Three things to help your design effort succeed in VUCA conditions
photo: Torsten Dederichs @tdederichs
Making it through the storm
In this time of complexity and crisis, Purpose provides guidance and focus to leaders on why you’re doing what you’re doing. Even if you cannot have the same goals you had before, you can know how close you are to living and expressing your values in daily action. You can ground yourself and steady your mind by staying close to values and purpose.
“...this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time… once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.” – Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
On an organizational level, Purpose provides a compass for leaders to cascade meaning, which creates engagement. Purpose travels much faster than goals (1) and allows people to make aligned yet independent decisions. Creating systems that allow for this agility is crucial in a crisis.
But then you need a framework for action – for shaping the who, what and how. Together with a few other key practices, design thinking can repeatedly help you shift your mindset out of fear and into possibility.
Why Design Thinking
Design thinking is an iterative, creative problem-solving methodology that makes it safe to be curious. Structures help us focus, calm down anxiety, and take deliberate action, rather than be paralyzed or reactive. Design thinking puts human beings, their needs, and their experiences at the center. It is ideally suited for disruption, for innovation, for complex conditions where answers are unknown and conditions are volatile. That is a territory that is terrifying to many people; design methodology breaks it down into manageable tasks.
At the core of it is an open and questioning mindset, collaboration, and a robust set of techniques and processes to help you, your team and organization come up with new solutions. You can apply it in almost any type of organization, to innovate products or services, or within any function in an organization that needs new ideas. I’ve used it often in learning and development and HR to create new People solutions. In another article, I focus on an example of using it to strategically pivot (2) looking at things from a whole systems perspective, and reconsidering strategy at a fundamental level.
As much as I love and trust design methodology, I’ve also seen how ideas generated by design thinking can get thwarted, or watered down. Design thinking benefits immensely by adding in additional practices of purpose, coaching, and intentionally creating diverse and psychological safe teams, so that the results are maximized.
fear, familiarity and seeking legitimacy: the three things that consistently limit the impact of the design process
Organizations want to innovate but I’ve noticed three things consistently hold back the process: fear, familiarity bias, and wanting to keep legitimacy by fitting in (a phenomenon described by neo institutional theory in organizational psychology). When these tendencies influence the process too much, or go on unaware, the results are negatively impacted. Anecdotally, I’ve seen that these tendencies will almost always win out unless proactively countered. These are strong unconscious drivers. Having run design sprints in many sectors, from finance and insurance to pharmaceuticals and tech, I’ve often seen participants shy away from some of their more daring ideas, especially when choosing which ideas to prototype. Even though design methodology is great at providing safety to be open-minded, without addressing these three limiters it can still deliver lukewarm outputs.
purpose, psychological safety, diversity: the three additions that amplify the impact design
Purpose helps galvanize a group and motivate them to think bigger. When there is a strong sense of purpose to serve something bigger, driven by a real and urgent need, a shared mental model starts to take shape and with it courage and curiosity take hold. A strong purpose is one of the best counters to fear. To keep close to that, leaders need to stay close to it, cite it and apply it all the time.
Having a process to help us drop down into something meaningful helps us manage our fear. Then we can shift into curiosity, reframe the situation and commit to hanging out with the discomfort of the unfamiliar, and the uncertainty that comes with breaking from the status quo. Why would you want to hang out with uncertainty? In order to find better, and more relevant solutions. To leverage that, we also need to compensate for our individual bias and assumptions.
What is purpose-led design?
First I want to say more about what I mean by purpose-led design, and what may be different about it. Design thinking is especially helpful when you want to think much bigger and out of the box, or if you have little margin, need to move fast in a new direction and avoid costly mistakes. But what if you don’t know what that new direction is? How can you figure it out?
Purpose provides the compass so that you can fully embrace the exploration that design methodology offers. I argue that purpose is a prerequisite to generating meaningful outcomes from design methodologies at any time, but especially during a crisis. Without purpose, it’s too easy to be unmoored and go completely off track, or else stay too close to shore and not veer from the familiar.
What might be different? Traditionally the design process is rather agnostic about values. It doesn’t inherently challenge practitioners to dig deeper. By only focusing on the customer or user, and not challenging the intentions of the organization designing for them, and how they collaborate together, it can sometimes remain superficial.
Being intentional about why you are doing what you are doing is what I mean by purpose-led design. So purpose work comes first, then the design work.
The role of shared mental models and in design
In addition to addressing fears and the gravitational pull to conformity, you need to set up systems for creating a diverse team and policies to support it. Without addressing team needs such as psychological safety, engaging collaborators, governance for communication and decision making, and putting systems, practices and rituals in place the process may even be a waste of time.
Amy Edmundson and Jean-François Harvey document this in detail in their book Extreme Teaming: Lessons in Complex, Cross-Sector Leadership. They describe how “shared mental models helped ensure that project participants figured out each other’s expertise and understood it well enough to put it to use at the right time.” This example of high functioning under pressure is a story worth revisiting in our current conditions. (3)
Also worth a (re)read is the HBR article Leadership Lessons for the Chilean Mine Rescue by Faaiza Rashid and Amy Edmondson. In it they outline “a framework that leaders facing complex, high-pressure situations can use to integrate fast innovation and urgent execution.” They describe a process of how the leaders at the mine “focused on driving work forward and looking for new ideas in unlikely places; they acted quickly and yet took time to reflect.”
They found that “leaders must perform three key tasks: envision, enroll, and engage. These tasks must be done iteratively; imagine them as the nodes of a triangle, not steps in a process...To orchestrate a balance between them, leaders must constantly analyze their changing situation and environment.”
Coaching supports individuals and teams in both setting up these systems, and in maintaining them, including taking that vital time to reflect. If you don’t have someone in your organization who can coach, then it can be a worthwhile investment to bring in an outside coach and facilitator to oversee, guide and maintain the process.
diversity vaccinates you against the familiar
If you know that more diverse teams correlate with more innovative solutions (4) then you have the motivation to seek out unfamiliar perspectives. The thing to watch out for especially in a crisis situation is that we are more prone than ever to gravitate to whatever feels safe, and safe usually equals familiar. We are comforted by familiar people, and by familiar ways of thinking and problem-solving. But in situations like a global pandemic, we are not in a familiar situation.
We might need transformational solutions, not incremental change. What may be familiar may be irrelevant, or at least incomplete. We may need input from people we haven’t worked with in the past, or with whom have different ways of communicating. To leverage the cognitive diversity in the room, you need inclusion practices. It goes against our grain, but there are practices that make it work, such as measuring who speaks first in a meeting. Heidi K. Grant
outlines this in her book Smart Collaboration. In particular, she underlines how teams need to communicate and leverage networks.
Think of it like a formula, if you like: Time spent generating ideas in a space of curiosity, aka uncertainty/not knowing, is proportionate to the quality of creative ideas you will generate. By being open to ideas coming from unlikely corners, and by forcing yourself to generate more options as you make a plan of action, you will get better ideas.
In summary, here’s a mini checklist of things to make your design effort successful
Create a diverse team; define the metrics for diverse perspectives - have you met them? When will you revisit them?
Make a team charter that includes
Practices for trust and psychological safety
Communication agreements
Ways of working
Stakeholder map
Purpose statement
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Laura Carmichael is a People leader to organizations of the 21st Century that want a future-of-work where Purpose and human-centric design underpin culture, technical, and business strategy.
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notes
(1) Documented in detail in Nine Lies About Work by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall
(2) A pivot is a term used to describe how an organization changes its strategic direction to something very different. There are many famous examples, including Twitter, Nokia, Flickr and PayPal. But we don’t have a lot of examples of how this can happen during a global pandemic.
(3) Edmundson and Harvey give an example of Project Willa, a complex collaboration (chapter 6 pp. 87-96), and in saving the lives of 33 miners trapped in 2010 in a Chilean copper mine (pp. 5-10).
(4) https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-diversity-matters