Finding Design Thinking: A Change Manager's Journey

A couple of years ago, a business colleague introduced me to design thinking. Having originally come from a design background, before transitioning into management consulting, I was fascinated by the opportunities it provided and the wonderful synergies it had with the field of organisational development and change management.

I subsequently did some courses in design thinking and thanks to my business colleague, was lucky enough to work with her to undertake a project with a retail client using the design thinking process. My colleague had so successfully identified that the client didn’t require branding support (which was their original request), what they required was a new operating model to support their vision that contradicted the underlying philosophies and business models of their industry.

Once I started investigating and using design thinking and talking about it with my network, I discovered that in some industries they used service design and others user-centred design. I am no expert in these fields however at the heart of all these design processes is a focus on the end user. It is the end user or stakeholder in change management terms where I see the synergies start to emerge.

In order for any kind of strategic change to be successful, the project or programme team needs to first understand their stakeholders and the culture in which they work. How deep they delve is often influenced by the organisations appetite for spending the time and resource on this activity but can mean the difference between achieving all or just part of their vision.

The desire to launch straight into problem solving mode particularly in technical organisations can often lead to the scenario that design thinking avoids, which is fighting over whose solution is more right or whose is going to work better. The approach you take to developing solutions and/or identifying the areas you are going to focus on to reach your vision are fundamental to any change effort as it will either engage the majority of stakeholders and harness the immense knowledge, passion and skill they have or disengage them as they feel solutions by ‘others’ are being forced upon them whether that be colleagues, senior management or external consultants. I’m sure that many a change manager has felt the disappointment of being brought into a project too late in the game to influence the approach resulting in the ability to do little more than issues management and one-way communication.

Working with stakeholders to co-create solutions and outcomes that they take ownership of whilst simultaneously building their skills in problem solving and effective engagement and communication is a big part of successful change management. The ultimate goal for me when working with a client is for organisations to build their change maturity to a point where they no longer need external support thereby making my service redundant.

Design thinking was a wonderful find for me as it so clearly articulates the benefits for deeply engaging with stakeholders and on working together to solve problems. I’m going to continue to investigate and write about this topic as I understand how design thinking can add value to traditional change management and how change management can add value to design thinking.