LIFE UNDER THE MAGNIFYING GLAS: WHAT DO WE LEARN FROM BEING EXTREME USERS?

Reflections in an informal Leadership Hacking Round

This time we welcomed two new Design Thinking practitioners: Pawan Sharma, President & Global Head of Strategic Initiatives at TECH MAHINDRA and Stephan Rathgeber, Head of Digital Sales Enablement at HAYS. Part of the virtual table again: Annie Kerguenne, Lead Design Thinking Strategy HASSO PLATTNER INSTITUT, Elena Zloteanu, Design Thinking Program Manager HOCHLAND SE, Steven Ney, Executive Innovation Designer T-SYSTEMS and Christian Steiger, Managing Director HAUFE LEXWARE.

We explore if Design Thinking is useful to “help a group of two or more people to achieve a common goal” – which is the definition of leadership we like. 

The unanimous starting point of our conversation this time: where ever you look, things become more extreme:  

o  The different behaviors and attitudes of dealing with the crisis on personal and professional level become more visible: one part would kind of ignore it and behave like if nothing had changed. Face-2-face meetings against all orders, private dinner parties or going to the closed playgrounds were actions we observed. The other part would acknowledge the gravity of the situation, strictly obey the rules and leave the decision about what to do to “the experts”. 

o  The polarity of home office discomfortand existential dangerfor health, life and businesses: even if we experience for the first time that a crisis has this global reach, crossing borders and population groups, the different levels of impact are creating immense gaps within societies. 

o  The radical acceleration of digital transformationin areas like education or work automatization: projects that were planned for implementation within the next 5 years are now put in place within several weeks. 

o  And – the pressure to perform and generate measurable financial impact still raises. Which means for you as a leader, that you may have to decide at a certain moment in time –if measurability becomes THE one criterion for your team to keep their job or not. Heavy duty. 

o  The trend to simplify complexity, a phenomenon that reached broad population segments in the last years, now becomes an overall philosophy. Figures, oversimplified causalities and “Do′s & Don′ts” are the tools of the day. 

From a Design Thinker′s and anthropologist′s perspective, we are currently living in an ideal exploration-field: the underlying needs, beliefs and norms of individuals as well as of organizations and societies become more visible: 

The new norm of measurability is one phenomenon. In addition, we see new norms of work, social relations, a new ideal of working skills and new criteria for business model success emerging. Some will stay: We will certainly not go back to a culture where working from home is considered as a kind of incentive and a topic of negotiation. Hopefully social distancing will end one day – but one of the questions is whether the new solidarity with our system-relevant people will also lead to new norms. What will happen after the crisis with the compensation of all the “front liners”? Nurses, truckers, salespeople in super markets and mothers that have to take care of their children? For giving first positive manifestations towards a more balanced society a chance on the long run – we should maybe wish the crisis to stay a bit. 

How will this “on the long run” look like anyway? What will be the value creation rules in the future? 

The dominant rules today are the pandemic rules: we measure doubling times of infections, and calculate the ratio of infections vs. recoveries vs. non-recoveries. We draw maps of pandemic spread and we listen to experts who base their recommendations on quantitative data models. Which is for sure the best way to behave in order to control at least what IS controllable.Yet, the pandemic dynamic is complex. Which is the reason why decisions that are taken (by business-leaders, family-leaders, pupil-leaders and country-leaders) are by nature interim-decisions. We don′t like these decisions, they don′t feel “real”. 

But interim is the “new black” In Design Thinking it′s called EXPERIMENTING FORWARD and means an iterative cycle of trying out if a hypothesis is true, learning from the effect and re-designing the solution. It is what the pandemic requires. When shut-down regulations are loosened “until further notice”, it′s like prototyping and testing. Prototyping of a situation that allows more economic activities and testing how the key indicators of the crisis evolve. The goal: learning quickly for the next decision to take within these extreme constraints and uncertainty. 

So, what and how can we as leaders learn for the future? The answer depends on our view on what “the future” will be. 

If we think that the probable scenario is “things will get back to normal again sooner or later” – we can take what we learned so far and base our decisions on it: eliminate the hurdles for quick digitalization, defining new KPIs for working remotely for our performance management and be prepared for bad cases by equipping ourselves with things like cash reserves, a good healthcare infrastructure, essential products for protection, effective processes and flexible structures. 

But maybe we want to consider that change becomes indeed the new constant, and then it will take more than these “simple” preparations. In that case, we will have to learn how to learn rapidly on demand. There is some evidence, that this is not the last time we will face a global crisis. Viruses have the capacity to adapt and change very quickly, maybe more quickly than cures and vaccines are developed. So, if we go for that scenario, the cut-down of value creation to simple measurable factors will not make the job. Leadership decisions will have to go beyond deductions of the measurable and preparation for the obvious. They will have to make sure that flexible adaptivity to unpredictable situations leave the Design Thinking workshops and gets anchored in our cultures.

We could seriously start to equip our organizations with an integrated rapid-learning-generator that sets new norms for team creativity, quick prototyping, testing and iteration. 

One example was shared by Christian who explained the “Assignment-Alignment Cycle” (Absprache-Aussprache Regel) being one basic rule defining the culture at HAUFE-LEXWARE: it integrates all three aspects of rapid learning: human-centric goal definition, definition of respective assignment goals by the teams and alignment on the feedback to transform learnings into user-value. 

Inspired by this, we closed our second round with the question: HOW DO WE LEARN FOR THE NEXT WAVE? Because one thing is sure: it will be different. And it′s our job to develop a good strategy for coping with this surprising world in the future. 

We will keep you posted. 

Annie, Elena, Steven, Christian, Pawan and Stephan.