How Human-centered Design Brings Us on The Same Page

A word, millions of interpretations! You probably have seen the “tree swing cartoon.” The illustration goes back to the 1970s. It illustrated that communication entails saying and hearing have the same meaning. The image was amended to use in many contexts, such as design and software development. See the picture below:

Having the tree swing cartoon in mind, in this article, I will briefly talk about the prototype and test phases as we come to the end of the “how” part of Design Thinking for Change Management.

Prototyping in Change Management

Previously, I talked about the?definition and ideation phases in design thinking.

A prototype generally is a first, typical or preliminary model of something. One of the most tangible differences between design thinking and traditional business thinking is the idea of prototyping. The tree swing cartoon above can tell you why we need to prototype. After empathizing, defining, and ideating and all the co-creation processes, we need to ensure that we discuss the same concept with the stakeholders.

Product developers use the concept of MVP. MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product, the least designed version of a new product that still works. In change management, I call it MVC, which stands for Minimum Viable Change. MVC means to make changes with a minimum number of people and as little money and expenses as possible. MVC also applies to the change plans, specifically communication and training plans.

As change practitioners, we need to be open to:

• Be comfortable with small deliverables
• Fail fast and early
• Learn fast from failures, act quickly and iterate

For prototyping, we should consider:

• A diverse group of stakeholders
• The immediate resources available, and
• The strategic priorities

We can also refer to the stakeholder journey maps we created from the empathizing phase to design an MVC. One question that comes to mind here is: what do we do with an MVC? The short answer is testing and implementing.

Test and Implement

In the previous article, I used the single-loop and double-loop learning concepts of Chris Argyris. I complete the conversation here with triple-loop learning. As you see in the illustration below, MVCs from the prototyping phase must be rolled out to the selected stakeholders. For each MVC, we ask the three main questions of triple-loop learning:

1- Is this MVC suitable?

2- Are we implementing the proper MVC?

3- How do we decide if the MVC is good?

To answer these three questions, we evaluate the context and/or the underlying assumptions and current MVCs and strategies we have already developed. This is the testing process.

For the testing phase, we should consider to:

• Develop testing criteria (Context, Assumptions, Strategy)
• Change success KPIs
• Cross-check with different sources of data
• Test our assumptions with actual stakeholders

After testing the MVCs, we can implement the changes, and in this phase, we can be confident that change is adopted with the least resistance and risks. Successfully implementing changes needs to be celebrated, and stakeholders need to be recognized. As human beings, we need to feel that we play a role in our destiny and, in this case, changes that impact our lives. Celebrating small wins is one of the most critical steps of the co-creation process. It helps reduce change fatigue and change the sense of complexity.

To sum up, I should acknowledge that the six articles in the “Design Thinking for Change Management” series?are comprehensive but very simple. I wrote them to explain why and how we use design thinking in our change management practices. However, these articles are insufficient to get the best out of design thinking. There are many tools and techniques associated with design thinking. Of course, when and how to use these tools are so important. For example, we need to determine which tool we use depending on the change phase. Are we in the research and initiation phase? Preparation phase? Re-evaluation phase? Or even the roll-out phase?

If effectively used, design thinking can make your life easy, and if not correctly used, it might complicate change management. If we co-create our change plans with those impacted by organizational changes, we can create adaptable and sustainable changes and resilient organizations.

Do you want to prototype and test your change plans quickly to save time and cost for the considerable change initiative you are working on??Take a look here.

To your personal and professional growth,

This article first appeared in?Change Management Review. This is the sixth and final article of the series on Design Thinking for Change Management (DTforCM?).