WE STARTED HUDDLE IN 2009 FOR two reasons — one was almost a rebellious streak in me that wanted to prove there was a different model of business that can be successful — one not based on process automation, silos, power hierarchies, and all of the things that up until that time I had experienced working at the defence department and inside other big organisations.
I wanted to design a business that ‘self-created’ itself and had the ability to continuously do that, depending on the personalities we had in the business at any given point and what their capabilities were. The second reason was my continued passion for improving conditions for people — irrespective of whether they’re inside or outside an organisation, or employees or customers of organisations. I wanted to be able to design deliberately meaningful stuff and with intention for a particular human context, and essentially create a business with the ability to provide those services.
My background is in human-centered design so Huddle’s practise is primarily human-centered design. The real challenge for a business like ours, due to its constant mode of self-identification, self-organisation, and self-creation, is when someone asks, ‘what’s your elevator pitch?‘ and you tell them, and they think you’re crazy. So instead of positioning around content expertise we positioned around process expertise and describe our methodology. In 2009 that worked because the differentiator was unique, and we had a unique take on human-centred design because it was a mixture of human factors, systems thinking, which comes from engineering, and design as the creative framework. There are still not a lot of people talking about it in that way, and back when we started, no one was talking about human-centered design as an offering, and so we were successful. Today, there are lots of strategic design; service design, human-centered design agencies and people don’t buy your method. They buy the impact and the outcome. For a truly human-centric business in that we don’t have job descriptions, we don’t hire people based on skill set, primarily. We hire people based on mindset, character and life experience. We have teachers, actors, tantric and meditation experts, designers, technologists, engineers and MBAs. We’re a truly multidisciplinary group of people who are all passionate about designing for the human condition.
Our work and the way we position Huddle are constantly in flux, and sometimes our clients find it difficult to know what it is that we do. Around 18 months ago I decided it was probably time we created an R&D capability, but more around what labs actually stands for, which is learn and build stuff. It’s about doing the thinking, then going straight out into the market and co-creating with people who are also doing that thinking, and who see value in the thinking. My intuition told me there had to be other dimensions of value beyond financial capital, and I wasn’t satisfied with triple-bottom-line. We began collaborating with Umair Haque, author of The New Capitalist Manifesto and Betterness. Within Huddle, Matt Kurowski teamed up with Umair and invited Eddie Harran to join the exploration, creating a team of a post-capitalist economics thinker, a design philosopher and a futurist. Together, they created the snowflake model, identifying eight different types of capital, allowing us to have conversations with clients to understand the different types of value exchange that can occur between people, between organisations and communities and between customer segments beyond financial.
Huddle is in a consolidation phase because we just launched Amsterdam. We’re in the middle of rethinking what type of container we actually need to be able to continue to do what it is we believe we need to be doing. The question we’re asking — is a business the right container? In the process of our own evolution we’ve essentially rendered our current business-operating model obsolete, and we’re open to whatever it needs to become. This way of working is extraordinary and painful all at once. What we find is that we’ve got nowhere to go and in this domain of, ‘we’re sure there’s places to go — we just haven’t found them yet’. As a leader it’s a place beyond what I know, emergence so to speak, and right now I’m kind of staring into the void.