The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

And now for a Very Special Episode of *The Resonance Test.* This particular conversation, straight from our archives, has our Toby Bottorf chatting up Thomas Thwaites, author of two thoughtfully bizarre books: *GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human* (you read right!) and *The Toaster Project: Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch* (sounds awesome, no?). It’s jolly great fun to hear Thwaites say things like: “I was really keen on learning to gallop and, you know, kind of chewing grass,” and: “If technology is about kind-of-letting-us fulfill-our-dreams-kind-of-thing, then I suppose it’s like: 'Which dreams do we try and fulfill?'” We think this is a great way to wind up the *Resonance Test* year. Thanks so much for listening—and please enjoy the goatish, toasty conversation between Thomas and Toby!

Host: Jen Ashman

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Heather Figallo, the Head of Design, Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Southwest Airlines, wants to “raise the expectations of the type of experience you should have when you’re traveling in commercial aviation.” So do we. The digital wayfinding project EPAM Continuum did with Figallo and her crew was very successful and we learned a lot from it. “I’ve never had something with 96% customer satisfaction, 94% employee satisfaction,” Figallo says, adding: “I’ve never seen something like that.” In the latest episode of The Resonance Test, Figallo and Lee Moreau, our VP of Design, take a payload of project insights and launch them into the world. The conversation has stops in a number of fascinating places: human-centered data, innovating in the highly regulated airline industry, responsible prototyping, and Southwest’s sui generis culture. Moreau and Figallo make it clear both Southwest and EPAM Continuum put their whole hearts into the digital wayfinding project, and the result was a very human outcome: “The real magic was turning data into knowledge and turning data into something personal.”

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Jon Stolk is in the midst of an experiment. But then, so is everyone at Olin College(http://www.olin.edu/), in Needham, Massachusetts. This project-based engineering school is trying to find a way to do higher education differently. They are, in many respects, succeeding, as we learned when EPAM Continuum’s Toby Bottorf, VP of Service and Experience Design, recorded an electric conversation with Stolk, who serves as Olin’s professor of materials science and engineering education. Listen and learn what it’s like to provide “just enough scaffold for teams of students or for individuals to dig into questions or problems that are exciting and interesting to them.” Stolk admits he and the school have quite a task in front of them: “It’s scary as hell sometimes.” What causes such fear? Could well be, as Stolk says, that a school that was “created to transform education” can’t “get stuck with one curriculum.”

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Data, data, everywhere. We grow more and more digitized every moment, and as humanity makes its digital transformation, we need people to help us understand what it means and how we can retain our own sense of values. We speak with two such people this time on *The Resonance Test.* Lily Tsai and Sarah Williams are professors at MIT. Tsai is a political scientist and the founder and faculty director of the MIT Governance Lab or GOV/LAB; Williams is the Director of the Civic Data Design Lab at MIT's School of Architecture and Planning. Together they spoke with our Lee Moreau about data, analytics, human-centered design, and civics. Listen, and you’ll hear our professors profess the following:

Tsai: “On social media or other new media digital platforms, we don’t where the information necessarily comes from, but we think we know. And that’s the problem. We think of them as the same as the newspaper, but they are not.”

Tsai: “Those who study the United States haven’t fully realized that the dynamics in the United States are very similar to the dynamics elsewhere.”

Williams: “In all the data analytic models I do, I really try to make them human-centered…. I’ll develop a model and then I ask those who the model describes whether they think it describes them accurately or, and then ask them to co-develop or change the model with me.”

Williams: “Missing data tells you a lot more than you might think.”

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

There is so much fear in healthcare. Fear for patients, for the surgeons who treat them, for the families who have to stand by and watch anxiously as a loved one goes under the knife. But for Melissa Burke and her colleagues, fear is to be cut down to size by simulation. Rehearsal. Practice. As the Director of Operations of SIMPeds, Boston Children’s Simulator Program, Burke is obsessed with how simulation can help the players in our #healthcare drama to master their fear. In this excellent conversation with our Lee Moreau, she delves into the tactics, the meaning, and power of #medicalsimulation—and the hope it holds for the future.

• “The hospital’s a really emotional place and being able to quantify emotion in the healthcare setting enables a whole host of new opportunity.”

• “The single thread that joins everything we do at the simulator program is fear.”

• “The whole point of the simulator program is to enable rehearsal, opportunities to reduce fear and anxiety, to create confidence, and to create clinical teams that operate from a very mature state of confidence, and to increase the confidence of parents going home with children who maybe have new lifesaving medical equipment that they need to take with them. Or even to empower the children that we care for in making decisions about their own care or contributing to their care.”

• “We’re creating synthetic patients that look real and feel real, for our clinical teams to learn from. We’re creating psychologically safe environments for clinical teams to be able to make mistakes, admit mistakes, talk about their mistakes. We have human factors experts that use these medical simulations as the reason to have conversations around how to improve a team.”

• “I like to think of us as the nexus of medicine and theatre because we’re creating very lifelike environments, replicas of exact operating rooms or exact ICUs where these teams natively work. And we bring them in and we have them work on synthetic patients that look real and feel real, so their head is in the game.”

• “We also have patients’ families represented, so the mom who spent three months in an ICU can say: ‘Hey, if the headwall isn’t over by the window, my child wouldn’t see the light of day for three months.’”

• “When simulation is done wrong, people feel beaten down. They feel demoralized. But when simulation is done right, the entire team feels like they’re *that much better.*”

• “In our simulation center, we go to Disneyesque length to make things real. So our simulated patients bleed and urinate and speak. And sometimes we use actors, and the level of realism that is elicited when you have an actor playing a patient or an actor playing a parent is so real, I have to look away.”

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Robing Glasco is a superhero. She goes where the love is. She is fearless, this Chief Innovation Office of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. Glasco is out to redesign healthcare, and she recognizes that this monumental task involves risk, collaboration, experimentation, and trust. She and Continuum’s Lee Moreau talk it all out in the latest iteration of our *Resonance Test* podcast. Here are some of her super remarks:

• “I really want to reinvent healthcare, and [to do that] you gotta be risky, you gotta have some fearlessness to you. If you’re into sports it’s kinda that Cam Newton pulling back that Superman pose that he does. I’m all down for that, so that’s how I leverage that in my world.”

• “My job is to break healthcare.... And by that I mean the status quo is not acceptable in healthcare.”

• “I’m not trying to perfect the pager,” she says, adding: “A good part of my role is the help the organization see that ‘the pager’ is not a viable, sustainable business model for us.”

• “Anyone in healthcare needs to spend time with physicians, working in that environment.”

• “Truly when human-centered design just becomes part of your DNA is when we don’t have to be there along the way, holding their hand.”

• “Health is a 360, 24-7 experience journey.”

• “There aren’t any winners in healthcare right now. There is pain across every step, every spot in the journey of healthcare.”

• “This is not the Robin Glasco Innovation Center. This should be a community asset that people should embrace and be able to see themselves as a part of.”

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Snacks are serious business, as Erica Eden, PepsiCo’s Director of Global Design Innovation, will tell you. She’s done an enormous amount of work to bring the front-end-of-innovation process into the kingdom of PepsiCo’s snack empire. Last spring, right before speaking at the Front End of Innovation conference, she sat down with Continuum Principal Eric Bogner—who used to sit near Eden when he worked at PepsiCo—to talk about innovation in a humongous organization, designing for women, and empathizing with the aesthetic of people who are very different from you. And now, a few of Eden’s most snackable quotes to get you excited for the main meal of this *Resonance Test* dialogue…

• “That’s my macro goal: to shift the portfolio to better stuff.”

• “The front-end-of-innovation process” is “changing a lot internally at Pepsico. The teams, particularly marketing teams, insights, R&D, and just overall business leaders are really adopting the new way of thinking.”

• “That’s been my challenge: to make design thinking fun.”

• “These big companies, PepsiCo and others, they’re not necessarily motivated to use their intuition.”

• “It’s hard to stand up in front of the CEO and say: ‘I think this is an opportunity.’ But I think designers do a wonderful job doing that. They build the case behind years of experience—which feels like a hunch, but it really is your years of experience.”

• “When you look at innovation briefs, you see consistently these happy women, eating salads. These false versions of women. They don’t exist. They’re always smiling, they’re always 30. They’re always moderately attractive.”

• “The industry is shy about having these strong opinions about women’s brands.”

• “There’s a disconnect there, between who’s doing all the making and who’s doing all the buying. Right? Men and women. Once you actually break down the numbers, it becomes pretty obvious that there’s a disconnect.”

• “I try not to think about demographic because I don’t think it matters as much as mindset.”

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

If someone told you that his company was all about “people analytics,” would you understand what that meant? How about if he added: “Sort of like *Moneyball* for business”? Bet that would make things crystal clear--at least for the multitude of baseball and/or Brad Pitt and/or Michael Lewis fans out there! That is, in fact, how Humanyze’s CEO, Ben Waber, described his firm to Continuum SVP Kevin Young, in the most recent installment of *The Resonance Test.* In a sprightly digital dialogue, the two talk through such topics as: the use of data in the modern work environment, how privacy functions in Humanyze’s work, and why the U.S. should look into adopting EU privacy standards. If you want to a glimpse into the future of the work place, you should pay attention to this podcast, and note when Waber says:

• “You don't care what Bob’s doing at 2:30 on Tuesday. No one cares. What you care about is: ‘What’s our most productive team do differently that everybody else? How much does management talk to the sales team?’ Those really big questions. That’s what we care about.”

• “Humans, by our very nature, we’re not recording devices. We’re also incredibly inaccurate when I even ask you questions about these things. *Who’d you talk to yesterday?* Only about 30% accurate.”

• “Essentially our customers use our technology to inject *real* intelligence into all their different people decisions.”

• “We give people consent forms, that show them the actual database tables we collect. That’s a legal contract between us and our users. That’s important especially in the U.S., to give people legal guarantees around what their rights are with the data.”

• “Because our technology enables you to literally, at a millisecond level, understand what’s going on, you can act that much more quickly.”

• “Just figuring out where somebody is at any given time is not that hard. And you can see how that can be abused—which is why having regulations out in front of that is really critical.”

• “Our average opt-in rate is over 93%, so we’ve gotten quite good at rolling this out. But... you have to take your time, and you have to be *transparent* about what you’re doing with this data.”

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

If you want to understand innovation in the financial sector, you talk to Mona Vernon. We know. We did—and we learned quite a bit. As the Chief Technology Officer at Thomson Reuters Labs, Vernon insists that innovation must business-case and use-case focused. Like Continuum, she insists on *making it real.* In this pointed conversation with our Lee Moreau, Vernon talks clearly and well about demonstrating value, selling innovation to executive leadership, hiring the right people, and managing a properly balanced portfolio of innovation projects. On episode 21 of *The Resonance Test,* Vernon says many valuable things. It's worth investing the time to hear her say:

• "Fundamentally, one of the values of Thomson Reuters is [partnership](https://www.continuuminnovation.com/en/how-we-think/blog/the-case-for-humility-partnership-in-a-changing-healthcare-landscape)."

• "If you look at the pace of change in financial markets, trying to do everything yourself doesn't make sense."

• "We are not a group of people playing with toys and foosball. We are actually extremely business-case focused."

• "I don't want your ideas. I want the problem you're seeing with customers."

• "In the process of defining a problem statement, you start seeing the solution."

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

*Attendez,* *Resonance Test* fans! Céline Schillinger, Head of Innovation and Engagement at Sanofi Pasteur, injects some Gallic intelligence and passion into this episode of the podcast. Schillinger is all about enabling *quality,* the full intelligence and autonomy of the people in her organization. She is about healing a system, from a human-centric and social movement perspective. Listen as she and Continuum SVP Jon Campbell talk about how W. Edwards Deming has been misunderstood, the philosophical side of innovation capability, the challenges of behavior change, the workforce of the future, and what it's like for her to have won the *Ordre National du Mérite* (yes, she is a *knight!*). *Ecoutez,* and you'll hear mots such as:

• "We have found that quality works better when it comes from people. When it comes from people's desires, when it comes from them and their head and their heart."

• "My work is about having people regain their full intelligence."

• "We can no longer rely on a system that has a small brain and many, many hands. We need the brain to be present in every cell of the organization."

• "We are not just doing a job. We are fighting for something."

• " When you give up control, you actually reduce risk."

• "We need to work with more people who don't share our ideas, and yet we need to work towards a common goal."

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon