All Leadership is Change Management
Regardless of the function—design, engineering, marketing, product management, etc., all leadership positions are ones of change management. Whether is overseeing operational improvements, installing new metrics, shepherding an acquisition, or establishing a new team, change management is just part of the job.
However, Design Leadership, especially at the executive level is more, its about organizational transformation.
Change Management is about putting a finite set of initiatives into action, these may be limited to specific teams, or they may impact the entire organization. But Change Management has a clear focus, it is about the execution of a well-defined plan, with clear expectations, and in all likelihood, metrics. While its never easy it is well understood.
Organizational Transformation is not that simple. Transformation is not focused on a set of discrete, well-defined initiatives, it is better thought of as a constellation of initiatives, programs, policies, each with their own cross-dependencies, all intersecting multiple teams. More importantly, the initial scope of any transformation is almost certainly underestimated, with new issues emerging over the course of time.
Organization Transformation is not about implementing a finite change — its about reinvention; of the organization, its values, business models, and most importantly its vision. It is by its nature unpredictable, iterative, and experimental.
Is this starting to sound familiar?
In my own experience as a design executives I learned to frame my role as a transformation leader first at Cisco, then later at SAP. At Cisco I was hired to rollout a Human-Centered Design program, using Cisco.com as the case study to prove its value. I was brought into transform SAP from a waterfall development model that intentionally excluded the end users to an agile model based on design thinking and focused on the customer-led innovation. IN both cases the charter was clear, and had the support of the highest levels of both companies. However, gaining acceptance, inspiring, demonstrating, eventually teaching, and actually removing years of legacy took an extreme amounts of work in both companies, and in the case of SAP its taken multiple generations of design leaders to deliver.
There are two types of organizational change
Adaptive Change. These are small operational changes to drive improvements or to accommodate evolutions in the organization’s processes, products, markets, etc. These can also include updates to workflows triggered by internal policy changes or third part regulatory requirements. Increasing diversity, creating inclusive workplaces, establishing work-from-home policies, are all forms of adaptive changes. For design examples could include expanding the role user research plays in defining both the opportunities and the solutions. Or making the user experience accessible and inclusive. Or integrating machine learning and AI in the user’s journey.
Transformational Changes. These are large scale changes that will impact most if not all of the organization. These changes are necessarily sanctioned from the top down given the impact both on the strategy and resource allocation. These could include things like moving from a monolith platform to a portfolio of products, starting a business division Launching a new product or business division, or deciding to expand internationally, are examples of transformational change. Or in my experience, building a design-led, customer centric culture to drive meaningful innovations.
These are some of my learnings from leading organizational level transformations at multiple companies:
Executive Sponsorship
The single most important component to any successful transformation is to have full and active support at the executive level. Ideally this would be the CEO. At SAP I was hired by Hasso Plattner, SAP’s Co-founder & Chairman, to lead the transformation.
At the time Proctor & Gamble was going through a similar transformation as SAP, Their then CEO, A.G. Lafley, made it a point to ask him GM’s for updates that included their conversations with customers. If a GM had to ask a member of the team to provide the insights, Lafley would stop the meeting, tell the GM to go talk to customers personally and not to come back until they had. Likewise at SAP, Hasso would do the same, making it requirement for teams to use design thinking. If they couldn’t show how they were co-designing with customers, experimenting on designs, and iterating their ideas, he would set send them back to do it right.
Set a clear vision
Sometimes referred to as a NorthStar or BHAG, it is important to give the organization a clear rallying point, something to muster and inspire them. And to provide a clear sign that things will be changing. The vision needs to be socialized and supported, obviously that includes your CEO and the CEO’s direct reports. But it also needs to be syndicated with your peers so they can understand why this transformation is taking place. What it means in terms of customer value and what it means to their current status quo. You may face resistance or worse resentment.
The vision needs to have clearly articulated milestone that can be transformed into tangible changes (i.e. processes, artifacts, practices, etc.) and eventually turned into metrics. These may also include changes in how you set your business strategy, hiring additional talent, deprecating product(s), or team reorganizations.
The more tangible you can make your NorthStar the better; Whether they are stories, white papers, prototypes, etc. providing something people can see, touch and experience makes it far easier to understand what they are working toward, what the outcome will look like when they get there. However don’t conflate these expressions with your vision, they are simply meant to familiarize your team with what their success will look like. What it will feel like when they have accomplished the objective. Never let these artifacts be substituted for your vision.
Communication
This actually starts before you begin delivering anything. The first step is to prepare the organization at large, to let everyone know this change will be coming, the reason for the change, how the change will benefit (impact) them, and the expectations for how they can be involved and support for the transformation. Its important that each person can identify how this transformation will impact them personally, how it given more reasons to be proud they are part of the organization.
Again, the ideal person to convey or to at least introduce this change is your CEO. Organizational transformations occur at the cultural level of a company, the best description of company culture I have seen is simply it is those behaviors that are either rewarded or punished by the people in charge. Its not words on a wall or posters in the break room, its what leaders encourage or discourage in the day to day that defines the culture. So having your CEO set the expectation that the transformation you setting in motion will be come with rewards-or punishments, makes it a clear priority for everyone.
Sequencing
While transformation are never finite, you still have to start somewhere. A key of knowing where to start is to identify the key people, projects, clients, or services that will give you a platform for demonstrating both the value of your transformation and give you a set of set of case studies to prove your transformation spans the full organization. At Cisco we did that by simultaneously targeting the legacy infrastructure (the “ontological engine” the programmatically built Cisco.com) and the developer portal which was a key growth driver. Replacing the “engine” with an actual CMS allowed the product, marketing and support teams to finally have control over the site’s IA and reduce IT spend. While redesigning the developer portal delivered increasing partner revenues and enterprise sales. In combination we were able to show how we could design business impact for the website team. At SAP my team delivered over 140 high profile projects in three years, ranging from running out vendor contracts through a design thinking process resulting in millions of dollars in decreased spend, to redesigning SAP ByDesign, the company’s flagship cloud-based ERP suite. In both organizations, Cisco and SAP, the executives we worked with became key influencers in building momentum for our transformation efforts.
Transparency
Change is scary but transformations can be ominous. Given transformations go far beyond delivering a well-defined set of initiatives, they initially lack tangibility, being initiated on a belief in that the outcome will deliver greater value. Which is why showing and sharing the inner workings and decisions starting with a clear articulation of the expectations and being completely open about the steps you are taking, how you frame the problem, determine the assessment criteria, and how outcomes are validated.
Its is not uncommon to hear “but that’s not how we do it” or “that will take longer”, giving permission to these would be nay-sayers to join in, to have ownership over how they will achieve the outcome is important. A former colleague described it a story about pajamas… When it came time to put his twins to bed, he’d give them the choice of which pajamas they wanted to wear—it made part of the decision process, but in the end, they still went to bed. With transformations, the outcome is what you need to keep your focus on, how exactly each team gets there can be up to them. There will be trade-offs and adjustments in your path for getting to your goal state. Overtime, once they have seen the value in the transformation, and its become muscle memory for them, you can being to focus on optimizing and standardizing the methods.
You need to make sure the transformation is never seen to be about a person or people, its about the desire to be in a better place, to do that you need a baseline of trust and transparency is the first of the three legs for building trust.
Accountability
Throughout any transformation effort, you need to show that it is achieving the desired results, tracking your progress at each stage ensures accountability, and sharing that progress builds greater transparency. Validation will also provide the means to iterate and tailor programs to your specific organization—one size never fits all. Each organization has different incentives, market forces, and legacies, objectively assessing what is and isn’t working, making course corrections is normal.
Keeping in mind everyone in the organization is both a stakeholder and an expert in their own work, holding yourself accountable to their success include defining well articulated roles and effective responsibilities. Providing incentives, as well as consequences, help reinforce positive behavior and demonstrate commitment to the transformation. At Cisco the incentives were economic, while at SAP they tended to more more emotional, with personal recognitions coming from Hasso to the teams who embraces the transformation.
Enablement
It is not simply enough to tell or even show what is expected, everyone needs to get their hands dirty. They need to experience the positive effect of the transformation. At both Cisco and SAP, my team created multitiered training programs that went from introducing the concepts, to providing hands on experience in a safe setting, followed by 1:1 collaborations, and moving to a coaching model, and then identifying strong practitioners to join the transformation team as instructors and coaches. Additionally we created knowledge bases, toolkits, even physical spaces in the case of SAP for teams to put the program into action.
Developing a cohort of champions accelerated the transformation, and actively embedded the new values, language, and practices directly in the teams who would need to carry it forward.
Follow through
Transformation requires constant consideration and reinforcement; requiring leadership to reward and celebrate the desired behaviors and the positive outcomes that they want from the transformation and, conversely, corrections should the old behaviors reemerge, either due to lack of attention or force of habit. Leadership needs to make new transformation the default, including it in everything from hiring and on-boarding, through performance assessments and career development.
Transformative changes are challenging but fantastically rewarding. Design Executives need to develop strong transformation playbooks for their company in order to bring design to the fore and to put the focus on what design can bring to the creation and delivery of value.
