Yes, You Can Scale the Design-Driven Culture -- Here’s How We Did it

Making yourself and any business successful arguably starts by looking for practical, creative solutions that really stay focused on what users do, want, and need. This needs to be a continuous customer service effort in which you experiment to test your hypotheses, bring products to market quickly, and scale your company once your ideas are validated. Design thinking is a hands-on, collaborative process or approach that’s meant to help you achieve this goal and get tangible, testable products or services into the market faster. To get a little more specific, it involves learning about and empathizing with your user, defining a problem, coming up with lots of ideas, making some prototypes, and then testing what you’ve built. Yet, how can you, as a leader, scale design thinking and make it an accepted cornerstone of your company culture?

The design sprint experiment

Much of what our company, CI&T, does is focused on helping businesses become and operate lean. And by “lean,” we don’t mean cutting costs or finding what’s cheapest. Rather, it’s all about efficiency as well as defining and generating what is most valuable for your customers. It often includes concepts like continuous improvement or looking at the flow of your operations. The idea is that the leaner you are, the faster and more consistently you can get something to your customer. And so to cultivate this lean mentality, and as part of our 2015 Strategy Planning meetings, we decided to try what’s called a design sprint for the first time at scale.

The length of time you take with the design thinking process is variable and can depend on a lot of elements, such as how much experimentation you want and have the resources to do. But with a design sprint, you take the whole design thinking sequence and condense it into just five days. It looks something like this:

• Monday: Map out the problem.
• Tuesday: Sketch out some individual solutions to the problem.
• Wednesday: Decide which solutions are the strongest and are worth trying.
• Thursday: Build your prototype(s).
• Friday: Test your prototype(s).

There’s also an updated, even more condensed design sprint 2.0 which takes just four days by combining map/sketch on Monday. Either way, experts don’t have to stay for the actual prototype building and testing if their time is tight.

In our case, we opted to host 12 simultaneous sessions of five-day design sprints with 110 people from within our senior leadership. 

Did we come up with solutions? Absolutely. But something else very interesting also happened. 

We noticed that everybody doing the design sprints suddenly became more engaged. They were enthusiastic, not only because everybody had come together across silos, but because the sprint proved to them that finding potential solutions didn’t have to be so burdened or constrained. They got to dive in, get their hands dirty, and toss concepts out in ways that standard processes and busy agendas normally wouldn’t support. And they got to see results from their teamwork very quickly.

After the sprints, those who had participated in the sessions became eager advocates. We’d converted people at the core of our business into believers in the technique by letting them actually try the method out. We suddenly had people who could support the idea of the sprint -- and design thinking in general -- simply because we let them have some first-hand experience with it. While, today, our approach to Strategy Sessions has evolved, switching up some steps and exercises, we’ve kept design thinking at the core. And by continuing this sprint method of delivering a few days of intense, super-focused work, we’re able to achieve some truly awesome results with our clients.

It’s the new experience and collaboration that counts

Now, if you step back a little, you can also see that those who were involved in the sessions took a risk and tried something new. And, ultimately, scaling design thinking so that it’s a central part of your business culture comes down to helping your team break out of ruts and old ways of thinking. Anything you can do that encourages them to get a fresh perspective or that challenges the status quo can get them closer to being comfortable with a design-oriented mindset. 

If your company can’t jump into a customized design sprint at the moment for some reason, or if you still need to work out exactly how you want to evolve your own design thinking process for the biggest benefit, you can still find small ways to encourage them to think outside the box until you’re ready to proceed. You just want them doing activities where they aren’t mere bystanders or observers and to push them to encounter their world in positive, memorable ways they never have before. Adding some simple exercises in day-to-day reflection and decision processes as well as using some of the tools and methods in regular 1-hour meetings can help create this culture. It’s these encounters that help them question biases, ask better questions, and consider issues from many different angles the way good design and product development demands.

Secondly, as you set up design sprints or other activities for your team, don’t underestimate the value of the collaboration element. Yes, collaboration creates some synergy that can increase how productive you are or the number of solutions you propose. But when you collaborate, you also get some quick, peer-pressure based confirmation that a new way of thinking or doing is OK. You have a shared experience that can help people feel like they really belong in the group. And so events that get your people together, even in a remote way, can be enormously helpful in unifying your workforce toward new strategies and cultural ideals more quickly.

Becoming the next real success

Leaders at some of the world’s most successful businesses have been using design thinking for years. But many companies still need to get their teams fully on board with it. Design sprints or other collaborative activities that offer new experiences to employees can help convert your employees into advocates for the process. Whether you’re a startup just getting off the ground or a well-established corporation bringing in billions per year, build design thinking into your culture to get more done and make your vision happen.

This is the second article of a 3-part series on design thinking. The third article will concentrate on how we’ve evolved our design-thinking process.

Here is the first article of the series: How to Include Your Engineers & Other Employees in Your Design-Driven Culture

Here is the third article: How We’ve Evolved the Design-Thinking Process for Our Best Results Yet