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EVERY JOURNEY STARTS WITH PREPARATION

Whether you’re about to go on a journey of exploration to understand your customer or design new business models for your future, preparation is key. You wouldn’t go into battle without preparing first. Likewise, you’ll need to prepare before launching a design (or redesign) initiative.

DESIGN IS ABOUT PREPARATION

The design process requires preparation in order for it to run well. You must prepare to observe and understand your customers, business, and context. You must prepare to ideate, prototype, and validate. What this boils down to is that to set yourself and your team up for success, you must prepare your team for the journey ahead, prepare your environment for the work that will ensue, and prepare your tools so that you’ll get the best results from everyone.

SET YOURSELF UP FOR SUCCESS

The design process may be different from many of the other processes you’re used to. For one, it is not really linear; it’s cyclical and iterative. It’s about embracing uncertainty. Not everything can be planned or controlled. It is also a full-contact team sport. Teams that take the time to prepare often enjoy much better results and outcomes. Design also requires physical space to work in. And not just people hunched over computers. The people designing the better business will need space to ideate, prototype, and validate. It also requires that you employ new tools, which also necessitate preparation in order to achieve the best results. Last but not least, design requires that you get used to a new way of working and a new project structure. It’s not about planning. It’s about maximizing the chance of a positive outcome and empowering others to make real change. There are things you can control and things you can’t. Set yourself and your team up for success by controlling what you can; don’t leave things up to chance.

PREPARE YOUR TEAM

Babe Ruth, the famous American baseball player, once said, “The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.” The same can be said about designing great businesses: the best businesses are the products of great teams.

That said, not just any team will do. A team that will generate the most useful ideas from its key findings, and that will most thoroughly prototype and validate those ideas, is made up of a diverse group of unusual suspects (think the A-Team, not Friends). They will find diamonds in the rough where no one else has. They will challenge each other. And, by virtue of their diversity, they will bring with them a network of other people and resources that will come in handy when it’s time to get down and dirty.

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SEARCH FOR THE REBEL

When it comes to big hairy questions or initiatives, most of us are unwilling to take a leap and try something new to achieve the outcome we dream of. In order to do this, we need a rebel. A rebel is someone who is willing to stand up and announce that the time has come to take a new approach to solving a problem or answering a question. This person has the ability to carve out time and broker for resources for the design journey. The rebel is the one who will persist and ensure that you’re able to try something new before going back to the old way of doing things.

PREPARE YOUR ENVIRONMENT, YOUR SPACE

By now you’re aware that design is not linear. It is an iterative process in which you will constantly need to refer to artifacts that have been developed along the way. Carting these around the office and sticking them on different walls every other day not only is it a pain in the neck, but it also reduces the time you have to actually design. This reduces overall productivity. Having a “war room” where the team can get together and see progress will boost productivity and efficiency tremendously.

PREPARE HOW YOU WORK (TOGETHER)

Tools like the screenplay – introduced later in this chapter – will help you design your meetings (or design sprints) to maximize your time together. Visual artifacts like the customer journey and Business Model Canvas will help your team hold more focused strategic conversations. Taking the time to think through how you’ll use these tools will help you maximize their value. It’s not hard work – but it’s essential.

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SO, WHERE SHOULD YOU START?

Think big, but be willing to start small! Most people approach big projects and new processes by seeking commitment from the board or an executive committee. This is fine and may work in some cases. Design doesn’t require a certain outcome. Instead, it’s about the journey, the findings you obtain along the way, and the options you generate and validate. With that in mind, here are some ways others have started their design journeys.

Of course, you could also start big and go straight to the board. If you decide to take that route, ask for a budget to train your team in design thinking for strategy and innovation. Whether or not there is an appetite for design in your organization, your colleagues will certainly develop skills and take journeys that deliver better business results, however small or incremental.

EVERY JOURNEY STARTS WITH PREPARATION

1 FIND YOUR SPARK

Change starts with a spark. Something in the world shifts, and someone reacts to that shift. Whether it’s for yourself or your company, to start your design journey, you’ll need a reason to take the journey in the first place.

2 FIND AMBASSADORS

Business as usual doesn’t leave much room for design process if you don’t have ambassadors on your side. Socialize your idea with a few potential ambassadors. If you get them on board, your journey will be a whole lot smoother.

3 RECRUIT THE RIGHT TEAM

Design is not a journey to be taken alone. Success in design comes when a team of people are in it together and are collectively compelled to see the process through. You’ll need varying points of view, skills, and a good network to tap into. Build your team with this in mind and you can’t go wrong.

4 RAISE ALL BOATS

Organize a targeted (not generic) training course or bring in a thought leader to help ignite interest in business model innovation or strategy design. Courses and master classes are great ways to learn new ways of working while becoming familiar with a new set of tools, skills, and mindsets. Oftentimes you’ll learn about other organizations that have employed design successfully. Use this insight to evaluate where and how you might further introduce design into your organization.

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5 DESIGN WORKSHOP

Organize a design workshop focused on business model innovation or strategy to immerse yourself in the design process and determine where the goal is for you and your team to co-create a concrete deliverable. This could be the design of a vision, a business model, or a value proposition for a new concept.

6 FIND THE STRAGGLERS

Pick one of your existing products or services that’s struggling to generate revenue (or profit). Run a workshop with a diverse team to generate new business model ideas.

7 GET OUT OF THE BUILDING

Get out of the building and talk to customers to understand what matters to them. What do they say? What do they think? Present your findings to others in your organization.

FIND YOUR AMBASSADORS

Preparing for a small team is one thing. Preparing for a large company is quite another.

So how do you best prepare for an innovation journey as an established company? We asked organizations like 3M, Lufthansa, SAP, ING Bank, MasterCard, GE, Philips, and Toyota how they have been nurturing and supporting cultures of innovation and design thinking. They shared their findings during a summit in New York, February 2015.

Their biggest takeaway: in order to prepare for innovation and design thinking, it is an absolute must that companies identify champion users of design tools, such as the Business Model Canvas, the vision canvas, and other human-centered tools. The champions, or ambassadors, must be proficient in the “lean” approach to design and development and carry with them a designer’s mindset at all times. No problem is too big or too small for these ambassadors.

When your goal is to scale design throughout your organization, it’s essential to find and train more than one ambassador. In fact, you’ll need to create an army of ambassadors who are familiar with and passionate about the new ways of working. They need to adopt and help spread design approaches to business by doing more than they talk.

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PREPARE YOUR TEAM

You won’t win a soccer match with 11 strikers or a football match with only quarterbacks. The same holds for business. Whether you’re trying to win in sports or in business, it’s crucial to employ players with varying skills (and superpowers) – the team needs to be multidisciplinary.

Don’t forget to have fun together! Hey! Who brought the drone to the party?!

Unusual suspects: that new graduate you just hired; a high-energy up-and-comer; or someone young, with interesting ideas, that you think of as an idealist.

Sales and marketing gurus who know the customer.

A strategist or product manager who always has the North Star in mind.

Kickass visual facilitators to drive the project forward, harnessing all of the energy.

Lateral thinkers, mavericks and rebels, hackers, developers, and designers.

An executive sponsor takes responsibility when things get tough.

Ambassadors and fans to increase engagement.

BUILD A MULTIDISCIPLINARY TEAM

The ideal team will be able to cover a wide range of tasks. Need someone to write a proposal? Add that person to the team. How about someone to design a pitch deck? And maybe we need a coder . . . You get the picture.

The more viewpoints the team brings to the table, the more options that team will be able to generate. There is no one single right solution in any design, business or otherwise.

FIND THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS

If every team member has the same exact life experiences, skills, knowledge, and viewpoints, the range of options they will zero in on is incredibly narrow. To avoid that, intentionally design your team to include people from different departments – and with different skills levels, backgrounds, cultures, and mindsets.

ROLES: IT’S NOT ON YOUR BUSINESS CARD

When you look at a business card, what do you see under the name of the person? Likely a title, and that title is very likely not that person’s role.

Roles describe the responsibilities that someone takes on, either formally or informally, as part of the team. They play a central part in getting things done. Roles, not titles, are critical to your success. It is important that each team member take ownership of the design, both while working on the design and when it comes to pitching ideas to other stakeholders. Designing the right roles helps team members understand how and where they can best contribute to the end result. The roles people play on your design team will vary from ambassadors to sales, and from visual thinkers to engineers.

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Just as you’ll intentionally design who’s on the team, you also need to design the roles people play on that team. When your team doesn’t know the plays, you can’t score a touchdown.

WHEN TO ASSEMBLE A TEAM

When considering your design team, it’s essential that you assemble the right people, with the right attitudes, at the right time. You’ll need this team for design workshops, brainstorming, and fieldwork: when you need to get out of the office to understand what your customers want, need, and do. You’ll need to assemble a team to design and produce prototypes.

Unlike in most corporate settings, do not assemble a team for a project or to simply join meetings or discussions. Do not assemble a team to engage in planning if that same team is not going to engage in the design process. Do not assemble a team for project communication; that’s what the facilitator is for. Your design team’s goal is to do and make and learn and deliver results.

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PREPARE YOUR ENVIRONMENT

Design is not business as usual. The spaces your team designs in must be able to handle a new way of working.

A SPACE FOR PEOPLE

If design is a contact sport, then the environments you play in must be able to handle the frequent interactions of the team. Design isn’t about meeting, sitting, talking, and leaving the meeting to go back to email. It’s about standing, interacting, writing on sticky notes, going outside, crunching numbers together, and assembling to update each other before doing it again.

The best design environments take into account how people interact – not just while they’re seated, but also while they’re standing, evaluating a canvas on the wall. These environments leave space for working together and presenting concepts. The best design environments are dedicated for a specific project, so that all of the design artifacts can be left as is, enabling the team to quickly track its progress.

HOME BASE

However you prepare for your environment, your goal is to create a home base where your team can be creative, soak in the information, and have meaningful discussions about it. Whenever possible, design a war room: a physical space in your company where people can meet, work, and see the progress visually. Alternatively, you can design temporary, popup spaces that can be rolled into and out of rooms efficiently. You will see the team start to work and think differently.

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