Change design: is it a new muscle to train?
Emerging capabilities for design
With products and offerings are constantly evolving, organisations need to evolve continuously. Just like products and services we need to design, organisational changes must be designed, too.
Ultimately, while every firm is different in its own way, all firms are facing the same challenge: continuous organisational change. In this case, it is not just about putting a digital tool or an innovation in place for users to interact with. It is about putting a process in place to facilitate this interaction. It is about designing a way for users to design their own experiences around the innovation or change. Therefore, it is crucial not only to properly design and implement the change or innovation, but also to properly design and manage the experience around that change. This means that change managers and designers must work closely together.
Organisational change vs product development
Organisational change and product development share similarities. Both are design processes. The way in which a change is introduced to customers or employees is as important as the change itself.
If you’re involved in organisational change, be it as a manager or designer, you have to be able to see beyond the launch of a new product or service and into the future state of your organisation. You have to understand how this new offering fits within an existing culture, how your company will benefit from implementing this new feature or process, and what all of this means for your customers. It’s possible that you won’t know everything upfront — many companies learn from their mistakes after launching products and services — but you want to make sure that you’ve considered the major factors at play before making any changes, so that you can appropriately address issues before they arise.
Change management? Another fancy term?
Change management is a discipline that encourages people to change undesirable or risky behaviours by providing training, incentives, counseling and other forms of assistance. It’s also an interdisciplinary approach that involves multiple stakeholders with different perspectives who are committed to achieving the same set of outcomes.
Change management is becoming a part of all organisational activities, not just for change initiatives. In other words, change management is becoming an integral part of governance.
Change design
Change management is evolving into change design. Change design is a concept that can help us achieve this evolution. Change design incorporates insights from the behavioral sciences to design the context that allows behavioral change to occur. It’s about designing the environment in which people work and live to make desired changes easier to achieve and naturalize.
This isn’t bad; in fact, the importance of change management often fades after a while, even before the habits are formed. So let’s look for ways to integrate behavioral changes in all initiatives and decisions taken within an organization.
Designers are used to being the ones who create and change things. They’re not used to being the ones who are changed and have to change things for others.
Designers’ changing role
The role of a designer has evolved considerably over the last decade or so. From being someone who physically designs a product, they now contribute at every stage of the design lifecycle, from ideation and strategy to research, prototyping, usability testing, and design management.
It is not uncommon for non-designers to be in charge of change management or innovation projects and initiatives with designers as their consultants. This raises questions: how good are these managers at handling change? How good are these designers at assisting them? How well do they co-operate? In most cases, both sides have limited understanding of what the other one really does. As a result, there is little trust between them and this can negatively affect the evolution of an organization.
In fact, some designers may feel uncomfortable with the idea of changing others’ experiences. This can come off as arrogance or elitism, which will make it difficult to build trust with the stakeholders they’re working with.
New service design capability?
However, if you avoid this pitfall, there’s a tremendous opportunity in service design: getting employees on board with change and helping them adapt to new processes. The scope of the Service Designer is similar to that of the Change Manager. They both take a holistic view of the entire environment in which a service is provided.
To do this, start by looking at your organisation through their eyes. Understand what they’re experiencing and how they feel about it in order to inspire empathy for their needs. Listen to their feedback about current systems and processes and use that information to create better solutions for them.
Designing for the human experience means designing for emotions as well as logistics, so you need to be able to connect with your colleagues on an emotional level so they’ll trust you and buy into your ideas.
Treating change as a design problem means that we can move beyond “reactive” change management and start addressing the root causes of undesired behaviors in order to make lasting changes faster and with lower costs.
At the end, change management can be used in any situation where a group of people needs to learn how to respond more appropriately to change. For example, when a company decides to implement a new strategy, it must ensure that its employees have the skills needed to carry it out. Change management can help with employee retention by smoothing the transition from an old job function to a new one and making sure that managers are sensitive to their employees’ concerns about the change.
