Creating a design thinking organisation. Part 2: 8 more lessons.

This article is part 2 in an ongoing series on creating a successful design thinking practice within an existing organisation. Read part 1 for the first 8 insights on this topic.

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Still introducing design thinking in your organisation? Read on.

So, you've built your team, created a space, had some first small successes and were able to get things rolling with some top-down support. Great. Now what?

1) PRESERVE THE PRACTICE.

Once design thinking is established and it’s become clear that there is a large initiative taking place in the organisation, you’ll experience a new set of problems:

On the one hand, there’ll still be people trying to attack the initiative and preserve the status quo. On the other hand, there’ll be an influx of people joining the momentum and wanting to take part. 

So you now need some way for the rest of the company to enter their project ideas, requests etc. The simplest solution is a temporary website: You’ll want everyone to see what’s going on, what’s in the pipeline and what’s in the backlog. You also need some clear guidelines on how to approach the practitioners as well as a clearly defined organisational structure.

People need to know where to find you, who’s in charge etc. If there is a space, they’ll need to know how and when to visit. Make sure no one can just pop in for a random visit. Offer some slots for presentations, user tests and workshops. You need to protect the environment you’re trying to build at this stage.

Everyone wants a piece of you. For different reasons. Not all of them nice. Typically at this point, there’ll be a deluge of inquiries to distract your team. It’s important to prevent multitasking and to preserve focus. You’re NOT out of the woods, and I’ve witnessed many efforts fail because they tried too many things at once without properly scaling the practice. 

You cannot scale a design thinking practice across an organisation until you first have a functioning, well-protected nucleus. 

Avoid sprints, workshops and the like just because people ask for them and there is pressure. Do them strategically to get more buy-in. Let the rest of the organisation work with agencies, outside consultants or run their own experiments. In short: ignore them.

Until you have clearly demonstrated the value of the practice, don’t scale.

2) SCALE THE PRACTICE.

You have the budget, the team, the space and the buy-in. Value has been demonstrated with lots of quick wins and one or two successfully completed risky projects. 

People really want to join the ship. Now, how do you scale?

To scale the practice, you’d have to stop what you’re doing to teach others, create new teams and distribute the insights across the organisation. At the same time, if you did that, there’d no longer be a practice.

After 10 years of experimenting, failing 90% of the time and observing others fail at scaling design thinking, I found a few approaches that work. Here is one:

Dedicate 10% - 20% of your resources to build toolkits, guides and resources that others in your organisation can use to set up their own practice. You want those to be self-explanatory. What IBM has set up with their practice is a good example of this. But this isn't enough, you also need to put a few people in place whose sole purpose is to train people. They need to be experienced practitioners. Starting with two trainers, you can easily train 3000 people in a year using a geometric growth approach. And this is where most organisations fail.

The scale needs to be increased tenfold.

People leave, change positions, learn for political reasons or to have the label, can't fully commit for various reasons, don't really dive into it, don't really get it. If you train 40 people, half of them will still keep doing what they were doing after a year. Out of 40, there might be three or four who want to keep pushing it, becoming facilitators, expert practitioners or even trainers themselves at some point. You need to train more people. Train 400, not 40.

And no, I am not talking about a frigging single day workshop!

When I tell this to people in charge of training programs in organisations, they usually tell me that not everyone needs to know design thinking. That's a piece of BS. Here is why:

Exchange DT with "compliance" or "office programs" or "agile" or "reading and writing".

Having a substantial percentage of the people be familiar with the approach, the methods, the terminology will enable the practitioners to actually work with everyone else later on. Executives want "an innovation mindset" or a "design mindset". They want people to buy into "digital transformation". But they don't think that they need the investment.

There is no way in hell to change an organisation if you don't invest in educating people. Period.

3) BUILD A MOVEMENT.

There is a great TED talk about it that tells you everything you need to know.

When you start scaling, you’ll need to build an internal community with regular events. You’ll need to highlight and support practitioners outside your own unit. You need to have design thinking as part of your internal training, moving people from initial experiences across specialisations in areas like user research or user testing. You'll also need to enable people to keep applying and spreading the practice outside your department. In short, you need to give the ownership away.

Your goal is for anyone in the company to be able to go to a website, start learning, start running their own projects, access other practitioners and learn by doing. You’ll want them to know what tools to use, how to build their own team, how to create their own space, and how to learn from your mistakes.

You'll need people to meet and discuss and contribute back without you while still referring to you. In order for them to do that, you need to lead them and support them initially. They need to know what the movement is, how to spread it, how to build it into daily practice.

4) CERTIFY. SORT OF.

People will want to have internal certifications for basic education, facilitation, teaching and methods.

To make it clear, I am no fan of certifications. If there is no rigorous testing with clear criteria and no requirements regarding practical experience, if you can just get them by throwing money at them, they aren't worth anything. There are a lot of institutions and agencies these days that certify you for a lot of money. Maybe I should just hand out a piece of paper for 100$. Just print it out. No need to attend anything.

People being people, they'll want something to "prove" that they are now a practitioner. Your certificate could be a badge, a pin, a statue, something relevant or common in your industry. It could be their picture on the wall. You can also use certification to actually prevent external dilution of your practice. But to do that is a project in itself.

To do all of this, you’ll need to work with HR, IT and corporate training experts.

5) TELL STORIES.

A lot of organisations screw up the communication. Either they announce the big design thinking initiative with a lot of publicity, raising both expectations and criticism too high, creating uncertainty in people. Or they keep everything hushed, playing favourites and stressig people out. I had a long talk with the former chief editor of Wired Germany about this. He keeps seeing the same problem over and over again: the c-level doesn't communicate these types of initiatives well. (you should hire him to work on it)

Take a look at mails, announcements and news channels within corporations. They suck. If you are in internal communications and feel offended, good. Do something about it. People neither want orwellian doublespeak nor emotionless reports by corporate robots. They want to know what is going on and they want to know they are following real leaders.

They also want stories.

If you are trying to create a design thinking organisation, you need to tell stories. Stories that can spread and become part of the culture. There are so many change and transformation initiatives now, but all of them focused on the wrong things. Culture is a collection of stories we tell ourselves. Stories that tell us what to think, to feel, what is good and what isn't. How to behave and why. Top down directives and platitudes aren't the same as stories.

When was the last time, someone in your c-suite just sat down with you in a circle, shut down the laptop and told you a story? The reason TED is so successful is that it literally emulates sitting around a campfire. Their stage and format are even designed that way.

6) HAVE FUN. IN MODERATION.

Working on projects that are supposed to push the envelope using an approach still alien to the organisation while being under scrutiny is hard work. Many people in a design thinking nucleus are motivated and sometimes pressured to stay long hours. So it's great to have some fun at work to mitigate that to let the creative juices flow. You should have the team bring in whatever they think they need for that, whether it be a PS4 or a foosball table.

By the way, that last bit is important. Don't just get a foosball table because that's what the cool kids do. Maybe your crowd is into darts, poker or something else. The point is to create a playful environment, not just to cram some toys into the space. So it's more about attitude than anything else.

BUT. Be aware that if you do this, the "real hardworking people" looking in from the outside will see this as an amusement park. If you listen through the grapevine, you'll hear comments like "do these people work?" or "this looks like a kindergarten for adults" or "what BS is this?". It would be very easy to chalk this up to narrow-mindedness. But how about practicing what you preach and go into empathy mode instead?

While you may be enjoying your design thinking island, free from the outdated IT, rules and bureaucracy of the business, those you are trying to win over have to go through that every day. If what they see at first is an adult la-la land, frustrations will quickly bubble to the surface and may turn towards you. So it is better to ease people into it.

If they haven't gone through a 10 hour grind with you, they might not need a improv inspired warmup to push through another 2 hours. If they understand a CAD drawing, using LEGO to visualise something might not be the best idea at first. Look at where they are and bring the fun in moderation. Also, their idea of fun might not correlate with yours.

7) DAILY PRACTICE.

To really shift an organisation towards a design mindset, to really be human centered, what you are doing has to become part of the daily practice. That is why it is important to scale it across the entire organisation. You can't have one half of the company talk about people first, needs and pain-points while the other half doesn't know what the hell you are talking about.

Being part of the daily practice means, you always need to ask yourself how what you are doing impacts other people. You always need to be aware that whatever you are building, it is for other people. You need to bring attention back to the fact that business is people interacting with people. Despite automation and AI, business is all about people.

Your employees, your partners, your customers, your fans, they are the only thing that count. The question always has to be: does this provide value to them? Are we doing this for us or for them?

To be a daily practice, it has to permeate all aspects of the organisation, including all support functions: HR, IT, facility management... all need to care about other people. And that is the next and most important part.

8) CARE ABOUT PEOPLE

Reasonable, kind and social adults turn into soulless drones at work. They drone on about what won't work, why it can't work, why nothing can be done. You won't win them over by choking the rah rah design thinking kool aid down their throats. If you really want to create a design thinking organisation, you need to have some empathy with the people there. You really need to deeply care about them.

People want to feel significant. They want to feel a human connection. They want to experience meaning, trust, kindness. Even the grumpiest cynic will appreciate an honest gesture of good will if there are no strings attached. The problem often is, there are. Especially in a corporate setting. You rub my back, I rub yours.

But that isn't caring. That's politics.

To truly create a design thinking organisation, you have to practice what you preach. You need to create empathy with even those who made it their mission to destroy you and your effort. Then you have to figure out how to care about them.

I'm not saying it's easy, but it is essential. Otherwise, people will rightly see it as hypocrisy.

CONSEQUENCES

Following through on the 8 points here and the 8 points in part 1 is not easy. It has consequences. I haven't talked about those, about the prerequisites to get started or how to actually act on some of the things I described. Maybe that's another article.

But here are two things you can do:

1. Experiment your way forward. An organisation is a living, dynamic system. You won't be able to plan or to consider everything. You need to experiment, then roll with the punches. Take any of the points above, then work on it.
2. Look at some of the great design thinking environments within organisations, as well as some of the great design thinking companies out there. You can google for it and find a lot yourself. I will also highlight some of the agencies and consultancies out there in future articles.

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I have helped organisations throughout Europe and Asia to successfully introduce, build, manage, and operate design thinking practices.

To discover how I can help you to implement design thinking throughout your organisation, get in touch with me today.

Follow me for content about #designthinking and #businessinnovation.

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