Designing the Innovative Enterprise

 Thinking like a designer can unlock innovation by understanding people

The rate of change in the world and in the lives of both customers and staff are seldom matched by the rate of change in organizations. This is logical because companies need stability to measure improvement, but it also creates hidden inefficiencies in the gap between customer needs and company processes. Fortunately the field of design offers some tools to bridge this gap and unlock innovation.    

Human centered design is a term used to describe a designer’s focus on the person. This designer need not be an art school graduate; rather they are any person creating a new process or structure within a business. This act of creation is design. In human centered design, the needs, dreams and behaviors of the people a designer wants to affect with his solution are examined. This means listening to people. It means understanding and respecting what motivates and captivates them. Once the designer knows what a person finds desirable, the solution that is created can then be looked at in terms of technical, organizational and financial feasibility.

Experienced designers also understand that people often fail to recognize their own true motivations; they are often hidden from the person’s own view. To overcome this, designers don’t just ask, but also use direct observation of behaviour. Designers also make sense of their research by looking for patterns, themes and larger relationships between the data. Designers aim to extract key insights from the data; unexpected revelations that allow them to see the problem in a new light.

The simple term for this approach is empathy. Empathy enables one to imagine the world from another person’s perspective; or in fact from multiple perspectives.  Thus the designer goes beyond thinking of customers in terms of demographics and LSM splits to identifying with their personal needs and desires. It is a way of putting people first when coming up with solutions.

As Procter & Gamble have shown, when the employees of an organization have a widespread sense of empathy for their customers they often see new opportunities faster than their competitors and possess an intuitive feeling for what is going on in their industry.  This process re-orients the staff view of company values externally in a way that is both measurable for the company and meaningful to customers.

A human centered mindset can easily be incorporated into an organization’s culture by making it a daily part of the way employees work. At P&G for example the paintings on the wall have been replaced with photographs of consumers.

Holding up the mirror of empathy inside a corporation towards its own employees can also unlock underlying opportunities. It will increase awareness of the unique, personal company style that can then be leveraged to inspire great ideas. It will highlight obstacles to greater efficiency and give employees the permission to find solutions for the things that need to change.

There are specific areas in a corporation where innovation can be accelerated by using a human centered design approach.

It is clear that the design of spaces in which employees work and meet affect productivity. It does not take a professional designer to observe the watercooler effect; how some areas encourage casual discussion that cross-pollinates ideas. Just as importantly, customer spaces can frequently be improved by observing how customers use work-arounds to accomplish their tasks.

Some businesses have an integrated plan for technological efficiency tools, but there are also simpler low cost tools that can help employees to increase their effectiveness. For example, a simple graphics database can allow managers to make their presentations more understandable, shortening meetings and decision times.

Many companies have a poor correlation between financial incentives and performance. The same is true for non-financial and informal incentives. Several tools exist to discover hidden staff motivations and correct incentives.

Team members often adopt multiple roles besides their official job descriptions. Recognizing these can improve teamwork as demonstrated by the famous design company IDEO.

Most managers tend to think of events as one-off occasions, but leading business thinkers now advocate a project-based approach to work routine since it creates dynamism and deeper satisfaction for employees. This can be extended to creating an event-based calendar that ebbs and flows with projects.

Finally, business processes often allow inefficiencies because they simply do not change as quickly as the needs of customers. The inward-focused company thus creates a gap between its view of “the market” and the reality of a customer’s needs. This not only hinders innovation, it is capitalized on by smaller and more agile competitors. Structurally, therefore, the business requires the ability to design and improve processes from the point of view of employee usability and customer experience in addition to the ususal efficiency imperatives.