Designer of Change: Mia Blume
Mia is a design leadership coach who founded the Design Department to help to transform the way creative leaders work and to help startups and companies use design in a more powerful and strategic way. We talked to her about how design and business can work together to make more effective change.
Tell us about your journey — how did you become a coach who specializes in changemakers?
At IDEO, I spent many years trying to help big tech companies change, stay innovative, and continue to provide valuable customer experiences to folks. I learned so much during that time, but I got tired of telling people how to change. I wanted to go do change.
So I transitioned into startups. Little did I understand what that really meant — creating change inside an organization that is being built is like constructing the plane while you’re flying it. But that experience led me to ask fundamental questions like how do I change our trajectory? How do I figure out how to build an organization that aligns with the changes we want to see in the world? How do I not just imagine the possibilities, but actually build that together amongst chaos?
After that experience, I think change found me in the next transition. Afew people started reaching out to me saying, “Hey, I’m building teams now. I’m trying to lead and I want to be the next executive in this organization, how do I get there?” This helped me genuinely see people on their journey — their personal change, their team change, the organizational change. I fell in love with the idea of helping these people create change in their own organizations.
How has design leadership changed over the past few years, and what you think leaders need to be paying attention to right now?
I deeply believe that design is core to what businesses do. I’d love to see more designers as CEOs because fundamentally what CEOs do is bring intentionality to the world. And that’s all design is. We’ve seen some shifts, but I think design needs to find a way to be more aligned with the business side of things. That’s been one of our biggest barriers for a long time. Yes, as designers we are these wildly creative beings who can make incredible things but when we distance ourselves from the business, we distance ourselves from impact.
One way to connect better with business is to overcome the language and concept barrier, so we teach designers a lot of business basics in a way that hopefully feels more human. We walk through a P&L in a way that hopefully feels more human and visual and accessible. Often this helps them realize “oh, actually, this is interesting, I can get involved.” When we unravel their assumption around what business is, the barriers fall away.
Another way to connect with the business side is to reframe how you think of your skills. We help designers realize that they have the tools they need, they just have to use them in a new way. That can feel very empowering because now they already have something — like systems thinking — to bring to change management, whereas before it felt like something they had to learn that was new.
Are there other gaps that you’re seeing that get in the way of people enacting change in organizations?
One of the big ones that we’ve been focused on the last few years is the fact that a lot of change management focuses on what the decision is and on communicating that decision. That’s great, but what people experience after the decision is equally important. Most organizations, they announce the change, they announce the reorg, they announce the new strategy, but how that change is going to be executed is almost always ignored. That phase — how to get humans from point A to point B is what designers do best, but it’s often overlooked.
Having a vision for change isn’t enough. As a creative, I originally thought “Oh, if we paint the vision, we will inspire change.” But you have to operationalize change, you have to bring it to fruition. I watched plenty of big companies rally around vision, but then nothing changes.
It also fails because the infrastructure in the company works against it. Something as simple as performance reviews can become a disincentive to change. Change means taking risks and being courageous and learning from failure, and the entire system may inadvertently work against this. You have to understand what’s getting in the way and clear those blockers.
What does it take to get over these hurdles to change?
I’ve seen change successfully designed. For example, in one company they knew they were going through a big reorg and they were really explicit and inclusive with everyone. They explained that we’re going to make changes and we’re going to learn along with you. The process of change was still painful, but it was much more realistic. It set expectations, it invited the team into the process by saying, “hey, we know we don’t know everything. We’re going to learn from this, and we’re going to integrate it. And then that will inform our next round.” All this gave people a sense of control because they knew what was going to happen. They knew how it was going to happen. And they knew how they could have input. And that gave them more confidence that things were going to be okay.
Another consideration is that just because it makes sense doesn’t mean that people will follow. You can spend a lot of time trying to articulate the change and bring them along and help them understand the why, but boy, those emotions can just really get in the way sometimes. That’s when I started to realize the power of understanding the neuroscience behind change, which is part of what we teach now, and genuinely understanding psychology, so that we can help people through something that naturally our bodies and brains say, “Whoa, I don’t want to do that that’s not safe.”
Another important approach is to think about the system that’s going to enable change. It’s not just about the change management process, but do you have the right system? In our training, we break apart all the pieces and parts of the organization and say, “which of these parts of the org are going to help you deliver on this change?” It includes the people, the roles, the processes, the implicit and explicit incentives, you know, all the pieces and parts, because you can’t just create change with your existing system or it would have happened already. So what parts of the system have to shift and change?
That’s an experimental process that you’re not going to get right the first time. You may change org structures and some processes and maybe even some of the people and hope that’s enough for that change to come to fruition. But it’s probably not and it will takes a few more tries. You have to design the system, as much as you design the experience of change. Those are kind of, in some ways, two separate projects but they have to work in parallel.
Thanks Mia!
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.
