- Dr. Luis Amendola, PhD.
- Articles
- Change Management, Design Thinking
No one doubts that we are living in complex times, and in this environment, companies face the challenge of adapting quickly to respond to market shifts. This is where the framework proposed by Design Thinking – Change Management brings a breath of fresh air to how change is managed in organizations. In this context, Design Thinking is seen as a powerful tool to link human-centered design with the co-creation and commitment of the people affected by change within organizations.
The term “Design Thinking” describes a creative approach to problem-solving that places human beings as end users at the center of the process. This approach is based on the belief that the people facing these problems are the ones who hold the key to the answer. Simply put, “Design Thinking” involves understanding the user being served and aims to reach practical and innovative solutions rooted in people’s real needs. Through PMM CIEx, we apply “Design Thinking” to drive impactful, human-centered change in organizations.
Figure 1. Design Thinking – Change Management (DT-CM), Amendola.L, 2018
• Step 1. Empathize: Learn about the organization’s change challenge from the end-user’s perspective.
• Step 2. Define: Look for patterns and insights that help you understand potential barriers and facilitators of change in the organization.
• Step 3. Ideate: Generate creative solutions that resonate with users and discover what “wows” them.
• Step 4. Prototype: Turn the best ideas into options you can test in the “real world” and improve through iterative refinement.
• Step 5. Test: Package the solution(s) into an integrated and holistic package that supports users through the different stages of organizational change.
What is our experience using Design Thinking in change management processes?
It is important to understand that, in our change management approach, once we have completed the insight-gathering phase, we seek to co-create a backlog of change actions or experiments with the people affected by the change. Therefore, designing interventions with those affected by change using a Design Thinking mindset allows us to:
– introduce a cultural hack that truly takes us to the heart of our work philosophy
– allow the people affected by the change to become facilitators
– turn resistance to change from a problem into a gift given to us by the organization.
How do we use the Design Thinking – Change Management process?
In practical terms, we use it as a tool to design the flow of an intervention with a group of people from the organization we are supporting through a change process. The deliverable of an intervention using the Design Thinking – Change Management approach is the generation of a backlog of change options and experiments proposed by the organization’s own people.
Our experience using tools of this type is the generation of alignment between the organization’s people and business objectives through OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Ultimately, for us as change agents, it is a strategic pillar of our project approach, regardless of the nature of the change—from helping our clients with agile transformation projects to designing change processes of any other kind.
At the heart of Design Thinking – Change Management is an approach that helps us define, review, and iterate on change action strategies, always keeping the people’s experience during the transformation in mind.
By empathizing with the needs of the organization’s people from the start and identifying their pain points or current experiences, it can even help us identify metrics to measure the impact of the change.
There is an important lesson we take away from applying the Design Thinking – Change Management mindset as an approach to our interventions for defining change actions: we are creating a safe space for people to talk about the feelings or emotions that surface in the organization’s daily life. We also must not forget that a DT-CM process requires taking measurements of the impact of the change.
In short, putting people at the center of the change process is at the core of the Design Thinking – Change Management approach. It is the fundamental axis to ensure that changes truly have the impact the organization requires to adapt to the reality of the market or field of action.
