Managing Directors of Moment Speak to MMM Students

The MMM program at the Segal Design Institute welcomed Joshua Lucas-Falk and John Devanney of Moment for an event called “Integrate: Business + Design: How to get the most from your degrees in the corporate world.”

Both Managing Directors at Moment, Lucas-Falk and Devanney spoke to a crowd of MMM students in the the Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center on November 2, 2016. Their talk was titled "The Design Management Office: Delivering the Value of Design at Scale."

Devanney has built relationships with Moment clients including ESPN, Turner, Tiffany & Co., and Walt Disney since 2003.  He serves on Moment’s management team, helping them pursue visionary ideas.

Lucas-Falk leads Moment’s Chicago office, where he helps the Chicago team apply Moment’s knowledge of product design and design management to a diverse range of industries and clients. Before joining Moment, Josh was the Associate Vice President of Digital Learning at the Museum of Arts and Design.

Devanney and Lucas-Falk stressed to the MMM students the importance of incorporating design into every step of Moment’s relationships with their clients.

“The same design tools we use to create engaging products also allow us to consider and improve our relationships with clients, our processes, and the way that we work,” said Lucas-Falk. “We can’t but help to design our business while we’re designing for our clients because we believe in the power of design to make positive change.”

Earning both an MBA from Kellogg and an M.S. in Design Innovation from the Segal Design Institute, the MMM Program provides a rigorous education that positions its graduates to drive innovation across industries. MMM students learn to embrace failure and risk as part of the design thinking process.

Moment helped the MMM students make the connection to how those skills could serve them well in their future work.

“Moment seeks to build close and honest relationships with clients, and part of doing that is acknowledging that we don’t always have the answers,” explained Lucas-Falk. “A big part of being a successful design practitioner is building the credibility and trust to take risks, to fail, and to learn and improve.”

Adam Attas, a first-year student in the MMM program, came to the talk because he wanted to hear how Moment approaches design and innovation.

“I think the most helpful point that Josh and John brought up was how design now has a place within the C-suite. Because there’s now more executive buy-in for even large scale organizations to innovate, it makes what we are learning in class that more powerful,” said Attas. “I see MMM being ahead of the curve in that respect and every time I get to attend one of these types of presentations where I hear the concepts we are learning about being used in the real world, it validates my choice to enroll in MMM.”

Christen Love, a second-year student in the MMM program, saw an opportunity to apply what she is learning in MMM to the kind of work Moment is doing.

“Moment is unusual in the design consulting space because they’re focused on helping client organizations develop design and innovation capabilities in-house through their Design Management Office system,” said Love. “This is a twist on the more common model and was another way to apply the skills we’re learning through the MMM program.”

When asked what advice they have for MMM students preparing to graduate, Lucas-Falk said, “Don’t lose sight of the value of making things real. It’s easy for all design practitioners to get endlessly define and refine without ever taking the risk of launching that app or going live with that website. It’s only by committing to a solution, even an imperfect one, that we learn what we’ve done right and wrong.”