Scaling Design Thinking: How SAP's Top Customers Helped Overcome Internal Friction and Frustration

The latest episode of the FRICTION podcast stars Sam Yen, a thoughtful and strong-willed leader who spent over a decade at SAP (a large enterprise software company) as leader of the firm's efforts to instill and spread innovation practices--especially design thinking. When we interviewed Sam earlier this year, he was SAP's Chief Design Officer and Managing Director of SAP Silicon Valley (about 6000 employees). His FRICTION interview "The Customers Made Us Scale It" offers sound and sometimes surprising lessons for teams that want to spread new ways of thinking about the work done in their organizations, changing how the work is actually done, and how they collaborate with customers. Sam recently moved to JP Morgan Chase to lead a new service and product innovation effort.

SAP started working on being more human-centered and customer-focused some 15 years ago--long before design thinking was a widely known term, had become a management movement that touched so many organizations (including education, government, and nonprofits), and was seen by some as a fad. The impetus and support for this effort came directly from SAP co-founder and chairman Hasso Plattner. SAP hired many talented people to lead the effort-- for example, Sam has a PHD in product design from Stanford and is an experienced entrepreneur. And, at the outset of this innovation effort, the company trained thousands of employees in design thinking methods.

Yet, as Sam explains in the podcast, these early efforts created frustration in the company because-- after learning these new ways of working and collaborating-- people went back to jobs and organizations where nothing had changed. As Sam put it, the feeling was "Hey there's a new thing, a new way of doing things, a new way of thinking, our executives support it, but I can't practice it." As Sam observed, when a company becomes so enamored with design thinking that they train many people in the fundamentals, but don't actually infuse it in the work that people do, it can create cynicism too. It is rightly seen as all talk and no action. When the main focus is just on workshops and training, and it does not change how the work is done, products are designed, or what customers experience, the effort is headed toward what Sam calls "the valley of death."

In some of the successful design thinking efforts that Huggy Rao and I describe in Scaling Up Excellence, the initial cynicism created by excessive hype and an overemphasis on training faded once people start using design thinking methods to create better products and services. That is what happened at Intuit. Many employees reacted to early presentations and training by saying "this too shall pass." Once leaders simplified their message, and then design thinking and other innovation practices were actually applied to guide and inspire new products and work practices, such methods were embraced in many parts of the company.

At SAP, the story took a different turn. Just as the design thinking movement seemed to be stalling out, Hasso Plattner and other senior leaders came up with a move that energized the effort. They had a three-day meeting scheduled with their most important customers. As Sam put it, they decided, "Why don't we introduce our most strategic customers to design thinking, as a way where we could help co-define our futures together using design thinking as a methodology?" So SAP, with help from faculty at the Stanford d.school, crafted a three-day program for these key customers. It entailed lots of hands-on brainstorming, user interviews, and rapid prototyping. Sam described the experience as being much like good "dinner theatre." Customers were taken with experience, asked to learn more about design thinking, and made many requests to work with SAP on collaborative projects that involved such methods.

Sam explained that this meeting changed the internal view of design thinking from being a strange and not especially useful thing that was done in an "ivory tower" in the company to something that customers needed and wanted. As a result, people in engineering, product development, sales, and elsewhere in SAP began seeing it as central to their work-- and valuable for working with and pleasing their most important customers. Design thinking began to seep into the work that people did in many corners of the company, to guide conversations and collaborative projects with customers, and to influence what people designed and built.

In the podcast, Sam also offered two intertwined lessons that are especially pertinent for scaling any effort meant to change how people act. The first is that, when design thinking succeeded at SAP and elsewhere, the leaders and teams involved didn't just use the lingo. They took the time to learn how to apply human-centered design to their work, to experience the necessary setbacks and frustration that are part of learning anything new, and to adopt it to the particular work they did, the skills their people had, the customers they served, and to company and national cultures. In other words, they blended a deep understanding of design thinking with an equally deep understanding of local needs and tastes. This lesson is similar to the findings from a PHD thesis that I chaired in the 1990s by Mark Zbaracki on the total quality management (TQM) movement. Mark found, that when people used TQM methods to improve products and services, rather than just talked about TQM methods, the practices were reinterpreted and radically changed in response to the the idiosyncrasies of each setting.

The second lesson is about who ought to spread design thinking. Although Sam's team hired people with the right skills to practice, teach, and create enthusiasm about these practices, he learned to be wary of people who were "too religious about what design thinking means." Those dogged people who insisted "this is how it should be practiced because this is how we learned it in school" or "this is how we did it at the last company." Such people were too rigid and unwilling to work inside of SAP or with clients to help them make the necessary local adjustments. Ironically, such zealots fail because they aren't empathetic enough about the needs of those they serve (a key tenant of design thinking).

In the podcast, Sam talks about many more twists and turns of his journey at SAP (this rollercoaster on the Stanford ecorner page for the interview transcript is fitting). Beyond the details of what worked and what didn't, I was struck by Sam's patience and persistence through it all. I've known Sam for years and am always taken with how he doesn't get overly upset when problems and setbacks arise. And he doesn't become overly excited, arrogant, or self-satisfied when things go well. That approach is especially well-suited to leading people through the ups and downs of long-term change efforts in big organizations. And it embodies one of my favorite lessons about learning and change: Focusing on whether one is a success or a failure (for now) isn't very useful. It is far more useful to ask "what am I learning?" and "what is preventing me from learning?"

I am a Stanford Professor who studies and writes about leadership, organizational change, and navigating organizational life. Follow me on Twitter @work_matters, and visit my website and posts on LinkedIn. My latest book is The Asshole Survival Guide: How To Deal With People Who Treat You Like Dirt. Before that, I published Scaling Up Excellence with Huggy Rao. My main focus these days is on working with Huggy Rao to develop strategies and tools that help leaders and teams change their organizations for the better--with a particular focus on organizational friction. Check out my Stanford "FRICTION Podcast" at iTunes or Sticher.