A new series exploring the journeys of c-suite leaders in Japan.
Brittany Arthur is at the forefront of driving innovation through human-centered design as a business executive and the head of Design Thinking Japan. With her extensive experience in managing alliances, partnerships, and senior-level relationships with leading companies, Brittany champions the integration of design thinking principles to foster creativity and efficiency. In our conversation, she shares insights on the methodology’s impact, her strategies for leading diverse teams, and the challenges she faced transitioning into her role.
What is “design thinking”?
“Design thinking is essentially a problem-solving methodology or process where instead of beginning with the solution in mind, we begin with the problem, and instead of looking at the problem as it is, we try to understand it from a human perspective. A simple example is, let's say I wanted to do something new in my business rather than putting all my team members at a table and saying let's come up with new business ideas. What we do is, before jumping into solutions, we would say hey, let's give our top five clients a call, and we'll ask them how things are going. We'll try to get their perspective, and we'll hear what we're doing well and what we could do better. We would then take what those clients have said and build a business based on that client feedback. It's important we have constant short feedback loops with our clients. In short, design thinking is a way to solve problems, but instead of putting the technology or the business first, we begin with the people.
What are the key benefits you have seen for companies using design thinking in Japan?
Design thinking is based on three principles: begin with the user, work in highly diverse teams and focus on prototyping. First up, you develop a common innovation language in your organisation. This is key, especially for CEOs or any management you're dealing with, such as multinational organisations.
For example, at Robert Walters, you are essentially like the UN: incredibly diverse. Lots of different backgrounds, and we're not only talking nationalities, we're also talking about life experiences, so of course that's different. What you want is to have people having the same conversation at the same time. This is important because innovation is all about speed; it's how fast we can move and how fast we move depends on how well each of us understands where we're going. When we sit down and ask our team something like “let's come up with ideas,” two people might both interpret the word “idea” here differently with regards to what is expected of them and end with two very different results: one person overthinking something vs. somebody else underthinking. The key here, especially with design thinking, is developing a common innovation language in teams so the organisation can progress forward quickly.
The second thing is, no matter which company you're coming from and no matter your background, it is an incredibly efficient way to create innovation. Not all companies can afford a research and development department where that's all they do, right? For example, maybe introduce a new product or service into your portfolio, but you don't necessarily have a dedicated department to do it. Using design thinking is a resource efficient way for any company, whether you're a small- to medium-sized business or a larger enterprise, to approach their innovation initiatives.
Can you share with us some differences you have noticed when working in diverse markets such as Japan compared to Australia?
I would say the one thing that stands out is probably the company roadmap and how people approach things. I would say in terms of innovation and initiatives, Japanese companies tend to be quite slow to develop something. But then, once everybody is on board, and they've decided they are going ahead with it, they are quick to do a large-scale rollout.
I've seen almost the opposite in Australia, where you'll have people jump onto something quickly, but then they'll also jump off quickly. So, you lose that scale. Even though things might take a little bit longer in the initial stages in Japan, the fact they move forward once everyone is on board quickly makes the process smoother overall.
Could you share some of the initial challenges you had stepping into your role and how you overcame them?
When you are starting out growing a business from zero, you are starting from a place where you are doing everything; I was doing everything from content creation all the way through to client acquisition. When, however, your company grows, you bring on people and you start having a team, it's important for you to reflect on where you bring the most value to the organisation and then find people who love doing the things that aren’t your top skills.
When you’re stepping into a CEO role the first time, one opportunity, which is also a challenge, is to sit down and do a nearly complete decompression of what your tasks are and really look at what you should be prioritizing. With everything that isn’t your priority to handle yourself, delegate that over to somebody else.
What kind of strategies do you have in place to lead your team effectively?
Great question. I can't be leading a company focused on human-centered design without doing human-centered design myself, right? One of the first things I do is speak to people that are interested in working with us to understand what's in their interest. Maybe they may have been in marketing previously, but maybe that's not where they want to go. Maybe they are really into detail, so they want to do something more on the operation side, whatever that might be. I like to sit down and understand this person as a person, an as we know in our businesses, although it's very helpful to have people focus on or have strengths, we also have to look at the business as a whole. We have to look at the business as a whole and see does this person have potential for growth? Do they want to grow with the business? Do they want to maybe do something else? Do they want to something short term or long term?
What I like to do when we're growing our team is to sit down and speak with people and understand what it is they really want to do. It's interesting because often once we understand who our team is, we can build a stronger business and a stronger offering to our clients. Rather than having something that I need done and then finding that person, I try to find people first, see what they like doing and try to build the business around that.
Moving on to some more personal questions about you and your team: how do you build and nurture trust?
I think building trust is something that is not done once. Trust is essentially the lifeblood of our organisation. Some of the things we like to do to build trust is go back to our design thinking principles and have very short communication cycles.
If something's going well, or if something's not going well, we try to get that spoken about as early as possible rather than sitting on it and scheduling a meeting a week later to talk about an issue we had the day before. We try to talk about it as soon as possible so people feel they can speak up and be heard.
Do you have a strategy around mentoring members of your team, and if so, could you share that with us?
Mentoring is not something we can necessarily think our way out of or talk our way out of. It's something we've got to do together. My approach to mentorship is to sit down and have a two-way conversation with the person. Listen to how they want to grow and try to get as much hands-on experience with that person as possible. Then, go back to shorter feedback loops, sitting down with them, asking them how it’s been going, what they liked and how we can do better next time.
What is one piece of advice you have for someone stepping into a senior leadership role for the first time?
When you're stepping into leadership, the key quality I've seen work well is to begin with empathy. Not only empathy for your team members but also empathy for yourself in terms of what you like doing as a leader. Sit down with your team members and clearly communicate empathetically with them. I would say empathy is key right from the get-go in any senior leadership position. Everything from adaptability, short feedback loops to
collaboration, all these things come second after you have built a team culture of empathy. If we have empathy, people are more likely to take chances. If we have empathy for each other, we're more likely to speak up and share ideas, and we're more likely to collaborate. If we can plant a core seed, it should be empathy and everything else can stem from there.
How do you maintain a good work life balance?
That's a great topic. One thing for me was how I looked at work-life balance before having my son compared to how I look at work-life balance after. He’s nearly two years old now, and what works for me is to view my life in terms of blocks. You often see these over-edited pictures of parents working with their child sitting beside them reading a book. Those of you who work from home with a child knows that may happen for about 30 seconds, but the rest of the morning or afternoon, it looks quite different.
For me, what works well is having blocked time and not crossing over that time. I often spend the mornings with my son, and when I am doing so, I'm not replying to emails, I am simply being his mother, nothing else. Later in the afternoon when I'm working, someone else is taking care of him, and I am solely devoted to my work during that time. I'm either at the office or I have the door closed, one or the other. If he's crying or needs something, I trust the person who's looking after him can attend to his needs. The thing that has made a difference is not trying to be all things to all people all of the time and to approach things in blocks— when I'm with my son, I'm a mum, and I'm not replying to emails.
What do you think are the qualities a CEO needs to possess to lead a business successfully into the future?
Anyone that's sitting in a position of leadership right now is looking into a future that's more complex than what we've dealt with before. We've just come through a pandemic. Not only are leaders looking to a digital future, but they're also kind of cleaning up lots of the effects we still have left from the pandemic. While they're doing that, they're also having to lead and having to grow new business: the sentiment that we hear amongst the leaders we work with, and I also feel this myself, is we've done kaizen really well for the last 30 years or so. But kaizen means the continuous improvement of existing things. What we need to do now is look at implementing new business, creating innovation and implementing new business models into what we are doing today.
For the person that's sitting at the front of your organisation at the moment, the key factor is being able to be intentional in where you spend your resources; whether it's your time, your people or your money, and to be intentional about where you want to invest in innovation and what kinds of innovation you invest in. If you're a leader right now looking into the future, I would say absolutely begin with being intentional about connecting that innovation initiative to your business objective.
What does a typical working day look like for you?
What we do varies from day-to-day. Sometimes, we do a lot of strategy sessions with clients, we're facilitating entire workshop days or we’re running sprints. Sprints are when we go in and we try to solve a problem as efficiently as possible.
I try to split my day into two halves. I try to spend as much time as possible with my son in the morning and work in the afternoons when he goes down for his nap, so I usually transition into work mode from around noon.
What efforts are you making to make sure your business is diverse and inclusive?
Diversity, equity and inclusion is something that's built into the way we work. It's not only seen in our organisation, but it's also common to see among our clients. We look at diversity on a larger scale, not only age or gender: we're looking at backgrounds, and we're also looking at how many years of experience people have. We want to have people that have been in a position for a long time, but we also want people that are brand new because they have different perspectives to bring to the table.
Diversity, equity and inclusion is not only built into the way we work, the process of design thinking, but it's also what we stand for. And now, also being a new mother myself, I'm very aware of asking related questions. I'm often asked to speak at events or businesses, and one of the things for me that is really interesting is how each event is designed. To give a good example of great human-centred design, I was recently given the opportunity to mentor some start up teams at the Amelia Summit, which is a startup lab for women. They had an onsite nursing room in case it was needed. This was extremely practical for me as a mother, and the people organising the event had clearly taken this into consideration and provided a solution for women coming with children.
When it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion, sometimes when we look at it in a general sense, it becomes difficult to implement on a tangible level. But the more we look at efforts on an individual level for people in your organisation, the more tangible it becomes.
Look at the individuals in your organisation, and what it is they need. Does anyone have issues with mobility and are there initiatives in place which solves any issues there? When it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion, it's not only in the process of everything you do and how you work, but the more you can get into specifics that support people in your organisation on a day-to-day and practical level, the more impact you can make to your employees.
What experience have you had working with Gen Z, and what kind of value do you think they can add to your business?
When looking at Gen Z, I think there's a few things that become clear, for example, communication styles and expectations about working environments are different. This doesn't mean you have to go out and become an anthropologist on Gen Z, but looking at all generations working in your organisation as a whole, what it does mean is to simply recognize there are groups in your organisation that need different things from you.
What we do in design thinking is always recommend beginning with that empathy I spoke about earlier. Yes, people are different, but rather than having to guess or hope you've got it right, sit down and have a conversation with each of your team members and ask them what is it they need from you for them to be happy. Does this mean we have to give everything our Gen Z employees ask for, such as 90 days of holiday or to work fully remote? No, of course not. The answer is however to have open dialogue. “What is it that you need to be happy here?” Then, as the organisation, you can say: “Well, we have been listening and reflecting on what you've told us, and this is what we can offer you.” When it comes to working with Gen Z, or really any other generation, sit down, begin with empathy and have that conversation with them about what that might look like.
Can you leave us with a final message for c-suite leaders working in Japan?
I think it all comes down to this: you do not need to know everything all the time. It is not your role to know everything all the time, which is why, if you can implement a culture of empathy in your organisation, you can listen to each other and collaborate.
Leverage those in your team. Listen to what they have to say. Nobody knows IT better than your IT team. Nobody knows marketing better than those working in your marketing department every day. Sit with them, speak to them and you'll save yourself a whole lot of time.
I think what will solve about 80% of your challenges is just simply acknowledging it's not all up to you. You don't have to have all the answers all the time. The more you can equip your team with commonality, whether it's a common language or common rituals or common ways of working, the smoother things will be.
About Brittany Arthur
Brittany is a business executive who oversees human-centered design strategy to drive innovation and customer value. She is responsible for managing Design Thinking Japan’s alliances, partnerships and senior-level relationships with leading companies. She is a member of the global management committee, and in-demand speaker and media commentator, and the mother of Charles, who was born August 2022.
