How to deploy design to ‘change the way you change?’
In 2024, Livework is hosting webinars discussing how design-led change can be crucial for successful transformation in the 21st century. Traditionally, change is management-led or technology-driven, but, as highlighted in our first webinar, design is the third pillar that needs to be added. It uniquely addresses human factors and barriers that often hinder change, offering the ability to incorporate diverse perspectives, reframe challenges, and align strategies across teams.
The Objective Value of Design
Design’s impact is measurable:
- Design-driven companies outperform the S&P 500 by 228% (DMI, 2015).
- Top design performers report 32% higher revenue growth and 56% higher total returns to shareholders (McKinsey, 2018).
While design’s benefits are clear, it remains a relatively new strategic capability. Therefore, many organisations struggle to understand how to deploy it effectively. The challenge isn’t just proving why design matters anymore, but figuring out how to integrate it into organizational change processes.
Challenges in Deploying Design
The successful utilisation of Design requires two critical integration efforts:
1. Vertical Integration: Aligning executive strategies with frontline delivery teams.
To optimise success, design brings an approach that enables vertical integration through the hierarchy of an organisation. It can connect executives to delivery teams – the big picture held in strategy and policy with the specific details where the difference is felt by customers. This is possible by bringing together different perspectives and shaping strategy into tangible actions. Design is able to speak to executives where it is essential to address the major strategic topic and priorities with brevity and clarity and then connect these goals to the work of specialists on the front line of delivery with enough specificity to be helpful to their tasks.
Case Study 1: Vertical Integration (Brazilian Insurance Company)
A Brazilian insurance company, after achieving financial strength and technical quality, sought customer centricity as a differentiator. The executive team prioritized this shift, and Livework was tasked with translating the vision into actionable steps throughout the organization.
We designed a program using Livework’s customer centricity building blocks, aligning the strategy from executives to delivery teams. Workshops helped clarify the leadership’s vision, which was then translated into operating models, processes, and people plans by the management team. Delivery teams were trained in customer-centric methods, with defined metrics to track progress.
Over a year, the program moved from setup to a continuous cycle of work, resulting in clear, tangible customer-centric practices across the business.
Key Success Factors:
- Long-term vision with short-term, team-driven actions
- Leadership engagement and active sponsorship
- Technical mentoring and narrative alignment
- Recognition and rewards for change agents
Challenges:
- Sustaining engagement beyond the program’s first year
- Balancing big ideas with necessary small improvements
- Managing time constraints for change agents with their primary roles.
When leadership is committed, provides a vision that everyone can agree and build upon, and change is not only cascaded but co-created through the organization, success becomes more likely.
2. Horizontal Alignment: Connecting traditionally siloed departments to collaborate on shared goals.
Design must also integrate horizontally across departments or silos. The value design brings is the ability to integrate perspectives and orchestrate change. This is something everyone professes to want but in reality we are cutting across well established structures that were implemented for a reason. To not understand that these structures are part of how organisations function can leave design fighting on multiple fronts. Design must consciously integrate and add value across the organisation, address the pains that come from the silo effect and find ways to improve the work and performance of each department.
Case Study 2: Horizontal Alignment (Global Retailer)
A global retail company embraced “consumer obsession” as a guiding principle. The initiative began in digital commerce with a visionary leader who saw the need to better understand customer value beyond Agile. We were asked to work with the Sales and IT teams to systematically embed the customer at the core of their work, using service design as the change driver.
Starting as a grassroots movement without executive access, we introduced service design through training and coaching in IT and Sales, eventually reaching 200+ employees, including senior leadership. Over time, this expanded horizontally across departments and vertically into strategy. A key moment was to use Service Design as an approach in a project on ‘last mile revolution’. The project was killed because customers did not want this new tech driven solution. This was our first tangible proof of value.
Over time, we ran 20+ service design projects across B2C, B2B, and employee experience contexts. A pivotal project aligned digital and retail departments for the first time, focusing on shared customer journeys, like ‘reserve online and try in store,’ transcending siloed KPIs.
To ensure lasting change, customer centricity was embedded into organizational routines, leading to the creation of a permanent in-house service design team. This team developed a customer journey framework, a living library that guides ongoing improvement and change initiatives across departments.
Now, most teams now understand their role in contributing to the customer experience and are equipped with design tools to address unmet customer needs. However, the transformation is ongoing and requires continuous evolution and embedding into organizational routines.
Key Success Factors:
- Scalable service design training for over 200 employees
- Cross-departmental collaboration, leading to customer journey alignment across digital and retail
- Embedding customer-centricity into decision-making processes and KPIs.
Challenges:
- Navigating internal politics and siloed structures
- Introducing a new design mindset within an agile, product-led organization.
There’s a cultural challenge in deploying design
Beyond structural integration, design must overcome cultural challenges. It’s often new and misunderstood, requiring strong leadership support to become part of an organisation’s daily operations. These integrations are difficult because design methodologies differ from conventional organisational structures and practices.
But deploying design is not the end game. The importance is to become more customer-centric as an organisation, so that better results will come. Organisations that are customer-centric embed design in all its corners because they know it is what will lead to better products and services.
So although deploying design in organisational change requires both vertical integration (from leadership to delivery teams) and horizontal alignment (across departments), it also requires a change of interpretation of what design is and what it can do for customer-centricity. When this happens, cultural acceptance is effective.
By addressing these factors, organisations can leverage design as a powerful tool for long-term success. And we’ve seen it happen too many times in our 20+ years of existence.
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I am a founding partner of Livework having set-up the company in 2001. My focus on keeping Livework at the forefront of service design practice and ensuring we continue to create value for our clients.