Blog #10 — IBM Design Thinking: Similarities and Differences
On Wednesday, we conducted a client session that was part deliverable review, part IBM Design Thinking workshop. I have both participated in and facilitated many Design Thinking workshops during my time at IBM, and they have all generally followed the same pattern. At the outset, the clients felt uncomfortable with a new way of thinking about their problems. By the end, they saw the value in the approach as well as the outcomes they were capable of producing. It was no different facilitating a workshop here in Argentina.
With the help of our translator, we led the following activities: Stakeholder Map, Prioritization Grid, User Experience Roadmap, and a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) Analysis using Design Thinking principles. In addition to generally learning more detail and nuance about my client’s current state, I also had a few takeaways that transcended the project itself.
My first takeaway was that strong Project Management is a challenge everywhere. In my experience, I have seen both highly effective and extremely ineffective project leadership. However, I consider myself fortunate to work in place where the cultural norm is proactive management of projects. Whether it’s the management of scope, stakeholders, risks, issues, dependencies, etc., the expectation is that there is a designated individual for managing these items. I can’t speak to the overall norm in Argentina, but with my client in particular project management is extraordinarily decentralized. Each stakeholder manages his or her own work, without anyone looking at an integrated point of view. On one hand, the lack of centralized project management responsibility provides a huge opportunity to add value through our recommendations and by sharing leading practices. On the other hand, it will require an enormous mindset shift, as well as buy in from a large and diverse group of stakeholders, for true transformation to occur.
The second concept that really shocked me was project accountability. As we made our recommendation for a new project governance structure, it became clear that there is no single word in Spanish for accountability. The difference between responsibility (the person who executes) and accountability (the person who experiences consequences if the work is not executed) is fundamental to project governance, and was a critical component of the model we proposed. Many of my projects at IBM include a “RACI” chart, indicating who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed for all key decisions; this tool becomes impossible to use if the “R” and “A” are indistinguishable. While we ultimately found a way to describe the concept, it was an eye opening experience to realize the drastic difference in cultural norms around accountability, and how they are reflected in the language. It was also interesting to me that other CSC project teams experienced this same challenge. Over breakfast the morning after our workshop, I exchanged stories with IBM colleagues from Germany and Japan who had the exact same issue when discussing the topic of accountability with their clients.
Finally, the cultural norms around group work were interesting for me to watch and learn from as well. Our client team is made up of half older / more experienced members, and half junior members with fresh perspectives. (There is an especially interesting dynamic as two team members are a father and daughter, whose family business is a key stakeholder for the project.) One of the things I love about the Design Thinking approach is that it enables collaboration across organizational hierarchy. Everyone gets a pen, and all ideas are posted up on the wall regardless of who generated them. However, I watched our client team struggle with collaboration when they went up to cluster similar ideas and discuss. The more senior members expected the junior members to do the “work” of grouping post it notes, while the junior members participated less frequently in the group playback discussions. The IBM team and our translator did our best to engage everyone, but it was certainly a challenge to overcome the cultural norms around seniority. While I have experienced similar issues during client workshops at home, the hierarchical barriers were even more pronounced and required even more effort to manage than usual.
Overall, I think our clients learned a lot from the workshop. They asked many questions and engaged enthusiastically in the subject matter, particularly on the topics of project management and governance. It was an awesome learning experience for the IBM team as well. In typical Argentine fashion, we celebrated the successful workshop by going to dinner together afterwards… at 10pm!
