Don’t you wonder sometimes about survival
Can we break down the walls between customers and organisations?
And you may ask yourself, how did I get here *: by chance or by design? Or somewhere in-between. Are you banking on riding a wave while it lasts or are you negotiating your space in that future real-estate?
To reach our future goals, let’s spell out the survival instinct, into a desire for adaptation and need for change. Let’s connect the dots between:
customer needs at heart (step 1) +
informed but creative problem-solving (step 2) =
growth & business survival by design (step 3)
In the long run, organisations survive if they innovate or sustain growth. But it’s no mean feat. Company lifespans tend to decline and many Fortune 500 companies cease to exist after 20 years these days.
Really. Bearing in mind that this is not an attempt at a single-factor explanation, why do these companies (rise and) fall? For lack of adapting to an ever changing environment, such as consumer behaviour, or an ‘inability to take appropriate action’?
Change sounds fast and vast but that’s not a good reason to fear or an excuse to ignore it. The risk of change seems high, yet the cost of not investing in change and innovation led to the downfall of these companies. Then how might they have increased the odds of success?
How might we survive
Key ingredients to adapt to change, in on-going fashion
A will to bend to customers and the wider stakeholder circle helps looking at issues from the user's perspective and embedding customer needs into the business lifeline— instead of sticking to business needs in a linear trajectory set out in lofty annual strategy objectives and traced by comfortable conventions and an organisational culture of silos (K. Best p.29).
Continuous curiosity and extroverted exploration of the world outside of the office walls injects life into business. Expanding an unquestioned world view helps improve products/services and ensure a satisfactory customer experience. To gain adaptive or competitive advantage, consider fostering the social sciences-influenced ‘user-centric’ design approach.
Investing in technology and people development or reinvesting profits into the business rescues companies from stagnation — instead of merely harvesting the quarterly profits or dwelling on the ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality.
Learning new skills and adopting new technology means staying abreast of the changes in the market and society. To give the change momentum a chance, staff need to engage and take an active part, particularly at large scale in a public sector context. Teams equipped with digital and relevant new technology can experiment laterally with new practices and methods developed in other domains, say, in software development circles, such as ‘agile’ ways of working a project.
Sharing and exchanging resources infuses the business with fresh blood and provokes novel ways of thinking, with insights as to how to improve or invent products or services—forfeiting a culture of competitive thinking, turf-building and fear of sharing intelligence with other teams or partners (see eg, Table 1 in Dunne and Martin’s article on managerial problems).
Collaboration — in con-junction with people in internal teams; in mixed customer-company-consultancy teams; or cross-industry with rivals — offers an innovation or survival strategy (consider reading The silo effect,2015, by the anthropologist Gillian Tett, for cases in electronics, banking and more). This may ask for a significant shift in leadership attitudes and work culture.
Adopting an open-minded, even generous, spirit backed by an experimental and rapidly iterative approach is at stake:
Sharing rather than owning may ask for a drastic shift in thinking (and, why not, in the business model).
We’re talking about some core ingredients amounting to design thinking, which is informed by design research and methods. The design process can become a decision-making tool, for understanding customer and other changes, before deciding how to best act on the observed changes and how to serve customers better.
Muster up this challenge: if children can do it, so can you! The approach is simple and transparent.
Our snapshot here drills down into a high-level structure: a design approach to fostering change or innovation in three steps. Others break down the process into five to six (eg, Stanford) steps.
Step 1. Customer needs at heart
Understand your stakeholders & define the problem
In the discovery phase, you include customers from relevant groups in the process. Why? Just like stock markets fluctuating on the whim of traders, people behaviour is notoriously elusive, emotional and so unpredictable. If customers think or feel alienated from a product, it soon becomes irrelevant as substitutes become available on the market. It’s crucial, then, to improve their (overall service) experience to keep the business alive.
Joining customers where they are in their natural habitat, observing how stakeholders currently solve (or get around) and experience the problem, leads to discovery. This contextual immersion may beget good or bad surprises. Surprises can reveal insights as to why and how people are using a similar or work-around product/service, beyond the obvious.
Step 2. Informed but creative problem-solving
Cross-map all data, include users in the creation of prototypes
The new solution should address a need, problem or gap in the market. Harvard Business Essentials (2003. Managing Creativity and Innovation) identifies ‘incremental’ and ‘radical’ innovation types that inform either the gradual creation of new design, or more radical, ‘disruptive’ innovation. Changing or designing something radical needs to make sense in a business logic, too.
Yet, information or logic best not get in the way of creativity. You need to trust the process and make room for innovation when exploring and brainstorming the problem. This is when the existing rationale that has led to the status quo in the first place needs to be defied. So the art is to strike a balance between creativity and feasibility.
Gathering information starts in the discovery and continues in the design phase. Now the team formulates ideas addressing the problem and crafts material or digital versions of those ideas, prototypes, often together in co-creation with stakeholders.
At this stage, the challenge is to succeed in overcoming the old logic and fear of investing in radical new ground. This happens when people from different fields of expertise contribute to the problem solving.
We’re talking of a cultural shift that breaks down the walls between departments or teams.
At best the walls between customers and the organisation come crashing down, too. This experimental phase (i.e., co-creating, prototyping) holds out a better future: a user experience that is meaningful because it stays alive and not stuck in times past.
Bonus! Stakeholders may also appreciate being consulted. Being in contact with people in ‘the field’ (outside the office walls) includes customers in the loop. People may want to share their bad experiences and contribute ideas for improvement or innovation. They are also more likely to buy into an experience that has been co-designed with users.
At one point in the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Judi Dench, who plays a grieving widow, is connected with a…www.mckinsey.com
This Brazilian case study on airline passengers’ first flight illustrates the design process in detail.
Step 3. Growth & business survival. By design
Test, launch & keep iterating … and fail rapidly or succeed!
Testing keeps products or services relevant. Why were we doing this exercise again in the first place?
To think from users’ perspective and understand if they might want to experience the service, after all.
Usability of the invention matters. Why produce something no one wants to use? So we’re testing the prototype with actual customers to validate its usability. Piloting an early version has the benefit of revealing infeasible products at small scale and saving costs of developing it further.
Usability testing is done fast and often to improve upon earlier versions and to scale them. A baseline mark is taken as a metric early on to measure progress with each iteration. Why iterate and improve? Iteration follows the rationale of change: it’s not a one-off event! Experimenting with prototypes in response to a problem means revising the overall user experience. The smaller the cycles, the more frequent the feedback and the faster the adaptation and early release of a ‘minimum viable product’. Failing at this stage bears a low cost and eradicates the hurdle of stagnation by ‘analysis paralysis’ or of irrelevance by ‘wild-guess’ assumptions.
The rapid iteration cycles adopted in design thinking-and-doing offer a way of dealing with change in a fast-pace, changing environment. The much heralded future is on our door step, what with a mobile, inter-connected world promising automation and artificial intelligence, 360-degree virtual and layered, augmented reality applications and Internet-of-Things connectivity.
Embrace the future head-on
A transparent connection to people-centric problem-solving can be woven into the organisation. Clarity of process and customer focus will have to break down those silos. Embedding a clear design philosophy underpinned by a set of processes and practices enables the business to remain healthy, to adapt and develop. Oh and ‘process’ may sound awfully stuffy, so beware of draining the life out of team work. Au contraire, the interactive and creative nature of design thrives on a sense of joy and playfulness.
Being “design driven” means operating in a fundamentally different way. In this video, McKinsey’s Mahin Samadani…www.mckinsey.com
The key is to embed design thinking into organisational culture and practices
So, connecting the dots between raison d’être, the macro (wider environment) and micro world (your customers) can help negotiate the road to survival. And, perhaps success in the shape of a disruptive shift in the marketplace, triggered by radical innovation.
Of course it’s best to strike a balance, to avoid disproportionate growth or excessive change in an organisation (or in the wider economy, as when the global financial underworld leaped ahead of general economic growth, resulting in the 2007/2008 global financial crash and debt crisis — as explained and narrated by G. Tett in The silo effect and in Fool’s gold).
Smart organisations and start-ups foster their own design processes and practices to keep ahead of the game.
Your organisation will want to experiment with how this process works best for your situation — and draw your own conclusions as to how to progress. You may opt for product development, service design, (user or ‘UX’) experience design, holistic organisational or digital transformation or for an entire shift in the business model. But most importantly you will adapt and innovate, grow and survive: by design.
Aim for the future and claim that space. Enjoy the journey, too.
Ⓒ NdeGoede
*From a Talking heads song
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