ACCELERATING INNOVATION IN ANY ORGANIZATION BEGINS WITH THE PEOPLE
Re-enforcing the spirit of Thomas Edison into everything we do through organization wide Design Thinking training.
Our founder was a philosopher, a researcher, and a visionary. GE and the later GE Transportation were founded on these principles of fortitude, experimentation, and entrepreneurial spirit — all of which carry into our brand messaging today. Edison recognized the value of design and research-led organizations as a means of discovery.
Today, the world around us, our customers, their workforces, and their shipping customers is changing at an unprecedented pace and in unprecedented ways. While our teams continue to make strides within GE Transportation, re-enforcing the spirit of Thomas Edison into everything we do as an organization will be critical for us to maintain our push as industry leaders and innovators. We as a collective group of thinkers, tinkerers, researchers, hackers, philosophers, and explorers will need to embrace our own design-led and user-centric framework, to enable adapting to the environment around us and to ensure our collective success within it.
To accomplish this, my team and I produced an immersive training program for all GE Transportation employees to allow individual business units, project teams, and other groups to learn the value and how-to application of the Design Thinking approach in their everyday projects.
The Design Thinking Program was created as an initiative of the GE Transportation Innovation Lab, to help our teams explore the future of freight and transportation, beyond our daily tasking and sprints, to understand how we and our partners will build and thrive tomorrow.
Throughout the three certificate levels of the program, our people gain a deeper understanding of what Design Thinking is and the value it can unlock for our teams and our customers. These enhanced workforce skillsets increase our Innovation Accelerator framework viability for new idea generation from the entire transportation industry.
*The case study will take you on a design-led journey of creating an open sourced Design Thinking training program along with a few lessons learned from the experience.
The problem to be solved?
INNOVATION WAS “DISCOURAGED”
Typical in a lot of legacy type businesses, the workforce generally becomes more risk averse and our institutions encourage us into siloed functional expertise from early education to advanced academia and ultimately throughout our careers. We are discouraged to think outside of our domain and/or explicit duties. We are discouraged from our innate playfulness to imagine the futures we dream of and desire to create for ourselves and the people around us. Essentially, we slowly deprioritize the creative abilities we are born with.
Several issues facing our workforce were inhibiting a business opportunity to empower 1500+ employees to be more innovative:
- There was not a common language around how to approach innovation
- The business was not providing structured resources for employees to more easily learn forward thinking frameworks that drive innovation
- The employees were not encouraged by middle managers to experiment with an entrepreneurial spirit
Who are the users?
“LEGACY” THINKERS & INNOVATION CHAMPIONS
The target audience and users of the Design Thinking Program are all employees at GE Transportation along with the company’s external customers.
The employees of the transportation industry are talented and passionate about their work. They have both in-depth functional expertise and a deep understanding for their perspective customers’ problems. However, a majority of the employees have been working in the same role most of their careers and have become accustomed to the status quo of legacy functional expertise steeped in history and nostalgia.
What’s the goal of the initiative?
ADVANCE INNOVATION CULTURE
Empower the workforce to drive new and meaningful leap innovations in and out of their functional roles.
I aspired to systematically recapture the magic of our founder Thomas Edison’s approach to innovation. My ambition was to create a training program grounded in forward thinking frameworks and methodologies which would enable the transportation industry workforce to re-imagine new futures, to embrace “failure/learning,” and to be inspired to try new things out in the world with end-users at the center.
I believed that harnessing the creativity of the entire workforce would ultimately reveal leap innovation opportunities at an accelerated rate.
My high-level goals were to:
- Leverage open sourced frameworks from leading edge companies and academia
- Provide a common approach to innovation across the industry workforce
- Produce a collection of resources that are easily learned with enhanced context around how to connect the dots for a user-centered, iterative methodology to new solution creation
What’s my role in the project?
EMBODY THE SPIRIT OF OUR FOUNDER
As the Global Design Director, I led the vision, strategy and creative direction to realize the Design Thinking Program at GE Transportation.
In addition, I evangelized the value of this program to all of our company and our customers to generate awareness, buy-in and support of the initiative.
APPROACH TO INNOVATION
My design-led approach is made of four different types of workstreams — discovery, ideation, design, and evaluation — all with the end user at the center!
During discovery I strive to learn what people really need by immersing myself in the users’ environment and prioritize actionable opportunities. Together with a multi-disciplinary team, I then ideate concepts, evaluate assumptions, and leap past obvious solutions to arrive at an innovative vision of a potential solution. Once we have alignment, I involve stakeholders and users at every possible step to iteratively design and improve ideas. I then evaluate solutions, implement feedback, and continuously validate to craft a human story that resonates with both executive stakeholder and users to drive adoption.
DISCOVERING WHAT WAS TRIED, TRUE AND DESIRED
During the discovery phase of this initiative I began (as I almost always do) with secondary research to identify leaders in the subject matter. I desired to learn from others’ successes and failures when deploying educational training in general and classify what’s become the most widely accepted methodology for design thinking.
While I have been immersed in all things Design Thinking for years, practiced it in the field across 5 continents, achieved advanced degrees based on the subject and evangelized the value to hundreds of internal and external customers to date, there was still a need to formally collect approaches that have achieved success out in the wild in order to increase our chances of success in the transportation industry.
There have been hundreds of books, scholarly journals and magazine articles showing the value of design thinking and the varying methodologies being deployed around the world. The sheer volume can be daunting to consume and make sense of, but by and large there are key elements that are always incorporated.
Some of my favorite books, articles, podcast and more on the topic are as follows:
Books
· The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley
· Change by Design by Tim Brown
· Design Thinking by Nigel Cross
· Creative Confidence by Tom & David Kelley
· The Designful Company by Marty Neumeier
· The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger Martin
· Exposing the Magic of Design Jon Kolko
· The Third Teacher: 79 Ways You Can Use Design to Transform Teaching and Learning Cannon Design, VS Furniture, and Bruce Mau Design
Articles
“Design affects much more than appearances and can help develop innovative solutions for just about any problem. Paola Antonelli, said it best: ‘Design is not style. It’s not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.’”
“Hendrix also sees design thinking fail in cultures that don’t promote play, which he believes is a necessary circumstance for design thinking to truly succeed. ‘Playfulness and joy don’t need a reason other than that they create the conditions . . . to allow people to be more creative,’ he says. ‘In cultures that are highly optimized, that promote efficiency, that celebrate intellectualism–they can push play and joy aside. It doesn’t mean those things are bad. Rationale analysis is very important. But coexisting with playfulness and joy will make those things work.’”
Podcasts
“Infusing your organization with a design-driven culture that puts the customer first may provide not only real, measurable results but also a distinct competitive advantage.”
In recent years Design Thinking has been gaining recognition as a leading approach to innovation. There have been numerous studies that have provided proof points for the value that the methodology provides.
Design Value
“What business needs now is design. What design needs now is making it about business” — Beth Comstock
“In fact, companies with high design maturity see cost savings, revenue gains, and brand and market position improvements as a result of their design efforts. What we uncovered about the practices of these enterprises offers a blueprint for business leaders to ensure their design dollars are invested for maximum returns.”
Given this, universities and companies alike have created courses and programs to educate and instill this type of thinking.
University Degree Programs
“Unite strategic design, organizational management, generative leadership, and innovative technology for total value creation.”
“The Master of Science in Strategic Design and Management program brings together a diverse group aspiring to initiate and lead change in emerging fields: business professionals wishing to address business challenges through design, design practitioners seeking to acquire expertise in business and leadership, and entrepreneurs looking to develop transformative business propositions for an evolving global economy.”
Company Training Programs
“Belief in your creative capacity lies at the heart of innovation.” — David Kelley, founder of IDEO and The Stanford d.school
“As an enterprise team, you face complex challenges. You work across silos and juggle competing requirements — all while racing to meet rising expectations. That’s why we developed Enterprise Design Thinking, a framework that aligns multi-disciplinary teams around the real needs of their users. When teams apply these scalable methods, they’re able to move faster and deliver differentiated outcomes over and over again.”
While synthesizing the secondary research findings, along with my own thoughts through years as a design thinking practitioner, I was able to set a vision and path forward for the working team with a strong sense of the elements that would be needed for an effective deployment. The key insight based on others’ successes and failures was that the program should be founded on open source materials and widely accepted terminology with a tiered approach to the learnings to increase the chance for high adoption rates.
Now that we had a solid collection of widely accepted “best practices” and open source materials to leverage, the team would need to perform primary research probes in order to help bring this journey to life in the context of the GE Transportation business and industry.
The team interviewed employees at GE Transportation along with random external individuals to better understand the state of awareness for Design Thinking as an innovation accelerant.
The most troubling insight was that a majority of internal employees had never heard of Design Thinking, much less the value that it has been proven to bring for a company’s competitive advantage. This presented both a challenge and an opportunity, as anything we produced would have an impact on the company’s innovation culture. However, as with anything I lead, “just good enough” isn’t my modus operandi, we needed to strive for high impact to our business.
Concluding synthesis of all research to date, a few of the foundational outputs identified for the initial version of the program would be a Design Thinking book that could be used as a toolkit of sorts, additional resources for each level of certification and marketing materials to evangelize and familiarize participants with the value of the methodology.
IDEATE AROUND THE BEST POSSIBILITIES
During the ideation phase the working team approached the program outputs holistically to drive continuity between levels of certification training.
At the center of the initiative was how I challenged the team to operate on the assumption of a beginner’s mindset. This had a dual purpose; by taking this approach they would be both empathizing with their end-user’s lack of experience with this forward-thinking framework in order to drive optimal adoption and also using this as a means to enhance their own expertise around the Design Thinking methodology.
One boundary I put on the team during this phase was to adapt best in class, open sourced materials. The purpose of this directive was to reduce the time to production and not create yet another company specific variation of the framework that couldn’t be referenced externally for enhanced personal learning outside of the program.
While I am a huge fan of any effort that increases the awareness of Design Thinking, a lot of individuals and companies are creating unnecessary confusion by producing their own variations of the methodology to advance their status as a forward-thinking company.
For instance, IBM has created their own version of the framework termed “Enterprise Design Thinking”. The impact they are having is seen as mostly positive from my perspective because it’s bringing awareness to how to think design in an enterprise environment, but they have introduced new elements such as the “loop”, “hills”, “playbacks” and “sponsor users”, etc. to name a few. All of which are “proprietary” ways they have restricted the methodology as more of a rigid process to be replicated than a flexible framework to be learned and adapted depending on the need. *At the time of this writing it appears they have opened their program externally which is a positive step as they advance their tailored framework (I encourage anyone interested in learning Design Thinking to check it out, I definitely will!!)
Another example is a book produced by former Google employee, Jake Knapp, called Sprint. It has been touted as a “five-day process” for solving “big” problems and testing new ideas. The issue I take with this is it sets a false pretense that any value-add design thinking effort can be reduced to a week of work. This notion of a set time frame to innovation is a disservice to any Design Thinking practitioner in the field who is fighting the good fight. It sets a precedence that executives crave, to just go fast and cut corners and that up-front research work and design iteration is a waste of resources.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” — Albert Einstein
Not that I do not appreciate executives need for speed to market, but what would Einstein know!?
And even closer to home, a few years ago GE partnered with Eric Reiss, who is the author of the Lean Startup, to create a custom innovation process with the aspirations of accelerating New Product Introductions (NPIs) to market. Together, over several years and tens of millions of dollars later they termed this program FastWorks. The initiative combined lean methodologies, Design Thinking and Agile development for what would become a proprietary process. FastWorks never really hit a tipping point with mass adoption and ultimately was deprioritized among upper management. When this program failed, company employees were left with training that had no true relevance outside the company and no avenue to bridge the gap on how the FastWorks approach related to other industry standard innovation methodologies.
Long story short, while proprietary innovation frameworks are well intentioned they often waste invaluable resources in the long run. Hence my objective to leverage “open source” innovation frameworks and widely accepted terminologies by leading academia in order to provide my participants with training that will have relevance outside our company and opportunities for advanced future learnings in the space should they be so inclined.
Because we were adapting open sourced materials that were considered methodology standards, the challenge was how to brand this program with context for our industry users, how to better connect the dots from phase to phase of the framework all while highlighting the value of Design Thinking through proof points that resonate and peak interests for both executive stakeholders and users.
The primary “aha” was that we needed to adapt and produce a book that would act as the tangible backbone of the entire program. We wanted to create a resource that could be easily referenced while advancing from phase to phase of the framework. Design Thinking is inherently hands-on and collaborative in nature, often using sticky notes, markers, and physical objects to create low fidelity proof-of-concepts. The book would be an ideal physical object to accompany participants in the spirit of the Design Thinking journey.
The first version of the branding exercise was based on the understanding that Design Thinking is essentially a way to build prototypes to iteratively validate with the market. The working team had many ideas around this but we ultimately decided on a variation of an adapted Lego design that built up a train while progressing through the framework.
Each phase was represented by a certain color and built certain components of a train.
To help with the idea that there is a big need for program participants to visually see how to connect the dots from phase to phase of the framework we came up with the idea of using one of our expert practitioner tools, the working wall, to illustrate how a prototype could evolve through Design Thinking outputs by phase.
And finally, another foundational idea was how we could provide proof points for the value of Design Thinking that would resonate with our participants and executive leaders. We initially approached this from two perspectives, showcasing design-led companies that were outperforming the S&P 500 to peak initial interest and internal case studies highlighting the impact one of the innovation lab’s design thinking engagements had on the business.
Now that we had an overall vision with prioritized ideas that mapped back to validated participant needs, we needed to iteratively produce all the elements of the program for a comprehensive approach to educate the industry employees in Design Thinking.
ITERATIVELY DESIGN THE ELEMENTS OF THE DESIGN THINKING PROGRAM
During the design phase the working team iteratively created and validated all the collateral that would be needed to begin communicating and executing against the vision of the initiative.
Along with the Design Thinking Book, for each level there was an intro video and presentation that acted as a guide through the experience, with a detailed agenda, theory explanations, exercise examples and instructions. In addition, there were printouts of the different exercises that needed to be completed and certification stickers all with the incorporated branding.
The program has 3 levels of certification:
Design Enthusiast — Completing the 1-day foundational workshop
Design Scholar — Participating in the 2-week immersive
Design Guru — Becoming the program facilitator
In the book, participants gain a deeper understanding of what design thinking is, the value it can unlock and practical how-to exercises by phase along with additional resources.
In the 1-day training, Design Guru facilitators guide participants through the Design Thinking framework to apply to their own wicked problems, and provide them with a tangible collection of a la carte exercises from the book to use for question-asking, insight-getting, idea-generating and prototype-testing.
In the 2-week immersive, Design Guru facilitators mentor a small cross functional team through the entire collection of exercises in the Design Thinking book to ultimately create a proof-of-concept for the business to validate with the market.
To achieve the Design Guru certification, a participant must facilitate their own 1-day workshop to train other participants in the foundations of the Design Thinking framework.
Throughout the program, the design team acts as facilitators, mentors, coaches and sometimes hands on practitioners to lead the participants through their learning journey.
EVALUATION THROUGH FEEDBACK LOOPS
My team and I led our inaugural training, the 1-day Design Enthusiast certification in Q4 2018, with one of our business units based out of Atlanta. We had 25 participants that was made up of cross functional teams, from individual contributor roles to directors to executives. It was a wild success and we leveraged this session as a feedback loop to evaluate the continuous evolution of what has become a high demand offering for our business and customers.
A key insight learned during the retrospect and evaluation was that we needed to further reinforce learnings in everything we produced.
For example, participants first received the Design Thinking book when they arrived to the 1-day workshop Design Enthusiast training which led to delays and too much cognitive load before starting the day. The enhancement here was to provide a digital copy of the book to our participants a week before the 1-day session to familiarize themselves with before they arrived. This generated additional excitement for the day of training and reduced the upfront learning load.
Another insight was around learning stickiness of new material. In the initial book, we did not do a great job of providing context for which phase the participants were in during each exercise. The enhancement here was to included visual breadcrumbs throughout so that participants knew which phase they were working in for a given exercise and so on. This approach increased the stickiness of their learning so that every time they saw an exercise they were again reminded of one of the four phases of the Design Thinking framework.
As part of the evolution of this program, the team wanted to re-imagine the branding language so that it better aligned to our company’s heritage. Given this objective, we went back to the very beginning and incorporated our founder’s innovation philosophy and lightbulb success story into every element of the visual identity. This change generated more excitement for the program as it felt like we were learning what we were always meant to learn, to be playful, to take calculated risks all with the end user at the center.
One of the final insights was that our participants were still struggling to understand how each phase was connected and evolved throughout the framework. To solve this, we decided to incorporate another design practitioner concept, the Double Diamond. This additional element provides more context of what is happening as an idea advances in Design Thinking. Not only did we include this as a new learning opportunity, the working team figured out how to bring all the elements together to incorporate it throughout our branding as well.
Pretty cool huh??
CONTINUED INERTIA
The Design Thinking training program piloted in 2018 and continues to garner interest and sign-ups, including upcoming international training. This effort is complementary to the top-down strategy workshops we lead, additionally enabling bottom-up user-centered and value-creating innovation culture across our organization.
While my team and I are already making strides within GE Transportation, re-instilling the spirit of Thomas Edison into everything we do as an organization will be critical for us to push forward with our own guiding principles.
I’m looking forward to 2019 and the potentials of our new business. I can only hope if Thomas Edison were alive today, that he’d give my team and I a nod for taking risks and progressing our own experimental visions.
