by Trent Mankelow

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At Optimal Usability our vision is to help transform our clients into providers of world-class customer experiences. But it turns out that it’s really hard to transform organisations. So lately I’ve been reading up on ‘big D’ Design, how organisations can build design into their DNA, and I thought I’d share a few ideas that have stood out.

1. Allow space for exploration and risk taking

"Financial planning and reward systems form the hidden infrastructure of the organisation, an all-but-invisible force that can promote or stifle design thinking." - Roger Martin, Design of Business.

It’s a tiny example, but we’ve recently bought two iPads for our Wellington and Auckland offices. They weren’t in the budget, and I couldn’t justify the spending from any logical part of my brain. We bought them because part of our job is to explore and play with technology, to try and figure out how it might help our clients.

Exploration is crucial to creating a design-led organisation. The structures, processes and culture of an organisation need to be open to risk taking. 

Unfortunately as organisations grow they are less open to risks. They tend to prefer the safety and predictability of efficiency over innovation. 

The thing is that a good design process is not very predictable or safe. It’s messy, difficult to explain and sell, and its results are not certain from the beginning. That’s why so many new ideas come from small companies. Small companies don’t have to consider what they might lose - market share, revenue, reputation - just what they stand to gain. 

So, if you want to be design-led, you have to be open to exploration. According to Roger Martin, this means that financial planning for innovative activities should only consist of setting goals and spending limits: "Goals define the breakthroughs the company is seeking. Spending limits reflect the reality that the company can only afford so much innovation spending in total, and each knowledge advance is worth only so much to the company."

2. Create a project-centred organisation

"Hot project teams start with a clear goal and a serious deadline. The hot group knows that it might disband after the goal is reached and reform the next week to slay another dragon." - Tom Kelly, The Art of Innovation.

As a consultancy, our work is based around projects and teams, often from very different organisations. Working with different people all the time, on challenging, time-bound projects is one of the most fun parts of the job.

It’s interesting to contrast our workday with those of some of the clients we work with, whose roles are more tightly defined. They don’t necessarily experience the energy and creativity that comes from being part of a "hot project team" focussed on achieving an important goal in a fixed timeframe. 

The good news is that, more and more organisations are moving from the old notion of "jobs" to the more expansive concept of work as "projects". As Kouzes and Pusner point out in their book, The Leadership Challenge, project-centred organisations allow people more freedom. Freedom is essential in a design-led organisation (see point 1).

3. Lead from the front

"I like to taste the food. If it tastes bad, I don’t serve it. I’m constantly monitoring what we do, and I’m looking for better ways we can provide financial services, ways that would make me happy if I were a client." - Charles Schwab, founder of the US-based discount brokerage schwab.com.

It’s hard to be design-led when the boss doesn’t care. If insanely great design is your goal, then senior management need to take a role in the design process. There is no substitute for senior management actively promoting the power of design, and ensuring that innovative, design-led projects are properly funded. If you are serious about being design-led then it takes real money. For example, Apple throw away 90% of their work in their desire to reach perfection. And they pay their designers 50% above market. (Source: Why you can’t innovate like Apple).

4. Be research-led.

"We’re spending far more time living with consumers in their homes, shopping with them in stores and being part of their lives. This leads to much richer insights." - A.G. Lafley, CEO of Proctor & Gamble.

To be a design-led organisation, you need deep empathy with your customers. You have to spend time with them and be a "first-class noticer". You have to ask consumer-oriented questions.

When you have taken the time to truly understand your customers, then it becomes easier to trust your gut. For example, the team at Air New Zealand always did what they felt was right when designing the Skycouch, even if that meant ignoring feedback from senior executives. That’s because the design team could rely on the insights they had gained from real passengers, rather than the individual preferences of execs who didn’t represent the target audience.

5. Don’t centralise the design function.

"Designers hold on to their craft as if only people with magic skills can do it. They need to let non-traditional designers into the effort, give them a role, empower them." - Adam Werbach, chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi S

I’ve read several arguments for having a small team responsible for the core design. Personally, I’m torn. I can see how that’s important when designing products, but I’m not so sure that’s true when designing services (which make up 70% of New Zealand’s GDP). 

For example, Proctor & Gamble’s transformation into a design-led organisation only happened precisely because they made design everyone’s job, rather than centralising the design function. 

I believe that today’s designers need to rely more and more on collaborative methods to co-create, particularly as our world gets more and more connected and complex. Just because you can’t work Photoshop doesn’t mean you don’t have a role to play in designing.

In conclusion

I remember four years ago we did a research project for a bank that was interested in improving their phone banking experience. When it came time to present our findings and recommendations to a room full of senior managers, we decided to try an experiment. Rather than jump straight into our conclusions, we got them to call into the test system and try a simple task, checking the balance of a credit card. We saw people having to hang up and start again multiple times, people swearing at the system, and a general grumbling about how "it shouldn’t be this hard". In getting senior managers to experience how painful it was to use phone banking, we made a much stronger case for change.

So, if you are trying to sell design thinking at your organisation, here’s one final tip: the importance of design can’t be explained, only experienced.