Embracing, Experiencing and Embedding Design Thinking in Organisations

The final Design Thinking Drinks for 2012 took place at Westpac headquarters in Sydney on a warm summer evening. It explored design thinking at the financial services organisations Westpac (personal, business and corporate banking) and BT Financial Group (a wealth management group that Westpac acquired in the early 2000s)

For more than 10 years Westpac’s online team, led by Ian Muir (who sadly was double booked on the night and sent his apologies) has been applying design thinking and design methodologies to a wide range of the bank’s digital interfaces and technologies. For more than 5 years, BT Financial Group has been building innovation across the organisation via an internal Customer-Centred Design Team, led by Opher Yom-Tov. Alongside Opher, the evening’s panel also comprised of Anthony Quinn (from Westpac) and Fran Samalionis (from BT). The panel was moderated by Deborah Kneeshaw.

So how does design thinking transform a bank? How does design thinking function within a bank? How does design thinking get practiced within a bank? Roger Martin (2006) once wrote about ‘Designing in Hostile Territory.’ Now the bank, as we learned on Wednesday evening, is not quite the hostile territory, but Martin gives a few pointers for how design can prosper in organisations. Our panel gave us even richer insight. Such rich discussions unfortunately cannot be fully fleshed out in a blog post, so here’s my summary of how design thinking begins to transform a bank (or two).

For design thinking to transform an organisation, using the case study and discussions of Westpac and BT, it must be embraced, experienced and embedded. In summary, here’s what I mean:

Embracing design thinking: The panel spoke of the crucial support needed from the “top” (the bank’s CEO and leadership team) for design thinking to prosper. Get them on board and let them see the power of design thinking through quick wins and outcomes-based work said the panel. This has seen a “trickle down effect” for design thinking at the bank of which Opher remarks “our phone now rings” and “our problem isn’t demand, it’s supply.” So lesson one – get the organisation to embrace design thinking by starting with support from the top.

Experiencing design thinking: Design is a discipline that is learnt by doing, rather then being an applied theory. The panel spoke to the importance of people experiencing design. Fran champions people experiencing prototyping and iteration – keep going and don’t let go, she insists. IDEO, other design consultancies and a few academics have often discussed prototyping as being a different culture, a different behaviour in business and a tool that can perpetuate organisational change (See Coughlan, Fulton Suri and Canales, 2007). So lesson two – let people experience as much of design thinking and design as possible (prototyping and iteration are just a few examples, but they are powerful ones). People understand design thinking through doing it.

And I should add here that the panel advises that yes, a “design space” can help, but they can only be as good as the people in them. In fact the danger of design spaces is creating an exclusive space, which signals the only place in the organisation where people can be creative when really, we want everyone in the organisation to be creative, even back at their own desks.

Embedding design thinking: Enter the challenges. The panel were wonderfully honest about the challenges each of their team’s faced bringing design thinking to the bank. While the panel spoke to their successes of having the organisation embrace and experience design thinking, to systemically scale design thinking is the next and the most challenging step. Some of the challenges to embedding design thinking at the bank have included –

• Getting stakeholders on board, in particular early in the process (to commission it) and later in delivery (to execute on the original intent);
• Operationalising design thinking throughout the broader organisation for scale which Anthony spoke to, as the Westpac team are currently in the process of doing this; and
• Being able to articulate design thinking in the context of the organisation.

We had a lengthy discussion at the end of the session on the last point and how this was different from “selling” design thinking. The panel didn’t believe the selling bit was challenging, it was more the articulation. Let me unpack this a bit. The articulation goes back to the first point above of the challenge of getting stakeholders on board. As design thinking can be applied to such a broad spectrum of issues, the panel discussed how the bank does not know when to ask for design thinking. I believe this is what they meant by the challenge of articulating design thinking because each application of design thinking can be a new and different situation from the last. There are no set parameters for where design thinking can be applied. Thus the articulation, rather than the selling, is challenging.  In short, people in the bank want it, but they don’t know when to ask for it.

So lesson three – which is not really a lesson, but the panel outlining the challenges of embedding and scaling design thinking throughout an organisation.

One thing that became apparent to me throughout the panel discussion was the time needed for design thinking to proliferate the bank. Bringing design thinking to a bank is no short-term activity. It is in fact a tenacious, committed and long- term endeavour, by those at the “top” and the design team who works from within to bring design thinking into an organisation for innovation.

Before I complete this post, I want to shift the spotlight onto you – What did you think of the panel discussion? What were your key take-aways? Have you seen or experienced other ways that design thinking has been embraced, experienced and embedded in a large organisation? We’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to post your comments below.

From all of us here at Design Thinking Drinks, thanks for joining us in 2012 and we hope to see you all soon in 2013!

Design Thinking Drinks would like to thank:
Deborah Kneeshaw and Anthony Quinn for organising this event, with support from Lauren Tan
Westpac and BT Financial Group for catering the event

This post of written by Lauren Tan