I am a designer. The focus of my design activity has evolved over time. I began by designing physical products (e.g. chairs and tiles), then swiftly transitioned to digital products (e.g. websites and apps). Eventually, I shifted my attention towards services (e.g. banking and healthcare). Services are particularly intriguing as they encompass numerous products and a wide range of experiences, both for customers and employees. After a few years, my focus shifted once more, this time towards the organisations reimagining these services and products. It became increasingly evident to me that without reevaluating the way firms approached the creation and delivery of new offerings, my ability to make a meaningful impact on the world would remain limited.
Most recently, my object of design changed once again, becoming change itself. Or better yet, the way organisations and institutions at large go about changing themselves to tackle some seriously hairy matters. What are examples of hairy matters? Take circularity in the fashion industry, for instance. It requires a complete rethink of how the fashion industry works, from the materials used for the garments, to the way they are produced, to the way they are moved around the world. It is a challenge bigger than any single organisation; it is multistakeholder, and it is systemic.
Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland help us clarify the very concept of designing change. In their book ‘Changemakers’ (2023), among other things, they describe the evolution of the dominant processes to make change happen in business. In organisations, the process or approach employed to design change and to implement any desired transformation follows the specialty that business values the most at that given time.
For example, in the 1960s, the approach to change favoured by executives mirrored the era’s emphasis on manufacturing. Change was meticulously planned and executed, akin to an assembly line process. Any modifications required halting the entire operation, making the necessary revisions, and then resuming activities. Leadership followed a top-down approach, reminiscent of a military hierarchy.
The 1980s marked a shift in focus from manufacturing to service-oriented offerings. Finance emerged as the dominant function, and change became a means of enhancing capital allocation and increasing share value. Leadership approaches adapted accordingly, adopting a more strategic visionary stance. While leaders still made most decisions, they began to foster followership among employees.
The authors continue their exploration, describing how change management evolved again in the 1990s with the proliferation of the internet. Change became synonymous with innovation, driven by traditional organisations’ imperative to keep pace with rapid technological advancements and globalisation. Leaders, in the words of the authors, “were inventive renegades who moved fast and broke things” (p. 8).
This brief overview illustrates how approaches to change have continually evolved in alignment with prevailing mental models and the dominant corporate functions of the time. Each approach gradually waned as the business context shifted.
Today, most organisations continue to drive change in a siloed and disconnected way. By doing so, they struggle to address some of the challenges of our time that are mostly complex, ambiguous, fluid, systemic, and multistakeholder. Design offers a way forward.
I really like the definition of design that Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland use in the book:
“In this context, where it is central to change, it [design] means to develop a future state or condition in concert with those affected by it.” (p.13)
The connection between design and change is not new. In 1996, Simon Herbert argued that “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (p.111). Designing entails striving for change, transitioning from the current state to a new, ideally improved one.
As the complexity and interconnectedness of contemporary challenges continue to grow, the scope of design has expanded. It now encompasses not only products and services but also the organisations that deliver them. It also extends to encompass large-scale systemic transformations. When I refer to designing change, I therefore mean fundamentally reimagining how organisations and institutions approach self-transformation to adapt to their operating contexts.
Anna Valtonen did all of us interested in the topic a favour by summarising the literature of the past few decades on the relationship between design and change. She argues that when thinking about large-scale systemic transformation, one must consider the organisation embedded within a given system. Why is this perspective important? For a couple of reasons that Kees Dorst (2015) explains very well:
1. Context: The environment in which an organisation operates is fluid and rapidly changing. Businesses, even those acknowledging the dynamic nature of their context, tend to seek a concrete problem definition. In doing so, they freeze the context at a particular point in time for analysis. By the time the solution is developed, the context has shifted, and the problem with it.
2. Practice: The way an organisation is structured and how it conducts its business defines its identity and culture. This culture permeates every aspect, from goals and values to accepted standards of quality. It dictates what is considered acceptable behaviour and thinking, and what is not. It therefore becomes very, very hard for employees to introduce new practices to tackle new emerging contexts, even if it is clear that existing practices are not fit for purpose.
We need an evolving set of practices relevant to designing in the service of systems-level change. In other words, adaptable practices to design within ever-changing contexts. Using Terry Irwin’s (2015) frame of reference for Transition Design, we know that what is needed is the following:
Visualise and map out complex problems and their interconnections and interdependencies;
Situate them within wider, spatiotemporal contexts;
Bridge stakeholder conflicts and leverage alignments;
Facilitate stakeholders’ co-creation of visions of desirable futures;
Identify leverage points in the wider problem system where the organisation might situate design interventions.
This is something that no given professional practice can do alone. It therefore offers an opportunity to look beyond the existing boundaries of the different professional practices. Design has a key role to play there.
The How
“Never in history has the need for change been more urgent. Yet, transformational societal change will depend upon our ability to change our ideas about change itself — how it manifests and how it can be catalyzed and directed.” Irwin et al.(2015).
Talking about “Designing change” or “Changing the way organisations change” often feels too meta. People stare at me like, “Wait, what?!” It is kind of an obsession of mine, as I believe that the complexity of challenges such as social injustice or ecological shifts does need a level of adaptability that our stiff organisations and institutions simply do not possess.
Therefore, in order to thrive within this unprecedented messy context, we must learn different ways to rapidly change the way we do things, the way we innovate, the way we make decisions, and the way we lead action.
How might we design for a context that is always in flux?
There are three themes that I find particularly useful that I want to explore to answer this question:
Making the slipperiness of the context visible,
Thinking about scale in three dimensions: up, down, deep,
Designing for stakeholders’ relationships.
There are a whole bunch of other things we could include, like offering a vision for transition, for example, but I feel that the three I picked are those where it is the most difficult to bridge theory and practice. Let’s dive in.
Making the slipperiness of the context visible
I’m borrowing this sentence from a comment by Molly Balcom Raleigh. I love the visual of a slippery context. The point being made here is that since the operating environment of an organisation is constantly changing, when you attempt to freeze the context to analyse a problem and formulate a solution, the context shifts, rendering your solution at best inaccurate and, at worst, entirely irrelevant.
So how to make changing contexts visible as they change?
Molly has been using the Design Tensions Framework for this purpose, which offers a good starting point, although rather academic. The framework conceptualises design not as a problem-solving activity but rather as a goal-balancing one. The point here is not to focus on the identification of a problem or a solution but rather on a set of choices among a few criteria. We are looking for the few key configurations that may make or break a system. It offers a way of reasoning about different relevant factors and their relationships.
In more practical terms, a few strategies I have found useful are:
Start with large buckets, themes that help you define the context.
Define the extremes and look at examples in between.
Find signals that can tell you when the context is shifting.
Monitor them.
The few documents you are working with should be “living” documents, updated regularly (ideally automatically) based on how your signals develop.
Base your design direction on both qualitative and quantitative insights. Quant tends to offer an absolute truth; qual will offer a direction of sailing. You need both.
Design in short iterative cycles, use prototyping also to continuously test whether your original understanding of the context still holds.
Never stop engaging stakeholders in conversations about the context within which the design develops.
Never stop engaging recipients of the design (human and non-human alike) in conversations about latent needs.
Every choice has consequences that might be beyond your competence or understanding — do always involve transdisciplinary teams in the continuous evaluation of the context and the suitability of potential solutions.
It might be superfluous to state it, but I’ll do it anyway as it is too important. If you are a designer — you are not the expert. Therefore, you need to find the experts and work with them throughout.
I like to say that design is creativity within structure. The above helps you define the structure, and within it, you can explore and create.
Thinking about scale in three dimensions: up, down, deep
A reflection on context vs. scale is now mandatory. Someone very wise recently reminded me that ‘there is a need for something that, by definition, is non-scalable because it is contextual.’ I started this conversation in a post on LinkedIn a couple of months ago, and many have contributed with smart reflections and relevant annotations.
The key here is that as we work with the very fabric of how we go about change, we need to work with localised and contextual solutions. The scale at this stage must reduce to what we can observe and to whom we can collaborate with. But that’s not the end of it. We must instil an intensive learning process that allows us to scale the process and its impact.
Moore and colleagues help us shed light on this story of scale. They describe three types of scaling activities:
Scaling up: These are institutional changes visible in processes and policies. An example is changing a rule or the law for people to achieve something. It’s about igniting change top-down at an institutional level.
Scaling out: Attempting to affect increasingly more people by covering a larger geographical area through replication and diffusion. An example is the replication of successful innovations emerged in one community into others, with the hopes of spreading those same results to more people.
Scaling deep: It assumes that durable change has been achieved only when people’s values and cultural practices are transformed. This includes the nature of relationships people have.
The issues associated with the first two types are pretty obvious. People might reject solutions that seem to be imposed, and solutions might not be relevant for different communities (therefore contexts). More often than not, designers and stakeholders need to engage with all three types of scaling activities to ensure the development of solutions that are contextual and at the same time able to serve a large diverse population.
Designing for stakeholders’ relationships
The last bit is about stakeholders. I have a point about stakeholders in any list I compile. It is so very important that I never miss an opportunity to remind ourselves about it.
When dealing with a fast-changing operating context, it is paramount to always have clear in mind not only the people involved and impacted but also their relationships. Things to watch out for:
Understand and visualise the political context and power dynamics among actors.
Ask the question, how are decisions made around here?
Look for network nodes, people with large influence on the surrounding.
Uncover conflicts, what is the (potential) tension?
Uncover alignments, what are areas of agreement?
Bridge conflict and leverage alignment in the development of your solutions.
Remember these can be people internal to the organisation (or institution) but also external. They can be humans (e.g. directors, front-line staff, customers) and non-human (e.g., nature).
I hope these reflections will help you and inspire you in your quest for changing change.
If you enjoyed this piece and haven't subscribed to this blog yet, please consider doing so. Also, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
References
Dorst, K. (2015). Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design. MIT Press.
Giudice, M., & Ireland, C. (2023). Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change. Two waves.
Irwin, T., et al. (2015). Transition Design 2015.
Moore, M.L., Riddell, D.J., Vocisano, D. (2015). “Scaling Out, Scaling Up, Scaling Deep: Strategies of Non-profits in Advancing Systemic Social Innovation.” The Journal of Corporate Citizenship, Issue 58.
Simon, H. (1996). The Sciences of the Artificial. MIT Press.
Tatar, D. (2007). “The Design Tensions Framework.” Human–Computer Interaction, 22(4), 413–451.
Valtonen, A. (2020). Approaching Change with and in Design. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation.
This is great, Marzia, thanks for sharing. In the end, it comes down to people, how they establish trust, and how they're capable of visualising alternatives. That's why local and situated work is so important. For me, the hardest bit seems to be balancing 'local' and 'systemic'.