Advocate Course
Design Thinking had taken off at IBM, and throughout the tech industry. IBM had become a leader in applying design thinking “at the scale of the global enterprise.” Yet designers and product teams were often still struggling to remain focused on user-outcomes. Figuring out the behavior gaps that our education programs had left behind led to a breakthrough in design education at IBM.
“The retrospective ends on a tense note, but out of the corner of your eye, you see the designer grinning ear-to-ear.”
-Human Centered Organization, Co-authored by Sean Pizel
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Once IBM decided to focus on design, there had been tremendous executive support. The earliest training programs were attended by every level of senior leadership, who would in turn evangelize the methods to their direct reports. Despite this powerful cascading effect, the Designers and Product Managers were still reporting a layer of leadership that was unresponsive to their needs, which often led to products that failed to exceed user and business expectations.
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IBM had implemented an award winning education program for Product Teams, but with over 350,000 employees there was no way that every stakeholder who might obstruct human-centered progress could attend a week-long bootcamp.
Research was showing that managers who had participated in the immersive Designcamp had become great promoters of design, but still didn’t have all the skills or habits necessary to support their team. Maybe this wasn’t just a problem of scaling education, maybe we had a problem with the education itself?
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By focusing on teaching Design Thinking in collaborative, cross-functional workshop environments, everyone was learning the same thing, despite their role. This was effective, and practical, but suboptimal. We realized that different stakeholders needed to practice and perform role-specific skills. The Advocate Course was born, and the future of Enterprise Design Thinking would too.
Once we started synthesizing the 24 month evaluations of our Designcamp and Patterns education programs, we noticed data best summed up as, “My manager doesn’t get it.” At first we assumed that since there were so many more managers than our current education programs could support this was a problem of scale. But when we dug further we realized that even managers who had been through our training were still showing knowledge gaps.
The problem with our development path was laid bare. Standard design thinking theory is that everyone in the room works as equals, and as such, that is how we had been teaching. But there are a whole category of human-centered skills that our enterprise product managers needed to know that were more important than storyboarding or brainstorming. We felt silly for missing something so obvious, but took solace in the fact that everyone in the global design thinking community, from IDEO to Stanford, seemed to making the same mistake: They were teaching design thinking as if everyone worked for small teams and were, what we soon came to call “CoCcreators”.
Once we realized that design thinking was overly focused on the CoCreator role, we continued to research how great leaders interacted with their teams. We found that being an effective stakeholder is a distinct practice with distinct objectives and methods: identifying human-centered opportunities, framing human-centered problems, properly chartering teams, and then knowing how to evaluate the progress of human-centered development team.
We spread out our learning objective across a one-day instructor led experience, assets on our custom built eLearning Platform, and our network of community based centers of practice. But even then we were very limited by the amount of attention and practice we could reasonably expect from the learners. Our solution to this problem was to teach Enterprise Design Thinking through the lens of one repeatable ritual, The Playback. This gave the learners an organizing concept for the material, and a discrete skill they could practice. It gave the educators a great scaffolding upon which we could layer complexity.
We had perfected a 6 hour classroom led experience became so popular that we began using it to form partnerships with clients who were looking to launch their own Design Programs. Things were going great, and then Covid Hit.
We quickly adapted the course into an instructor led remote learning course spread out over two 3 hour sessions. This presented us with a chance to scale the lessons. Furthermore, we implemented a bold social learning program, where we trained experienced design thinkers on how to deliver it themselves. Take that covid.
Impact
The Advocate course set out to find and close a critical skill gap around human-centered project management. In pursuing that goal we made step-level gains in peer led learning, remote education, and Design Thinking mind-share.
The research and discovery that went into this course uncovered fundamental gaps in how organizations grow to become human-centered. This deeper understanding of the Jobs to be done in the corporate pursuit enterprise success allowed IBM to strengthen its position as leader in the space.
In fact, the course itself was so elegantly designed, not only did it solve the transition to remote education via video conference, it became the vanguard experience of IBM”s Client Education process, and was taught to hundreds of executives from other fortune 500 companies.
100+
executives from other Fortune 500 companies educated and certified
