Innovation isn’t always flashy. It isn’t always about technology. For many entrepreneurs right now, it’s the quiet work of figuring out how to keep your business going during the sea of change caused by:
A. Covid Fallout
B. Supply Chain Challenges
C. The Great Resignation/Reshuffle
D. Rapid Growth and Rising Prices
E. All of the Above
Marc Bolick, managing partner at Design Thinkers Group, USA, leads a team that’s been helping organizations accelerate innovation by using the practices of design thinking. Design thinking applies a nonlinear, human-centered approach usually seen in the design world to solving problems and spurring innovation in any context.
You collaborate. You try out prototypes. You make your winding way toward a significant change. Bolick talked with GVLinnovates about how companies — including his own — can innovate during challenging times.
Where are you seeing companies innovate most these days?
They are responding multiple pressures around employee engagement, talent acquisition, onboarding and retaining the best talent at different levels. With new or accelerated ideas of working from home, all of that is a soup of trouble for HR and leadership. So we see companies re-strategizing at a high level, and the HR organization trying to up-skill and up their game around the employee experience.
The other trend is a clear rewrite of the dynamics in some industries with regard to supply chain challenges.
How has this environment affected your own business?
We had to fast-track some things that had been on a slow track. And our delivery model was affected. We tested and learned we couldn’t really just move online, because three 8-hours days on Zoom will just blend your brain into nothing.
We had no idea what to do. We were faced with an existential dilemma. And that’s the perfect time to use design thinking. It was our core team having discussions, and at some point, somebody came to the realization that we needed a strategy.
We said, let’s turn design thinking on ourselves in a big way.
One thing we did was look at the structure of the company. We have two employees, two partners, a core team of contractors, and consultants — recognized authors and speakers, who often bring in leads. So, we’re designing how we work with them. We’re in the process of building a platform to enable all that and make it work really smoothly.
How was the experience of using the design thinking process on yourselves?
It’s really easy. It’s like we can’t really think any other way. Everything we do is infused with highly collaborative, human centered, people before technology.
We hired an expert design thinking strategist to take us through the process. We’ve done it before on the cheap where we don’t hire somebody, and it doesn’t work.
I learned from doing one of your workshops and working with you that design thinking can become emotional. Was that the case for your team?
From an emotional standpoint, that was deep in the middle of Covid and I’ll tell you, I feel very proud that we’re a close-knit team of eight people. While everybody was in that very uncertain period, we’re very much a community that supported one another. We were all just surviving. There were some emotions about the uncertainty of the storm, but we took care of each other.
As for innovating around our service, we came to focus on a specific challenge. A lot of times people do design thinking and get all jazzed up, but they are just embryonic ideas that need to be tested and prototyped. But I’ve seen where our participants get back to the office and have to fight all these antibodies, so to speak, that want to kill off the new idea. They need more help so those ideas can see the light of day.
And what internal innovations did the process generate?
We’re all about building the capability of your own people to do what we do. But we discovered we were leaving clients too early, before the capability was there. Often that happens because of budget, so now we’re moving up in the level of employees we work with.We’re also including later engagements.
The other shift on our side has been to focus on HR and leadership. It’s a big shift. We were at a time when emotions were really high, and we knew people were going to come out of the pandemic with a lot of uncertainty. We felt we could help with that.
There’s no single definition of innovation. And that’s the beautiful thing. Figuring out how to retain employees, being able to get through a recession and still grow, finding innovative ways to help your company survive — that’s innovation.