Design Thinking in HR

How do you create significant change within age-old structures governed by budgetary constraints and legal considerations to protect business culture? During late August 2015 we suddenly realised that there was a methodology out there that opened up opportunities for some much-needed fresh thinking in HR.

For years, using our expertise and intuition in equal measure, we have followed a gap analysis approach informed by the assumptions and perceptions of those in senior roles client-side.  Since a thorough understanding of business context has always been fundamental to our approach, the Beyond team has often fought against restrictive norms and existing paradigms. However, many businesses simply don’t have the patience or the budget to make sure we have a sufficient depth of base information to deliver real change.

When clients have seen the value of accompanying us on this journey, it is fair to say that the outcome has always been significantly more successful over the long-term.

But back to the fresh thinking: Design Thinking.

When you look at the core components of Design Thinking, they are logical steps on the path to uncovering needs and gaps which lead to the right solution that stakeholders can buy into.  We no longer need to worry that we won’t be able to tell our story in the way they want us to.  By creating an opportunity to think of the way that things could be rather than having our hands tied by the history or the statutory, helps us find new ways of engaging employees through the whole employee lifecycle and create a greater EVP (Employee Value Proposition).

We’ve been using this technique across a number of projects recently including:

• Uncovering the learning ecosystem - in order to create the right solution for the right audience, we first need to understand the learner and learning ecosystem – what was important, why and how should it be engaged?
• Delivering learning content – we have used (and exposed learners to) the Design Thinking process in both content design and delivery. This has resulted in new ways of delivering content. Sessions have also been structured in a way that allows participants to identify new ways to solve old problems
• Managing change – if you want different results but use the same tried and tested approach, you’ll be sorely disappointed – we’ve used Design Thinking to consider other ways to engage audiences (the empathy sessions have been very telling).
• Creating technology solutions – we’re in the process of working through the design thinking methods to uncover why and how a new piece of learning technology might serve the individual and the business - and what it will achieve.

Design thinking process has been around for many years, but it is only now that we can really see the opportunities it provides for the people functions. At Beyond Performance we believe we need to get on the bus or be left at the station.