Influencing organisational change
I gave a talk at Service Lab London today on influencing organisational change. This post is the transcript of my talk. If you want to see the slide, you can find it here.
My name is Lingjing Yin. I’ve been working in and around service design for quite long time. I spent most of my last decade working as a practitioner for agencies and consulting firms to help embed service design in client organisation. Last year, I decided to jump the fence to work for a local authority in London. I currently lead a product function in the Royal Borough of Greenwich with a mission to design better services and products, and grow in-house skills.
Thank you charley.pothecary, Ottla, Katerina Shikhotova for kindly invited me to talk about organisational design and building relationships. As a relatively new team in the council, this is something me and our leadership at Greenwich spend a lot of time doing to build trust and create condition for the digital team do the best work.
What I want to share with you today is a provocation and call to experiment. I hope you find them resonating with your own experience.
There is no shortage of ideas and attempts to make things better. But very few of those ideas ever get implemented or built into real services.
I believe most of the people in the room are all very familiar with journey maps that are simple, fast, joint-up, putting human experience at the heart. And we have all wondered why we designers always hit the wall when it comes to implementation.
This tweet from Harry, Head of Design at Made Tech, has created a bit of a buzz recently.
Developing new language and toolkits. Here are Six Provocations.
In my view, to implement change, designers have to develop new language and toolkits (on top of what they already have) to look at setting strategic context, framing meaningful problems, influencing organisational culture and behaviour.
I’d like to share some of my thoughts on how to influence an organisation. I only know how I do it. And I am sure a lot of other people have their own recipe. So please take these as provocations and inspirations to try it in your context.
1
Double diamond is one of the many mental model designers use to frame problems and look for alternative solutions. In this process, it’s very tempting to ignore organisations and the dark matter.
Dark Matter is a phrase Dan Hill in his book Dark Matter and Trojan Horses, uses to describe the intangible matter that makes it difficult for one-off design or prototype to scale. In the context of an organisation, it’s the culture, policy environment, market mechanisms, legislation, financial model, incentives, governance structure, traditions, habits, situations and events that decisions are produced within.
As a designer, we can use our discovery skills to perceive the dark matter of an organisation and the wider context it sits in. We could do dedicated research on this. We could run experiments to test boundaries. We could design the context of the work and set better briefs and scope.
2
We know from experience when we measure the wrong things, then the wrong things become our priorities. We default to bureaucracies. We create busy-work. We lose our best people. We suppress the collective potential. Our tools are likely to shape us, rather than the other way around.
Taking an outcome-led approach can help maximise impact with limited people and things. It could bring a stronger sense of purpose for teams, too.
At the moment, we are starting to develop a practice in Royal Borough of Greenwich to be more outcome-led. This includes:
- articulating better outcomes which cut across directorates
- measuring progress against committed outcomes
- organising people and funding in a more adaptive and relational way
The first step we are taking is to role-model how the digital team uses an outcome framework to identify partnership opportunities with service teams. I will be sharing more on this in future Weeknotes.
3
When I was leading the digital transformation for the British Film Institute (BFI), we were looking for a tangible change to demonstrate the wider organisational changes that has to happen, that is to work across organisational boundaries to deliver audience outcomes. We decided to start with the BFI website to prototype the change we’d like to see.
After observing how different teams communicate with each other, collaborate to produce the content for the website and how technology decisions are made overtime, there are patterns and habits of these teams emerging. During the process of decluttering layers of information and legacy websites, we realise paired working is a great way to bring different teams together. For instance we had content designer and product designer pairing with BFI producers and film fund teams. They worked on shared documents and prototypes to challenge each other. The outcomes are much more unified services that speak to the audience in the language they use.
These are small moves to start to model the change we’d like to see, which are simply about doing everyday business intentionally, as it might be able to shift the patterns at the macro-level.
4
Organisations are made of people and relationships.We can always design better alternative services. And often there is a lot of resistance to change, particularly in a busy operational environment. People like their routines and hate changes. Change is emotional. It takes time. It costs money. If it’s not a lot better, why should people bother? If people don’t feel safe, why should they even try?
I see change as a constant navigation of people’s emotions and motives. Building relationships and trust along the way. This is a massive subject by itself, including how you understand people’s motives, linguistic empathy, going with the energy and honouring the past. Most importantly. It is about always trying to be the kindest person in the room. Everyone is trying their best. It’s only work, and it degrades you to be mean, even if it’s tempting.
Here is a list of my tips on building trust after having worked with the most sensory human Kit Collingwood in the past year.
- Understanding the motives of as many people in the room as possible and picking your battles. What’s important to people might be different from yours. They might be getting home to their kids on time; managing organisational-level risks; making themselves look good; escaping scrutiny; or beating you. Whatever the motive is, try to give them what they want. Don’t fight everything. Particularly don’t fight it when you don’t have proof.
- Listening more and speaking many languages. Repeat people’s glossary of words back to them, before introducing my own words and concepts. Kit Collingwood is a brilliant translator :) She often repeats people’s glossaries to them, before they repeat hers back. I am consciously building my linguistic empathy.
- Going where the energy is. It’s hard to control how things will be done in a large organisation. And I’ve learned before I can influence, I have to sense the beat of each team then dance with it. Once I can dance with it, I can start influencing the cadence of things. Sitting with my discomfort is my biggest challenge. This is about letting go of control and following others’ beats and moves sometimes.
- Honouring the past and giving people choice and control. Shifting to a new way of working will incur grief of the loss. And I often find showing curiosity on where people have come from and how they go about things will help ground the relationship. This is particularly important for a new team like digital. I find what often helps is laying out the options including their past can give people the safety and facilitate them in choosing a future they believe in.
5
In Greenwich Council, we are often tasked with designing interventions and putting in place digital solutions within a complex system such as social care, housing, homelenssness, digital inclusion. These are often constantly evolving living systems or ecologies which are not within control of a single person or team.
This is a great quote from the BBC podcast The Digital Human on why it’s so hard to unpick legacy software. Softwares are often put in by people who are making decisions at a time to get the software do the job they needed to do. It reflected the aims of services and businesses at that time. When the service context are changed, the organisations will face the challenges of replacing technology and unpicking culture and ways of working.
6
I really like this quote from Jamer Hunt in his book Not to Scale: How the Small Becomes Large, the Large Becomes Unthinkable, and the Unthinkable Becomes Possible.
“If we were aiming to grow roses, to use an analogy, we might design and build a lattice so that the roses have an infrastructure for successful growing. The aim is for the roses to flourish and for the lattice, ultimately, to fade into the background…the intent is to design an intermediary framework that is not the thing itself (that is, the rosebush), but the means by which many different configurations (or roses) may emerge.”
When it comes to influencing organisational change, I find it useful to approach it like garden design. Instead of trying to tightly control how your plants grow, I find it more useful to nurture the conditions in which services and people can emerge and flourish.
When I started the product function from scratch this time last year, I was inspired by Aly Blenkin’s approach in creating the scaffolding for the team to do their best work. And a lot of work so far has went into creating the basic scaffolding for our teams to anchor on and grow around, including a set of organising principles and meetings deliberately designed to encourage cross-disciplinary learning and collaboration.
This is not a glamorous job. It involves a lot of admin work, speaking to a lot of people and context switching. But it is deep intentional work with the aim to influence people and purpose, create positive dynamics, and bring clarity to situations.
To close. I’d like to offer a final provocation.
I vividly remember watching a Japanese gardener at work when I visited a garden in Kyoto. When they are pruning their branches, they are often thinking about a thousand year mental map of the tree.
I often ask myself nowadays “what would a Japanese gardener do to ensure the action they take now can help grow something bigger and beautiful that outlasts them?”
And I extend this question to you today.
Thank you for having me :)
Thank you Kit Collingwood for bouncing ideas with me leading up to this talk. Thank you to all organisers of Service Lab London. And it was brilliant to hear other inspirational speakers Charlie Cosham, Xenia Kolesnikov-Martin on their approaches in organisational design.
Here are some pictures of my actual garden. Not quite a Japanese garden yet. But I am working on it in my own way.
