Organisational Change through Design
What I learnt at the final week of CIID Summer School 2019
Last week, I attended the “Change Management through Design” summer school course at CIID. The course was facilitated by Mary Wharmby and Grace Ascuasiati of Design Transformation, and formerly from Spring Studio and BBVA, where they led the design transformation change across the BBVA organisation.
It was exhausting, but I got a lot of out of it. It renewed my optimism for design thinking approaches as a counterpoint to traditional top-down, management-driven initiatives, by balancing it with human-centricity, creativity and experimentation, iteration and learning.
The main takeaways for me was about maintaining focus on people, having the right attitude, making incremental impact and trusting the process. I’ve tried to document my reflections from the course here.
Design Thinking in Org Change
Design thinking has been around for awhile, and designers are no strangers to its methods and applications. This course re-emphasizes its process in non-designer hands — a phenomenon that’s been taking place across enterprises like IBM (pdf), Salesforce, and Kaiser Permenente. It transitions the designer’s role from craftsperson and facilitator to teacher and coach.
