Designer of Change: Sam Yen
Sam has championed the power and potential of design thinking since his days as SAP’s first Chief Design Officer. He continues to lead change from a design perspective in his current role as the Chief Innovation Officer for Commercial Banking at JP Morgan Chase & Co.
Sam, you have a unique way of describing the phases a changemaker goes through in trying to lead transformations in an organization. Can you explain what they are and how they progress?
Sure, let me start with some context. I developed this with my colleague, Janaki Kumar, who was with me at SAP. She led an external design consulting position, which worked with over 500 clients. Together we had a lot of experience dealing with companies that were trying to transform themselves using design as a methodology.
We started to notice some patterns that defined four phases of innovation readiness. The first phase we called the “lonely soldier” phase. This is when a high level executive has some sort of “aha” moment about a change and its potential for the organization. That senior executive assigns the lonely soldier as the person to transform the entire organization. It’s not completely by themselves–they often have a small team to do some projects, and it’s usually overseen by the executive. There’s a spotlight on those projects and if the team is able to show that this change enables the organization to do things differently, and you’re creating unexpectedly good outcomes, then that’s a success and the initiative moves to the second phase.
The second phase is when you have success in silos. You start to work on more projects. You’ve got some highly skilled team members that were probably part of that initial formation, and you’re starting to get into different parts of the business. Once you find success in silos, you move on to the third phase.
The third phase, which is probably the most critical phase when it comes to actually scaling transformations, is when you go from “push to pull.” Instead of the senior executive pushing the change down and only seeing success where that executive puts his or her attention, now you’re starting to see other lines of business start to “pull” your services. They ask you for help to build out their capabilities within their teams.
The last phase is scaled, and scaled is when the organization really starts to transform the people that they hire, the org structures, incentives, and their processes to really bring this into the organization.
That’s a really clear perspective. Are there struggles or challenges specific to each phase?
Yes, here’s an example. At the very beginning of the “lonely soldier” phase, the executive is really, really excited about what they’ve learned about the power of design and what it can mean for their organization. So sometimes the first thing that the executive tells the lonely soldier is, “I want you to train my entire organization.” So all of a sudden you’re training thousands and thousands of people, and it’s very shallow training because that’s all you can do. But even with training, they’re unable to make an impact because nothing has changed–the environment hasn’t changed, the processes haven’t changed, the incentives haven’t changed. And unfortunately, we find that this lowers the morale of the people that went through the training because now they see that there’s another way to do things, but they’re unable to practice it.
That taught us that training a lot of people doesn’t work unless middle management buys in, and you get the right stakeholders that can actually change the way things are done. Also whenever possible, try to do training in the actual business context (rather than mass training sessions). In addition to doing the projects with the teams, we would make sure that we left behind people that could understand and advocate for the change within that line of business, so everyone could continue to grow and learn on their own after we left.
If you look at your role and your legacy (especially at SAP), do you feel like you made massive change happen?
Yes, for all of us that are going through organizational transformations, it’s not something that happens overnight. It’s a long journey and you go through a lot. And as you’re going through the journey, you feel like you have the weight of the company on your shoulders and you don’t feel like you’re making any progress. But, the nice thing about looking back is you see “wow” that was a whole lot of change that happened, right? For a company that was engineering driven and tech dominant, we were able to hire a lot of designers and change the ratio of designers to developers. We were able to introduce design guidelines, change the development process, and be recognized externally as a leader of design and user experience, which was something that nobody would have ever guessed.
Thanks Sam!
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.
