Designer of Change: Dave Hoffer
Dave has a long and successful career aligning user needs with organizational goals, whether working at a design agency like Frog, consultancies like McKinsey & Company or PwC, or as an independent designer.
You’ve helped lead change at many orgs who wanted to become more design conscious or adept. What do you see as the elements of success?
Those designers who have been able to become effective changemakers know how to incorporate their perspectives into the organization in a robust way. If you’re a young designer, it’s all well and good to know the tools and understand your craft and be able to describe the gestalt of things you’re designing. Incorporating user needs, emotion, and the empathy that is required to really make meaningful products–that’s another level up. But it’s a step change to get to a kind of design consciousness. Being able to speak the language of your organization and translate your design acumen to the way in which that org runs is the ultimate goal.
Be as massively communicative as possible and radically transparent so there’s no ambiguity. The worst they can say is you communicate too much.
What do you think are the conditions for success for these changemakers within the organizations they are trying to lead?
I think there has to be an amount of receptivity to changing some of the ways in which the organization is operating. There has to be a set of individuals who are receptive, and that’s a good base. Then there has to be an openness in the culture to allow for an educational change. You have to be able to implement some sort of an educational tool set or curriculum, classes, and offsites.
The other thing I would add are the two attributes that are my mantras: patience and flexibility. Being flexible enough to know that not everyone’s going to be receptive, and to figure out how to change their minds or, in some cases, go around them. Or, alternatively, how to bend and allow that it’s okay for them to resist. On the patience side, it’s just time. For an organization to transform is a long process. It is time-consuming, and those involved have to understand that it is not going to happen overnight.
What are some of the landmines that you see — the mistakes that people repeatedly make in leading change?
Well, if you’re not clear that your role is that of a change maker, I think that a big pitfall is thinking about and focusing on your craft or tasks when you should be focusing on the bigger picture. For example, my team would often show up very early in our efforts to transform an organization into one that valued design. We would show up on projects, and the stakeholders would say, “We’re so glad you’re here to make our PowerPoint decks look pretty!” I would explain that we’re here to understand who our users are, and explore that in the context of bringing more business value to them. Then I’d offer to show them how that works.
I could have sat and made PowerPoint decks pretty all day long, and I gotta be honest, I did that once or twice. But I didn’t do it to the point where it would detract me from getting anything else done. I did it specifically to gain traction with, and build the trust of that team, while simultaneously going out and doing primary research and then applying that insight and understanding to whatever it was that we were developing.
Trust is a big factor in success, right?
Yes. Whenever you enter a new organization, you’re going to have a cohort of people who are really happy and supportive of what you want to change, and then you’re going to have a whole bunch of people who are incredibly skeptical. They don’t know who you are or why you’re there. They wonder if you’re going to impact their job. So there are supporters and detractors, but how do you deal with people in the middle, who are indifferent or ignorant of your mandateThe don’t understand the value of what you’re advocating so you need to find a way to demonstrate your value.
My team was working on a digital banking transformation, and we were getting hammered by those middle folks. They were asking a myriad of questions about what we were doing. But when we delivered a prototype and everything that had been abstract or on a whiteboard was demonstrated by this prototype. When they saw it, their eyes lit up, and the quote that we heard people say was, “wow, you made it real.” It was just a simulation but it showed them what we’d been talking about. We got huge praise and our middle group of folks backed off.
Thanks, Dave! (learn more from Dave on his Medium site)
Find more interviews and insights like these in our latest book, Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World. Available now on Amazon or Rosenfeld Media.
