Sensemaking in a changing world

People are the heart of a conference experience: conversation by design

The family is shaped by the direction in which it points its conversation. It can focus on its memories and basically keep on saying: “this is the way we are, this is what the different members of the family have done and are doing.” Or it may treat itself as a base from which its members set out to explore the outside world, and to which they return with something new to say, so that conversation is constantly enriched by outside as well as inside happenings. We become the prisoners of our families, our genes, our memories, only if we wish to be prisoners. It is by conversations with others, by mixing different voices with our own, that we can turn our individual life into an original work of art. -  Theodore Zeldin, Conversation

What makes or break a conference experience? People – their ideas, stories, and the resulting conversations. Some of this conversation happens during the conference sessions themselves. But more often it happens in the hallways during breaks, over lunch, or during informal events.

If hallway conversations are often the best part of a conference experience, how can we extend and play on the value of hallway conversations?

If a good presentation at a conference is merely a conversation starter, how can we extend the avenues available to us to continue those conversations?

If conversations build communities and keep refreshing them with new ideas, how can we use the conference experience to build, nurture, and welcome new members to a community?

Ever since he published the influential book Beyond Bullet Points, Cliff Atkinson has been trying to get people to rethink the way they do presentations. In The Backchannel he argues that presentations can become much more than a one-time information transfer event with limited opportunities for interaction. Instead he suggests that through the use of social media presentations can instead become part of an extended conversation.

Last year in the Innovation Lab at Open Text Content World we began a conversation around the challenge of adoption. During focus groups, usability tests, surveys, and in follow-up conversations with customers we’ve been exploring the extent of the adoption challenge faced by organizations. What we’ve discovered is that the various facets that influence adoption are poorly understood. Only a minority of organizations measure adoption. Few deploy with an adoption strategy in mind. ECM is too often treated as a technology platform and deployed with little understanding of the business context. Kyle McNabb from Forrester suggests that:

Most implementations fail to take into consideration business context… implementation teams know who their users are, but they know very little about the people that will use the technology. 

Gartner predicts:

When it comes to collaboration, IT organizations are accustomed to providing a technology platform (such as, e-mail, IM, Web conferencing) rather than delivering a social solution that targets specific business value. Through 2013, IT organizations will struggle with shifting from providing a platform to delivering a solution. This will result in over a 70 percent failure rate in IT-driven social media initiatives. Fifty percent of business-led social media initiatives will succeed, versus 20 percent of IT-driven initiatives. Enterprises will need to develop entirely new skill sets around designing and delivering social media solutions. Until this happens, failure rates will remain high.

Like the presentation pyramid above, ECM technology is just the tip of iceberg. One of the most common mistakes organizations make when they deploy ECM is thinking they’re done once the deployment is rolled out. And yet, if you consider the adoption experience, deployment is only one step along the path of gaining traction across the organization. Think of deploying ECM in your organization as the beginning of an extended conversation with the people you expect to use it every day as part of their jobs and with the business to whom you’re delivering specific business value. Or, as one customer phrased it, think of it as moving from a ‘launch and leave’ to a ‘launch, listen, learn, and never leave’ philosophy.

In the Adoption Track at Content World this year, we’re going to continue the conversation around adoption. We’ll discuss what it means to take a people-centric approach to deploying ECM and how design thinking can help. And in keeping with the theme, we’re going to experiment with people-centric approaches to the design of the sessions and the track experience itself, using the Adoption Community to extend the experience before and after the conference.

At the heart of the the Adoption Track are conversations about people-centric topics, including:

• the problem with requirements
• ‘the GUI sucks’ – role of the interface in adoption
• what prevents people from sharing knowledge
• discovering how opportunities for innovation can come from putting people first
• role of knowledge champions as agents of change
• moving from a training to a learning culture
• nudges, mind control, and the psychology of adoption
• measuring adoption
• usability testing

If you’re interested in bringing a more people-centric approach to deploying ECM solutions and giving your right brain a workout, join in the conversation at #OTCW. And let me know if you’re interested in participating on a panel, presenting a case study, or have ideas for additional topics of conversation.

And in the spirit of Beyond Bullet Points, we promise not to brain-damage anyone attending sessions in the Adoption Track with boring presentations packed with bullet points.

Visualizing the adoption experience

Earlier I blogged about visualizing the customer experience using customer experience journey maps. The experience I’m currently trying to understand and visualize is the experience people go through when adopting a new application at work. The challenge of people adopting of new applications in an organization is a much different challenge than the one of people adopting new applications in their personal lives.

People don’t like being changed. Yet new applications force people to change their behavior. This has a significant psychological effect (illustrated in the technology adoption cycle) due to our many cognitive biases. One important cognitive bias that comes into play when it comes to the challenge of adoption is that we overvalue what we have. For a great background on cognitive biases and other ways in which people are predictably irrational, check out Dan Ariely’s great book of the same name.

Just how big is this psychological effect? John Gourville, in the must read article Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers: Understanding the Psychology of New Product Adoption published in the Harvard Business Review, says that people tend to overvalue what they currently use by a factor of three. And businesses have a corresponding tendency to overvalue a technology’s benefits by a factor of three. This results in a significant hurdle when, for example, organizations try to shift employees from shared drives and email to shared document repositories and collaborative applications.

What are the stages people go through when adopting new applications in a business context? Below is a diagram illustrating my first take at visualizing the adoption experience for ECM (click on the image for a full size version).

Two important sources that informed this draft of the adoption experience are the Experience Cycle and the ADKAR change management model.

The Experience Cycle updates the sales cycle and the traditional marketing funnel with a more holistic, customer-centric point of view. The stages illustrated in the Experience Cycle, however, are incomplete when it comes to the challenge organizations face when deploying enterprise software. With enterprise software, there’s another layer of complexity. Instead of the direct Producer to Customer experience discussed in the article, there’s a Producer > Organization > Internal Customer experience. The organization has its own goals, its own internal customers, and must be actively involved in designing and supporting the adoption experience.

ADKAR is a goal-oriented change management model focused on the people dimension of change. A change management model that brings in the people dimension is important because businesses want employees to adopt new applications in order to support their business goals. But enterprise applications such as ECM are difficult to mandate. As a result, organizations need to explicitly plan for and design behaviour change into the adoption experience.

This attempt to visualize the adoption experience is just a starting point and I would love some feedback and ideas on how to improve and extend it. I also plan on creating a version based on a specific persona as the adoption experience will differ based on the behavioural patterns and goals of different personas.

Taking a people-centric approach to the design and deployment of enterprise software

There’s been a regrettable lack of discussion on the challenges of designing usable, engaging experiences for enterprise software. Often the business problems solved by B2B vendors were compelling enough that whether or not they were easy to use organizations were willing to put up with poor design. Companies purchasing the software have traditionally been more demanding of features rather than good GUI. The pace of change is also slower in organizations which means trends that impact B2C software take time to make their into their B2B counterparts. I think there’s also traditionally been a perception that management could simply tell people to use something or adopt new behaviours through policies, incentives, and punishments as it was considered part of the job. And when designing enterprise software, there’s usually a complex ecosystem of roles to support around planning, configuration, administration, deployment, and supporting the software.

After the purchase, organizations have the equally complex task of designing and deploying solutions based on that software within their own organization. And those responsible, IT (like B2B vendors themselves) have traditionally had a very technology focused mindset.

The socio-digital revolution, the experience economy, the rise of mobile, the impact of the changing demographics within the workforce, and the failure of so many enterprise deployments to reach their objectives call for a new focus on understanding people’s relationship with technology within organizations.

If we want people to adopt the solutions we design and deploy, we need to adopt new approaches to the design and delivery of those solutions. Approaches that start with people. This means shifting from treating people as rational users of technology (one-dimensional) to people with goals, hopes, dreams, and complex relationships (multi-dimensional). And finally, it means shifting from evaluating human performance as if people were cogs in a factory assembly line whose behaviour we can adjust through a simplistic carrot and stick reward system (one-dimensional) to researching experience and designing for behaviour change (multi-dimensional).

This requires a two-pronged strategy:

• Designing technology to adapt to people
• Designing for behaviour change in order to adapt people to technology

While these strategies may at first glance seem contradictory, they are actually both equally important and form a creative tension. If technology isn’t designed and deployed with people in mind, then it can be a frustrating failure. On the other hand, no matter how compelling the value proposition and how well designed, any new technology requires behaviour change. And while there are always early adopters who eagerly learn the technology and shift their behaviors to incorporate the technology into the way they do things, for most it’s a more complex challenge as illustrated by the technology adoption curve first defined in 1941 which, fascinatingly enough, was developed to illustrate the diffusion of corn hybrid seed (illustration from the excellent article Design Strategies for Technology Adoption).

These strategies call for a people-centric design and deployment approach that considers:

• values people hold and how these impact behaviour, decisions, performance, and adoption
• organizational culture in which people work and it’s impact on people’s behaviour
• people’s motivations and how these affect behavior, decisions, performance, and adoption
• activities people perform and how technology (products, business processes, procedures) can support, enhance, or change these activities
• goals and aspirations and how these affect the choice of the activities people engage in
• social relationships people have both within and outside of the organization, the pressures they exert and opportunities they enable, and how they’re transforming the way we work
• approaches to how we design and deploy solutions and how these approaches reflect organizational values and impact the resulting adoption of the solutions
• transformation in work practices we hope to effect through the technology so that we are designing for where thing are going rather than where they have been
• experiences and the ideas, emotions, and memories we hope to evoke through our solutions
• constraints of how our brains work and how to take these constraints into account when we design technologies, processes, services, or behavior change

Designing solutions that promote changes in the way people work requires us to look beyond traditional user-centered design (an approach most enterprises never actually adopted) to a people-centric holistic experience design approach which ensures that solutions are culturally relevant, emotionally engaging, easy-to-use as well as more readily adopted to promote desired transformations in culture and work practice. By placing people at the core of our thinking we can:

• Deliver more holistic, engaging experiences that accelerate the adoption process
• More effectively manage risk
• Ensure solutions achieve their business objectives by aligning people, process, technology, and content with business objectives
• Make organizations better places to work
• More rapidly transform business (see the recent discussions around social business design)

There are number of tools that can help us keep people at the center, a fun one of which is IDEO method cards (available as a free iPhone app).

Thinking beyond the website

While I’m excited by the rapid growth of the discipline of content strategy as evidenced by last week’s sold out Content Strategy Forum in Paris and the growing buzz about content strategy across the webisphere, most of the conversation is currently centered around web content strategy.

I think the reason the conversation has centered around the website is that most people with Content Strategy in their job title come from the web world, where the website is central to the overall customer experience. Yet despite the website’s central, highly visible role in engaging with customers, content has been an extremely neglected part of the experience. As a result, content strategists have started a movement to address this situation. And while I applaud this, I would argue that the experience expands past the website and as a result content strategists need to think beyond the website.

For example, the Zappos website is their storefront. But people don’t come to the Zappos storefront for the content. They come to buy shoes. And they come to buy shoes because of the service experience. While Zappos sells shoes, it’s primarily a customer service company. While the website is an important pillar in delivering their overall service experience, it’s only one pillar. If you’re part of the school of thought that considers corporate culture = strategy (Zappos and Netflix are two examples of companies who think this way), then internal employee communications (including events, training, social learning, the Zappos culture book, and so on) becomes critical to corporate strategy. Just think of the value a content strategy approach to internal communications could bring to the table.

Because the content exposed to customers on the web is only the tip of the iceberg of all the content that an organization contains, I’d like to see the discipline of content strategy start thinking beyond the website and start asking questions like:

• What story are we telling internally through our employee content experience?
• What story are we telling through our partner and supplier content experience?
• What story are we telling through our employee, customer, partner, or supplier onboarding experience?
• What story are we telling through our technical or how to content?
• What story are we telling through the way we invoice our customers?
• What story are we telling through our correspondence with customers?
• What story are we telling to the rapidly increasing portion of the population accessing content through their mobile devices?
• and so on…

Every organization tells a story through the content it produces, whether designed or not.

And all of this content is in desparate need of a content strategy, what Kristina Halvorson, keynote speaker at least week’s Content Strategy Forum and author of Content Strategy for the Web, defines as “the practice of planning for content creation, delivery, and governance.”

So while it’s critically important to tackle the problem of the web experience, let’s not forgot the larger experience and the central role of content within that larger experience. Because if you haven’t designed your content strategy around the larger experience, odds are the story your organization is telling is a fragmented, unsatisfactory story.

For those new to the field of content strategy and wondering where to learn more, here are a few places to start:

• Search Google for content strategy
• Review the presentations from Content Strategy Forum 2010 on SlideShare
• Check out the #contentstrategy hashtag on twitter and follow one of the content strategy twitter lists
• Read the content strategy knoll
• Check out the Content Strategy Google Group
• Join the LinkedIn Content Strategy group
• Keep an eye on the Business Exchange Content Strategy related articles at Business Week

Bridging silos through story

In the spirit of filter or be flooded (Fast Company) and the Simplicity of Dr. Seuss (a funny must read on the need for content strategy), I’m sharing my draft of “What’s your story? Designing a holistic customer experience” in advance of my talk at the Content Strategy Forum. I’ve crafted something too long to present within my 40 minute time limit. I’m hoping that by sharing it with you in advance, you’ll let me know what you find most interesting, where you think I should cut, what intrigues you the most, or where you think my thinking is flawed.

For those not attending the Content Strategy Forum, I’ll be happy to continue the conversation here or on twitter.

10 reasons content strategy is essential when designing a holistic customer experience

Next week I’m attending (and speaking at) the first Content Strategy Forum in Paris. I’m intrigued by the discipline of content strategy because I believe that now, more than ever before, content strategy is critical for designing a holistic customer experience. No longer will content be thought of as a necessary evil (technical how to information) or blatantly promotional (I’m so great, buy me).

Before listing my 10 reasons, I’ll share some definitions for the terms I’m using:

Customer: The person who’s needs you want to satisfy and whom you want to delight. In other words, the person you’re designing for, whether you’re a:

• Organization designing product or service experiences for customers or clients
• Government agency designing programs or services for citizens
• Hospital or health unit designing health experiences for patients
• Educational institution designing learning experiences for students
• IT, HR, Finance, or Legal department within an organization designing application or service experiences for internal customers

Customer experience: “Perception that customers have of their interactions with an organization.” I like this definition by Bruce Temkin for two reasons. First, by using the word perception, he hits on the emotional aspect of what a customer experiences and the memories these perceptions create. Second, it focuses on interactions. Interactions imply a dialog, extend across time, and occur across a wide variety of moments and touchpoints. All these moments of interaction and the perception that forms combine to shape and form overall holistic experience.

Holistic customer experience: Hmmm, could just reuse Bruce’s definition and scrap the holistic part. But every organization tells a story, either by design or as an afterthought. So I like holistic customer experience as a phrase to express how we can influence the total experience through interactions that are crafted and coordinated by design. Magic occurs when we hide our back end systems, processes, and silos and craft engaging, memorable, and meaningful interactions that work together in harmony across touchpoints throughout the customer lifecycle. As Rahul Sen so concisely states, it’s “perfecting the craft of thinking and doing as a whole.”

 

Exposing inner workings results in a fragmented customer experience. Designing an overall story across interactions and time, adding a layer of magic on top of internal systems and processes, leads to a more holistic customer experience. (Diagram from Brandon Schauer’s The (Near) Future of Designing Experiences.)

Content strategy: The design of content experiences. “Content strategy is an emerging field of practice encompassing every aspect of content, including its design, development, analysis, presentation, measurement, evaluation, production, management, and governance.” – Jeffrey MacIntyre

10 reasons content strategy is essential when designing a holistic customer experience

1. A holistic experience requires an overarching frame or story to shape choices. Content strategy can serve as the story’s blueprint for an increasingly diverse set of content creators.
2. Customers are looking for meaning. By telling a story, great content conveys meaning.
3. To tell a story, you need a voice. A voice requires a personality that emerges through each interaction. Content needs to express that personality.
4. Content is a social object. Social objects stimulate conversations and as a result form social networks. Social networks help build relationships.
5. Because of the increasing complexity of the conversations happening across social networks, we need to design content for emergence: “CS is about mastering the tiny—the power of data, contained and defined in those XML containers to bubble up via SEO and SEM—in the realm of the massive. As destination websites and traditional brand marketing give way to the artful arrangement and deployment of billions of nuggets of containerized info that can be reused, recycled, retweeted, reblogged, and otherwise recirculated in the vast data anarchy of the Googleplex, content strategy is the only measured response marketers and media companies have to get their stuff out there.” Craig Brombery
6. Designers shape behaviour. Content is one of the critical elements for shaping behaviour. Great content nudges and influences.
7. Traditional forms of push marketing and advertising are dying. A purchase is just the beginning of an experience journey that can start well before a purchase and extend into a relationship that lasts for many years. Content marketing turns organizations into publishers.
8. Content has its own journey. Birth, childhood, rebellious teenage years (leading to raging debates), retirement, and finally death. Without a plan for this lifecycle, a mess disrupts the experience.
9. There’s a mountain of content behind the scenes. This supporting content and backstage crew  are essential in delivering the front end experience.
10. <ok, I ran out of steam before I got to a 10^th reason… any takers?>

Designing for a holistic customer experience – thinking outside the product

Economies right now are fundamentally becoming less about physical objects and more about creating ideas and experiences… We now have a new challenge: we have to meet a new emphasis on improving experiences instead of objects, and we need to improve the flow of interactions between customers and service providers. – Daniel Pink, Business Thinking in the Knowledge Economy

If economies are fundamentally changing to be about ideas and experiences, how do we prepare for this change?  What does it means to create experiences? And how do we improve the flow of interactions between customers and service providers?

First and foremost, we have to think outside the product, service, or system.

To do this, we need to break some bad habits. The habit of seeing objects as merely functional. The habit of thinking that technology is the answer. The habit of thinking features matter most. The habit of calling people users. The habit of working in silos. The habit of ignoring or downplaying emotion, uncertainty, and mess. The habit of failing to listen for and study the resulting experience (because there’s always an experience, whether designed for or not).

If we put people front and center, embrace them in all their emotional complexity, and situate our understanding of them firmly in a messy socio-cultural context, then design becomes much more complex.

Designing for a holistic customer experience means designing within and for this messy socio-cultural context. And although we can’t truly define or control the experience (after all, we’re not the ones having the experience) we must still do our best to understand it, design for it, and influence it.

To do this, we must develop deep empathy.

We have to let go of our assumptions and reframe our thinking.

We need to collaborate across our silos to design for, prototype, and deliver the experiences we hope to invoke.

We must think about and explicitly design for every point of contact, every customer interaction (whether that interaction is with the product, website, service, content, employee, message, call center…) 

We must weave together disparate interactions into a coherent whole.

Delivering a holistic customer experience means ensuring everyone in an organization has a deep understanding of the customer, the desired customer experience, and is empowered to act on it.

And then we have to let go. Observe. Listen. Engage in a dialog. Learn. Iterate. Intervene. Evolve.

Because every intervention, every point of contact, every message, every piece of content, every conversation has an impact on the experience.

So while a holistic customer experience can’t be scripted, we can still design for its emergence.

What others around the web are saying about holistic customer experiences:

• It’s All About Experience (Sohrab Vossoughi, BusinessWeek)
• Holistic Customer Experience (by Nick Finck blueflavor.com love their tagline “we speak people”)
• Prediction: Holistic user experience for 2008 (Lynda Rathbone)
• How to Lead the Customer Experience, Stephan H. Haeckel, Lewis P. Carbone, Leonard L. Berry
• Customer Vs User Experience, Leisa Reichelt
• The Human Interface, Christopher Fahey
• Experience is the Product, Peter Merholz
• Framework of Product Experience, Pieter Desmet and Paul Hekkert
• From Design of Objects to Design of (Almost) Everything, Bernie Roth (video)

What does thinking outside the product to design for a holistic customer experience mean to you?

Visualizing the customer experience using customer experience journey maps

People discover unseen opportunities when they have a personal and empathic connection with the world around them. For individuals, that means developing the ability to walk in other people’s shoes. For companies and other large institutions, that means finding a way to bring the rest of the world inside their walls. – Dev Patnaik, Wired to Care

Too often when we think of a customer, our view is filtered through the lens of our job, profession,  department, or specialty. Think of how patients are treated in most hospitals. They are viewed as a disease, an illness, a collection of parts – each with its own specialist. The hospital system is designed for the convenience of the specialists, not for the needs of the patient. Specialists in a hospital are much like the silos in an organization, each viewing a customer from their own departmental lens.

Bringing the outside in using customer experience journey maps

Customer experience journey maps are a tool to help bring the outside world into an organization. They are a tool that can help bring customer stories to life. An entire story. Not just the piece one silo or function within an organization normally may encounter.

And as we map out the customer’s story, our organization’s own story becomes visible. And often what’s revealed is an incomplete fractured story.

Below are a few examples of different types of customer experience journey maps.

Social Gamer created by nForm

This map was created by nForm during a project to evolve one of Comcast’s gaming websites

• I like how the map provides a brief summary of the target persona for the journey, the use of visual icons to code the journey, and how actual quotes from gamers are used to illustrate key points.
• Notice the journey isn’t linear and the absence of the traditional marketing funnel. The gamer is in control here. Awareness is ongoing and crosses different media channels. Choosing is quite complex and is dependent on actually being able to play the game.
• Journey includes past experiences, awareness of new games, process of choosing, purchase experience, play experience, and sharing experience. Really hits home at how gamers invest their time – on forums, in stores, with friends – before buying a game. But misses out on the post-sharing experience… what happens when the gamer tires of a game (and what are the factors that contribute to tiring of a game)?
• Map could have benefited from including moments of truth (when the gamer forms an opinion, turns a corner, makes a decision).  Was the game fun? What’s their definition of fun?

Customer experience journey mapping as part of transforming public services in the UK

In 2005, the UK government set out on a journey to transform public services. As part of this journey, they focused on customer insight techniques such as customer experience journey mapping. This presentation includes some interesting maps based on government services such as applying for school meals, applying for an entry visa, and jury duty. These examples reveal feelings, call out touchpoints, and capture moments of truth. One of the examples also steps down to reveal underlying processes that support the experience.

Lego’s WOW map for an executive’s experience visiting LEGO

Lego uses tool called a ‘customer experience wheel’ to map an existing experience. “We understand what is and what is not important to the customer in that experience and then we design a ‘wow’ experience to improve it.”

• This particular LEGO map is a service oriented map, visualizing a WOW experience for an executive visiting LEGO.
• Unlike the Gamer example, this map does highlight moments of truth (defined as make or break moments).
• This map also specifically highlights questions to think about and reveals requirements (in the form of information or data to help deliver the WOW experience).

Designing with the social brain in mind

We are like a herd of buffalo quietly grazing on a plain until one of our neighbors starts to run… then we start to run, and others start to run, and suddenly mysteriously, the whole herd is barreling forward… 

Cooperation, altruism, punishment, and free-riding are written into our DNA.

 – Nicholas Cristakis and James Fowler, Connected

This herd behavior is a fundamental aspect of human nature. We are social creatures, with a social brain.

It’s time to discard the notion that people are fundamentally rational and self-interested, recognizing instead that we’re governed by social paradigms we aren’t directly conscious of, enormously swayed by social influence, and rely on limited and biased memory of past events to guide our decisions.

And if we accept this, then the task of what design is, what we need to do as designers, is fundamentally changed.

Instead of designing for mythical entities that make rational decisions with excellent information in a social vacuum, we need to design for predictably irrational decision making under knowledge constraints in a profoundly social context.

Like people, organizations are social organisms that follow a social logic not easily understood, make flawed decisions based on historic notions and hidden paradigms, and operate with something less than perfect rationality. Organizations have a social brain and are just as predictably irrational as individuals.

And if we accept this, then the task of what change management is, what we need to do as designers of change, is fundamentally changed.

If you haven’t yet seen these videos on social influence, they’re well worth watching. Then share your thoughts on the impliciations of designing with the social brain in mind.

 

A few things that spring to mind when I think of designing with the social brain in mind:

• Epidemics:  Rob Paterson asks “What if new ideas were like germs and the process of change was like an epidemic? How could you set change in motion by using this concept?” Like the I Love NY campaign triggering an epidemic of good that helped change the city.
• Structures: What structures can we put in place to connect people in support of a change? When thinking of structures, think of anything from creating communities, design of the workplace, design of meetings (like Open Space), socially creative governance strategies, to the hidden structures of rewards, processes, and hierarchy that shape an organization.
• Language: The language we speak, the values we absorb shape the brain. We include or exclude others through language. We form tribes through language. If words create worlds, how can we leverage language, conversation, story, and social objects?
• Social pressure: “[Muhammad] Yunus [innovator of the micro-credit movement] attributes the success of the Gramen Bank model to features of the social network: ‘Subtle and at times not-so-subtle peer pressure keeps each group member in line.” – Connected
• Innovation: Be wary of consensus or groupthink.  Welcome the fools, outliers, eccentrics, tribal leaders, culture hackers, design thinkers, anarchists, and dancing guys. Connect teams to customers and the broader cultural context. “Teams made up of individuals who had never before worked together fared poorly (Broadway musicals). Weren’t well connected and contained mostly weak ties. At the other extreme, groups made up of individuals who had all worked together previously also tended to create musicals that were unsuccessful. Because they lacked creative input from the outside, they tended to rehash the same ideas that they used the first time they worked together.” – Connected

Other ideas?

Build design thinking into organizational DNA to infuse delight into customer’s lives

In Designing in hostile territory I talked about injecting design thinking into your organization using a subversive, bottom-up approach.

But to really benefit from design thinking, to create products and services that delight customers, an organization has to build design into their DNA, like many of the world’s most innovative companies have done.

Some of these companies have a long history of design. Others have embraced it more recently as an underpinning for organizational transformation.

For each, design has become a strategic approach to developing new products, services, or meanings, creating value for customers, and boosting the bottom line.

Companies that innovate through design

• Samsung 1993 deliberately chose design as a strategy to become one of the world’s leading brands
• P&G’s A.G. Lafley, in a game changing move, sought to weave design into every strand of P&G’s DNA to transform P&G from a place that’s good at selling “more goop, better” into one which uses design thinking to create products that infuse delight into customers’ lives
• Philips is emphasizing smart design to drive innovation, make happy customers, and boost the bottom line (for more on how, check out behind Philips’ “High Design” and driving innovation in corporate culture)
• Kaiser is looking to revolutionize health care using human-centered design and has built an infrastructure for innovation to use design thinking as a tool for finding solutions
• David Swift President of Whirlpool North America credits design as Whirlpool’s differentiator and a strong strong contributor to revenues which doubled over six years
• Apple is already well known for using design to innovate
• Herman Miller, strong proponents of a design approach for many years, are now applying design thinking to areas such as sustainability
• Even GE, a company known for its performance driven Six Sigma approach, is getting into the act after stumbling in the downturn to help the company shift from a focus on operational effeciency to imagination at work
• And in the UK, as part of a public service transformation effort to drive customer-focused change, they’re innovating by design in public services

Bucking the trend of the short corporate lifespan

3M is one of the oldest companies that has bucked the trend of the short corporation lifespan through design thinking. Mauro Porcini, Head of Design for the Consumer & Office Business at 3M, describes how design thinking is embedded into 3M’s DNA. “Infusing design successfully in a corporation is not about an isolated team of super-designers. Designing successfully in a corporation is about the way the entire company thinks.”

3M’s approach to embedding design into their corporate DNA reflects the recommendations made by Roberto Verganti in Design Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean. To achieve design-driven innovation he argues we need to “investigate the evolution of society, economy, culture, art, science, and technology” using interpreters to research how people give meaning to things. Thus, relational assets with key interpreters (social capital slowly built over time, tacitly preserved, and carefully nurtured), combined with internal assets (corporate memory), and the interpretation (design) process become core assets that are difficult for competitors to copy.

Need help selling the value of design?

Try the Value of Design Factfinder put together the UK Design Council based on extensive research which concluded that businesses using design perform better than their rivals.

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