🎉 TGIW #004 – From vision to manifestation, how to leverage design to drive purpose with Ben Callaghan
🎉 Thank God It’s Wednesday! (TGIW)
TGIW: Every Wednesday, I interview design enthusiasts and creative leaders to understand how they use design to empower their teams and supercharge their businesses, diving deep into their unique relationship with design!
#004: I had a chat with Ben Callaghan, Senior Director of Brand and Client at Goodroot (Connecticut) ⭐️
What Ben is interested in is converting future vision into real business value – powering the confidence of business leaders and inspiring engagement from partners, customers, and influencers. Armed with years of experience in strategy, organisational consulting, and brand systems, Ben and I will de-mystify how design can drive purpose!
Co-create the newsletter with me and take part in the movement 💌
De-mystify is also the perfect opportunity to put into practice the design principles that we learn along our journey. I will be iterating and prototyping to make this newsletter tailored to your preferences! But for this, I need your help and feedback! Answer this week’s poll by scrolling to the bottom of the page 👇🏼
🎙 On-Air
De-mystify is not only a newsletter but a podcast too! On-Air highlights key takeaways from our discussions!
In today’s newsletter with Ben Callaghan, we discuss:
What does design mean to you?
Using design beyond products
What is Future Design?
How can language define future?
Designing as a consultant vs as an insider?
What does design mean to you?
For Ben, design is a way of being! Design is a lifestyle that shapes his daily activities and is not only a professional tool that he uses at work. Design is at the intersection of intention, purpose and play.
Going further, design has been for Ben an enabler, a tool that helps him push past his limits, for instance when he started a ski company straight out of college! Design helps you transform a vision into an experience. In the podcast, you will learn about the place of design in this project, and how Ben managed to have his skis featured in the trendiest ski magazine!
Using design beyond products
When you build skis, applying design seems pretty obvious as you are crafting a product from scratch. But what is interesting is that Ben takes design way beyond just his craft.
Products are enablers for experience!
When you buy a piece of tool, what you are looking for is the experience you gonna have when using it, right? Having beautiful products matters less than tangible delighting experiences, whether it is in relation to the outside and nature - or whatever it might be.
When building skis, you do care about the aesthetics of your product, but you need to take your design thinking process one step further and think about the experience your customer will have.
What is Future Design?
After college, Ben also joined Fathom. Initially, a traditional marketing shop, Fathom became over the years a catalyser for purpose-driven companies built on the concept of "Future Design". Ben explains.
Future design is about designing an organisation around purpose and go beyond the benchmark of what they have currently known as what is possible.
If you look at the companies that overturned their entire industry - Apple, Uber, Airbnb to name a few - the ones that a lot of people look up to and that are valued very highly, they have one thing in common…
… they set their sights on something that is not even close to the current reality of their situation. And they just leap because they made it about the user and about exploring something that did not exist yet!
In the next edition of #OTR, Ben will dive deep into his current situation at Goodroot and the challenge that it represents to balance innovation and performance ⭐️
How can language define future?
At Fathom, Ben tells us that his job was a lot about guiding leadership to look way beyond where they were and define this future in language. But, if you are imagining a future beyond where you are, people struggle to think that could even be possible.
Designing a mission statement is a powerful tool to also invite the entire organisation to be embark on the company’s transformation and therefore have ownership of this change!
Indeed, design has a role in creating real artefacts of the future that might take the shape of product design or new ways to train salespeople, and that could lead to a real identity and brand transformation.
Designing as a consultant vs as an insider?
During his time at Fathom, Ben worked as a consultant with Goodroot, a community of enterprises aspiring to reinvent healthcare. Before the disruptive impact of the company, Ben joined the project and became senior director of brand and client experience.
I asked: Has it been easy to advocate design since Goodroot already had the initiative to work with Fathom?
"Yes and no!" was Ben’s answer!
To some degree, the role in itself was not that different. But when you are an external consultant, the client will give you the space you need and will listen because they are paying for your service. On the other hand, as an insider, you have to earn your way up to some degree and advocate your ideas internally.
Google is having a similar internal dynamic when it comes to new features. Make sure to check it out ⭐️
In the podcast, Ben and I explored these topics in more depth but also touched on others such as how is design being measured and tracked. So, make sure to give it a go → https://anchor.fm/de-mystify 🎙️
👋🏼 Ben Callaghan
⭐️ Explore Purpose Driven Design further
⭐️ Off The Record
#OTR helps you to dive deeper into the relationship our guest has with design throughout the week.
For the past two years, Ben has been working on understanding the healthcare industry and leveraging design to reinvent healthcare - one system at a time.
In the next edition of #OTR, Ben will dive deep into the functioning of the health system and concrete applications of design to drive purpose and innovation.
In the next edition of #OTR
Why is Healthcare broken?
The back-end picture of the system to understand the challenges the industry and its stakeholders face?
How to leverage design to streamline ultra-complex workflows to empower users?
✨ What’s up?
Be part of the Co-Demystification Experiment!
💡 Where are we at → From this episode, we understood how Ben leveraged design as an entrepreneur, as a consultant and in a strategic position at Goodroot! After this fourth episode, design appears to be this horizontal layer that can be applied on top of many roles and industries, driving change towards a user-centred approach!
💌 Poll outcome → Last week, I asked you who should be our next guest. You wanted to me interview a consultant ☺️ Therefore, I hope you like today’s newsletter!
💌 Be the change you want to see in the world
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