The digital revolution is primarily an opportunity to initiate deep changes responding to the increasingly global issues of the new world.
The world is a complex place — it always has been. But our era is mainly defined by the speed at which changes take place.
Changes in uses, economic models, as well as increasingly abstract competition boundaries. Differentiation through services is currently all the rage. Switching from selling a product to selling the uses of a product requires a new kind of excellence when it comes to understanding customers’, coworkers’ and citizens’ expectations, needs, contexts, and environments.
Sometimes technologies become uncontrollable because of the mind-boggling speed at which systems mutate towards ever-increasing complexity. Opinions have been voiced, holding designers of such systems responsible — please refer, dear reader, to Alan Cooper’s inspiring manifesto extolling the virtues of “the good ancestor”.
Furthermore, major organisations that need to adapt to these changes while also promoting them have been leading for years so-called “digital” transformation efforts. Such plans often take on the tough task of endorsing increasingly global, adaptive, mutative endeavours while facing an increasingly complex, technological world.
Looking closer, however, even though such movements are emphasised by disruptions that take root in the digital world, it would be simplistic to define their global form through the digital lens alone. Transformation runs much deeper — we are talking work patterns, economic models, platform and network strategies, and even the place and role of business as we know it in society.
And to understand in depth this complexity — to extract meaning relevant to humans and their groups — is a challenge faced daily by disciplines such as design. Therefore the method plays a major role in defining and setting up transformative strategies and programmes, through:
- Answering open questions by examining expectations, needs, contexts, and environments expressed by customers, coworkers and citizens at large, while laying out a systemic vision of the organisation’s challenges — financial targets, network of agents, regulation, concerns, societal changes, and so on.
- Analysing and shaping real-life experiences to act as catalysts for thought about what will truly be useful for future users or customers.
- Prioritising to concentrate on the projects with the strongest impact: a balance between desirability, economic viability and feasibility (either technological or human).
- Experimenting through prototyping — products, services, organisations, and more — in order to bring ideas face to face with real-life user conditions as swiftly as possible, allowing fast iteration, small-scale understanding of value creation mechanisms and preparing industrialisation.
- Industrialising and launching on a large scale to achieve a powerful impact for the organisation’s users.
To sum up, the method restates the question of understanding user interests or future experiences instead of wondering how to sell an emerging technology, a strategy to its market or even a new organisation to its company.
A real-world example: BBVA, the bank that transformed itself through design thinking
Sphères recently had the pleasure of joining a workshop instigated by BBVA’s design teams as part of IxDA’s Interaction18 event.
International bank BBVA is a truly worldwide, 160 year-old institution, home to 132,000 employees and catering to 72 million customers in more than 30 countries.
Despite its institutional breadth, BBVA understands at its highest organisational level that challenges manifesting in its market can only be taken on by building a system around more than just the latest digital platforms — more holistic, human-centric approaches geared towards customers, coworkers and citizens.
Because, even if the world is and will remain largely digital at its core, this transformative approach addresses the digital archetype as such, on its own scale, i.e as a new way or opportunity to set up new, smart interactions in the service of a strategic vision.
Forcefully instilling design thinking into the organisation
Before scaling its project to its 132,000 coworkers, BBVA already had a historic affinity to design thinking, having worked many times with companies such as IDEO.
In 2015 BBVA CEO Carlos Torres Vila decided to acquire a Silicon Valley design firm (Spring Studios) to engage its own internal transformation. He declared his direct competitors were no longer bankers — ultimately relatively predictable — but Amazon and Google — totally uncontrollable.
This gave birth to a department dubbed “Design Transformation” whose role was to overcome injunctions to innovate and provide a business framework and tools to effectively make it happen.
The Design Transformation teams started by trying to understand issues that prevented employees to actively build a new BBVA. Instigating change whether on fresh economic terrain or within the bank’s basic framework.
Three major issues cropped up following this research, echoing many similar situations that Sphères identified when initiating projects for their clients:
- An emphasis on technology and functionality instead of use;
- A silo effect between departments each having an impact on customer experience;
- A day-to-day culture of “business as usual” that prevented much-needed reinvention.
These three aspects were then considered by the Design Transformation teams as a gap between a vision — “To bring the age of opportunity to everyone” — and its execution.
This observation provided a key insight: such transformative projects must effectively, head first, re-create the link between vision and execution. So to succeed, it was necessary to address two distinct communities: those responsible for the vision and those in charge of implementation, in order to reveal methods, tools and processes to limit or further articulate this gap.
For BBVA, three possible routes towards change
In order to fill that gap, three routes were studied by BBVA. The change could be:
- wide and sparse (e.g. through online training);
- deep and targeted (e.g. through intensive training of specific teams, such as digital teams);
- wide and deep (e.g. by bringing tools to the most possible coworkers through tailored workshops).
This third route — the most ambitious one — was chosen and approved by the CEO. The idea was at once simple and disarmingly straightforward: “Each one of BBVA’s 132,000 employees have an impact on the company’s customer experience that they must pursue.”
Therefore the change had to be both wide and deep. The vision of transformation by design thinking was set.
Such a challenge took over-centralisation out of the question. At the time BBVA’s transformation team only included two designers (there are now nine, joining a community of over 200 designers). The next challenge was to deliver this vision through a swarm of “hybrid profiles” all over the organisation. Such profiles were able to introduce new methods on a daily basis.
These individuals came from various banking-related positions — including positions endemically “far removed from the end customer” — later to be known as “design ambassadors”.
To ensure top management members were on board, they were summoned to four-hour workshops throughout the world to introduce the new process, with an unambiguous goal — to trigger the leaders of the bank to answer a straightforward key-question at the end of the workshop: “What do you need to deploy this approach?”
After two years spent working in over thirteen countries, there are now 1000 ambassadors. Their motto: Learn — Do — Teach.
An educative approach inspired by design methodology was put into action, featuring:
- introduction to design workshops (Learn);
- assignments to complete over a number of months (Do);
- a daily practice organising processes between various coworkers, departments, and countries (Teach).
Operational support was handled centrally by the transformation team when needed.
Key teachings from these transformation projects led by design thinking
This workshop, along with examination of other transformation projects led by Sphères, allowed us to pinpoint a list of teachings or focus points.
Far from being exhaustive or replicable verbatim, here is a helpful list for starting out on this type of project:
- Just like with any design project, working within organisations requires understanding the system’s issues in a very precise way. User research both at customer and coworker levels remains the cornerstone of all projects. It takes time.
- Welcome key executives on board very early in the process. Giving decision-makers a taste for design thinking. What can it bring them as individuals and to the company in a broader sense? Their specific challenge, according to BBVA’s Mary Warmly and Anxo Lopez, is to face the question, “What do you need to launch this transformation?” and, of course, to attempt to answer it.
- Demonstrate viability through the project itself. Create series of projects. Point out concrete results of the process through relevant examples. Identify teams whose jobs have a prevalent need for the approach and start by launching initiatives with them. A recent example: Sphères was initiating a transformation project featuring data teams searching for cohesion and common goals with the company’s other departments.
- Make it simple. Avoid unnecessarily complex rhetoric. State compromises from the start-out to be accepted easier along the way. BBVA’s head of Design Transformation Mary Wharmby stated, “We had to make compromises at the beginning to prove our point.”
- Armed with this legitimacy, you will be able to work on the most extensive, deepest transformative task of all the processes, behaviours, norms. Design as an operating system.
- Perhaps obviously for some, this approach must be multidisciplinary while respecting all parties’ expertises. It must not, however, attempt to do without professional designers.
- You will have detractors because it is always easier to lead transformations through more traditional, comfortable projects. Listen to them. Encourage them to express their disagreements. Build upon these grievances. If they are not constructive, keep moving.
- Demonstrate entrepreneurship. Management effectuation will help in this case. And as René Char said, “Impose your luck, grab your happiness and go towards your risk. They will grow accustomed by watching you.”
- Concede that this process will be long, probably never-ending, but keep measuring both baby steps and large strides.
Speaking from experience, when projects are led with high requirements and passion, the returns from this kind of process are extremely positive at all levels of the organisation. Qualities that have been pointed out — sophistication, creativity, innovation, positive impact on in-house activities and business in general.
Many thanks to BBVA’s teams for this workshop, especially Mary Wharmby and Anxo López for their time.
par Jérôme Bruneel, C.E.O. Sphères
