A Human-Centered Approach to Unlocking Organizational Change

By Mathew Chow and Mollie West Duffy

We often get asked, what is organizational design at IDEO? In our history as a global design firm, we frequently find that, behind an organization’s interest in designing new products, services and experiences, lie greater aspirations and desires for change—and a need for help designing their future. To maintain competitive advantage, today’s organizations need to be agile, innovative, and customer-centered.

Many approaches to organizational design come in the form of templated programs—from the tried and true like matrix structures, to newer and more experimental like Holacracy. These systems typically come with a fixed set of assumptions about how organizations need to operate.

Unlocking the untapped potential of an organization often requires a more tailored and iterative approach, taking into account an organization’s singular challenges and opportunities. At IDEO, we do this by tackling organizational change with the same methods we use to create innovative products, services, and experiences.

Here are five ways organizational designers at IDEO work to shape creatively competitive organizations.

1)  Develop deep organizational understanding, quickly

Our experience has shown empathy to be a key element in research to help uncover latent needs. We not only want to learn what our clients and their customers say and do, but also to understand how they think and feel. Organizational design is no different. Interviewing and observing stakeholders provides the first insights to understanding how an organization works; from there we try to understand deeper systemic needs by tapping into our playbook for organizational empathy.

It can be difficult for an organization to take its own measure of creative strengths and opportunities: are we a creative organization? In what ways? What’s missing in our current organization to unlock a more innovative approach to our business? Creative Difference is an online tool for organizational assessment of six key Creative Qualities: Purpose, experimentation, collaboration, empowerment, looking out (at external forces), and refinement (the ability to successfully execute new ideas). Creative Difference analyzes and shares the results, highlighting areas for development and suggested action items to improve.

Creative Tensions is another methodology, developed in partnership with the Sundance Institute Theatre Program, which can provide quick insights on where a group stands—quite literally—on a variety of issues. Reflecting on a tension between two ideas, participants are asked to stand on one side of the room or the other to represent their answer. Suddenly it’s possible to visualize the full spectrum of ideas and philosophies within a group. Participants are asked to share why they chose the spot where they are standing. For example, participants from a financial services company were asked, “how does the company’s purpose guide your work?” The possible poles were “It guides our day-to-day work” and “It guides our big picture strategy.” The distribution of people across the room made evident how the company's purpose was guiding behavior, and where there is opportunity for change.

2) Take a collaborative approach

A design-led approach starts with a multi-disciplinary team which includes software designers, graphic designers, engineers, architects, businesspeople, writers, physicians, lawyers, and many more. This diversity of experience, expertise and perspective enables us to better understand the design, business, and technology needs of an organization and their users.

This approach also allows us to collaborate with client partners in radical ways, whether embedding and designing new products and services together, or having select partner team members embed with the IDEO team, away from their daily demands.

Organizational change tends to be challenging work. It’s important to remember that designing change in a workplace directly impacts people’s lives. It can be emotionally—as well as intellectually—demanding. The shared experience of working side-by-side builds deep understanding, trust, and an emotional reserve with our clients which we can both draw from as we change unfolds in the organization.

3) Create a shared vision for what’s possible

Developing empathy and trust is just the start to the organizational design process. How can the insights revealed in the first phase be leveraged? Some might be tempted only to optimize current operations. But when creating future-fit organizations, we also design with an eye towards new competencies which may reveal or catalyze new possibilities.

This forward-looking attitude is essential to removing false constraints from brainstorming and ideation sessions where dozens of concepts about how to address organizational challenges may arise. After this generative period, “hot spots” of interest are identified and testable concepts are co-designed with our clients to help answer questions about how organizational change can occur.

Often the greatest value we provide is in helping clients see themselves in new ways. One way we do this is by inviting a company to look beyond their immediate competition and learn from organizations in analogous industries. For example, we asked a government innovation team: what could you learn from the way Blue Apron approaches digital customer service? Non-business organizational systems are also great sources of inspiration.  A fashion e-tailer might consider what they might learn from the way bonobos and chimpanzees organize themselves. Nature’s time-tested organizing principles can provide new ways of looking at man-made challenges.

Organizations may also find it beneficial to think about the future of their own industry to consider how prepared they are for change. We’re not fortune tellers, but by working together to examine the technological, economic, and social possibilities that might shift industries, we provoke clients to consider how they might begin to plan for those projected futures, starting today.

4) Prioritize and prototype change initiatives

The application of fresh insights, outside expertise, and analysis may help point the way to sweeping change. But often in complex organizational change problems, no amount of analysis will bring absolute certainty, especially on the path towards future-readiness. Prototyping allows organizations we work with to start small, learn what works, and evolve their toolkit for change as they go. It’s important to start with a vision of where you’re going, but also important (not to mention cheaper and less disruptive) to be able to get started smaller and sooner, knowing you have the ability to shift gears if the path towards your change vision runs into unexpected challenges.

As an example, a cruise line company wanted to explore changing its customer service call center to create a better experience. Together we designed a new team structure and incentives model for call center agents. To test it out, we designed a live prototype. One team adopted the new team structure and incentives for two weeks to see the impact on real customers. A simple A/B test of customer service survey results provided a comparison of the prototype team’s customer service with the norm. Qualitative research was also conducted, listening in on calls and getting feedback from the agents themselves. Based on these measures, we learned that the team structure and incentives were largely successful, and small tweaks were made before rolling the new experience out to a larger group of agents.

Innovative companies often build Minimum Viable Products (and services) to prove or disprove concepts cheaply and quickly. The same can be done with organizational change. Prototyping change allows organizations to prioritize projects that can have an immediate impact, engage stakeholders who are already bought in without consensus across the board, and react nimbly to changes in external conditions.

5) Create self-sustaining change

As organizations evolve to tackle increasingly complex projects and endeavors, greater capabilities will be required. Organizational change via design thinking allows for an iterative organizational design cycle of prototyping interventions, learning how an organization reacts, measuring success (comparing periodic Creative Difference results to an original benchmark can help here), and using those learnings and results to evolve change strategy.

For a major global conglomerate, IDEO ran Creative Difference with four related but non-competing companies, convening leaders once per year to evaluate change initiatives from the prior year against changes in their Creative Difference scores. Companies celebrated successes and dissected unexpected results, and were additionally able to compare notes from one company to another to share learnings. Several companies prioritized increasing their purpose and empowerment scores in early days. The annual event created some friendly competition and accountability between companies, but also sparked organic cross-company collaborative efforts on change initiatives for subsequent years.

Transformation takes time, but doing so iteratively ensures you’re making progress along the way and adapting to changing conditions as they arise. It allows for scaling to happen organically. And it looks a lot more like a movement than a mandate.

As organizational designers at IDEO, we try to avoid abrupt, rigid, or linear change models in favor of iterative change partnerships. Just as designers use creative methods to understand their users, co-create with stakeholders, and adapt concepts iteratively to design a product or service, we partner deeply with our clients in their change journeys. Our aspiration for organizational change is that we’ll leave our clients with new methods, mindsets, and capabilities that are a part of their own toolkit for change. For us, successful programs result in our partners being able to tackle their future challenges with the same creative rigor and adaptability that have made IDEO itself a leading innovator.