Change the way you change: how design can transform your ability to address complex challenges

Imagine your change initiative was faster, smoother, less risky, and delivered better outcomes. We can do this by focusing on human value.

This is what design can bring.

The reason a design approach is essential is that change is a human challenge and failure is generally due to human factors. Think about any change you have been involved with and you will have experienced challenges in a least some of these factors:

• power structures: change buts up against vested interests and shadow power;
• culture and mindset: when change is seen as ‘not how we do things around here’;
• behaviours: when change requires that people do things differently;
• networks of relationships: when change requires new relationships and routines.
  

Design is not just another change tool – it is the process of change, the activity of change. Design does this with people, exploring the future, getting familiar with it and working together to address the resistant factors -with respect.

A design approach enables you to integrate a wide range of perspectives in your change process. This brings more diversity to the table, reducing the unknowns and roadblocks that can derail change.

Design’s inherent tangibility makes change more real for all involved. We give it shape. We enable organisations to quickly identify added value and describe a long term vision. This reduces the ambiguity about what is being undertaken, proves what is possible and defines what the desired future looks like.

Creativity also provides an invaluable ability to reframe a challenge when change is required but gets stuck. When the solution is not provided by best practice or industry standards, design can imagine an alternative path.

Finally design aligns people and organisations to the value that their organisation exists to create. We ensure that technologies are guided by customer needs. We help people see what their part in creating value is with clarity. We orchestrate change.

In practice four qualities work together to make change happen. To help illustrate how, here are four examples that focus specifically on each quality.

Change is a given for organisations – public and private. Drivers of change vary – from cost pressures to market ambitions – but the need to adapt remains or is accelerating. However, every change is a risk. A risk that the change fails or that it actually causes damage to the balance of an organisation.

Around 70 percent of change management programmes fail. There are a broad array of reasons for failure but employee acceptance of change is an accurate predictor of success. Deloitte

Only 21% of companies are reaping the transformative value of digital. However for those employing a strong customer focus that number rises up to 53%. HBR, Genpact

If we dig into these two statements, we can find the answer to our question.

Change management fails and technology transformations underachieve because employees and customers are missing from the picture. Organisational change is fundamentally a human process so missing on two huge human constituencies is a huge gap. Either employee acceptance or customer focus is lacking. Failure follows.

The core problem of management approaches is the Achilles heel of its strength. Single-minded focus on business goals and their delivery excludes wider perspectives. For example, frontline knowledge of how things work is neglected, leading to both lost know-how and demotivation. The issue becomes greater when important perspectives are excluded to the extent that the system breaks.

In response to the management issue – we need something in our change approach that works more coherently with the context of change to ensure that perspectives are better integrated. We need the ability to reframe the direction we are taking once we understand how these perspectives come together in a specific situation.

Technology on the other hand has a user problem. When developed in isolation of an understanding of the needs, context, abilities and motivations of its users it is working blind. Often the approach is to just keep going until you get it right but this leads to escalating  increase in costs, delay and the levels of dissatisfaction with change programs that executives and leaders are experiencing. 

To address the blindspot of technology, we need to have a much clearer picture of the shape of the new ‘thing’ informed by the needs, context, capabilities and motivations of all its users. We can then orchestrate how the system of people, teams and organisations  adopts and uses the technology.

Design is first and foremost focussed on value. Specifically the value created for people. What value are we creating for the beneficiaries of our organisations activities? From this flows a focus on the people delivering the value – employees. This focus then informs the design of  processes and systems that support people to achieve their goals – management and technology. Design  provides the golden thread to the change program – the value it is creating for the beneficiaries of the organisation. 

We are not arguing for design to replace other approaches to change – more that it is a missing element. Think of management, technology and design as a three legged stool. Design provides balance where it is missing. Design provides a clear vision of what to do and how to do it. It does so by defining solutions that are valued by customers, deliver on business goals and provide a clear scope for technology. Of course design must work effectively with the other two legs. 

Design is generally understood as the ability to shape things. Historically tangibles like chairs, cars etc. More recently our digital products and services are understood as designed. Design has made its way into unusual places such as banks, hospitals and government. 

What we are adding here is that design brings value not only to the new thing that is being created but to the capability of an organisation to create that new thing. The capability to change in itself. 

Bringing this together we need to have the capacity to change, to adopt change and to benefit from change. This clarity helps us to identify what is core to this change – It is the people, humans, involved in the change. The staff, the managers, the customers, the users. It is people in all their complexity – their behaviours, their mindsets, their power dynamics and their relationships that have to change for change to happen. We can blast through these factors creating damage or failing on the way, or we can bring them into the process, understand what we are changing and grow the human capability to change.

Design is the change as it happens

To conclude; what makes design so valuable to change is that it works at two levels. 

Design delivers the future state. Through the inherent ability to describe and define the future – and to do so from the perspective of the customer or beneficiary of the change. To do this with the people who will be involved in delivering and managing it and to do this with a systemic lens. Design is able to connect the strategic vision to the specific details.

Design also delivers the capability to change. By integrating perspectives and orchestrating the change, design provides a change methodology that brings people – customers, users, staff and stakeholders – into the process of change. Design addresses these fundamental barriers.