The Transformation Paradox

The State of the Matrix

If you are on this network, chances are your company has clients paying for your salary.

Clients desperate enough with their problems that they use your solutions for a lack of a better one. Which means you have to strive to serve them so that you don’t become the next Nokia, Blackberry, MySpace, BlockBuster, PanAm airlines, Atari, Saab…

But you can’t just give clients what they want or ask for, can you? Clients typically have no idea what’s going on in your kitchen: a very limited knowledge in product development, regulations, compliance issues, investment requirements…

So you need to design something that they desire, yet financially sustainable, technically feasible, legally compliant, ecologically and socially viable.

You also need to be careful, on the other hand, not to get so focused on making something viable that you forget to make it desirable for your clients. Cause then they will just leave you, won't they? And yet...

Large companies organize themselves to optimize the growth and management of products and services clients buy from them. To a point where they get so big that employees start forgetting why the company exists and start optimizing purely for internal KPIs instead of the greater goal of improving their client’s lives. Which quickly translates into tensions building between departments and people. Sales calling out IT because clients they don’t understand are unhappy. Backend peeps pushing back because they’re asked to do stuff that are not compliant or legal. IT pushing back because marketing asks for 432 features a year, most of which will be used only once, if at all, if they are even feasible to begin with.

Start sounding familiar? Don’t beat yourself up. That’s true with every single company.

EVERY. SINGLE. COMPANY! That’s why we get to work with some of the most famous companies out there.

Sometimes it's even before the company becomes large! At Co-creation Lab, we recently worked with a startup of 70 employees that grew a little too fast. The AI team and engineering were not aligned on priorities. Customer success was asking for product features to the product team while the new strategy was changing the business model and a new platform would be needed from engineering.... who needed help from AI on non-AI-related stuff to ship the platform.

The Denial Phase

You get the point. The problem is usually overlooked at first...

"We'll deal with this later"

"Solving this won't help us make money, we don't have budget for this"

"We're behind our targets this quarter, this is not the priority"

[repeat mantra quarter on quarter]

It goes like that until it turns into an hemorrhage of clients, money, talents or all of the above. Until the tension grows so much between the teams and the pressure from the management becomes so high that it becomes a problem the organisation can no longer ignore. In fact, it becomes so problematic that companies put budgets aside to cover the outrageous fee we are charging and decide to mobilize a bunch of collaborators with outrageous salaries on their own and outrageously full agendas to feed us with insights to address the challenge. ?

This tension is as real as it is fascinating though. Because it's a tension between serving the client's best interest and improving your life, as an employee. We all agree that it should be the same goal, in theory. It is actually very rarely the case, in practice.

Changing the lens

So could we possibly rethink the way we are working ? What if we started from a vision of an improved user experience and backtrack from there to question the way we are delivering a service, together, as a team, an organisation, a company? What if from the very beginning of the process we could bring different perspectives to the table, the most critical ones, so that we can reframe the challenge at hand and come up with holistic solutions. And quickly prototype potential pathways towards a happy outcome that we can test easily.

What I just described is the very reason why design sprints were invented. The concept is simple: extract a team of relevant stakeholders from an organisation for a few days, keep them away from their day-to-day distractions and on-going inefficiencies of the company, gather them in a room - a virtual one if you must - and dedicate all of your attention, energy, creativity and goodwill into taking a series of informed decisions, as a group, so that you can get to a happier place. Following a precise user-centric framework, so that you can work simultaneously on improving internal processes and the customer experience, for instance, integrate the expertise of key stakeholders and the perspective of your users, from scratch and continuously, towards one unique common goal.

A few days seem very little time to solve it. Challenges like the ones described above are multi-layers, suffer from their own history, internal sensitivities and failed attempts at solving them. They are usually so complex, in fact, that it would take years to gather all the necessary information to have a complete understanding of the situation, but by then things would have changed, the team would have changed, the regulations would have changed, everything would have changed and the company would still be bleeding money, talents and/or clients. At least until a competitor or a grown up startup comes up with such a better solution that your organisation eventually shuts down this operation.?

But we don’t want that, do we?

New ways of working

So to avoid analysis paralysis, we need to accept that done is better than perfect, that acting is better than waiting for a miracle to happen. We need to take a snapshot at a moment of time and start working with an incomplete set of data, but a rich set of skills and experiences, to identify what we really need to design to make the situation better.?

With the right people in the room, you'll have access to a wealth of complementary data and knowledge that you can leverage to take an aggressive swing at the challenge. With the help, insights and candid feedback of your very own experts, the collaborators who made your company so successful, you will be able to identify and put together the right pieces. Just like a Lego adventure. You will be able redesign any process, product, solution or organisation, prototype it fast and test it instantly! That’s why design sprints have become so famous all around the world. Because they allow you to make a lot of tangible progress in very little time through validated iterations, to go from learning to testing without building the whole thing, to avoid spending all of your resources on something that may never work.

As for the roles of the facilitators of that process, it is to be somehow the least knowledgeable people in the room, to drive the co-creation process and to extract the knowledge from the experts. To be the biggest idiots in the room, to ask the stupid questions, the ones no one dares to asks anymore along with fresh ones. But also to push said collaborators beyond their own limitations and boundaries. To refuse “no” for an answer. To provoke your teams and challenge them to go deeper.

Remember that most companies are born the same way. From understanding that a user's need is not fulfilled, and that something should be done about it. That something must be done. Lots of founders nowadays come from corporate teams, where collaborators just gave up on trying to solve their big challenges from within. One day, they realize it is not possible to change the way things are, so they just leave and launch their own gig. And you lose them and their expertise forever.

Don't let that happen. Leverage the sleeping expertise of your internal talents to question the status quo. Refuse that things cannot be changed and change them. Invite everyone to think big, creatively and differently so that, by the end of your short sprint, your leaders can walk in just to be amazed by the capacity to come together as a group and tackle complex challenges in such an accelerated manner.?

I hope you’re excited about your future because I know I am!!! And Co-creation Lab is.