It is a Friday afternoon and there are post-its all over the living room wall. I’ve been mucking around in data trying to make sense of where we are as a business and where we think we’ll be in the future. Financial projections, team composition, and industry trends all find their way onto post-its in hopes that the data will give me a sense of “knowing”. And, in some ways, it does. It helps draw a possible path between the present and future. While the path isn’t always the right one, it offers a reference point — like a trend line that points in a direction but without an endpoint.
The truth though, is that our projections are almost always wrong. Within days of putting them on paper, they are outdated. But there is one type of data that has historically been pretty accurate and stands the test of time. Those are the themes that arise from the reoccurring conversations and projects we have with our partners.
As a design firm that works with 20+ organizations each year, we are on the front lines collaborating with those who want to innovate and change the way people live and work. Each of these relationships and projects gives us insight into the future. We hear our clients’ early thoughts and partner with them to make sense of what they are seeing and where they want to go. In doing this, we make connections and uncover themes that emerge in the realms of education, innovation, and culture.
As I look at this mess of post-its, there are a few hopeful trends that seem to be crystalizing. While the trends are each quite different, they all tie back to culture. Organizations are taking a hard look at their patterns of behavior to evolve the impact they have on their employees and their end-users. We see these patterns of behavior as culture. The more we can intentionally design these patterns, the more intentional our impact will be.
First, Some Context Around our Current State of Affairs
We are facing a set of challenges and a scale of change we couldn’t have imagined in our wildest dreams only months ago. Between the virus, working from home, businesses struggling or shuttered entirely, online learning the new normal, and the biggest civil rights movement in history underway, we’ve hit an inflection point that prevents us from returning to anything resembling the past. It is clear that our communities are crying for change — no, they are demanding it.
What is true for one person or organization, is not true for another. Not only are we each navigating a different level of uncertainty but it appears as though stasis is nowhere in sight. We are headed for a long period of turbulence that I personally find equally terrifying and exciting. My heart is heavy as I consider the number of companies shuttered and jobs lost, leaving people’s livelihood and purpose both in limbo.
On the other hand, excitement bubbles. If you know me, you know I am a pretty positive person. I teeter on the brink of appearing fake with a Polly-Anna attitude and “Minnesota Nice” smile. But, I can authentically see the potential in almost anything. This moment in history presents us with so much opportunity, I can hardly sit still. We are on the precipice of major societal change and what that change looks like, is up to us.
Trend #1: Creating cultures that honor individual voices
Organizations are learning how to honor every customer and employee. People are no longer willing to feel like a cog in the corporate wheel. They want to do work they love for a company they love and shop at businesses they love. And, they want to feel loved in return.
For many organizations, this means having to take a critical look at their culture and learn how to prioritize people over profits. This includes how people interact during difficult times, the way personal connection happens, how disagreements unfold, and how decisions are made. Culture is an everyday experience. It is deeply human and personal and can’t be mandated from on high. It is created by individuals and cultivated at a team level by leaders who often aren’t sure how to do it and don’t feel like they have the time.
We haven’t historically had the patience to really tune in to the day-to-day experience of individual employees. So, in lieu of that, leaders have designed for efficiency. However, in our experience, efficiency is the enemy of inspired teams and creative work.
Listening to and honoring each voice is part of what companies will need to do to cultivate a culture that people want to be a part of. It is the soft, qualitative half. The other half is about data.
We look at culture as an interconnected network of characteristics where the past has set the present in motion. So, understanding culture requires one to look at the systems and structures that created it. If adequate data doesn’t exist to paint that picture (which it often doesn’t), start creating it now. What we measure, we move. Finding ways to regularly measure inputs allows an organization to find focus.
We are experimenting with leadership development, culture calibrations, and team-dynamic experiences that consider both the qualitative and quantitative sides of culture design. While it is relatively new for us, it is some of the most rewarding work we get to do right now.
Trend #2: Work as a vehicle to learn
The face of education has been changing dramatically over the past 10 years. The idea that “getting an education” happens after highschool for the purpose of landing a good job, isn’t as true anymore. I mean, we’ve known that this was a flawed model for a while now. We continue to ask ourselves if a 4-year degree is worth it. How about that MBA, worth it? Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg don’t have college degrees, why do I need one?
As we grapple with these questions, it is clear that education is evolving to be about exploration, pursuing curiosities, and personal transformation. With this shift, people are beginning to see their work as a tool to learn vs. needing to learn to do their work.
Google’s 20% time was an early attempt at this. The popularity of this specific approach has waxed and waned, in part because it assumes that exploration and learning are separate from work. The idea is that 80% of the time you are working and 20% of the time you explore personal interests. But when the learning and work are set apart, it ends up looking more like 120% time (as was so infamously reported by Marissa Mayer).
In order to evolve, organizations must learn how to play a role in their employees’ ongoing learning and find ways for them to apply what they are learning in a useful way to their work. While leadership development programs are commonplace for this learning to occur it can also happen through company-specific educational experiences, team or individual coaching, and succession planning.
Trend #3: Focusing on the right innovations
Agile, Design Thinking, Service Design, and Systems Thinking have all been touted as the best innovation approach. While you can guess my bias, we’ve learned something pretty breakthrough over the years — they all work AND don’t work depending on the set-up. Historically, innovation experts (including us) have focused on cultivating the skill of the team (generate a lot of ideas, build and test quickly, find diverse collaborators, celebrate failure, etc). The assumption was that if you have the right tools and behaviors, you’re half-way there.
But often those innovation efforts don’t work. Leaders are disappointed, teams are frustrated, and projects are defunded. People ask themselves, “Why aren’t we coming up with big, bold, exciting ideas? Why can’t we implement our best ideas?”
While the tools and behaviors are important, they work best when two other things are also in place; the team is confident they are solving the right problem connected to a meaningful strategy and there is leadership support from the right people.
Organizations have become pretty good at solving problems. What they struggle with is figuring out what the most important problems are and having strong support to solve them from the beginning. This alignment sometimes feels like an all-out war between lines of business. Or, worse yet, a project is tackled that isn’t a priority at all. Connecting innovation work to the organization’s strategy ensures that it will get the support it needs in order for the solutions to see the light of day. And, it is the leader’s job to make this happen. Leaders who participate in the project, provide cover, ask good questions, and pave the way for the team, dramatically increase the odds of success.
Now that so many companies have built the internal capacity to innovate they will be confronted with figuring out how to slow things down at the onset of the project to lay this groundwork for the sake of consistent successful innovation.
Our Future is… Ours
Lately, I’ve been holding on to the quote by Representative John Lewis,
“Find a way to get in the way… make some noise and get in good trouble to make our country a better place.”
I believe these shifts will help us do just that. We are navigating a time in the world we will look back on and tell our grandchildren about. We are in the middle of creating a legacy line. A period of time where there is a “before” and an “after”.
Before and after COVID-19.
Before and after our shift to home offices.
Before and after our civil-rights revolution.
As organizations, we have the capacity to mold what the “after” looks like. If these trends take hold, we will be designing cultures where people are more connected, personally evolving, and working together on society’s most important challenges.
Let’s get to work.
