The SPIES Framework: The Insightful Innovator With Danny Seals

In a labor market where employees will leave organizations that make them feel like just a number, human-centered design should be front of mind for all L&D teams. 

If you’re looking to ramp up your employee experience with a no-nonsense approach to designing people-centered products and experiences tailored to your organization's needs, you’re in the right place. 

In this episode of The Learning and Development Podcast, I speak with Danny Seals, former Head of Employee Innovation at Legal & General, about his book ‘The Insightful Innovator’ and how you can level up your employee experience using design thinking. 

Read on to learn about creating better internal employee services, products, and experiences, how sense-making is at the core of helping employees understand your organization, and leveraging Danny’s DARE tool for better stakeholder engagement.

SPIES: Creating better people experiences

For the last ten years, Danny has been looking deep into how to design better employee experiences and realized that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all. 

“If I wanted a unique approach to creating better employee experiences, then I’d have to create one myself,” he explains. “So, that’s where the Insightful Innovator comes in, which is a reflection of my career adventure so far and that burning curiosity.”

Working with and helping companies, Danny has been using his SPIES framework to help startups and large enterprises alike design better learning experiences:

• Subscription: The arrangement between a business and employees who constantly decide whether to continue subscribing to the company’s people’s experience.
• Product: What a company’s employees engage with from onboarding to offboarding.
• Interaction: Design for the moments where interactions occur and affect each other.
• Experience: Take account of employees’ stories, senses, space, and the things they share.
• Service: The connection, flow, and organization of people, processes, and services that underpin the employee’s experience. 

“When I think about SPIES,” Danny explains, “it’s when you look at your employee experience—the collection of services, products, interactions, and experiences—and their subscription. They subscribe to coming to work, or they don’t. It’s a bit like Netflix: if you don’t have a great experience, you unsubscribe and go to another streaming service.”

Creating chefs, not cooks

Danny’s book aims to help businesses create better internal employee products, services, and experiences that make work better through good design. 

“While I don’t want people to pick the book up and think this is the only way good people experience can be done, the flow is there for you to iterate on and bring your business strategy and context to it,” he explains. “I'm trying to create chefs, not cooks. So, I'm going to give you the tools, but you're going to create your own recipe.” 

The goal is to provide those who design a better way of stretching their thinking and looking forward to how things could be done. “And to do that,” Danny says, “you need to look at the kind of service, what’s in place for the organizational system, and the human tensions within.”

Leadership and sense-making

Too often as L&D professionals, we narrowly focus on generic or universal leadership traits, and so we apply courses full of those instead of helping our leaders understand our organization. 

In Danny’s book, a piece on sense-making says leadership programs, for example, should be based on the human element, the service, and the system in place. Sense-making will help leaders understand the context and culture of their organization. 

“When you look at leadership, the system in place is the organization, “ Danny explains. “It has nuance and a window into the culture of your business. By taking something that is off the shelf, you let go of nuance and the context of what that means to your business.”

“So, by proxy, you're doing a disservice because you're just going for the boiled rice of leadership,” he says. “Really, it should be something personalized and specific.”

DARE: Design a relationship experience

Danny explains that when thinking about stakeholders in any environment, you will likely bump into various forms of tension, including red tape and competing priorities.

“I'm a big advocate of having difficult conversations early on, instead of avoiding them and sticking our head in the sand because they then end up being this massive thing later on,” he says. “That belief turned into a tool called DARE or design a relationship experience.”

DARE is designed to enhance your understanding of your stakeholders and build a rapport with them. The tool also helps you signal early on that you will be working together in transparency and acknowledging the different points of view so everyone understands the starting point. 

“The main objective of the tool is to dedicate time at the start of a project to understand the stakeholders and the dynamics that are in relationships and then focus on the key individuals in that project,” Danny explains. “DARE is about having difficult conversations, but in a more engaging and psychologically safe way.”

Developing the right problem statement

In Danny’s experience, there is a big difference between what we think the problem is–and the real problem. 

“I use the analogy of a ladder,” he explains. “And it’s really simple. Before you go into the problem and say, ‘I need x,’ you challenge it. You sweat it a little bit and ask what that problem looks like if you go up the ladder?”

The higher up the ladder you go, the more abstract the problem becomes as you ask questions like ‘What if?’ or ‘Imagine if?’. As you go down the ladder, the more you will get into questions such as ‘How?’. You might end up with ten or fifteen problem statements as you climb the ladder. 

“Then you ask if the initial problem we brought is still viable or if these other problems are those we need to resolve,” Danny says. “That's where the value comes because you start dismantling the problem into the DNA of what it is and tighten your challenge around that.”

“It’s simple, but I think we don't spend enough time sweating the challenge, and we spend too much time perfecting the solution, and it's the other way around,” he says.

The value of human-centered design

As Danny explains, if you don’t have the human element—if you don’t care about your people’s problems—then they won’t care about your solutions, products, or services. 

“And ultimately, they'll find another subscription service, aka work, who do, and they'll leave your business,” he says. “I've worked with massive companies who got this wrong, and their turnover has been over ten million pounds in losing people within twelve months because they initially didn't add that human element to what they were designing for.”

On the other hand, massive companies like Disney, Lego, and others have great employee value propositions and manage to keep their people for as long as they do. “And I think that’s because they put the human element center in everything they do,” says Danny. 

Thanks to Danny for sharing his insights with us! Check out our episode with Guy Wallace about transforming soft skills into measurable results or with Kenny Temowo about talent development at Netflix.

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