Design driving cultural change

• Creativity Inc. is apparently a must read on how Pixar creates and how we can learn from how they’ve done their work
• The Design Gym set out to reinvent the consulting formula – shaped by experience in a number of traditional consulting firms and seeing opportunities to change what doesn’t work about consulting
• Founders knew it was going to be bigger than just having design thinking workshops – there’s a community of learners across industries craving the opportunity to keep learning and helping their companies.
• The company released their lessons as Creative Commons to encourage hacking and remixing
• Community of learners are always interested in learning more, so they’ll attend a class, but for them, the experience is more than a one off class – the question is ‘what”s next’ after the class is over.  They extend the experience by former students helping out at hackathons and other Design Gym events.
• Innovation isn’t just a business strategy – it’s about what kind of culture a company has, and if people are comfortable talking with one another about innovation on a day to day level
• Learning is most passionate form of team building
• For izone as a client, it’s about teaching the teachers design thinking so they can go out and teach others the tools; this isn’t just applicable to teachers as ‘service providers’, but that anyone in a company can be taught and then go out and teach other coworkers
• Fun and hard work go together – so the Design Taco is an example of theirs where they’ve created something useful for students.  This is also another example of the ‘Third Space’
• Metric of success for them  is if a client comes out to one of their happy hours – again, the focus on community and not just the project or class.  Sometimes it involves knocking down the walls in a company to get this kind of interactive learning experience to become institutionalized, but if the client takes customer focused approach in the end, then that’s what matters
• Little stories from attendees talking about the cultural change that comes from learning at the Design Gym are little wins
• There’s no pressure to be the smartest person in the room, in contrast to traditional consulting.  For the Design Gym, the work isn’t the point of it, but the learning, and curating experiences is what matters.
• If a client comes in with high energy and enthusiasm for an event but not an understanding of design thinking or purpose, that can be a red flag for a problem.  The issue isn’t just the project – how can we keep employees engaged and empowered after the event? This is not about turning people into designers – it’s turning them into people who want to work on projects together in a safe environment
• For companies – even successful ones – the challenge is to reframe how they apply their expertise and success to their problems
• The issues are that omnichannel is bound to products – but when Applegate is trying to reinvent the grocery aisle, that’s more about innovating a service or industry, which is important to prototype
• Good concept on giving direction to the brainstorming  – so ‘ we’re opening up’, ‘we’re remixing’, ‘we’re closing’  helps give direction AND permission for participants to know what to do.
• Importance of  incorporating solo and group work – so have 15 mins. just to get ideas out there, get creativity flowing and get comfortable with ideation.  Teaching about journaling and synthesizing helps people get comfortable with being creative – in a sense, it’s almost  teaching people how to be an introvert, since synthesis is something that can come to introverts easily
• A three step process involves 1) planting a seed – introduce a common language, 2) grow – empower the enthusiasts, 3) loop, learn and teach, repeat… all of this points to culture change as not one quick burst of energy.  Much like going to an actual gym, it’s about  is going and keeping practicing and introducing skills over time.  Clients are usually on board with loop process after identifying enthusiasts
• It can be common to have  creative design departments pushing back – how do you incorporate them into the process? Also potential challenge with people not keen on qualitative research.  Once you get them out talking to a customer, that can change their opinion.
• What are low barrier entries to the company? Address that you’re not to be a design thinker overnight.  They teach it as a non-linear process.  One person at Nickelodeon did the entire process of the work at the Design Gym session on her own and then asked her team what they thought of the process – an example of not needing to be an official Design Thinker.
• There will always be a need for executive champions!

It will be fascinating to see how The Design Gym evolves their service offerings to clients, and how they can help spread their unique ideas around creativity, design, learning and exercise.  It raises issues of how consultancies operate and how we can innovate them to better meet the needs of a rapidly evolving business landscape – and if we have companies like the Design Gym changing how they work, they may be better prepared to evolve to keep up with what consulting needs.

Posted By: Rachel M. Murray · In: consulting