Amelia Johnson, a User Experience Researcher at the University of Exeter, recently hosted a workshop at Cambridge University’s LeanHE conference.
Lean is a way of working or thinking which considers what is the most value we can provide a user with the lowest amount of effort, meaning we can continuously experiment to ensure we provide the most value to the user over time.
This blog post shares some of Amelia’s reflections from the event, discussing whether the language used really matters when using a Lean working approach.
I attended my first LeanHE conference on 23-25 October 2024 hosted by Cambridge University. The theme of the conference was āSustainability in Lean: Bridging innovation and traditionā and the agenda was jam-packed with activities and discussions around this topic.
As well as attending the conference, I also hosted a workshop with Alice Trethewey, Director of HEdways Group. Our session was called āMadness to our Methodsā and examined similarities and differences between Lean Thinking and other methods with the goal of exploring the synergies and sustainability of Lean Thinking in the sector. Over 30 people came to the workshop and it sparked some great conversations about methods and language around change.
Throughout the conference, I met some amazing people in similar roles across Higher Education and came away with a whole notebook of notes to help me navigate the following months of problem-solving!
Here are some of my reflections..
Itās all about the language!
Being new to Lean as an approach, I found that some language can be daunting. But, when you break it down, the words used are just new terms for techniques I have already been using anyway! Make sure to use words that make sense to you and your organisation, even if that means not mentioning a process or method at all!
Discontinuous Improvement
David Hall from The Ideas Centre Ltd gave a great session on creativity techniques, how the brain recognises patterns and how we need to break those to be truly innovative. This has been really helpful when trying to truly innovate in order to solve wicked problems.
Service Design at City St George’s
The team at City St Georges presented their use of service design, with some pretty impressive maps that spanned the whole room! Thank you to Jordan Nickel, Kate Mather, Pia Chaffey and Gemma Bergomi for an incredible session. It was a huge inspiration to me as someone who is moving into the service design space, and has given me lots to think about in my current projects.
Three months on, I have been able to apply some of these learnings to my everyday work. When Iām working with teams outside of this world of digital transformation and change, itās so important that I donāt alienate people by using unfamiliar terms or finding ways to explore complicated problems so we can start solving them. I’m looking forward to the next one!
– Written by Amelia Johnson, User Experience Researcher
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