Strategies for Amplifying Design's Influence for Org Changes

Richard Armada at UXDX Community: Innovative Leadership and Design. Video: https://youtu.be/29tpjY5meV4

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

An introvert talking about facilitation

[00:00:00] Richard: Well, hello everyone, and thank you, Katherine, for having me here today. As Katherine mentioned, I'm a lead interaction designer at Allegion. But that's not all: I'm also a husband and father of two beautiful, talented children. Another thing you need to know about me is that I am a self-diagnosed introvert. I really try to avoid large crowds, and I especially try to avoid speaking in front of a lot of people. So of course it makes sense that I'm here today to talk to all of you about facilitation.

[00:00:30] Facilitation is the art of speaking in front of a group of people in order to inspire them to achieve their goals. But don't worry, I'm not here to talk about how to be a great facilitator, but about how we as designers can use facilitation as a tool to help expand our influence and help our organizations grow their design maturity. For full transparency, I will be telling my story from the perspective of an in-house design team, but my assumption is that this could be helpful for agencies or solo startups to reframe the way they engage with their clients to build stronger relationships.

Why design maturity matters

[00:01:08] You may be wondering, why do we need to level up our design maturity? Why should we expand the influence of design? Well, in 2019 InVision published a study that showed companies with a high level of design maturity were more successful across a wide variety of metrics. The study proposed a framework that assigned levels to companies with varying degrees of design maturity: at the bottom, level one, producers, and at the top, level five, visionaries. 41% of the sample group were at the lowest level of design maturity, while only 5% were considered level five visionaries.

[00:01:49] Considering that, and everything in between, odds are we all have the opportunity to help grow our design influence within our own organizations. In all industries, across the board, there is room to grow. If we as designers want to help our organizations succeed, and if we truly want to provide the most value for our customers, we need to improve our design maturity. If there's only one thing you take away from my talk today, it's this: part of our mission as designers should be to help our organizations understand the value of design. We need to improve our design maturity.

Barriers to design maturity

[00:02:30] What are some of the barriers to design maturity? I know there can be a lot, but these are a few that I've encountered the most in my years as a designer. Legacy systems that put an almost insurmountable constraint on what a designer can do to provide value to the user. But in my experience, legacy thinking is an even harder barrier to overcome. Back when I used to work in healthcare and biotech, a lot of key stakeholders were subject matter experts on the health industry and patient care. Innovation as a designer was nearly impossible, because we'd always get pushback. We'd get things like, "Well, that's not how we do it," or "It's always been done this way, we can't change it. Believe me, I'm the expert."

[00:03:15] "What's the ROI of design?" This kind of question usually comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the value of design. The business just thinks design is there to make things look pretty. They can't see how design helps their bottom line. When your organization lacks a clear or well-integrated design process, it is hard to keep everyone on the same page and speak the same language when talking about helping our customers.

[00:03:45] A lack of transparency. Sometimes someone along the chain of command has deemed that some things are need-to-know only. It's institutional knowledge, it's my silo, and the design team, you don't need to know. Have you ever heard this? "Well, the design team just doesn't understand our business." But what's the truth? We really want to understand, but someone is gatekeeping the fountain of knowledge. But it can work both ways. I've seen design teams that want to hold the keys to their design magic, work behind closed doors and not give away any of the secrets to their design superpowers.

[00:04:27] Production focused. Some organizations prioritize and incentivize delivery: get this feature out the door on time and on budget, that's it. Design is often seen as a bottleneck. Your focus then is on building things fast instead of building the right thing, and we as designers want to build the right thing for our users and the business.

Drawing the rest of the owl

[00:04:53] So what's the solution? It's pretty simple: just become a level five visionary organization. A level five organization not only incorporates design processes into product development, but they also apply design to their internal business strategies. Imagine a level five visionary organization. No more legacy thinking. No more misunderstanding the value of design. There will be a clear and well-integrated design process. No more silos, full transparency, and no more production-focused mindset. See, it's pretty simple.

[00:05:43] But I know what you're thinking: how do we get from step one to step two? How do we draw the rest of the darn owl? Maybe better questions to ask are: how can we be better at showing our stakeholders and executives the value of design? Then, from there, how can we start incorporating design into business processes? A possible answer to this question is facilitation.

[00:06:10] For a little background, I am working with Scott Kbus[?], the design director at Allegion, to build a design-led facilitation program. Over the past couple of years we have facilitated processes and workshops, some design related, some not. What we have realized is that as word has gotten out about what we've been doing, the demand has grown to be more than we can manage. Our vision for the facilitation program is to recruit and train a bench of facilitators well versed in design process and design principles as they relate to facilitation. This will give us the resources to continue to evangelize the power of facilitation, and then when someone asks, we can deliver.

[00:06:56] In a nutshell, facilitation is an approach for engaging and guiding a group or team to increase its effectiveness in doing its work or making decisions. Facilitation is not just for meetings or workshops. Facilitators can also help guide processes, initiatives and even projects. So far I've led a series of training workshops where we've trained Allegion's designers and design researchers to lean in on their design superpowers to become great facilitators. The workshops have focused on two things: the skills of a great facilitator, and the process and tools of a great facilitator.

Good facilitators and good designers

[00:07:38] Why the heck should design lead this effort? Well, first, what makes a good facilitator? According to the International Association of Facilitators, here are some of the skills that make a good facilitator. A good facilitator seeks to understand the needs, purpose and intended outcomes. What about a designer? A good designer seeks to understand the needs, purpose and intended outcomes. A good facilitator seeks to understand by asking good clarifying or open-ended questions. A good designer seeks to understand by asking good clarifying or open-ended questions. A good facilitator adapts and iterates as they learn more. A good designer adapts and iterates as they learn more.

[00:08:31] The similarities go on, but the point is, good facilitators use some of the same guiding principles as good designers. Designers can use their superpowers to help facilitate business processes. We can show the value of design while disguised as facilitation.

[00:08:51] So why facilitation? Why should an organization care whether or not they have a strong facilitation capability? According to inc.com, we waste $25 million a day on unnecessary meetings, $37 billion a year. Now imagine, when trying to convince leadership to mature design within the organization, what would be your ask? You could try convincing them that design is the answer to all your problems: "You can trust us, we're designers." Or you could offer to help them save millions, and oh yeah, by the way, we might be able to get a few of those meetings off your schedule. What's the easier sell? The value of facilitation is easy for anyone to understand: fewer meetings, less wasted resources, better decisions.

Facilitation mirrors design thinking

[00:09:45] I've talked a bit about how the skills of a good facilitator align with the skills of a good designer. I'd like to take a few minutes now to talk about how facilitation processes and tools align with design processes and tools. Most of you may recognize this as the design thinking process framework, but what most of you may not realize is how closely this model compares to a good facilitation process. The design thinking framework divides the process into three major phases: understanding, exploring and materializing.

[00:10:20] In the context of facilitation, it is the job of a good facilitator to work with a group to first understand what they need. This aligns with the understanding phase of the design thinking framework. A good facilitator must first empathize with the group to understand their purpose, then help that group define their objectives. Once a facilitator understands the group's purpose and objectives, they can begin to design a meeting or workshop where they can guide the group to explore together how they might achieve their goals and define next steps.

[00:10:58] In the explore phase, facilitation uses a number of divergent thinking tools to help a group ideate, where they share and explore ideas outside of their own bubbles and silos. In the same spirit as prototyping in the design thinking framework, a good facilitator uses convergent thinking tools to help a group take the best ideas and reach a consensus. Through the guidance of a facilitator, the group can materialize their ideas and their next steps towards their final goal and objectives. Through thoughtful and intentional facilitation practices, a good facilitator can begin to teach their non-design colleagues how to use the design thinking framework to reach their objectives or to solve their problems.

Becoming a facilitator

[00:11:49] Now I'd like to take a few minutes to talk about my own journey in becoming a facilitator. As I mentioned earlier, I am a relatively introverted guy, and I'm also recovering from impostor syndrome. With support and acknowledgement from my peers and managers, like my esteemed design director Scott, I realized two things that really opened up possibilities for me. One, giving voice to my perspective had value, and two, the questions I asked had value. I realized that I could step outside my comfort zone and grow professionally.

[00:12:23] I started speaking up more. I submitted workshop and speaking proposals for my local design conference, and I volunteered to facilitate a workshop, specifically an experience brief workshop. The experience brief is a tool that Scott brought to Allegion, and it helps cross-functional teams align on common product development goals. It contains concepts like journey maps, target audience, problem statements and other design concepts that can be hard for product teams to manage or wrap their heads around. They needed help.

[00:12:57] After I got a couple of these workshops under my belt, I really started to understand how participants found value in the questions I asked and the guidance I gave. Even more surprising, I saw more and more people start to speak using design language. Both Scott and I saw this as an opportunity to use design thinking tools to facilitate other processes and initiatives at Allegion.

Helping the cybersecurity team

[00:13:23] An example of one of the teams that I helped through facilitation was the cybersecurity team. They were starting a new initiative and were wondering how they might infuse a culture of secure design into Allegion software development. They had a vague idea of what they wanted to achieve but couldn't put it into words. Through facilitation, I helped them clearly define their objectives and desired outcomes. They had a vague idea of who they wanted to reach. Through facilitation, I helped them define their target audience and understand how far off they were from their desired outcomes.

[00:14:00] I helped them determine what key results and metrics they needed to measure and monitor in order to ladder up to their primary objectives, and I helped them design a plan for achieving those key results. Through facilitation, I helped them have fewer meetings, and in those meetings have a clear and aligned purpose, generating a more effective and efficient process.

[00:14:27] Is it working? Is design-led facilitation helping us to level up our design maturity? I don't know yet. But what I do know is how my engagement with stakeholders and product partners has changed. I'm hearing more and more of my peers and leaders speak in a design language, being more focused on the user, their needs, their problems. I'm hearing people asking better open-ended, probing questions, like "How does this help the user?" or "What's our purpose, and what problem are we trying to solve?" There's less of a checkbox mentality of a requirements document.

[00:15:07] I'm not sure yet if facilitation will help us get where we need to be, but in my gut it sure feels like it. It feels like a step in the right direction. But as a designer, I know that is just an assumption, and I won't know for sure until we measure it. We're just getting started, and we have a long way to go. For me, the definition of success would look like this: I get up, I go to work, and I know in my bones that every day what I have to say as a designer matters to the organization, what I do as a designer has a positive impact on the customer, and everyone I work with, from the CEO to the product team, finds true value in my work. Imagine that.

Q&A

[00:15:59] Katherine: That was fantastic. I really love that you opened with the fact that you're a self-proclaimed introvert. I think there are a lot of people out there, and I speak to them every day, who aren't brave enough to do a talk because they feel like they have imposter syndrome and they feel like they don't have anything to share. So I loved your talk on so many levels. Thank you. You had your lovely slide with the five levels. If we could go back to there, if I can quickly ask: taking those levels, what do you think it takes to go from stage four to stage five, as an organization?

[00:16:55] Richard: Specifically going from stage four to stage five, I don't know if I could speak to that directly. But I know, going through these different levels, using facilitation as a tool to get more of the product teams talking with a design language, getting everyone on the same page through effective facilitation, and the real tools of the facilitator are really closely aligned with design itself. Once you get your product teams or your executives in meetings or in workshops using these tools, they can really start to understand the value, and hopefully organically move through these levels as more of the organization starts using design thinking in their everyday practice.

[00:17:49] Katherine: Yeah. And what does a training in facilitation look like? How long does it take?

[00:17:55] Richard: The trainings that I've done so far were over two days, and they were primarily with designers, so I didn't really have to teach design principles that much to this group. We really focused on facilitation. On the first day we focused on learning what good facilitation verbal and non-verbal skills are, giving those skills a name and a definition, so they can start recognizing when they're using them in the real world and when others are using them, so that they can start observing how others use them and learn from that as well, and then learn from their own use of those skills. We really spent the first day practicing those skills in a really safe environment and getting really good feedback on how they were using them.

[00:18:47] The second day we really focused on the tools and how the tools go together with their verbal and non-verbal skills, and on using those tools as a facilitator, one, to build engagement, and two, to create opportunities for divergent thinking and then bring it back again to convergent thinking. Again, since these were designers, a lot of those tools are the same tools that we designers use every day, so it didn't take long for them to catch on in day two. But for non-designers, I can see the training probably being a little bit longer, just so we can teach some of those other fundamental skills that this original group already had.

[00:19:31] Katherine: And what are those tools, out of curiosity?

[00:19:35] Richard: Like I mentioned, the three major buckets are engagement tools, so you can use things like ground rules or a parking lot. These are tools that really enable the participants in a workshop or meeting to feel heard and understand the intent and purpose of a meeting. Then there are divergent thinking tools, like different ways to brainstorm, different ways to think about things differently by reframing the way people think. And then there's also the bucket of convergent tools, like the simple ones such as dot voting, or a prioritization matrix, to bring all those ideas down into something that's manageable and something that can be turned into next steps going forward from that workshop or meeting.

[00:20:28] Katherine: Love all those, particularly the prioritization matrix. Nice. And from your facilitation in your role, or that you've seen, what have been some of the best outcomes that you've seen from a facilitation like this?

[00:20:45] Richard: Some of the best outcomes are when I work with teams that have this idea, or have been told about this initiative that they have to do, and they have really no idea where to start. As a facilitator and as a designer, I'm sitting down with a core team first to really help them define their purpose and objective. Then that's when the fun starts, because then you get to start thinking about how we can get a larger group engaged with this initiative or project, because now we have a really clear view of where we want to end up. Then it becomes easy to design activities for meetings in order to make decisions or to raise the level of confidence in something. Just seeing a team come together over a shared purpose, and helping to facilitate that process for a team that might have been lost in the beginning.

[00:21:46] Katherine: Yeah, I love it so much. Thank you, Richard. That was really, really inspiring, and a really nice, fresh perspective on thinking outside the box in terms of facilitation and the benefits. Thank you, I really enjoyed it. Your presentation will be available this week for people to tune in and watch and share. So thank you, and until next time, we'll talk to you soon. Bye.

[00:22:13] Richard: All right, see you later. Bye, thank you.