Establishing a bond of trust to expand Design’s influence and impact
Design Leadership conversation with Sami Niemelä
The client’s perspective over the perennial question of how design adds value to the organization is one that Sami Niemelä, Founding Partner and Creative Director at Nordkapp, has seen evolved over time. Engagements used to start with a small problem. Someone needed a website or a mobile app, for example. From that point forward, “we started asking questions — Why? Why do you need a website? Why do you need a mobile app? We needed to get to the root cause of the problem,” says Niemelä.
Establishing a bond of trust
One of the keys to developing a good client-consultancy relationship is to establish a strong bond of trust. Niemelä’s perspective is that building trust with your client becomes a social process. You talk and interact with many people in the organization, from prominent stakeholders to those responsible for the execution. You listen, you observe and you uncover patterns, discovering challenges and problems. In a very proactive manner, you begin proposing solutions for them.
“Over the last few years, we found ourselves working with a lot of CDOs, chief digital officers, who are actually hired within corporations to lead a change program. We partner closely with them to formulate the change agenda and act behind the scenes to facilitate the transformation. The idea is to make them own the change from within and look as good as we can for the board and the CEO — — this often makes the process a lot easier, things happen pretty quickly after that. In a sense as an outside design leader and consultant we make ourselves invisible unless needed.”
What C-Suite role does the organization need? A Chief Digital Officer, Chief Design Officer or a transformational CEO?
Niemelä argues that organizations need a strong leader who champions the voice of the customer, owns it and evangelizes it from the inside. An executive that ensures that the customer input and participation in every aspect of the experience is assimilated as part of the culture. This includes every customer touch point with the organization and goes beyond product and service design and development.
“In Europe, Nordics in particular, Chief Digital Officers are the transformation executors,” says Niemelä. The charter of the CDO is broad and complex. It involves a lot more than IT, product development and design. The effective approach, he suggests, is not about pushing design, but rather one that fosters empathy and understanding. After you build rapport and trust, you bring the customer into the heart of the business process, whether it is HR, Training, Finance or Product Development and Delivery.
In addition, Niemelä adds that you have to look for partners inside the organization. While the role of Chief Design Officer may not exist, there is a strong chance that there is a Head of Design or a Head of Innovation. These folks and their teams will be instrumental in facilitating the transformation program with a design perspective. If not, very often the outside design experts help clients to hire and build the team inside or coach the existing teams to improve their performance and work closely with the customers.
Creating a self-sustaining transformation ecosystem focused on the customer
Designers, at every level, must understand that design is not the only way or primary driver with which companies make money. Organizations embed design as an important business function; however, design does not drive the business. Companies must be attuned with their customer behavior, their purchase patterns, their feedback, and their pain points. A multidisciplinary perspective enables the organization to define, adjust and refine the customer experience vision across all its channels.
This is even more important as we as a society face grave threats and wicked problems such as climate change, the very definition of sustainable growth and the role of artificial intelligence in the society at large. Niemelä believes that when companies act ethically, sustainably and transparently they also perform better than their peers in the market. This all starts by listening and understanding the customer
“As design consultants, our goal is to help the organization become self sufficient and ourselves unnecessary. They should take the ownership of the customer experience, design and their vision.”
Niemelä sees benefits, for both the client and his team, to create a self-sustaining transformation environment with champions across the company.
Designers are expanding their impact and gaining recognition
Design leaders in organizations around the world continue to work on embedding design as a strategic part of the business. Niemelä knows this challenge well as his team partners with in-house design teams to articulate and amplify their impact.
In order to drive the business with a forward looking perspective instead of the rear view mirror, companies and their leaders need to take a strong stance on what is the future they enable and why.
He argues that data-driven organizations “have their eyes in the rear-view mirror.” While hard metrics are important, Niemelä considers that design practitioners need to bring back the soft metrics like design quality, empathy, customer feedback, and ethics. Design leaders must make these soft metrics part of the process, alongside with the hard metrics in the organizations.
Amplifying design’s sphere of influence
Niemelä encourages his clients to get the C-Suite management team in the customer service center for a day or two, at least once a month. It is eye opening for executives to get first-hand exposure to the customer pain points and interactions with the organization. Designers should leverage these activities to build empathy, raise awareness of design and highlight the importance of getting actual end users in the product development process.
The design consultant, as Niemelä, takes the role of a therapist to the organization. You have to listen to people, you talk to them, you learn about their motivations, what their pain points are, what is keeping them up at night. Once you have this understanding, you have to bring it up a notch, and demonstrate how design helps address these needs and demonstrate how it creates value to the customer and to the business.
In addition, you have to create strong partnerships inside the organization. You have to bring them along in the journey and make them part of the solution. The work of the design consultant is much easier when there are change agents inside and they see themselves as owners of the solution.
A piece of advice for Design Leaders — don’t give up
Emerging design leaders who are trying to earn a seat at the table should not give up or feel discouraged when some decisions don’t go in their favor. Niemelä points out that as designers “we don’t work against the organization, we work with the organization and their leaders.” Designers need to work hard to understand the “what, who, how and why” of the organization. Designers need to be adaptable and embed themselves in the business. Once you understand the answers to these questions, you can exert influence and facilitate change.
“Don’t give up, keep the faith and find allies to amplify design’s voice and help facilitate change. Very often it is a long-term game where making the change seems very often slow and invisible, until you, yourself, have almost grown tired of it. That is usually the point change happens around you.”
Share your success stories
It is important for those designers who are successful in these strategic battles to share their stories. We need to inspire, encourage other designers to believe that they can exert influence when they see that many design leaders are successful. Once design gets positioned at the strategic level, the amount of work should increase. Design consultancies and in-house teams will derive the benefits, and we will need more designers to get the work done.
About Sami Niemelä
Watch his keynote presentation at Interaction 17 in New York City. “The New Invisibles”
Watch Sami Niemelä in his Interaction17 presentation- IxDA
Follow him in Medium Sami Niemelä — Twitter @samin — LinkedIn
About Nordkapp — Niemelä’s design studio
About Design Impact
At Design Impact we are always open to meet and connect with design leaders. If you would like to share your story, have design people in mind, would like to facilitate an introduction or suggest folks we should reach out to, please let us know @ DesignImpact
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