4 ways leaders of mature companies can keep it visionary

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The Founder’s Mindset

When a visionary founder of an organization moves on, it can inevitably cause trepidation for those left behind. Recently, a frog client shared an anxiety that many mature companies face in the wake of their founder’s departure. They are an extraordinarily successful multi-billion-dollar company that has enjoyed years of profitable growth. However, there have recently been opportunities in their market—big opportunities—that they missed, and they can’t afford to miss more.
Successful founders often leave to the organizations that survive them a strong and vital cultural legacy. As organizations mature, so do cultures. The “we have nothing to lose” thrill of innovation and Goliath-slaying disruption is eventually supplanted by a “we have everything to lose” mentality as a growing number of investors and stakeholders leads to an increased demand for stability and steady returns.
The incentives for consistently delivering on returns are strong—so strong that it creates its own mindset that, by definition, approaches the world differently from others. We can call this mindset the “operator’s mindset.” In this particular client’s case, their competition are startups who clearly saw how much opportunity our client was leaving on the table. As a result, our client has not only failed to capture value in emerging market opportunities, but they have also disappointed the very investors they aimed to please in the first place, who have reassessed the value of their holdings considering where they see the growth potential.
Yesterday’s missed opportunities become fertile ground for today’s crises of confidence. These crises in turn bring about necessary questions:
Are these missed opportunities the beginning of a larger trend?
Have we lost our magic touch?
And most importantly: What should we do differently so we do not miss the next one?
This anxiety is common. Reminiscing on their own scrappy origins, our client has come to realize that their maturity—and more specifically, the supplanting of the founder’s mindset in favor of the operator’s mindset—is the root cause of their concerns.

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<h4>What is the founder’s mindset?</h4>
At frog, we have worked with founders since our own founding over fifty years ago. Most famously, we have worked with Sony founder Akio Morita and Apple founder Steve Jobs, among dozens of other visionaries. Founders had become such a large customer segment for us that we created our own <a href="https://www.frog.co/services/venture-design" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Venture Design</a> practice with an approach, process and revenue model tailored to the needs of founders.
Understanding this customer segment has been essential to the growth of our Venture Design practice. It has been essential to the growth of our business as we help mature organizations of all kinds <a href="https://www.frog.co/designmind/the-key-to-innovation-challenging-the-status-quo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">challenge the status quo</a> by recapturing and rekindling the founder’s mindset—as they seek to thrive beyond the exit of their founder.
Through the years, we have observed in successful founders four key attributes that define the founder’s mindset.
They unpack into a complex set of skills and capabilities that collectively help them succeed where many have failed.
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<ul>
<li>Vision: The ability to see opportunity where others cannot and to envision a future where opportunity becomes reality in the form of a new product or service</li>
<li>Storytelling: The ability to clearly articulate and communicate the vision and build belief among people so they invest themselves (either through capital or as employees) in the effort</li>
<li>Resilience: The ability to relentlessly pursue the realization of their vision in the face of obstacles and setbacks</li>
<li>Judgment: The ability to know one’s strengths and weaknesses, and the ability to listen to and take advantage of objective feedback</li>
</ul>
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<h4>How can I embrace the founder’s mindset?</h4>
We have seen organizations address the loss of the founder&#8217;s mindset, and the need to balance it with the operator’s mindset, by creating a special team, such as a <a href="https://go.frog.co/en/accelerate-organizational-impact" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Center of Excellence (CoE)</a>. A CoE operates quasi-independently of the core business and represents the founder’s mindset within the organization. Some organizations have seen success with this approach, but many have found it exceedingly difficult to see the future and incubate the next big thing beyond the core this way.
There are many reasons for this. However, one of the consistent themes we have observed in these scenarios is that the primary mechanism of change becomes negotiation between the core business and the teams, CoEs and initiatives looking beyond the horizon. Negotiation is an activity that compromises the needs of both parties, requires time most businesses just do not have and disrupts team harmony and corporate unity.

Of course, good and bad tensions exist. We believe a better way to balance these tensions is to empower all leaders with both the operator and founder mindset. This type of organizational transformation isn’t easy. And it doesn’t happen overnight. But, there are specific habits and practices that are simple to grasp and apply straight away. We have outlined four such practices that we believe offer a good place to start.

If you have studied innovation or improv, you’ll have heard of the <a href="https://www.frog.co/designmind/design-mind-frogcast-ep-17-the-magic-of-storytelling" target="_blank" rel="noopener">power of “yes, and&#8230;” thinking</a>. Unfortunately, today, operational excellence often looks like finding ways to say “no, but&#8230;” to ideas that are unproven or unfamiliar. Introducing “yes, and&#8230;” when discussing a new idea not only increases positive energy in a team environment, it encourages others to build on the idea, adding diversity of thought and shared ownership.

Say “Yes, and...”

We are all guilty of believing we know our customer. But our knowledge of our customers is inherently biased because we seek our understanding of them through the lens of our business motivations. So, the next time you are in a discussion about who your customer is or what they want, ask yourself: am I as certain as I can be about this, or should I get some feedback from a real customer? Your customer might be a peer in your department, your admin or the teammate who uses the spreadsheet. <a href="https://www.frog.co/services/customer-experience-design" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Seek customer input early and often</a>—and use that input to inform your perspective.

Ask “What don’t I know about my customer?”

Sometimes a conversation with a few customers is enough to get quality insight. But more often when you have an idea about something novel, you need to prototype the idea so people have a better understanding of what it is and can provide you with meaningful feedback. Experiments can be <a href="https://www.frog.co/designmind/hacking-innovation" target="_blank" rel="noopener">small in scale</a> and, if possible, designed to learn one thing at a time. How much should it cost? Run an experiment. What should it weigh? Run an experiment. Should it be round or square? Blue or red? Narrow or wide? You get the point: Keep testing until you see results.

Make to learn.

Remember in “The Karate Kid” when Daniel is practicing his “wax on, wax off” drills? Mr. Miyagi had him repeat the benign motion of waxing the car so that his muscle memory would kick in when the time came for the real fight against Cobra Kai. The same principle applies here. Practice a founder’s mindset when creating a spreadsheet, stocking the kitchen shelves, when making slideware, in business review meetings. If you “save” these behaviors for product and market activities only, you will not have built the proper muscle memory (and yes, unfortunately, that’s when people get injured). The goal here is balance, which means knowing what works and what doesn’t. And the only way to know that is to reflect on your results. You may find there are situations or circumstances where the operator mindset is the best way to look at the issue. And you will likely find that some things are much easier to make than others. But this is the point. Without reflection, you will not be able to achieve balance.

Repetition and Reflection.

4 Ways to Keep It Visionary

So, now what?
The above sampling of skills is part of an offering we call the “Founder’s Workout”—a comprehensive assessment of the mindset and capabilities of your organization’s leadership team and an action plan that puts the skills to use in real time with real business challenges. You can learn more about frog’s Founder’s Workout, as well as how it can bring value to your business by <a href="https://www.frog.co/contact" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reaching out to us</a>.

Anthony Pannozzo

Linda Quarles

Authors

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How companies like Amazon, Apple and Disney accelerate decision-making for innovation and make the most of their meetings.

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8 Ways to Hack Analysis Paralysis

I was once working with a client who wanted better decision making in their organization. Partway through the effort, he exploded in exasperation, “You’re creating meeting design when I asked for decision-making design! Why are we spending so much time figuring out meetings?!” My response was, “Where do decisions get made?” He sheepishly replied, “Meetings.”
Now, this is not always the case. In some organizations, decisions are made in the meeting before the meeting. In some they are made in the meeting after the meeting. In some, they are made in the break room, on the golf course, social hour at church, or on the sidelines of a youth soccer game. Study this in your <a href="https://www.frog.co/services/org-activation" target="_blank" rel="noopener">organization</a> to get past ‘<a href="https://www.frog.co/designmind/design-mind-frogcast-ep-8-three-pitfalls-of-innovation" target="_blank" rel="noopener">analysis paralysis</a>’ and design more effective decision-making moments.
We do know that the most challenging innovation behavior is decision-making. Whether it is to determine the next large-scale investment area, or which feature to prioritize, lacking rigorous decision-making design can contribute to <a href="https://www.frog.co/designmind/innovation-swirl-try-frogs-innovation-accelerator-canvas" target="_blank" rel="noopener">swirl</a>, waste, frustration and lack of competitiveness. Standing up committees are a very common approach to solving decision making, however without clear objectives and accountability, committees often do not serve their constituents and can even prevent progress.
Beginning with a primary ‘servant leadership’ approach (i.e., the committee serves the business, not vice versa), we design committees that are guided by eight principles to help overcome these challenges.

<a href="https://www.adamgrant.net/book/originals/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Research</a> reveals that the quality of ideas is directly correlated to the quantity of ideas. If you want one good idea, you need 10 bad ideas. If you want 10 good ideas, you need 100 bad ideas. Getting comfortable with giving voice to bad ideas is a muscle that can be developed. At frog, we design collaborative work sessions, research, user testing and a myriad of activities to accelerate getting to the best answers through this principle.

Suspend judgment: Separate sense-making and decision making (AKA “diverging and converging” in design thinking).  

When two or more people are together, they form a new entity that has its own personality, inseparable from the individuals. Embracing this principle means understanding that all ideas generated in a group are borne from the collective. This principle also shifts behavior away from individuals attempting to be the “smartest person in the room” to attempting to solve and create something collectively. This applies both to teams and decision-making bodies. The objective is not for “my idea” to win but for “the best thinking of the group” to win.

Collective wisdom: The idea of the group will always be superior to the idea of the individual. 

This is one of the most challenging behaviors that we see in an organization. There is often one or more executive “decision makers” that is involved in the work, causes unnecessary re-work and deck-making activities, and has no practical or emotional incentive to move with speed or in ambiguity. Instead, ensure that business is involved and enrolled, learning together with the innovation team and aligning on choices together, but the people closest to the work should ultimately be making the decisions.

Work proximity: The people closest to the work make the decisions.  

The sponsor’s primary role is to remove blockers, not to create approval cycles. Instead, the sponsor should accelerate the solution by creatively and collaboratively helping navigate requirements, context and constraints.

Get me outta the way: The sponsor as removal blocker. 

Predetermined investment moments are the only times that require structured reviews and approvals by the business. Other key reviews are for information and alignment purposes only. What this looks like, as an example: “We believe the opportunity for us is $10M. We are 20% confident of this, and with an investment of $100,000 ($X/100) we can prove this to 50% certainty.”

Funding gates: Define the decision-making checkpoints in advance. 

In combination with points 3, 4 and 5, decisions are made at the principal level in a cascading format (e.g., “We will proceed with funding the best solution, and those doing the work will be the ones to determine which is the best solution.”)

Make space for debate: Decisions by committee need time and space. 

Leaders can unintentionally sabotage innovation efforts when they mumble behind the scenes or otherwise send signals that they aren’t completely behind decisions. When hard conversations have already had a “Can you live with it?” moment, don’t double back and re-visit decisions unless major, significant, new data is brought to light.

Disagree and commit: As the good book says, “Let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no.’” 

Finally, even taking into considering all of the above and our behavioral model, at the end of the day we value progress over process. The best way to demonstrate that we are capable of change is to show outcomes.

Progress over process: Foreword movement trumps all else. 

<h3>How the Amazon ‘6-Page Memo’ Applies the Principles</h3>
Take the famed <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/23/what-jeff-bezos-learned-from-requiring-6-page-memos-at-amazon.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Amazon 6-page memo</a> as an example of these principles in action. Why is this mechanism like this so powerful and effective? It applies the principles in a simple, elegant, dummy-proof format.
My favorite part of the 6-page memo format is when all the people in the room sit in silence for 30 minutes reading the memo. Why? Because we all know about the “curse of the pre-read.” Have you ever, like me, received pre-reading in the form of a 200-page slide deck at 11 pm before the 8 am meeting? That certainly doesn’t lend itself to priming me for productive decision-making.
Regardless of the length of the pre-reading, your meeting is bound to have three types of people:
<ol type="a">
<li>Those who completed the pre-reading, took copious notes and have an opinion about what should happen next</li>
<li>Those who admit they did not complete the pre-reading or did not read it thoroughly</li>
<li>Those who did not complete the pre-reading, but lie and say they did</li>
</ol>
Now you have a situation where some are trying to make sense of the information (diverging), while others have already made sense of it. All the while, the group is trying to move toward a decision (converging) and you are caught in a big fat, as we call it, ‘swirl.’ Making the pre-reading time a part of the agenda gives everyone the time to read it, suspend judgment, and makes no assumptions as to who are the responsible, truthful adults who came prepared. It also prevents the author from having to turn in the memo a week in advance so that everyone has adequate time to read it, in which time parts of the memo itself may have become obsolete.
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<h3>How Will You Hack Your Decisions?</h3>
In following the principles, we can come together, bring our collective wisdom and make space for debate. Once we have had an opportunity to disagree and commit, we can get outta our own way while those with the closest work proximity get through this pre-determined funding gate and we know that we have made way for progress over process.

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Crafting a Talent Value Proposition around frog's Six Drivers of Value will not only sustain and grow  your organization as it transitions into a post-COVID workplace, but will also make it a better workplace for all. 

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How to Differentiate in a Place-less Talent Marketplace 

The coronavirus pandemic has <a href="https://hbr.org/2021/01/9-trends-that-will-shape-work-in-2021-and-beyond" target="_blank" rel="noopener">radically altered</a> the nature of the workplace. The most obvious change has been the widespread adoption of remote technology, accelerating an ongoing trend toward remote work across many industries and becoming the primary focus of many employers’ “post-COVID” plans. Some have already announced that they will allow employees to work from home permanently, regardless of the state of the pandemic. Others have developed rotation systems that are largely remote, but which also allow employees to work safely from the office part of the time.  
While these approaches address some key questions about how COVID has changed the workplace, they overlook a more fundamental reality: COVID has changed workers themselves. The pandemic, along with the many political and social upheavals of 2020, have affected us in ways large and small, visible and invisible.  Even if you do manage to get your employees back to their desks, they’re not going to be the same employees. Personal and professional priorities have changed alongside everything else. While many employers expect that remote flexibility will be the main employee experience differentiator post-COVID, many employees already expect even more. 
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<h3>What are you really offering your employees? </h3>
When employee expectations shift, even a previously excellent employee experience can start to fall short. Along with the employment contract that spells out responsibilities, compensation, and benefits, employers and employees also engage in a social and psychological contract, which often matters just as much when it comes to the employee experience. After one of the most disruptive years in recent memory, it matters even more. In order to attract and retain top talent in the post-COVID era, you must revisit, refine and re-articulate your talent value proposition (TVP). 
Your TVP defines the personal, professional, social, and financial value you provide for your employees. It tells prospective employees why they should want to work for you, and current employees why they should continue to. Every employer provides a slightly different TVP: Some compensate for difficult and consuming work by paying extremely well, others emphasize opportunities for education and advancement, and still others promise their employees the feeling of working alongside teammates on an important mission.  
Due to COVID, the role of the TVP in recruitment and retention is more significant than ever. With a workforce that’s increasingly distributed and mobile, many of the traditional perks and rituals that employers saw as TVP-enhancers are becoming relics of the past. The proliferation of remote work also makes it much easier for candidates to cast a wider net during their job search. In order to compete for top talent, businesses will have to articulate their TVP more clearly than ever before. But your TVP doesn’t only determine the type of workers drawn to your company—it also shapes their experience once they’re employees.  
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<h3>What defines your employee experience? </h3>
Employee experience (EX) is closely tied to TVP and is in many ways a product of it. The strength of your EX depends on how well employees feel you are fulfilling the contract they’ve entered into with you. In other words, EX is shaped by how well your TVP shows up in your culture, which consists of the practices and messages employees encounter and expect in their workplace—what people do and don’t do, what they say and don’t say. 
Most companies with a distinctive EX and high levels of engagement have managed to closely align their day-to-day culture with the core elements of their TVP. Creating that connection may seem straightforward, but it’s harder than it sounds, especially if your TVP has fallen out of sync with what your employees truly care about.  
Case Study: The importance of having a clear and compelling TVP was made apparent during a recent engagement with a client whose workforce was largely distributed and remote even prior to the pandemic. They asked us to help reimagine their EX in order to address their high turnover. At the outset, they believed employees were leaving due to weak connections with colleagues—a reasonable assumption given their remote workforce. However, after conducting research through the TVP framework, we discovered that social connection at work was of secondary importance to their employees. In reality, they valued the career growth opportunities enabled by the company above all else. Once the client recognized that their primary TVP was accelerating career growth, they were able to address the turnover problem by providing experiences that helped employees get closer to their ambitions. 
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<h3>Identifying your TVP </h3>
A successful TVP clearly communicates the value employees derive from working for you, and to do that it must speak to their needs. In our EX work with clients, we have identified the six needs that are most commonly expressed by employees.

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Growth 
Need: to make progress and develop personally 
Emotion: I feel motivated
Equity 
Need: to know I’m treated fairly 
Emotion: I feel considered
Recognition 
Need: to receive individual acknowledgment 
Emotion: I feel valued
Environment 
Need: to work under the right conditions 
Emotion: I feel supported
Nature of work 
Need: to see the contribution I’m making 
Emotion: I feel engaged
Team 
Need: to be part of something bigger than myself 
Emotion: I feel inspired
While all of these needs are important, different people prioritize them in different ways. By understanding which needs matter most to your employees in their work experience, you can tailor your TVP around one or two core needs instead of trying to be everything to everyone.
Deciding to better understand your employees’ core needs is a significant first step toward enabling your desired EX. Even before you act on your learnings, the process—which is similar to a typical engagement survey, but with some crucial adjustments—will help them feel heard and understood. When done correctly, it will help you refine your message to prospective hires, so you can attract the talent you want in the future. But it&#8217;s still only the first step.
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<h3>Delivering on your TVP</h3>
Most organizations say they’re committed to their employees, but words alone do not enable EX. More than anything else, your EX depends on the extent to which your culture delivers on your TVP. We have identified distinct cultural enablers that correspond to these six core needs. By focusing your time, effort, and resources on the specific cultural enablers that align with your TVP, you can more confidently and reliably shape your EX.

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To deliver on the core need for growth, employers can focus on&#8230;
Learning: Invest in experiences that demonstrably expand and improve employees’ skills and abilities. 
Career opportunities: Make sure opportunities are prevalent and attainable. 
Mentorship: Facilitate relationships that help bring out the best in your employees.
To deliver on the need for equity, employers can focus on&#8230;
Expectations: Ensure that expectations are clearly communicated and consistent between employees of similar skills and roles. 
Evaluation: Provide fair and frequent feedback on performance, tailored to employees’ individual goals. 
Equal access: Build structures and processes that give peers the same information and consideration for opportunities.
To deliver on the need for recognition, employers can focus on&#8230;
Pay: Explicitly align compensation with each employee’s skills, experience, and contribution. 
Benefits and perks: Offer a variety of resources to support the wide range of employees’ life situations. 
Celebration: Recognize effort and accomplishments in the moments and ways that are meaningful to each individual.
To deliver on the need for environment, employers can focus on&#8230;
Spaces and tools: Equip employees with resources that enhance their ability to do their work well (physically and virtually). 
Autonomy: Empower employees with the freedom to do their work as they see fit, providing guidance only when they need it. 
Work-life fluidity: Encourage employees to exercise agency over their work-life rhythm, and create enough flexibility to honor their needs.
To deliver on the need for nature of work, employers can focus on&#8230;
Impact: Articulate the connection between day-to-day work and the larger purpose of the organization’s offerings. 
Challenge: Push employees to improve and take on new responsibilities, then help them rise to the occasion. 
Variety: Provide opportunities for employees to use multiple skills, day-to-day as well as long-term.
To deliver on the need for team, employers can focus on&#8230;
Trust: Cultivate psychological safety among employees so that they’re comfortable being vulnerable and taking risks. 
Belonging: Build a diverse and inclusive community that fosters connection between employees with varied perspectives. 
Leadership: Practice active, transparent leadership that shows employees the organization is headed in the right direction.
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<h3>Do you know what your employees need right now?</h3>
It’s common wisdom that consumers are increasingly seeking brands that align with their own values and culture, and many business leaders have recognized that the same is true for talent. But competing for talent beyond mere compensation can be perilous: If your TVP promises things that your EX doesn’t actually deliver, your company might come to be seen as insincere and misaligned with the very people you want to attract. Even organizations with a clear TVP and historically positive EX must take the time to reassess and redefine them for the post-COVID era, or else run the risk of getting left behind in today’s competitive labor market.
So, do you know what do your employees need right now?

Ami Elisman

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For leaders looking to challenge the status quo, are you ready to look in the mirror?


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The Key to Innovation: Challenging the Status Quo

As any organization pursues growth and innovation, a likely phrase you will hear from the boardroom is, “We need to challenge the status quo!” Indeed, challenging the status quo is one of the top capabilities that organizations today are trying to develop. It may sound simple, but how exactly do you do it?
First, it is useful to define what we mean by the “status quo.” Generally speaking, we can define the status quo as doing an old thing in an old way. In other terms, the status quo is “the way things are done around here,” like selling the same products to the same customers, having the same meetings, and hiring and promoting the same types of talent we always have.
If the status quo means doing an old thing in an old way, or doing things the way they’ve traditionally been done, then it would appear that innovation means doing a new thing in a new way. Does that mean any organization seeking innovation has to either reinvent themselves or reinvent the wheel, pioneering a completely new industry or solution? Not exactly.
Many of the most useful and most profitable innovations of our time have been those that find a new way to do an old thing–think ride sharing services or the smartphone–or those that create a new experience using existing methods and tools–think podcasts or farm to table dining.
On one hand, this means there’s a lot more room for innovation than it might at first appear. On the other hand, it means any organization struggling to “challenge the status quo” might have to face some uncomfortable questions about itself in order to move forward.
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Challenging your own status quo 
If you’re a leader asking your team to “challenge the status quo,” recognize that what you’re really asking them to do is challenge “the way we do things around here.”
The first step in that process is identifying what the team or organization is actually doing–not what you say you do or what your customers think you do, but what you actually do. What are the tools, processes and products that make the organization tick? This constellation of factors is the status quo that you will need to interrogate and disrupt if you want to innovate.
Once you’ve taken stock of your own status quo, the most important question is: Why do we do these things in these ways?
The point of asking the question is not necessarily to burn the status quo to the ground completely, but to identify the elements within it that are preventing innovation. After all, there are often good reasons that organizations do things the way they do, and there’s no need to fix something that’s not broken. But if your team struggles to explain why they do a particular thing in a particular way, it might be the case that those good reasons either don’t exist anymore or that they need rethinking. In such cases, there are two likely explanations for why things are the way they are: past leaders decided they should be that way based on now-irrelevant factors, or the organization allowed them to get that way over time by losing sight of their original intent or value. In other words, you’ve either made it be or let it be.
In either case, the people within the organization are responsible for the way things are, and the people within the organization must be the ones to change them. So if you’re a leader asking your team to “challenge the status quo,” be aware that you’re potentially asking them to challenge your decisions and leadership, and that your decisions and values might need to shift in order to achieve the innovations you want.

Innovation is not easy, and many organizations fail because they cannot shift their status quo. But if you feel prepared to challenge your own decisions and beliefs for the benefit of the organization, you are ready to begin the journey toward innovation.

Choose your own adventure to discover the best operating model for your organization

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CyOA_DM

How to Accelerate Organizational Impact

When building a new capability, a <a href="https://www.frog.co/designmind/what-leading-cx-companies-still-arent-paying-attention-to" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Center of Excellence (COE)</a> can accelerate organizational impact. Designed by frog Org Activation experts and informed by real-world examples, this interactive guide will help you identify the COE design that is right for your team from five proven COE models.
First, choose the responses that most closely reflect your team in this interactive PDF. Then, view your results to find the recommended COE design for your organization.
Download the interactive guide to learn more about:
<ul>
<li>Which COE design best reflects your team&#8217;s needs</li>
<li>Five proven COE designs for organizations of all sizes</li>
<li>The characteristics of different COE designs as well as linkages with the rest of the organization</li>
</ul>

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Yukari Yamahiro

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Why you should focus on your customers, not your competition

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Enterprise Design_DM

What Leading CX Companies Still Aren't Paying Attention To

Why do some enterprises struggle to create and deliver delightful customer experiences, while others — regardless of their size or maturity — seem to win on their CX? Below, we’ll offer some considerations for those organizations and leaders that find themselves grappling with this dilemma.
Let’s first define <a href="https://www.frog.co/designmind/business-cx-defining-quality-unlocking-potential" target="_blank" rel="noopener">customer experience</a> (CX), which is comprised of all interactions and impressions people have with an organization over time. Interactions include all customer touchpoints, from web or mobile interactions to conversations with an employee in-store or over the phone. Impressions can be anecdotes from friends or colleagues about a brand, as well as news or headlines from earned or unearned media, PR and social media channels. Finally, over time denotes that these interactions go beyond the purchase point, beginning with pre-purchase and extending much further into user journeys. All these things together shape peoples’ opinions about a brand, and in turn can have real economic impact on the company.
The larger the organization, the more challenging it can be to impact and measure customer experience. And, like trust, one negative experience can ruin a lifetime of positive experiences. For multi-channel organizations, there is a lot of opportunity for experience gaps in handoffs.   
Here’s an example of a customer experience gone wrong : 
<ul>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="1">I’ve just experienced a product failure in a new digital app. </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="1">I go to the company’s website, but it does not clearly state who to contact for support.  </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="1">Eventually I find a chat feature, which is actually a bot that directs me to phone a call center. </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="1">The customer service call starts with a long wait time, and then I am transferred to the wrong department. </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="1">The department that is supposed to handle the call realizes that this problem is too technically complex. </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="1">The call is escalated, but then is dropped in transfer without me receiving the help I need. </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="1">To further exacerbate matters, I am serendipitously served up a social media ad promoting the product’s reliability.  </li>
</ul>
In this unfortunate scenario, which department is accountable for the negative customer experience? Is it the product group, the website design, the unresponsive chat bot, the call center representative, technical support, the brand team who created the ad, the marketing agency who placed the ad or the phone company who dropped my call? 
At frog, we are frequently contacted by one of these departments to help improve customer experience. They may ask us to design a new product, a new website or to redesign the entire call center experience. But the reality is that until the entire ecosystem has been designed to <a href="https://www.frog.co/designmind/how_to_measure_and_communicate_customer_experience" target="_blank" rel="noopener">prioritize the customer experience over all other metrics</a> (e.g., sales, call wait times, site clicks, case resolutions, clickthroughs), and until customer experience is integrated into all existing touchpoints, the company is not going to see a significant impact.
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The Rising Bar 
The focus on customer experience by the likes of Airbnb, Apple, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Tesla and other CX leaders has had a profound impact on both consumers and businesses across all industries. For example, as a financial services company, you may pride yourself on how well your experience compares to your peers in the space. However, every user of your product, from a student saving money to a high-level asset manager, is consciously or subconsciously comparing your experience to that of Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
We conducted research to understand what it takes to become a customer-centric enterprise, not just from a strategic perspective but also from an organizational design perspective. Our key take-away? Anyone who tells you they have the secret recipe is lying to you!

CX Executive Summary 
While there are many approaches to transforming into a CX-led company, there are a few consistent considerations. 
 CX in the DNA 
<ul>
<li>Culture is the key to growing and internalizing CX from the bottom up.  </li>
<li>The older the company, the more difficult it is to pivot to CX.  </li>
<li>Unless you were “born with” a CX ethos, the idea that “it’s everyone’s job” equates to “it’s no one’s job.&#8221;</li>
</ul>
The Path to CX 
<ul>
<li>There is no single, correct org design. You must consider and mitigate the risks of each org possible design.  </li>
<li>The path to CX maturity takes an average of five years. </li>
<li>Although B2B CX leadership is rapidly growing, consumer companies have a slight advantage over B2B companies. </li>
</ul>
Roles and Ownership  
<ul>
<li data-leveltext="o" data-font="Courier New" data-listid="6" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="2">A Chief Customer Experience Officer (CXO) can be critical to bridge and lead a company’s transformation.  </li>
<li data-leveltext="o" data-font="Courier New" data-listid="6" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="2">CX sometimes emerges from marketing or technology, sometimes from design, sometimes from customer success. </li>
<li data-leveltext="o" data-font="Courier New" data-listid="6" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="3" data-aria-level="2">Careful coordination and integration between design, marketing, technology, strategy and insights is the key to accelerating impact of CX initiatives. </li>
</ul>
The CX COE 
A COE (sometimes referred to as Center of Excellence or Center of Expertise) can be extremely helpful when standing up a new function within an organization. Often, functions like HR, finance, legal, design or UX may benefit from operating as a COE. COEs may be small and focused or large and scaled. There are five typical CX COE models. <a href="https://go.frog.co/en/accelerate-organizational-impact" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Download the interactive guide to see which one will have the greatest impact in your organization.</a>
The Road to CX Maturity 
The journey to a truly delightful customer experience is not for the faint of heart. It’s time to ask yourself: Where is your organization on the road to CX maturity outlined below?  
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<h2>The Bottom Line</h2>
In our analysis, we identified a few key take-aways for those starting on this journey. See the chart below for examples of how real brands fit into the CX maturity landscape.
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The older the company, the more difficult it can be to achieve a high NPS (Net Promoter Score), since the idea that CX should be everyone&#8217;s job can be foreign.

50+ Years Old

Companies that are trying to break into the top&#8211;right quadrant find a Chief Customer/Experience Officer to be critical in helping push the organization into a CX mindset.

CXO/CCO

Older companies can drive lasting success by maintaining a customer-first mindset. American Express began as a travel services company with an emphasis on customer convenience, and is one of few financial services companies in the top-right quadrant. Disney is also an outlier, due to their inception as a storytelling organization.

50+ Years Going Strong

Some companies have learned how to sharpen their CX focus. Even though Microsoft began its journey with a very low CX mindset, CEO Satya Nadella realized in 2014 that they “needed to build deeper empathy for our customers and their unarticulated and unmet needs.”

Not “Born with It”

Today’s top CX companies were founded with a CX ethos. They are known for their service orientation and were created with a customer-centric purpose. 
Keeping Your Eye on the Prize 
How will you know when you have arrived? There are three key indicators that your organization has reached <a href="https://frogmarketing.typeform.com/to/lUU7Di" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CX maturity</a>:
<ol>
<li>Every decision that every employee in the company makes is tested with the question, “How will this help our customer?”</li>
<li>You do not need to ask or study what other companies are doing to advance customer experience.</li>
<li>The CXO may no longer be needed.</li>
</ol>

“Born with It”

While there are many ways to get there, we see the role of CXO as critical in moving an organization from the mindset that CX is no one’s job to the mindset that CX is everyone’s job. The executive-level impact, the focus and accountability, as well as the ability to educate the organization on great CX is critical to success.
Your organization may be looking to leading CX companies for insights, but what these CX leaders aren’t doing is studying others — they&#8217;re focusing on their customers, not the competition. If you’re ready to take the next step in your journey towards becoming a CX-led organization, find out what organizational design model is right for you with our <a href="https://go.frog.co/en/accelerate-organizational-impact" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Choose Your Own Adventure quiz</a>, and start a conversation with a frog <a href="https://www.frog.co/services/org-activation" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Org Activation </a>expert.

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Authors 

Design talent changes companies, companies change design talent

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The Gap Between Corporate and Creative Culture is Closing

The talent landscape is always evolving. With social media providing new levels of transparency and changing expectations of creative and tech talent, companies need to start competing not just on their customer experience, but on their employee experience as well. The next generation of talent with in-demand skills is seeking purpose-driven organizations, meaningful jobs, inclusive cultures, vibrant office environments, authentic and vulnerable leadership, psychological safety and belonging, and flexible work arrangements.
What are decades-old organizations to do? Whether leading or following in the culture race, each year more organizations are investing in their talent through maturing existing functions and adding new functions and capabilities. One of the fastest-growing disciplines is design. Once a strategic differentiator, design is now all but necessary to connect with customers and drive relevant and emotional solutions for the market.
At frog, we have seen the balance shifting from clients asking us to design for them, to clients asking us to design with them, and now to clients asking us to develop and enable their in-house design talent. In order to rise to the demand, we also see design pushing the boundaries of corporate recruiting priorities and policies. Just as an influx of MBAs caused major shifts in campus recruiting strategies in the 80s and 90s, today’s design talent creates new challenges for HR, operations and executives alike.
Corporate gets creative 
Unlike MBAs, design talent is not necessarily motivated by titles and compensation. What can be a big turn off is restrictive dress codes, stifling political maneuverings, and uninspired workplaces. Having an environment that nurtures creativity can now be just as important as more traditional employee benefits.
One of the most talented creative directors I know tells a story that perfectly encapsulates this shift. Years ago, he arrived at the building for his final interview at a top tech brand that had been wooing him with the promise of massive budgets and headcount, along with the autonomy and freedom to “push the envelope.” At the time, it was one of the most sought after head design jobs in tech. But when he cruised into the parking lot on his Ducati, he found himself staring at a corporate office park of endless low-lying beige buildings, and a uniformed mass of Dilberts trudging in from a sea of sedans and minivans. At that moment, he knew that his heart would never be able to sing the way it did in the dynamic, rich chaos of a creative studio. So, he drove right off the lot without even stepping foot into the building.
Sound crazy? He probably made the right decision. We so often hear of talented design and tech hires that are lured into large enterprises with the promise of operating in a “startup environment.” On paper, it seems perfect—all the freedom of a startup, all the resources of a stable, legacy company. But they quickly find that political realities are harsh and that even the most celebrated creative leader is no match for the corporate planning cycle.
Enterprise culture is slowly catching up, however. We have seen significant changes from the demands of designers and other younger technical talent. Design is pushing talent acquisition to think differently about where and how they source talent. In the same way that the new generation of talent has been a forcing function for organizations to invest in employee experience and diversity, designers have even further pushed HR to review an even broader swath of policies and practices. Goldman Sachs has relaxed its dress code (gasp!), and a major non-American bank we work with has been re-evaluating its drug testing policy in order to make it easier to attract the talent they are looking for. Additionally, our <a href="https://www.frog.co/services/architecture-places">Architecture &amp; Places </a>practice is growing by leaps as employers realize that inspired and creative work requires equally inspired and creative workplaces.
Creative gets corporate 
On the flip side, while the new talent landscape is demanding that employers evolve to attract diverse talent with new skills and capabilities, corporations are also demanding more of this new workforce.
While we have long taught design thinking in business schools all over the world, more recently the capability-building we are seeing increasing demand for is business skills for design teams. If designers want to sit side-by-side with strategy and line leadership, they need to know how to read a balance sheet, what an EBIDTA is, and how market caps are defined. We are also teaching this to frogs and design students in many of the top design schools around the world, including the School of Visual Arts (SVA).
Within many other industry-leading forums such as <a href="https://www.invisionapp.com/design-leadership-forum">InVision’s Design Leadership Forum</a>and the <a href="https://www.dmi.org/page/Conferences">DMI Leadership</a> conference, topics primarily focus on articulating the business value of design, developing talent, leadership skills, influencing and navigating politics, educating the organization, understanding and measuring KPIs, and the importance of diversity.
Like the functions that have arisen in the past to demand a “seat at the table,” design must both push the corporate boundaries, as well as learn to embrace (or at least tolerate) some of the indisputable realities of corporate life: politics, budget cycles, the thirst for quantitative data, risk aversion, internal competition.
Closing the gap  
The cycle of designers working in enterprises currently averages two years. While the HR dashboard might see the turnover and attrition as an uphill battle, forward-thinking companies are changing their mindset and all but abandoning retention as a top strategy. Instead, they are prioritizing deliberate onboarding, strong alumni networks, and intentional boomerang programs.
The movement of design talent from enterprise to agency and back is healthy and in many cases, desirable. At frog, we are happy to send our great talent out in the world to build new companies and products, and just as happy to welcome them back with their newfound empathy for our clients’ real organizational dilemmas.
And within the work we do with our clients, we’re excited to see companies and enterprises of all sizes really starting to grasp the business value of design—and more importantly design talent. Because of our wide range of expertise across industries—from legacy players to new ventures alike—we are able to help our clients build, maintain and scale best-in-class design capabilities. We’ve worked with leading companies, like <a href="https://www.frog.co/designmind/the-new-enterprise-designer">American Express</a>, to create a pathway of growth for internal design functions. Through our <a href="https://www.frog.co/services/org-activation">Org Activation practice</a>, we solve the most complex organizational puzzles to ensure companies get the most out of their investment in design, and that design talent is able to flourish—even in legacy corporate environments.

In her role, Linda provides a broad range of consultative services to build capability and improve organizational performance with clients globally. After more than two decades leading organization transformations from within, Linda brings empathy for leaders driving culture change, innovation and growth in organizations from startups to Fortune 50.

frog and BCP, Peru's largest bank, worked together to create a path for designers within a financial services enterprise.

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Dialing up Design in a Large Enterprise

<h6>So you’ve stood up a design function in your organization. Good! Now what?</h6>
This is the exact question that Banco de Crédito del Perú (BCP) was asking itself when it reached out to frog. BCP is Peru’s largest bank in a country with tremendous opportunity to reach some of the most significant un- and under-banked populations. As a part of a massive transformation, BCP had ambitious aspirations to claim the best customer experience in all of Peru—not just among banks, but all Peruvian brands.
When frog first visited BCP, we were impressed by all the progress that had already been made. After embarking on a world tour of customer-centric organizations, the executive committee had adopted an agile tribe model, standing up agile as a new way of working, and transformed the corporate campus into a vibrant and inviting creative environment covered in bright Post-it Notes and whiteboard sketches. We even found people playing musical instruments in corners of team spaces. As designers, we felt right at home.

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In just three years, BCP had grown a design team from 4 people to nearly 60 UX, UI, and design researchers. They had adopted new cultural principles including “Customer Centric: Our clients are at the center of all our decisions.” The battle to get a seat for design in the organization had been won, but how does the enterprise sustain and scale the design function? The question they posed to frog was, “how are we doing, and where do we go from here?”
BCP’s head of design, Mariela Sotomayor, and frog embarked on an intensive six-week program to answer these questions, starting from the shared premise that driving business impact requires much more than excellent design craft. The correct approach, environment, talent and passion is needed, along with a strong mind-shift from technology and business partners to truly embrace and appreciate design within the company.
Methodological approach 
The main inputs gathered to support the assessment included surveys on existing design capabilities, at both individual and organizational levels, and project debrief sessions with teams. We also conducted a high number of formal and informal interviews with BCP and design leaders, design team members and other key business roles.
Surveys 
A cross-functional organizational survey was deployed across leadership, design and key functions to evaluate how the design vision was being supported in execution by the talent, processes, structure and enabling tools/technology.
In addition, an individual design skills survey was deployed within the design team in a 360º format, with the aim of gathering not only the self-assessment from designers on their own capabilities, but also the perspectives from their managers, peers, direct reports, business partners and frog team. These skills were built upon the “Design Skills Coin” (Moneda) that frog created specifically for BCP.
Project debrief sessions 
Twelve in-depth project debriefs took place. In order to maximize the effectiveness of the sessions, teams prepared homework that included a project scorecard and emotional journey map. Through the two-hour sessions, we understood what was done, why and how, as well as the impact. We also had the opportunity to better understand the designers’ skills and identify some of their main opportunity areas.
On-site visit and stakeholders interviews 
Both during the executive visit by key leaders to the frog NY studio, and during the frog stays in Lima, we had the opportunity to really get to know the BCP and design leaders, the design team members, and other key business partners. Through individual and group interviews, as well as more informal conversations, we achieved a deep understanding of their perspectives as well as the strategic and cultural transformation context of BCP.

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Outcomes 
In total, frog synthesized over 50 hours of intake, resulting in a set of impactful outcomes. At the individual level, frog provided each of the 52 designers with an individual scorecard including the results of their 360º assessment and their main strengths and opportunity areas according to the comments of their evaluators. Additionally, designers received a development guide devoted to helping them create a specific action plan to develop and grow their design capabilities according to the results obtained.
At the organizational level, frog delivered the design organization assessment and the resulting high-level observations or opportunity areas for the design area, as well as a set of 6 actionable recommendations and 60 tactics framed in a prioritized two-year roadmap for implementation

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The resulting roadmap is informing key areas of investment and growth for BCP as they continue to grow on their journey to excellence. BCP is creating a path for designers within their enterprise, adding strategic value to the business through close partnerships, and influencing the overall strategy of leadership as it learns more about customers’ needs through design.

Understanding the value of design for your organization is the first important step in what should be an ongoing conversation and assessment relying on cross-functional learning across design, business and technology. Design can push organizations to grow, to adapt and to innovate, but the organization itself must be part of that journey. Only if the whole organization truly understands and involves design in the early stages of the decision-making process is it possible to elevate design to the strategic level and, consequently, drive customer-centricity across the organization.

Mariela Sotomayor

Nieves Padilla

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Linda Quarles is Director, Strategy + Org Activation at frog. In her role, Linda provides a broad range of consultative services to build capability and improve organizational performance with clients globally. After more than two decades leading organization transformations from within, Linda brings empathy for leaders driving culture change, innovation and growth in organizations from startups to Fortune 50.
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Mariela Sotomayor is Head of Strategic Design at BCP. At the bank she focuses on leading the design team and guiding projects through the perspective of human centered design. With an Industrial design background, Mariela brings more than 12 years of experience in product and service design and has worked with social organizations and in different industries tackling challenges related to education, public services, financial services and healthcare.
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Nieves Padilla is a Senior Strategist at frog Madrid. Combining an innovative mindset and a practical approach to make data-driven decisions, she is able to conceptualize complex business challenges in order to drive change in organizations. She brings more than 8 years of experience in strategy consulting engagements involving customer experience transformation, organizational transformation and corporate and portfolio strategy for worldwide companies within industries such as financial services, transport, services or tourism &amp; entertainment.
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frog’s human-centered approach to creating change within organizations

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From ‘Change Management’ to ‘Change Engagement’

<h2>What is frog’s approach when it comes to change management?</h2>
As co-lead of frog’s <a href="https://www.frog.co/services/org-activation" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Org Activation</a> practice, I am asked this question nearly weekly by clients and internal teams alike. Because most of our design and innovation clients are leading provocative or disruptive products and experiences into the market, there is bound to be some organizational resistance in the process. Thus the proclivity towards wanting to bring in experts in change management. But like everything else in our current business and technological landscape, theories around enterprise organization are rapidly evolving. In order to define the future of this practice, it’s helpful to look to its past in order to more fully understand the context.
Change theory throughout the decades 
Change theory for companies dates back to the mid-20th century when Kurt Lewin came up with the concept that organizations needed to “unfreeze, change, and re-freeze” to dismantle existing mindsets. The theory was particularly useful at this time, as the industrial age was transitioning to the information age, creating huge ripple effects in the way companies conducted business.
A new field emerges 
The field of “Change Management” officially emerged in the 1990s as enterprises needed to respond to rapidly changing technology and competition. Many enterprises were managing massive enterprise software installations and embarking on complex M&amp;A activity. John Kotter’s eight-step change model expanded on Lewin’s work, focusing on “leading change” as IT implementations and M&amp;A were increasingly failing due to human inertia and resistance. The idea that “70 percent of transformation efforts fail” was also introduced by Kotter—though this statistic has no source in any academic or popular study. Edward Deming further simplified the actionability of change models with the idea of “plan-do-check-act” as a change-reinforcing routine.
Through the 2000s, many appreciative models emerged to counter/compliment Kotter’s “burning platform” theory. These useful models expanded beyond painting a bleak picture of what it would mean to stay the same (logic of consequences), with an aspirational perspective of why move towards the future (logic of positive impact), (Heath/Heath, Cooperrider, Kegan/Laney). During this period, change management experienced expansion beyond IT into broad applicability in organizational systems theory. In large organizations, HR, IT and the PMO became the primary stewards of change. In mid-size companies, systems integrators and change management consultancies took the charge.
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<h2>What’s the state of change today?</h2>
Two stories come to mind as I reflect on change management and its state at this moment. Not too long ago, I was at a small gathering where we had the opportunity to hear from Jim Carroll, futurist and innovation expert. Much of Jim’s consulting centers around coaching clients to prepare for change. He noted that at his talks recently, as his audience is comprised more of millennials and younger professionals, they are increasingly confused by his calls to plan and prepare for changes ahead. “Why not just change?” is the question they ask. He has realized that the field of change is essentially disappearing. “I’m talking my way out of a job,” was his observation.
The other example is with a large outsourced services client that frog is working with to reimagine the future of their offerings. One of the products we envisioned for them will be positioned as a solution for “organizations in transition.” May sound targeted and clever, but it is essentially a ruse. Because, let’s face it… what company isn’t in transition? Thus, we are left asking ourselves: What is the role of change management when only those organizations that are change-capable will survive?
Let’s look at two common monikers often overheard in meetings and workshops:
“Change is the only constant.” 
If change is constant in organizations, then it is essentially equivalent to life in organizations. So change management effectively is “life management.” Because we no longer have a “frozen” state in any aspect of organizational leadership, there is no longer a state of “change” vs. “not change.”
“Change is slow… until it’s not.” 
Change will happen, and one can make it happen or it can happen to one. People generally overestimate how much will change in one year, and underestimate how much will change in ten years. The better an organization and its leaders become at managing in adaptive ways, the less relevant change management becomes because we are making change happen, rather than managing the change that is happening around us.
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<h2>Change Engagement</h2>
While there is still value in change as a process to navigate a moment in time, the reality is that what organizations need is change resilience and change capacity. Or, what we like to call change engagement. So yes, frog can manage you through an eight-step process starting with creating urgency, a powerful coalition, a vision for change, and so on. We can create awareness, desire, knowledge—all from a very human-centered perspective. We do it all the time.
However, we know that the capabilities of ‘agility,’ ‘adaptability,’ ‘flexibility,’ ‘learning,’ and ‘leading through change’ are consistently among the top most sought after executive, leadership and organizational capabilities by nearly every research study and industry list published in the past few years.
What we see in our clients’ future is this: Rather than “managing change,” we partner to build purpose-driven change engagement. By building the capabilities to operate in the new reality of constant change, change no longer is something that the organization anticipates, fears, or plans for.
Here is an example of how this works. The first step in Kotter’s framework is to “create a sense of urgency” and the third step is “create a vision for change.” Together, these steps articulate the “why” and the “why now?” for a change effort. At frog, you’ll hear us referring to this as the “North Star.” Many change programs will have decided what change will be, and then realize they need to articulate the why. But what if teams were constantly asking themselves, “why are we doing this?” in every action, every decision. This is what we mean when we talk about being “purpose-driven.”
Every person in an organization, from the CEO to an intern, should be asking themselves why they are doing what they are doing. What value does it bring to the customer? What impact will it have in the world? In this case, one doesn’t have to create a vision for something retroactively because it’s always been there. It fulfills your purpose for being. One of our clients has every individual, including the janitor, asking “how is what I am doing helping our customer?” They don’t have to create change initiatives because they never stop asking, how can this be better? This is what we mean when we encourage “engagement” over “management.” By increasing engagement, a janitor at this company now holds a patent because he had a great idea to improve a customer experience and the organization was designed to listen and act on that great idea without having to enact a “change plan.”
In today’s landscape “change” hardly exists because like the air we breathe, it is always there. The organization inhales and exhales what each day brings, without treating it as a deliberate activity. Because it is ever-present, we don’t prepare for our inhale and exhale. We don’t think about changing, we just do it. We are it.
Is your organization ready to start inhaling and exhaling without effort? Read <a href="https://go.frog.co/en/designing_human_centered_organization" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Designing the Human-Centered Organization</a>” to learn more about how you can do this.

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Org Activation report

Linda Quarles is Director, Strategy + Org Activation at frog. In her role, Linda provides a broad range of consultative services to build capability and improve organizational performance with clients globally. After more than two decades leading organization transformations from within, Linda brings empathy for leaders driving culture change, innovation and growth in organizations from startups to Fortune 50.

How the design process lets us reassemble data when our brains crave patterns but our markets want us to break them

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Pattern Un-Recognition

Despite the exponential leaps and surprising learnings each year in neuroscience, what remains certain is that one of the brain’s primary functions is to find patterns and make connections. Patterns help us simplify and quickly make sense of the constant barrage of data that is coming at our brains through our five senses. Being able to condense and filter information into patterns, and recognize those patterns, keeps us sane and safe. But with increasing pressure for companies and brands to rapidly innovate and adapt to emerging technology and changing customer expectations, relying on old patterns is anything but safe. So, how do you begin to do something differently when your brain is hardwired to fall back on the same patterns?
Patterns can help or hinder 
Gestalt theory seeks to explain the perceptual processes that allow us to make patterns visually. These habits of mind have been a huge boon for graphic designers. For example, the IBM logo designed by Paul Rand in 1972 is comprised of 37 disconnected blue shapes; 35 quadrilaterals, 1 triangle and 1 irregular 13 sided shape. But when we look at the logo, our minds effortlessly make sense of these shapes. Using the proximity and similarity of the shapes, along with our past experiences, the brain groups the disconnected markings into familiar letters, allowing us to see exactly what the designer intended.
However, as design is increasingly a strategic driver in business, we find that we often have to help our clients work with un-curated data that needs to be grouped from many different perspectives because there are no ‘right’ groups. Like with the IBM logo, the first attempt to make meaningful groupings out of the data often relies on past experience. This is true both in the outlines that we believe are meaningful, like the Roman alphabet, and in the types of similarity or proximity that we can easily observe and believe are salient. In strategic efforts to understand areas of opportunity or market segments, this often takes the shape in easily identifiable demographics. These groupings are familiar because they have created meaning in the past. But for companies who want to innovate, they need a way to see new patterns and new groups that convey new meaning.
Patterns create “grooves” in our memories, making new paths difficult to chart. The patterns that protected us from harm and made sense of the world can often become evolutionary biases or personal or institutional habits of thought. Sometimes to see a new pattern, you need to disassemble the pieces, which is something anyone can learn to do. The design process allows us to suspend judgment long enough to consider, if not commit to, new formations that break the status quo. Below are three methods that frog uses to disassemble familiar groups and find new patterns that can lead to insights for opportunity and innovation.
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<h6>1. Re-arrange: Understanding the underlying emotion</h6>
One method that we employ to see beyond expected patterns is an affinity diagram. Rather than organizing information around pre-existing categories, creating an affinity diagram allows common experiences and themes to bubble up out of the qualitative data collected from in-depth interviews. For those new to it, this can be a surprising and slow process but what emerges are groupings based on similarity and proximity of experience that no one on the team could have predicted.
For instance, in conducting research with breast cancer patients, we were surprised to discover which aspects of the process people found most difficult. Rather than the initial diagnosis, hair loss, surgery, the uncertainty of waiting for results, or the physical effects of treatment, participants cited the moment they had to tell their children as the most difficult. Understanding this, our client was able to provide better support resources around a largely ignored part of the patient’s experience.
Fears, motivations and misconceptions surface when asking the right questions, which can also help make sense of market data that seemed to point to irrational or inconsistent user behavior. We have new insight, not just into the what, but also the why. When companies understand the fears or changing motivations or incomplete mental models that dictate the actions of their customers or users, they can provide real value. Disassembling the familiar categories we use to understand customers, creates the opportunity to re-arrange the data and discover new and surprising groups.

re-arrange

Re-Arrange

<h6>2. Re-frame: Segments vs. Archetypes</h6>
Once we understand the underlying emotion, we can generate customer profiles. Typical methods of customer segmentation may include demographic information such as age, gender, marital status, income, geography, education level, etc. As segmentation has evolved, types such as “the soccer mom,” “DINK” (double income no kids), “sandwich generation,” and “millennials” have emerged. However, when getting to know human beings, more often than not these types may not be very helpful in understanding peoples’ deep motivations, needs, desires, hopes, fears and aspirations.
Demographic segmentation assumes that behaviors are static and that individuals with similar external characteristics have the same internal beliefs and motivation. But as we are learning, types such as “millennial” are too generic to be useful in true customer-centric design. Instead, customer archetypes describe customer motivation and action, understanding that in different circumstances the same person may embody different archetypes. To create these archetypes we have to remove our biases around familiar groups and try different ways of looking at the data until we discover the factors that actually bind customers into meaningful groups based on behavior and motivation.
By reframing customer data to align on behaviors, we can create more meaningful experiences and more lasting, durable customer relationships. For example, <a href="https://go.frog.co/en/consumers_are_people_too">we have uncovered unexpected buyer archetypes</a> such as “the spotter” who is hunting for deals and “the socializer” who gets input from others on their purchases. These archetypes transcend typical market segments and are much more useful to companies when creating campaigns.

re-frame-1080

Re-Frame-1080

<h6>3. Re-focus: The wisdom is in the system</h6>
One of the ways the brain makes sense of the constant barrage of data is to filter out things we think we already understand. For example, we may not notice the drive to work anymore because our brain has a model for that, which gives us space to think about other things. Organizations sometimes stop really seeing their employees because they think they already know what is there, or think their model for that group is complete. In the same way that clients may not see the groupings or motivations that matter for customers, they also sometimes miss the same for their employees.
A key source of truth in our discovery process is the employees of our client companies. Whether we are speaking with executives, line managers or individual contributors, the surprising truth is that even when we ask the most basic of questions (e.g., what would make our products better? What would make our company better?) everyone has a unique point of view that they are willing to share. This is why so often, the wisdom is in the system. While many organizations conduct employee sentiment surveys to understand engagement or employee experience, what they often fail to do is harness the collective wisdom in the organization to uncover new market opportunities.
Sometimes you are so close to the patterns that you cannot see them, and it takes discipline to pause and step back to refocus on the answer, which may be right in front of you.

re-focus

Re-Focus

In order to move beyond the brain’s familiar defaults, consider bringing diverse perspectives into your teams to re-arrange, re-frame and re-focus to see new patterns. Put in place methods that force you to suspend your judgment and engage in new ways of seeing the world.
Even some of the most experienced and ingenious designers and strategists can sometimes find that they are too close to their own data to see new patterns. The key is to recognize this and find a way to get additional perspective; many choose to partner with a strategic design firm. Consider broadening your view of the world and perhaps even turning it upside-down in the process.

Samara Watkiss

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Linda Quarles is Director, Strategy + Org Activation at frog. In her role, Linda provides a broad range of consultative services to build capability and improve organizational performance with clients globally. After more than two decades leading organization transformations from within, Linda brings empathy for leaders driving culture change, innovation and growth in organizations from startups to Fortune 50.
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As a Senior Interaction Designer, Samara Watkiss brings strategic and creative problem solving together to achieve business goals, and improve experiences for users and employees. She is engaged in frog’s Healthcare and Org Activation practices and is passionate about designing a future that makes the benefits of technology and innovation accessible to everyone.
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Linda Quarles

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