Designing Change, Transforming Organizations

Design helps organizations adapt to change

Today, we are seeing a proliferation of Enterprise software that deal with massive scale and complexity, such as cloud-based ecosystems, Big Data products, and tools that maximize automation. Like every other domain, Enterprise is experiencing the excitement — as well as the challenges — that accompany such transformation, growth and innovation.

In the opening keynote, Greg Petroff (@gpetroff, CXO of GE Digital), spoke about how the process of building Enterprise products needs to adapt to new opportunities that include Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and embedded technology. In such a densely-connected world, each and every touchpoint with any product or service, leaves long trails of data; how do we leverage these to generate value for users? With enterprises beginning to take on these technological advancements, teams are scrutinizing “What to build and why?”

The answer lies with Design. A hypothesis-driven approach that designers apply in uncertain scenarios is one of the many tools that we carry in our design toolkits. We as designers, can help teams better understand the new material and grasp the changing landscape using the artifacts we make and the methods we employ. The design methods and our conditioning as designers, help organizations dynamically adapt to changes — beyond just helping define and design products and experiences.

“Designers are the possibilitarians of software”
 — Greg Petroff

Fostering creative culture through design

There was a time when post-its and sharpies were perceived as symbols only for design, but this has changed. We see this as more non-design teams actively use these tools to collaborate, identify problems, prioritize solutions, and plan projects. Similarly, we’re seeing an increase in the number of physical spaces, often referred to as “studios”, being set up in many companies. Comfortable lounge seats, lots of scribbling spaces, idea walls and whiteboards transform spaces into active collaboration studios. Over time, these spaces become an integral part of the organizational culture. By empowering people, by creating such collaborative spaces, and by fostering creative engagements and exchanges, design influences culture and makes it sustainable.

The implicit power of design and artifacts

In any organization, design artifacts are created with a specific intent. This established goal, which the team then works towards is clear, tangible and known. However, as they get closer to or achieve the intended goal, certain unexpected effects emerge. Let’s take design system for example. As a library of patterns and components that make up your products, the goal of a design system is to create a cohesive experience across a diverse set of products. Over time, however, this artifact also helps break organizational silos, increase collaboration, improve connections and establish a common vision within an organization. Nalini Kotamraju (@nkotamraju), one of our coworkers, presented the Lightning Design System (SLDS) as a “culture story” with people and relationships at its core. A long-term commitment is necessary to be able to influence something as big as culture, and it’s not easy. Conveying the value of design systems to get executive buy-in and to onboard partners across disciplines, is integral to bringing people together and cultivating relationships.

Design systems bring people under a fold, and from within these, connectors rise. Connectors are facilitators of change — who reach out and build connections and establish synergies. More connectors emerge as adoption of design systems increases. Together they create avenues for collaboration, sharing, and exchange, resulting in an indestructible culture. For example, we at Salesforce are experiencing a similar cultural impact of SLDS. Teams across different product clouds within Salesforce, are reaching out and forming connections to learn and adopt the Lightning Design System. Because of these interactions and collaborations, we’re seeing a rise in cross-cloud initiatives and integrated solution ideas.

Design conditioning — how we see the world

Collaboration is important and it’s essential to ensure that a variety of viewpoints are represented. A healthy collaborative environment enables participants to have diverse opinions and encourages them to ask “what if…” questions. As designers, through practice and learning, we develop an instinct to approach problems in a certain way.

As designers, we nurture and put into practice the art of questioning the status quo. When Maria Giudice (@mgiudice, VP Experience Design at Autodesk), set out to transform Autodesk from a product company to an experience company, she implicitly applied design methods to set this new vision rolling. She exemplified the power of design conditioning in transforming an organization internally by starting with people, understanding their context and goals, and identifying problems worth pursuing.

“Treat every problem like a design problem”
 — Maria Giudice

Let’s look at yet another story. As the President of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), John Maeda (@johnmaeda, KPBC, RISD and MIT Media Lab), pioneered the transformation of school curriculum from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) to STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Maths). This was a step towards his larger goal of “Building a justifiable case for creativity in the world.” Maeda’s practices and thinking as a designer played a significant role in leading such institutional transformations.

As designers everything we make and all the problems we solve have an implicit touch of design.

Designers’ guide to leading change

Careers, a design project — We have seen that application of design methods and artifacts to solving problems (from product to culture to organizational) lead to change, either directly or indirectly. But how can we as designers ensure that our career leads us to such opportunities?

“Why don’t we treat careers as design projects?”
 — Ian Swinson (@iswinson, Global Head of UX at Anaplan)

Many designers have never really thought of designing their careers, but rather are focused on building a career in design. Career is composed of multiple non-linear aspects such as core skills, success criteria, adaptability etc. As designers, we are adept at navigating through non-linear scenarios, figuring them out, and converting them into potential opportunities — we are well-placed to start designing our careers.

Embrace uncertainty and take risks — Say you designed your career well enough and landed an opportunity where you are at the helm. Now what? As leaders, we will face tons of challenges and tests. We need to develop the courage to take chances, learn from and apply our skills to such unfamiliar situations. To do this, we need to be receptive to taking risks, and we need to be optimistic. Optimism helps us keep an open mind and believe that any problem can be solved. And this, in turn, will lend us the courage to take the step forward.

“Take the next step!” 
 — John Maeda

The business of business — Maeda emphasized the importance of business acumen in designers. Most Venture Capitalists (VC) today have a designer on their board along with business and engineering leaders. In addition to knowing and practicing design methods, designers need to develop an understanding of business concepts (e.g. value chains or financials) to develop better synergies and lead transformations. Maeda suggested having more conversations and spending more time with people from business. Getting a business degree is not a taboo for designers. Let’s empower ourselves into leading change through business education, training, or experience; combined with our design thinking.

Values — As designers we also need to nurture certain core intrinsic values. According to Maeda, for designers to become effective leaders and change makers, we need to embrace humility and let go of our established designer ego. Only then will we be able to see value in disagreements and opposing perspectives. This is fundamental to everything we do as designers.

Design is powerful, not only when deliberately applied, but also in its existence as an integral part of our conditioning as designers. We need to be conscious of the role of design, not just in transforming user experiences, but also in building culture, shaping careers, and helping organizations adapt to change. We are empowered. Let’s start leading change and script more transformational success stories.

“A leader is best when people barely know they exist, when their work is done, their aim fulfilled, they will say: We did it ourselves” 
 —Lao Tzsu as cited by John Maeda

Special thanks to Doug Molidor for collaboration on this post.