Figure 40: Exploring Design Awakening
This section explores the relationships in how METSCo overcame the barriers in understanding, accepting and utilizing design-led innovation. The significant relationship that will be explored within this temporal theme looks at the shift in employees across all levels of METSCo, to actively participate in design-led innovation activities and engage with the market. The data will present the effects of internal and external influences that shifted participants to engage with the design-led innovation process.
DLI Credibility and Temporal Understanding
Figure 41: Exploring DLI Credibility and Temporal Understanding
As the positioning of the researcher and the DLI project was not receiving a desired level of internal buy-in, the orientation of the DLI team was restructured within METSCo from a role that was ‘doing’ a lot of the work, to one that ‘organised and facilitated’ others to participate and have input into. “I think DLI lends itself
more to a coaching exercise than a training exercise. I think it’s something people need to experience by doing”. As METSCo operates within the mining industry, the
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shifting the position of the DLI team, the researcher’s goal was to instil design-led innovation within the employees, who interact with the customers, to bring new knowledge into the DLI project and to build validity around new design propositions. This position allowed a greater focus on knowledge dissemination, theory training and facilitation of the design tools. Observational data suggests that participant’s fluctuate in their understanding of design-led innovation. “In the early
days when you are not understanding the language or the perspective…it’s painful, it’s tough”. Shifting the role of the DLI team to help facilitate the engineering
driven company has shown to help the participants learn their way through understanding design-led innovation. Within this change, engineers begin to witness professional skills within design that are not implicit within the engineering profession. “Part of me feels as though designers are better with moving constraints
than we are, and working within them”.
Top Down Buy-in and Temporal Understanding
Figure 42:Exploring Temporal Understanding and Top Down Buy-In
Before the researcher began the project at METSCo, design-led innovation had already received sponsorship from the M.D. “He wanted to find mechanisms to
embed more of that (DLI) thinking more deeply into the whole engineering team so that the place wasn’t just dependent on (a few key people)”. Numerous observations
throughout the DLI project witnessed the M.D present his own personal journey in understanding the theory of design-led innovation. He describes to the wider METSCo his own continual journey of uncomfortable change, moments of clarity, which is then followed by self-doubt. He reflects that each change in thinking is so painful and different, that when reaching a point of clarity he believes that he now
understands design-led innovation, until he re-engages in it and the feeling of self- doubt and understanding continues.
While this leadership was admired internally, participants saw the buy-in from the top as crucial because, “The most successful change in this organization is
directly sponsored by the M.D. So if he decrees something, then we all get into line and make things happen; if we don't, there is no other mechanism to make that happen”. Within METSCo, their hierarchical structure indicates that, "The tone of the M.D sets the tone of the management team, who sets the tone of the business".
Being acutely aware of his business, the M.D advised that the diffusion of design-led innovation would achieve the greatest success from the top-down and the bottom-up.
“It would be really nice if the status of DLI can be clearly identified within (METSCo) at the management level, to get serious attention and buy-in with the management team. And then, in parallel to that gets DLI into the ‘guy in stores’ so that everyone’s aware”.
Active Engagement of Managers and Customer Facing Employees
Figure 43: Exploring the Active Engagement of Managers and Customer Facing Employees
METSCo indicated early on that they “Have plateaued in terms of our growth
within the marketplace”. Early DLI project work pushed the message that, “We
should probably talk to our customers before we make decisions, and I think that was a hugely important activity”. While this message and an effect on some employees, it was indicated that the market downturn instilled the need for change to, “Look at
other areas, new products, new business models, new services”. With an impending
revenue threat, internal focus shifted with the realisation that technology innovation and risk aversion did not secure company success.
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The managers responsible for the prototyping project realised that both METSCo and their customers are trying to conduct business within an industry-wide downturn. While METSCo were innately aware of its pressures, they could only speculate how this downturn might be affecting their customers and what ramifications it might have on current and future business. Using the tools and techniques promoted by the DLI team, seemed like a risk-free way to quickly test an offering within a turbulent market. In order for management to prototype potential offerings with customers, meant collaboration with customer-facing employees.
“We've started working on a service offering, where we profile the customer and we're trying to continue the prototyping loop where we're debriefing our sales staff at the moment, and just making general notes on those”.
Because the pressure to maintain revenue was high, staff saw the prototyping
task as a selling task. “Guys are feeling ambushed to sell in 24 hours – they don’t
know the product they are being asked to sell… the difference is between selling and prototyping”.
Although management faced communication issues with the customer-facing
employees, the prototyping activity was being caught in slowed down by, “People,
who wouldn’t let something go out that was a prototype”. One participant
highlighted that, “People still have the old management and innovation paradigms”. Observations revealed that with tenacity and a consistent message, managers were showing leadership in creating the internal change needed for METSCo to accept design-led innovation. “I just think the challenge is to be brave enough to talk in the
DLI language when the rest of the company isn't...taking a proactive measure to get something that you can see value in”. This cultural change was first witnessed with
the project received buy-in from the M.D. Through the prototyping activity, employees were championing design-led innovation activities internally, and management began establish trust and convincing other employees in seeing the value of design-led innovation. “We’ve managed to convince a couple of the senior
execs who were blockers that we can think about other things other than products, and that’s huge”. What lies beneath this change has been simply summarised. “The culture of (METSCo) is innovative, and innovators change. We respect innovation; we want to be part of the innovation circle. We want to constantly improve. We have those things embedded into our core values”