Todd Zerger: Building culture with intent

Pauline Bertry 0:13

Hi Todd. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to the Den. And I want to start the conversation by asking you to tell us a little bit about yourself, the journey you've been through, what are you doing now, and we can get from there.

Todd Zerger 0:30

Awesome. Well, good morning, Pauline. I'm delighted to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, the first thing that leaps to mind about my journey is how long it's getting, but also how much I've loved it. I very distinctly remember my first job was a paperboy when I was a little kid, riding a bike around, hooking papers under the people's porches and being mystified about how that's the switch from being a sixth grader to being a professional would happen and all that. deciding very overtly that I wanted to become a creative director one day as you know, I've been an artist and drew and had received encouragement. So yeah, I'm here and it's kind of amazing and it's it's healthy I think to slow down every once in a while and remember like, oh, I got here and to celebrate that and then also to wonder what to do next. It's less clear I would say now and that's one of the real challenges of growing your careers. If you set a goal and you get there, you've to figure out how to set the next goal and keep going. So yeah, that's been very exciting and very rewarding. I did start, and I will say that one of the pivotal pieces of my journey has been the encouragement that I've received. My mother was a creative writer and my grandmother was an artist and sculptor and painter. And so early on when I was drawing, I was encouraged to keep going and people said they loved it. Whether it was good or not, I couldn't tell you, it was a long time ago. But so often we sort of beat creativity out of kids at a very early stage. know, your drawing isn't good enough, it doesn't look realistic. And I didn't encounter that. And so I kept going and here I am still going.

Pauline Bertry 1:58

Are you still draw?

Todd Zerger 2:00

I do still draw and I love doing that as much as I can. I've tried to really set a standard where I can't go to bed if I haven't been physically active or creatively active. And some days that's pretty challenging. But yeah, I still get the sketchbook out. I recently started a series. I know you're into artificial intelligence and it's been top of mind for all of us. as I was processing the stress of AI and it's either gonna be sort of this existential take over all of our jobs, or it's all kind of vaporware, I needed a middle ground. And so I started processing that with drawing. It was very cathartic. So I started a series called Embarrassing Moments at Robot High School. And it's all these little cartoon drawings about robots that are AI, and they're going through their growth curve the way that human beings do, right? Like through middle school, and they have awkward moments and embarrassing things happen to them, and they're clumsy and figuring things out. And I found it really re-centered me in a way that I just needed. personally at that point. So I posted those on Medium for shits and giggles, but I don't know that anybody has seen them, but it's been fun.

Pauline Bertry 3:04

That's so cool. No, I haven't seen them. Are they, where are they living on medium or where are they posted?

Todd Zerger 3:10

Yeah, so I, so yes, and another part of my journey that connects to that is my mother who was a writer, she was trained as a photojournalist and a writer. When I was a kid made me sit at the dining room table and write a paragraph every morning before I could go out and play with all my friends in the street in the summers. The net consequence of that though is that I fell in love with writing. She just said, there's no reason it can't be fun, right? It has to be a paragraph, but that's your only constraint. It could be about whatever you want. And so I've always loved the writing piece and I never really took it on. I've started some things, but never really published that felt like a bridge too far, right? It's like that's sort of stating that you are a writer with a capital W, which I'm not, but I do love the craft. So when I was reading all these articles about, about AI, I just needed a way to put my thoughts together. So I started writing and then I thought, well, I'm going to try and connect it to what I do know and, and publish some of those things. So I did start a medium channel. That felt like a big commitment to me. And then the first article was about how AI should, can, will, should influence the idea of collaboration, right? It had been thought about a lot as a tool, either replacing people or taking over certain activities, making you a little bit better. And I thought, I want to invite it overtly into a process. like me and another human being in the AI. And so I wrote about that. And then I went on and did that. So I have another friend, another colleague friend. Matthew Doty, who is a UX director and we worked together a number of years ago. He writes a lot. And so we thought, let's write an article together. We'll each write our parts, almost like an exquisite corpse, right? And then we'll merge them together, but we'll use the AI as the arbiter and editor. Our styles are very different. Mine is biased towards pros and I'm a little long-winded. And he was bullet-points kind of guy. So it was really grinding the gears a little bit, but the AI helped a ton, right? We negotiated what could have been a very emotional process of like, you you fall in love with terms of phrase or points you want to make. And the AI instead, we assigned it the job of sort of figuring out how to make this article cogent and followable by an audience that's sort of reading it for the first time. So yeah, it's been fun. Yeah.

Pauline Bertry 5:21

That's so fun. I I never heard about this use case for AI. But

Todd Zerger 5:28

Yeah.

Pauline Bertry 5:28

I mean, I'm now kind of very prompted to go more into this direction. I know you recently joined Strategy CX. how does this AI thing living together with you now as part of your role?

Todd Zerger 5:46

Yeah, you know, it's been really interesting. I know this is a keen interest of yours as well. I am not an AI skeptic in the same way that I'm not skeptical of another designer who's more talented than I am. think that, you we all like the phrase, I don't want to be, I want to be the dumbest person in the room, right? Surrounding yourself with smart people is amazing. And yet somehow we have this knee-jerk reaction to AI feeling that role, right? And I don't know that it is yet. I don't know how intelligent it is. I don't know if it's, just a language model or something special. But why not include it, I think. So I think I've tried to be open-minded. I started with Mid Journey as my first sort of foray into AI. And it can definitely do amazing things. What's interesting is it almost never does the thing I was thinking about. So immediately I thought about it as that collaborator. Somebody who's, and actually I would say right away I was most smitten with the hallucinations, right? wow, that's not only not what I was thinking, it's like so far removed and so twisted that like I have to pause and think about that contribution to the conversation. So as a collaborator, I found it really interesting and it took me in directions that were unexpected. And that's what I love about brainstorming. You know, I can think on my own and make my own things and often do and love that. But when I'm with other people, what I love is the exchange, right? Like you see this problem really differently than I do. Your solution is really different than mine. And as a leader, that's become, think, very central to my perspective is my job is to help the team do their best work, not my best work. And that means giving up some aspect of the ownership or the vision for it and so that it can be shared. And so I've taken the same approach with AI, like, I don't know, that's not what I was thinking, but it's interesting. Let's keep going down that road a little bit and see where it takes us. And then I also set myself a challenge, which I mostly still stay true to. is when I do use image generation AI, that I force myself to bring it back through Photoshop and make modifications. So if I don't want six fingers, I don't accept six fingers and I can fix that. Sometimes it's hard to talk to AI into editing like little small parts and some people are much better than I and maybe they do. But I like the idea of getting my hands back on it too so it's continued to feel collaborative and not just like a prompt and response because to me that's not quite yet collaboration. So yeah, going back and forth and then I sometimes have modified or add something in, put that back into AI. And then it felt more like we were partnering, which I appreciate. But yeah, back to your question about the strategy CX, we do use it. What's interesting is we do not yet have a formal process. That's something where I'd hope somewhere in the back half of this year we'll start getting into. I think different people use it differently. I use Grammarly a lot. I love to write myself, but I'm not the world's greatest speller, which is kind of normal for creative directors. and nor am I a grammatician. And it loves to inform me about all the Oxford commas I've missed and whatnot. So I use it in that quick way. Always copy and paste. I never let it do the writing for me. And we do use some other things like Fireflies and Notion. The team uses Notion a lot, which has been, we're just dabbling with for note taking, but some of them have started using it to like almost make software. Like for recruiting, we've got a spreadsheet in here. And rather than starting in Excel, you can sort of tell it what you want. So our next leg of this journey is to sort of consolidate, like what should we be using kind of the same tool set together so that we're all building the same knowledge and where it's transportable, it's institutionalized, and it's standardized so that we can use it and onboard new people into it, et cetera. So it's a little ad hoc, but we're getting closer. Yeah, I've also, used it for, we'll use image generation for things, making videos, especially for pitches where you have so little time. and the expectations are high that we'll use it for making music or a little video or an image, something that would have been fun to hire a photographer to handle. But when you don't have three or six weeks, you've got 30 minutes, right? Or it's the next day. It is possible to show up with something to show. So that's pretty powerful tool, actually.

Pauline Bertry 9:55

Very cool. so in this world that is, I mean, changing completely from what I experienced when I was a designer, because when I first started doing any type of design work, it was all in Photoshop. The gurus were using Acture to do like the clickable prototypes and we had Illustrator, etc then Sketch came in and Figma came in and Envision was in there, et cetera. But now, first of all, I think there are so many different tools that are coming all over the place and

Todd Zerger 10:35

Yeah.

Pauline Bertry 10:36

with different features, different value proposition, etc How do you think about building a team that can consistently deliver at a super high speed, as you were saying, while at the same time keeping up with all the elements around experimentation and learning and kind of getting to play with all those new tools, etc

Todd Zerger 11:05

Yeah, that's a very complicated question, but an excellent one and very timely. I think a couple of things. I think as you noted, the tools have gotten faster and faster and they have indeed accelerated the creative process as a whole. But I do think neurons still go the same speed, something like 260 miles an hour, I think is the max, right? And the process of the human exchange and conversation and brainstorming, those things are the same speed they've always been. and I think it's important to continue to leave room for them. So in the event that AI or the software anywhere accelerates the process, I would love to see that we get used to giving back some of that time to the human part of the process, instead of expecting the human part to go equally fast, right? So yes, some efficiencies, deadlines can happen faster, but give some percentage of that savings back to the people because They do need that time together, especially since so many teams are distributed and remote. You just need time to sync up because you don't bump into each other in the kitchen anymore. You need to have those moments where you get together and just, I show you what I'm doing? I've got some questions. Otherwise everybody solves their problems kind of the same way, which is they Google it and they find some answers. And then we're sort of behaving like human, you know, modeling ourselves, because we're just sort of averaging everything rather than feeling like there's room for us to take some risks. If mine maybe goes back just a little further, we started pencil and paper. And what's been powerful about that is when we start a project, if all I have is the pen and the paper, I can start, right? Well, three things, the pen and the paper and the problem, three P's, not

Pauline Bertry 12:45

Hahaha

Todd Zerger 12:45

intentional. But I think that one of the... unintentional consequences of the software has been that we've made design fairly programmatic. And this is

Pauline Bertry 12:57

Hmm.

Todd Zerger 12:57

not a slight against anyone. But it is evident to me, having gone through school before UX was even a thing, in fact, encountered some of the first computerized design in college for me. So it was very nascent and it was exciting and fun. And we played with it just like we're doing with AI right now. So that's why that part feels familiar. But as the software has gotten specialized and this complexity of projects has ballooned, right? Like a website, I coded my first website from a sidebar article in Macworld magazine. It wasn't even a full article. They were like, web, that's kind of interesting. Here's how to make one. Start typing at the top of a simple text page. And it was that easy. And that was a super powerful idea for me, that you could publish your work without a million dollars of Heidelberg in the basement. But it's since gotten incredibly complicated and very specialized and makes for amazing experiences, so no regrets. But it does mean that there are individuals on a team who went through school knowing they wanted to do UX, went through the program, got out of the school doing UX and they started their job doing that. Instead of having been a generalist designer at any point in their career or their education potentially. What I find challenging about that is when the process has omissions, it's often difficult for that. particularly a craftsperson to start with just a pencil and a paper. We're used to having personas and journeys and research and requirements and background and patterns and templates. I just don't think that that's... Well, let's put it this way. Clients don't hire an agency if everything's fully buttoned up and wrapped up with a bow in it, right? If they had all of those things and the conclusion was self-evident, they wouldn't need an agency. we find often that when we come in, there is some chaos to deal with. And so the skill set that we have to bring to the table that's maybe not talked about in school as much is the ability to be a diplomat and to broker, you know, peace between the CIO and the CMO and their different visions about how things should be or how to get there. All the constraints of timeline and budget and, you know, all those things get thrown into the mix that weren't really part of your school project. or even often in your early career, especially if we were protecting the team and just saying, make some wireframes. Here's everything plated up for you. So think there's this messiness that we have to be prepared to embrace. And so there's something comforting about being a generalist or having some of that generalist background that lets you go, okay, well, if that's the problem, let me just think about it a little bit, which is why said earlier, yes, the software goes quickly, but sometimes the people need to slow down if they want to make a good solution.

Pauline Bertry 15:40

I mean, I have so many points I would love to follow up on. But I think the most interesting kind of thought that I heard from what you are sharing is like building and leading a team where you have people with very mixed educational and professional backgrounds. And I would love to kind of go a little bit deeper onto into this topic and kind of trying to understand a little bit what are the patterns from your experience that are kind of it or break it elements to a team which is constantly working well together, performing well together where people feel valued and they feel autonomy, they stay longer and a team where people kind of there just to tick a box and then leave at 5 p.m. or they eventually end up leaving because they're burned out and they don't see their

Todd Zerger 16:49

Yeah.

Pauline Bertry 16:49

place anymore. So, I mean, I know the question is not very well formulated, but...

Todd Zerger 16:54

No, no, that's great. It's a great question. You asked complicated questions. So I'm it's hard to come up with simple answers to them. So in answer to your question, I think what I fall back on is the way science thinks about creativity, which is that if you're highly creative, you have more neurons firing simultaneously when you encounter a problem than someone who's less creative. You're not a rogue, you don't just roll out the pattern. So you're thinking hard all the time. And so that always makes me think about the idea that creative problem solving is about a diversity of thought. And if that's true, then it makes sense to me that the team should be diverse as well. because that means that their backgrounds and their present moments, their interests, their personalities also contribute to that diversity and that supercharges the creative process. So, like Ivan was mentioning, it can be hard for folks who don't have, if they're missing a part of the process, it can be hard for them. But there's room in a larger team for that, right? I think if everyone was the same, you lack that diversity. So you need somebody who sort of orchestrates and sees the big picture. You need some people who are scrappy and willing to switch from making videos to spreadsheets or whatever it is. You also need people who understand the process very clearly and will champion that. And I'm very lucky, know, strategy CS, have a team of my current projects, 16 creatives on there, right? Including some writers, UX designer, visual designers. And it's that diversity that makes it work because if it weren't diverse, then I would have to do the thing where I have the vision and I just having people execute for me, which isn't interesting. and won't yield the best work. So some folks are constantly like going, hey, I'm missing this part of the process. We don't have this. I'm frustrated that the feedback's not consolidated. And other people are like, I get it. I get the basic sense of things. I'm pushing forward. And so then the team is always moving, but that movement is sort of stochastic, right? It doesn't have to operate just because we have a two week sprint doesn't mean everyone has to be in lockstep the whole way. And then I can help folks who need help. They help each other a lot, by the way. And then other folks are doing the same because they get, have a different perspective or challenging me or I'm challenging them or the notes are back and forth. So I think there's, there's something about the messiness that is important to creativity, just as it is important to diversity and culture, right? That's why we have different music and different culinary experiences in different fashion and different ways of thinking about problems in different languages. All that arises out of the messiness of, of our differences and creativity is sort of the the opportunity to revolve all that difference around something, all that diversity, should say, around a central problem, and then you get to neat solutions.

Pauline Bertry 19:30

Thank you so much because it inspired me to ask you another question. So I think when I was junior and I was just starting my design career, I have a very similar view on things. Things can be messy a little bit, it's fine, we will learn, we will adjust, et cetera. But

Todd Zerger 19:50

Yeah.

Pauline Bertry 19:51

what I see more and more as I work with the people who are like... one or two generations younger than me, so either like people in the middle of like starting their career or people just out of the university. Often what I observe is that they kind of go into the workforce expecting to have a certain job description, let's say it, or a certain clarity around the scope of the work that they're going to be doing. I'm wondering, like, how do you, like, what's your view on that? Like, are you observing the same patterns at, around you and how you, like, how you solve it, how you help them get to the point where they feel more comfortable in the reality, let's say.

Todd Zerger 20:50

Right, yeah, great question. Again, I think you have to start with openness, right? Just accept that everyone on the team will come to the problem with different backgrounds. I tend to think of your life experience as sort of your creativity filter. when you get a brief or a challenge, you pass it through this filter that is the cumulative life experience you have. And everyone's is different. And that's what makes the opportunity to work together so amazing. But then there are definitely differences that you have to grapple with. So if it's not structured enough for someone, for them to get to their best creativity, then that's one of the things we have to focus on. How do we discover enough structure, create enough structure for that person? Often they're full of ideas, by the way, so that it's not something that I have to sort of be the expert on. And it's just like the openness, know, a facet of openness is asking questions rather than providing answers. And so if you can say, what do you need? You know, what do you really need? Let's talk about that. Like, I know there's these boxes you want to take that are the things you should have, but what if we don't have those? Could we make our own personas? There have been a couple of occasions actually, interestingly enough, where clients are not just lacking personas, but they object to them. So we can't make them and show the client. But my response to the designer is, you need what you need to be creative. So if you need a persona as the catalyst for your work, let's make a persona. Let's just not present it to the client because it's not going to make things better for them. but it's the background that you need to do your best work. And that's just one example, everybody needs a different thing. And so we'll often spend time talking through things. A lot of that's one-on-one because it can be very different. And I agree with you, is. Generational is probably not quite fair because I think that it's, I think it's probably not true. It just becomes a very big group of people and not all Gen X are the same way either. Some of us love to freestyle and make a mess and have it work out in the end and others don't. I want to grant all the other generations that piece too. I think there are cultural trends though, for sure. And those are somewhat generational. And so the expectations have changed. And to a degree, think experience design is a victim of its own success in that regard, right? We did not used to talk about patterns. We did not talk about templates. Like you mentioned Photoshop, right? We used to design a webpage from top to bottom. All the words, all the content was in there, the imagery, you aligned to the pixels, right? There was no padding or automated this or anything was done for you. You manually moved it there. And that was a lot of work, but it forced you to think through all of the implications of everything. And we're now in a place where the tools are very powerful. Sketch and Figma are amazing. But we often, in my opinion, end up solving for the design system rather than using the design system to our So we've got, well, we need to put something here and we have cards. So we put a card there and the card has room for a headline and a sub headline and three lines of body copy and an icon. So that's what we do. And that is something I'm really grappling with. So I don't want to sound judgey at the moment, but I, I'm wondering in my own mind, if that is design or is that decoration, right? And again, not to be dismissive of either discipline, but just to sort of put them in the right place in my mind. I think there are times where we do need to move. very quickly, consistency is the most important factor, right? We're adding something to a system that's already working great. That's not a moment to come in and reinvent. So I think that that is designing within the parameters, right? Not just decoration. But if you've got a blank slate and a good budget and somebody said, make me a world-class app. And the first thing we do is apply a design system to that. You may inadvertently be cutting yourself off from experiences that were more novel. are more exciting, yes, maybe more challenging, maybe less intuitive, but maybe the world's ready for that. There was a fellow, Jay Pattisall, think his name, I hope I got his name right. He was in the office above us when I was working in the city and worked for Forrester and came down one time and talked to us about it and said, you know, the thing is UX everywhere has gotten pretty good. All the airline apps are good, very usable, but they're not very creative anymore. They're not distinct. there's a brand, you know, flavor, a brand experience that's really one of them could claim as being special and a differentiator and reason to use that app. And that definitely got under my skin in a good way. I think what we tried to do at that point was yes, think about the patterns, understand the norms. There's no reason to have people like hunting around for things that they shouldn't have to hunt around for. On the other hand, some discovery is kind of fun. It's rewarding. It's like, you finding a shirt you love on sale, right? It's sort of like, it's this hidden gem that you discover. And I think there's some human nature stuff that gets left out when we fall back on just applying patterns.

Pauline Bertry 25:49

Yeah, I fully agree with your point. I might disagree with the fact that airlines app all got the UX

Todd Zerger 25:56

Yeah.

Pauline Bertry 25:58

right because I flew, like I had a period of my life where I had to fly a lot and I do have some very specific comments to share with some of them.

Todd Zerger 26:11

That's fair. I it was his example not mine. I think it is Jay Patisil. So forgive me if I got the name wrong names are another one of my not strengths. And I'm hopeful that when we all have AI agents, mine will be very good at remembering all the names of people in my life because I care about all of them. But getting that name recalled out of the databases, there's some system latency there that I've got to work with. But yeah, I agree. think, you know, you can debate the merits of the UX and how efficient and intuitive everything is. I think that's an interesting conversation in itself. It's also interesting that the word intuitive gets thrown around a lot. And it doesn't mean obvious, it means sort of extractable from your previous experiences, right? So back in the day, when we first started doing websites, we didn't even there wasn't even a pattern that navigation was at the top, right? I mean, that's how early the days were like, we had navigation bottom like I remember when I'm going like, maybe the navigation should float in the middle of the page. That could be interesting. Like it's type, it's got shape around it. Like it's a design element. But we normalized on some things and that's because as you get going in a direction, that becomes the intuitive part, right? Like, well all the other websites, the close buttons and X on the top right corner. I don't know that anybody ever figured out that was absolutely the best way to do it or it just sort of congeals in that direction. And then it becomes a foregone conclusion. And I'm not opposed to those things at all, right? And I think you can make them special. They can spin and be colors and do cool things. We just need to recognize that that's what happens. It's like we normalize stuff, not always through intent, but by just repeat use.

Pauline Bertry 27:43

Yeah, I agree. think my first web project ever, was a Harry Potter fan page and navigation was on the left. So that's it was not on the...

Todd Zerger 27:54

Yeah. And why not? Right? Like, I love it. Yeah, we did a lot of that.

Pauline Bertry 27:59

Very, very true. And so now with all this kind of background and all the different people you have to care about, how do you make it sustainable for them at the same kind of building a team where they can experiment, they can express themselves, they can learn, they can be accountable? but at the same time building a culture in the organization where the growth is fair, where it's not only reserved for the loudest voices. So how do you, I know it's fallen a lot on your shoulders. How do you deal with all that?

Todd Zerger 28:43

Yeah, excellent. I think the culture has to come first because it would be, it is easy for me to feel like it all falls on my shoulders and I have to solve all those problems. But just like the design, it probably isn't best if that's actually what happens. So when you have a healthy creative culture, the culture itself contributes to that solution, right? It starts to define its own norms and what it needs and it the people within it feel comfortable saying like, I'm burning out and not feeling like that's waving a white flag and saying, please fire me because I can't handle it. Because that seems crazy to me. Like creativity is immensely emotionally draining. Often your heart is on your sleeve. You're putting your best effort out there. You've been emoting about all these other people, what they need to use and pouring your own self into it. And if the critique is not gentle, if the culture is not receptive, if everyone doesn't work together around that, it's just risky everywhere for everyone all the time. And that causes burnout. So what I try to do first is, and this is the part that as a leader I really can help with, is like establish a value for the unique qualities of everyone and our ability to contribute to a culture that we all love. Once you build enough trust that people actually take You know, I'll speak for myself. Once I build enough trust that people actually are comfortable taking me at my word, I find they let down a lot of their guard and they raise their hand when they have free bandwidth and they support each other. They jump in with opinions. They make notes in Figma. And that happens because we invite them all the time. I'll put something out there and I open up, I give edit access to all my decks and stuff. like, hey, this isn't precious. This is just me wanting to get a start and getting my thoughts out. but I tend to say things in question format a lot. I use we a lot, actually probably reflexively at this point. I don't know if it's even healthy, but you know, like, what do we think? What should we do here? And then I also, when I do use an individual pronoun, it tends to be you, right? Like someone, so what just happened the other day, someone's like, here, we were debating these four options. And I said, well, here's the one that I like, but I also could go with what my other colleague thought, but guess what? you're the lead designer, so you get to own it at the end of the day. You just wanna be equipped with your perspective. So you can say, I designed a couple of options, I talked to some of my colleagues, we got some input, and here's what I think the strongest solution is for you. That is a really exceptional way to consult with a client. I I've often liked to say, my job is not to give you one great solution and two straw men that make you feel good, killing them off. It's like, I should give you three things that are awesome, and it's hard to choose. What's wrong with that? You got all the bang for your buck out of that. And we can talk about the strengths of them. And then my job, and this is one that tends to come with experience a little bit more, but being able to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of each design direction, I should say a design direction, in a way that's somewhat neutral, right? So this one does this well, this one does this other thing, this third one takes a middle path. And let's talk about that. And it helps tease out the business requirements and makes the stakeholders think about the design as is more than an application, Not like a software application, an applique, right? It's not just a surface you put on your business. It is your business, and it's going to be probably the primary way your customers interact with you. So there's lots of implications to that. And the more we can get them involved with thinking through them, the client thinking through some of those implications, the better. But that does mean that the designers feel like they're, you know, often we'll have one designer per direction and we have three. So everybody feels like they've got a horse in the race, right? But if they know I'm going to treat them all evenly and present them fairly to the client and take the feedback and come back and tell everyone how it went, here's how we're merging things. I know that feels weird. What do we do about it? And that those things are all input and the designers still own the response to that. I think it's super critical so that there's, they're not designing for Todd and they're not designing for the client. They're designing for the audience still. And they still have this agency to make the change. So it's based on the response and not a dictum that I might have. And I think I strayed a little bit on that answer, but yeah, how do you keep them engaged and all that, right? Yeah, it's funny. I started doing this during COVID. I had a friend of mine, I was in Minnesota at the time, which has a strong Scandinavian heritage. And there's this thing called, now I'm forget. What do we call it? I call it a cafe Zeno now because that's Brazilian. But anyway, there's there's a Swedish tradition of having a coffee hour with a friend and it's a coffee and a little treat in a conversation. You slow down and don't talk about work. And so we started doing that. Had it just had a it's like in all hands, but we're not talking about the business.

Pauline Bertry 33:31

the office.

Todd Zerger 33:32

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we just chat and we play games. There's this one called Sketchasaurus, which is hilarious. It's like Pictionary online. And one person draws over is furiously trying to guess what it is. And the sooner you guess the more

Pauline Bertry 33:44

Such a lovely game.

Todd Zerger 33:46

Yeah, it's a lot of fun. You know what? And it breaks down tons of barriers just to have 30 or 40 or 50 minutes together where we just laugh and talk about music or our kids or our pets or cycling or whatever it is that we do. It goes an incredible distance to making everyone feel like it's OK to bring their whole selves to the job. So I love that. So now my my team is a lot of them are in Brazil. So we renamed it Cafe Zino, which is the equivalent Brazilian tradition of hanging out and having a coffee. And we get together and just chat and play music or whatever we might do, which is a lot of fun for the cultural exchange, but just to make things break down barriers.

Pauline Bertry 34:23

But walk me through the setup because I know they physically in Brazil, you are in the US. So how does this work?

Todd Zerger 34:34

Yeah, it's definitely all remote. Although we're bringing some folks to Los Angeles from Brazil, we've got, think, five or six coming up for the Figma config in San Francisco. But you're right. one of my, you know, I know in your setup, you talk a little bit about like, what are your predictions? I don't have a crystal ball by any means, but I have seen design become democratized in a sense. and the workforce get diversified into other parts of the world, which is really exciting. At first it was, know, maybe it's probably still is it's there's a cost angle, right? So if you're running an agency and it needs to be profitable and you have to move this fast and your client is not live in California where the budgets support a California based team, you have to find a way to like right size the cost of the team. For a long time, we, you we would out, we would have offshore and near shore. And I think what has taken agencies a long time to realize is the impact in that decision well beyond the finances. The cultural norms that those teams bring are very different. Not bad or good, just really different. And you have to account for those. So I've had some experiences where the culture really needs you to break down the creative problem into a series of subtasks because they want to execute them. That's what the culture values. And so it's foolish and not very productive to try and run counter to that. What's been interesting about the team in Brazil is they're the reverse. They don't want a bullet list of things achieved. They want to understand the big picture. They want to contribute to the design. They have this very celebratory culture and also, I would say, very gentle at the same time. They take great care of each other. So you have to figure that out first, right? And when you're building a culture that you want people to be a part of, it can't be your culture. It has to be our culture, right? It has to be everyone's culture that we create. So the cafe is, you know, is the time to get together and it should happen all the time every day, right? But It's the moment where you, I use the word celebrate a lot. And it's not like it's a party all the time, but just honor maybe is another word, like the background that you have kids and we recognize each other. And, yeah, but Pat, of course you've got to go walk them every once in while. I don't expect you to be online 24 seven. So like, as we all learn that our lives are variable and rich and rewarding, and that's what contributes as much as anything else to our design. We learn to reward and celebrate and honor and enjoy those things in each other. And the minute you give someone else grace to go to the doctor's office or visit with their nephew or get their exercise, the more you carve out room for you to do it too. So it's a gift that sort of keeps giving as it were.

Pauline Bertry 37:06

Is the Cafe Zino like an everyday Zoom meeting where you guys connect and share

Todd Zerger 37:12

yeah, I should have.

Pauline Bertry 37:14

your stories? I love the concert so much. How did you organize it?

Todd Zerger 37:19

Yeah, it's mostly monthly. find that, you know, this is interesting when you talk about one-on-ones too, I often will start off by asking someone who reports to me how often they want to get together. Because some people it's like once a week, absolutely I need to keep in touch. And other people like every other week is fine. Some people are like, just touch base ad hoc when we need it, right? And so I think that's part of the culture too, is understanding that like, just because the calendar comes in days, doesn't mean that everybody operates according to the calendar. They have their own sort of biological rhythm for being connected to other people. And I think the Cafe Zino typically runs monthly. We're just getting started here in the past. I just remembered it's in Swedish. It's called a FIKA, F-I-K-A.

Pauline Bertry 38:05

Yeah, I was thinking if this is it or not, but I was not sure.

Todd Zerger 38:09

Yeah, yeah, I just slipped the word. But yeah, I was a good friend of mine when I was working at Sapient Nitro in Minneapolis, who brought this idea to my attention. And we did it with a team there. And I was like, wow, this is great. I'm going to just use this forever. And in any case, so yeah, monthly seems to be enough. we saw what we try to do is have it be like, often there's a theme or we'll play game, we'll get together and overtly talk about something that's not work. When we're starting out, we build a It's in FigJam, this one. So there's a card for each employee with their name and where they are. And then there's an opportunity for them to fill out like their hobbies or interests, you know, family, pets, kids, mood board on there. But when I introduced it, I say this is 100 % optional, right? Like you do not need to give up more about yourself than you're comfortable doing. And we're just getting to know each other. So I don't expect that to be a whole lot yet. But I find that over time, people contribute more. So I start out, I fill mine out completely and go, I'm trying to be as much of an open book as I can and share if you want and not if you don't. And so we start walking through some of them and then I find that more and more of them ahead of where I am are getting filled out. And we do this over time. So it's not a big rush. get, just get to know each other and introduce one another. And then when that process is taking place, which is a little bit like, you know, in a movie, especially a series, right? Like the first film is often about the sort of character development, right? Like who are these people that we're sort of gonna follow along their lives with? So the first couple of cafezinos are like that. And then sort of the action can come, right? Where we can play games together or sometimes it's a great venue for people who are earlier in their career and they want some presentation experience. It's a safe place for that because it's just internal, no clients I should add. In fact, not even a lot of leadership often it's just the design team. So if you wanna, you know, If you want to align an interest early on, AI was a good one where people were like, I'm interested in this thing about AI. I'd love to do some research and present to the team. So it's an excuse to follow a side interest, structure that however that person needs to do. They're filling in some growth gaps usually, like things that they want to get better at, and then presenting it to the team. The team can give feedback, and we archive that stuff right on the board so that you all can always go get it, see what it was, and be influenced by that. And then we did other things where it's like, let's just crack open mid journey and do like a design jam. Like, here's the problem. Let's all just make a thing and see what we get and then post it here. So there's lots of opportunities for having it be fun, like a kid's birthday party in a way. And then having that shared experience. And usually, know, 50, often I'll book them for an hour, but 50 minutes is probably people are starting to be done. So somewhere in the 45 to 50 minutes, that's.

Pauline Bertry 40:53

on coming up with their activities and stories and ideas.

Todd Zerger 40:59

I do it first because I think part of the big the job is really convincing people that they can let their guard down and just be in this moment. And it's not they're not being judged. I mean, yes, it goes into my mental file cabinet about everybody and how they perform as part of a team or not. And it comes up in like growth reviews and stuff in an abstract sense. But it's not a box I'm trying to take for anybody, which is why they can just sit and listen the whole time if that's how they want to participate in that in that time. But what I do look for is as soon as possible, how I can stop talking, because they hear a lot from me, and someone else can take the lead. So I who would love to lead the next one? you can all be the same person. You can have different tasks. But it would be great to have a playlist, or a theme, or a game, or a topic. And usually somebody's got something on their mind they would love to talk about or share about, and so they lead the next one.

Pauline Bertry 41:49

Ernest, and did you already have the one about AI?

Todd Zerger 41:53

Yes, this was at I guess I was at Razorfish for that one. it was a couple of five years ago, So AI was in the news, but it was still new enough that we're not sure what it meant yet. And so Indigo was her name, UX designer. She's like, I really want to understand sort of how this came about. So she just got to nerd out a little bit looking back at the history from 1952, I think is sort of the formal start, the penning of the idea. Yeah, I think so, because it was just post-war. I played with this a little bit too for an article. But in any case, she went back to some of the early roots and said, here's how we've gotten to this place. And then whatever the 20 of us that were on that call, all got that education. And she got to share. She got to do the research. It was a win-win, right? And the other thing that's interesting is when we talk about culture, knowledge and culture aren't the same thing. The culture is the knowledge that we all share, that we of maybe even co-discover at a point. Had we all gone out into Google and researched what AI is, we would have gotten probably 70 % overlap, right, in what that is. But there's some differences there. By having one person lead that and then share it with us, we have a shared understanding. And a lot of interpretation happens in that exchange. You can ask questions. Well, what does that mean? Like, what if we did this? Where is it going next? And it inspires someone else to take the ball and move it forward to the next interest, which is. Maybe they jumped off AI altogether and did something else, but it becomes organic and that to me is what makes it cultural.

Pauline Bertry 43:27

That's so true. always say that, I mean, I don't have the exact data, but there are multiple researchers that are proving that adults are learning through the conversation. So yes, of course you need to have like a practical element to it, but for adults to learn, you need to have an exchange, you need to have a conversation because this is what is creating. the actual lived experience around the topic. And that's how adults learn best. when a kid, like for them, it's just enough to like do a thing and they learn it. Like adults need a bit more of a like mental interaction with the subject in order to be able to understand and to kind of fully absorb it. So I like this example because it goes also into the, like how you grow the connection and the new skill set in the team at the same time.

Todd Zerger 44:25

Yeah, I totally agree with you. think it happened. I don't know when it starts, but I know children's brains are very plastic. And I've always thought about it as a puzzle. They're just sort of getting out of the box, finding the corners, similar colors. Everything works for them. Everything's meaningful. And as you're in your career by a couple of decades, you've got a lot of the puzzle built already. And the things that stick are the puzzle pieces you need next. So to the degree that you can have a culture that is flexible like that, everyone comes. with a different level of completion in their puzzle, their personal puzzle, and you're having this free exchange, they can find those pieces, or maybe the pieces sort of find themselves for them, right? And it sticks because it was the next one you needed. It won't be the same piece for everyone, right? I think that's sort of why conferences work so well. We keep going back to being in room with 500 people and a very inspirational speaker. We each take away sort of a different thing that inspired us based on where we are in our career, what piece was gonna be sort of meaningfully. propellant for us, right?

Pauline Bertry 45:25

Yeah, I love this element of like how you build. I mean, I think people are talking so much about building the culture, but I really love your examples of how very kind of practical things are making the culture live. that's just amazingly cool. But I wanted to ask you like, What would be your one best advice for anyone who is now building a culture in an agency space? What is one thing you think they should really put 80 % of their effort on?

Todd Zerger 46:08

Wow, that's a super interesting question. What jumps immediately to mind is that culture is emergent. And I did not coin that phrase and I can't quite tell you who did. In college, what interested me most along with design was cultural anthropology and sociology. So somewhere in there, I encountered this idea that culture is an emergent property. So it coalesces around the people that are in it rather than being imposed from outside. I think it was probably in anthropology, there's this idea that if you're an anthropologist, you can have an objective view of a culture that you're studying, but you can never have the same internal subjective view that they have. And if you're inside a culture, you can have that rich subjective understanding of the culture, but you can never extract yourself from that and have an objective view of it. So I think that's sort of the genesis of that idea for me. And I think then when you want to establish a culture, there's a lot of letting go involved. You have to be the catalyst as a leader. You have to want that and you have to make it important and you have to invest your time and interest in it. And then you have to make it okay for everyone to contribute. And then you have to let them do that. And if you prescribe how they contribute to the culture, I don't think it is a culture. It's something else. I don't know what that word is. But you have to just let them make it their own in a way. that's... That's always been the scariest part of the way I creative draft as well, because I don't know what I'm going to get. I've presented you with a challenge and I've given you ownership and I didn't draw it out. I'm so well, sometimes that's not true. Sometimes I give you a number of primer, right? But I really do want them to bring their own selves to the project. And so I want the same thing from the culture because they should feel like they own that too. So I would say the 80 % is be the catalyst for it, make it okay, but then let it emerge out of the team that you have. And then it will be authentic and sustainable. and people will want to continue to be part of it.

Pauline Bertry 48:02

I love it. I think it's an amazing closing thought. Yeah. Thank

Todd Zerger 48:06

Yeah, well that's good. Long as always.

Pauline Bertry 48:09

you so much. Thank you so much, Todd. I love the conversation and I learned so much from you.

Todd Zerger 48:14

it's my pleasure. enjoyed it too. We should keep going. There's a lot of great meaty topics that we talked for days.

Pauline Bertry 48:18

Amazing. Thank you so much.

Todd Zerger 48:18

and good luck with the series.