Designing Culture
I have long advocated for design to have a seat at the table, and for design leadership’s participation in defining company strategy. I believe design provides not only a critical perspective to finding the right strategy but also unique ability to embody what success could look like. Indeed in the 15 years since I wrote “How Tangible is Your Strategy? many other design executives have secured their own seat at the table.
However, after co-founding a series of start-ups, I have come to understand that design can play an even more significant role; setting foundations of the company culture.
Here’s why.
We all know by now that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”*. That even the most brilliant strategies wither in the face of a culture not prepared or capable of recognizing their value. Ironically, all too often, the same leader trying to sell the strategy created the culture that just ordered a side of bacon.
In a recent interview Roger Martin, a disciple of Drucker and brilliant business strategist in his own right, commented:
“Cultures, inherently, are prone to protect the status quo because they’ve evolved over time to become a set of shared beliefs, systems, values, and actions. Strategy requires some aspect of that to change and that’s where the resistance is created.”
While some individuals, and the occasional small team, can pivot and adapt quickly to external changes, turning an entire organization takes significantly more investment. Not only the full commitment of the c-suite along with communication, incentive, operational programs, etc., but in the ability to demonstrate the change’s value in lived experiences of the employees—and even then there are no guarantees. Having run an organizational transformation program at a Fortune500 company, it took years and multiple generations of executive leadership and demonstrable wins in the market before the changes really took hold.
Culture’s Breakfast
Reflecting on that experience, and my experience co-founding multiple start-ups, I took a step back to think about Culture’s “breakfast”. I stopped focusing solely on how design could influence strategy, and began to think about how do you create a culture that was adaptable; one that could embrace ambiguity, learn from experimentation, and adopt new strategic directions quickly.
We are familiar with how the objectives, initiatives, and measures frame both the planning and help manage execution. But commonly organizational models that include culture only draw a connection between the abstract tenants of culture and the articulation of of a strategy, but how that happens it left to the imagination of the reader. On the outside, Purpose & Values provide the rails, while Mission & Vision are the before and after inspirations. Resulting in an overly simplified depiction of what according to many is the single most important part of delivering your strategy; the culture.
There are of course a number of popular books on building company cultures, many focus on safety, vulnerability, openness, idea-sharing, and purpose. Having a clear mission statement and treating people with respect, publishing a set of values that speak about rewarding curiosity and that failures are teachable moments, not something to be punished, all provide inspiration and guidance. But its the founders’ behaviors—in both deeds and words, and the incentives they apply in the day-to-day, that really provide the bedrock for the culture.
Founders set the tone for what is important in terms of how work gets done, how people interact, and what kind of company they want to build. Employees mimic leadership in how they interact, communicate, and prioritize their work: If the leaders are arrogant, that becomes a quality of leadership. If they lie to cover up their mistakes, that becomes standard. By contrast if the founders act upon feedback they are given, others will feel less vulnerable. If leaders make decisions based on customer needs, so will everyone else. In short, culture is a reflection of the founders’ lived values and behaviors not a poster on the wall or a book left in reception.
While I still advocate for design leaders’ full and equal participation in setting corporate strategy, I have come to realize the limitations of that approach. While having a seat at the table addresses the political needs of design as a business function, for design to reach its full potential within an organization is needs to be a part of the company’s foundation.
Design as Culture
A number of design executives have shared with me that in order to have greater creditability and respect from their peers and CEO, they wrap design tightly inside business cases; that is they present design by translating it into financial terms. I have done the same thing for years.
Most of these design leaders work at software companies, founded by engineers, by contrast in these same organizations, the engineering leadership doesn’t have to wrap their technology in financial terms, because the value of technology is foundational to their culture. As result, of being founded by engineers technology was a core belief in building their culture. So unlike design, technology is never swaddled in business terms; it is discussed just as technology. Engineering doesn’t have to bring the most data to prove its value or the value of its work; it simply needs to imagine the possibilities and then select the one with the most compelling argument.
All too often as I sit in planning meetings, the non-engineering people sitting around the table have no more understanding of the “technology” being discussed than they would have of design. But because technology was there when the culture was established, its place in these discussions is institutionalized. As a result there is an expectation that all present share the same belief in technology, and because its value is implicit to the culture, no one questions the investment.
Having been student of anthropology, it took me longer than it should have to come to this realization; that unless design is part of the culture—and by design I mean the practice of design; the problem solving, the “make to think”, how design creates value, etc., that regardless of who was sitting at the table, or how they packaged it, design’s contribution to the strategy would be supplemental.
Organizational Transformation v. Terraforming
I led an organizational transformation program at SAP to incorporate design & design thinking into the culture. While the tactical, visual, and emotional aesthetics that come from well designed solutions was also a part of program, its focus was helping people adopt design thinking to help drive innovation across organization and at all levels of the portfolio. This program covered everything from the corporate strategy, and product portfolios to employee on-boarding and training, etc. It included all the development processes, partner outreach, customer co-innovation, sales, support, and even our IP strategy. Though we had the full support of the Chairman, CEO, the Executive Board, partners, analysts, and customers, it still took 7 years and four generations of executive design leadership, before the changes really took hold. Underscoring Martin’s observation about culture’s resistance to change.
By contrast if you look at companies who’s founders/co-founders were either designers themselves, or who brought in strong design sensibilities from the start, they developed cultures by prioritizing design over technology. By prioritizing the belief in design’s value and aligning incentives and behaviors to make design central within the culture these leaders “terraformed” their organization, altering the environment to make it human-centric, for employees, customers, and the planet. While building a start-up is never easy, if the co-founders live authentically by their values, and those values include design it is far more easier to build in design from the beginning than attempting to run a design-centric transformation program later.
Some examples of companies with strong design cultures that where founded by designers, or people with very strong design values.
Steve Jobs, CEO & cofounder Apple
Brian Chesky, CEO & cofounder Airbnb
Tony Fadell, CEO & founder Nest Labs
Evan Williams, cofounder Twitter, Blogger, and Medium
Stewart Butterfield, CEO & cofounder Flickr, and Slack
Evan Sharp, cofounder of Pinterest
Ben Silbermann, cofounder Pinterest
Charles Adler, cofounder of Kickstarter
Daniel Burka, cofounder Digg
Lynda Weinman, cofounder Lynda.com
Mark Kawano, cofounder Storehouse
Tim Brown, cofounder Allbirds
From the inception, the founders of these companies built design into their cultures, providing their organizations a set of shared beliefs, behaviors, incentives and actions, the encapsulated design. Some like Scott Chesky at Airbnb, feel that design, like finance or technology, provide such great value to the organization it must report to the CEO:
"The Head of Design should never ever ever report to the Head of Product. The Head of Design should report to the CEO of the company." - Brian Chesky, Airbnb.
While there are fluctuations in the investments these companies make in design, design helped shape their incentives and expectations for recognizing and rewarding success, which helps ensure design remains core element within their cultures.
If we go back to the Culture → Strategy diagram, and imagine how design could inform the culture and influence strategy, planning and execution, you can begin to see how design can become institutionalized. In fact I did exactly that at three of the start-ups I co-founded, I incorporated the values of design; curiosity, human-centric thinking, user research, iterative prototyping, constructive critiques, etc., into our daily behaviors and actions. Most importantly I moved design in front of technology in the mission, vision and purpose.
We integrated the tenants of design into how our work was discussed, prioritized, planned, and delivered. Design was part of the default day-to-day activities, setting clear expectations for everyone to participate. Things like user research, prototypes, constructive critiques, etc. were there from the beginning, they were as much a part of our mission and vision as technology or financial success. I reinforced this by making the practice of design thinking integral to recognition and reward structure of the company.
Making a company culture centered on design reframes both the role that design plays in the business and how disciplines use design to inform their practices.
Discovery in cultural terms means that curiosity is part of the shared beliefs, and that everyone is continually learning and focusing on solving meaningful problems that impact people’s lives. Not just learning to learn, or gaining new technical skills, but that everyone is driven by a higher purpose of discovering what really matters the most to the people you are trying to reach.
This naturally combines with being Human-Centric, and placing people at the center of everything you do. People always come first, profits and shareholder value will follow, but people become the mirror for assessing success.
Experimentation at the cultural level is not a formality but rather an organic practice that on the surface can look almost like play, but the underlying intention is not about finding a solution but about finding the best solution that is scalable, sustainable, and profitable.
Which ties to Tangibility, taking conversations, ideas and words and transforming them into artifacts, prototypes, physical embodiments that can be seen, held, experienced and reflected upon. Most importantly tangibility demonstrates the desirability, viability and feasibility of the idea but it also provided a clear point of reference, align expectations for what success could look like.
Finally, there is Optimism; not as a personality trait but as a shared belief, it was what that separate success and failure in these companies. At the cultural level, optimism not the belief that things will get better, though that is part of it; Its the belief in each other. It allows the organization to leverage constructive feedback, and have frictionless alignment and collaboration.
Status Melius
Since cultures are slow to change, given their desire to maintain the status quo as Roger Martin described, I cannot help but wonder what if you created a culture that was status melius? That is, always in a "state in progress”. Where the shared beliefs, systems, values, and actions were based on a design mindset of discovery and experimentation, and that was inherently human-centric. One where constructive criticism was rewarded, and where prototypes are the common language: Could you achieve a culture that is more adaptable and open to evolving based on the changes in world?
There is still much work to be done to normalize design’s role in defining the corporate strategy—much of that work will hinge on the business acumen and creditability of the design leaders to either step into the role of founder, or to take on the role of transformer. But its potential has been proven we just need to make it the norm.
* Although it does sound like something he would say, there is nothing from his writings, interviews, or talks, that connects Peter Drucker to this pithy, well-proven insight, thus the reason I didn’t provide an attribution.
