Design at Scale 2021- Scaling Empathy, A Case Study in Change Management (Matt Stone)

—> Thank you Bria for being an excellent host and MC
  • 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:
  • 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
    • Many subcultures within an org, that have their own drivers
  • Understanding this has been impactful for him
—> This talk structured to think about it with two ways
  • First, a cautionary tale of what not to do
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • This seems obvious but it is foundational

 

—> Strategic value has to start with how people would use the new technology and process
  • This needed to be felt by executive sponsor and cross-functional team
  • We needed to know how project would be perceived by people and whether it would change how they worked
    • No value of investment if people ignored it
—> 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Our team could make pivots, based on changing circumstances
  • Other teams couldn’t connect their empathy to strategic values
—> We needed to jump into their timeline, and teach people about what we discovered
  • 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.
  • Advocacy networks provided bi-directional communication into how things were understood and changes or direction that was going on with the other teams
  • They allowed a conduit for information and the new feature would change the employee’s role
    • People could then act as ambassador’s as to what the new process would be
  • 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
  • People were then eager to help

 

—> Finally, we gave away our recipe, and there was “no fee for entry”
  • 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
  • This was exciting for teams and leadership to have
—> Everywhere we went, where we talked about the new technology that would be introduced
  • We talked about what was produced and how it would benefit the organization and make it more compliant with regulations
  • We talked about how we managed it, and made the project a real product that would change the way we would do our work
    • Inspired competitiveness within the executives

 

—> To sum things up, I’ll challenge you to connect empathy to strategic value beyond the project you think you are working on
  • 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
  • To scale how we deliver on things in an empathetic way, we need to have empathy for others around us, including other teams
  • It’s not always clear how things fit together, and it’s challenging to see that connection, and the value of seeing these connections
    • There is intense pressure for people to stay in the lane
—> 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.
  • 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