something works, what problems it’s trying to solve, and what makes a good design. I grew up very much embedded in the idea of affordances, and I made a determined and concerted effort not to become a designer. I decided that, like everyone else, I didn’t want to be what my parents were, so I spent about ten years trying to avoid design work and taught instead. What kept happening, even in teaching, was that I was continually drawn to a problem: how you solve it, the conditions in which it can be solved, and the experiments you can run to make something better. Innately, the idea that you never solve something in its entirety—and that design is a continuous state of incrementing on a current state to reach a future state—was something that was in my blood from childhood. I finally gave in, went back to university, and became a designer.
John: I’m interested; you said you had eight kettles lined up and your father was trying to get you to make an aesthetic or a practical decision? What was the test?
Harriet: It was a prototyping household. If there were eight kettles on the bench, he wanted to know why you chose the one you did. Often it was just because it was closest to my hand, and then he would ask what made me choose it—was it the color or how it felt? I grew up being able to tell immediately whether a teapot is well-balanced. What’s the point in having a teapot if you can’t pour? I know how to balance a kettle. He worked in small product development, so it was hair dryers, kettles, car mirrors, and cables. He even invented stretchy cables for hair dryers so you could walk across the room and back. We grew up with this ongoing sense of what a thing is, what it is designed to do, what problem it is designed to solve, and how well it performs that task.
John: That’s so interesting. How did your career land you in Australia? You’ve worked for some very big businesses. Tell me where and when you landed in Australia and your journey to where you are now.
Harriet: I’m an accidental corporate, really. Through university, I studied English and I missed the graduate career show entirely. I was never really intending to have a corporate career. I fell in love—the usual reason people move countries—while working in Macedonia. I was working in a school there, fell in love, and came to Australia. Because I had a career in education and then moved into web development and design, I entered the early days of online learning development. I worked with the Australian Flexible Learning Framework on the design of “Learning Toolboxes”—modular components of online learning in the early stages. That was in the days when UX was a brand-new career; you would rarely see UX jobs advertised. For me, with an understanding of language, how things were made, and web skills, it was a natural place to understand the interfaces between people and technology. As we started to use the web much more robustly as a means of transferring value through different mediums, I was naturally drawn toward UX.
John: Take me back to your first role in Australia. Where and when was it, and how did it progress?
Harriet: My first role was a teaching role. Then I went back to university and had a baby—the typical path of falling in love and having a baby changing a career. I spent five years in Karratha in the far northwest of WA. I went from Central London via a roadhouse to working in Karratha during the peak of the mining boom. I worked virtually for a couple of years building online learning components. Then I went to work for Telstra in a role focused on SMEs and Indigenous communities. At that stage, Telstra had rolled out CDMA as a mobile network and satellite broadband into the Indigenous communities. My role was to find ways to help people use that technology more effectively and to help SMEs in a mining boom town like Karratha use the internet more effectively for business. It was a really interesting role.
John: This is Twiggy Forrest country?
Harriet: Totally. I had to learn advanced four-wheel driving and how to go out in the bush. I was going to places like Jigalong and Punmu and working with Indigenous communities to look at new ways to use technology. We did hip-hop via video conference and worked with art classes, looking at how to use the early days of the internet. For me, a lot of that was about collaboration and networks. Everyone has a superpower; mine is systems and collaboration. I looked at the problems in those communities, the services working there, and the technology as a connecting point. To design interfaces to exchange value, you need to understand which people are exchanging value and for what reasons.
John: When was this? What year?
Harriet: 2002 or 2003, I think.
John: The early 2000s. What happened after Karratha? It sounds like an interesting time—collaborating, remote working, and connecting with the community.
Harriet: I got laughed at a lot for wearing hats and being the only person in the community doing so. From there, we went back to Perth. I went to work for a TAFE college during the early days of blended learning. We were moving away from online-only learning, and big education institutions were starting to invest in new forms of learning, particularly around apprenticeships. I ran their blended learning program. By this time, I was fairly sure I didn’t want to stay in education; while I loved the concept of learning, it was the design part that really fascinated me. UX was starting to become a more mainstream career. I went to a mobile technology conference in Melbourne in 2007 and realized I wanted to live there. My partner said if I got a job in Melbourne, we’d go. It took a year and a half, but I was offered a role managing the Flexible Learning Toolbox program here. Within two weeks, we packed up the family and moved. I arrived in Melbourne in 2009, the day before the fires.
John: Wow.
Harriet: That was the transition. I did learning for a bit longer, but Agile was becoming a key skill set in Australian business and UX was becoming mainstream. I went to Sensis for a while in a producer role. Then I had an opportunity to go to NAB. They had invested in a service design lab and were building a brand-new team to look at the best way to build design capacity within an organization.
John: When did you realize that you were actually back at the kitchen bench looking at which kettle to pick up?
Harriet: After several years of imposter syndrome—wondering how I ended up in a big corporate and if I was meant to be there—I had some very good mentors. I told one mentor that I wanted to be working in a funky agency, wearing black polo necks and being one of the “cool kids.” She told me that what really interests me is misalignments. She said I love things that misalign, lining them up and connecting them. She pointed out that big organizations are full of misalignments.
John: What an amazing insight.
Harriet: I realized she was right. It annoys me when things don’t line up, though anyone who saw my chaotic desk would laugh at that. As design became more mainstream in organizations, it was also becoming more siloed. Although we were building labs and incubators, we were locking design capacity into those specific centers. It became clear that if we were going to fundamentally change how we designed for customers and people, we also needed to fundamentally design the utility models of the businesses that serve them. That took me into the next stage of looking at what design should and could be in organizations.
John: Explain what that looks like. It’s a big statement to move it from the lab into organizational design. What does that mean in practical terms?
Harriet: It looks like a lot of gray hair. I am an optimist and an idealist. If we look at how organizations are set up, they are very much based on an industrial revolution model with units of production that produce things to be sold to customers. But in a complex and fast-moving environment, those production units need to be different. While we talk about collaboration and design, my definition of design is how we combine and recombine the knowledge of an organization in new ways to build original thought. That sounds simple, but the practice of bringing organizations together in a sense of “unknowing”—to sit in the discomfort of good design and emerge with meaning together—is a fundamental shift in how we do business.
John: It is such a big concept—both small and large at the same time.
Harriet: Like any good design, if it’s done well, the concept is simple: how do we help people work together more effectively and tap into the knowledge they have in new ways? The practice of doing that within current organizational structures is very difficult.
John: Where does aesthetics come in, and how does this ultimately translate to a transaction between an organization and its customer?
Harriet: It applies across the whole value chain. If you are setting your strategy, how does design help bring that strategy to life so people can understand it? We’ve moved past the world where strategy can just sit in a PowerPoint deck; the concepts need to be experiential. How do we use the capacity of design to frame problems and generate tangible scenarios? At that end of the value chain, we are taking something complex and turning it into something people can understand. A lot of design focuses entirely on ideation or innovation, but for me, design is just about helping people see problems and solutions in different ways. At a high level, service designers and strategic designers work with our strategy people to help people make better decisions. Often, we send people into a workshop to brainstorm and they always come up with the same six ideas: a robo-chat, an app, a dashboard, or a specific service. This happens because asking people to innovate is asking them to step into unfamiliar territory. If we instead use our skills to generate tangible scenarios and ask people what makes sense or doesn’t, we are asking them to use the knowledge they already have in new ways. That is a far less uncomfortable and far more practical way of using skills.
John: You’re big into use cases and scenarios by the sound of it.
Harriet: “Use case” has probably become a bit of a burden. It’s time to look at the skills of Agile and Lean as methodologies and the skills of design as capabilities and stop arguing about which is which. For me, it’s about making tangible what is sitting in a PowerPoint deck, because humans don’t make things based on slides; they make things based on a need, a practice, or a skill. At the strategic level, we work in that area. Another aspect is how we support the development of new tools and frameworks. There are three metrics we look at: Probability (how likely this is to reduce risk or change how someone approaches information), Productivity (how this changes the productivity of the organization and our customers), and Profitability. You touched on “purpose beyond profit” earlier, and I think we’ve done a disservice to ourselves in design by shying away from money. If you develop something great that people want to use and it makes their lives better, it should make money.
John: Yes, I was referring to purpose beyond profit, not before profit.
Harriet: We work to help build those metrics, frameworks, and tools. Then we have designers working in the actual development of those flows—traditional UX—where you design the components that make an experience real. In terms of cooking: at the strategic end, it’s looking at what’s in the fridge and what equipment we have to decide if we’re making a meal for five people or four hundred. At the component design stage, we have the equipment out and we’re looking at the ingredients. Further down the track, we are chopping and making, and the final part is assembling that into a recipe that makes sense.
John: I love this. But there is another issue on the horizon: user experience, design, and customer journey mapping were developed perhaps a decade ago, and the world has changed. How has the rise of digital and data impacted how we think through customer journeys?
Harriet: That is a big question. This is a personal view, but I think we’ve gone through a period where journey mapping was seen as an exciting tool that was going to change everything. In using it, we often applied it without the rigor required to use it as an evolver of practice. There are an awful lot of journey maps sitting on the walls of organizations that look beautiful and talk about an aspirational customer experience. But to me, a customer journey map is a benchmarking tool. It needs to be tied to deeply rigorous data to help us understand drivers and where we should apply effort. It’s a prioritization tool. More importantly, it’s a tool to help bring a strategy to life from a customer perspective. Right now, it runs the risk of being overused, poorly applied, and delivering weak results. Design has an opportunity to take a tool that started as a design tool and help it evolve in partnership with data teams. If we don’t do that, journey mapping will become just another thing. Like any Scrum or Agile board used incorrectly, it’s just a bunch of cards on the wall. Used correctly, it’s a benchmarking tool that shows us the world as it is, the world as it could be, and helps us map a pathway between them.
John: Explain the connection between deeply integrated data and a journey map.
Harriet: There are many ways to do it, but for me, the first step is helping an organization understand where to focus by seeing what customers are actually doing. We often have data in pockets, but it’s only useful if we have a framework to interpret it. A journey map provides that framework. It doesn’t make the decisions for us, but it helps us work with the data to see how big an opportunity is. We should be able to quantify the importance of drivers based on what customers say and the value to the business, and then economically model how much value we would get from moving that driver. That allows us to focus corporate spend based on a journey map framework. This generates better rigor and allows us to solve problems effectively. Journey maps are key tools, provided they are based on both design and data practices.
John: You’ve applied this philosophy—or versions of it—at Australia Post, NAB, and now IAG. What kind of difference has it made?
Harriet: That’s why I’m interested in system changes. In the early days, we were learning. Now, these practices are being applied at a system level. In big banks, you see journey mapping frameworks used as a systemic approach to evolve strategy. This has contributed to a new body of expertise in our field. Instead of just saying “I like customers, so we’re going to do this,” we are seeing the development of rigorous, robust frameworks that are becoming as essential as financial or strategic modeling.
John: You had a nice metaphor around cooking earlier. What are customers now eating as a consequence of your cooking?
Harriet: It’s still a bit botched up sometimes. For customers to get “glory meals” every time, we need to make difficult decisions because the structures that allow us to operate effectively on a journey-based framework are very different from traditional business structures. We’re starting to see those changes in organizational structures. I would say we’re sometimes eating oyster burgers, and occasionally some quite odd meals turn up. Customercentricity is an evolution for us as a business community as much as it is for our customers.
John: Can you give some practical examples of how organizations have changed their design from the old industrial model to a contemporary one?
Harriet: We’re seeing customer delivery departments and journey mapping strategies. We see organizations aligning innovation and incubators to journey mapping opportunities. Marketing and relationship teams are aligning communication and channels to journey approaches, using journeys as benchmarks. Instead of people having NPS as a target—which happened five years ago—we’re starting to see people responsible for a specific journey stage or a journey flow. That is happening reasonably fast at the moment.
John: Final question: if you were to advise an organization on how to stay relevant in this rapidly evolving, disrupted economy, what is the secret to innovating?
Harriet: Be brave. In the past, strategy defined exactly what needed to be done with less accountability. You have to trust that these frameworks will provide enough support for good people to evolve good solutions within constraints. In design, we ask: what is the problem, what is the constraint, and what is the intentional solution? To work like that, we need to know what the problems are. Invest in the journey framework that maps how big and where those problems are—those are the opportunities. Don’t be afraid of constraints. Innovation is no longer just about coming up with something shiny and new; that hasn’t worked. Good design operates best within tight constraints. We need to bring together the right people to intentionally design a solution within those constraints. The next five years will be really interesting. I suspect we’ll look back and say that was the point where it really started to mature.
John: Thanks so much for joining us today, Harriet.