I've been hanging out at Huddle Design, "Australia's most loved service agency", for the last month doing some voluntary work experience. So far I've logged about 90 hours working on some of their projects.
Why the hell did I agree to voluntary work experience?
Two key reasons:
1. I really like Mel Senova, the managing director of Huddle. I met Mel at the Innovate Symposium and connected with her straight away. She's a really fun person to be around. We were talking about quite serious things (e.g. how do you convince people to stop using so much electricity?) but unlike most conversations around these topics, the tone wasn't "those stupid people, why can't they just stop being so wasteful!?", it was "how can we influence their behaviour by making it fun!?". I really liked that positive slant and that emphasis on doing good without being evangelical.
2. I wanted to learn service design. While talking with Mel at Innovate, I felt a huge knowledge gap. I went out to dinner with Mel and Will Donovan and I have to admit, half the time I didn't have a clue what they were talking about. "Service design", "touchpoints", "customer journey maps", what the hell were they talking about? I didn't get how they did it, but the results they talked about (e.g. a project Will's driving, Kin, which is around connecting up elder people and younger people for two-way knowledge transfer) sounded really cool. I wanted to learn the "How".
What's it been like?
Amazing. To give you a snapshot, the four things I've really liked about huddle so far have been:
1. Huddle is fun
2. Huddle is innovative
3. Huddle is bold
4. Huddle does good.
Fun
Huddle is fun. On one of my first days in the new office, there was a trolley lying on the ground. We'd been working for a while and Damian announced "It's time for a break! Let's go for a chariot ride". He eyed up who was going to be the least likely to break the trolley and decided that I was going to be the lucky one to go for a chariot ride on the trolley! We followed it up with a paper plane contest. I was a bit resistant to the idea of having fun interludes in the work day at first. I've been brought up with a philosophy that 'hard work will yield rewards' and 'breaks are for the weak'. But I noticed how my productivity was actually higher when I had an energetic, fun break to ramp up my energy levels. Laughter is a helluva lot healthier than coffee!
It's not just in the breaks either. Working with Damo and Patti was an overall fun experience. Every quasi-meeting we had was interspersed with laughter. It was serious work but by approaching it lightheartedly I think we got more done. This was especially the case during crunch time with 2 days to go on the project. We were working on building a database (details are secret:P) and we realised there were some major data integrity issues. That meant we were going to have to audit the whole database (1000 rows argghh!). Auditing! Pretty much the least fun job in the world right?
But we made it fun. We divvied up the work into bite sized chunks and created a 'gamified spreadsheet' with a chart that showed how much work there was to go. Ticking off the box after every chunk and watching the blue wedge shrink made the task feel a lot more achievable especially when I'd check back on the chart and see that someone else had finished a chunk. We did it together and that made it easier.
Innovative
Huddle is innovative. I've worked in a very conservative environment (won't name the company) in the past, where my innovation (a wiki to replace a centralised, SLOW knowledge management system) was actively stifled because it might interfere with ISO 90001. Management didn't seem interested in process improvement from staff. I love new ideas. My experience from Huddle so far is that they LOVE new ideas too:) Coming onto this new project, I made a couple of fairly radical suggestions (details secret). At most companies, these suggestions would go through a formal process, get handballed from person and sit on a manager's desk for weeks or months. At Huddle, we implemented the new ideas the same day. We had a quick chat about the potential risks and then said "let's do a prototype". We gave it a go.
Courage
I think it's safe to say that in most companies, the mission statement is regarded as a wanky waste of paper (for a comical take on it, try the mission statement generator). At Huddle it is real. I have seen the values in the mission embodied by Huddlers constantly during my month here. One powerful example is around Huddle's vow to be Courageous and Honest. I saw this embodied when one of the project teams did "Black ops" customer research that the client (details secret) didn't want them to do. Huddle knew that customer research was necessary to create a meaningful outcome for the client, so they did it, even though the client didn't want them to.
Doing good
Huddle makes its money largely from corporate clients (a few non profits in the mix too). I'm cool with that, you've got to make money somehow and we're talking ethical companies not uranium miners or cluster bomb manufacturers. But what I really like is Huddle does a lot of pro-bono work with organisations that couldn't afford to pay for Huddle's services. They've worked with Les Twentyman, they're working with Streat and even with Shift360 an organisation that looks after former slaves in south east Asia.
One of my chief challenges has been how can I balance doing good (through volunteering) with making enough cash to keep myself going. I really like Huddle's model. The corporate clients give them enough of a foundation to do meaningful pro-bono work. It's working for them - they've doubled in size in the last 6 months!
I've really enjoyed my one month, have learnt a lot and hope to do more with Huddle going forward:)
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