How to embed “Design DNA” in your leadership team to create large transformations?
Background
It has already been one year since I joined the EY business transformation team in Hong Kong, so I believe it is the perfect time to reflect a bit and share some of my perspectives on this journey. I am truly grateful that I have not only already gotten many opportunities to be involved in various business transformation projects for financial institutions, but also led the experience design work for one of the key pods in a large global project during this year.
As I’ve completed my MFA thesis in 2020 — Culture of Innovation: Transforming Retail Banking, I truly believe that there are tons of opportunities that can bring the value of design into the financial sector and any broader area. In addition, I have also written my first medium article early this year— “Why are visionary designers better business leaders?”, which provides more backgrounds of the design industry and the development of design as a discipline.
In the 2021 Design Leadership Trends Report, Adam Fry-Pierce (2021) mentions that for years design managers and executives have been advocating for more resources to unleash the value of design across their businesses. The pandemic accelerated the digital transformation, and many top-line executives looked to design to help stabilize their company as the broader enterprise had to pivot. As one design leader said back in March: “We finally got a seat at the table, but the chair was on fire.” Furthermore, in my experience, even though the value of design has already been recognized in many cases of business innovation, many people recently still misunderstand the role of designer, or overlook design points of view when running large transformations, especially in Asia.
There is definitely a risk to cost a lot at the end, or a need to restart the whole journey again if business leaders are excluding the voice of designers at the beginning. The key issue here is that business leaders couldn’t bring up the power of design to the right place and even have been disconnected in the whole ecosystem of transformations. In my opinion, the four crucial points below will help you embed “Design DNA” in your leadership team to create large transformations and maximize the value of design.
1. Sympathy vs Empathy
Empathy is the first step of the design thinking process which is a common practice for designers but business leaders. It allows people to truly put human at the center no matter from the micro or macro angles. Most business leaders misunderstand empathy as sympathy, so they can’t come up with adaptable solutions or strategies. The slight differences cause huge impacts on end-user experience and feeling. In the Sympathy vs. Empathy in UX, Sarah Gibbons, Chief Designer of Nielsen Norman Group (2019) asserts that sympathy is limited to acknowledging that users are going through a difficult scenario, task, or journey; empathy enables us to understand not only our users’ immediate frustrations, but also their hopes, fears, abilities, limitations, reasoning, and goals. It allows us to dig deep into our understanding of the user and create solutions that will not only solve a need, but effectively improve our users’ lives by removing unnecessary pain or friction. The true goal of design is not to be nice to users, but to empower them. The wonderful error messages example in this article has also proved the importance of empathy, which is highly associated with business success.
Most companies might understand design thinking in general, but it is not easy for them to see the value of design until they deeply understand the context behind or really dig into the design practices. Common design tools or methodologies might help with design practices in organizations, but staying humble toward understanding end-users is the key mindset to drive empathy behind design thinking. Therefore, sympathy is not enough. Practicing empathy in your team is one of the vital elements to make a large transformation successful.
2. Include designer in the strategic planning meeting
Design is thoroughly associated with business success. Designers play a crucial role to drive changes. Business transformation and digital transformation, which need more designers involved, have become hot topics these days. Lisa Lindström, Experience Officer EMEIA & CEO Doberman Nordics, EY (2019) proposes that a designer’s role is to do more than make something beautiful. They also interpret the world and communicate in a common language everyone can understand. Moreover, she also points out that technology can help us do anything we want. We need to know all the progressive technologies to make sure the innovation we come up with is relevant, modern and efficient, but technology shouldn’t be the driver of that innovation. We always need to start with people and understand their needs.
Like I’ve raised a bit earlier. Adam (2021) claims that it is usually not easy for a designer to get a seat at the table, but the chair was on fire when the designer finally have a seat. This has happened a lot in the real world.
In many cases, now the roles of design leader and business leader are interrelated and the boundary of responsibilities is blurred. Designers should have power at the very beginning to drive research, analysis, and make strategic decisions. Nothing is different from business people. Even it would be more valuable if executives put designers in analytic or strategic roles as they have been through lots of systemic thinking training and practicing empathy all the time, which will effectively catalyze the large transformations.
3. Integrate design-led innovation process into transformation programs
Design has already been applied to many “non-design projects”, particularly in business transformation and digital transformation areas. RED, a spinoff of the UK’s Design Council, defines transformation design as “a human-centered, interdisciplinary process that seeks to create desirable and sustainable changes in behavior and form‚of individuals, systems, and organizations. It is a multi-stage, iterative process of applying design principles to large and complex systems.” It is time to integrate the design-led innovation process into large transformation programs.
During my time in EY, I have felt honored to be part of contributors for the Transformation Value Monitoring (TVM) thought leadership this year. This thought leadership provides comprehensive ideas for businesses to unlock, maximize and preserve the value of the transformation journey in the organization. It is literally similar to the concept of service design and sustainability design. Leveraging systemic thinking to capture value from dynamic interactions and relationships is one of the key trends in the design world as well. Overall, there are lots of alignments between the design-led innovation process and the end-to-end transformation journey. Design can also be applied to different dimensions and levels of transformation projects such as operating model and change management. Experts from each side should start to learn from each other to achieve maximum value during the transformation journey.
4. Build a design leadership team in your organization
Designers are usually still hard to get support from business leaders, even though their roles have become much more important these years. Most business leaders don’t have enough design knowledge. In many cases, if the voice of designers couldn’t be included at the beginning, the business will take a huge risk to cost a lot at the end, or to restart the whole transformation journey again. Mariana Morrisadvise, Founder & Managing Director of Fruto, (2021) states that we most commonly hear from others — design teams find themselves swimming against the tide, facing resistance from other forces. Without top-down leadership, it becomes very hard to remove these barriers. Senior leadership needs to champion design. Where possible, finding someone in a leadership position that is a design champion who you can have regular catch-ups with and work together to make the change happen is a great place to start. In the long term, it helps a lot to translate, communicate, and bring up a stronger design voice or point of view when making strategic decisions.
From a design perspective, design leaders believe that diverse groups and multi-disciplinary collaborations generate more adaptable and inclusive solutions or strategies at the end. In addition, design leadership also talks more about empowering people and humbly respecting every voice in the team, rather than just staying on a small group of people. Therefore, the qualified design leader will bring new angles and creative energy to drive transformation programs.
Summary
As customer behaviors are constantly dramatically changing in the uncertain world, it has been not easy to accurately seize the taste of customers. Different generations also have unique perceptions to see the world. In the Hong Kong Business, Gaurav, EY business transformation team partner (2021) mentions that “If businesses ignore the customer in the pursuit of blind digitization, then they are very likely to fail. Therefore, the customer needs to be at the center of all transformation — digital or otherwise.” Without the consideration of humans, these transformations won’t adapt in the market.
Furthermore, designers don’t believe the single way can gather enough customer insights so they are trying to develop various tools and methodologies to uncover inspirational insights from users’ perceptions or feelings in different dimensions and levels.
Therefore, I believe that embedding “Design DNA” in your leadership team to create large transformations is the right thing to do. Our world doesn’t need to become fancier, but humanizer. In addition, designers’ eyes have also moved on accessible design and inclusive design, which might have huge benefits on business transformations and the human community.
Extra note: although the demand in the market for designers has surged, qualified designers still should keep learning up-to-date design management capabilities, and keep aware of the revolutions in the design field, so they can move beyond experience design and take over business/transformation design. Staying humble, staying foolish, and being a long-life learner is the key to being a T-Shaped person/ Generalist/ Design Strategist.
The opinions and thoughts shared are solely my own, and do not reflect EY’s views on any of the issues.
