Building an Innovation culture
Rise of “T-shaped” personalities | Infusing Design Thinking
We are all ‘programmed’ as individuals. It holds true, especially from a workplace perspective. You walk into your office, sit at your desk, start your computer, check your email and get on with assigned tasks. Almost without thought, we react to the various stimuli (objects + people) presented to us in different contexts and situations. This can clearly be defined as a ‘business as usual’ scenario.
Design Thinking as a methodology, in contrast to the BAU scenario is finding a lot of favour, especially in companies that are building solutions around customer experience. If you observe closely, the one thing that differentiates these companies from the rest is their culture — flat hierarchy, diverse teams, customer experience focused.
The premise of this article is based on understanding the genesis of the modern-day work culture and how to infuse creative thinking in an organisation, as it prepares for the emergent reality. Let’s first begin with understanding the evolution of the modern-day work culture and how the industrial revolution was instrumental in designing it.
Industrial Revolution and the Assembly Line
Henry Ford developed the first affordable automobile that was produced on a mass scale catering to a wider audience. This was one of the most famed outcomes of the second industrial revolution and the assembly line played a critical role in this effort. Prior to the development of the assembly line, products were generally hand-made by one or a group of craftsmen. This method was slow and inefficient because the craftsman was responsible for completing many different tasks.
The control is not in the hands of the individual, but the pace of their work is defined by the conveyor belt.
The modern-day workplace is an extension of the assembly line model, where individuals work in departments or teams and each of their work cut-out. The rise of frameworks and methodologies such as Six Sigma, Agile, JIT (just in time) and many more are a testament to the fact. They focused on improving the efficiency of the process by focusing on the interplay of humans and machines. No doubt this improved the efficacy of the work, as each individual does the task (assigned) in a repetitive manner, thus attaining accuracy/mastery. Having said that, the control is not in the hands of the individual, but the pace of their work is defined by the conveyor belt - eventually creating silos.
The rise of ‘T-shaped’ personalities
The process-oriented approach created a generation of specialists, who attained mastery in their domain. Subject matter knowledge and specialised skills are important for professionals, but if you look at it from an organizational perspective, it’s just one part of the story. As the world becomes more and more dynamic in nature, organizations are struggling to keep pace with the ever-demanding customer. This is where the understanding of human behaviour becomes more and more crucial.
This requires a concentrated effort from an organisational perspective of having some of their workforce transitioning between roles more frequently, moving away from the status quo of nurturing specialists. This means that there is a need to develop more ‘T-shaped’ personalities – deep in one field, but with very strong horizontal capabilities (expertise) and understanding of things (through empathy).
Role of ‘failure’ in organisation culture
Organisations will surely prioritise based on multiple variables, but organisational culture has to be one of the top priorities as we look into the emergent reality. A lot of companies are making concentrated efforts by fusing in creativity to instil an innovation mindset. The debacle of the Amazon Fire phone is a great example of how failure can be embraced in organisation culture.
Introduced in the summer of 2014, Amazon had taken a $170 million write-down on account of unsold Fire phone inventory. It has been one of Amazon’s biggest failure, but in a way paved the way for it’s biggest success - Alexa, a cloud-based voice assistant An early prototype of the Fire phone included a voice recognition feature that could play a song based on a user's request. Today, Amazon maintains the largest install base of smart speakers in the US and it’s voice assistant is the most used, in spite of it not being the default voice assistant - Google Assistant on Android and Siri on iOS.
"If you think the Fire Phone was a big failure...we are working on much bigger failures right now."
- Jeff Bezos after the debacle.
Bezos shows a better way to handle failure by being willing to quickly let go of the ones that don’t work instead, following a portfolio approach. It’s the opposite of how leaders often confront failure. They continue to devote energy and resources to bad ideas that end up dragging down their team and their business.
It is easier said than done, as organisations continue to tread a fine line between short term goals versus the long term. There are plausible ways through which organisational culture can be built upon. This is where Design Thinking, as a methodology comes to the fore.
Infusing Design Thinking
Design Thinking now is a whole new discipline which the purists/designers snigger at and new practitioners swear by it. The key is not to confuse Design Thinking with Design. It enables organisations to ask the right questions, by keeping the user needs (articulated + unarticulated) at the centre.
Managers, who especially come from the world of productivity and efficiency, there is always inherent friction when they deal with creators/makers/designers. Design Thinking is useful for managers to educate themselves about the creative process and work with these individuals to resolve problems or leverage opportunities.
Design Thinking ≠ Design
Design-led culture is built on a co-creative approach, which means that it enables an organisation to break down the silos and deploy a cross-functional team to improve the efficacy of its solutions. It also encourages individuals to mould themselves in a T-shaped personality, which in turn reduces friction and misalignments.
The current pandemic has acted as a catalyst in the organisation pushing them beyond the hierarchy based decision-making to a decentralised process. This meant that the people down the hierarchy, who are closer to the context, are empowered to make decisions (tactical) and the leadership can focus on the strategic decisions.
As part of the innovation consulting work, I have worked alongside organisation leaders to instil creative thinking (through a series of interventions) as part of their innovation capability building journey. In one of the engagements which I was leading. The client was Shared Service Center for a global organisation headquartered in the UK that provides finance delivery and information services to their global network.
The larger objective of this engagement was to roll out an enterprise-wide Design Thinking and culture-building program to help them shift their internal positioning and delivery within their organisation. This began with aligning the strategic objectives of the leadership with the tactical objectives of the implementation stakeholders. This alignment ensured that everyone in the organisation was aware of the end goal and were in a position to evaluate the impact their actions had. This was followed by workshops and sprint-based problem-solving engagements (theory to practice).
To sum up, infusing creativity and building innovation capability is a very dynamic process and has a lot of variables at play. The key is to keep an open mind and keep learning through an iterative approach.
What do you think? Let me know your thoughts.
Until next time!
~ Sajid
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