Marc Rettig
Managing Principal at Fit Associates
Clearleft Says
Marc Rettig has been a big name in the industry for many years now. The whole Clearleft team gathered in our meeting room recently to watch and discuss his most recent talk on fostering design culture. The resulting debate was electric, so we couldn’t resist bringing him over to London and sharing his thoughts with you.
A frontier for designers: cultures of creativity
It’s one thing to hire more designers, but how do we put in place the conditions necessary for the design process to come to life in our teams and organisations? It’s one thing to be a good designer, but how do we equip ourselves to affect the way our organisation sees and conducts its work? Do we need design-driven organisations, or profoundly creative organisations? What’s the difference? To shed light on these questions and invite you to consider how they relate to your work and your career, Marc Rettig will draw on current efforts in large companies, trends in social innovation and leadership, and return to an old and profoundly deep view of the creative process.
Dialogue facilitation: a tool for research and team impact
Design and design research efforts are effective to the extent that they impact the organisation. We could say that the work of design is conversational: the quality of the result is dependent on the quality of the conversation we moderate between our organisation and the people for whom we create. Have the same old conversation with customers, have the same old conversation between your team and the rest of your organisation – get the same old results.
Too often, a team’s conversational arsenal is limited to enthusiastic vision, heartfelt persuasion, or plain old argument. This workshop is based on the premise that UX and design professionals can increase their effectiveness by expanding their kit of communication tools beyond observation and interviews, beyond meetings and presentations, advocacy, and persuasion. Let’s increase our portfolio of tools for fostering good conversation.
Happily, the world is providing us with a rich selection of additional tools. In this workshop, we will experience a few of them, and survey the larger landscape of organisational dialogue.
Activities and topics include:
- Collective story harvest
- World cafe
- The facilitation building block
- Situation modelling
- The continuum of communication – a design framework for influence and advocacy
You’ll come away with a sense of the wide range of methods for conversation design, and a personal experience of some of the methods. Workshop materials include an extended reading list and directory of online resources and facilitation guides.
Please note... For this session, Marc will be looking for some volunteer storytellers. If you're thinking of attending his session and are intrigued about telling a story, you can take a look at these details. To apply to be a Storyteller Volunteer you can fill out the online form (scroll down!) beforehand and Marc will get it - or we'll have copies available on the day so you can head to the session a little early and prepare your story (also it's important to note that as all workshops are on a first come, first served basis, completing a form in advance does not guarantee entry, so please arrive in plenty of time to avoid disappointment).
About Marc Rettig
Marc equips organisations to work with the roots of social challenges, from organisational culture to product-life alignment. Through training and workshops, events and retreats, and extended coaching and support, his company Fit Associates helps leaders, teams and organisations deepen their creativity, align to a common purpose, and grow their ability to work systemically across the boundaries of silos and organisations. In addition to his work at Fit, Marc is on the faculty of the Masters in Design for Social Innovation program at the School of Visual Arts, and teaches in the Carnegie Mellon Graduate School of Design.
After a first career in software systems, Marc has spent twenty years as a designer of projects, interactions, products, services, experiences, and transformations. He has worked with corporations across a broad range of sectors, including Philips Home Health, Nissan, Microsoft, Comcast, Whirlpool, KitchenAid, Seagate, SAP, and numerous startup companies.
In the midst of it all, Marc plays at improving his cooking and photography skills from his home in Pittsburgh, returning whenever possible to his birthplace in Montana.