How IDEO.org’s CEO Jocelyn Wyatt is changing the world through human-centred design
When Founding Room Member Jocelyn Wyatt was in college, she dreamed of a career where she could do good and travel the world. “I grew up curious about and interested in the broader world,” recalls Wyatt whose parents were educators and regularly hosted international students in their home.
Two decades after graduating from Grinnell College in the U.S. state of Iowa, Wyatt is the co-founder and CEO of IDEO.org, a non-profit design studio on a mission to create a more just and inclusive world. Wyatt has enjoyed a professional odyssey that has enabled her to achieve her personal mission to do good in the world and her passion for exploring the planet — along the way making a positive impact on millions of lives around the world while having the chance to travel to multiple countries around the world.
From her first job with a global development contractor for the USAID to landing a social innovation role at the global design trailblazer IDEO, Wyatt attributes the realization of her career aspirations to nurturing great relationships. “I had the good fortune of building and having strong networks. So much of my professional growth has been about mentorship and networking, as well as being in the right place at the right time. I’ve had the benefit of people thinking about me all along the way.”
In addition to fostering strong relationships in her career, Wyatt has also leveraged the power of thought leadership. “There were very few people speaking about design to social impact audiences. So very early on, I got a lot of high-profile speaking engagements and opportunities to write articles for the Stanford Social Innovation Review and others. That elevated my personal brand in ways that allowed me to be known by people and to have a larger network than I would have otherwise been able to have.”
She says that it was these thought leadership opportunities that led to her participation in several fellowship and leadership development programs over the years. Wyatt is also grateful for the exposure to the experts and mentors that these programs offered — which were made possible in large part through her writing and speaking.
Wyatt also credits her board appointments with advancing her leadership through connections to peers in different sectors. She says that board roles have been not only incredibly valuable learning experiences but also provided meaningful opportunities to share her expertise with leaders and organizations that she usually wouldn’t be exposed to.
As important as relationship building and thought leadership have been, Wyatt also points to the value of education. Early in her career while supporting U.S. government aid work around the world, Wyatt realized that she and her colleagues were mostly a group of 20-somethings sitting in Washington, D.C. trying to decide what dramatically different countries and people on the other side of the world needed. Wyatt acknowledges that she and her colleagues really didn’t have any grounding in what the aid recipients required. She had big questions about the effectiveness of the programs she was working on.
She explains “there was a disconnect between the work we were doing and what the real needs were. So I decided to go to business school as a way to explore private sector answers to these questions.”
Wyatt credits her MBA experience at the Thunderbird School of Global Management with introducing her to the concept of the “social enterprise” at a time when few people were talking about the idea of social innovation. During the summer break between her first and second year of business school, Wyatt worked for Visionspring in India and secured an Acumen Fellowship in Kenya upon graduation. Wyatt contends that it was the relationships that her MBA enabled at Visionspring and Acumen that connected her to IDEO and ultimately led to the creation of IDEO.org.
At IDEO.org, Wyatt’s proudest achievement has been the portfolio she has led around reproductive health for adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa. IDEO.org partnered with a few NGOs and funders to increase the adoption of modern contraception among girls and young women in this region. Wyatt highlighted the 200,000 girls and young women who have taken up contraception as a result of the services and programs IDEO.org designed.
“We are seeing global health organizations and foundations really embrace human-centred design as a methodology to design new programs. Consequently, several new players are practicing human-centred design and we are seeing human-centred design taking centre stage at global health conferences,” says Wyatt. “The outcomes are important, but it’s also about how we are seeing the field shift towards being more adolescent-centred. Programs now resonate much more strongly with adolescent girls. That is the power of human-centred design.”
Wyatt believes that innovation, more than anything, will distinguish those organizations that survive and thrive during these consequential times — and those that don’t.“The ability to innovate is so critical at this moment. Organizations need to reflect and pivot quickly. You need to be able to embrace ambiguity and try new things.”
She suggests that our ability to shift how we work is indicative of an organization’s ability to innovate today and into the future. Wyatt says that the world now realizes the value of working from home and not travelling so much — allowing us to live far less chaotic and hectic lives. However, Wyatt admits that innovation is hard when working remotely. “Having offices is expensive — but the value we get from spending time together allows us to do work at the quality level we want. So many of the people we hire thrive on being with colleagues and being surrounded by people and working together in close proximity.”
While Wyatt says that IDEO.org won’t require people to work in-person 100% of the time as they’ve done in the past — “we’re not looking to get out of our leases or shift to a permanent remote workforce. We believe in having a balance between in-person time and remote time. We’ll give our people more flexibility, but we also believe having spaces for people to collaborate in-person is really important.”
Looking ahead, Wyatt believes that IDEO.org and other firms will move away from being solution creators to being solution catalysts. She says that community co-design has become a central part of how they work with partners. “We are spending much less time designing for our partners and much more time designing with them. In the future, our goal is to enable others to design for themselves through the tools and platforms we provide.”
Twenty-five years later, it’s clear that Wyatt’s decision to study anthropology and her curiosity in understanding people and cultures different than her own has paid off. It has been valuable not only in the relationship building that has fueled her dream career but also in the good she is doing for millions of people across the planet.
Jocelyn is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of IDEO.org, the non-profit design organization that she co-founded in 2011 after leading IDEO’s social innovation practice. As CEO, Jocelyn spends her time developing the vision, strategy, funding, and growth plans for IDEO.org.
