A Conversation with MURAL’s CEO Mariano Suarez-Battan and the IBM team that’s using MURAL everyday.
With MURAL, see what we MEAN
Design thinking is not new. It’s been in practice as “human-centered design” for years as organizations, particularly large enterprises, embarked on the journey of building innovative organizations. In the age of innovation, it’s not just startups that can move at the speed of innovation. Many large organizations have figured out how to adapt swiftly to changes, manage large global teams around constant change, and capitalize on disruptions. This is all partially due to integrating “design thinking”.
In a Harvard Business Review article, Jeanne Liedtka, professor of business administration at the University Virginia’s Darden School of Business, presents, “Design thinking can be for innovative organizations what total quality management did for manufacturing….Design-thinking processes counteract human biases that thwart creativity while addressing the challenges typically faced in reaching superior solutions, lowered costs and risks, and employee buy-in.”
It’s now possible for anyone in the company to become an innovator. You no longer need to wait for an “Innovation Team” to come along. Everyone has the capacity to invent solutions. Innovation is not just for design or technology teams. Innovation can happen in any area. Anyone from any department in the company can use the design thinking process to innovate.
Recently, we’ve all been working remotely due to the coronavirus, and many of us are adapting to this disruption as best as we can. Companies that are prepared for this remote working trend are taking this opportunity to refine their remote work practices. Many collaborative organizations that are used to innovating at the speed of light integrated design thinking practices into their organizations. But, not all companies practiced these types of collaborative working styles with remote working employees.
This is why MURAL, a software company that is integrating design thinking into remote work to enable teams to collaborate both synchronously and asynchronously, is seeing a rapid climb in the number of signups for their platform since we started the remote work trend.
Daily sign-ups between January 1, 2020 - March 30, 2020
Daily sign-ups between January 1, 2020 - March 30, 2020
Large technology companies such as IBM, Intuit, and E-trade are using MURAL as a visual collaboration tool to enable employees from different functions such as designers, product managers, software developers, accounts, etc. to collaborate seamlessly. Today, 40% of Fortune 100 global enterprises are using MURAL. When the remote work trend started, these companies saw even more value using MURAL.
When Imagination Workers Work Remotely
At the heart of an innovative organization are the imagination workers. Imagination workers are people who are using their creativity to work across the organization. Many employees such as designers, developers, and product managers have components of their jobs that require them to take on the role of the imagination worker. But, imagination workers who are working with clients that span many organizations such as strategy consultants, coaches, and facilitators find mandatory remote work to be especially hard.
When we work remotely, what we are concerned about are the imagination workers. Workers that use visuals to come up with possibilities and solutions. They collaborate with people from different disciplines. Designs, developers and product managers use MURAL. But, strategy consultants, coaches, facilitators also use MURAL.
At the heart of these remote worker’s day to day jobs is face to face interactions. These imagination workers are people who thrive on brainstorming ideas, understanding client’s needs, and visually collaborating their thought processes.
This is why in the mandatory remote work environment, every imagination worker will need a visual tool such as MURAL. MURAL acts as an interactive whiteboard where conference members can input their ideas and share information as if they are standing shoulder to shoulder in front of the same whiteboard.
With audio and video, you understand from listening to each other. Inside MURAL, you see what people mean.
Imagination Workers Use Design Thinking That Is The Cornerstone of Innovation
Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that allows for more creative and innovative solutions to emerge. It is based on the process of empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. The imagination worker can be at any part of a company, from entry-level to CEO. The company can be as large as an enterprise or as small as a startup. Alternatively, this imagination worker can be a one-person entrepreneur, a consultant or a freelancer. No matter the size of the company, the imagination worker can iterate their best ideas through design thinking and come up with solutions that will best solve problems.
IBM is one of the pioneering enterprises that use enterprise design thinking as its framework to collaborate, align teams and form the intent to solve business problems. The result is a large innovative organization where everyone’s inspired and supported to contribute the most value as an imagination worker. In the era of innovation, every employee has the potential to take on the role of an imagination worker during a project — design thinking simply nurtures the imagination worker’s creative process.
Using MURAL, IBM’s natural language processing team can iterate through many innovations to better serve clients across the globe.
In our team, we have two dimensions where we use MURAL: 1) one is enterprise design thinking 2) the other is for development, and especially for development of machine learning models. Our team works in the Natural Language Processing domain. The most important part in any of our projects is to understand the domain. Understanding the data is first and foremost and you need to talk to the business to see how you can actually work with that data. We found the sweet spot of using MURAL in this area, to use it to understand the domain concepts
Even before the movement toward remote work, IBM’s teams used MURAL in conference rooms in front of a whiteboard.
This is not strictly reduced to remote work. We also use MURAL sitting together in a room with a whiteboard. Everyone was contributing and making their contributions understood by everyone else in the meeting. It’s powerful because when you are done with the meeting, everyone’s heard, meetings are shorter, and you have all your documentation done.
When everyone started to work remotely, there was not much disruption to the existing teamwork. A computational linguist on the IBM’s NLP team regularly uses MURAL for annotating speech concepts. She saw the benefits of MURAL early.
We have to speak to subject matter experts all the time in our work. Just being able to sit together and have them input their thinking all together and we simply support their way of thinking by rearranging aspects of the workflow, it speeds up the entire process of knowledge sharing between the SMEs and us. We don’t send data around anymore waiting for feedbacks from the SMEs.
Data Science and Machine Learning Projects Need MURAL
The nature of data science and machine learning projects across the enterprise lend themselves especially well to the use of MURAL. Often, whether it’s enterprises or startups, data science and machine learning projects need to pool together resources cross-functionally. These projects often have a big impact on the company’s bottom line. It’s simply much easier to use design thinking from the beginning to obtain buy-in from stakeholders and gather requirements that truly align with the business.
The whole trustworthiness of your machine learning pipeline at the end is understandable from the beginning. That’s the main benefit of using MURAL and design thinking starting at the beginning of your machine learning project. This was something that was difficult to achieve before we started using MURAL.
Working cross-functionally, there’s often a knowledge barrier. Domain expertise is often acquired throughout the years and is reinforced by specific domain language that people in other functions have trouble understanding immediately. But, many concepts are often similar from one discipline to the next. For instance, an IT security professional might talk about endpoint management as endpoints of devices to be managed, a manufacturing quality assurance manager talks about endpoint management as endpoints of production plants that need to be managed. They can sometimes even share the same vocabulary but mean different things.
Using MURAL, people who have different domain expertise can draw parallels between conceptual ideas and pinpoint differences in their vocabulary and come to a mutual understanding.
Most of the use cases that we apply NLP for require a lot of conceptual or design thinking. Every use case is different because you have different domains. With every domain, you are speaking a different language with the user. Before you start to implement an NLP pipeline, you have to think about what kind of data you need. MURAL helps us and the users to speak the same domain language.
Many data science and machine learning projects are global projects. In enterprises, when domain expertise might lay in different regions of the world, collaboration becomes a necessity. Efficient collaboration means taking account of time zone difficulties and cultural differences in the way we work.
MURAL enables a kind of asynchronous work away from the conference environment where imagination workers in different time zones can contribute their ideas on their own time. Then, once everyone has an overview of everyone else’s ideas, they can come together for productive discussions and come up with the best solutions. As the team members of the NLP team at IBM found out most often, the best solution is apparent to everyone on the team once all the ideas are reviewed.
The creative process can flow naturally in conjunction with productivity.
It also works in an asynchronous way. In MURAL, you can kick off the project together. Global teams, like what we have, can go off and input their ideas during their time zones, contribute ideas, and split up the work. Then, we all come back to synchronize and discuss what everyone’s discoveries are. The best solution is then often apparent right in front of all of us.
In the age of innovation, while enterprises are trying to make the best use of design thinking to build agile organizations that can withstand disruptions such as the current pandemic, MURAL will likely become an essential part of these innovative organizations. The current remote working environment simply brought all the benefits of using it to the forefront.
