Episode 5: Design Thinking and Public Value with Lisa Baxter

Written By Patternmakers

How can design thinking help cultural institutions deliver greater social value?

In Episode 5 Tandi is joined by Lisa Baxter, founder of The Experience Business, for a deep dive on qualitative research, customer empathy and social purpose. We talk about how to facilitate meaningful conversations between arts organisations and communities, and how that insight can inform everything from our brand values, to our programming, marketing communications, and engagement programs.

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Guests

Lisa Baxter

Lisa Baxter FRSA is the founder/director of The Experience Business, working nationally and internationally in supporting the design of optimal audience experiences.

A pioneer in her field, and an avowed audience champion, Lisa uses innovative facilitative and qualitative research methods to help arts organisations conceive, articulate, design and understand their experiential value propositions. She is increasingly in demand as a speaker on the subject of audience experience design, including keynotes at the Australia Council for the Arts Marketing Summit (2013), the City Cape Town Arts and Cultural Indaba (2015) and the Federation of Scottish Theatres (2017) and the up and coming Connected Audiences Conference in Vienna. Lisa has also guest lectured at the Universities of Leeds, Groningen (Netherlands) and Deakin University, (Melbourne).

A specialist in researching audience and customer experience, she has collaborated with the University of Sheffield on an AHRC/ACE funded programme around innovative methods of enquiry into the audience experience and is published on the subject.

Clients include the National Football Museum (Manchester), the Swiss Science Centre (Zurich), Rockhampton Art Gallery (Queensland, Australia), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead), Imperial War Museum North (Salford) and the National Coal Mining Museum for England (Wakefield).

Key points

This episode covers:

  • Why audience experience is at the core of why organisations receive public funding

  • How qualitative research puts the humanity into research and why it’s a good idea to have arts professionals sit in on research groups

  • The techniques that arts professionals can use to more intensely explore the audience experience

  • How the gap between booking a ticket and seeing a show can be used to create greater audience value

  • How arts organisations develop their customer knowledge, customer empathy and audience sensibility

  • The five-step process of Design Thinking that organisation can apply

  • How arts organisations can find their core purpose through conversation, art and creativity exercises

  • Why thinking about extracting value from the market is the putting the cart before the horse

  • Why arts organisations should ‘do their homework’ about what’s going on in their communities

  • How arts organisations can understand their operating context and the aspirations of their visitors

Links

Key resources mentioned in the episode:

  • The Experience Business - a strategic insight consultancy with a pioneering approach to audience and business development

  • Experience Design (UXD, UED or XD) - practice of designing products, processes, services, events, omnichannel journeys, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience and culturally relevant solutions

  • Leeds Grand Theatre – a theatre and opera house in Leeds, UK

  • Warwick Arts Centre - one of the largest multi-artform venues in the UK

  • Market Research Society - the UK professional body for research, insight and analytics

  • Arts Council England - Set up in 1946 to champion and develop art and culture across the country

  • Arts and Humanities Research Council - promotes and channels research that provides insights into ourselves and the nature of the world around us

  • Russell Willis-Taylor – former President and CEO of National Arts Strategies

  • Design Thinking - the cognitive, strategic and practical processes by which design concepts (proposals for new products, buildings, machines, etc.) are developed

  • Human-Centred Design (HCD) - an approach to problem solving, commonly used in design and management frameworks that develops solutions to problems by involving the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process

  • Customer Experience Management (CXM) - management of customer interactions through each physical and digital touchpoint in order to deliver personalized experiences that drive brand loyalty and increase revenue

  • Customer Journey Mapping - technique using storytelling and visuals to illustrate and understand what motivates customers

  • Personas - a fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar wa

  • Rich Pictures - a mechanism for learning about complex or ill-defined problems by drawing detailed ("rich") representations of them

  • Kinaesthetic Tools – methods that use physical activities rather than solely listening

  • Mind Map - a diagram used to visually organize pieces of information about a single concept

  • The Experience Economy - a company intentionally uses services and goods to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event

  • Charrette – an intense period of collaborative design or planning activity

  • Arts Marketing Association Conference – a conference exploring what connection really means for audiences, partners and colleague to ensure organisatons thrive

  • IDEO – an organisation helping to advance the practice of human-centred design and create change through design

  • The Design Thinking Playbook - an actionable guide that helps individuals, teams, and organizations Apply design thinking tools and methods in the right context—especially to digital products and services

  • Systems Thinking - the ability or skill to perform problem solving in complex system

  • Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse – two theatre venues, the Everyman and the Playhouse, located in Liverpool

  • Octogon Theatre Bolton – a theatre located in Bolton

  • Arts Marketing Association – Association that helps people working in the arts and culture sector reach more audiences

 

All episodes

Transcript

Tandi:                   Welcome to the podcast, Lisa.

Lisa Baxter:     Thank you, Tandi. It's good to be here.

Tandi:                 Let's talk about where all of this started for you, I want to go back into the past of your career and hear a little bit about what inspired you to go down this path, and a little bit about your story so far.

Lisa Baxter:     How far back do you want me to go?

Tandi:                Where does it start in your mind?

Lisa Baxter:      It started when I was 14. I went to see Henry V at Leeds Grand Theatre on a school trip, and I'd never been to the theatre before. I'd never been and experienced Shakespeare before, and I didn't actually understand a lot of the words that were being said, but it was like a depth charge, it was profound, the experience of that on me, the language and the colour and the sounds and everything around that. It was then that I decided that this was something that I had to be involved with in my life.

Lisa Baxter:      Then I joined a youth theatre thinking that I could be an actress, and then realised that I would make a dismal actress. I'm terrible at acting, but I did do drama A-level, I did do drama at university, and then had some fallen years where I worked in a completely unrelated business. I then decided to come back and try and get a job in the business side of the arts, that's when I joined Warwick Arts Centre, which was the biggest arts centre in the country, next to the South Bunk, I think at the time. I lasted there about five years, and that was my one and only, long term, professional, paid for, full time employment, job in the arts, and it killed me.

Tandi:                Do tell.

Lisa Baxter:      I think a lot of people that go into arts marketing, or they are going into the arts - we're all very passionate about the arts, and we all know that it's one of these things that can be transformative because most of us have had that experience. But after five years of working in a very good arts centre, I mean it had a concert hall and a theatre, a studio theatre, a contemporary art gallery, an independent cinema, so I cut my teeth on marketing in lots of different kinds of work. I learnt my business skills there, and it was a great training ground, but I didn't get the sense that the audience really mattered.

Lisa Baxter:      For some reason, that really got to me, and I decided two things both at the same time. One was I wanted to start a family, and two, there had to be another way. My husband got a job and I said, "Right, you got a really good job now, I'm going to get pregnant and start a business." He was like, "All right then," so that's what started me on my freelance career, and I've been freelance ever since.

Lisa Baxter:      I guess what I've been trying to do for the last 20-odd years is try and fill in the gaps. After learning a lot at Warwick Arts Centre about the way that things are done, it was time to look at the negative space and think about what might be possible. One of the first things I looked at was training in qualitative research, to really try and understand how real people are experiencing the work, the reasons why they went, what they took away from that experience.

Lisa Baxter:      I spent a lot of time, and I found some mentors, and I joined the Market Research Society, and I was very diligent in developing my craft, but it was interesting that there wasn't a lot of demand for it. There is still an institutional lack of curiosity about audience experience. It's as if the audience experience was a by-product of the art, and that the art is what everybody is about, when actually my personal philosophy is that the reason why people are funded to put on the arts is to deliver experiences for human beings. That is the product, and the art and your brand and your buildings and your staff serve that end.

Lisa Baxter:      I didn't make a lot of money doing that, but fortunately, I got involved in a research project with three universities funded through Arts Council England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which was trying to find innovative, new ways of researching the audience experience of the arts. I think for me, that was formative because it got me to a whole different level using techniques that I'd never used before, that went beyond just pure dialogue techniques.

Lisa Baxter:      The stuff that came out was quite remarkable, and it was a real privilege to be able to delve into people's lives and really find out firsthand their experience of arts, but there was still no demand for it from the sector. I wracked my brains and I thought, "Okay, what can I do next?" I thought, "Maybe if I developed a facilitative capacity, I would be able to facilitate the results and get people to understand the meaning of all this research." I went back to my original mentor, a wonderful woman called Caroline Piquel, who I'm still in touch with, and she sponsored me to go to an innovation gathering that happens every year in Canada, and I've been going ever since, working with the world's top creative facilitators and innovation consultants, and really just finding new ways of getting people to shift perspective.

Lisa Baxter:      It's not about being clever, it's not about being a consultant, it's not about telling people what to do, it really is about helping people realise for themselves possibility, because that's the only way that they will make anything happen. Now I had my two brand new skills, I had qualitative research on the one hand, creative facilitation on the other, and did anybody want it? No.

Tandi:                Still no.

Lisa Baxter:     There I was, an expert in things that nobody in the arts and cultural sector wanted, and I was very busy doing marketing and audience development and branding, but the stuff that I felt was really important, there was literally no demand for. I just got really despondent about that, but I didn't let it get me down. Then I was at an event, I'm just looking at what you've got there, Tandi, like little things to promote the conversation, you put "pivotal moments", there was a conference about 10 years ago, and Russell Willis-Taylor was talking at the conference.

Lisa Baxter:     She quoted Warren Buffett, and she said, "And Warren Buffett said, 'Price is what you pay, value is what you get.'" It was like everything fell in place, everything, and I thought, "Bloody hell, that's what it's about." The problem with the arts is that it doesn't focus on developing value, because it thinks it is intrinsically valuable. I saw a need to do something about this, so I spent about a year reading widely and looking at what other people were doing outside of the arts sector, because most of the stuff that I've brought into my practise certainly hasn't been from within the arts sector.

Lisa Baxter:     I came across things like Design Thinking, which is an ethos around new products and service development also known as Human-Centred Design, so it's about creating value propositions for real people, based on an empathic understanding of their needs. I brought that into my little stable, and then I looked at Customer Experience Management, which looked at the importance of emotion, and how emotion is a really important factor in the value attribution of a person's experience, but also triggering them to want an experience.

Lisa Baxter:     I came across tools like Customer Journey Mapping, which is where you walk in the shoes of your customer, of your user, of your visitor or your audience member, and you experience what you have to offer from their perspective. Developing personas, which is about taking away the tic boxes and the stereotypes that funders tend to get arts organisations to look at, and really create their own typologies of the types of people you have coming to your institutions or want to come but aren't coming, but in a way that isn't just that they're black, ethnic minority, or hard to reach or impoverished, or whatever the labels are, but really looking at them as human beings.

Lisa Baxter:     I kind of went underground for a year, just doing enough work that it was possible to keep me and the family going. Then I emerged as The Experience Business in 2012, and I remember the website going live, and I sat at my desk and I went, "Flip." I didn't really say flip, but you know what I mean. "Flip," I said, sort of, "Nobody wants what I'm doing, what am I going to do next?" Thankfully I'm still here.

Tandi:                I know that you did some Design Thinking in that year, I'm sure. Today your services are very much wanted. I want to talk a little bit about some of those techniques that you mentioned, just because I think we've probably all heard of them at times, but I think it's probably a good opportunity to ask you a little bit more. Can you talk about what qualitative research means to you, why that captured your interest? Then I'd love to hear a little bit more about Design Thinking and some of the facilitation things you've learned as well, but let's start with the qual.

Lisa Baxter:     You see, for me, you are what you measure. The problem is that people are measuring all kinds of things that actually don't really matter to human beings. Everything that we're measuring is there to appease the funders and the policymakers, but they're not actually really there to deliver value for the people in communities that every arts organisation is funded to support. The wonderful thing about qualitative research is it puts the humanity back into a profession that we're passionate about, and for me that's absolutely fundamental.

Lisa Baxter:     When I sit down with a group of people to talk to them about their experience of art, it is a huge privilege, but it's also a great sadness to me that when they sit there, they have such a wonderful time and they thank me at the end, and they go, "Oh Lisa, thank you so much. So much came out that I hadn't really thought about, and you're taking me deeper into the experience, and you've really made me think about it in a different way. I've got much more out of it now than I would've done if I hadn't have had the conversation."

Lisa Baxter:     Here's the thing, qualitative research is important for, I'm not going to give you the number of reasons because I'm going to make them up on the spot, but qualitative research is important for reason number one, it enables you to tap into the humanity of your marketplace. Number two, it gives real value and benefit to the people that are being interviewed, and if you've done it well it's not an interview, it's a conversation. It actually gives them an opportunity to critically engage with the experience that they've had, if it's done well.

Lisa Baxter:     Three, it brings the thing that matters the most alive, so that people can focus on the invisible stuff, thoughts, feelings, emotions, embodied experiences, all the stuff that remain hidden. When I talk to artistic directors or artists and I say, "How do you know if the work's landed in the way that you wanted?" they'll say, "Oh, it's the atmosphere in the room," which is a load of rubbish, because that doesn't tell you enough. The atmosphere in the room is great for a little litmus test of the collective experience, but what about the real human stories?

Lisa Baxter:     For the first few years where I was conducting qualitative research, I was very protective of my craft because I've invested a lot of time, a lot of my own money into becoming "the expert". Now what I'm doing is, I've gone 'round the other way and I'm trying to get people to let me train them to do their own research. Because the problem that I find now is that I'm creating reports for the clients to read, so the goodness is at one remove, and the client is not having that transformative conversation with the audience that will fire up the passion in the arts professionals that is dying by inches at the moment.

Lisa Baxter:     When I do have arts professionals in my research groups, and I think I'm absolutely fine with that, and a lot of researchers think it's a bad idea, I don't necessarily think that's the case, they come away enlightened. Now I run courses, and again, they're not in demand, again, something that is not wanted within the sector but I feel is absolutely crucial, is to help arts professionals have meaningful conversations with their audiences and visitors to develop their customer knowledge, their customer empathy, their audience sensibility in order to connect them with their passion and really understand the value of what they're doing, so that's qualitative research.

Tandi:                I hear you, I'm just nodding and thinking, "Yes." There's nothing like sitting in a focus group or an interview and experiencing at firsthand the texture of what people are saying and their body language. As a focus group facilitator, whenever the client asks, "Can I observe?" Part of me thinks, "Is that going to change the quality of conversation we can have, if the person participating knows that the client's there, will they be able to speak up?" The benefit so outweighs the cons, don't they?

Lisa Baxter:     Absolutely, and it's about the framing of the session. As long as you make a joke with them and say, "I've got them a packet of tissues if they start crying, don't worry about them, just look at me, just tell me exactly how you think and feel about these things." Also, after a while if you're moderating a group, they forget that the other people are in the room, and that's the skill of the moderator within the group. The other thing is, in the core research I do around audience experience, some of it is dialogue-based, but I do other things to try and tap into the subconscious, because a lot of the experience of the arts resides there and will remain there unless you're able to coax it out.

Lisa Baxter:     When I'm able to coax out those deeper experiences, the stuff that hasn't yet reached conscious thought, they look at the words that come out of their mouths and like, "My God, did I really say that? I would've never have thought that, but that's really what happened when I was in the room watching that performance." Things like rich pictures or metaphor work, or guided visualisations, all kinds of techniques that get people out of the left side of their brains, and really using kinaesthetic tools where they're moving their bodies and moving from left brain to right brain activity, to really unearth some of the deep stuff like where they felt an experience.

Lisa Baxter:     When I was researching experience of contemporary classical music, the audience that came from a classical background and had moved into contemporary music listened in their heads, because what they wanted to do was to understand the form of the music and relate it back compositionally to how they understand how classical music is created. For them, anything that was improvisatory they didn't understand, so they didn't like that kind of music because they couldn't process it.

Lisa Baxter:     Then there were people who were more visceral, and they felt with their bodies. They talked a lot metaphorically, and they felt the music more in the sense of their bodies, and it was more an emotional, rich kind of kinaesthetic engagement with the music that then took their imagination off to different places, so their imagination and their visceral reactions were tied into each other. Then there was a small group of people who only chose one or two events, but these were really important, like the Frank Zappa event, and this was about identity.

Lisa Baxter:     For them, it was about sitting there and being a Frank Zappa fan, and for them it was experienced like a kind of glow and an aura. These things happen all the time, and it may sound fussy, it may sound a bit woo-woo, but it so isn't because that is what happens when people experience art. If we don't bring that to the table, it will be lost, and that's the only reason why we exist as a sector, is to make those experiences happen.

Tandi:                When you worked with someone to experience this in a group or in a conversation, what kinds of benefits do you think exist for the arts professional to really explore the audience experience much more deeply like this? What kinds of things does that spark for some of the people that you've worked with?

Lisa Baxter:     Just think about a marketing person, so they usually come out of university, they'll get their first job, they're full of ideas, they're passionate about the arts. They'll go into a marketing department and really try to change the world, and get more people to enjoy something that they're passionate about, and then they're told how to write a direct mail letter, they're told how to do social media, and they're told which people to target, and all that imagination and creativity and positivity after a while can get stamped out of them.

Lisa Baxter:     When I bring these people in, when I bring younger marketing people or younger members of staff in, they suddenly realise why they're doing it, they understand their mojo, they've reconnected with it. What they realise is that the copy that they write probably isn't the kind of copy that these audiences might want to hear, because the copy isn't usually written from an artistic perspective, rather than an experiential one. Also, they get to understand that what they're doing is a good thing.

Lisa Baxter:     Now, when I get people from the artistic teams involved, they kind of go, "I knew that anyway," but they didn't. What would happen is that they'd say, "Oh yes, that kind of resonates with what I wanted for this show," but you can tell deep down that they're either quietly pleased or a little bit disturbed by some of the things that the audience are saying. Every time someone listens to an audience talking about their work, they reconnect with what it is that they're doing.

Lisa Baxter:     Depending on the nature of the questions, it can inform the brand, it can inform marketing communications, it can inform programming, designing engagement initiatives, because at the end of the day, all of these things are either about selling or creating and managing experiences for audiences. It's really important that we understand how those experiences come about and how they unfold, and it could bring a whole new vocabulary. It cuts the clichés, because people are talking about experiences in their own words, and it brings a whole new vocabulary to the table.

Tandi:                Let's just stay with the craft a little bit longer. I want to know a little bit about how you analyse or interpret qualitative data, because sometimes I hear someone say, "But that's only the view of one person," and, "Don't we need a survey to understand what more people think?" What does your process look like in terms of what happens after the group? How do you go about analysing and interpreting and turning that into something useful and meaningful?

Lisa Baxter:     Say it's a piece of work around audience experience. You have your recording, like you're recording this podcast, and then I'll have lots of creative material that they've produced. There'll be photographs of metaphor cards, the metaphor cards is like a deck of random images, and they're asked to select the images that for them evoke a dimension of the experience of the work. Then what they're invited to do is to explore the metaphor and what that metaphor means for them, which we do get some very, very rich language. Then there may be some timelines or some rich pictures, where they get to draw pictures themselves and free associate and really start delving, so I don't just have the recordings.

Lisa Baxter:     When it comes to recordings, I partially transcribe them. Say I have eight people in the room, I create a spreadsheet, but I hand write the spreadsheets, so I have a long roll of paper, and then I collect all the themes in all the different areas of the elements of the questioning, and I tie the themes across the different responders to see what rises to the surface. Those become the key themes in the elements of the conversation, and those are put into the report. Where there are pictures and metaphors, those get put into the report as illustrative, and I also have a thing called a thought dump.

Lisa Baxter:     What tends to happen when you're facilitating research is that you're so busy having the conversation that you're not really analysing what they're saying. I think it's really important, even though it takes a little bit of time, is to re-listen to the tapes in full. Whilst I'm partially transcribing, something will occur to me, and so I write it down in the thought dump, and it's usually a mind map. That's where the goodness is, that's the stuff that emerges in the moments that you can't recapture later on, and I pour all those together into the reports.

Lisa Baxter:     My reports are normally PowerPoints, and they're very, very visual. They're very light on my words, very rich on the words of the people in the room, and I simply pull out the key themes, so whether it's useful. That's what I do.

Tandi:                Tell me where Design Thinking comes in, and some of the new kind of techniques that you're working with.

Lisa Baxter:     Design Thinking is a five-step process where say, for example, Apple say, "You know what? We are going to develop a handheld device." They've already done it, what do people need from that? We need to empathise with what's going on with the mobile phone market at the moment, and how we can add value to that. The first stage in Design Thinking is you have to empathise with the user. The second stage is you define what the problem is. The third stage is you ideate, meaning develop solutions to the problem. The fourth stage is you prototype those ideas to get proof of concepts and refine them, before taking them to market.

Lisa Baxter:     Really easy steps, it's a no brainer. In some respects, lots of artists work in that way too. The empathy stage is inspiration, the define stage is coming up with a creative idea, the ideation stage is devising the work, prototyping stage, some artists do test their ideas with others and prototype their ideas before taking their work to market. The two are completely complementary, except one is unashamedly about selling product, Design Thinking, and the other one is about creating art, but they are complementary.

Lisa Baxter:     The thing I liked about Design Thinking was that we could use this to create brand experiences, and really think about holistic experiences for audiences. At the moment, what tends to happen is we have arts institutions that house art, and they still look like arts institutions looked 150, 200 years ago. They've still got all the same ingredients, they're just a little bit flashier, most of the rituals are still the same whether it's a museum or whether it's a theatre, so they haven't really innovated. The business models haven't really innovated, customer service hasn't really innovated, it's all doing catch up.

Lisa Baxter:     Online selling, not innovated, all these things, we're so far behind what is going on in other sectors of the marketplace. When I was looking outside of the arts and reading up on the Experience Economy, which is where the arts sits, and how Design Thinking was being taken on to design experiences for people, I thought, "This is what I can bring." The beauty of Design Thinking is it is a facilitated process, "Oh, and I'm a facilitator," and also in the empathy stage, you need to understand your customers. "Oh, I'm a qualitative researcher, I could help people do that," so it brought together two of the skills that I'd hard won the previous 20 years.

Lisa Baxter:     That's what I started to do, was to work with organisations to look either holistically or tactically at elements of their audience experience and find ways to design and develop them in order to bring value back into the business. Here's the philosophy behind it, is at the moment in the arts, the emphasis is on extracting value from the market. What tends to happen is that, especially the bigger arts institutions are literally trying to expunge as much value from the market either at footfall, if they're visitors, spend on sight, selling tickets, as they can to contribute to their bottom line, and those are their business needs.

Lisa Baxter:     It focuses them onto a particular relationship with their audience, which is the audience value to them, which is an incredibly selfish relationship, when actually what needs to happen is they need to focus on their value to the audience. At the moment, what they're still doing is saying, "Well actually, we're very valuable because the art is intrinsically valuable, and all we need to do is to house it, and people should come. If they don't, we'll use audience development and outreach, and all kinds of insidious things like dynamic pricing to get as much out of them as we possibly can."

Lisa Baxter:     That's where the mission creep sets in. My mantra is, "You cannot extract value from your market without designing that value in the first place." The work that I do is front end work helping arts and cultural organisations optimise and innovate around the value propositions that they offer their audiences. It could be the in-house experience around the venue, it could be around capital developments of new buildings, garden exhibition design, online fundraising, I've even used it for fundraising, I've used it for all kinds of things.

Lisa Baxter:     I'm now beginning to apply it to rural touring as well, so as a methodology it can be applied to a lot of things, but it comes with a warning. The warning is, the problem with Design Thinking is that because it's based on consumer empathy and fast design, it too can lead to mission creep. I take a step back and I work on organisations first on their core purpose, like the Pilates for business, and if they don't have their core purpose, this shiny new toy called Design Thinking could end up taking them down a rabbit hole.

Lisa Baxter:     It's really important that they understand who they are, what they stand for, what their values are, how and why they want to matter as an organisation, and then the Design Thinking process can flow from that. Does that make sense to you?

Tandi:                It does, I want to hear more about this core purpose. How do you know if you've got a strong core or not, if you haven't been to Pilates class?

Lisa Baxter:     Here's the thing, and this is the thing about being self-employed, I've worked with over 50, 60, maybe perhaps even 70 organisations, so I kind of have this overview based on all the people I've worked with around the world, not just in the UK. When I say, "Tell me what your mission is," it's something like, "We want to be the leading blah that creates the best high-quality blah to give people lots of blah," and it's all interchangeable. They sound exactly the same, and it's got nothing to do with where they are situated.

Lisa Baxter:     Then I say, "What are your values?" I kid you not, you know those fridge magnet poetry sets that you get, where you put the words on the fridge and you can make poems out of the words? I can probably create one of arts values, let's have a think, what have we got? Chip in if you can think of some, Tandi, there's innovation, quality, diversity, inclusivity, equality, trust, what else is there?

Tandi:                Risk, ask first.

Lisa Baxter:     Yes. Do you know, and again, they're all incredibly worthy and well-intentioned words, but they mean absolutely nothing if they haven't been grounded in context. When I do core purpose work with organisations, I work with them to figure out and be able to talk through this narrative. This is the world that we operate in, so let's say the world is Bendigo, this is Bendigo, "This is the world that we're operating, and these are the trends and forces that are impacting on this world from the global to the hyper-local. Because of this, this is what it's like to live here. People are feeling this or doing that, and their aspirations are this, and their challenges are that."

Lisa Baxter:     They develop a worldview that isn't about them, they develop a worldview about the people and communities they serve. Next, because this is happening in the world that we operate in, these are our values, and the values are grounded, they come from the bottom up. They might still be about access and inclusion and diversity, but they write them in their own words, and they have a grounded backstory, which makes them authentic. Then I have a conversion exercise which is a lot of fun, which is where they turn these values into behaviours and actions, statements of intent.

Lisa Baxter:     Those have impacts on the very world that they described, and that is their cause. It just so happens that the way that they do it is through art and creativity, but what they are, are civic agents. That's what I do.

Tandi:                Fascinating. Is this something that can be done in a day, and then it's done?

Lisa Baxter:     Yeah, it can be done in a day, it's better if it's not. Interestingly, I did write a programme funded through Australia Council for the Arts looking at audience engagement in remote and rural Australia. This was, I think, 2015, 2016, about that time, maybe 2016, 2017, and it was in Rockhampton, Mangaratta, Port Headland and Kalgudi Boulder, and at each of those places I spent two days with representatives from the arts organisations really understanding their context and doing a field trip.

Lisa Baxter:     What I tend to do now is get people to do homework in advance, they do the desk research. Because it's interesting, most arts organisations are absolute experts on all the trends and forces that impact on them, but they have very little knowledge about what's going on in their communities. Actually, it can really test their assumptions big time about what's going on, and they need to have that authoritative voice if they're going to make good decisions for their communities.

Tandi:                You've been doing this for several years now, what kinds of things have you learned along the way?

Lisa Baxter:     I have learnt to be ... No, I'll tell you what I've learnt. I've learnt that I'm not the expert, but I have expert intuition because of the years that I've worked in the business, and because of my experience of the experience business. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to bring the organisations that I work with through facilitative process, working cross-departmentally to get organisations to develop their own expert intuition. To enable them to understand their operating context, to able to understand the needs, concerns, and aspirations of their visitors, to understand the audience experiences that they're responsible for. And then intuitively be able to make good decisions informed by insights also, but still be able to have that knowledge, that wisdom that is sadly lacking within the arts and cultural sector.

Lisa Baxter:     What I've also learnt is that when you get a group of people in a room from an arts organisation and you give them permission to be challenged, and you give them permission to be creative, you have got a wonder group, and they surprise themselves with what can come out. They raise each other up, they raise me up, often I raise them up, but they always come out transformed.

Lisa Baxter:     I've learnt that I'm doing the right job, this is what I was here to do, changing arts organisations one organisation at a time, maybe changing a few one speech at a time. It's amazing when I just talk about this simple proposition, that audience experience is your core product offer and everything you do serves that, then you see the penny drop and people go, "Oh." Once they appreciate that, everything changes, and then they need the tools and they need the support to be able to do something with that, otherwise they'll just default back to the old way of doing things.

Tandi:                I imagine much of your work is confidential for your clients, but can you talk in generic terms, or perhaps there are examples that you can share of how an organisation, having gone through a process like this, what kind of impact or value have they derived from going down this path. What are some of the practical manifestations of doing this?

Lisa Baxter:     I was working with a regional theatre, and we were looking at their online booking. It was a two-pronged investigation, one was, is the online booking mechanism feeding into loyalty building and encouraging people to understand deeper values and drawing people into the brand as they're booking their tickets? Two, are we extracting as much financial value from the market as we could in the way that the booking system has been set up?

Lisa Baxter:     What we did is we looked at a couple of their key audience types, the two that they wanted to focus on, and we did some customer journey mapping on what it's like for these people to come to their online booking and website for the first time. We gave them company credit cards to actually do the online booking, to really go through it properly, to highlight all the glitches, and they were told to look for specific shows. One person was a wheelchair user, really look at the journey, and to try and figure out not only how useful it was, how quick it was, how functional it was, but how connected to the brand it made them feel.

Lisa Baxter:     Then we looked at the gap, and this is a really important gap that needs to be addressed in the cultural sector, which is the gap between booking a ticket and seeing the show. Because normally they've forgotten once they've booked the tickets because you've got the money out of them, and then they see the show, then the next time you contact them is to sell another ticket, which is incredibly transactional. You're looking at, what other touchpoints could we put into that in order to be able to build bridges, develop anticipation and excitement before the show, maybe deepen appreciation and signpost them to some stuff so that if they wanted to, they could go into it a little bit more, really using that space between ticket purchase and attendance in a way that created value for audiences, but whilst doing that, also thinking about the confirmation emails.

Lisa Baxter:     If they didn't book for a meal or any packages that we created, they could still gently be reminded that they could still do that. As a result of the programme, in the first year, I think they increased their income, their yield by 4% over the first year, which is pretty good, and they exceeded their financial targets on that.

Tandi:                Amazing.

Lisa Baxter:     That's the money one. Another one, I'll use an exhibition one. I was in Germany recently working with the state museum, and they'd been working with a designer on a brand-new blockbuster exhibition, and they didn't like the designs. They got me in to run a three-day troubleshooting Experience Design workshop to try and personalise the visitor experience, so it was a formative project to try and get a better brief and engage the designers. We had the curators in the room, we had the cross-functional team from across the museum, we had the designers, and we had representatives from the visitors.

Lisa Baxter:     We had four different visitor types who had representatives, and we did some evaluation of the designs, we customer journey mapped a charrette, it's kind of a scale model of the exhibition as it stood, realised that it really wasn't going to work, and innovated and created some whole new designs. We discovered the problem was that the curators were saying, "We need as a curator to have this, this, this, this, and this," and the designer would just design it but in a pretty way, but the audience wasn't in the conversation.

Lisa Baxter:     What we did was we created an experience framework that was curator-led, and then we created an experience framework that was audience-centred, and then we put the two together so the designer could create something that delivered personalised value for the visitor, but also let them visit realms that they couldn't have imagined, because that's what the curator's job is. They're working on that at the moment, and the curators have said it's completely changed how they're going to curate exhibitions in the future, and I'll be back with them sometime in the new year to embed the processes.

Tandi:                Very interesting. For someone who might be listening to this thinking, "I think this is something we need to do," but they're just a member of a team, what advice would you have someone working in an organisation who thinks this is something that they need to tackle?

Lisa Baxter:     I think that's really hard, isn't it? There's a conference called the Arts Marketing Association Conference here in the UK, and they do little surgeries, and the last two times when I've held surgeries it's mainly been junior members of staff who really want to bring Experience Design in because they see the value of it, but it's the people further up the pecking order that don't appear to see its value.

Lisa Baxter:     I would say, read up on Design Thinking, try and find someone near you who is doing something like that, and ask for a mentor, and try and get a small project off the ground that doesn't cost very much at all. Because the wonderful thing is, you might ask yourself, "How might we make the face-to-face experience at our box office a much brighter and engaging experience for our visitors?" and just say, "You know what? I'm going to work on that, I'm going to use Design Thinking and I'm going to come up with some ideas to improve that, and I'm going to present it to my boss. We're going to try it, and if it works, the boss will see that this works, and then I might get another project." It's a can-do mentality.

Tandi:                You mentioned some reading, are there any particular sources or texts that you would recommend?

Lisa Baxter:     Anything by Ideo, I-D-E-O, they were very formative for me, I think it's very useful, and then if you Google "Design Thinking". It's really interesting, because I was lucky in bringing it into the arts, well adopting it, rather, the arts are just beginning to think about it, and Design Thinking is now moving on in some respects to whatever the next thing is going to be. We're definitely behind the curve on this one, but I think, just do a really good Google search, there is so much on the internet. There's templates, there's videos, there's probably more stuff on the internet than there are books. There is another book that's useful that's very visual called The Design Thinking Playbook, but I can't remember who wrote it.

Tandi:                That's all right, we'll find it and pop it in the show notes for listeners. For you in terms of your career, what's next, what kinds of things are you excited about that you're looking forward to working on in the next three years, say?

Lisa Baxter:     It's something else that nobody wants, of course. I really want to look at Systems Thinking, and I'm really interested in the idea of the healthy organism, and how you might compare an arts organisation to a living system where everything is interconnected, and it has to be a holistic functioning organism, every element needs to work seamlessly together in order for the whole organism to be healthy. I'm talking to a major reparatory theatre up in Scotland who are putting a leap of faith in me to come up with sort of a facilitative process to help them understand the health of one of their key systems which is critical to the theatre, it's like the circulatory system of the organism, and that is checking the health of what happens between the first idea that the artistic director has and the opening night of the show, and trying to look at how that system works, and using Systems Thinking, Design Thinking, Experience Design to find the limiters and to make it a much more holistic experience all 'round.

Lisa Baxter:     I have to say, by the way, that everything that I've done since I set up The Experience Business has begun with one client putting their faith in me, and I have to say thank you like the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, and to the Bolton Octagon, and to the Arts Marketing Association for enabling me to try out my crazy stuff, which is now beginning to be mainstream, and believing in me.

Tandi:                What a lovely thing to do, give thanks for that, that's special. Look, for someone who is intrigued at all of this and wants to find out more about your work, follow you, connect, where should they go?

Lisa Baxter:     You can go to my very out-of-date website, www.theexperiencebusiness.co.uk, it hasn't been uploaded for three years, because that's how busy I've been, and just connect with me. If you go the website, there's Skype and there is my email address. I'm done with Twitter, it's just my brain's too full of ideas to deal with Twitter, but that's probably the best way. I love Skyping with people, sharing ideas, riffing, jamming, shooting the breeze, changing the world.

Tandi:                Lisa, thank you. I've been a big fan for a long time, it's lovely to come and hear your ideas face-to-face, and for those listening, I couldn't recommend Lisa more highly. Have a good dig around on the website, there's case studies and all sorts of interesting things. We'll be back next episode, see you soon.

Patternmakers
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