Most innovation work starts in a boardroom.
Danny Seals starts in someone’s kitchen.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
When working with a client to understand the lived experience of their employees, Danny and his team showed up at people’s homes at five o’clock in the morning.
They got ready for work with them. Had breakfast with the family. Did the commute. Lived the morning – “We got up in the morning. We knew that these people were getting ready for work at six. And we got ready for work with them. We had breakfast with the family. We did all this good stuff.”
The disconnect between what organisations think people experience and what people actually experience is often where innovation quietly fails.
Closing this gap is the core argument: understanding real human experience, not assumptions, is the key to effective innovation.
Danny Seals is a leading experience and transformation designer, author of The Insightful Innovator and host of the Knot another podcast and writer of the Knot Another Newsletter.
He has spent his career working with some of the world’s most recognised brands across customer & employee experience, service design and organisational innovation.
He is also a contributor to Innovation in Action. His approach isn’t just about favouring analogue over digital. The real argument: innovation succeeds when solutions authentically connect with people’s lived experience, before any technology is chosen. As Danny says: “It’s not tools and methods. Let me just get that straight. It’s not the shiny method.”
Let’s dive in on how to design better experiences,
Start With the Human, Not the Brief
Most organisations arrive at a project with a brief that reflects what they already believe.
The workshop confirms it. The solution follows. Nobody stops to test whether what the organisation believes and what people actually experience are the same thing. They almost never are.
Danny’s sense-making phase runs across three lenses simultaneously – the human, the system, and the service. Each one surfaces something the brief doesn’t contain. And he runs all three before any creative work begins.
One of his go-to tools here is what he calls the naive expert – someone who has your problem but operates in a completely different world – “You go and spend a day with a taxi driver, a nurse, a truck driver. You will find a handful of ideas you can take and apply to your problem.”
This is the Discovering phase of DUCTRI in practice based on a belief to not confirm what you already suspect, but to try and surface what you don’t yet know. Innovation in Action gives you the tools to do this systematically, before a single solution is considered.
Build the Conditions Before You Build the Solution
Getting the insight is only half the challenge. The other half is what happens when the room comes together.
Danny is clear about where most projects fail – “A lot of the time failure starts from the get go. We don’t ultimately align our people. We all come in and we all nod our heads and we all go out – and then there’ll be whispers.”
The misalignments that should have been addressed on day one show up three months later, when momentum is harder to recover.
His fix starts before anyone gets creative. He runs what he calls a dare canvas (design a relationship experience), a structured conversation with the full stakeholder group that names assumptions, surfaces tensions, and establishes how everyone agrees to show up –“Go slow right at the start and you’ll be amazed at how fast you can move at pace once everyone’s on board.”
From there, Danny argues that creativity itself depends on a specific stack of conditions. Nurture, curiosity and playfulness create the space for ideas to emerge. Novelty and realness stretch and ground them. Momentum, courage and commitment carry them forward – “It’s not a pick and mix. A bit of playfulness without courage won’t get you far. Curiosity without realness and you’ll just spin in circles looking for more and more things.”
And supporting these interactions is a technique he calls signalling. Signalling is the discipline of telling people, before you share an idea, how you want them to engage with it. Not to critique. Not to validate. But, to take the time to ponder on the idea to avoid critique too early.
Make It Real Before You Make It Perfect
The third place high-tech solutions die is in the presentation.
Most organisations show ideas as slides. Slides get argued with, deprioritised, or quietly filed after the meeting.
“Nobody feels moved by a slide. Nobody commits to a slide. Alternatively – make something real as fast as possible. Nobody cares about PowerPoint slides. No one can feel it. Try and make it tactile.”
When Danny was working with a global technology brand on their employee value experience – a company whose products are almost certainly in your home right now – the team didn’t present findings. They created experiences.
One idea that emerged was a deconstruction exercise. New employees would breakdown and rebuild the company’s products, building a genuine connection to what the brand actually makes and stands for from the very first week.
It wasn’t in the project brief. It came from sitting with people, mapping the system and making ideas tangible enough that something real could be felt and responded to.
Danny describes what this kind of work actually feels like from the inside –
“A lot of people think it’s this great thing where it’s all just post-it notes and everyone’s high-fiving and sitting on beanbags. And it’s not. It’s frustrating. It’s hard work.”
High touch isn’t warm and fuzzy. It’s disciplined, structured and sometimes uncomfortable. And it’s precisely that discipline of going to the human first, carefully building the conditions, making things real before making them perfect that produces solutions people actually adopt.
The organisations that create truly high-touch solutions don’t succeed because of superior tools. They stand out because they first focus intensely on understanding people before designing anything.
That sequence sits at the heart of Innovation in Action. The Discovering and Understanding phases of the DUCTRI framework give you the system to do exactly what Danny describes: get beneath the surface of a problem before a single solution is designed, and bring your people with you when you do.
If you’ve commissioned innovation work that produced great workshops and underwhelming outcomes, this is where to look first. Order Innovation in Action here.
Register your purchase to receive early access to chapters, original DUCTRI tool templates, expert insight videos including Danny, and live group training sessions with Christian and me.
Practitioner Insights
The brief is not the problem. The problem is what people actually experience. Until you’ve sat with them in their world, on their terms, you’re designing from assumption. Always prioritise going to the human first.
Creativity needs conditions, not just permission. Telling people to be creative doesn’t make them creative. You must build the right conditions such as psychological safety, aligning mindsets, and using signalling before a single idea is worth generating.
Make it real before you make it perfect. Nobody commits to a slide. The moment you make an idea tangible, however scrappy, is the moment people can actually respond to it. That real reaction provides the data you need to truly begin the work.
Want to Go Deeper?
The full conversation with Danny – covering systems thinking, idea tiers, the behaviour stack, and his case study redesigning employee experience for a global technology brand is now live on my YouTube channel. Watch the full interview here.
Thank you to Danny for a conversation that was as generous as it was practical. His human-first approach is exactly the kind of thinking this book is built around.
Q: Is your organisation building the conditions for great ideas or just booking the room where ideas are supposed to happen?
See you next week,
Vaughan