The power of soft skills to design
Nowadays, users are shaping how companies understand their processes, culture, products, and services. The customer empowerment brought a very interesting challenge to companies that have begun to absolve new disciplines in order to adapt its environment and follow the trends. This effect has led organizations to realize the need to reshape their values, processes, culture, products, and services offerings to remain relevant in a market, where more innovative and flexible solutions are emerging every day.
Bringing it to a practical field, any innovation project that will be implemented at the technological level needs hands and specific knowledge to materialize it. Typically, the people involved in the development process are technology professionals, which are quite different from those who, usually, design the experience. And so, the challenge begins! How to integrate teams with distinct values, mindsets and ways of working so different? How to generate a product or service with a full value offer? How to make sure everyone is aligned with the same vision of what is going to be developed or changed? How to make sure that the solutions will be really human-shaped? These questions, indeed, have millions of answers. I will answer them by sharing my experience, beliefs and learning absorbed during a project with this level of uncertainties and challenges.
In 2017, as member of the technology cell, I participated in a project that had the ambitious vision to develop two minimum viable services touching four layers: experience, business, processes and technology. That’s what we call a full value offer. In other words, to cover all layers, we counted with two different cells, one focused on Technology and another focused in Strategic Design. In addition to the main objectives, we were committed to promoting the internal cultural transformation in the client by sharing new ways of working based on an agile mindset and design methods.
We started the project without understanding the boundaries of each cell and how together we would define a consistent delivery that would make our entire value offer explicit to the client. That was the biggest concern of the project, without a doubt. During the first divergence sessions, came the friction. We started to work in silos, with each team doing what it knows best, the Technology cell performing its assessment and the Design cell conducting their research. However, since there was a big interdependence between the experience and technology layers, we were “forced” to overcome our differences and start to act and think as one team. From that experience, I got the answers to all the questions I mentioned above. The key success factor to integrate different teams is soft skills, and I will explain to you why.
As google's definition says, soft skills are the personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people. The definition was totally in consonance with our needs. We began to empathize and comprehend the different ways in which we worked which helped us improve our communication, flexibility, negotiation, and empathy skills.
Our first action to improve as one team was to substitute the technical language with a simpler and common one. This change also aided in our communication with the client who engaged in our integration process. As part of the empathy exercise, I participated in some pure design research sessions with observation, shadowing, contextual and in-depth interviews. Working in the technological cell, I was impressed by the output insights provided by those methods. They really made the whole project more people-centered and clear to us technicians.
Furthermore, working together, we found a way to maximize our ability to gather information in each work session and interview. To do so, we co-created the systems map, a tool that allowed us to identify all the important points of service taking into consideration all the involved layers. Everyone has participated from research to ideation, collaborating and sharing insights in real-time. We all noted that collective knowledge was much more significant and important to the convergence process than the specific areas. We naturally evolved as a team. After some weeks of working like that, the technicians started to facilitate invision sessions and designers started to map the technological environment. We finally understood that it's better to work together. With the right attitude and openness, we started to tackle the challenges of innovation and deliver more value.
As a reflection, driven by all the changes we are facing, we will increasingly be challenged to work with professionals from different areas, expertise, sectors, countries, cultures, etc. It’s a natural process for human-centered innovation and the future of working. Now as a Designer, my perceptions didn’t change. Actually, they started to be more sensitive to people’s relations. I strongly believe that what will distinguish a successful endeavor or a fail, is the power of human interactions. Because, in the end, we want to design what matters to people.
