Let’s wake up — Design is not special

Design Leadership Conversation with Alberta Soranzo

Published in

DesignImpact

7 min readJan 22, 2018

Alberta Soranzo facilitating a design leadership workshop at EuroIA

Design Impact spoke with alberta soranzo, End-to-End Service Design & Systems Thinking Director at Lloyds Banking Group. Our conversation started with a quick trip down memory lane where we looked at how much the design field has evolved over the last several years. Not too long ago, you did not have many career choices, or you had to forge your own educational path. You would be either an engineer, an architect, or maybe an industrial designer. However, there were not many education programs that would make emphasis on usability or interface design. Today, we have Interaction Design, Design Ops, Service Design, Design Program Management, Customer Experience and many more.

Soranzo recalls that she started in a completely different field, as an information architect in a communications agency. She navigated different areas of professional practice from systems design, to marketing, to engineering, to information architecture and now to service design and proper systems thinking, with a sprinkle of complexity. These experiences in so many different areas directly and not necessarily related to design, “have allowed me to have the shamelessness to even think of moving into design leadership” says Soranzo.

Soranzo embraces challenges and is a firm believer that there are always different perspectives to tackle and solve them. As a design leader and hiring manager in many organizations, she sees a lot of people who come out of design schools, with a hyper technical design perspective. They have a deep understanding of certain technical aspects of design, and they stick to processes that they learned in their programs. As an example, Soranzo mentions how some designers today talk about the double diamond as the holy grail of design but they are unable to contextualize the notions and then apply the technical skills to a problem and a process. She challenges the people in her teams to be critical thinkers, recognize that they must be flexible and choose the right processes for a problem or an organization. She describes her process as iterative and continuous, to some extent, she draws a parallel to the infinite loop represented in IBM’s design thinking process.

Always be learning

We need to embrace “free opportunities for on-the-job education” says Soranzo. For example, if someone works in an agency they should take advantage of the opportunity to learn about media buy, composition, copyright, and being willing to “go above and beyond.” It will make them better designers and it will help them empathize and collaborate more effectively with others.

“It is fundamental to have the ability to draw connections — which may not be readily apparent to others — between different disciplines and problem areas.”

Soranzo highlights how the economic environment requires that some European and South American education systems develop design generalists who are comfortable moving across different disciplines. In some situations, as a designer, you had to have working knowledge of marketing, sales, production and distribution to help an organization sell their product solution.

“When we lack the empathy to understand what other people do, we fail as designers.”

Technology fundamentals and business perspective are critical for a designer’s success. The more we need to move to agile, in a collaborative environment, the bigger the need to at least understand the feasibility of a new design to be implemented and taken to market. The fallacy of lacking fundamentals is manifested when design solutions cannot be implemented or cannot be sold. Soranzo says that when we lack the empathy to understand what other people do, we fail as designers.

Experience based Market

We are now in a competitive world where we are not creating a feature-based differentiation for the products and services we deliver. We are creating the contrast based on the entire experience, the product experience and how easy it is for the customer to interact with the organization. When an organization employs design purposefully to create thoughtful touches around the entire experience and creates the value differentiation for the business, you see client retention, client acquisition, and a direct measure for return on investment.

An example of the evolution of service design, can be illustrated with the “utility bill pay process.” Before the time where you could pay bills online or on your mobile, you had to go to the Post Office, or the Utility Center to make a payment. When online bill pay was first introduced, the lack of design was very apparent. The process to try to change a bill pay in progress was nearly impossible to accomplish. Adding a “merchant” required the intervention of customer service agent. For the customer changing financial institutions was very difficult, because the burden to set all these payments was high. The influence and impact of service design just around online payment systems and the evolution of these processes, how they are simplified and presented to the end-users today is very concrete.

Building a team and establishing influence

Before Soranzo joined Lloyds, the service design team did not exist. She established her team and build the service design practice. In her relatively short tenure, her sphere of influence has grown exponentially. Now, she sits where decisions are made, at the table with the other executives.

The challenges she faced across different organizations are primarily around people and scale. When you have millions of customers, and more than 85K employees, design has the potential to have a big impact. In any organization, large or small, change takes time to implement and to be embraced because change is disruptive. An organization culture has antibodies of change, so it is critical that design and transformation leaders bring people along, create an environment of inclusion and shared ownership. Leaders need to create the conditions to facilitate change and for people to experiment. A culture change takes place when the system changes. It is important to identify what the triggers are in your environment, so you can alter them and make change possible in your organization.

For transformation leaders, it is important to create an environment that fosters collaboration, rather than one of competition. The incentive model should promote cross functional collaboration over individual performance.

Agency vs. In House Challenges

Soranzo sees the challenges on the agency side like those faced by in house teams. However, these challenges are seen from a different perspective. As an agency consultant, your boundaries are dictated by the type of client, contract and statement of work. Your access to resources, and the scope of work may create some additional challenges.

Moving to the in-house side gives you a different perspective, access to other types of opportunities, resources and levels of decision impact. The internal environment may also show signs of resistance to change. For example, product managers may tell you that they do not want UX Research as part of the project, because they know what the problem is, or what the user needs. Our role as design leaders is to make sure that our clients and our peers understand the need to support decisions based on quantitative and qualitative data.

Design Leadership is about hard work and humility

As design leaders, we must understand the organization and the problem space we are working on. We also need to treat our craft with care and respect. We are taken seriously when we apply rigor and discipline, when we listen, collaborate and deliver value. We should always demonstrate preparation and understanding of the problem and the business impact, whether we are facilitating a design workshop or delivering a C-Suite presentation.

Soranzo argues that “Designers need to grow up together with the discipline, understand that design is another facet of business.” We are not so special anymore, not that design was ever special. We need to accept this reality, wake up and understand that we are not entitled to a seat at the table, we earn credibility and respect with hard work.

In a lot of organizations, design already has a seat at the table. However, it is important that each designer in your team understands what that means. Designers need to stop whining about deserving a seat at the table, we need to roll up our sleeves and get great work done. It is possible that not everyone will agree with all the work product we deliver, but that is true of every discipline. If you realize that design is not a critical component of the success of an organization, you have two choices: you either stop whining and keep grinding at the problem, or move on to an organization that recognizes the importance of design in their overall business and strategic success.

As design leaders, we earn respect when we are humble and focus on demonstrating the value and the impact our teams can deliver to the people for whom we are designing and the organizations that we work with.

More about Alberta Soranzo:

UX Scotland — in her keynote, she discusses experience design and digital transformation — “The Architecture of Talent”

TEDxFulhamWomen — “Our Eternal Digital Afterlife”

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

We invite you to share your comments, questions, and perspectives.