Designer of Change: Doug Powell
Doug Powell shares insights on how he and his colleagues led extraordinary change at IBM that greatly improved the organization’s speed and agility.
Doug, often when large companies hire people to lead change, they don’t really know how to accept it and end up blocking it. At IBM, you and your colleagues found a way around that. Can you share how you did that?
Yes, you’re spot on with that observation. There’s often a real disconnect between what companies ask for and what they can support. It highlights the need for a clear mission when the transformation initiative is launched. When I look back at our journey at IBM, the moves we made all tie back to the mission we had: to create a sustainable culture of design and design thinking at the company.
That’s a big vision. How did you get others in the company to believe in design as something that is strategically important to them?
Structurally we started with a centralized design function and we worked very closely with business leaders across the company to promote the value of design and to convert their thinking to a design-driven point of view. Then, over the course of five or six years, we migrated design out into the business, making it a distributed and embedded function that is integral to the organization.
Convincing other leaders took a lot of work, but we had leverage because initially we controlled the talent pipeline for design. We were hiring all of the designers, so we served as a portal into IBM and then deployed them out into the company. In order for you as a business leader to get designers assigned to your business, you needed to be a believer in design’s power and you needed to agree to play by the rules we set in place to run a healthy, high-performing design team.
That’s a tough challenge for a large organization like IBM. I imagine not everyone was supportive?
We had strong support from our CEO at that time, Ginni Rometty, but you know how this works in big organizations–it’s not the very senior leaders that are the problem, it’s the middle tier. The people who were managing others or managing the projects. They mostly just don’t want to screw up and often they are incentivized to resist change. Rather than battling with them, we worked to change their incentives. Now, executives are incentivized in part around the quality of the user experience their teams deliver, using NPS or various other user sentiment metrics. It’s imperfect, but it was something we could scale and connect to executive performance.
This all sounds like a series of wins, but I bet there were at least a few missteps or mistakes?
When IBM does something they do it at a global scale. When we launched the program in 2012, they were the biggest organization that had taken on this type of transformation. In the beginning phases, it was just a mess. I mean, we were recruiting and hiring designers at a ridiculous scale and rate. We had to figure out what it was as we were developing it. What does it mean to be a designer at IBM? How are we going to bring this whole new breed of talent and culture and everything into this hundred year old company? How are we going to create studio spaces that are suitable for the way designers work? How are we going to get the right initial projects and what are we going to work on? That first year we were just scrapping it together like nobody’s business. It was truly a prototype.
One mistake we made was that we didn’t start measuring stuff early enough. We should have been measuring user sentiment, productivity, performance, speed, alignment–whatever could be measured–from day one. We just had a blind spot on that and it took us a couple of years. As a result, we missed a couple of key errors that we could have addressed. Now because of the measurements, we can talk about the difference that design is making.
Forrester Research did a report that confirmed the gains we made. Everyone thinks we can’t do design because it’s too risky but what this report revealed was that it actually dramatically reduces the risk. They found that it was like a 300% greater ROI on the investment of design and design thinking. Those are things that product managers and business owners respond to–there is not a product manager, business manager, or vice president who does not want their teams to move faster.
It might slow a team down when they are initially adopting and developing the behaviors and practices. That middle manager who is so resistant early on is thinking “Oh my god, it’s going to take two months for my team to really figure out how to do this well.” But then once everything’s in place, then you’re going to be on a glide path and you’re going to be flying.
Thanks Doug!
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.
