Across industries, roles and regions, it is often believed that the way to get ahead in ones career is to show up, work hard, do as you are told, and eventually you will get recognized and move your way up through the ranks. However, that does not really foster innovation and growth on an organizational level. At the end of the day, if companies are not innovating, they are quickly fading away, and that does not seem like job security to me!
Within Design Management and the buzz around design thinking these days, it is becoming more accepted that an inquisitive / explorative mind set is creating new business frontiers. And this (hopefully) means that business executives are now willing to listen to those artsy folks who were making pretty things. Managing designers takes a special balance between giving them their space and allowing for freedom (creativity) while working within constraints (briefs and deliverables). Often these designers do not fully speak their mind, yet these designers can be your biggest asset to foster organizational innovation.
While no one likes a trouble maker, I believe that by identifying, encouraging, and providing a platform that allow your designers who question strategic directions to be (potentially) heard at an executive level can foster the change your organization may need to not only stay alive, but thrive by creating new markets. Should a designer really be designing a new water bottle, when what they believe is that there should be a new sustainable system behind that? Allow them to speak freely, and these trouble makers, heretics, people who ask too many questions just may raise the right questions and challenges to shift strategic direction from the bottom up.
Although identifying and encouraging change can be good, the task behind managing and implementing it is a challenge that often closes the door. According to Caluwe & Vermaak, in a study of Change Paradigms, they propose a system of colors to identify and manage agents of change. The color system comprises five types of change agents:
- Yellow – getting everyone to think the same wavelength,
- Blue – change according to set plans,
- Red – change based on behavior and emotion,
- Green – change based on collective learning and growth, and
- White – change through an evolutionary process.
As a Design Manager, identifying and managing change through Green thinkers (who are often designer mindsets who continually seek new learning) and White thinkers (who are holistic thinkers and try to understand where opportunities lie and search for seeds of renewal and creativity), just may be your future design leaders and agents of change your organization needs.
http://www.decaluwe.nl/articles/ChangeParadigms.pdf
Tags: change management, culture, organisation
