You Can Get There From Here

Design as a map and model for better organizations

By Ramsey Ford with contributions from Sarah Robertson, Dr. Curtis Webb and Sarah Corlett

“We are increasingly disillusioned by organizational life. For people who toil away at the bottom of the pyramids, surveys consistently report that work is more often than not dread and drudgery, not passion or purpose.” — Robyn Short, Reinventing Organizations

In the midst of the Great Resignation, organizations are waking up to the increasing dissatisfaction of staff and the imperative to think differently about how they operate. More and more workplaces are realizing the need to transform their structures to value and engage staff more holistically. Every day, we consult nonprofits across the country on how to live out this transformation through a human-centered design (HCD) practice that operates at the intersection of leadership, equity and creativity. In our approach, HCD provides a scaffold for collaboration, empathy, divergence and learning; all of which are cultural capacities that enable more inclusive, innovative organizations. In effect, our application of HCD provides both a map and model for equitable organizational change. HCD provides a safe space for small teams to lay the groundwork for working collaboratively and creatively by developing tests of change that can positively impact work culture, and to build a path for organizations to move from a traditional structure toward a more inspirational and inclusive way of organizing.

Starting small to go big.

“You can’t lead alone. It takes a team to be a great leader. This project was about more than the prototype. It was about dropping boundaries, building rapport and communication. Everybody had a great perspective. It helped me grow. We forgot all about titles while we were in the program.” — Child Care Team Member

The organizations that we work with don’t often articulate the goal of reinventing themselves or going through a transformation process. Their aims are often more prosaic — getting teams to think more creatively, to collaborate more and to communicate more effectively across hierarchy. However, these aims can be difficult to achieve in isolation and are better understood as parts of the path toward organizational reinvention. Surface-level and swift organizational movement without a consideration of the deeper shifts needed in behaviors, values and mindsets often falls short. By approaching interventions with an understanding of these deeper shifts we can work toward more sustainable, responsible and transformational change in organizations.

We’ve found that HCD is successful in achieving concrete goals for change — setting in place new programs, practices and policies — while simultaneously impacting mindsets and behaviors in ways that support long-term culture and institutional change. At DI, we assess our impact by evaluating how mindsets, actions and conditions change over time. We apply qualitative evaluation tools to measure these changes and have seen how the HCD process effectively leads to mindset and behavior shifts that can support the emergence of organizational breakthroughs related to self-leadership, wholeness and evolutionary purpose. The following vignettes help to illustrate this phenomenon.

Self-leadership is rooted in accountability, trust and growth.

In 2020, The National Fund for Workforce Solutions sponsored a cohort of small-to-medium sized businesses to go through a yearlong HCD process aimed at improving job quality for frontline staff. Cross-functional teams made up of individuals from different levels of the organizations’ internal hierarchies were led through a process of research and testing. Throughout the process we evaluated the mindsets and behaviors of the teams in order to understand how their understanding of equity, leadership and creativity was connected to organizational change. Our focus was geared at developing the creative capacity of staff, identifying and reflecting on the power structure within the organization, and building trust among individuals in the organization.

Our learnings suggest that HCD supports individual growth as well as staff alignment toward strategic business outcomes in a worker-centered environment. By centering the process around worker voice, DI created a dedicated, supportive environment through which employees and leadership could overcome resistance and defensiveness in the face of change and different perspectives. This fostered their growth not just as individuals, but also as leaders within the organization with the ability to reshape the workplace to reflect their values. This supportive environment was reinforced by project leads and organizational leaders who learned to create space for the work and invest in the results; to defer to frontline workers and supervisors as the “experts.” These leaders recognized that centering worker voice was not only the “right” thing to do, but, in fact, critical to supporting frontline workers.

Through this process, individuals and teams built their capacity to lead. They reported feeling more comfortable with change, ambiguity and emerging processes. They learned to pivot, see failures as learnings, and ultimately build individual and organizational capacity for navigating change.

Equitable wholeness requires us to disrupt systems of oppression, share power, connect deeply and claim joy.

Equitable wholeness is the ability of all staff, no matter their intersecting identities, to bring their whole self to work with them. Within our own organization, we recognize the importance of equitable wholeness and strive for it. Still, in listening to staff, we realized that how we work to change the systems of oppression we live within weighs differently on each of us. For instance, while we value a culture of risk-taking, an organizational evaluation of DI revealed that staff of color felt less able to make mistakes than white staff. In response to this our whole team explored ways to bridge this gap and eventually implemented a few interventions including investing in feedback training, the development of affinity groups and a peer mentoring program. We also invested in developing our staff’s capability in restorative practice, supported individual coaching, and worked to deepen our trauma-informed and healing-centered practices with partners and with one another. All of these shifts occurred through a collaborative approach aimed at building our collective capacity to be in a trusted working relationship.

Through this work our team improved our capacity to listen with intention. We stretched our empathy by working across roles and levels, embraced divergent perspectives through conversation and feedback from prototypes, and practiced vulnerability by reflecting on personal and team growth. Together, these practices created more trust among our team and fostered individual openness to embracing new points of view. We will always be a work in progress, but our continued commitment to wholeness has allowed staff to feel more valued and respected.

Evolutionary purpose honors our innate worthiness and abundance as paths to collective liberation.

Evolutionary purpose is a recognition that an organization is a living entity with its own energy and sense of direction. However, in many organizations this purpose is cut off from most staff through barriers to collaboration and ownership. Montgomery County Jobs and Family Services (JFS) in southwest Ohio — a regional government service agency that serves residents receiving public benefits — struggled with these exact barriers. Leadership at the organization wanted to improve internal collaboration to better serve customers. Yet they acknowledged that fragmented infrastructure, siloed communication, high turnover, limited transparency and top-down decision-making made this difficult.

Over the next three years, Montgomery County JFS invested in their capacity to innovate and improve the way they serve the community through a HCD-based leadership development program. In this program, cross-functional teams explored customer and staff experience and then designed and tested a variety of interventions. These included new communication protocols between staff, cross-training events, customer-facing space redesigns and even programmatic shifts that brought services directly to customers. Through this program staff reconnected with their “why” and over 80% received promotions within the next year.

Through this process, participants worked outside of their normal roles and siloes, which helped them see connections between their work, others’ work and the overall organization. Within any organization it is easy to feel invisible to those who don’t share your role — whether you are a leader or on the frontline. However, when provided meaningful space to connect, individuals were able to grow their understanding of ways organizational issues impact all corners of the workplace. Participants saw themselves as part of an abundant community, which increased their motivation to support each other and address organizational needs together.

How to walk the HCD path.

“Becoming human-centered isn’t a head thing. It’s a heart thing. We’ve found, at least for us, it’s best to learn through doing. You don’t have to license a training platform for your company. You don’t have to fully — or even partially — understand how your whole company gets “enabled.” What you need to do is to start doing it.” — Excerpted from IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking framework, “Human-centered organizations: Why and How to Build Them”

By applying HCD within an organization open to change, we are inviting the development of creative and inclusive leaders at all levels. Through the HCD process we’ve seen participants learn to listen and to use their voices. We’ve built individual agency, trust across differences and a sense of belonging in organizations. Additionally, we’ve witnessed these mindsets and behaviors foster movement against key business outcomes that positively impact organizational performance. These shifts require that organizational leadership see the importance of investing in staff as whole people who are more than just their work function. Design Impact looks for a few essential ingredients before undertaking an HCD process within an organization aiming at transformation:

• The leadership is engaged. Major organizational change doesn’t happen unless leadership is on board and in the know. Leaders need to create space for the work and should influence the outcomes through framing and direct engagement. However, they must be willing to accept the results of the teams’ work and release some authority.

• The organization is stable. HCD works well in complexity, but is not a great tool for quickly resolving crisis. If the organization is currently experiencing turmoil due to politics, turnover, or sudden revenue loss, it may not be the best time to go through a change process.

• There is a willingness to learn. Recognize that working across levels is new for many organizations, and teams will need support to grow in their ability to navigate the power dynamics and conflict that may emerge through the process. Getting comfortable with the ambiguity and discomfort of learning is essential for the success of the change process.

For a more comprehensive description of the HCD framework, IBM has published an extensive report on applying HCD within organizations, or you can check out the HCD Toolkit on the National Fund for Workforce Solutions’ website.

Changing mindsets to change culture.

Longterm organizational change requires that we recognize that we are the organization; that we are the work. If an HCD process is applied with a focus only on tangible outcomes it will fail to produce sustained culture change. However, when applied through the lenses of equity and leadership, HCD can be an effective foundation for change that allows for individual and group growth while achieving measurable results. The HCD process is a map for that impact and serves as a model of what collaborative, inclusive teams can look like, making it a powerful and useful tool for organizational change.