Gain good insights into how to gauge your organization’s readiness for design and the ability to analyze your organization’s culture and use it to make meaningful decisions about change efforts and much more!
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Why is this so hard? Understanding Design Challenges - Adam Connor & Magga Dora Ragnarsdottir, 2017
1. WHY IS THIS SO HARD?
Understanding the challenges that inhibit design
Adam Connor
aconnor@madpow.com
@adamconnor
Magga Dora Ragnarsdottir
maggadora@madpow.com
@maggadora
8. aconnor@madpow.ne
t
@adamconnor
maggadora@madpow.
net
@maggadora
#madpow
• Have not (accurately) identified the aspects of their organization
that support or contradict design
• Are trying to make changes and don’t consider the implications for
the rest of the organization
• Are trying to make changes at too large a scale
• Are trying to change people/units faster than they’re able to
THE CHALLENGE
Why doesn’t this work?
11. Design is more than just roles, tools and activities.
Behind those roles, activities and tools are
beliefs about what we’re trying to do and why.
THE BELIEF GAP
12. Design is more than just roles, tools and activities.
Behind those roles, activities and tools are
beliefs about what we’re trying to do and why.
THE BELIEF GAP
19. • Inflexibility: People’s understanding of design lacks a
connection to the “why” behind it.
THE BELIEF GAP
How It Presents
20. • Inflexibility: People’s understanding of design lacks a
connection to the “why” behind it.
• Conflict: There are beliefs work counter to those
inherent in design.
THE BELIEF GAP
How It Presents
21. • Assess the culture, or more specifically the underlying
beliefs currently influencing your org.
• Make sure you’re clear on the beliefs that you’re trying
to infuse. Can you clearly articulate them?
THE BELIEF GAP
Addressing The Gap
22. If the gap lies in inflexibility and people not understanding
the beliefs behind the techniques and tools they’re using…
• As you introduce process, techniques, tools etc. include discussion about
the thinking and reasoning behind them.
• Expose people to a variety of tools. Find opportunities for them to try them
all and give them chances to think through and choose on their own.
• Provide additional support, not oversight, as teams work to use new tools
and techniques on their own.
THE BELIEF GAP
Addressing The Gap
23. If the gap lies in conflicting beliefs…
• Take stock of how far apart they are. Are they counter to each other? Or
are they competing?
• Work to understand the conflicting view and the value in it.
• Determine if you’re alone in recognizing and wanting to address the
conflict.
• You can rarely change beliefs directly. Beliefs are built over time based on
experiences.
THE BELIEF GAP
Addressing The Gap
25. aconnor@madpow.ne
t
@adamconnor
maggadora@madpow.
net
@maggadora
#madpow
We’re trying to establish new patterns of behaviors
– new ways that teams will explore opportunities
and make decisions.
The same over-focus on process, activities, tools,
etc. that can lead to gaps in the beliefs behind
these behaviors can lead to a gap in the behaviors
themselves.
THE BEHAVIOR GAP
34. aconnor@madpow.ne
t
@adamconnor
maggadora@madpow.
net
@maggadora
#madpow
Just as before we need to take stock of the behaviors we’re
trying to establish and those that our teams are exhibiting
and determine:
• Have you provided the right support needed for the
behaviors we’re after?
• Are there additional behaviors we haven’t accounted
for?
• Are their behaviors that conflict those we’re after?
How do we change behavior?
THE BEHAVIOR GAP
Addressing The Gap
37. aconnor@madpow.ne
t
@adamconnor
maggadora@madpow.
net
@maggadora
#madpow
Just like when we design for experiences, we can’t force a
behavior to happen. So what can we change?
THE BEHAVIOR GAP
Addressing The Gap
Beliefs
Values
Behaviors
Rituals
Artifacts
Skills & Knowledge
Tools & Materials
Structure & Roles
Communication & Language
Environment
Policies & Processes
Incentives & Metrics
These are our levers. We can “pull” on these things in combinations to drive the
behaviors we seek and – over time – grow and reinforce the beliefs behind
them.
58. aconnor@madpow.ne
t
@adamconnor
maggadora@madpow.
net
@maggadora
#madpow
• Design DOES have more attention on it than ever before.
• We have a wide variety of tactics for strengthening design
capacity within our organizations.
• By understanding culture and how change is adopted we can
better understand:
• How to to combine tactics
• When to use them
• And who to use them with
• We can approach our efforts as we would a design challenge.
CLOSING
In Summary
Adam
Lots of hiring and organizational efforts to try to capitalize.
§ Why? (Do we need to answer this?
§ “Each of you probably has been through this for very different reasons but between being a hype, design thinking has shown itself to be instrumental in creating products and services that people gravitate towards (slide: DMI graph of index of design cos vs other companies)
Lots of talk about “Experience/design lead” organizations
Some reasons we could cite:
Multiple channel offerings – need for consistency in appearance and experience
Larger organizations, multiple teams – need for consistency to reduce rework/increase reuse
Competition – making their offerings more competitive
Digitization – transforming their organization to be more digital in nature, revisiting their offering and production approach with the eye of modernizing them
Innovation –
Design “thinking” is now a part of the curriculum in many MBA programs
Adam
Adam
Magga Dora
What have they been trying?
We often see companies that start bottom up. Teams start allocating budget to design and hire to fit their needs. Designers spring up all over the organization and there is little coordination
Other companies try the top down approach. Make a big splash about hiring a C-level person to promptly start building out innovation centers to disrupt the business or centers of excellence where all the design lives. Often what we see in this case is that the design resources become a bottle neck for the whole production.
Adam
Adam
Whether it be groups that feel like they’ve hit a wall.
Attempts that seem to be going well for a little while before people go back to their previous ways
Or attempts that really never seem to gain traction at all.
So if these tactics make sense in one way or another, what is it that’s holding them back?
Magga Dora
There are many reasons for why this doesn’t work. A few we would like to mention here – and you could potentially measure up to your own experiences and give us a shout out if you recognize are
The organization….
Aspects of the organization that support/contradict design:
Processes/structures
Mindset/culture
Incentives
What it means to integrate design
Who is involved
What skills are needed
What effect it will have on how work is done (process / structure / responsibilities / roles)
What effect it will have on the product / service that will be “designed” (changing features, changing scope, changing audience, changing needs that are addressed…..)
Being “ready”
Not understanding/knowing what design is
Not understanding that there are issues design can help with
Not ready to change how they work
Don’t see value in design (for them / for the organization / for the product/service / for the customers)
Level of comfort with with open communication
Level of comfort with with ambiguity
Behavior
Ignoring beliefs and trying to implement design as a skillset
Adam
Magga Dora
Magga Dora
Design is not just about sprinkling the word ‘experience’ into people’s titles, buying truckloads of post-its and telling everybody to workshop.
Magga Dora
These are just ways to get at what we need. We need to get useful information out of our audience, we need to be able to collaborate effectively cross functionally, we need to sketch, iterate, learn
When all the focus is on the color of the post-its then we have stumbled upon the belief gap.
Adam
Adam
Adam
Adam
Adam
Adam
Magga Dora
People’s understanding of design (or even just a part of the design process) lacks a connection to the “why” behind it, leaving them inflexible to use a tool other than the one they’ve learned. (Contextual Awareness)
Adam
Provide Example.
User wants are not the same as user needs - find the actual problem
Adam
There are beliefs (conscious or otherwise) that conflict to some degree with the beliefs/values inherent in design causing teams to struggle to connect activities or even be willing to accept them
Magga Dora
Provide Example
· Great design is iterative. It leverages continuous learning and never truly ends.
Adam
Magga Dora
The trick here is not to just give the team a hammer. As we know, if all you have is a hammer, then everything starts looking like a nail… If you demonstrate the variety of tools, and you talk about what goal each tool is useful to to reach, then people will not get hung up on the tool themselves, but start to internalize the goals they want to reach and the ways that you can get at them.
Adam
Magga Dora
Magga Dora
As we have touched upon before, the way to get at nudging / changing beliefs is through behavior. We change the way people behave, give them the right context and that will lead to a shift in belief. Because if we overfocus on the behavior then it is just too easy to fall back on the old, familiar, style of doing things. Especially if the new behaviors are not in synch with the current belief system.
Adam
Efforts focus so much on the design process that the many related (supported?) behaviors that are needed for an organization to succeed with it are overlooked.
Magga Dora
When people want to integrate design into their organization this is inevitably where they start. They focus how the company today leverages design and design techniques and where they want to be and then they start working towards that goal by training and hiring. That’s always the first conversation.
However, this is just a little part of the behaviors that need to be assessed and potentially changed in order to support design and make use of design techniques.
Magga Dora
When we work with companies we need to understand their capability for collaboration, their history with collaboration.
This is important because we cannot overemphasize the cross-functional nature of design and design techniques. Are people open to collaborating between departments, units, silos even? Are they encouraged to do that or is that something that the company discourages by a complex hierarchical or incentive structure?
Also leadership within the teams, design or otherwise
If that basic behavior cannot be changed then we cannot integrate design to its full capacity.
Adam
Adam
Adam
Magga Dora
On a related note – design is all about how we learn incrementally, listen to our audience, learn from previous attempts. How open is the company to do that? Do we see people declaring that since they’ve been a product manager for 25 years they don’t need to talk to the end-user? How does the company deal with failure? If there is a penalty for failure, then immediately people are not willing to learn incrementally. They are forced to hedge their bets and effectively take higher risks.
If that is the belief that is expressed in their behavior, an organization is not ready for integrating design on an organization level.
Magga Dora
On a related note – design is all about how we learn incrementally, listen to our audience, learn from previous attempts. How open is the company to do that? Do we see people declaring that since they’ve been a product manager for 25 years they don’t need to talk to the end-user? How does the company deal with failure? If there is a penalty for failure, then immediately people are not willing to learn incrementally. They are forced to hedge their bets and effectively take higher risks.
If that is the belief that is expressed in their behavior, an organization is not ready for integrating design on an organization level.
Magga Dora
So once we have understood these different factors about the organization, we understand the work that is ahead of us. We have taken stock on the behaviors and beliefs we want to change.
But how do we change behavior
Adam
Magga Dora
As we know full well as designers we can’t make our users do anything, but we can facilitate the process so that they are likely to do something.
Same applies here – we want people to internalize the reasons for why we do design and how it works, and we lead that horse to water, but how to make it drink.
The key is in the belief model. As you can see there are things we can directly change and given the right context we can shift those beliefs.
Magga Dora
To do that we have multiple levers that we can pull.
In an organizational setting we can build skills and knowledge, we can give tools and materials – this is what everybody reaches for.
Often these come with organizational shifts, like we have talked about earlier with new roles and new structures that should facilitate the designer’s access to the table.
But less frequently people reach for the other levers.
There is much to be said about how we communicate this and talk to each other.
There is also a real potential to affect behavior by just changing the environment to facilitate collaboration and communication within the teams. Open spaces, war rooms, white boards to name a few.
Policies and processes are of course important for any behavior change – especially when we find that they clash. If a design process in one part of the organization is supposed to interact with a totally different kind of process somewhere else (say a waterfall project management process) sparks will fly.
Lastly, we look at incentives and their twin brother metrics (cause you can’t incentivize what you can’t measure). Often we see business units incentivized for customer contact (number of new sign-ups, increase in sales…) but the development unit is incentivized by sticking to budget and delivering on time. If the incentives are encouraging behavior that runs counter to the behavior expected by design, incentives win.
Adam
Adam
Magga Dora
Magga Dora
You can’t work it alone, design isn’t a solo, it’s an orchestra piece – so to speak. You need to get them to march in rhythm to the same beat. So the influence gap describes three important questions the people get wrong.
Influence gap: Trying to push to far to fast, either by trying to get your organization to jump too many levels too fast or by not recognizing the types of influence you have on people.
Adam
Influence gap: Trying to push to far to fast, either by trying to get your organization to jump too many levels too fast or by not recognizing the types of influence you have on people.
Magga Dora
A way to understand how you communicate the proposed change you want to make you need to understand the relationship of the people you are talking to with regards to the problems you want to solve and the solution you are proposing.
A fantastic way of describing how people respond to change is the trans-theoretical model of change that puts people in different stages. The first one is being totally unaware of a problem and the need to change. People that are in this stage won’t benefit from learning new skills – they don’t know why they would ever use them.
Adam
Magga Dora
Once people are aware of the problem and they are ready to be introduced to the notion that they could do something about it. Here is where you would start introducing new skills and behaviors to facilitate that.
Adam
Magga Dora
Addressing the problem feels like victory but we all know that every time a smoker puts out a cigarette he’s quitting. It’s not pulling up the next one that’s the trick. So you need to be on your toes and help people maintain the behavior. Don’t just do one project with the new approach, follow through with more. Revisit and update and adjust and keep them at it.
Adam
Magga Dora
And as you probably realized by now, this is not a one-and-done. People will fall back on their old ways, remember, people are like water – they will always flow the easy path. And then you have to explain why that is a problem (pre-contemplation) and get them in to the cycle again.
But each time they go through the cycle again they will become smoother, more internalized and each cycle will take less time.
Magga Dora
This slide is out of order… belongs with the address the gap? Or skip? Or include it in the buildout?
Adam
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Adam
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Adam
Magga Dora
This mapping is the basis for all your planning.
Magga Dora
Just to pre-empt something that has crossed the mind of some of our listeners it is our strong belief that you can affect change no matter what your position is.
Sure, if you’re C-level you can immediately have a huge impact. But even if you are the only UX in the village, or if you are a middle manager in a multi-silo-ed organization you can affect change.
There are opportunities all around you to build trust, ask questions, introduce new approaches, point to issues that need to be fixed.
Adam
Pictures
What process would you recommend ….
Top down/bottom up/middle out