How Dries Started in Behavioral Design and Pivoted into Business Design
Dries is a Belgium-based Business Designer, currently working at Accenture. In his present role, he helps organizations take creative, human-centered innovation and make it succeed out there in the real world by approaching business challenges with the tools, tactics, and mindset of a designer. When Dries isn’t working, he is an avid reader, mountain bicyclist, and Twitter user.
By Dries Vaesen, d.MBA alum, with contributions by Clare Goldblatt
I don’t have a formal UX Design background and originally started off in communications and advertising. During my communications studies, I was intrigued by how you can move people with behavioral design in the form of words. From there, I learned about how you can also move people through clever physical design, and this really piqued my interest. One example that interested me was how you can get people to slow down on highways by designing them a bit differently. So, I went from the concept of moving people with words, to moving them with design.
After my Bachelor’s, I did a postgraduate degree in advertising, where I’d learn even more about behavioral design. I’m a big reader, so I read lots about behavioral design during my studies and it became my dream to work as a behavioral designer. One of my professors worked for a Belgian political party and they used behavioral design and psychology to craft campaigns and messaging, and this kind of work interested me. We also had a lot of guest speakers at university and one of them was a guy who’d come to speak about a digital products studio he’d created with his brother. His background was in psychology, but he built digital products that helped move people with technology, which piqued my interest as a behavioral design aficionado. It was a nice departure from the sometimes traditional, boring world of moving people with campaigns, moving people with technology.
I approached the guy after his speech, asked him lots of questions, and he ended up offering me an internship at his design studio. This studio’s operating model is design sprint-based, so it’s very fast-paced. I ended up doing a 5-month internship that year, rejecting the more lucrative and comfortable offers from sizable advertising agencies I received upon graduation. I chose this internship because I was able to curate a custom-made role for myself. This was a bit intimidating, but the risk paid off as this studio is where I learned about UX Design. I labeled myself as a behavioral designer, but more in the field of technology, using UX principles to build and create products. It wasn’t only a behavioral design role, but I also worked as a workshop facilitator, UX designer, and strategist.
While I was working at the studio, I also did the d.MBA, where I started to learn more about business design. The studio was heavily focused on design sprints, so we’d build these polished, hi-fi prototypes, which always tested well, but I felt that these prototypes weren’t able to build a viable business, despite that they’d been validated by customers.
It’s the underlying and sometimes very basic needs, like building a financial model of how the business would work instead of how the product would work, which intrigued me more.
Eventually, I left this company, for the exact same reason that I joined, which is that everything was at lightning speed. In the 2 years I worked there, I did over 40 design sprints, which was really fun but ultimately, I decided to find a position with a bit slower pace, and also, I was interested in getting into business design.
So, I did what I always do when I want to learn a lot about a new topic. I read lots of books, listened to podcasts, and followed lots of interesting people on Twitter. I started reading a lot and I’d been following the d.MBA in its early days, when it was still called “Beyond Users.”
It’s not as though I had a business design portfolio ready to go for prospective jobs. Instead, I just did lots of research, networking, reading, and writing. Social media was a huge catalyst for getting me to my current role as a business designer. I find Twitter to be the most interesting place for people, insights, frameworks, and resources.
I applied many of the things I read in books and wrote short content snippets on Linkedin. I post on Linkedin using the card format where you can just swipe on the cards and can also reuse them on Instagram. Linkedin’s algorithm rewards personal profiles and people interacting with your posts instead of just getting likes, so I like to start a dialogue on my profile. Twitter is a great place for learning and networking, but the most valuable spotlight I’ve found is LinkedIn. A lot of interesting people have reached out, including Senior Designers and Business Leaders, all due to my posts. I’d then have a chat with some of these people, and they’d ask me if I was looking for a new position. That’s when it occurred to me that I could actually do something else, through this curation of my public profile.
I’ve gotten at least 10 job offers just through Linkedin.
I always phrase it like this: I learn and consume on Twitter and produce on Linkedin. Subsequently, I decided to look around and begin applying to organizations offering interesting positions. It was hard for me to find many companies offering business design roles, especially in Belgium. Ultimately, someone who spotted one of my posts in my Linkedin network reached out and offered me an interview at Accenture. I ended up getting the job, and if you want to read about it in detail, check out how my typical day as a business designer looks like. My current job as a Business Designer at Accenture is fulfilling and challenging.
I’m currently spearheading a strategic project with a large retailer in Belgium, and we’re helping them to update their business strategy in order to remain relevant.
I often create workshops for our clients from scratch, using the knowledge I gained from all the books, the d.MBA program, and podcasts I’ve listened to. Not everything I do is 100% Business Design-focused, as I still do some UX projects, but it’s luckily still my main focus.
I recommend to other fledgling business designers that they make sure that their Linkedin profile is up to date and that they post every so often. I personally don’t worry about SEO, I just try to post what’s interesting to me and hope that others will find it interesting and interact with the content. Also, don’t be afraid to reach out to other experts in the field and always keep fresh with business design books and other content. Finally, be sure to hit the books, and don’t be afraid of Twitter.
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