Design at Scale 2021- Scaling Empathy, A Case Study in Change Management (Matt Stone)
—> Thank you Bria for being an excellent host and MC
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I’m here to talk about scaling empathy and I hope to leave you with inspiration, about how to take your project and integrate it with the system you work in
—> About Me:
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Like Bria mentioned, I’m interested in designing for the employee and that has taken me to think about how internal company systems (org systems) that work together
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Many subcultures within an org, that have their own drivers
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Understanding this has been impactful for him
—> This talk structured to think about it with two ways
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First, a cautionary tale of what not to do
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Second, a good story of success
—> First, the cautionary tale: In a prior role there were always things slipping through in our workflow, so we needed to create a digital system to help identify key opportunities to prioritize
—> The goal of the system was to create institutional memory for customers and to keep track of what their experiences were
—> But what we didn’t do was that we didn’t understand ecosystem that technology would live in, and that the tech would be rejected by key stakeholders
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I didn’t understand the people who would internally use it
—> The project barely got off the ground, as the project was seen as pointing out that people at the company were doing a bad job with their work
—> So I soon had another project to make things better, and was working with many cross-functional people wanted to improve things
—> But the company culture started squeezing that out and people began to abandon ship
—> We typically make investments in tech, process, info, people, to get strategic value
—> But we overemphasize tech, process, info, and forget the people
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People means the employees inside the org, along with other roles, such as the end users
—> My story of failure was the result of me failing to understand the employees
—> Going back to my project, we were focused on aligning with different regulations that governed industry and allowing better management of those regulations
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Tool was meant to change processes of 24+ communities. Not just designers, but legal and product people
—> We also knew we were not the only project going after this space of making process change for laws and regulations
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Pressure would be weighing down on employees, and there would be resistance to the initiative
—> As a result, our project took a different focus of balancing equation of looking at communities instead of people
—> It was balanced by connecting empathy for employees to the strategic value for the organization
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This seems obvious but it is foundational
—> Strategic value has to start with how people would use the new technology and process
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This needed to be felt by executive sponsor and cross-functional team
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We needed to know how project would be perceived by people and whether it would change how they worked
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No value of investment if people ignored it
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—> We gathered together a team and focused on understanding the people the project would impact
—> We asked set of standard questions to employees to clarify what would change for them
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People knew a little about this, as we were building the process for themselves
—> Discovered disturbing fact that no one saw how their role would change
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People were so focused on delivering their project, that they didn’t understand how their project would impact other teams, as well as the internal employees who would use the project
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They said “It won’t change anything for me”
—> We were back to the pressure of related teams squeezing everything out not related to following the product roadmap
—> We needed to have way to export empathy to internal customers, and to all the other teams who were making things in that space
—> We needed to understand the pressures being put on them, to the point where the teams felt they could only blindly follow the roadmap in front of them
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Our team could make pivots, based on changing circumstances
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Other teams couldn’t connect their empathy to strategic values
—> We needed to jump into their timeline, and teach people about what we discovered
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We found people believed they didn’t have the time and space to process our tools
—> We went to their meetings and stand-ups to understand what we could do to make their lives easier
—> We stood up advocacy network for this greater thing we were trying to put together.
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Advocacy networks provided bi-directional communication into how things were understood and changes or direction that was going on with the other teams
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They allowed a conduit for information and the new feature would change the employee’s role
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People could then act as ambassador’s as to what the new process would be
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People now recognized changes that would happen to them in doing their work, and recognized that they needed to be more involved with what was built
—> Fantastic shift that happened over and over again, and there was residual benefit to connecting software projects to each other
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People were then eager to help
—> Finally, we gave away our recipe, and there was “no fee for entry”
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Didn’t require people to learn the design process upfront to start getting value
—> People got the value upfront, with the option of learning the underlying design process
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This was exciting for teams and leadership to have
—> Everywhere we went, where we talked about the new technology that would be introduced
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We talked about what was produced and how it would benefit the organization and make it more compliant with regulations
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We talked about how we managed it, and made the project a real product that would change the way we would do our work
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Inspired competitiveness within the executives
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—> To sum things up, I’ll challenge you to connect empathy to strategic value beyond the project you think you are working on
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Understanding the purpose of the intended project, and how it fits with all other projects
—> Main takeaways is that there is pressure in large org, and we all feel it
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To scale how we deliver on things in an empathetic way, we need to have empathy for others around us, including other teams
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It’s not always clear how things fit together, and it’s challenging to see that connection, and the value of seeing these connections
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There is intense pressure for people to stay in the lane
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—> When exporting empathy, you need to give away value and provide the punchline of how empathy for the end-user creates overall value for the project
—> Start with value first and tease people that you will provide more.
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It can help clarify what you’re building and the value that will be made, not just a bunch of features and stuff happening
—> Especially true in the employee experience, where we often slip into the mode of not thinking of employees as humans with challenges in their own lives
—> I’m eager to continue the conversation outside of the conference and connect via LInkedIn