Treating the Organization as a Prototype: BusinessWeek Story on a d.School Class

When Jeff Pfeffer and I wrote Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management, one of the main themes we emphasized was that the best leaders have an attitude of wisdom. This means that leaders have the courage and confidence to act on what they know right now, and the humility and cognitive flexibility to doubt what the know.  That way, when new information comes along, they can change direction.  You can also read about this perspective in articles that we did related to the book here and here. I've written about variations of this perspective a lot on this blog too, notably in this post on strong opinions weakly held and in this one on Andy Grove.

Jeff and I also make the related point that another way to think about the attitude of wisdom is that it means treating organizational practices and structures as prototypes: Rather than doing endless planning and arguing about what will work, it is often wiser to take your best guess at the problem based on what you know now, then do a series of relatively quick and cheap prototypes, and iterate your way to a better solution. Now, the iteration cycle for organizational changes varies pretty wildly; a good example of one that has gone on for years is Cisco's merger integration process, where they have continuously improved the process over the years -- but even in that case, the mergers (until recently) have been relatively quick and easy as they have focused on small companies that are close to headquarters.   But there are some processes that can be iterated much more quickly... at least that has been our theory. 

In essence, this is applying design thinking to organizational practices. And while Jeff and I have been talking about it for years, and we have a lot of examples from other places that reflect this mindset, this last term I finally got to be involved in a d.school class where we found some companies that let our students mess with their organizational practices.  Debra Dunn (among other things, a 22 year HP veteran who held many senior jobs at HP including General Manager of a large division and SVP of Strategy), Kris Woyzbun (veteran of six d.school classes and now at IDEO), Kerry O'Connor (a d.school Fellow heading up our executive education efforts and a splendid design thinker) and I taught a class last term called Business Process Innovation: Treating the Organization as an Unfinished Prototype.  We had only 14 students in the class -- and boy, did they get a lot done.  They came-up with and tested (in a d.school class, you can't just recommend things, you have to test them in the real world) ideas to improve the customer experience at a major airline that are being implemented and also came-up with ideas to improve the new employee onboarding process in another firm that are scheduled to be implemented. 

Perhaps the most dramatic project, however, was the shortest (and it is a company I can name too) -- a project aimed at fixing Timbuk2's company wide meeting. BusinessWeek's Jessie Scanlon just came out with a pair of detailed stories about it, one that focuses on what our students did at Timbuk2 and the other on 8 ways that you can improve your company meeting.   Check out the story, as it is pretty detailed and accurate -- yes the meeting was that messed-up and yes all signs are that in just a few weeks it was made dramatically better by changing a bunch of simple things.   But I do think that there some important lessons I take away from this:

1.  It is rare that a management team will so openly admit that something is messed-up.  I think this is testimony to CEO Perry Klebahn and his head of HR Andrea Yelle; they were completely blunt with us, and then with BusinessWeek about how messed-up it was.  Now, in their defense, they had spent the prior year simply trying to keep the company alive and were making massive changes in personnel in the process. BUT the lesson is that deep dissatisfaction helps provide an impetus for organizational change.  We took a 45 minute bus ride from Stanford to Timbuk2 with the students, and when we were traveling back, some students were discouraged by how bad the meeting was -- Debra, Kris Woyzbun, and I had the opposite reaction, as our view was that there was so much motivation for change and so many simple things to fix.

2. Perry -- a world class product designer, who among other things, invented the modern snowshoe and was COO of Patagonia -- later admitted that he really didn't think that the design process could be applied to organizational problems. But, Perry being Perry, decided to see if it would work anyway (How is that for strong opinions weakly held?).  And now I am getting one email after another from Perry asking about other ways the process might be applied in his company.

3.  The students did something absolutely brilliant when the senior people from Timbuk2 visited our class.  They didn't just present their suggestions in a Powerpoint, they had all of us "live" both the current "bad" company meeting (standing-up, little structure, little personalization or celebration) and then they switched gears and had us all live the "good" meeting they imagined.  We all immediately recognized the power of simple things and because -- rather than just talking about making the change -- the Timbuk2 folks were already rehearsing and "feeling" the changes within in minutes of their arrival, they were acquiring much more actionable knowledge than the passive experience of reading a Powerpoint and talking about what they would do next (although we did some of that after living the meeting).

4.  I've been an academic researcher for years and believe in rigorous data -- both qualitative and quantitative -- of all kinds.  But these students showed that, at least for some problems, rather than digging in for months and months and thinking and thinking -- that some problems do have simple causes and simple solutions.

5. This is also a great argument for the power of small wins, for focusing on things that are small enough to fix rather than being overwhelmed by such a big problem that it seems impossible to fix.   

6. Company meetings -- as well as smaller meetings such a brainstorms and problem-solving meetings -- are likely especially amenable to this kind of prototyping because everything is on "public display." But meetings also strike me as an unusually powerful point of intervention because everyone sees how everyone else is acting, and it is a place where changes are communicated through everyone by actions, not just words, and where any distance between talk and action is obvious to everyone involved.  My hypothesis is that changing behavior in meetings can also change behavior in other kinds of interactions because they are so vivid and shared by all.  Debra Dunn has her sights set elsewhere for our next class -- she argues that performance evaluation conversations are especially broken in most places, and that is something we should have the class do next year -- which would mean finding a company that lets students sit in on real evaluations and then getting them to change and iterate on how the evaluations are done.  This could be tough, but my experience is that  these conversations are so broken in most companies, that they are ripe for change.

Debra and I are already thinking of how we are going to teach this class next year.  So we would appreciate any suggests, possible concerns, and the like you might have about our approach and the kinds of problems we should tackle.
 

Comments

[Wally Bock]

Another way to talk about the same thing is to use the language of experiment. You try things to see if they work. Depending on what you find you abandon the new idea altogether, adopt it in a wider scale, or, most likely modify it and test again.

[Bill Burnett]

I like the phase 'Strong Opinions Weakly Held'. It's got a ring to it and you get the sense of it, even though 'Strong' and 'Weak' pretty much mean the opposite, and if you have an opinion, you pretty much are holding it!
I have been running a little thought experiment on the difference in people's perceived ability to influence and be influenced by others depending upon whether or not their opinion is strongly held or not. It is at http://www.wburnettllc.com/thoughtexperiment.htm and I'd like it if you'd participate.

[David Maxfield]

Your class has such amazing potential for solving entrenched problems, transforming organizations, and changing the lives of the students and faculty involved. Hooray for you all!

I'm interested in entrenched problems that require behavioral solutions. Many of the organizational issues you describe fit exactly. I'll add a few more: reducing hospital-acquired infections by getting healthcare workers to wash their hands appropriately, improving the success rate of drug rehab by getting participants to succeed in the 6 months following treatment, improving the career trajectories of women and minorities in major organizations. So many important issues and cool opportunities are within our reach!