Human Resource Design: Steering Human-centered Innovation within Organisations (PoliMI SpringerBriefs) 303087611X, 9783030876111

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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN APPLIED SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGY · POLIMI SPRINGER BRIEFS

Martina Rossi

Human Resource Design Steering Human-centered Innovation within Organisations

SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology

PoliMI SpringerBriefs Editorial Board Barbara Pernici, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy Stefano Della Torre, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy Bianca M. Colosimo, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy Tiziano Faravelli, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy Roberto Paolucci, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy Silvia Piardi, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy

More information about this subseries at http://www.springer.com/series/11159 http://www.polimi.it

Martina Rossi

Human Resource Design Steering Human-centered Innovation within Organisations

Martina Rossi Department of Design Politecnico di Milano Milan, Italy

ISSN 2191-530X ISSN 2191-5318 (electronic) SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology ISSN 2282-2577 ISSN 2282-2585 (electronic) PoliMI SpringerBriefs ISBN 978-3-030-87611-1 ISBN 978-3-030-87612-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87612-8 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

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Foreword by Luca Solari

One of the most contentious areas in the research on the connection between strategic HRM and performance concerns the identification of the specific mechanisms through which HR practices may have an impact on behaviours by individuals. The prevalence of a ‘black box’ approach raises dilemmas when we move from research to practical applications. Is it enough to provide high-performance work systems? Do organizations need to communicate them in a specific way? What about the nature of the person–organization pre-existing relation? Does perceived authenticity by managers play a role? Many of these important questions are not addressed adequately by academic research with the important consequence of not helping HR practitioners in developing a sound body of evidence-based approaches to the design of HR practices. Martina Rossi leverages her academic research as a former Ph.D. student in service design, coupled with an extensive practical experience helping companies as a consultant (and in fact action researcher), to provide a framework which pushes service design in the HR field to a new level, which she defines as human resource design. It should be noticed that this apparently minimal shift in the formal definition of the field is in itself an agenda for change both in HR and in service design. Martina makes it clear that the nature of HR practices makes them significantly different from other services. Employees are not simply customers to the HR practice, they need to be engaged by them, and they heavily interact with them through time. Moreover, those practices have far-reaching consequences on their well-being, engagement, personal gratification and health. In an analogy to the famous statement by Marshall McLuhan, it appears as if ‘the management is the design’. The corner point of her approach is rooted in the firm belief that collaboration and participation are key aspects for a successful design or redesign of any practices which have an impact on employees. While it could be easy to think of her proposal as a too ambitious effort to make a change in a relatively stable HR field, her intuition of the need of a novel role, that of the human resource designer should inspire any chief HR officer to challenge the status quo. We confer too much power to the rational nature of HR practices, and we expect them to work on the basis of their formal features. However, our experience as vii

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inhabitants of organizations (and maybe scholars as well) points to the many factors which interact to shape our behaviours. We tend to under-evaluate them. and we resort to a very narrow view of design. A more effective road to the future of our organizations is to realize that they are themselves social and collective realities emerging from a collective design process which requires new skills and competencies. Martina Rossi identifies the path. It is our role to embark in the journey. Luca Solari Professor of Human Resource Management Università degli Studi di Milano Milan, Italy

Foreword by Anna Meroni: Designing as Well-being

Since the nineties, cultural and positive psychology started to study humans in their real-life contexts and to interpret their behaviours in virtuous and development situations, rather than in pathological ones (Inghilleri 2014). In their explanation, the quality of our subjective experience, the ‘way we feel’, has been interpreted as related to several causes, including the culture and the context we live: in fact, it is connected to our past, to the present experience and the ability to connect the latter with purposes and projects (ibidem). Creativity is recognized as a phenomenon resulting from the interaction of the individual with the context. It is influenced by multiple factors, such as personality, culture and society, and it is enhanced by collaboration and group interaction, so much so that the greatest innovators are known to work not in isolation but in community. Scholars of psychology recognize the importance of collaboration in creativity for several reasons: combination of expertise, divergent thinking and sharing of methods, engaging of individuals that ‘feel like they are part of something greater than themselves, by sharing a same objective or ideal’ (Gaggioli et al. 2014, p. 54). Moreover, they speak about ‘networked flow’, a state in which the actions of the individuals and those of the group are in balance, so that a sense of social presence is established, the general performance is positively influenced and there is the generation of new knowledge and ideas (ibidem). Subjective experiences of the individuals are good from both a cognitive and an emotional point of view, and they are in a state in which all the psychic energy is invested in the ongoing practice, and experience a state of competence, self-determination, meaning and well-being (Inghilleri 2014). In the same way that the collaborative nature of creativity come as no surprise to psychologists, it is a cornerstone of the practice and thinking of designers, hence of so-called ‘design thinking’. Edward De Bono in 1967 began to publish his famous series of thoughts, methods and tools for ‘training’ creativity, arguing that ‘lateral thinking’ (the process of using information to produce creativity) is not a talent, but can be deliberately learned and applied to generate new ideas, being them ‘the stuff the of change and progress in every field from science to art, from politics to personal happiness’ (De Bono 1970, p. 7).

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It is worth noting that De Bono mentioned happiness as a result of the application of creativity. Well-being and personal happiness are thus mentioned in relation to creativity as an experience of a collective creative process and as a result of the ideas generated through it. Let us start from here to understand the connection of design and in particular design thinking as a methodology and service design as an approach to artefacts, with human resource management, the effective and efficient management of people in organizations. Indeed, we can take from here that creativity, collaboration and wellbeing are claimed principles of today’s management culture as well as hallmarks of a well-crafted design practice. Yet, two additional building blocks can be considered to understand this relationship: they come from Ezio Manzini and Richard Buchanan. Manzini, in his well-known essay ‘Design. When Everybody Design’ (2015), distinguishes between ‘diffuse design’ (performed by everybody) and ‘expert design’ (performed by those who have been trained as designers). His argument is that, since design is today recognized by an increasing number of people as a way of thinking and behaving applicable to many different situations and problems, its meaning is becoming wider and often misunderstood. Design, as a combination of critical sense, creativity and practical sense to imagining something that does not yet exist, is a way of acting based on a capability peculiar to humans. Thus, everybody designs for problem-solving or for making sense of things through the social construction of meaning (Manzini 2015). In other words, everybody is endowed with the ability to design and, to a certain extent, does so. This ability can be therefore trained to mastery for the benefit of the individuals and the system in which they are. Buchanan, in an essay published in 2015 on the journal She Ji, reflects on the connection of design with the management culture: he highlights that the major theories of management in the twentieth century can be regarded as a theory of design, so that ‘the product to be designed is not an artifact or a customer service but the organization’ (p. 8). Moreover, he mentions the ‘organizational culture reform’ movement, in which designers are more and more involved to turn the concepts and methods of design towards addressing the problems of organizational culture. Actually, management has become an extension of the application of design thinking, because the role of design in our lives is to create environments within which ‘human intent can move forward in interaction, forming human meaning in the reach toward satisfaction and fulfilment of the original intent’ (p. 18). Organizations are in fact environments, in which design can act to generate true experiences in people’s life, facilitating practical action, intellectual understanding and emotional engagement. Buchanan, thus, concludes that design should provide for the quality of experience for all of those served by the organization, including employees as the best way to reform organizational culture. The work of Martina Rossi on human resource design lies in the intersection of these worlds of thinking and doing and has started from the intuition of a problem, on the one side, and of an opportunity, on the other. The problem originates from the phenomenological observation and the professional experience of the author on the adoption and mis-adoption of design thinking in companies: within the mentioned plural meanings of design as problem-solving,

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sense-making and creative collaboration practice, the purpose of its adoption goes often lost in translation and is unclear and ill-defined. This is not a minor problem indeed, as it can bring about unwonted effects of disillusion for a team, and ineffective or useless ideas for a company. The opportunity originates precisely in this misuse and in the understanding that there is indeed a great room for design in the reform of organizational culture, considering that everybody designs, design skills and creativity can be learned and developed and this can bring individual and collective well-being. Thus, Rossi first disambiguates the understanding of the use of service design as set of methods and tools applied to that particular field of services that is the human resource management in order to generate better solutions. Then, she comes to the definition of human resource design (and designer) as a practice and approach aimed at the well-being of employees, achieved through new and conscious ways of working together, and therefore at understanding how and why to work together, beyond what is produced. Needless to say, a key ingredient of this way of designing and using design in organizations is co-design. So much has been done and discussed in the last two decades about co-design and participatory practices that it is beyond the scope of this study to review the work done. However, it is worth mentioning that these collaborative design practices have been progressively adopted in different fields and, again, with different purposes: from understanding the problem to imagining the solution, from involving people to creating awareness on different topics. It is certainly true that collective creativity practices are considered promising for dealing with the complexity of our age in a more effective way, considering multiple and diverse voices and designing spaces of participation and collaboration. But it is also true, and even more relevant to this topic, that effective collaboration in participatory activities with different social actors can lead to a collective state of mind in which individual intentions harmonize with those of the group, as we have learnt from psychology. Furthermore, we are discovering that subjective well-being is related to a belief in interpersonal relationships and to the capacity to activate and bring people together around an idea and resolve a problem, as the so-called creative communities (Meroni 2007) teach us. This purposeful collaboration, which co-design can soundly support with its array of strategies, methods and tools, also leads to the development of a sense of belonging, self-determination and intrinsic motivation to do things with others. It is a practice of well-being as well as a form of upskilling and empowerment. Building on these arguments, we may extend to (certain) collaborative practices in companies the term ‘infrastructuring’ coined and used by the Scandinavian school of participatory design (Hillgren et al. 2011). It means an approach to innovation that, differently from project-based design, is aimed at providing a permanent ‘infrastructure’ of conversation and exchange between stakeholders, enabling them to act and create connections from which opportunities may arise. If we replace stakeholders with employees, we see that the concept is still valid and we better see the role of a company to facilitate, guide and create the conditions for this ‘conversation’ to take place. We also understand how professional designers, ‘expert designers’ in the words of Manzini (2015), could play a role using, in particular, a service

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design approach that combines co-design methods with a focus on behaviours and interactions between people. We can say that this is the professional domain of the human resource designers, whose profile is inherently interdisciplinary, as they have to combine design, psychology and management skills. The ‘virtues’ that Steen (2013) argues are distinctive for a participatory designer, cooperation, curiosity and creativity, and are transformed into skills to allow other people to flourish, using their talents, thus promoting their well-being and helping to create a better working environment. This happens when designers share power, i.e. do ‘empowerment’, and delegate agency to ‘users’. Hence, from an organizational point of view, the human resource design is a design activity that can make employees aware of the organization in which they are, of the relationships they have with the others and of their role, power, capability and opportunities. From an emotional point of view, it uses design as practice of wellbeing for a whole organization, by leveraging the power of collaborative creativity, the diffuse design capability of individuals and the professional skills of a new designer profile. Returning to the terminology of psychologists, the aim of a human resource designer is to facilitate the realization of so-called ‘optimal experiences for an entire community, i.e. flows of consciousness (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) in which individuals are in a position to understand the circumstances they are experiencing, to be able to cope with the challenge set before them, to experience positive emotions, to feel motivated and engaged (Inghilleri 2014). Following Seligman (2002), these are also the ingredients of a good life and therefore of what he defines as authentic happiness. I believe that having clearly understood and framed this application and evolution of design into a theoretical and operational tool is a truly valuable contribution to the better adoption of design thinking in companies. In fact, it provides company managers with insights to understand and decide whether, how and why to introduce design thinking initiatives in the organization and their consequences. It helps to understand that, under certain conditions, employee empowerment and team building can go hand in hand with the production of good ideas that can turn into innovations, but that the two are different and must be consciously managed with different methodologies. It also disambiguates the goal of applying service design to the production of human resource management solutions, i.e. design for HR, from its adoption as a means of fostering positive and constructive collaboration between employees, i.e. the human resource design. Rossi finally defines a new job profile, which already had a manifestation in practice, but was not yet identified and conceptualized in theory. The human resource designer, in fact, can be seen as one of the various specifications of the service designer profile: however, it has the peculiarity of not only dealing with a specific field of application, human resources precisely, but interweaving design skills with behavioural sciences, management and psychology. It is a profile, by now, shaped through the experience on the field. Of course, it would require signature training and enters into the wider debate on the evolution of the designer job and education. The kind and balance of so-called hard and soft skills are obviously discussed, yet

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one of the key features of this profile is the capability to enable others to do, to let them flourish in their selves and talents. We have seen that this is a key capability of all participants in co-design practices, yet it is something that has to become truly hallmark of a HR designer, whose role is orchestrating and facilitating the creative collaboration of employees to achieve personal and collective well-being, because designing is an act of well-being. Anna Meroni Professor of Service Design, Department of Design Politecnico di Milano Milan, Italy

References Buchanan R (2015) Worlds in the making: design, management, and the reform of organizational culture. She ji (1), Autumn. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2015.09.003 Csíkszentmihályi M (1990) Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. Harper and Row, New York De Bono E (1970) Lateral thinking. A textbook of creativity. Penguin Books Gaggioli A, Milani L, Mazzoni E, Riva G (2014) Positive change and networked flow: from creative individuals to creative networks. In: Inghilleri P, Riva G, Riva E (Eds) Enabling positive change: flow and complexity in daily experience. De Gruyter Open, Warsaw/Berlin Hillgren PA, Seravalli A, Emilson A (2011) Prototyping and infrastructuring in design for social innovation. Codesign 7(3–4):169–183 Inghilleri P (2014) Phenomenology of positive change: social growth. In Inghilleri P, Riva G, Riva E (Eds) Enabling positive change: flow and complexity in daily experience. De Gruyter Open, Warsaw/Berlin Manzini E (2015) Design, when everybody design. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Meroni A (ed) (2007) Creative communities. People inventing sustainable ways of living. Edizioni Polidesign Seligman MEP (2002) Authentic happiness: using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment. Free Press, New York Steen M (2012) Virtues in participatory design: cooperation, curiosity, creativity, empowerment and reflexivity. Sci Eng Ethics September 2013 19(3):945–962

Preface

Acknowledgements The research that is narrated in this book gave me the opportunity to meet people who have enriched me immeasurably and this alone would be enough to repay all the effort and work I have put into it. First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor Anna Meroni, an inexhaustible source of knowledge and inspiration on every front. Her generosity and elegant and patient manners that have accompanied every suggestion and opinion have gently guided my research, always leaving room for my sometimes clumsy intuitions. I cannot thank enough all my colleagues at POLIMI DESIS Lab, a team of tireless women, researchers driven by a passion that I have never encountered in anyone else. They have allowed me to concentrate on my research, freeing me from other thoughts without ever burdening me, and for this, I am immensely grateful to them all: Daniela Selloni, for believing in me from day one and never ceasing to do so, spurring me on with a unique energy and her wise advice. In moments of discouragement, her voice echoed in my head, shouting ‘Courage!’. Marta Corubolo, for always reassuring me and involving me in interesting projects for my research. Chiara Galeazzi, for her pragmatism, her smiles and her precious advice in any field. Daniela Sangiorgi, for her rigorousness in research; she taught me to give order and scientificity to my thoughts. Stefana Broadbent, for her attention to the human factor; she made me discover the social sciences, representing the anthropological counterpart with which every designer should be confronted. Together with them, all the people who have animated and lived in our office for some time and who have shared this journey with me: Ana, Pamela, Marta, Chiara, Filipe, Maíra, Vanessa, Monika and Andrea. I would like to thank Claudia Nicolai, for hosting me at HPI d.school and welcoming me as a member of her team, trusting me from the start, sharing her

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contacts with me and offering me many opportunities for experimentation. I have learnt a lot from our discussions, and much of her input has shaped the substantial components of my research. Together with her, I would like to thank the whole team of researchers at the d.school who welcomed me as a family and contributed to my reflections, always providing me with stimuli of the highest quality: Benedikt, Marie, Karen, Mana, Udit, Andrea, Christian, Sherif, Jentz and all the others. As well as being colleagues, they have above all been friends and have made me feel at home. My colleagues of the XXXII cycle of Ph.D. with whom I shared joys and sorrows and the MiniFARB girls: Carmen, Francesca, Silvia, Vanessa and Ilaria. The MiniFARB project was born as a job, but it has also naturally turned into a mutual help group, which has created friendships that I can no longer do without. The most heartfelt thanks go to Serena Leonardi. Above all, she is a dear friend, the best partner one can have, the person with whom I have most pleasure in working and with whom I have maintained a constant dialogue of comparison and reflection. Each of our passionate chats enlightens me, and I can say without doubt that this book is also a little bit hers. Together with her, I would also like to thank Marianna Carbone, who followed us and shared our passion, enriching our reflections with joy. My colleagues and friends from Service Design Drinks Milan: Chiara Leonardi, Luca Molinari, Marihum Pernía and Claudia Pollina, for having supported and understood me. I love this project as much as I love each of them. Luca Nascimben, an enlightened HR professional who has believed in my work and continues to trust me. I thank him for putting his experience at my disposal and involving me in so many interesting projects. Pierpaolo Peretti Griva and all the people at MIDA, who continue to be a source of stimulation and knowledge and who have supported the research. Valentina Auricchio, for helping me in various experiments and always being available, attentive and generous towards me. All the people who in some way gravitated around me during these three years and consciously or unconsciously were a great stimulus, in particular Marta Mainieri, Silvia Toffolon, Luca Solari, Enrico Girotti and all the people who enthusiastically participated in the numerous interviews and projects. Finally, my closest friends, the family I have chosen. To put up with me, to always make my life lighter and to make me laugh. Caterina, Silvia, Bianca, Susanna, Costanza, Laura, Debora, Camilla, Margherita, Michele, Fabio and all the others. I thank Mattia, for filling our present with joy and for making me dream about the future. But above all, my parents. For always leaving me free to choose and for giving me lessons in love every day.

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Abstract This book aims at investigating how service design could be applied to guide human resource management of private organisations within processes of organisational change. In particular, it focuses on internal collaborative practices that make use of design tools and methods. In the last decades, much attention has been focused on investigating the effectiveness of service design and design thinking in increasing innovation in the solutions produced by the design process and delivered to the market. Less exploration instead has been addressed towards understanding how the design process both influences and is influenced by the way the people involved interact, behave and grow. All these aspects regard what happens internally to the organisation, and namely to people, when they undergo such processes. In doing so, the book faces the demand of human resource management functions to adapt to recent transformations that organisations are facing. This demand is increasing due to the major changes that the labour market is undergoing and that are affecting the employee–organisation relationship. Those changes are driven by many global forces such as: increasing level of diversity in the workforce; the diffusion of digital technologies in all aspects of work; and the evolving expectations of the younger generation on the experience of work and more. As a consequence of these changes, interactions among workers and between workers and organisations are transforming, spawning a series of inquiries that concern the ways in which those interactions should occur and develop in the most advantageous manner, for both the company and the employees. Private organisations therefore express a greater demand for consultancies for solutions and interventions aimed at innovating the way employees work. This request is often considered as a ‘design thinking’ issue and tackled without a structured practice specifically dedicated to redesigning internal behavioural dynamics. The book proposes a framework that defines a dedicated course of action, based on design features, aimed at supporting private organisations in facing internal transformations. The framework represents guidance to undertake projects related to organisational change, which mainly appeal to human resource management departments. Moreover, the book envisions a set of new skills required for the so-called human resource designer, who is the professional specialist who guides such processes of transformation.

Introduction This book develops and evolves from the results of the Ph.D. research carried out by the author.

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It is narrated through a structure that starts with the two main bodies of background knowledge needed to introduce the entire story. In particular, the first paragraphs introduce the notion of human resource design in comparison with service design for human resources. This paragraph sets the foundation upon which the entire book develops. The second paragraph provides an overview of the main interpretations given to the design thinking practices in the literature with regard to the relevant connotations in applying those practices within the human resource management field. Given this preliminary body of knowledge, the subsequent chapters deep dive into the two main disciplinary fields involved, offering the two different perspectives on the topic of ‘collaborative design practices’ within organisations. Chapter 2 indeed includes a first exploration of ‘collaborative design practices’ through the lens of the design discipline, elaborated downstream of a set of interviews and observational studies. The analysis continues with Chap. 3 which is instead looking at the topic from the HR management side and therefore includes the perspectives of HR managers that investigated the impact of collaborative design practices in human resources. A better exploration of the group dynamics instilled by collaboration is provided by the paragraph that analyses the group development model of Tuckman (1965), comparing it to the most relevant group models. The issue of collaboration is then inspected as a way of learning; therefore, I introduce the concept of ‘teaming as a learning’ experience and the correlations with innovation processes such as design thinking. To complete the HR perspective on design, I touch the topic of behavioural design as a discipline that can support organisational change, and finally, I provide some experiments and applications of service design for human resources. The core part of the book is dedicated to three different experiments where I developed and tested the features that would compose the final human resource design framework. The experiments, which I called ‘projects’, are followed by a paragraph that summarizes the lessons learnt and includes the discussion of those features, which leads to the development of the final version of the framework. The proposal of the human resource design framework is the result of the iterations of the experiments and subsequent reflections upon them. It is presented following the stages of the design process (proposed in an extended version) divided through ‘content’ and ‘context’ level. Each stage of the process is described with dedicated tools to be used and indications about specific behaviours that the facilitator needs to perform according to the group status. The ‘context’ indications also include information about the configuration of the group and specific stakeholders to involve at each stage. The second paragraph of this chapter provides a proposal of skillset for the professional that could lead a human resource design project and act according to the framework. The skillset of the so-called human resource designer includes some skills which are typical of the service designer, enriched with other competences coming from change management and psychology fields of knowledge.

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The book ends with a chapter of conclusions which includes further development in research and possible implications of the findings in the field of education and practice. Milan, Italy

Martina Rossi

Reference Tuckman BW (1965) Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychol Bull 63:384–399

Contents

1 Reframing the Role of Design Within Private Organisations . . . . . . . . 1.1 The Difference Between Service Design for Human Resources and Human Resource Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 ‘Rethinking Design Thinking’. An Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Design Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Blurred Understanding and Applications of Design Thinking in Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 A Compass of Variables in Collaborative Design Practices . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The HR Management Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 What HR Managers Look for in Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Service Design for Human Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 The Tuckman Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Teaming as Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Design as Agent of Behaviour Change in Organisational Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 10 16 19 19 26 37 39 39 47 51 59 64 67

4 Experimenting Human Resource Design in Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 4.1 Project n.1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 4.2 Project n.2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 4.3 Project n.3a . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 4.4 Project n.3b . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 4.5 Lessons Learnt and Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 5 Proposal for a Human Resource Design Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 5.1 The Rise of the Human Resource Designer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130

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6 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 From Project Teams to the Entire Organisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 From Short-Term Intervention to Long-Term Strategies . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Impact Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 Implications in Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 Implications in Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

133 133 134 134 135 135 136

Chapter 1

Reframing the Role of Design Within Private Organisations

Abstract The first paragraph (1.1) regards the definition of Human Resource Design compared with Service Design for Human Resources and sets the foundation upon which the entire book develops. It discloses the difference between Service Design for Human Resources and Human Resource Design over three main dimensions which regard: (i) the ‘place’ of design within the organisation, (ii) the designer-client relationship and (iii) the level of ‘humanization’ of the organisation. In brief, Service Design for HR focuses on defining ‘what’ might be designed to fulfil whatever need related to the employee journey, and therefore new services. Human Resource Design instead relates to ‘how’ employees might behave. The second paragraph (1.2) provides an overview of the main interpretations given to the Design Thinking practices in the literature regarding the relevant connotations in applying those practices within the Human Resource Management field. The different connotations that have been given to design thinking fall into three main clusters: (i) the democratization of the design mindset, including all the theories that refer to the cognitive side of the design process; (ii) design thinking as a strategic asset, which companies can leverage in order to have a competitive market advantage; (iii) design thinking for collaboration and codesign, where DT is seen mainly as a vehicle to foster collaboration and ignite new dynamics of work with diverse stakeholders. Those three main connotations on one hand contribute to a general confusion and foster multiple interpretations, and on the other hand they underpin new research paths.

1.1 The Difference Between Service Design for Human Resources and Human Resource Design This paragraph lays the fundamental premises of the entire research project. It is a cornerstone of understanding the topic and the consequent formulation of a correct research question. The research question concerns how service design could support practices that aim to achieve change within private organisations, leveraging employee collaboration.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rossi, Human Resource Design, PoliMI SpringerBriefs, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87612-8_1

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It took me extensive and confused, often controversial, reflections to come up with the revealing intuition of the difference between two connected but different concepts, which are Service Design for Human Resources (SD for HR) and what I will call from now on Human Resource Design (HRD). Even if the formulation of the concept of Human Resource Design represents the result of the entire investigation and therefore the last step in chronological order, understanding this concept and the distinction with SD for HR is propaedeutic to a correct interpretation of the following passages. Throughout the book indeed, I will uncover all the steps undertaken to frame and elaborate this notion. Today’s organisations are increasingly taking advantage of approaches that are typical of the design field, applying them to a range of continuously expanding area of innovation spanning management, policy making and social engagement. Within this context, where everybody can access the ‘tools for designing’ (Manzini 2015), there is an increasing need to find rigorous ways of acting for design practitioners to remain consistent and impactful through their interventions (Junginger and Sangiorgi 2009). The focus of this research are private organisations that use, in various ‘places’ within their structure (Junginger 2009), design methods and tools that are included in the broader spectrum of ‘design thinking’ (Kolko 2015) with the explicit or implicit aim of rethinking their way of working. Within this chapter and the entire research, I will refer to ‘design’ per the specific domains of service design (SD) and design thinking (DT) and I will specify when pointing to one of the two in particular. While research discourses of service design and design thinking are taken from different roots, practitioners use these notions with very similar connotations, often subtending blurry meanings. Understanding those blurry meanings is also part of my investigation and will be extensively discussed in paragraph 3.1. The definition that I intend to convey when I will mention ‘collaborative design practices’ within organisations includes both SD and DT without distinguishing their specific semantics. This is because, at least for the first part of the investigation, I did not want to exclude relevant cases just because of the labels given, often without relevant thought. Therefore, I framed my definition of ‘collaborative design practice’ when it displays the following features: • it makes use of methods and tools that refer to the design discipline; • it implies collaboration among different stakeholders; • it involves a guidance role played by a trained designer or a facilitator that uses design artifices. In the last decades, design has caught the attention of stakeholders in various areas of private organisations. R&D, Marketing and Innovation departments have understood the value of adopting service design to innovate products and services for quite some time. Still, just recently there have been other business functions asking for design interventions.

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One of these emergent areas is Human Resources (HR), which is increasingly looking at design to develop innovative services to respond to the emerging needs of a new typology of worker. Significant changes in contemporary society of the last decades such as demographic transformations, the diffusion of a wide range of new technologies in all aspects of work, and the development of a new meaning of work for younger generations (Bersin by Deloitte 2016; World Economic Forum 2018) have led to the development of new worker behaviours, in their relationship with their employer and interaction with peers. With this demand, companies try to direct their innovation capacity to internal users and clients rather than tackling external challenges. Therefore, the emerging needs of employees in organisations are related to the evolution (ibidem) of the working environment and of economic and working processes, which inevitably entail a transformation within the organisations themselves. This mutability of the workplace according to the changes of the context to evolve have seen one of its major manifestations during the COVID-19 pandemic. This disruptive phenomenon is currently reconfiguring the pillars of work in contemporary society and it’s object of studies for many scholars. According to the studies, there are multiple aspects that are contributing to reshape the world of “work” given the pandemic situation. They include but are not limited to: social life and people relations, working routines, infrastructures, mobility, security, policy frameworks, emotional wellbeing and more (Kane et al. 2021; Kaushik 2020). However, the transformative power of design in this sense is meant as an ‘implicit agent of change’ of the organisational culture and directly connected with product (or service, in our case) development (Deserti and Rizzo 2014; Junginger 2008; Sanders 2009). Hence, if we consider service design ‘at the service’ of Human Resource Management, we refer to the activity of designing services to manage the functional processes within the Human Resource department’s scope. Those processes, which are associated with very specific responsibilities within the HR function, are still siloed and also considered by the suppliers as separate markets. There exist indeed tools for increasing productivity and collaboration that range from engagement and feedbacks solutions, to performance management or wellbeing solutions. This is a demonstration that the focus on the end-to-end employee journey is still new since they address punctual issues only (Bersin by Deloitte 2017). Within this perimeter, I will talk about Service Design for Human Resources. The preposition ‘for’ underpins an activity that is addressed to creating a ‘platform’ or a ‘system’ that is enabling a ‘multiplicity of interactions’, as it has been formulated by Meroni and Sangiorgi in their concept of ‘Design for Services’ (2011). For example, when we talk about redesigning the process that a company follows in order to recruit new talents and, by doing so, the experience of the new candidates, the physical and digital touchpoints that characterize it and the interactions among them, we are under the scope of service design for HR. In this regard, HR can be considered as just another field of application of service design that, in its implementation, doesn’t imply any relevant innovation besides specificities of the subject area.

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It is instead revolutionary when design encounters the domain of organisational change, and therefore implies a series of substantial differences with the abovementioned definition. Those differences are to be found at least in three dimensions of an organisation, which I identified as: (i) the ‘place’ in the organisation (Junginger 2009; Schmiedgen et al. 2015), (ii) the designer-client relationship (Yu and Sangiorgi 2018) and (iii) the level of ‘humanization’ (Augsten et al. 2018). The first dimension is about the ‘place’ (Junginger 2009) in the organisation, which refers to the level of depth of design practices in the organisation. They have been classified with reference to design thinking by Junginger (2009) in her essay ‘Design in the Organization: Parts and Wholes’ and then reclaimed in the report issued by the Design Thinking Research Team at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute (HPI) ‘Parts Without a Whole?: The Current State of Design Thinking Practice in Organizations’ (Schmiedgen et al. 2015), where the authors mapped out the current state of the design thinking practices in different kinds of organisations according to the scheme originally proposed by Junginger. The four archetypical places of design in an own elaboration taking elements from both the abovementioned sources can be resumed as follows: • Periphery: in this configuration, design is considered as an add-on resource that can be booked on demand for a specific need and then dismissed. Here the need typically deals with traditional design problems of form, communication and function. Junginger (2009) makes the example of a company that needs to redesign its logo and hires an external design consultant to produce one. In the adaptation of Schmiedgen et al. (2015), this is the case where design thinking consultants are hired just for developing a design thinking project (or a workshop). In this case, design has no continuous presence in the organisation, therefore it doesn’t have any effect in changing the organisational framework. • Somewhere: design is part of a specific organisational function such as marketing, UX or R&D departments. In this situation, the professional in-house designers are seen by the rest of the organisation as the ‘creative staff’ and a significant trench can be perceived between them and the remainder of the organisation. It is therefore clear that design has no relevance in the organisation overall, but it is rather constrained to specific products and services without envisioning any departmental impact or organisational strategy. • Core: design has a central position in the organisation and therefore has access to its leadership and strategy levels. The ‘objects of design’ become organisationwide, for example corporate identity. Here, design questions vision and purpose, resources, structures, and procedures of the organisation and integrates products and services “into a coherent whole” (Junginger 2009). In this position “design begins to shape aspects of the organisation and has a potential to transform” (ibidem). • Intrinsic: design is an established practice and mindset; it can be considered as part of the company culture. It is an approach to solving those ‘wicked problems’ (Buchanan 1992) that go beyond the design realm. Hence, “managing and

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designing are no longer treated as different organisational realms” (Junginger 2009), but they are instead integrated. The organisation can be considered as resilient because it is able to adapt according to the external market and internal needs (Fig. 1.1). The second dimension to consider when understanding the difference between Service Design for HR and Human Resource Design is to be found in the designerclient relationship (Yu and Sangiorgi 2018). This element is somehow linked to the localization of design in the organisation because it is a consequence of the desired impact that the company intends to achieve when looking for design interventions. Designing for or with the internal staff of an organisation might be assimilated to the idea of designing for or with a specific kind of client, because employees are a kind of client. The three typologies of client-partner relationships are appointed by Yu and Sangiorgi (2018) to be: • Delivering: within this relationship, the client plays the passive role of the commissioner, providing a brief and then receiving the designers’ output. There is no intervention of the client in developing the solution. • Partnering: here, the client codesigns with the designers. During collaborative sessions, clients are providing their organisational perspective about the designers’ work and are engaged with them in the project. This configuration implies an alignment of the stakeholders where the “objects of change also become human actors” (Aricò 2018, p. 64) • Facilitating: this relationship entails a more educational role for the people of an organisation. It is about transferring design capabilities in order to enable learners to apply design methods to their own context. The designers become coaches that train employees to change their routines. The third important dimension to consider is the level of ‘humanization’ of an organisation. The concept of ‘humanization in organisations’ was proposed by

Fig. 1.1 Own adaptation of the concepts developed by Junginger (2009) and (Schmiedgen et al. 2015)

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Augsten et al. at the ServDes—Service Design and Innovation Conference held in Milan in June 2018. The authors built upon the extension of the human-centeredness principle of design, addressing it towards the creation of a more humanistic organisational environment rather than just the delivery of more desirable products/services for end-users. In their own words: “Internal humanizing might result in, for example, employees working flexible hours, input on and control over the details and scope of each project, and advancement opportunities. Meanwhile, external humanizing can resemble speaking the customer’s language and providing services when and how the customer wants them” (ibidem) (Fig. 1.2). As mentioned, when talking about Service Design for HR, we refer to the areas of application of the Human Resource Management department (recruiting, onboarding, learning, performance management and more). Among all those areas, there is a transversal goal, which is often managed by one specific team within HR, which is the wellbeing of the employees. Wellbeing is one of the norms of a human-centered organisation identified by the International Organization for Standardizations (ISO 27500:2016) which also includes: “capitalizing on individual differences as a strength in the organisation; making usability and accessibility part of the organisational strategy; ensuring health, safety, and wellbeing; valuing personnel and creating meaningful work; being open and trustworthy; acting in a socially responsible way; and adopting a total systems approach within the organisation” (ibidem). When Service Design for HR is applied to achieve the wellbeing of people working in an organisation, it can generate solutions where design principles contribute to building a positive and collaborative company culture among its population, being the human resources the population of the organisation. Wellbeing covers the overall way people work and live in the organisation and beyond, tapping into a more holistic approach to the employee experience, which is in this conceptualization reframed and elevated to what in a recent report by Deloitte Insights (Bersin by Deloitte 2019) has been called ‘human experience’. “Human experience builds upon the foundation of the employee experience, but extends beyond work processes to focus on the meaning of work itself, thereby targeting the most personal question that can exist in the workplace: am I making the difference?” (ibidem, pp. 48–49) (Fig. 1.3). When design enters this domain, it aims to shape the ‘how’ more than the ‘what’ of the organisational practices. To make an example, just like Service Design (SD) for HR applied to (re)designing the recruiting journey can envision a service that helps recruiters to identify and select the best candidates on the job market, SD for HR applied to increase wellbeing Fig. 1.2 A ‘Copernican revolution’ of the human-centeredness principle of design. Own elaboration

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Fig. 1.3 “When experience is bottom-up and personal, it becomes focused on human experience” (Bersin by Deloitte 2019)

can mean reformulating routines of day-by-day tasks, questioning and reshaping employee behaviours. In the latter case, the solution can include design elements as enablers of new routines: there, behavioural design comes into play and there is a shift to what I define as Human Resource Design (HRD). HRD, in fact, implies a course of action that focuses on new ways of working together and ‘how’ employees might behave. SD for HR instead focuses on defining ‘what’ might be designed to fulfil any need related to the employee journey, and therefore new services. SD for HR and HRD are not to be seen as alternatives but rather different intensities of integration of design with Human Resource Management. The three dimensions of analysis described above offer a first direction to forming the intensity gradient. In general, we can say that lower levels of integration of design in organisations qualify the realm of SD for HR. By contrast, higher levels qualify HRD. In this regard, HRD appears as the stretch of SD for HR toward organisational change. Nevertheless, in my definition, HRD set its main focus around human beings and their behaviours rather than organisational structures. In this sense, HRD builds on the ‘experiential nature’ of design (Elsbach and Stigliani 2018), focusing on the learning experience that design, and specifically codesign, offers more than the content produced as output of the process. The experience becomes the content of the design activity in a way. Hence, HRD aims to shape new forms of interaction among people inside organisations. Those interactions should be ideally empowered by favourable organisational structures but could transcend from them (Fig. 1.4).

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Fig. 1.4 The difference between Service Design for Human Resources and Human Resource Design. Own elaboration

In this perspective, HRD relates with organisational cultures because when design involves behaviours, it affects norms, values, and assumptions (Schein 2010). Many authors have investigated the mutual and reciprocal impact of design culture and organisational culture on each other, drawing different frameworks to depict this connection (Junginger and Sangiorgi 2009; Sanders 2009; Deserti and Rizzo 2014; Elsbach and Stigliani 2018). Junginger and Sangiorgi (2009) built upon the framework developed by Rousseau (1995) that framed the levels of culture as concentric circles with fundamental assumptions of organisations at the centre and products and artifacts at the periphery. Junginger and Sangiorgi (2009) differentiate three depths of interventions that service design can reach in an organisation, where the deepest one is ‘organisational transformation’ and the service design project implies to question fundamental assumptions. In the same direction, Sanders (2009) also provided a model for co-creation in product development where she locates tools, methods and methodologies at the highest and most superficial point of a pyramid, while placing at the foundations mindset and culture. Both these models suggest considering the artifacts, products, services or tools to design them, as the result, the tangible manifestation of a culture. Product development in this sense can either express or require concurrent organisational changes. To this regard, organisational change is framed to be product or service-driven. In support of the concept above, Elsbach and Stigliani (2018) also acknowledged: “the role of physical artifacts and emotional experiences [are] signals of the existence of a design thinking culture. Nevertheless, these cultural signals represent only the tip of the iceberg of more profound changes brought about inside an organisation by the introduction of design thinking tools at the level of behaviours, perceptions, and mind-set”. In their review on empirical studies, the authors recognized that organisational culture influences in a reciprocal matter the use of design thinking tools, identifying specific cultures as more favourable to use design thinking tools. In their own words: “we found that cultures that were defined by values, norms, and assumptions, such as collaboration and experimentation, supported the use of specific design thinking tools (e.g., tools of prototyping, cocreation, and customer journey mapping), while

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contrasting cultures defined by productivity, performance, and siloed specialization impeded the use of these tools” (ibidem, p.6). A relevant contribution going towards this direction is given by Deserti and Rizzo (2014) who argue that “new product development, and new internal processes produced the occasion for the change”. The need for change is seen as a natural consequence of product development where design represents an “implicit agent of change” (ibidem, p.41). This model suggests that the design potential is expressed towards the innovation of products and services to be delivered to the external market. This can also imply the creation of new tools and methodologies, which can gradually impact the creation of new processes, therefore penetrating the fundamental assumptions of the company culture. Even if in these models, design can reach the deepest foundations of a company culture, the final aim of the design activity is always directed towards the outside, or rather, towards the development of a new product/service, while internal changes are just consequences. In this view, we can state that the design focus goes from the core to the periphery (see Fig. 1.1). While discourses in DT and SD are focusing on the transformative power of design as ‘implicit agent of change’, the contribution given by this study explores the possibility of introducing design elements as explicit agents of change. In this view, design would address its potential toward the inside of the organisation, in a framework where tools, methods and artifacts are functional to improve inner processes and practices instead of the opposite. According to this concept, the design focus would go from the periphery to the core of the organisation in order to change the norms, values, and assumptions and shape a more welcoming culture for design (thinking) to be adopted (Manzini 2016; Elsbach and Stigliani 2018). This kind of design intervention (HRD) can be seen as a preliminary action, a precondition, to offering innovative products and services on the market. If we could use design tools to explicitly foster a human-centered and collaborative culture, defined by “flexibility and the free flows of ideas between different functional groups” (ibidem), products and services for the external market would become the natural consequences while new internal practices would be the implicit agent of change of innovative artifacts. As a root from the research point of view, my contribution in defining Human Resource Design builds upon the research agenda recently published by Elsbach and Stigliani (2018) about the connection of design thinking and organisational culture. In particular, I would like to call attention to the main points of the agenda that this research aims to address, listed below: “Future research might consider how best to move from cultures with these values to cultures that value a user focus, collaboration, experimentation, and risk taking (which tend to support the use of design thinking tools). […] most of the studies in our review also suggest a project-focused avenue for cultural change. However, few of these studies examined the use of design thinking projects as a direct means to changing culture. […] Thus, future research may need to explore how using design thinking at the project level is an effective means to change the overall culture of an organisation.

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[…] researchers might explore how our current understanding of organisational culture change could be extended by using an experiential learning lens. […] future studies may attempt to reveal whether some design thinking tools are more likely than others to facilitate agreements about solutions and organisational problems. In addition, future scholars could investigate whether some specific aspects of the experiential nature of design thinking tools (e.g. holistic sensorial engagement, emotional involvement) facilitate collective cognitive work.” (Elsbach and Stigliani 2018). In the last years in the world of practice, design consultancies are increasingly asked to undertake projects in the HR field and, at the same time, consultancies that traditionally worked in the area of Human Resources, training and coaching, are integrating and expanding their competencies with design expertise. Some of those consultancies are, but not limited to: Openknowledge (Italy), Methodos (Italy, France and Germany), PeopleRise (Italy), MIDA (Italy), HR Pepper (Germany), AJ & Smart (Germany).

1.2 ‘Rethinking Design Thinking’. An Interpretation This study initially originated from the purpose of investigating private organisations’ understanding of the application of design thinking (DT). This first body of research was ignited by intuition, as a design researcher and practitioner in the field, of a lack of focus and misinterpretation of the usefulness and value of design thinking within the company practices, including the intercourse with the service design (SD) domain. As scholars report: “in research, discourses of SD and DT have different roots. In practice, they are often introduced simultaneously and follow the same purpose: humanizing products, services, and processes.” (Augsten et al. 2018). The general lack of clarity is seen by many authors, especially from the design discipline, as a threat to the professionalism of the design practice (Muratovski 2015), because, when applied without solid understanding and experience, it could result as merely an ineffective set of magic tricks and tools that, after an ‘initial excitement’, suffers from construct collapse (Hirsch and Levin 1999). This paragraph aims at helping organize the knowledge about the topic, connoting design thinking according to three specific clusters. These connotations are not to be considered exhaustive of the entire panorama, but they are the ones that better apply to the organisational change arena within the private sector. Design thinking as the democratization of the design mindset. The first appearance and relevant contribution of design in the realm of cognitive sciences and psychology has to be attributed to Herbert Simon with his book The Science of the Artificial (1969). Simon argues that design can be applied to solve problems of any kind, ascribing to designers the creative problem-solving ability to face problems and envision the future by “transform[ing] existing conditions into preferred ones” (p.4). In his formulation indeed, design refers to the knowledge

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subtending all the fields concerning what ‘ought to be’ as opposed to the sciences that study ‘what is’. Another milestone in understanding the nature of the cognitive side of the design process has been placed by Bryan Lawson (1980) who proposed the framework of ‘how designers think’, leveraging the author’s belief that we all can learn how to design and improve our creative ability by nurturing it. Later on, he supported his thoughts defining the designers’ cognitive style as ‘thinking by doing’ (2004; 2006), a learning process that happens while tackling and solving a problem. Another scholar that advocated the same cognitive ability is Peter Rowe (1987): he provided the first analysis on design thinking arguing that problem-solving itself is the process through which solutions are shaped. On the same line, Cross (1982) framed this solution-focused problem-solving approach for the first time as a ‘designerly way of knowing’, initiating from this contribution on a vivid ongoing discussion about what defines a designer from the way s/he thinks and works, invoking both cognitive and practical competences of professionals who design. His reflections went on throughout years of observations and collections of case studies that culminated in his book inherently titled Design Thinking (2011). With regard to ill-defined problems, a major contribution has been provided by Richard Buchanan in 1992, when for the first time he used the term ‘wicked problems’ to identify those problems for which the design thinking approach can help to provide a solution. The abovementioned authors attempted to ‘standardize’ and define the way in which designers think and act. The underlying idea is to make the design process closer to a course of action that can be transferred and trained. In recent times, the ‘tools for designing’ have become more accessible and, in general, the design discipline has become more acknowledged and appreciated by communities and organisations of various kinds, enlarging the spectrum of people acting or pretending to act as designers (Manzini 2015). This phenomenon touched predominantly on the construct of ‘Design Thinking’, which was made popular worldwide also thanks to the IDEO consultancy firm and its founders and top managers. IDEO overtly declares to consult through design thinking and the portfolio of the firm provides cases of application of the approach in several industries. Besides that, IDEO also contributed to the distribution of the tools and methods they use and design, therefore becoming a reference point for many practitioners and consultancies. Most of their resources are available with open access on their website, therefore underpinning a form of ‘democratization’ of the methods and tools for designing, but at the same time eliciting the diffusion of an approach that can be subject to risky distortions. In the same direction in 2013 David Kelley, the founder of IDEO and creator of the Stanford d.school, together with his brother Tom Kelley, published a book called Creative Confidence where they sustained the belief that everyone is creative. Therefore, to unleash the creative potential inside any individual and innovate the way to approach problems, they developed and made available a series of strategies and principles.

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As it happened for the tools, the design thinking process itself also underwent diverse articulations. Most agree on defining it as an alternation of divergent and convergent phases, where divergence means broader possibilities of solutions and convergence indicates selecting and pursuing one concept (Brown 2009). This dimension of design thinking is commonly represented as a ‘double diamond’ made of two subsequent pair of divergent and convergent stages. Here, the distinction is between a first ‘diamond’ embodying the problem definition and a second one framing a concept for a solution. Those ‘diamonds’ compose a process that is likewise articulated in four stages: discover, define, develop and deliver (Design Council 2014). Another important dimension that has been highlighted in the process formulation is iteration, on which Brown (2008) has built his formula characterised by the three macro-steps: inspiration, ideation and implementation. The model proposed by Stanford d.school retraced the features above, shifting the focus on user-centricity and prototyping. This time the steps are five: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test (d.school 2015). Every one of these formulations focuses on a peculiarity of the approach, without going against the other models but instead complementing them and highlighting a different attribute. The mere fact that the concept of design thinking is broad and blurred, gives room to many different interpretations. Consultancies and agencies indeed use to refer to one or another model according to their preference and relevance with their activity, while adapting tools and techniques to their own convenience. This hunger for design thinking and its popularity together with the confusion that surrounds it, makes the world of practice an interesting ground for research to investigate and analyse the attributes of those practices. Lucy Kimbell (2011; 2012), underpins the concept that design thinking is still untheorized and unstudied and she requests further explorations in the world of practice, that can be summarized as follows: • In order to shift from the discourse of design thinking as individual cognition, we need to research design as a set of practices in a situated context, in action. • In a world where everybody designs (Manzini 2015) there is the need to understand if designers are special and why. • Since the activity of design now includes a series of other stakeholders, we need to enrich our research field with other studies such as anthropology, sociology, history and science and technology. Design thinking as a strategic asset. The second connotation to highlight deals with the introduction of design thinking within organisations as a way to foster innovation and gain competitive advantage over the competitors (Martin 2009). In the last decades, we have witnessed an increasing adoption of methods and tools coming from the design discipline to foster innovation, falling into the more general spectrum of ‘design thinking’ (Kolko

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2015; Politecnico di Milano 2018). This is also demonstrated by the numerous acquisitions of design expertise within organisations that did not count design as an asset within their structure before. The acquisitions are being carried out by organisations of different types, including both companies that are delivering products or services on the market and consultancy agencies that are offering their support to those companies (Muratovski 2015; Politecnico di Milano 2018; Engström 2017; Schmiedgen et al. 2015). The strategies to build internal capabilities in design are also varied: they include recruiting of external expertise on design, training employed staff, business acquisition of design boutiques or the creation of dedicated in-house teams entitled as ambassadors of the design expertise (Muratovski 2015). A relevant perspective on the possible role of design thinking in value creation has been given by Katarina Wetter Edman (2009). The author built upon the concept of service-dominant logic (SDL) (Vargo and Lush 2004) that emphasizes the role of services as the basis of economic exchange where goods are just a distribution mechanism for service provision. The service-dominant logic perspective configures a conceptualization of services as value creators rather than a category of market offerings as a replacement of products (Foglieni et al. 2018). Wetter Edman (2009) draws her analysis by researching overlapping notions between service-dominant logic (which belongs to business and management domains) and design thinking (a concept originated from design studies). She found that there were not so many overlaps, and therefore she concluded that SDL and DT are to be considered as complementary rather than alternatives. She acknowledges that “Design Thinking is rooted in practice and experiencebased descriptions and has difficulties reaching managerial and strategic levels” (ibidem, p. 209), but at the same time there is a continuous interest in understanding “how the business/management perspective of service and design disciplines perspective of service are related and possibly could merge” (ibidem, p. 210). Some representative examples are given by the ‘service design logic’ concept introduced by Cautela and Zurlo (2009). The book Service Design Thinking (Stickdorn and Schneider 2012) combines design and marketing principles in order to improve customer experience and the interactions between service providers and customers that in the book Service Design for Business (Reason et al. 2015) are proposed by the influent consultancy Livework. Other authors from the management realm advocate the need to better understand the managerial implications of design thinking when elevated to a strategic level in organisation. Among the critical thinkers, Nussbaum (2011) affirms design thinking to be a failed experiment in business, arguing that companies packaged it as a linear process, without addressing the messiness which was the peculiar and intrinsic component of it: “in order to appeal to the business culture of process, it was denuded of the mess, the conflict, failure, emotions, and looping circularity that is part and parcel of the creative process” he stated (ibidem). Coyle (2017) reclaims Nussbaum’s thoughts arguing that what companies are not likely to buy is design thinking as something fuzzy like a ‘mindset’. Some others, like Vassallo (2017), invoke not to become slaves of user-centricity seen as “asking

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users what they want and then trying to give it to them” but rather fostering to build evidence-based solutions, making use of data instead of solely empathy. Micheli et al. (2018) in a recent article, unfold a research agenda for further research on design thinking where organisational design represents one of the paragraphs. In particular, they see organisational design as a necessary condition for successful design thinking. In order for this to happen, it entails change in the organisation’s culture, structure and policies to the point of requiring a paradigm shift in strategic vision (Collins 2013). Adding onto the Micheli et al. (2018) research agenda, I outline the following open point that guides further investigation: • Design research needs to explore ways of initiating or igniting real ‘change by design’ (Brown 2009) with the aim of reaching organisation culture, structure and policies that can ultimately inspire innovation. Design thinking for collaboration and codesign. The integration of diverse perspectives from within and outside the organisation is considered a central aspect of design thinking (Carlgren et al. 2016). At the individual level, the ability and propensity to work with people from different disciplines has been identified as a fundamental attribute of a ‘design thinker’ (Brown 2009). The collaboration domain represents the connection with the third connotation of design thinking, which frames the scope of this research. The pervasion of collaborative practices and bottom-up approaches have been already initiated and often established in social contexts (Manzini 2015; Manzini and Staszowski 2013) but just recently, they have been starting to enter organisations, trying to hack their hierarchical models. This tendency is fostered by the fact that private organisations are experimenting with new structural models, designing faster, more flexible and effective processes that could react to the generally increased rate of change in society (Bersin by Deloitte 2016). An example of the changing paradigms in how organisations work is represented by the ‘agile’ movement. Agile was originally conceived as a software development iterative model characterized by iteration and experimentation as well as a clear focus on user requirements (Beck et al. 2001), therefore owning intrinsically shared principles with design thinking (Carlgren et al. 2016; Liedtka 2015). Agile is increasingly being adapted to be the guiding model for handling diverse projects within organisations. The approach implies that for every iteration, a crossfunctional team is formed, which is revolutionary for any siloed organisational setting. Obviously, in order to put the agile model into practice, there is the need to invest in the formation of teams and make sure they work. The concept of teaming and how to create effective teams is deeply explored by Edmondson (2012) who also states how the concept of effective teaming is closely related to business interests like productivity. Another direction that organisations are undertaking are ‘flat management systems’ which could be represented by the concept of ‘holacracy’ (Robertson 2015).

1.2 ‘Rethinking Design Thinking’. An Interpretation

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Holacracy refers to a form of decentralized management and organisational governance, where the traditional hierarchical structure is flattened down. The idea of holacracy is today being adopted by many organisations in different forms and at different levels of ‘flatness’ (Martin 2015) questioning the pyramidal leadership model. Diverse authors claim that flat management is becoming popular not just for efficiency reasons, but predominantly for the more democratic working environment that they constitute, which is perceived to be equal, transparent and built on shared accountabilities (James 2012). This contributes to ultimately leading to less turnover while attracting and retaining talents. These alternative organisational models are inevitably outlining new configurations of the interactions among people working within organisations that need to be redesigned and then adopted. The last paragraph outlined the managerial perspective on the power of design thinking to enhance collaboration as a by-product of its adoption. However, collaborative approaches have been extensively discussed by design scholars under the notion of codesign and the participatory approach. A recent contribution on the topic, the book Massive Codesign (Meroni et al. 2018) provides an overview of evolution and the state of the art of codesign today, starting with a reflection on the popularity that it has garnered in the last decade which contributed to extending and blurring its boundaries. Codesign has been studied as an activity of collaborative design within various contexts, and deeply analysed in approaches, methods, tools and implications (Sanders and Stappers 2008; 2013; 2014). Within the formulation of the concept of codesign, the influence of the Scandinavian approach by the school of thinking of prof. Ehn, is of particular significance here, since the role of the user shifts from being ‘subject of study’ to being a ‘partner’ of design. With this regard, this connotation of codesign matches with how the concept of ‘partnering’ was later defined: a form of client-designer relationship where the client takes part in the design activity. In a Human Resource Design project indeed, the client identifies also with the user, therefore utterly representing a form of codesign (see paragraph 1.1 for a deeper explanation of Human Resource Design). Moreover, the conceptualization originally offered by Ehn (1988) started from studying participatory practices within organisations as a form of ‘democratization at work’, in which people affected by design were entitled to have a voice in the process. Nowadays, codesign is depicted by the scholars from the Scandinavian schools as a way of ‘infrastructuring’ a design process in order to facilitate collaboration within different actors throughout the entire design thinking process (Bjögvinsson et al. 2012). Hence, focusing on the realm of organisations, codesign still maintains its value of ‘democratization’ because it implies the inclusion of an extended number of stakeholders in the design process which directly affects the organisations’ models of governance (Selloni and Corubolo 2017). With all these considerations, I want to point out that even if collaboration is insistently mentioned as an underlying attribute of design thinking, literature is still scarce

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1 Reframing the Role of Design Within Private Organisations

in developing specific methodologies, frameworks and tools that directly address design toward increasing collaboration within private organisations. Hence, drawing from the research agenda shaped by Elsbach and Stigliani (2018), the contribution of this study should tap into: • Exploration of the experiential nature of design thinking processes to improve our understanding of how they enhance collaboration within organisations (p. 28).

References Aricò M (2018) Service design as a transformative force: introduction and adoption in an organizational context. Frederiksberg, Copenhagen Business School [Ph.d.]. Ph.D. series, No. 39.2018 Augsten A, Geuy B, Hollowgrass R, Jylkäs T, Klippi MM (2018) Humanizing organizations—the pathway to growth. Paper presented at the ServDes service design and innovation conference, Milan Beck K, Beedle M, van Bennekum A, Cockburn A, Cunningham W, Fowler M, Grenning J, Highsmith J, Hunt A, Jeffries R, Kern J, Marick B, Martin RC, Mellor S, Schwaber K, Sutherland J, Thomas D (2001) Manifesto for Agile software development. Agile Alliance. Retrieved from: http://agilemanifesto.org/ Bersin by Deloitte (2016) Global human capital trends 2016. Deloitte University Press Bersin by Deloitte (2019) Global human capital trends 2019. Deloitte University Press Bjögvinsson E, Ehn P, Hillgren PA (2012) Design things and design thinking: contemporary participatory design challenges. Des Issues 28(3):101–116 Brown T (2008) Design thinking. Harv Bus Rev 86(84–92):141 Brown T (2009) Change by design: how design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. Harper-Collins, New York Buchanan R (1992) Wicked problems in design thinking. Des Issues 8(2):5–21 Carlgren L, Rauth I, Elmquist M (2016) Framing design thinking: the concept in idea and enactment: creativity and innovation management. Creativity Innovation Manage 25(1):38–57. https://doi. org/10.1111/caim.12153 Cautela, Rizzo, & Zurlo. (2009). Service design logic: An approach based on the different service categories. Paper presented at the IASDR 2009. Collins H (2013) Can design thinking still add value? Design Manage Rev 24(2):35 Coyle JK (2017) Is design thinking a “failed experiment?”. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/des ign-thinking-failed-experiment-john-k-coyle Cross N (1982) Designerly ways of knowing. Des Stud 3(4):221–227 Cross N (2011) Design thinking: understanding how designers think and work berg. ISBN 9781847886361 Deserti A, Rizzo F (2014) Design and the cultures of enterprises. Des Issues 30(1):36–56. https:// doi.org/10.1162/DESI_a_00247 d.school (2015) Retrieved from: http://dschool-old.stanford.edu/redesigningtheater/the-design-thi nking-process/ Edman KW (2009) Exploring overlaps and differences in service dominant logic and design thinking Edmondson AC (2012) Teaming: how organizations learn, innovate, and compete in the knowledge economy (1 edition). Jossey-Bass Ehn P (1988) Work oriented design of computer artifacts. arbetslivscentrum, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ

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Elsbach KD, Stigliani I (2018) Design thinking and organizational culture: a review and framework for future research. J Manag 44(6):2274–2306. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206317744252 Engström J (2017) When consultancies acquire design agencies: fjord and veryday. Swedish Des Res J 1:22–25 Foglieni F, Villari B, Maffei S (2018) Designing Better Services: A Strategic Approach from Design to Evaluation. s.l.: Springer, Sham Hirsch PM, Levin DZ (1999) Umbrella advocates versus validity police: a life-cycle model. Organ Sci 10(2):199–212 James M (2012) Navigating the new work paradigm. Center for Creative Emergence Junginger S (2008) Product development as a vehicle for organizational change. Des Issues (24)1 Winter 2008:26–35 Junginger, S. (2009). Design in the Organization: Parts and Wholes, Research Design Journal, 23–29 Junginger S, Sangiorgi D (2009) Service design and organizational change: bridging the gap between rigour and relevance. s.l., International Association of Societies of Design Research Kane GC, Nanda R, Phillips A, Copulsky J (2021) Redesigning the post-pandemic workplace. MIT Sloan Management Review 62(3), https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/redesigning-the-postpandemic-workplace/ Kaushik M (2020) The impact of pandemic covid -19 in workplace. Euro J Bus Manage. https:// doi.org/10.7176/EJBM/12-15-02 Kelley D, Kelley T (2013) Creative confidence: unleashing the creative potential within us all. William Collins Kimbell L (2011) Rethinking design thinking: part i. Des Cult 3(3):285–306 Kimbell L (2012) Rethinking design thinking: part ii. Des Cult 4(2):129–148 Kolko J (2015) Design thinking comes of age. Harvard Bus Rev 66–71 Lawson B (1997) How designers think: the design process demystified. Architectural Press, Oxford Lawson B (2004) What designers know. Elsevier/Architectural Press, Oxford Lawson B (2006) How designers think: the design process demystified (4th ed). Oxford; Burlington, MA, Elsevier/ Architectural Press Liedtka J (2015) Perspective: linking design thinking with innovation outcomes through cognitive bias reduction. J Product Innovation Manage 32(6) Manzini E (2015) Design, when everybody designs: an introduction to design for social innovation Manzini E (2016) Design culture and dialogic design. Des Issues 32:52–59 Manzini E, Staszowski E (2013) Public and collaborative. Social innovation and public policy, Exploring the Intersection of Design Meroni A, Sangiorgi D (2011) Design for services. Surrey, Gower Meroni A, Selloni D, Rossi M (2018) Massive codesign, a proposal for a collaborative design framework. Milan, Italy, Franco Angeli Design International Series Martin R (2009) The design of business: why design thinking is the next competitive advantage Martin R (2015) Organisations running on Holacracy. Retrieved from: structureprocess.com Micheli P, Wilner SJS, Bhatti SH, Mura M, Beverland MB (2018) Doing design thinking: conceptual review, synthesis, and research agenda. J Prod Innov Manag. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpim.12466 Muratovski G (2015) Paradigm shift: the new role of design in business and society. She Ji: J Des Econ Innovation. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2015.11.002 Nussbaum B (2011) Design thinking is a failed experiment. So What’s Next?. Fast Co.Design. https://www.fastcodesign.com/1663558/design-thinking-is-a-failed-experiment-so-whats-next Politecnico di Milano (2018) Observatory design thinking for business—which kind of design thinking is right for you? Reason B, Løvlie L, Flu MB (2015) Service design for business: a practical guide to optimizing the customer experience. Wiley Robertson BJ (2015) Holacracy: the new management system for a rapidly changing world. Henry Holt and Company, New York Rowe GP (1987) Design thinking. Cambridge, The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-68067-7

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Sanders. L. (2009), Contextmapping/Exploring Co-creation on a Large Scale, Keynote at Symposium: Design for, with and from user experience, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, 13 May, 2009 Sanders EB-N, Stappers PJ (2008) Co-creation and the new landscapes of design. CoDesign 4(1):5– 18. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710880701875068 Sanders EB-N, Stappers PJ (2014) Probes, toolkits and prototypes: three approaches to making in codesigning. CoDesign 10(1):5–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2014.888183 Sanders EB-N, Stappers PJ (2013) Convivial toolbox: generative research for the front end of design. BIS Publishers, Amsterdam Schein EH (2010) Organizational culture and leadership, 4th edn. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco Schmiedgen J, Rhinow H, Köppen E, Meinel C (2015) Parts without a whole? the current state of design thinking practice in organizations. Potsdam Selloni D, Corubolo M (2017) Design for social enterprises: how design thinking can support social innovation within social enterprises. Des J 20(6):775–794. https://doi.org/10.1080/146 06925.2017.1372931 Simon HA (1996) The sciences of the artificial. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. ISBN: 978-0-26219374-0 Stickdorn M, Schneider J (2012) This is service design thinking: basics, tools, cases, 1st edn. Wiley, Hoboken, New Jersey Vargo SL, Lusch RF (2004) Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing. J Mark 68(1):1–17. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.68.1.1.24036 Vassallo S (2017) The way to design. Foundation Capital World Economic Forum (2018) The future of jobs report 2018 Yu E, Sangiorgi D (2018) Exploring the transformative impacts of service design: The role of designer–client relationships in the service development process. Design Stud 55:79–111. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2017.09.001

Chapter 2

The Design Perspective

Abstract This chapter of the book contains a first exploration of those defined as ‘collaborative design practices’ within private organisations obtained through a set of interviews and observational studies carried out with different kinds of stakeholders within private organisations. The first round of interviews outlined in the first Sect. 2.1 a set of different interpretations and applications of design thinking in the world of practice. Those have been clustered in what have been called ‘areas of blur’. They refer to: (i) the goal of the activities, (ii) their subject-matter and (iii) their impact. Section 2.2 showcases a series of observations of collaborative design practices. Those observations composed and informed a comparative analysis that was carried out through the identification of a set of variables. The variables refer to specific characteristics of the practices such as: (i) goal of the activities, (ii) variety of participants, (iii) style of guidance and (iv) process design. The observations highlighted correlations between those variables that have been organised in a compass. The compass represents a navigation tool that could support who organises collaborative design practices.

2.1 Blurred Understanding and Applications of Design Thinking in Practice1 The preliminary study aimed at generating a first understanding of the current adoption of ‘design thinking’ practices in the industry. I hereby use the term ‘design thinking’ as an umbrella that embraces a number of activities that companies label in this way, and that I defined as ‘collaborative design practices’ in Sect. 1.1, such as: ‘service design workshop’, ‘codesign’, ‘hackathon’, ‘bootcamp’ and more. As a start, I didn’t want to narrow down too much the analysis, considering just what was overtly titled as design thinking, because I knew that the popularity of these

1

This paragraph is based on the paper “Rossi, M. (2017). ‘Design Doing’: what if we put more design into design thinking? Proceedings of 4D Designing Development Developing Design Conference. Kaunas, September 2017. ISBN: 978-609-02-1364-3, pp. 315–325 https://www.ebooks.ktu.lt/eb/ 1404/4d-designing-development-developing-design-conference-proceedings/”. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rossi, Human Resource Design, PoliMI SpringerBriefs, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87612-8_2

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activities contributed to the use of a plethora of attractive titles to define them, but they often result to be very similar in purpose and course of action. I therefore planned a round of interviews to a set of private organisations that I identified to be experimenting with design thinking in Italy. Concurrently to this research, the ‘Design Thinking for Business’ observatory was launched by the School of Business of Politecnico di Milano. The observatory is a research activity that aims at collecting data and insights from the world of practitioners on a specific topic. The two studies can be considered as complimentary because the qualitative information I was gathering were enriching the quantitative data provided by the observatory (Politecnico di Milano 2018, 2019). The interviews have been carried out between March and May 2017 with a duration of around 1 h each. The interviews followed a semi-structured schema aimed at investigating three main aspects: (i) the level of adoption of design thinking (including critical situations), (ii) the role played by design and designers in the process, (iii) different purposes and interpretations given to the approach (Table 2.1). Table 2.1 Interviews scheme Interviewee name

Affiliation

Business type

Acronym

Giuseppe Attoma

CEO e Senior Design Strategist at Attoma

Design agency

G.A

Pietro Curtolillo

Customer Experience Design Manager at Vodafone Italy

Company (Telco)

P.C

Enrico Girotti

Head of Design at H-Farm in HIC

Design agency

E.G

Bruno Gori

Clinical Research Physician at Lilly

Company (Pharma)

B.G

Franco Guidi

Founder and CEO at Lombardini22

Other consultancy

F.G

Stefano Grisenti

Project Manager ‘Vision’ at Leroy Merlin

Company (Retail)

S.G

Gianluca Loparco

Digital Transformation Service Line Leader at Deloitte Digital

Design agency

G.L

Pierpaolo Peretti Griva

Partner, Coach e HR Consultant at Mida

Other consultancy

P.P

Fabio Salierno

Head of the Experience Design Lab at Intesa Sanpaolo

Company (Finance)

F.S

Lidia Tralli

Service Design Lead at Fjord

Design Agency

L.T

2.1 Blurred Understanding and Applications of Design Thinking …

21

This first set of interviews resulted in a series of insights which are below synthetized and labelled as ‘areas of blur’ in the field of collaborative design practices. ‘Areas of blur’ The following paragraphs outline four initial issues drew from the contributions of ten practitioners in lead positions, that shared the experience with design thinking within in their organisations. Those issues have been defined as ‘areas of blur’ of the practice, that supplement the literature gaps outlined in Sect. 1.2 with evidences from the field. The ‘areas of blur’ are clusters of the main qualitative insights that I got from the interviews which where pinpointing uncertain or ambiguous aspects of the design thinking practice. Those, together with the results of the observational studies, represented a starting point to delineate a narrower perimeter and choose a specific perspective to adopt for the subsequent phases of the research. Goal: ‘problem-solving’ or ‘creative confidence’? The approach proposed by design thinking embeds two peculiar aspects: one is related with the collaborative way of doing things, while the other one focuses on a specific methodology aimed at shaping innovative products/services. These two complementary aspects generate different interests by the functional departments inside a company: people working with human resources are highly attracted by design thinking as a new way of making employees collaborate crossdepartments, while people working with the releases of new products/services (R&D, Marketing, Innovation etc.) are interested in the design and innovation proposition of the approach (Fig. 2.1). These different interpretations often cause some confusion on the objective of the adoption of design thinking, finally making everyone not fully satisfied with the result. As G.A. states: “for a consultancy, it happens many times that requests come from different departments of the client company that share the same budget. In those cases, you have to make compromises that weaken the success of the consultancy activity because interests are not aligned and often conflictual”. The collaborative aspect sometimes is so evident that there are companies that uses the term ‘design thinking’ to identify the way the employees internally work and interact. An example is given by F.G., who even added ‘design thinking’ as a pay-off in his company name: “we have added design thinking to our brand from the beginning because that has always been our way of working”. But the higher level of application of design for human resources purposes is represented by P.P. He works for a consultancy firm that offers services to the HR departments inside companies. He got fascinated by design thinking and service design, so he started to gradually introduce them within the consultancy and today they are completely embedded inside their activities: “what was really attractive for Human Resources was the humanisation of the process of design thinking…before that there were other methodologies for problem-solving purposes coming from

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Fig. 2.1 Design thinking within private organisations

total quality management, but those were engineering approaches, which were not interesting for HR.” Moreover, the idea of a more human-centric process for designing and delivering products and services makes implicitly people happier with their workplace (Kolko 2015). P.P. is aware of the ‘design-specific’ aim of those methodologies, but he consciously uses them for training purposes: “in our DNA there is the strong belief that a project is an experience of learning”. This is a concept that has been supported by many authors that studied experiential learning related with project-team dynamics and also design thinking in specific (Beckman and Barry 2007; Edmondson 2012). Subject-matter: framing the scope The most recognized feature of design thinking seems to be fostering the generation of new innovative ideas. What is not that common, or trendy instead is: what for? In many cases the definition of the brief on which to start the idea generation is a very fast and marginal step: “people inside companies tend to simplify the design thinking process, defining it as a way to find innovative ideas or experiencing a new way to collaborate, without understanding that it is just a part of the entire process” claimed E.G. In order to reinforce the importance of defining meaningful problems to solve, E.G. reframed the way his team works with the client during the brief definition. Within the various format of application of design thinking that usually starts from a defined brief, E.G. used to introduce a pre-session of codesign with the client

2.1 Blurred Understanding and Applications of Design Thinking …

23

uniquely dedicated to shape the brief and understanding the specific problem to be solved. Also F.S. had to deal with the same concern. He claimed that he was really inspired by a talk he attended within an international conference: “I was impressed by the speaker showing an extension of the traditional double-diamond graph, adding two smaller double-diamond at the beginning and at the end of the process. There I founded the visual explanation of the way we are working in our team, indeed we dedicate a lot of time doing research to define a relevant brief.” G.A. gave a specific definition to this practice: “It’s a collaborative mediation of the need. I talk about mediation because it deals with helping the decision-makers to decide to make a conscious choice and to decide for one direction, that will be pursued in an effective and measurable way. My proposal would be: let’s start applying the design thinking methods to understand the problem we want to solve, instead of using them to produce more solutions”. This concept can be linked to the definition of “innovation of meaning” expressed by Verganti (2017): “a novel vision that redefines the problem worth addressing. It takes innovation one level higher—not only a new how but especially a new why: it proposes a new reason why people use something. A new value proposition, i.e., a novel interpretation of what is relevant and meaningful in a market. A new direction.” Impact: measurements and adoption Almost all the interviewees highlighted as one of the biggest challenges of the design thinking approach the lack of measurement features. There are some consultancies that are trying to find a solution to this issue in order to comply with business needs, as G.L. stated: “The major difficulties we usually face with clients are related with measuring and assuring effectiveness of these activities: companies are increasingly asking rapidity and quick win solutions that can have a clear impact on the business level. Companies often struggle to evaluate the impact of this discipline within the organisation: it is indeed a transversal discipline, therefore the variables that influences it are various and they influence different metrics, both quantitative and qualitative which can be related either to business or to the user experience.” This issue can probably be extended to the service design practice or design in general and it is not limited to consultancy: indeed, it is often raised by specific structures inside the companies. F.S. in fact, who is the head of the Service Design team within a big Italian banking and insurance company, points out the lack of specific KPIs to evaluate service design. With regards to this topic, the most repeated argument about the integration of design in business environment is that designers lack basic business competences and language. A contribution on this subject comes from P.C.: “The hardliner approach in a designer doesn’t work. What is working is simplicity and pragmatism. Designers inside companies have to face two clients: one is the end-user and the other one is the company itself. I position myself in the middle. I think that designers don’t know

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how to argue effectively the benefits of design within a company. We are missing the profile of a designer who also own business competences.” This is really a major issue, raised even during the Advisory Board of the course in Product Service System Design at Politecnico di Milano (2016), which was composed by professors, practitioners and researchers in the field of service design. The other issue with impact, beside measurements, deals with the adoption in the long term of the ‘design thinking’ approach. All interviewees agreed that after a design thinking workshop, beyond some scepticism, there is overall a relevant dose of excitement and optimism. The problem is that often those feelings slowly decrease over time when employees come back to their desk and need to carry out their ordinary day-to-day activities. P.P. identified this weakness in the practice of the competitors, therefore he built their distinctive asset on that: “we guarantee to lead and accompany the change within the organisation, going beyond the experiential formula of the hackathon used by many competitors, which is really impressive on the emotional level, but has less impact on the organisation itself. Sometimes these activities generate even the opposite effect because people produce a lot of material that unlikely enters inside the organisation, causing frustration in people who participated.” Even in the experience of P.C. the biggest challenge of design thinking in organisations is “to give continuity to these activities. In order to give continuity, the motivational component is crucial and to achieve it we would need a cultural change, which is the most difficult challenge.” For E.G. this issue is crucial for his team and solving it is one of his main mission. Therefore, he started to make different integrations to the process they usually follow. He divided the process in: PRE-DURING-POST. • The PRE phase is intended to co-design the initial brief with a core team of the client side; • The DURING phase is dedicated to the workshop itself, based on the agreed brief and aimed at reframing it in 4 more detailed and focused ones. This phase involves a larger group inside the company; • The POST phase is a program of guidance and review with the client throughout the development of the projects responding to the briefs. This program ends with the development of raw prototypes that will be presented to the management board (Fig. 2.2). This new format represents for E.G. a first attempt in trying to come out of the process with tangible outcomes and finally answer to the client question: “How do we quantify the return of investment?”. Lessons Learnt As said, these issues represent a starting point for further investigations, research and experimentation in order to guide a new course of action. In general, it can be said that most of the reported weaknesses brings back to reinforce some of the core premises of the design practice, which have probably been oversimplified in order to meet the business constraints (Nussbaum 2011). Starting

2.1 Blurred Understanding and Applications of Design Thinking …

25

Fig. 2.2 New process workflow according to E.G

from the four issues depicted above, we could envision four initial directions to be further explored. • First of all, it is important to understand the authentic need that drives a company to look for design thinking and, consequently, what is the ‘kind of design thinking’ that suits it (Politecnico di Milano 2018). If it is true that companies are adopting design thinking for different purposes, as also the results of the observatory reports (Politecnico di Milano 2018), then probably there is the need to shape different processes to suit diverse purposes and communicate them properly to all people involved. In this perspective, I believe that the community of designers should address this demand by rigorously studying effective ‘designerly’ course of actions. • Secondly, it would be fruitful to dedicate enough time to frame the specific scope of any design thinking activity. This might require more time than looking for solutions. In order to do so, as design researchers we need to investigate a strategy to guide internal stakeholders towards a process of problem framing which can bring about the formulation of a meaningful challenge and, at the same time, can engage the stakeholders in an activity that can turn out to be frustrating. • Thirdly, there is the need to find ways to assess the business potential of the solutions or at least find convincing motivations about why they can’t be measured. If from one side it is true that designers need to learn how to speak the business language, it is also true that “organisations that ‘get’ design use emotional language (words that concern desires, aspirations, engagement, and experience) to describe products and users” (Kolko 2015), therefore they don’t need quantitative evidences. • Lastly, what would push design thinking a step forward is a further comprehension of how the intervention of design and designers could go beyond envisioning and planning, therefore addressing the phase of adoption of the solutions so conceived. In this hypothesis it is also to be investigated who is the professional or professionals that lead this phase and the range of skills that those profiles need to own.

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2.2 A Compass of Variables in Collaborative Design Practices2 The following paragraphs build upon the discourse outlined in Sect. 1.2 with the aim of addressing the research directions highlighted by literature and practice and advance the comprehension of those inquiries. I hereby report the observational studies and the related findings as part of the field research carried out from April until November 2017. The observations have to be considered as complimentary to the interviews, in a comparative analysis where the two paths were continuously and mutually informing throughout the investigation. The aim was to dig deeper into the characteristics of collaborative design practices and generate an empirical understanding of what is currently undergoing within private organisations. As introduced in the Sect. 1.1 I defined as ‘collaborative design practices’ the ones satisfying three characteristics: (i) making use of design methods and tools and explicitly referring to the design discipline, (ii) involving diverse actors to work together for a shared goal in the same place with limited time, (iii) having a clear guidance in the design of the process and in the facilitation. The specific objective was to investigate the variables that insist on them, draw a comparison, and ultimately reflect on the findings in order to inform the final framework. The studies reported in the following paragraphs are based on direct observations of workshops and design activities conducted within a set of large companies (more than 250 employees according to OECD classification) based in Italy, selected among the ones that were experimenting with collaborative design practices in the Italian context. Variables of observations and interpretation The workshops I observed vary for different aspects: here after I define the variables that delineate the session and generate the categories through which the studies are analysed: Goal: The goal is the brief the workshop deals with. It both embraces the reason why the workshop was run and defines its purpose. Therefore, the goal is the variable that determines the stage of the design process where the session is introduced. The design process here considered is the Double Diamond framed by the Design Council (2014) which defines the stages as: ‘discover insight into the problem’, ‘define the area to focus upon’, ‘develop potential solutions’ and ‘deliver solutions that work’. In this sense, the variable connects with the concept of ‘subject-matter’, introduced by the ‘Collaborative Design Framework’ proposed by Meroni et al. (2018) (Fig. 2.3). In this framework, the authors define the two poles of the Double Diamond as tensions towards design activities that are ‘topic-driven’ or ‘concept-driven’. ‘Topicdriven’ activities are the ones that can be found on the left side of the process, 2

This section builds upon the article: Rossi M (2021) A compass to drive collaborative design practices within private organisations. Strategic Design Res J 14(2):396–406, May–August. https:// doi.org/10.4013/sdrj.2021.142.02.

2.2 A Compass of Variables in Collaborative Design Practices

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Fig. 2.3 The Double Diamond by the Design Council in the interpretation of Meroni et al. (2018)

connected with problem exploration and definition. The ‘concept-driven’ ones, instead, are the ones that start from the orientation given by the problem-solving brief and build upon it. Participants: people involved in the workshops have diverse roles within the company. They can be internal employees, employees of another company, or endusers. When employees, I considered also the level in the organogram, since it is interesting to understand the assortment of stakeholders involved in the session and how they were mixed during the activity. Style of guidance: it is relevant to highlight the background and the professional role of the session’s moderators, because it relates to the ‘style of guidance’. The ‘steering’ style of guidance differs from the ‘facilitating’ one, as it implies that the moderator contributes with her opinion and provides direction to be discussed within the group. Hence, expert designers, when in this role, leverage their envisioning skills to offer topics for discussion to the participants. Process—tasks and boundary objects: it is meaningful to understand the course of action and the main tools used in order to understand the disciplinary approach to which they refer. The author took part in those workshops, with different roles and different levels of involvement. This made it possible to collect insights trough different perspectives, get a more complete overview of the whole process, and be aware of possible biases. In particular, in study 1 (see Table 2.2) I was observing all the groups, in study 4 I acted as participant, and in studies 2 and 3 I was part of the design team that conceived and run the workshop. In the latter cases, I also acted as moderator. Study n.1 Goal: This session was held on the 23rd and 24th of November 2017. The company who commissioned the activity is a corporation in the automotive industry. The

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Table 2.2 Summary of the case studies Study No

1

2

3

Company and consultancy names

Automotive company with Skillab

Intesa Sanpaolo + Autogrill with Experientia

Banking company with Attoma

Goal (design subject Generate action plans matter: on existing ideas + ‘concept-driven’) training

Refine existing idea on Design new digital a new service concept services for customers

Participants

Internal: Top management

Internal (mixed levels) Internal (mixed levels) + External (partner + External (users) company employees)

Style of guidance

Designers (steering) + Designers (steering) training consultant (facilitating)

Designers (steering)

Process—tasks and boundary objects

Business model canvas Value proposition canvas Stakeholder Map Action Plan

Personas User Journeys Prototypes

Personas Storyboard on Spatial Map Service Blueprint

challenge that this company was facing is the relevant dip in sales of diesel engines, attendant on the raised awareness of consumers about polluting emissions. One year before this session, the company was at a crucial turning point of its journey, since top management needed to take a strategic decision to stay competitive on the market. Moreover, the impact of this decision could involve the whole organisation, and they thus decided to ask a consultancy firm to help them find solutions. The output was a set of ideas that were supposed to be adopted and developed by the company: yet, this did not happen because of different obstacles that the projects encountered within the organisation. For these reasons, the company engaged again the firm, Skillab, to support them to implement those ideas. At the same time, the company realized that the employees needed to acquire a more collaborative way of working and asked Skillab to train the participants toward this direction. The session was suitably called ‘Beyond creativity: engineering innovation from concept to execution’. In this sense, the workshop can be considered ‘concept-driven’, because there were already some concepts as a starting point that needed to be better defined and ultimately harnessed into action plans. Participants: the workshop was addressed and restricted to the top managers of the company, since the activity implied taking strategic and urgent decisions for the company. Style of guidance: Skillab appointed two experts to design the session: a business researcher from Università del Piemonte Orientale and one design researcher, the author, from Politenico di Milano. In addition, Skillab engaged also a teambuilding coach.

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The two researchers worked collaboratively to design the workshop, merging business and design principles to develop a dedicated path and specific boundary objects that lead the group toward practicable action plans. The coach, instead, planned some parallel activities to be performed during isolated slots throughout the workshop. The intention was to reinforce the principles that participants were applying to carry out each task with some teambuilding activities, which were however disconnected from the specific topics of the session and the core business of the company. The style of guidance was a ‘steering’ one, because the researchers pushed the team toward a service-oriented approach, envisioning scenarios to stimulate the ideas of the teams. However, they were not moderating single teams but launching tasks and then suggesting directions if need be. Hence, that can be considered a case of ‘light steering’. Process—tasks and boundary objects: Since the process had the specific aim of guiding the implementation of concepts, it was conceived as an efficient mix of design and business methodologies and tools. There was not such an emphasis on specifying or promoting the names of the disciplines that were adopted, but the researchers clearly supported their instructions referring to design thinking and business. In order to understand the starting point for the workshop and at what stage of maturity the projects were, the researchers prepared a ‘pre-work activity’. In the ‘pre-work’ they asked participants to share some information about the project. The information was structured in a ‘business model canvas’ (Osterwalder et al. 2010) that is a good synthesis of the main features of the concepts. In addition, specific information was required regarding the stage of maturity of the project (‘idea’, ‘prototyping’ ‘development’, ‘launch’) and, most importantly, the barriers that the project team encountered along its way. The outputs were important for the researchers to understand which was the starting point of the session and, consequently, to design the following tasks. What came out was that most ideas were not proposals of solutions, but they were still framed as challenges, hence they were not conceived yet. Moreover, the barriers reported by the project teams were mainly related to lack of commitment and approval from internal stakeholders. Hence, the process designed for the workshop was reframed, planning more time for the idea definition and a strong focus on stakeholder analysis. Participants were split into groups of 5 people. The first activity was indeed repeating the ‘idea generation’. All the ideas needed to propose possible solutions to overcome the challenge of the diesel underselling. Once ideas were framed, the process went through the definition of the value proposition and then the definition of the project milestones of development. After that, the process went through the analysis of stakeholders, being the crucial aspect to focus on. Each milestone was therefore associated with the need to involve internal and external stakeholders to implement it. This task helped to state exactly ‘who needed to do what’. Those statements gained an even higher significance when they were brought into the action plan template, where they were enriched as ‘who needs to do what and when’.

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Study n.2 Goal: This session took place on the 12th and 13th of April 2017. Intesa Sanpaolo, which organised this activity, is one of the largest Italian banking group. In recent years, Intesa has been working to improve branch experiences for its clients, launching projects dedicated to changing the traditional concept of bank branch. Intesa wanted to offer to its clients a unique and immersive experience in terms of spaces and layout, services offered, communication and more. Therefore, Intesa set a partnership with Autogrill Puro Gusto, a fine food shop line of the multinational catering company Autogrill. What they came out with was a place that could connect the two services, where people could enter and relax as in a bar and at the same time use the services of the bank. This was the concept conceived at the strategic level of the company, but it was still not completely clear how this place would have functioned and served clients. Therefore, Intesa Sanpaolo engaged its internal Service Design Team, together with its consultancy supplier Experientia, to design the new branch service concept. Prior to the workshop, Intesa and Experientia conducted an in-depth desk and field research, which lead to the definition of preliminary service concepts and specific target users to focus on. The designers decided to concentrate on three different targets: two of them were ideal prospect clients the bank wanted to attract, while the other one was the profile of a typical client of Intesa Sanpaolo. This choice was intended to envision both the new experience for an ordinary client and for potential ones that could be attracted by the new concept. Anyhow, the workshop kicked into motion with some existing draft concepts. Hence, the workshop was still aimed at expanding and envisioning possibilities, yet it was somehow driven by some defined concepts (‘concept-driven’). Participants: The participants were employees from Intesa, covering different roles with different hierarchical levels. They were selected as representatives from each department of the company that impacted on designing and delivering the new experience. Designers from Experientia worked together with the Service Design Team of Intesa to develop and moderate the workshop. A group of employees from Autogrill was also involved, selected with the same criteria as Intesa employees. The participants worked in mixed groups, each of them focusing on a different target previously identified by Experientia. Style of guidance: Each group was moderated by an expert service designer, who ‘steered’ it throughout the process, giving guidance and advices grounded on the preliminary research. Process—tasks and boundary objects: The first part of the workshop was dedicated to reviewing the existing concepts and the profile of target users highlighted by the preliminary research. The target users were framed as Personas, the format used by service designers to draft the behavioural features of people. Then, the groups outlined a Storyboard on a Spatial Map for the assigned persona, envisioning an ideal experience path through the spatial layout of the new branch.

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Fig. 2.4 Setting of the activity of Study 1 in Intesa Sanpaolo

The second part of the session was devoted to designing the Service Blueprint, which is a framework usually employed by expert designers. This task was indeed strongly guided by the moderator. The process and the tools used were derived from service design practice and discipline (Figs. 2.4 and 2.5). Study n.3 Goal: This activity took place on the 9th, 10th and 11th of May 2017. A banking company based in Italy had to kick off a project of digitalisation of some of the main services in order to stay competitive in a market more and more dominated by online banking providers. The company asked for the support of the strategic consultancy firm Attoma. Attoma carried out an extensive research that led to the identification of three ‘personas’ and three streams of services to be designed. The three personas referred to three levels of ease towards digital banking services. The three design streams instead dealt with three different demands: ‘opening a bank account’, ‘deferral of payments’, ‘saving’ and ‘insurances’. Once the research was concluded, Attoma organized a workshop with the banking company to codesign new digital services that could satisfy the demands identified. Participants: The session involved a variety of participants. Attoma gathered a group of employees of the company with different functions and hierarchical levels, a group of consultants and also a group of potential users to represent the personas identified. Participants were split into mixed groups and each group worked on one stream. The groups were quite numerous, made up of around 10 heterogeneous members. Style of guidance: The session was moderated by expert designers; the groups were working in different rooms with one moderator each. In addition to the moderators, there were people from the research team of Attoma to support them.

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Fig. 2.5 Storyboard on the spatial map of the bank branch

The moderators led the process guiding the group through every reflection and giving precise instructions when launching the tasks. Hence, they adopted a ‘steering’ style of guidance. Process—tasks and boundary objects: The author observed just one of the teams, hence she will refer here to the group she observed. The process adopted was the same for all teams. The first part of the workshop was dedicated to sharing the results of the research and framing with participants the User Journeys based on the Personas. This created the bases of the second part of the workshop called ‘codesign’ by Attoma, where participants were asked to imagine solutions to the ‘key moments’ of the experience highlighted in the user journeys. Each person was then asked to individually design the user interactions of the personas with an ideal digital service. Each participant was therefore provided with smartphone mockups to be completed with sketched interfaces, in order to structure the flow of user interactions with the service. That came out to be a highly technical and hands-on task, unfamiliar for most of the people in the room who were not designers. The mockups represented proper ‘prototypes’, physical manifestation of design concepts, as defined by Sanders and Stappers (2014) This individual task was followed by a sharing moment, where everybody presented to the other his/her work and then voted for the favourite solution. This

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Fig. 2.6 Design of the user journeys with the entire group of participants

process was repeated for each of the ‘key moments’ and lead to the convergence of the group toward the most voted solutions for each (Figs. 2.6 and 2.7). A compass of variables The variables used to interpret each case can be turned into axes with two opposite poles, representing their specific qualities: from one pole to another there is a gradient of different situations blending the two qualities. Goal: idea generation versus consensus The first focus is on the ‘goal’. In all the cases, the company started with a challenge that was quite clear. In some cases, it was supported by a preliminary research, but the collaborative session was always planned as a subsequent step, to generate ideas once the problem was already framed. Based on the experience of the cases presented here, we can argue that, considering innovation processes, collaborative activities usually fit in the right-hand part of the Double Diamond, the one dedicated to finding solutions (Design Council 2014). Within the second diamond we can even position the sessions at different stages, according to the level of definition of the concepts at the beginning of the workshops. We are indeed in the ‘concept-driven’ area (Meroni et al. 2018), where the collaborative session begins with some phrased directions.

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Fig. 2.7 Codesign of the solutions as paper prototypes

In the graph below (Fig. 2.8) I positioned the sessions according to their goal. To the left, we find the more divergent processes (‘develop’ phase of the Double Diamond), aimed at generating and expanding options; to the right, we find sessions aimed at converging on implementation plans (‘deliver’ phase of the Double Diamond). Therefore, we can argue that processes closer to the left polarity have as the main purpose the generation of new solutions; while processes closer to the right have the aim of creating a consensus around a conceived direction. Participants: low variety versus high variety As regarding participants, a relevant quality for investigation was the variety level. The workshop ranged from involving very similar participants to mixing completely diverse ones. Style of guidance: facilitating vs steering ‘Facilitating’ and ‘steering’ stay at opposite poles, allowing many nuances inbetween. From the above experience, it can be said that collaborative design practices, when led by designers, are likely to be characterised by a steering style of guidance. That is because designers are still seen as expert in the process, who own the ability to envision solutions (Manzini 2015). Collaboration then comes into the stage to enrich

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Fig. 2.8 The cases mapped on the Double Diamond

and discuss the concepts with the experts in contents (employees of the company) and with the end-users. Process: design-like versus designerly way The cases described above reveal how design tools and methods were adopted and interpreted for different purposes. The sessions closer to the left polarity (‘design-like’) are those where the design approach was adopted in a lighter way (Robert and Macdonald 2017). For example, in study 1, where the goal was to define action plans, most of the tools were inspired more by business studies than by design. The ‘design thinking’ approach pervaded the session for some general principles that have been introduced, such as collaboration, human-centricity, hands-on attitude and the importance of prototyping. However, the typical design tools were not adopted. I called it ‘design-like’ because it introduced some design principles into a process that was not design-specific (ibidem). On the other hand, I called ‘designerly’ the right-side polarity, where sessions are characterized by the presence of design-specific tools, like service blueprints and interfaces, which are very technical and generally used by ‘authorized personnel’ (Cross 2007) (Fig. 2.9). Lessons learnt From the cases observed through the variables, it is possible to recognize a pattern that draws a rough compass for collaborative design practices. Surely, three cases

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Fig. 2.9 The compass of collaborative design practices elaborated through the observational studies

are too few to represent a significant panorama, but they own additional qualitative features that informed the subsequent considerations. With regard to the compass, it can be argued that all the subject matters of the observed activities were ‘concept-driven’ and the designers moderated in a ‘steering’ way, probably because this is the more congenial style for a designer. Considering the goal of the sessions, it can be noticed that the more the session aimed at developing new solutions, the more the people involved were varied. As such, the more the variety of participants increased, the more the style of guidance tended to be a ‘steering’ one. We can suppose that, since contributors were heterogeneous, the option to adopt a steering style of guidance was deemed more appropriate. A similar reasoning can be applied to the type of process: when the goal dealt with developing concepts, the whole process was characterised by design-specific tools and attitude. Sometimes it can even end up being too technical and ineffective if proposed to non-designers. According to Stickdorn (2016), that happens when designers, and especially service designers, focus more on the ‘how’ than on the ‘what’ “becom[ing] obsessed with the tools and methods and los[ing] sight of what [they]’re actually trying to do” (Drummond 2017). These represents initial considerations that could be consolidated by adding more case studies to the data set on the one side, and on the other by deepening into some insights. For example, based on my last reflection, the focus of collaborative sessions seems to be less focused on the ideas and contents produced and more on the process, so that the experience and the tools become more important than the output. In some cases, this can be due to the fact that the session is organised around a concept that is already defined, and the aim is to generate commitment by the participants. That

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happens especially in the aforementioned contexts where the purpose is to either reach a ‘consensus’ or alignment (Forrester 2018). Drawing on these considerations, the subsequent steps are directed toward understanding how the role of design could evolve in order to address purposefully those experiential or context-related aspects identified in such sessions while still delivering innovative outputs. Moreover, the lessons learnt from observation suggested to dedicate attention to the involvement of different stakeholders during the process and specifically to inquire the meaning of their role at each stage. This is ultimately aimed at framing how the decisional power is distributed toward the process and to which extent such collaborative practices are contributing to the democratization of strategic decisions. Another topic that certainly deserves a deeper investigation deals with the relationship that training coach and designers can establish when guiding collaborative processes. In case 1, they experienced this alliance, being potentially valuable but actually ineffective. Since the purpose of the company in that case aimed at both training the people and innovating the company offering, the designer and the coach could plan their intervention in a joint way, enriching their respective skills instead of carrying on their separate paths. How can designers and training coach create valuable alliances to structure joint collaborative activities within organisations (Auricchio et al. 2018)?

References Auricchio V, Rossi M, Dezza G, Peretti Griva P (2018) Service design and human resource consulting: an integrated vision. In: Proceedings of the service design and innovation conference, Milan, 2018 Beckman SL, Barry M (2007) Innovation as a learning process: embedding design thinking. Calif Manage Rev 50(1):25–56 Cross N (2007) Designerly ways of knowing, 1st edn. Birkhäuser Architecture, Boston, MA Design Council (2014) The design process: what is the double diamond? Retrieved from: https:// www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/design-process-what-double-diamond Drummond S (2017) The what not the how of service design. Retrieved from: http://rufflemuffin. org/the-what-not-the-how-of-service-design/ Edmondson AC (2012) Teaming: how organizations learn, innovate, and compete in the knowledge economy, 1st edn. Jossey-Bass Forrester (2018) the total economic Impact™ of IBM’s design thinking practice. Retrieved from: https://www.ibm.com/design/thinking/static/media/Enterprise-Design-Thinking-Report. 8ab1e9e1.pdf Kolko J (2015) Design thinking comes of age. Harv Bus Rev 66–71 Manzini E (2015) Design, when everybody designs: an introduction to design for social innovation Meroni A, Selloni D, Rossi M (2018) Massive codesign, a proposal for a collaborative design framework. Franco Angeli Design International Series, Milan, Italy Nussbaum B (2011) Design thinking is a failed experiment. So what’s next? Fast Co.Design. https:// www.fastcodesign.com/1663558/design-thinking-is-a-failed-experiment-so-whats-next

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Politecnico di Milano - School of Design - PSSD (2016) Msc product service system design advisory board meeting report. Milan. Unpublished Politecnico di Milano (2018) Observatory design thinking for business—which kind of design thinking is right for you? Politecnico di Milano (2019) Observatory design thinking for business - mapping design thinking: transformations, applications and evolutions Robert GB, Macdonald A (2017) Co-design, organisational creativity and quality improvement in the healthcare sector: ‘designerly’ or ‘design-like’? In Sangiorgi D, Prendiville A (eds) Designing for service. Key issues and new directions. Bloomsbury Academic, London Sanders EB-N, Stappers PJ (2014) Probes, toolkits and prototypes: three approaches to making in codesigning. CoDesign 10(1):5–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2014.888183 Stickdorn M (2016) Service experience camp conference. Key note speech, Berlin Verganti R (2017) Overcrowded: designing meaningful products in a world Awash with ideas. MIT Press

Chapter 3

The HR Management Perspective

Abstract This part of the investigation enriches the exploration with a specific focus on the aspect of collaboration. The first Sect. 3.1 further explores the ‘areas of blur’ identified through the previous research and enriches the analysis through the variables outlined during the observational studies. Section 3.2 digs deeper into the concept of Service Design for Human Resources. Even if the concept of Human Resource Design differs from the concept of Service Design for Human Resources, as said, it was crucial to explore in the first place SD for HR as a lighter level of integration of the two fields. Since the research at this point introduced a strong focus on collaboration, Sect. 3.3 provides an overview of the main literature studies about group development. Using the Tuckman model as a main reference, the overview compares the most acknowledged models in psychology and business studies, in order to generate a critical and comprehensive knowledge about the main stages of group development and their characteristics. Section 3.4 takes a step further in the analysis of groups and teams by exploring the concept of teaming as a learning experience. It also investigates the correlations with innovation processes such as collaborative design practices. Last Sect. 3.5 of the chapter and last step of conceptual reasoning is devoted to the comprehension of how design can also leverage on behavioural sciences to better tackle change projects within organisations. Organisations that are facing change management challenges need to work also on a behavioural level, that implies both analysing current behaviours and ignite desired behaviours in employees besides changing the organisational structure. The contamination of behavioural sciences with design represents a promising opportunity for tackling organisational change challenges and offers relevant elements of investigation for further developing the final HRD framework.

3.1 What HR Managers Look for in Design While framing the three areas of blur that synthetized the insights gathered in the first part of the research, I started to realize that the most unexplored path regarding the introduction of collaborative design practice in organization dealt with collaboration itself. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rossi, Human Resource Design, PoliMI SpringerBriefs, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87612-8_3

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The contributions gathered led me to reflect on the hypothesis that private organisations, when enacting or looking for collaborative design practices, often aim, even inexplicitly, at enhancing the way people work and live the organisation rather than ideating innovative solutions for the market. And this intuition coming from practice is also confirmed by literature in the HR management field. The four most recent reports issued by the research team Bersin by Deloitte, that is one of the most accredited and influential institution in the field of ‘human capital’, clearly detects design thinking and the human-centered approach as the trends that are shaping the future of human resource management (Bersin by Deloitte 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019). Among the innovative perspectives that Bersin by Deloitte promotes, there is the advocacy for a more holistic and less siloed approach to the various responsibilities in charge of the HR function, shifting towards considering end-to-end journeys of employees, framed with the concept of ‘employee experience’ (Bersin by Deloitte 2017). This concept is subsequently advanced towards the idea of ‘human experience’ in the most recent report (Bersin by Deloitte 2019), where the notion extends beyond work processes to focus on the meaning of work itself. With this regard, it enters in the personal sphere of the workers and the design of the experience becomes employee-led and bottom-up rather than top-down. It is clear therefore that design and HR management in this scenario would have a lot to share in terms of propositions, principles and values. The assumption is also confirmed by the results of the Observatory of Design Thinking of the School of Business of Politecnico di Milano that is monitoring 291 companies (Politecnico di Milano 2019). The findings suggest that design thinking as a mean to instill the ‘creative confidence’ within organisations is increasingly getting a foothold. The ‘creative confidence’ approach is intended as “hav[ing] the main aim of nurtur[ing] mindsets and shap[ing] the organisational culture, which are the fundamental premises of any kind of innovation”, therefore it “focuses especially on people because the most effective way to transform businesses is through several changes in the mindsets and attitudes of people” (ibidem, p. 16). Considering that “Design Thinking originally derived from the product and service field, it is worth noting that almost ¼ of revenues obtained by the Consulting Organizations in 2018 through Design Thinking projects concern cultural and organisational change issues” (ibidem, p.32). Another study carried out by a group of researchers of the Hasso Plattner Institute (Schmiedgen et al. 2015) shows that many organisations intend design thinking as an approach to help with internal process improvements and matters of cultural change in teams and departments, reporting that 71% of the companies investigated (235, worldwide) used design thinking to improve their working culture on a team level. It is surprising even in this research how customerfacing, or service innovation is often not the main area of application. Based on these assumptions, I initiated a second round of interviews, in order to get more qualitative insights related with this specific objective of collaborative design practices.

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Table 3.1 In-depth analysis. Second round of interviews scheme Interviewee name

Affiliation

Business type

Acronym

Julia Altenburg

Senior Manager People Strategy and Agile Methods at Lufthansa

Company (Transport)

J.A

Enrico Cerni

Head of Faculty at Generali

Company (Insurance)

E.C

Rosa Martelli

Digital HR e Employee Experience Manager at Vodafone Italy

Company (Telco)

R.M

The second round was composed of three main sections of exploration: (i) the goal and the process with the related tools of the activities, (ii) the specificities of facilitation and (iii) participants composition and engagement. The interviewees were selected among HR management practitioners of three large private organisations operating internationally in different industries (more than 250 employees according to OECD classification). Table 3.1 shows the overview of the interviewees with their affiliation and, subsequently, the findings outline. The Variables Connotation from the Perspective of HR Managers The insights gathered from the second round of interviews boosted a step forward to the comprehension of what were initially identified as ‘areas of blur’ and secondly became the variables of a compass for collaborative design practice. This round was indeed dedicated to better investigate the collaboration dynamics activated by design and their impact on employees experience and behaviours. Therefore, the variables acquire in this case a specific connotation that synthetizes the state of the art on the perception of design for HR managers. Goal: Design as ‘Not-So-Explicit’ Agent of Change As introduced in Sect. 1.1 design can often be applied for customer facing innovation purposes with implicit consequences on the way people work and therefore on their behaviours. Design in these regards is considered as a form of implicit agent of change because it represents a side effect compared to its traditional purpose. This is the case of all the organisations that are applying design thinking with what has been called by the research team of the Observatory (Politecnico di Milano 2018, 2019) the ‘Creative Problem Solving’ approach, which still represents the majority. This is also the case reported by the interviewee from Generali, who covers a managing role in the HR function. He claimed to be aware that design thinking can instill new ways of working, but this purpose was never declared: “[we have never organized a design activity focused on an HR topic] openly, but all the activities I told you about are part of the initiative: ‘New Way of working—WoW’ which provides a whole series of new ways of working such as temporary posting for a particular project, Smart Working, a temporary assignment on certain activities, hackathons. They are all new ways of working that allow us to break down silos, flatten hierarchies and proceed with respect to a key word in the company strategy

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that is: ‘faster’. There is therefore a strategic vision behind it, into which collaboration is also grafted” (E.C.). This is the case that represents the largest use of design thinking in a consulting support function (internally and externally) as reported by HPI report (Schmiedgen et al. 2015). DT in this diffused configuration is embodied by a special team which is in charge of giving support to other internal teams by offering ‘design thinking facilitation’. Moreover, all interviewees reported that within their organisation there is a special team which is acting as internal consultancy. However, just one of the companies interviewed had this team established within the HR function (Lufthansa), therefore having the declared goal of boosting internal change. It seems that the internal benefits that design is bringing to the organisations are recognized but they are a sort of collateral effect to the activity. HPI reports as third motivation to adopt design thinking within the companies interviewed is to reach ‘better alignment, collaboration and knowledge transfer’. Companies that fall into this motivation’s cluster acknowledge “the application of design thinking … [as] more about resolving inefficiencies due to dysfunctional teams and processes (e.g. cross-silo rivalry about competencies or insufficient information exchange also with external entities, etc.). Knowing and navigating the organisation via design thinking is therefore seen as a quality itself” (Schmiedgen et al. 2015). Subject-Matter: From Engagement to Employee Experience to Wellbeing In all the abovementioned cases we could say that design (or design thinking in the label of the reports cited) is considered, often even unconsciously, as implicit agent of change in the way people work. Nevertheless, many companies are starting to declare to ask for design thinking with HR-related purposes in mind. HR departments appear to predominantly ask for internal process improvements (collaboration) and better recruiting/on-boarding experiences, for which the internal preconditions had to be set (Schmiedgen et al. 2015). In the studies developed by HPI, ‘improving own internal business processes and organisational structures that are not necessarily related to innovative market offerings’ is ranked as the fifth out of twenty motivations to reach design thinking. This is considered as a striking result by HPI research team compared to expectations. One representative case in this direction that is provided by the team QUEST in Lufthansa. In April 2018 Lufthansa constituted an internal team called QUEST that operates within HR and directly reports to the Chief Human Resource Officer. QUEST stands for ‘QUick and Easy Solutions Tested’ and it has a declared goal to “change the way [employees] work together” in Lufthansa (J.A.). I found this case of high relevance because the establishment of an internal team, especially in HR, embodies the wish to enact a durable and solid change. QUEST team already launched a series of projects related with HR, always involving people also from other departments according to the specificity of the project.

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They envisioned, for example, a new onboarding experience where they prototyped a new ‘welcome day’ and a ‘buddy program’. Other initiatives were more related with spaces, where participants imagined how the offices should look like in the digital era and the new competences that are required for workers to face the digital transformation. Moreover, within the initiative labelled ‘Qualify Yourself’ new ways to motivate employees to undertake self-development paths were explored. All these projects are explicitly focused on HR topics. Quoting J.A.: “since the initiative here (in Lufthansa, ed.) is pushed from the HR side, the benefits that you provide for the internal customers are not even the case of an “hidden agenda” or an “indirect purpose” of any DT workshop. It is quite obvious that we definitely want to tackle the new work style, the engagement and that we want to change the system”. However, even if part of HR, the QUEST team is still ‘localized’ within a specific organisational function, which is seen as restrictive for its potential and should be boosted as a cultural change program beyond teams and organisational functions (Schmiedgen et al. 2015). The target topics of QUEST are similar to the scope given to the functional role covered by the interviewee from Vodafone. R.M. is appointed as Digital HR e Employee Experience Manager. Conversely to Lufthansa, R.M. doesn’t have a team, but she forms ad-hoc teams for each initiative following an ‘agile’ approach. R.M. is in charge of the program that Vodafone launched focused on reviewing a set of HR processes from taking the internal user perspective. In this regard, she embodies quite literally the shift of HR roles from being process developer to experience architect (Bersin by Deloitte 2016). The importance of considering and understanding the emotional state of the employees clearly emerges from the approach she is promoting: “we start from the real “pain point”, whether at an emotional or process level, dismantling the logic of perception”. This also represents an attempt of moving towards what has been defined as ‘human experience’ in the workplace (Bersin by Deloitte 2019), in an employee-led and bottom-up attitude. R.M. reported people and teams that work on such projects to reach a strong commitment to push forward their ideas, they feel empowered when proposing their solutions to the decision level because they bring a collective voice supported by the awareness of having given the priority to the ‘experience’ rather than process convenience. These sorts of activities are therefore contributing to shape the idea of wellbeing as having a purpose at work and being heard as individual (Bersin by Deloitte 2019). The next step in the integration of design principles within HR seems to be to look at the employee journey in a more holistic and systemic way. This is an ambition which has been disclosed both by Lufthansa and Vodafone. Lufthansa is trying out ways to scale the work they are doing to the entire population while Vodafone is striving to bring the abovementioned systemic approach in HR, as in the worlds of R.M.: “the critical thing I see frequently in Human Resources is to be self-referential. HR people are often technical and have a very specialized profile, so they work

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very deeply on their silos. There is a lack of an integrated, end-to-end, overarching perspective”. Style of Guidance: Internal Facilitators and Ambassadors Regarding the syle of guidance of the facilitators of collaborative design practices, the approach that is preferred is of having multiple internal facilitators with different backgrounds. The specific expertise in the design process assembled with the ability to manage group dynamics are perceived to be a successful formula. In particular, besides the knowledge of the design process and tools, a skill that the interviewee from Vodafone highlighted as precious is visualizing. In particular, she claimed to feel the lack of a professional who is able to sketch in order to record information in a visual way during a session and foster people concentration. All the interviewees affirmed that they wish to expand the pool of internal facilitators in various forms. Lufthansa is in the process of shaping a ‘train the trainer’ program in 2019 aimed at scaling the approach to an enlarged audience. Generali already initiated a series of training which are not specifically aimed at training facilitators, but rather to qualify a group of experts that can become ambassadors of the methodology and act as reference points for the rest of the community. They did it in a very structured way, assuring that each business function has a DT ambassador who works as a bridge with the internal consultancy team. This action is actually part of a strategy to scale DT to the entire organisation and contaminate all business functions. This tendency is also confirmed by the increase of educational programs aimed at training design (thinking) facilitators. HPI itself runs a Certification Program for Design Thinking Coaches that constantly receives groups of people selected within companies to become ambassadors or internal trainers for the other employees. Other relevant entities that offer specific executive courses that explicitly state to train “design facilitators” are increasing on the market and they include but not limited to: Design Thinkers Academy, AJ & Smart and the University of the Arts in London. Participants: Leveraging on Intrinsic Motivation All the interviewees affirmed that they try to compose heterogeneous groups both in term of hierarchy and business function. This allows to increase diversity which can boost creativity and to have a representative pool of the organisation. Nevertheless, voluntary participation seems to guarantee a higher commitment compared to a top-down involvement. Vodafone and Generali are currently selecting people that have to participate to the activities, often in a joint discussion that includes HR and the business lines. However, both of them expressed the will to shift to voluntary applications in order to assure a higher commitment to the project. R.M. in particular, shared her difficulty in motivating people to work on the projects related with the ‘employee experience’ that she manages. Since people

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that she involves are part of other departments, they use to consider the HR-related projects as ‘on top’ of their ordinary activities. This obviously discourage people to give priority to those projects and inevitably undermine their advancement. She therefore started a conversation with the business managers, who are the direct supervisors of those employees that she involved, asking to introduce the ‘contribution to the employee experience design’ as one of the performance goals of their collaborators. The result was not satisfactory as expected, in her own words: “it worked just partially. In the sense that if people do not report to me functionally and hierarchically, the leverage on them is always weak. It counts to some extent this goal. It is not a strong criterion of evaluation.” Asking for volunteers would mean to leverage on intrinsic motivation, which is stronger than any imposed direction from top. This should obviously be supported by the approval and appreciation of managers: “the only real motivational lever that remains is the evaluation of appreciation by their ‘direct manager’. If s/he does not enhance the performance goal related with the ‘employee experience’ because it is not part of her/his goals, the whole logic of using the performance goal as an incentive lever is lost” (R.M.). Lufthansa instead, has always adopted a “pull” attitude, where the support of QUEST team was activated on demand when teams were requiring it. Lufthansa also started to develop a study on the characteristics of people that ask for their support, framing ‘personas’ profiles based on people who already participated to the activities. The use of ‘personas’ to study the employees’ profiles and build empathy with them is developing also in Vodafone: “Our segmentation today is too much influenced by hierarchies and contract types. So, we tend to draw different experiences for the intern and the manager, when instead the ‘personas’ can be transversal to these segments, it depends on what point of view they are analyzed.” Impact: From One-Off Affair to a Regular Course of Action The main reason for discontinuation of design thinking activities identified by HPI report (2015) lays in their perception as one-off affair. Employees tend to see collaborative design sessions as parenthesis in their day-to-day activities because they don’t find motivation neither a fertile ground in the organisation to support a different working mode. Even if engagement is very high during the co-creation and appreciation diffused as both disclosed by reports (Politecnico di Milano 2018; Schmiedgen et al. 2015) and confirmed by the interviewees, it is still challenging for organisations to give continuity to those courses of action. One interviewee from Intuit (ibidem) critically reflected on this issue: “Design thinking became analogous to workshops. We had to break that mindset by trying to integrate design thinking into everyday work and tell employees: ‘It’s not a special event—it’s just how you work!’ We had to stop teaching it as a workshop […] experience, because that became the expectation of what [design thinking] is!” (ibidem, p.60).

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This misleading perception is also confirmed by the interviewee from Generali, E.C., who claimed: “if there is one word that distinguishes the mood of the people who participate in the workshops is ‘enthusiasm’. People reluctantly return to their daily work”. With this statement E.C. implicitly endorsed the idea of a design thinking perceived as a one-off affair and that the employees daily work is profoundly far from it. The same concern is shared by R.M., who pointed out that “the activities related with ‘employee experience’ are now perceived as ‘on top’ and not as ‘core’ activities of everyone’s work, even if they are part of the performance goals”. Lessons Learnt The main findings gathered from this second part of investigation focused on understanding the relationship between collaborative design practices and HR management, can be clustered in five main areas of further development. • The first one regards the goal of collaborative design practices. In the majority of cases, companies interpret design thinking as implicit agent of change and claim to adopt it to innovate products and services delivered to the market. Since collaboration, internal process changes and engagement are very often seen as desired goals within the practice, it could be advantageous to understand to what extent design could become an explicit agent of change. • The second area is closely connected with the first one. Even when the goal is overtly addressing internal issues, like envisioning what practitioners call ‘the employee experience’, there is still lack of a holistic perspective on the employee-organisation relationship. Even if the posture of HR managers changes from process-driven to experience-driven, the issues to tackle still attain to specific functional silos that characterize the HR department, losing overarching purposes such as wellbeing. • Third, leaders of collaborative design practices should own both design and group management skills. As of now, interviewees reported that facilitation is performed by multiple facilitators with complimentary skills. However, we spot a tendency in training internal trainers, facilitators or ambassadors that could disseminate the approach to the rest of the organisation. Research could investigate the specific skills that are required for a facilitator of collaborative design activities aimed at achieving internal innovation purposes. • Fourth, top-down incentives seem not to be successful to foster participation. Intrinsic motivation and openness to change are the levers on which companies are focusing that need further analysis. • Fifth, there is the need to understand how to scale the impact of such activities and ensure continuity. Collaborative design activities are still perceived as extra compared to the ordinary tasks, therefore the working modes barely becomes habits. Some experiments of permanent contamination are being carried out: the example of representative functional ambassadors enacted by Generali represents a trial in this direction, but an evaluation of the impact of those kind of initiatives in terms of behaviours remains unexplored.

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3.2 Service Design for Human Resources Section 1.1 provided an introduction of the differences between Human Resource Design and Service Design for Human Resources. As mentioned, HRD and SD for HR lays are different levels of integration of the design field and HR management field, therefore they don’t have to be considered as alternative concepts but as nuances with different intensities of two ingredients. Hence, the first level of application of Service Design in the field of Human Resource Management lays in what we defined ad Service Design for HR. Therefore, before framing HRD we need to deep dive in framing SD for HR. Recent studies in the field of ‘human capital’ outline a series of global forces that are driving change in the labor market and are therefore shaping new paradigms and directions for innovation in the field (Bersin by Deloitte 2016; World Economic Forum 2018): • demographic upheavals: the workforce is undergoing an increase in generation as well as expectation diversity. Millennials make up more than half of the workforce joining on the workplace older generations with which they need to create shared beliefs to tie together. From one side millennials own a new notion of a rewarding working life, looking for a purposeful work experience that offers constant learning and development opportunities together with a dynamic career progression. Today’s workers’ demands are recorded to be flexibility, creativity and purpose at work. From the other side, older generations are finding themselves to cover new roles and often being managed by younger colleagues. Those differences are obviously causing social clashes. Moreover, the new mode of organisation, synthetized in the concept of ‘network of teams’, requires employees to be more flexible and adaptable to role switches and cross-functional collaboration. • diffusion of digital technologies: digital technologies such as 3D printing, sensors, cognitive computing and Internet of Things disrupted the way companies develops and delivers products and services on the market. At the same time big data analytics, machine learning, augmented and virtual reality are predicted to receive considerable investments by 2022. The application of those technologies in supporting manufacturing and distribution is inevitably causing an increased automation of certain types of tasks as well as the rise of different jobs and new competences. In general, we register a net positive overlook for jobs, meaning that estimations on emerging jobs are exceeding disappearing jobs (World Economic Forum 2018). Moreover, technologies together with social networks have transformed also the way in which companies deliver internal services to their employees, changing the way they hire, manage and support people. The latter trend is profoundly changing the field of HR management, giving birth to a revolutionary movement commonly called ‘digital HR’ or ‘HR tech’ (Bersin 2017; In-recruiting 2018). • intensification of the rate of change: technological innovation as not only propelled the development of new and more advanced technologies, but has also

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boosted the pace of business-model innovation. In order to face the velocity of change in the market, organisations are experimenting more agile configurations. • development of a new social contract: the relationship employer-employee is also changing. As said, today’s workers have different expectations from a lifelong solid career in a unique company. Almost one third of the workforce is composed by contingent (Pofeldt 2015), contract and part-time workers that look for an enriching working life, that allows flexibility in the workplace and reflects personal values. Deloitte framed the concept of ‘open talent economy’ that includes all those flexible labor models, identifying it as one of the most important sources of talent. Already in 2018, the World Economic Forum reported that most part of the business are set to expand the use of contractors for taskspecialized work and more generally engage workers in a more flexible manner, making use of remote staffing and decentralizing operations. This phenomenon became even more evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced even the most conservative companies to rethink the assets through which they use to engage with people. According to some of the most recent reports about changes after pandemic, most of the norms related with collaboration, social connections, culture, routines, leadership and mentoring, location and time flexibility has been revolutionized and need to be reassembled in the near future (Kane et al. 2021; Kaushik 2020; Zucker 2021). • reskilling imperative: All the trends highlighted above and especially the pervasion of technologies and disruption of business models are obviously impacting job profiles, with an estimation of 42% reskilling rate in the time span 2018–2022. The new skills required by the job market are not just technology-related, but they concern also ‘human’ abilities such as: creativity, originality and initiative, critical thinking, persuasion and negotiation, attention to detail, resilience, flexibility and complex problem-solving, emotional intelligence, leadership and social influence as well as service orientation. All these trends are leading HR managers and organisations in general to rethink the relationship with employees from many perspectives. Within this transformation, design represents a valuable asset on which to leverage. In the global survey performed by Bersin by Deloitte, 79% of executives ranked design thinking as high priority in meeting talent challenges. HR functions are called to take a crucial role, in redesigning the entire worker journey in order to review internal processes through a human-centred approach, but also having to support managers and employees navigate the complexities of structuring the cohabitation of such a mosaic of roles and contracts. They find themselves becoming changemakers who, rather than developing processes or programs, focus on understanding and design services that meet their demands and ultimately feel more productive as well as less stressed. They are perceived as actual service providers by the employees and that is the reason why they look for service design (SD for HR). This change of perspective gave rise to the emergent concept of ‘employee experience’ which is replacing the traditional field of employee engagement (Bersin by

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Deloitte 2017; Yamkovenko and Tavares 2017). In doing so, design provides a relevant mean to focus on employee as users and a strategic asset to be preferred by talents compared to other employers. Connected to the notion of employee experience, scholars have also framed the concept of ‘humanization of organisations’ (Augsten et al. 2018). In the experimentation made for the ServDes conference in 2018 Augsten et al. (2018) defined it as: “our proposed concept for humanizing an organisation via SD offers an approach for investigating the human relations of the organisation as well as ways for designing compelling, creative pathways towards sustainable and healthy growth” (ibidem, p. 1230). The authors designed a workshop where they provided a set of barriers to humanization and participants had to conceive solutions to overcome those barriers. This represent an experiment of putting design at the service of HR, towards ‘humanizing’ organisations and therefore applying human-centered principles to the design of solutions for the employees. Service Design for Human Resources: A Studio In order to understand better this emergent field of application, on the 11th of March 2019 I organized an event on the topic ‘Service Design for Human Resources’. The event was designed and organized within the frame of Service Design Drinks Milan (SDDM), of which I am co-organiser together with other three professionals in the field of service design who are: Chiara Leonardi, Luca Molinari and Marihum Pernía. SDDM are a series of event to discuss topics related with the discipline of service design with the community of service designers in Milan (Rossi et al. 2020). The events run for 4 years and the one about HR was number 18th. The community is very engaged and around 150 people attend every event. The community is composed mainly by passionate students and young professionals. For the 18th edition we organized a panel discussion with six experts from the industry. They were: Stefano Besana, Digital Organisation Design & Social Analytics Lead at Ernst & Young; Ginevra Fidora, People Strategy Competence Leader at OpenKnowledge; Luca Nascimben, HR Practice Leader at ccelera; Emanuele Schmidt, President at MIDA, Matteo Sola, People & Culture Manager at Talent Garden and Camilla Mignani, Service Designer at Vodafone Design Studio. The experts came from different sectors, but the common attribute was that they all had experience either in HR management and consultancy, service design or even in the integration of the two. The debate allowed to build a preliminary understanding of the state of the art in practice and open a debate with a community of experts. From the discussion emerged that SD for HR is still underexplored, the demand from companies is high but there is not enough awareness of the impact that service design can have in the field of human resource management. We could report a sort of intuition from both side that the two disciplines could benefit each other, but there was still a lot to research and experiment. Right after the event, we collected informal feedbacks from the panelists and we sent a feedback form via mail to the audience. From both we got the confirmation that there is a high interest in the topic, but that the debate stayed at a too abstract

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level and there was the need to dig deeper in specific arguments and discuss real projects. As a start of a deeper exploration, from April to June 2019, I contributed to the design and lecturing of a service design studio with a class of students attending the Master of Science in Product Service System Design of Politecnico di Milano. The studio was headed by the professors Anna Meroni, Stefana Broadbent, Daniela Selloni and tutored by me and Luca Molinari. The aim was to experiment to design innovative HR services for people working in various types of organisations (small and large companies) in order to deal with various types of contractual relations (permanent or temporary). In particular we considered the following phases of the lifecycle of the employee-organisation relation, based on the areas that emerge as more relevant in the most recent studies in the field of HR management (Bersin 2017). • Recruiting: attracting and acquiring new talents, converting them from candidates to hire. • Onboarding: Supporting new workers in the acquisition of the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviours in order to become effective organisational members and insiders. • Learning: training workers and enabling them to expand their knowledge, updating their skills and building their self-development path. • Wellbeing, inclusion and diversity: enabling workers to perform better, achieve a work-life balance satisfaction, engage with their colleagues, have fair and equal possibilities and contribute to a positive company culture. • Performance management: creating a working environment or setting in which people are enabled to perform to the best of their abilities. This relates also with how workers are evaluated, promoted or rewarded. • Offboarding and ageing: Maximising the experience of leaving a workplace or developing strategies to manage the aged population of the organisation. As final output of the studio each group of students designed a complete service to address the topic assigned -one of the abovementioned areas-. The solutions included but were not limited to: a buddy program empowered by artificial intelligence that helps future candidate with a better preparation for the hiring interview; a referral program that organizes and motivates the word of mouth; a mobile app that boosts the onboarding path through gamification logics, learning platforms that enhance knowledge sharing between peers; co-creative and personalized wellbeing programs; a rotational leave scheme that allows employees to take diluted and enriching work breaks; performance development tools that enable continuous and peer-to-peer feedbacks; support services for leaving the workplace that guide the laid-off towards reskilling and facilitate the preservation of the tacit knowledge within the company.

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3.3 The Tuckman Model The collaborative design practices analysed in the book focuses on short-term project teams -a detailed definition of ‘project teams’ is given in Sect. 3.4. The term ‘team’ is used alternatively to the term ‘group’ as for the definition of the latter as a cluster of people that could co-operate, but mainly pursue individual goals. When talking about ‘team’ instead, we refer to people who collaborate to achieve a shared goal and perform tasks that are complementary to accomplish the common goal (referring to the definition given by Tuckman 1965). As Rickards and Moger (2002) define them in their article “project teams have become a popular organisational form under circumstances that require coordinated actions directed towards a non-routine goal. They are widely found in organisations dealing with design, innovation, R&D, product development and quality issues. They make up a relatively simple form of group to study, having a clearly-defined task focus, identifiable allocated resources, relatively stable membership and leadership.” In particular, the subject of the book are those project teams that have a short-term goal to achieve and follow a process that can be attributed to the Double-Diamond framework of Design Thinking (Design Council 2014). I will refer to these short-term sessions with such characteristics naming them “workshops”. While studying group dynamics and characteristics I particularly focused the analysis on two main concepts. The first one is ‘team effectiveness and performance’. In order to create a framework of group development to consider as reference I built upon the Tuckman model (Tuckman 1965; Tuckman and Jensen 1977), trying to enrich it with additional concepts expressed by other subsequent frameworks. The second aspect taken into consideration is the concept of teaming as an experience of learning, which is unfolded more in detail in the next paragraph. The Tuckman model here is considered as reference because it is the initial framework upon which most of the subsequent group development frameworks where built. The model is later on being applied to management and organisational behaviour theory in order to look at it from a team performance perspective. Those studies often refer to the original Tuckman model or one of its later interpretations given by other scholars or practitioners. In particular Katzenbach and Smith provided an analysis of several teams from the performance perspective and gave a classification based on that. Nowadays many corporates are referring to the framework given by Tuckman to evaluate how their team are performing. Moreover, the model has been chosen as main framework of group development by the Design Thinking Research Team based at the Hasso Plattner Institute. The fact that such an excellent institute in the field of Design Thinking is taking the Tuckman model (or its further interpretations) as a framework of reference in

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their studies indicates that it has been considered as the most relevant one to analyse behaviours of teams that undertake projects following the design thinking process. This highlights a set of correlations between the two models that I aim to expand and articulate foward. Within this paragraph I am reviewing a selection of group development models that I found as representative of the main theories with the aim of discussing and finally enriching the Tuckman model. The Tuckman model essentially identifies 4 main stages of development of groups that comes out from the analysis of different group settings through the social realm and the task realm lenses. The 4 stages identified are forming-storming-norming-performing. I hereby consider also the additional stage added by Tuckman together with Mary Ann Jensen in 1977 which is adjourning (Tuckman and Jensen 1977). The length of each stage can vary from team to team and can also be dependent from being temporary or permanent teams (Huczynski and Buchanan 2007). Each stage described below starts from the original definition given by Tuckman and it’s compared with the other interpretations and theories both coming from the psychological and managerial domains (Fig. 3.1). Stage 1: Forming “Groups initially concern themselves with orientation accomplished primarily through testing. Such testing serves to identify the boundaries of both interpersonal and task behaviours. Coincident with testing in the interpersonal realm is the establishment of dependency relationships with leaders, other group members, or preexisting standards. It may be said that orientation, testing, and dependence constitute the group process of forming.” (Tuckman 1965).

Fig. 3.1 Own elaboration of the five stages of group development proposed by Tuckman (Tuckman and Jensen 1977), integrated and compared with other models of group development (Fisher 1970; Bass and Ryterband 1979; Woodcock 1979; McGrath’s 1991; Katzenbach and Smith 1993; Tubbs 1995; Zoltan and Vancea 2016; Singh and Rani 2017)

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As the first stage that a group undertakes, this is the moment in which the members begin to get to know and test each other but they are still focused on themselves. While doing so, they can pass through the emotional status of anxiety due to the uncertainty of the project they are approaching and of their role, but the interaction is generally positive and polite. This stage is also devoted to understanding the scope of the project and of the single tasks. The group needs to formulate what to accomplish, members introduce themselves to each other, and they establish initial behaviours for performance. The role of the leader here -being him/her a facilitator or a manager- is crucial in order to clarify specific tasks and the general scope of the project team. It is a ‘safe’ and ‘comfortable’ stage to be in terms of mood, because it is unusual that members will come to conflict at this stage, but if we consider the level of performance, most scholars agree that almost anything gets done. Other group development models that looked more at the mood side identified the ‘forming’ stage as ‘orientation’ (Fisher 1970; Tubbs 1995) or ‘acceptance’ (Bass and Ryterband 1979). Fisher (1970) made a correlation between the mood of the group and the phase of the project that the members are undertaking. In this sense he looked at the ‘content’ dimension of the interactions, specifically analysing the decision-making process. The term orientation refers to that awkward feeling people have before communication rules and expectations are established (Singh and Rani). The peculiarity of the model introduced by Fisher is that he related some ‘content’ decisions made for the project to the contingencies of group dynamics. For examples, the modification of a proposal can be subject to the conflictual level of the group. If the level of conflict is low, the group will go further with adding details to it, whereas if the level of conflict is higher, the group is likely to make other proposal at the same level of abstraction of the previous ones (ibidem). Tubbs in 1995 also titled the first stage as ‘orientation’. The model proposed by Tubbs had the peculiarity of integrating a systems approach. The systems perspective allows to conceptualize an event by studying the dynamic nature of that event. Through his theory, Tubbs hypothesizes that a group changes according to the events that take place. A continuous feedback process on the events that affect a group can provide elements of learning and activate changes within it (Hurt and Trombley). Those loops of feedbacks introduce a crucial characteristic to the model, which differentiates it from previous frameworks. It indeed implies a cyclical nature, which is connected with the concept of systems. Another model that identified ‘modes’ of groups in relation to the content of the activity performed is the one proposed by McGrath (1991). McGrath discusses the possibility that a team might not follow the same path to achieve the same outcome. In particular, he points out two modes as optional. The first stage mode however, is involved in all group projects titled as ‘inception’. Inception deals with the goal choice as the target of a project within a team. As said, this is a mode that connotates a team which is very much related with the content of the activity. It indeed implies the acceptance of the project by the team and the definition of its objectives. All the above mentioned models refer to different stages that the groups can assume during their development. However, they don’t concern the maturity of the

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group because they are not analysing their performance. Hence, they provide relevant evidences on mechanisms that can change group dynamics, but they are not useful to evaluate performances. One of the most scientifically recognized models that outlines group maturity in terms of performance instead is the one introduced by Woodcock in 1979. Woodcock describes the first stage with similar characteristics to the ones already cited. This model classifies the teams at this stage as ‘infant teams’. Infant teams, that are conceptually teams who are ‘forming’, are undeveloped, meaning that the expression of feelings is avoided and objectives are uncertain (Zoltan and Vancea 2016). A similar perspective to the proposal of Katzenbach and Smith in 1993 where the maturity of teams is the principal driver of the classification. The maturity is evaluated through performance impact of teams. Conversely to Woodcock, for Katzenbach and Smith a group at its lower stage can’t be called a team yet because tasks are still not assigned as part of a common brief, therefore the group is called ‘working group’. In both models, what is needed to bring the group to the next stage is a clear goal and tasks division. For this reason, most models suggest that the presence and authority of a leader is crucial in this phase. In general, if we take the Tuckman model as reference to compare the other frameworks, we can say that there is an overall coherence among them, without relevant conceptual differences. Hence, besides the different perspectives and focus taken, most authors agree with the peculiar characteristics of the ‘forming’ stage of the Tuckman model. Keywords unclear objectives, uninvolvement, uncommitted members, confusion, hidden feelings, politeness. Stage 2: Storming “The second point in the sequence is characterized by conflict and polarization around interpersonal issues, with concomitant emotional responding in the task sphere. These behaviours serve as resistance to group influence and task requirements and may be labelled as storming.” (Tuckman 1965).

Tuckman defines this stage as ‘intragroup conflict’ that originates by forcing group structures onto people. Therefore, this second stage is characterized by conflicts according to most authors. Conflicts generate because group members start to push against the boundaries established during the forming stage. The reason for conflict can be either caused by different working styles or approaches or by the fact that different ideas collide. Team members can also struggle for leadership at this stage (Zoltan and Vancea 2016). In any case, the storming phase is seen as necessary to the growth of the team (Singh and Rani), but some teams can never come out of this stage. In this case the storming phase can be destructive. Fisher (1970) similarly describes the second stage as ‘conflict’. In his model, conflict is caused by the ‘content’ of interactions, therefore deals with debating ideas

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related with the task being performed. Even in this case, conflict is seen as positive in order to achieve results (ibidem). Tubbs model inspired by the ‘system’ theory also frames this stage as ‘conflict’, identifying different categories of factors that can influence group development: they can vary from members personality to individual’s attitudes to the physical environment where the group works. This stage helps the group to avoid conformity. McGrath’s (1991) model also contemplates one mode of group that relates with ‘technical problem solving’. Even if this stage refers to problems which are technical more than behavioural, it either way implies encountering problems that need to be solved. Another difference introduced by McGrath is the fact that this mode may or may not be involved in any given group activity (Singh and Rani). This means that a group can skip this step when going toward goal attainment. However, since McGrath conceived this model as cyclical, it can happen that a group undergoes a ‘technical problem solving’ stage during one group activity and not doing so at the next one. Conversely, Bass and Ryterband (1979) don’t consider any conflictual stage that can relate with ‘storming’. They describe the stage of ‘acceptance’ as a general feeling of mutual trust that comes right after the initial instability. In Bass and Ryterband analysis this stage is very much disconnected with the ‘content’ of the group activity, the members indeed share information and test each other without discussing about specific tasks. The definition given by Woodcock instead (1979) at this stage is the one of ‘exploratory team’. At this step the members interact in a more open way and they are settled in an active listening mode. Within this level of maturity there are no direct references to conflictual situations, but the open attitude of the members toward discussion and express their position indirectly set the conditions for possible debates. The performance-driven model developed by Katzenbatch and Smith (1993) puts at the lower level of the performance curve the ‘pseudo-team’. This is the worst group of people in terms of performance, they can call themselves teams, but they are not willing to take risks of “conflict, joint work-products, and collective action necessary to build a common purpose, set of goals, approach, and mutual accountability” (ibidem). In a pseudo-team there is no focus on collective performance, and this is causing detraction even of individual performances. As Katzenbach and Smith state: “the sum of the whole is less than the potential of the individual parts”. To conclude, we can say that this stage requires the highest level of involvement of the leader or supervisor. S/he has to be directive but it’s important that members don’t feel judged and can freely express their opinions. (Singh and Rani). Keywords lack of cohesion, subjectivity, conflicts, confrontation, frustration, volatility, inconsistency, failure. Stage 3: Norming

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3 The HR Management Perspective “Resistance is overcome in the third stage in which ingroup feeling and cohesiveness develop, new standards evolve, and new roles are adopted. In the task realm, intimate, personal opinions are expressed. Thus, we have the stage of norming.” (Tuckman 1965).

At this stage, the group already set its own rules and tasks and communications are established. The mutual goal to be achieved is also clear. In order to manage to pursue a common goal, it is necessary that some members within the group have to give up with their own ideas to find consensus. Tubbs (1995) indeed labelled this stage as ‘consensus’, highlighting the fact that members compromise and select ideas to follow, inevitably discarding some of them. A similar approach, which is also conceived as cyclical like Tubbs’ model, is Fisher’s one (1970). Those models, even if very similar in the content, uses two different terms for the last phases, that indicates slightly different interpretations. While Tubbs focuses on the agreement that the members need to achieve, Fisher puts the spotlight on the ‘emergence’ of the social structure and task of the group that in this phase become evident. Another similar concept is expressed by McGrath (1991) that identifies this stage as ‘conflict resolution’. In his model McGrath differentiate this stage from the previous one because the nature of conflict to be solved is different. If in the previous step the group has to overcome technical problems, in this stage the group is called to solve political conflicts. In this sense, in McGrath’s model this phase is very much aligned with the other models mentioned above, the focus is on making policy choices, which is consistent with building consensus. As mentioned, there is just one model among the ones analysed that doesn’t envisage a stage of conflict comparable to the storming phase, which is the Bass and Ryterband one (1979). It rather identifies just an initial feeling of mistrust that is immediately followed by acceptance—with similar characteristics to the forming stage—. Right after that, the group set the rules for decision making and communication which implies that each member expose his/her attitude and point of view to the others, but this is not done in a conflictual way, it’s just a way of stabilizing the group and reach ‘solidarity’, which is the stage comparable to Tuckman’s norming. The definition given by Woodcock (1979) to a group which is undertaking this phase is ‘under consolidation’ team. The group is just one step away to perform at its best, but still need to consolidate its norms of interaction. Personal interactions are established to be addressed toward cooperation and the group task is clarified. In a similar way, Katzenbach and Smith (1993) call teams at this stage ‘potential teams’. Those are teams which are trying to increase their performance impact, aiming at climbing the performance curve in order to become a ‘real team’. What they are missing is “more clarity about purpose, goals, or work-products and more discipline in hammering out a common working approach” (Katzenbach and Smith 1993). The ‘norming’ stage is a crucial point for group development because, regardless of how it has been labelled by scientists, it sets the transition point between a group and a team. This transition is defined by the fact that from this stage on, the common rules and norms, as well as the collective goal, are defined and clear for all members who start to act accordingly. (Zoltan and Vancea 2016).

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At this stage the role of the leader is a motivational one, his/her role, as all the other roles, are starting to be recognized. Therefore, it is necessary to show first results in order to foster the team to move forward to achieve the ‘performing’ stage. Keywords performance questioning, objectives review/clarification, roles confirmation, assertiveness, listening, testing new grounds, strengths and weaknesses identification. Stage 4: Performing “Finally, the group attains the fourth and final stage in which interpersonal structure becomes the tool of task activities. Roles become flexible and functional, and group energy is directed into the task. Structural issues have been resolved, and structure can now become supportive of task performance. This stage can be labelled as performing.” (Tuckman, 1965).

Group members at this stage match individual capacities and support each other in order to maximise the group success, therefore Bass and Ryterband (1979) titled the last stage of development as ‘control’. Flexibility and informality are peculiar of the stage of control. For the authors that studied group development from the decision-making point of view, this is the phase in which the final decision about the project is taken. Fisher (1995), for example, calls this stage ‘closure’. Closure indicates that the final result is achieved, and the group supports the decision. Since for Fisher and the other ‘system’ thinkers the process is to be intended as iterative, the ‘closure’ stage sets the end of one cycle. Similarly, Fisher (1970) titled it ‘reinforcement’, which already entails a more active attitude by the group members. The reinforcement indeed implies supporting the final decision with verbal and nonverbal communication. McGrath (1991) gives an even more active connotation to this stage identifying it as ‘execution’. This is another mandatory stage for groups in McGrath’s model. It ends with the ‘goal attainment’, achieved thanks to the execution of the performance requirements of the project. The decision-making process is handled by the team members in an autonomous way. Conflicts could occur, but they are managed through the group rules and established dynamics. The concept of execution is very much linked to performance proficiency, which qualifies a ‘mature’ team (Woodcock, 1979). In a mature team the members could express their feelings and opinion in an open way and the group accountability is recognized by its members, also towards the organisation. Hence, in a ‘real team’ (Katzenbach and Smith 1993) members are equally committed to the shared goal to which they contribute with their complimentary skills. The team at this stage works as a unit and it is able to get the job done smoothly. Since the team members are now competent and interdependent, the leaders here are playing the role of contributors because the team doesn’t need external supervision. There is also another condition that teams can achieve and has been framed by Katzenbach and Smith (ibidem) and it’s the ‘high performing team’. This is an outperforming team, where the members, besides being committed to the common

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goal, they are also engaged in fostering the other members’ personal and professional growth and success. This is a very peculiar situation, that even transcends the professional sphere and the life of the team. A team that reaches this status achieves the highest level of effectiveness and performance impact. Keywords creativity, initiative, flexibility, open relationships, pride, learning, confidence, high morale, success. Stage 5: Adjourning The phase of ‘adjourning’ was introduced in 1977 by Tuckman and Jensen who did a review of the original Tuckman model, recognizing an additional stage to group development. This is a termination stage, where the group disbands, and the members separate. This is particularly significant for the authors that consider the group development as a life cycle (Mann 1971; Gibbard and Hartman 1973; Spitz and Sadock 1973; Lacoursiere 1974; Braaten 1974). Tuckman and Jensen called this stage ‘adjourning’ and can frequently occur in organisations where teams are created ad hoc on projects, for example in organisations working with an ‘agile’ configuration. Keywords separation, termination, disbandment. Potential Integrations To conclude, the model initially proposed by Tuckman still represents a consistent reference framework to analyse the contextual factors of project teams, but it could be enriched by some aspects taken from the different theories that offer other lenses of interpretation of group dynamics. There are three main elements that represent limitations in the Tuckman model and could be considered to be integrated to build a completer and more updated framework: • The first one deals with the linear nature of the Tuckman model. The model is conceived as a linear progression that goes from one stage to the other and it concludes with a termination. There are other scholars that envisioned a cyclic frame for the development, conceiving it as a process that can be repeated many times and some stages can occur more times within the same cycle. Another diversifying aspect is that some stages are non-mandatory within the progression and could occur or not depending on the situation. The only needed stages are the initial and the conclusive ones, while the mid stages depend on the tasks and history of the group activities. Given the increased flexibility of organisations and the new organisational models inspired by the ‘agile’ methodology, a cyclic process seems to be more suitable to analyse team dynamics within contemporary organisations.

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• The second aspect to consider for possible integration is the system perspective. Beside the cyclical shape that is part of the system theory, a systemic approach suggests a dynamic nature of any structure, which is composed by parts which are interconnected. Originally, the system theory has been introduced by the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968). He suggested that changes in one area can cause changes in other areas that could be apparently unrelated. The Tuckman model doesn’t entail a systemic perspective while Tubbs built upon the system theory to develop his model. This means that he took into consideration the analysis of inputs, throughputs and outputs within groups and how each of them affects group dynamics. Consequently, a relevant integration to the Tuckman model can result from the correlation with systemic aspects such as, for instance, members personality—inputs-, the physical environment—throughputs- and the quality of solutions or personal growth—outputs- (Hurt and Trombley 2007). • Lastly, the Tuckman model was conceived as a developmental sequence of changes in group behaviour not specifically focused to study groups within organisations. Therefore, this model was not directly aimed at optimizing group performances. However, the model offered a scientific starting point for further interpretations and adaptations made by business scholars such as Katzenbach and Smith (1993). Those interpretations are highly relevant to organisations and especially for Human Resource development striving to create more efficient and effective groups (Hurt and Trombley 2007) in terms of performance.

3.4 Teaming as Learning As anticipated, within the panorama of ‘collaborative design practices’ I took project teams as a dimension for analysis. The term ‘project teams’ refers to cross-functional teams whose members are usually drawn from several disciplines to solve a specific problem, realize an opportunity, or design a product or service (McShane and Von Glinow 2018). Typically, project teams are constituted for a limited period of time and disband upon the completion of the project. A comprehensive overview of the different types of teams that can be found in organisations has been provided by McShane and Von Glinow (2018) (Table 3.2). In order to generate an understanding of what a project team is we need to come back to the definition of a team and consequently head back to the definition of group. Scholars studying group dynamics over time have given many definitions to the concepts of ‘group’ and ‘team’. In social sciences, groups have been defined as social entities of two or more people who interact with one another and share similar characteristics. There are then various opinions when coming to interdependency of team members or objective similarity, with scholars stressing more one or the other attribute for defining a group.

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Table 3.2 Team types proposed by McShane and Von Glinow (2018), adapted from the definition of Hollenbeck et al. (2012) Team type

Description

Typical characteristics

Departmental teams

Teams that consist of employees who have similar or complementary skills and are located in the same unit of a functional structure; usually minimal task interdependence because each person works with clients or with employees in other departments

Team permanence: High—departments continue indefinitely Skill diversity: Low to medium—departments are often organized around common skills (e.g., accounting staff located in the accounting department) Authority dispersion: Low—departmental power is usually concentrated in the departmental manager

Self-directed teams

Teams whose members are organized around work processes that complete an entire place of work requiring several interdependent tasks and have substantial autonomy over the execution of those tasks (i.e., they usually control inputs flow, and outputs with little or no supervision)

Team permanence: High—teams are usually assigned indefinitely to a specific cluster of production or service activities Skill diversity: Medium to high—members typically perform different tasks requiring diverse skill sets, but cross-training can somewhat reduce skill diversity Authority dispersion: High—team members share power, usually with limited hierarchical authority

Task force (project) teams

Cross functional teams whose members are usually drawn from several disciplines to solve a specific problem, realize an opportunity, or design a product or service

Team permanence: Low—teams typically disband on completion of a specific project Skill diversity: Medium to high—members are typically drawn from several functional specializations associated with the complexity of the problem or opportunity Authority dispersion: Medium—teams often have someone with formal authority (project leader), but members also have moderate power due to their expertise and functional representation

Marianna Carbone (2019), an alumna of the Master of Science in Product Service System Design at Politecnico di Milano, just published her thesis where she investigated the definitions of ‘group’. She suggests as the most comprehensive the one proposed by Bertcher (1994) who is an anthropologist that authored many facilitation manuals: ‘A group is a dynamic social entity composed of two or more individuals,

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interacting interdependently in relation to one or more common goals that are valued by its members, so that each member influences and is influenced by every other member, to some degree, through face-to-face communication” (ibidem). Within this book, the definition of group is relevant because it represents the initial configuration of what can become a team. In the previous paragraph you can find an extensive explanation of the moment of transition from a group to a team. Taking the model framed by Tuckman as a reference, this moment corresponds to the ‘norming’ stage. The stage of ‘norming’ is characterized by a specific set of attributes in the mood and feeling displayed by the members. They can be summarized by the achievement of awareness about the different roles and a clarification of the shared goal. Besides the perspective given by social scientists, mainly focused on group and team dynamics disconnected with the organisational and business context, those concepts acquired different connotations and values when related within the frame of ‘organisational behaviour’. A major and recent contribution in the field of organisational behaviour has been provided by McShane and Von Glinow (2018), who gave a definition of teams within organisations. The authors define teams as “groups of two or more people who interact with and influence each other, are mutually accountable for achieving common goals associated with organisational objectives, and perceive themselves as a social entity within an organisation” (ibidem). Connected to the idea of team, researchers and practitioners started to study teams originally in relation with performance and introduced the concept of ‘team effectiveness’ as a team which benefits the organisation and its members, and survives long enough to accomplish its mandate (Shea and Guzzo 1987; Hackman et al. 2000; Hackman 2011). Some scholars have also proposed frameworks in which they relate Tuckman’s model of group development with the concept of team effectiveness, obtaining a potential correlation between performance and team formation (Katzenbach and Smith 1993). An enlightening perspective is the given by Edmondson (2012), who shifted the notion of team as a noun to teaming as a verb. In her conceptualization the act of teaming is an ability that is indispensable for people working in today’s continuously changing organisations. In her own words: “fast-moving work environments need people who know how to team, people who have the skills and the flexibility to act in moments of potential collaboration when and where they appear”, therefore “Teaming is a verb. It is a dynamic activity, not a bounded, static entity. It is largely determined by the mindset and practices of teamwork, not by the design and structures of effective teams. Teaming is teamwork on the fly. It involves coordinating and collaborating without the benefit of stable team structures” (ibidem). The concept of teaming is particularly relevant because it is considered as the engine of organisational learning. Edmondson affirms indeed that organisational learning happens through teaming, maintaining that “crucial learning activities must take place within those smaller, focused units of action, for organisations to improve and innovate” (ibidem).

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Starting from this statement, we directly deduct that when a team undertakes a process it also starts a learning path. This learning path, for its own nature, falls into a cognitive pedagogical perspective that can be associated with the ‘experiential learning’ model originally formulated by Kolb (1984) who basically suggests that real-life experiences are key for learning. Kolb is an educational theorist that developed a four-stage learning cycle from which four related learning styles originate. Kolb’s experiential learning model has been taken as a reference both by design and management scholars to illustrate how teams can develop a collective understanding about the design problem and solution, but especially how they can enhance innovation (Beckman and Barry 2007). The ‘experiential learning’ model indeed has very similar characteristics to design thinking. It is framed as an iterative process where the stages are: • concrete experience: an exploration of real new experiences or situations; • reflective observation of the new experience: a critical reflection of the experience; • abstract conceptualization: general conclusions are deducted with an exploration of the theoretical foundations of what has been experienced; • active experimentation: the contents just learned are applied and tested in a real or realistic context. From the learning cycle, Kolb also derived four related learning styles, that later on, Backman and Barry (2007) and Rhinow (2018) linked with the innovation process and more specifically with design thinking. By juxtaposing the two approaches in grasping the experience (concrete experience and abstract conceptualization) and the two approaches in transforming experience (reflective observation and active experimentation), the authors obtained four quadrants from which learning styles are derived: • diverging (reflective observation—concrete experience): people talented in viewing concrete situations from several different viewpoints. They are good in idea generation activities; • assimilating (reflective observation—abstract conceptualization): people with a concise and logical approach. They are good at taking in a lot of information and logically ordering it; • converging (active experimentation—abstract conceptualization): people who can easily find solutions to practical issues. They prefer technical tasks over tasks dealing with social or interpersonal issues; • accommodating (active experimentation—concrete experience): people who prefer to rely on intuition rather than logic. Their learning style is ‘hands-on’ and action-oriented. Learning styles are thought to be derived from personality type, educational specialization, professional career, current jobs and specific situational tasks. Therefore, learning styles are traits that are not fixed for each person, but each individual is generally inclined to prefer one (Kolb and Kolb 2005).

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That information can both support and be supported by what I defined as ‘collaborative design practices’ from two perspectives. Firstly, teams should be formed, if possible, with members who have different learning styles in order to perform optimally in each stage. In this regard, scholars have proved that a high variety of ‘knowledge diversity’ results in better performances for teams with regard to certain types of tasks—creative/innovative—(Bell et al. 2011; van Dijk et al. 2012). In this regard, Edmondson and Harvey (2018) identified three types of knowledge diversity: (i) disparity (pay, income, prestige, status, authority, power), (ii) variety (content expertise, functional background, network ties, industry experience) and (iii) separation (opinions, beliefs, values, attitudes). If we relate these knowledge diversity types to the organisational context, we could handily associate ‘disparity’ with the level of the person in the organisation and with ‘variety’ with the functional role. ‘separation’ could refer to the personality traits and therefore also to the learning style. Secondly, human resource designers must become aware of the targeted learning goals for the people in the process. This is very relevant from a ‘learning design’ point of view (Dirksen 2015). If the human resource designer has to both produce the content and handle context (people), then s/he should design and take care of the learning objectives for each stage of the design process that teams undertake. Moreover, understanding the learning styles of team members can help to give a prominent role to the participants where they can perform better so that each one can play the ‘lead’ role at different times and foster project success. The learning cycle can indeed follow the same conceptual steps of design thinking that correspond to a specific learning style (or objective). This merge was operated by Beckman and Barry (2007), who developed an iterative model framed as follows: (i) observation of the context, suiting the diverging learning style; (ii) setting frameworks derived from the insights, suiting the assimilating learning style; (iii) looking for imperatives and finding ideas to solve problems, suiting converging learning styles; and (iv) developing and testing solutions, suiting the accommodating learning style (Fig. 3.2). Another representative proposal of integration between the learning cycle and design thinking is given by Elsbach and Stigliani (2018). In the framework that they developed, the stages of the learning cycle are combined with design thinking tools in an attempt to understand the mutual impact that they have on each other when aiming at cultural change. This model is highly relevant to the development of the Human Resource Design framework because it has the purpose of connecting the experiential value of design thinking (or collaborative design practices, in our definition) with the creation of content and advancement of the project.

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Fig. 3.2 Innovation process and learning style model developed by Beckman and Barry (2007)

3.5 Design as Agent of Behaviour Change in Organisational Contexts Design in general, but in particular service design, has the ambition of understanding human behaviours, anticipating their interactions and guiding them towards a certain path. Even if people behaviours can’t be predicted with certainty, it is possible to conceive design interventions that can nudge desired behaviours. In order to do that, there is the need for the designers to lend knowledges from behavioural sciences and leverage on those to conceive solutions that could influence users’ behaviours (Naumof, 2014). These kind of practices falls into the field of interest of behavioural design or design for behaviour change (Lockton et al. 2010; Niedderer et al. 2014). In this regard, there are various academics and professionals who proposed toolkits and techniques that connect design and behavioural sciences. Among the most representative we find: • The EAST Framework: a framework developed by the Behavioural Insights Team (2014) with the original aim of making the policy community understand the fundamental principles of behavioural approaches. The Behavioural Insights Team is composed by advisors that from 2010 work mainly with public and third sector including governments, local authorities, businesses and charities mainly in Anglo-saxon countries. In 2014 they shared the EAST Framework. EAST stands for Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely. The framework provides a set of guidelines to apply behavioural insights to policy making. The guidelines underpin four main strategies that leverage on behavioural insights, supported by case studies. The

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four categories of strategies refer to the letters composing EAST: ‘make it Easy’, ‘make it Attractive’, ‘make it Social’ and ‘make it Timely’. Even if the target are policymakers, the framework could be easily adapted to a broader span of fields and challenges. • Designing for Behaviour Change Toolkit by Bridgeable (2017): this toolkit has been designed by the consultancy Bridgeable. Bridgeable is a strategic design firm based in Canada which built its distinctive approach upon bridging service design with behavioural principles. The toolkit was developed in 2017 to “explore how to design for behaviour change by leveraging behavioural economics (BE). Bridgeable has developed the Behaviour Change Framework to insert BE into your design process. The framework was crafted for design practitioners, assuming [they] are familiar with the foundational tools of service and experience design, but are new to the principles of behavioural economics” (ibidem). The framework consists in a series of introduction guidelines that explain how behavioural principles can inform and support service design choices, in addition it provides two main templates that could be used by the designers (i) in the ideation phase and (ii) in the testing phase. The most inspiring for this study was the format provided for the ideation phase, that inspired me in the development of the ideation toolkit used in project 2 and 3b. The layout fosters the ideation of solutions that can drive desired behaviours, leveraging on behavioural economics principles, which are represented through a card set. The full list of behavioural economic principles that they recall have been created and distributed by the Center for Advanced Hindsight. This toolkit represents a tangible proposal to connect service design and behavioural sciences. • Behavioural Intervention Toolkit: toolkit developed by Van Lieren et al. (2018) within the service design consultancy Livework. This toolkit coverts the entire design process through the development of a behavioural intervention. The peculiarity of this proposal is that it integrates the ideation of solutions that leverage on the ‘automatic fast thinking’ of users with “behavioural interventions that can stimulate people to switch to more deliberate and conscious thinking when necessary” (ibidem), therefore enacting a ‘rational override’. While most design interventions that make use of behavioural principles are conceived to nudge automatic actions, the concept of rational override deals with using micro moments of friction to disrupt users’ mindless automatic interactions and stimulate conscious individual decisions making. Livework formalized the process associated within the Behavioural Intervention Toolkit (2019). The consultants at Livework have applied the process to reduce insurance fraud by following 5 steps: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Scope: define business outcomes and identify processes where to intervene; Understand the context: analyse the behavioural patterns of users leveraging on available data; Design interventions: decide on intervention type and iterate it; Prototype and learn: measure the impact of the intervention in the context with real users through an A/B testing;

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5.

Implement and scale: build internal capabilities in order to scale the intervention to other processes.

All the toolkits and processes above presented have been developed with the aim of incentivazing certain behaviours regarding the use of products and services provided by a company or a public body to the society. No focus has been put in understanding how these approaches could be adapted to drive change within the organisational context, therefore addressing behavioural change interventions towards employees. An attempt to do so is in progress within the Italian HR consultancy MIDA. I started a collaboration with MIDA in April 2019 with the purpose of constituting a new unit in charge of framing and then divulgating to the rest of the company a new framework of practice based on the integration of service design and behavioural sciences/change management/social sciences. The business unit is called ‘Behavioural Tranformation Unit’ and at the time I joined it was in the process of shaping the framework starting from the available knowledge in literature and the practices already enacted by the consultants. The unit is composed by a selected group of MIDA consultants with different expertise that meet on regular basis to share their practices and knowledges to build up the framework. During the meetings they share the materials collected, the knowledge acquired by professional trainings and the projects done in the time elapsed. My role consisted in contributing with the expertise in service design to contaminate the knowledge of HR consultants and other experts in various fields of social and organisational sciences in order to ultimately establish a framework of practice that can be tested with MIDA clients. The first meetings were dedicated to collect and formalize past and ongoing experiences in the very first version of the framework that has been called DREAM. Below I outline the characteristics of the DREAM in its first version, which consists of 5 steps. 1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

Define: define the scope of the project with the key stakeholders (who commissioned the project), the expected outcomes and a first definition of the desired behaviours (‘to be’); Research: understand and analyse the stakeholders involved, the current behaviours (‘as is’) and possible barriers to change; Experiment—design, prototype, test: identify crucial behaviours (key behaviours) and gaps with the desired ones. Design of interventions, prototype and test on a subset of the target population. This is an iterative step, that can be repeated multiple times in order to refine and optimize the solution; Adopt: define strategies to progressively diffuse and scale the interventions to the target population; Measure: evaluate and measure the impact of the intervention.

For each phase of the process, the Behavioural Transformation Unit has developed a series of dedicated tools that were partially adapted from tools already tested in previous projects and partially designed from scratch. Both the process and the tools

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Fig. 3.3 Framework of intervention DREAM, designed by the Behavioural Transformation Unit of MIDA in collaboration with the POLIMI DESIS Lab, Politecnico di Milano

that support it, are the result of an attempt to integrate the design and behavioural science approaches. The model DREAM is still evolving and especially the ‘adoption’ phase requires a further understanding and exploration. Nevertheless, DREAM, together with the other behaviour change models, inspired the final Human Resource Design framework by enriching it with integrations of behavioural economics principles into the design process (Fig. 3.3).

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Bertcher HJ (1994) Group participation: techniques for leaders and members, vol 10, p 3 Braaten LJ (1974) Developmental phases of encounter groups and related intensive groups: a critical review of models and a new proposal. Interpersonal Dev 55:112–129 Bridgeable (2017) Designing behaviour change toolkit—a guide to using behavioural economics with service design. Retrieved from https://toolkit.bridgeable.com/ Carbone M (2019) D. group. Designing the group experience. Master thesis of the School of Design, Politecnico di Milano Design Council (2014) The design process: What is the Double Diamond? Retrieved from: https:// www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/design-process-what-double-diamond Dirksen J (2015) Design for how people learn, 2nd edn. New Riders, San Francisco Edmondson AC (2012) Teaming: how organizations learn, innovate, and compete in the knowledge economy, 1st edn. Jossey-Bass Edmondson AC, Harvey J-F (2018) Cross-boundary teaming for innovation: integrating research on teams and knowledge in organizations. Hum Resour Manage Rev 28(4):347–360. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2017.03.002 Elsbach KD, Stigliani I (2018) Design thinking and organizational culture: a review and framework for future research. J Manage 44(6):2274–2306. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206317744252 Fisher BA (1970) Decision emergence: phases in group decision making. Speech Monogr 37:53–66 Gibbard G, Hartman J (1973) The oedipal paradigm in group development: a clinical and empirical study. Small Group Behav 4(3):305–349 Hackman JR (2011) Collaborative intelligence: using teams to solve hard problems. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, CA Hackman JR et al (2000) Team effectiveness in theory and in practice. In: Copper CL, Locke EA (eds) Industrial and organizational psychology: linking theory with practice, pp 109–129 Hollenbeck JR, Beersma B, Schouten ME (2012) Beyond team types and taxonomies: a dimensional scaling conceptualization for team description. Acad Manage Rev 37(1) Huczynski, A.A. and Buchanan, D.A. (2007). Organizational Behaviour. An Introductory Text. 6th Edition, Prentice Hall, Pearson Education, UK. Hurt AC, Trombley SM (2007) The punctuated-tuckman: towards a new group development model. 7 In-recruiting, (2018). 1° Osservatorio HR Tech Italia Kane GC, Nanda R, Phillips A, Copulsky J (2021) Redesigning the post-pandemic workplace. MIT Sloan Manage Rev 62(3). https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/redesigning-the-post-pandemic-wor kplace/ Katzenbach JR, Smith DK (1993) The wisdom of teams. Harvard Business School Press Kaushik M (2020) The impact of pandemic COVID-19 in workplace. Eur J Bus Manage. https:// doi.org/10.7176/EJBM/12-15-02 Kolb DA (1984) Experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ Kolb AY, Kolb DA (2005) The Kolb learning style inventory—version 3.1: 2005 technical specifications Lacoursiere R (1974) A group method to facilitate learning during the stages of a psychiatric affiliation. Int J Group Psychother 12:39427–43451 Livework Studio (2019) Behavioural interventions in service design. Retrieved 17 August 2019, from Liveworkstudio website: https://www.liveworkstudio.com/articles/behavioural-intervent ions-in-service-design/ Lockton D, Harrison D, Stanton NA (2010) The design with intent method: a design tool for influencing user behaviour. Appl Ergon 41(3):382–392 Mann RD (1971) The development of the member-trainer relationship in self-analytic groups. In: Cooper CL, Mangham IL (eds) T-groups: a survey of research. Wiley-Interscience, London McGrath JE (1991) Time, interaction, and performance (TIP): a theory of groups. Small Group Res 22(2):147–174

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Zoltan R, Vancea R (2016) Work group development models—the evolution from simple group to effective team. Ecoforum 5(1):7 Zucker R (2021) Breaking free from a “9 to 5” culture. Harvard Business Review, July 27, 2021. https://hbr.org/2021/07/breaking-free-from-a-9-to-5-culture

Chapter 4

Experimenting Human Resource Design in Practice

Abstract This chapter includes the participatory action research carried out to frame and test the Human Resource Design framework or parts of it. You will first find the scheme through which each project is showcased. Some of the categories reflect the variables emerged during the preliminary research phase and used for the observational studies (Sect. 2.2). Then, each paragraph contains the story of one project and the elements of the framework that have been formulated or tested for the project itself. At the end of the chapter, you can find all the lessons learnt from the projects that led to the final configuration of the framework, presented in the next chapter.

The participatory action research included in this chapter intended to test some items of the HRD framework, introduced during what we defined as collaborative design practice. The attempt is to investigate how specific service design interventions can affect the contextual factors within project teams that are engaged in innovation tasks. In order to analyse the contextual factors, I mainly refer to the group development model developed by Tuckman. Within the specific stages I could take into consideration also elements suggested by models proposed by other authors, as discussed in Sect. 3.3. The final aim is to propose a framework that could link the stages of group development with the design process, in order to interpret how the latter—with its specific techniques and tools—can affect the interaction between members of the team—the context level. The projects are all referring to short sessions of practical work on a specific brief, therefore you will often find them in the text as ‘workshops’. Each project is described through a same structure that covers the categories below. Some of them are the same ones used to interpret the observational studies of Sect. 2.2 and some extra ones: • Company and consultancy name (if any): the company or the industry sector in which the company is operating and the consultancy agency that was in charge of developing the project. In all projects I am to be considered as part of the design team that organized the workshop, designed the tasks and activities and facilitate © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rossi, Human Resource Design, PoliMI SpringerBriefs, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87612-8_4

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one or more teams. Where a consultancy agency is nominated, I was partnering with it for the project. Title: title of the session. Date and duration: date and duration in terms of days to carry out the workshop. Level of analysis for the research: here is defined if the project is relevant for the analysis of the ‘content level’ or the ‘context level’ or both. If the subjectmatter of the project deals with changing how people work within organisations, therefore including change management strategies or solutions for human resource management then the analysis covers also the content level. In this sense, we can consider this kind of projects as metaprojects for the sake of this research. For any other project the content level is considered as not relevant, therefore the project is analysed just through the context level. Goal: this category refers to the same parameter used for analysing the observational studies of Sect. 2.2. It indicates if the workshop was aimed at reaching consensus and creating commitment on kinds of ‘pre-worked’ solutions or at generating entirely new ideas. In the first case there will be a predominance of activities devoted to convergence, while in the second case the focus is more on divergent phases of the design process (Design Council 2014). Since all the sessions have the general aim of designing a new solution and not merely collecting opinions on a topic, they can be all considered as ‘conceptdriven’. Participants: here I outline the variety of participants in terms of relation with the organisation- internal or external-meaning if participants are employees of the same organisation or they are mixed, in terms of hierarchical status within the organisation—operative staff, middle and top management and business functions. I also examine specific roles played by participants and facilitators and the impact that they had on the activity. Style of guidance: here I define if the facilitator performs either a ‘facilitating’ or ‘steering’ style of guidance (see Sect. 2.2 for detailed explanation). Besides very specific cases where the facilitation has been done pairing with other professionals, most of the projects have been facilitated by designers. Since the facilitation was aimed at innovation purposes the designers adopted a style more shifted toward ‘steering’, even if with different intensity. Extended Double Diamond position: All projects can be positioned at different stages of the proposed ‘extended Double-Diamond’, which is an alternative version of the traditional Double Diamond (2014) that adds a preliminary phase dedicated to scope the project and limit the perimeter of the action, and a final one that regulates the implementation phase depending on the starting point and the goal of the workshop. The first diamond indeed is dedicated to scope the ‘Strategy’ and the last one to the ‘Implementation’. Tasks and tools: description of the process followed during the workshop with a detailed explanation of specific tasks and the tools used to facilitate them. Extended DD—Tuckman stage correlation: discussion and correlation of specific tasks with the extended Double Diamond and the Tuckman stages of group development. Each task is identified with the name of the extended Double

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Diamond stage, the specification if it’s a convergent or divergent phase and finally the Tuckman stage that is the most appropriate for defining the status of the group at that point. Analysis of the impact of tasks and specific tools introduced on the interaction of participants. • Final output: This section contains an overview of the services conceptualized during the workshops. In the next page I provide a summary of the projects and the main information regarding the categories descripted above (Table 4.1).

4.1 Project n.1 Company and consultancy name Company in the Automotive sector and Skillab The company produces propulsion systems for diesel engines of a multinational corporation in the automotive industry. It is based in Turin, Italy. Skillab is a Human Resources consultancy based in Turin, Italy. Title “Beyond Creativity. Engineering Innovation from Concept to Execution”. Date and duration 24th and 25th of November 2017 (2 full days). Level of analysis for the research Context. Goal Generate action plans on existing ideas and training – finding consensus. This session was organised as a subsequent phase of a previous one aimed at conceiving new service solutions for the company to remain competitive on the market. Due to the restrictions applied on diesel vehicles, the company had to completely rethink their business focus and activate new strategies, ranging from a complete switch to electric or focus the diesel production just for specific vehicles or markets. In any case the company was facing a big strategic challenge that would have led to major organisational changes. The focus of the second session and of this study, was to help the employees to generate roadmaps of implementation of those service solutions conceived in the previous sessions. Between the first and the second session indeed, the company was not able to develop those solutions because of various reasons including time and budget, but above all the difficulty in engaging the right people inside the company to get the necessary approvals and the sponsorships. That resulted in a lack of commitment in the project teams. The reason why the automotive company approached Skillab was to ask for a support in developing action plans that could help the employees to overcome the criticalities encountered. At the same time, the company, specifically the HR unit, also asked for engagement activities to enhance the teamwork. For this role, Skillab appointed a specialized coach.

Steering (designers)

3rd diamond − solution space

Internal − Middle management − Different business functions → middle/high variety Steering (designers)

1st and 2nd diamond − strategy and problem spaces Vision board + Employee persona + Stakeholder map

Internal − Top management − External − Mixed Different business functions hierarchical levels − Same → low/medium variety business function (HR consultants) → medium/high variety

Steering (designers) + facilitating (teambuilding coach)

4th diamond – implementation 2nd and 3rd diamond space – problem and solution spaces

Stakeholder map + Action plan

Participants

Style of guidance

Extended Double Diamond position

Tasks and tools

3b

Generate action plans on existing ideas + training

3a

Employee Persona + Behavioural change ideation toolkit

Steering (designers)

Training: masterclass on “Service design for collaborative innovation” Simulation of a project carried out by a team in the organisation

Redesign of five HR processes: recruiting, onboarding, learning, performance management, talent management

Employee Journey (As Is) + Behavioural change ideation toolkit + Employee journey (To Be)

Internal − Middle mgmt/operational staff − Different business functions → middle/high variety

Redesign of the ‘recruiting’ process – generating new solutions

OTB Group and ccelera with OTB Group and ccelera with Amploom Amploom (part 1) (part 2)

Goal (subject-matter: concept-driven)

Hasso Plattner Institute

Automotive company and Skillab

Company and consultancy name (if any)

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Project no.

Table 4.1 Summary of the projects

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Participants Internal – Top management – Different business functions → low/medium variety. The participants were 28 employees working at the top management level of the company. They have been divided in 7 groups of 4 people, each team working on a different project, all related with the major strategic change that the company was about to undertake. Hence, the variety level was quite low. This is probably due to the fact that the decision that had to be taken was very strategical and delicate. At the same time, I noticed that the HR manager and the CEO, the key stakeholders that commissioned the workshop, were genuinely attentive to the participants’ thoughts. This attitude suggested us that the workshop was not aimed at building consensus on a strategy that was already established by the CEO, but it was a real consultation, even if pre-worked and tracked within quite strict boundaries. The following episode is also supporting this thesis. During the first day the CEO was part of one group, but he was also passing by other groups, giving suggestions and directions. At the end of the day, as facilitators team, we had a debrief with the HR manager and the CEO and we decided together to take the CEO apart from groups for the next day because he was influencing too much the directions to be taken and the participants felt intimidated by his opinion. Style of guidance Steering (designers) + facilitating (teambuilding coach). The facilitators were: one designer (me), a researcher specialised in organisational studies from the Università del Piemonte Orientale and a teambuilding coach. The designer and the other researcher were leading the participants in the development of the action plans while the teambuilding coach was leading some attitudinal exercises in between the activities related with the action plans. The participants worked most of the time in small groups composed of 4 people, without a dedicated facilitator. All the facilitators mentioned were conducting the entire group and they were passing by the smaller teams to give guidance from time to time or upon specific requests. The teambuilding activities where somehow connected with the design activities, meaning that they were intended to transmit some principles of team effectiveness that the participants could apply on their projects. For example, just before the presentation of the action plans, the trainer proposed an exercise addressing the topic of ‘persuasion’, in order for the participants to learn how to communicate properly an idea according to the audience and how to effectively receive and elaborate feedbacks. At the same time, I can say that the two activities were perceived as disconnected by the participants because the link was not intuitive and there was no joint conduction by the facilitators. The very fact that the session was designed as a mix between developing solutions and teambuilding is a demonstration that the attention of the client was equally concentrated on the output as much as on the process and the experience that this was generating. Extended Double Diamond position 4th diamond.

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A draft concept of the solution was already defined, therefore we could position this session at the 4th diamond. The 4th diamond is indeed dedicated to the definition of how the solution should be assembled and implemented. Tasks and tools After a phase of initial warm-up led by us and the teambuilding coach, the process was divided in the following tasks to be completed in groups: 1.

2.

3.

B2B Value Proposition: the first activity was aimed at articulating the value proposition for each beneficiary of the solution. Since the services to be developed were B2B, I designed a canvas to help the group to understand what were the specific offers that could cover each need of the beneficiary chain. The canvas was designed by us as an extension and adaptation of the Value Proposition Canvas developed by Osterwalder (2014). The B2B Value Proposition Canvas has one section that should be filled with the needs of the final user. The second section is dedicated to the B2B intermediary. In this section there are the ‘jobs-to-be-done’ by the intermediary, meaning the specific offers that cover the needs of the final user. Consequently, the intermediary has its own needs, that are the ones that should be covered by the last item of the chain, which is the company. Its jobs-to-be-done constitute the value proposition of the solution to be designed. Stakeholder Analysis: this activity was aimed at mapping all the stakeholders involved in the solution to be designed and hypothesize their level of involvement in the delivery of the service. The activity was facilitated by a canvas called Stakeholder Map. The Stakeholder Map is a framework where to physically position and move the different actors according to their level of involvement. This is supported by a board that made of concentric circles where the closeness to the centre indicates a higher level of involvement. In this specific case, the actors were represented through 3D characters made out of paper that the participants could label and move while discussing. An additional tool has been used to enrich the team reflection on the political and strategical role of each stakeholder: the Stakeholder Analysis Map. The Stakeholder Analysis Map is a tool derived from the business administration and project management domains and in particular from the stakeholder management field (Mendelow 1981; Bryson 1995; Eden and Ackermann 1998). The stakeholder analysis helps to map all the relevant stakeholders involved in a project and to address possible strategies of engagement according to two variables: influence/power and interest of the stakeholders. This tool was specifically designed to foster the discussion about the relation between the specific roles given to the different actors within the project and their strategical role in the organisation. Action Plan: the final task was to define the milestones of the project, giving timings for each subtask and define the people accounted to accomplishing them. This step was mediated by a tool called Action Plan. The action plan is actually a roadmap of the development of the solution that has been designed with the

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aim of investigating the role of the different stakeholders in the completion of each task. The peculiarity of this tool is indeed the focus on people rather than on the activities. The template requires to fill in specific sections where to list the leader, the main project team, the decision makers and the sponsors for each task. Extended DD—Tuckman Stage Correlation 1.

2.

B2B Value Proposition: deliver – convergent – norming. Even if this session is positioned at the 4th diamond, at the beginning of the workshop there was the need of reclaiming the concepts that came out from the previous session. In order to do that, we asked the participants to do a prework prior to the session where they had to recap the Business Model Canvas (Osterwalder and Pigneur 2010). Therefore, when they arrived at the workshop, they had already the Business Model Canvas printed out and the first project activity they had to do—besides the teamwork side activity led by the teambuilding coach—was the B2B Value Proposition Canvas. At this stage the group members didn’t have to conceive anything new, they just had to detail the concept by articulating the specific offers that composed the solution. As regarding the context level, the group can be considered at a ‘norming’ stage because the final goal of the project was already declared, even if needed to be clarified. Participants were expressing their own opinion in a confident way even if it was the first activity of the session. This is probably due to the fact that teams were already formed from the previous session. Therefore, we can attribute the status of the group to the ‘norming’ domain even if there was a background of complaisance typical of the ‘forming’ stage. The tool provided in this case was just facilitating the project task without impacting in a relevant manner the context level status. Stakeholder Analysis: detail – divergent – storming Here the group needed to list all the stakeholders involved in making the service work. This has to be considered as a divergent activity because in doing so, the participants were invited to think about all possible actors both actively engaged and passively impacted, therefore diverging from their initial assumptions and expanding their supposed target group. In doing so, the templates provided helped to push those boundaries because, as previously mentioned, they had dedicated spaces to be filled with different kind of actors. The mere fact that there are dedicated sections to be filled, forces the group at least to reflect and discuss if there are other actors that they should consider or not. At the same time however, the canvas constrains to give an order to the actors according to some criteria such as influence, power, level of involvement. The

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members of the group therefore need to discuss and take a decision, often leading to conflicts. At this stage, the group was already ‘formed’ and people were confident in sharing their own opinions, but they were often disagreeing when talking about the role that people were covering within their organisation. This is probably caused by the political dynamics and the conflictual interests that are felt by different people in organisations. Hence, the Tuckman stage which is most appropriate to define the status of the groups while performing this task is ‘storming’. Action Plan: deploy – convergent – norming Defining the action plan on how to deploy the solution dealt with matching the milestones of implementation with the stakeholders to involve. It was a matter of choosing the stakeholders mapped in the previous task and allocate them on each task of implementation. We could consider this as a convergent phase because it was not implying the creation of extra choices or possibilities but rather the selection of the relevant ones, specifically the relevant stakeholders for each task and their role. I considered that the most representative status of the team at this stage was ‘norming’. The team was already compact in following one specific direction, the discussions were already solved, and the effort was focused on organising information and writing down a plan on which everyone already agreed, at least at a macro-level. Some debates could still arise, particularly on accountabilities of specific tasks, but at this point the confrontations were already focused on achieving a shared and agreed goal, therefore the commitment in realizing it was stronger than stepping back from extra responsibilities.

Final output The output of the workshop was a defined offering for each solution conceived and a detailed action plan (a board) on how to realise it. The solutions were varied and sometimes alternative, because they implied completely different strategies and repositioning that the company should embrace. Therefore, all the solutions needed to be prioritized and discussed later on by the CEO and a restricted committee. I hereby report some examples of the solutions conceived to describe the variety and the strategical level of the proposals. A team depicted a new service based on predictive maintenance and industry 4.0 that could allow all actors involved in the chain to save costs and time. This solution would have required the development of an entire new expertise, with all the related consequences in terms of organisation and business, besides a strategic shift of the core business. Another group hypothesize a selling strategy to concentrate sales towards special vehicles that needs particularly powerful engines and high customization. All the other solutions were envisioning scenarios to shift from diesel to the electric vehicles industry (Figs. 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4).

4.1 Project n.1

Fig. 4.1 Stakeholder analysis map

Fig. 4.2 Action plan

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Fig. 4.3 Participants of the project n.1 using the tools provided

4.2 Project n.2 Company name Hasso Plattner Institute. The Hasso Plattner Institute is a training institute that offers advanced training programs in Design Thinking to students and professionals through the School of Design Thinking and the HPI Academy. It is based in Potsdam, Germany. This project was carried out during the visiting research stay as part of the Ph.D. research, that lasted from September to December 2018. Title “Service Design for Collaborative Innovation”. Date and duration 28th of November 2018 (1 day). Level of analysis for the research Context and content. The project is investigating possible solutions to enhance collaboration among project teams, therefore my interest and analysis is focused both on the contextual factors of the codesign activity as well as its outputs, which relate with the content. Goal Training. Masterclass on Service Design for Collaborative Innovation – generating new solutions. The masterclass had the aim of exploring how to foster collaboration in teams within organisations. In order to do that, I designed a workshop where I proposed

4.2 Project n.2

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Fig. 4.4 Participants of the project n.1 using the tools provided

a simulation of a specific project that a team needs to carry out within a fictional organisation. For the ideation phase, I leveraged on the behavioural principles that have been studied and distributed by the Center of Advanced Hindsight in 2016, which is a leading research lab on behavioural economics. Even if the main purpose was training and testing the behavioural principles during the ideation phase, the aim of the workshop was also to generate new services that could enhance collaboration within teams. Participants External – Mixed hierarchical levels – Same business function (HR consultants) → medium/high variety. There were 30 participants that worked in 4 teams of 5 people, mainly HR consultants or professionals within the field of Human Resource Management. A marginal number of participants were students from the advanced track in Design Thinking of the Hasso Plattner Institute. Therefore, the variety of participants was medium/high because people were coming from different organisations and they had different levels of expertise, but they were all coming from the HR field. Style of guidance Steering (designers). I was the only facilitator for the entire group. However, the participants, as HR consultants, were mostly trained facilitators so they had a high level of independence in performing the tasks. I noticed that often teams had too many people wanted to

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guide the team so that conflictual situations sometimes arose from abundance of leaders. As a designer and head facilitator, I was passing by teams and giving directions. I was also stimulating the brainstorming and design of the solutions giving insights and ideas. In addition, I steered the group by presenting some case studies that participants used as inspiration. This presentation had a strong influence in the development of the concepts that resulted to be very similar to the examples. Extended Double Diamond position 2nd and 3rd diamond (main Double Diamond). The session was designed to follow the main Double Diamond process, starting from a problem that I partially defined in a preliminary phase in order to recreate a realistic situation in a simulated environment. Tasks and tools The project started with a challenge that a fictional telecommunication company had to face. The simulation was about a company that has just created a new team to undertake a special project (meaning not part of the ‘business as usual’) which was the design of the new app. 1.

Employee Personas: The first task was to envision the profiles of the employees that would compose the abovementioned team. The profiles were already preconfigured in some elements such as: the level in the organisation, the seniority and the functional department. My aim was to recreate a team in which there was a high level of diversity. I wanted to simulate a team with a high variety of ‘knowledge diversity’ as it is demonstrated that such teams have very good performances as regarding certain types of tasks—creative/innovative—(Bell et al. 2011; van Dijk et al. 2012). Multidisciplinary teams are also among the assets that characterize design thinking teams (Brown 2009), but they necessarily imply more complexity in people interactions. With the information I provided we represented two of the three types of knowledge diversity identified by Edmondson and Harvey (2018) which are: (i) disparity (pay, income, prestige, status, authority, power) represented by the level in the organisation and (ii) variety (content expertise, functional background, network ties, industry experience) represented by the functional department. Each profile was assigned to one group and the profiles together were supposed to represent the special team introduced in the brief. In order to create the profiles, I designed and provided the template Employee Persona, which is a more specific version of the ‘persona’ tool coming from the service design discipline. The ‘persona’ is based on a fictional character whose profile gathers up the features of an existing social group. “The personas assume the attributes of the groups they represent: from their social and demographic characteristics, to their own needs, desires, habits and cultural backgrounds.” (Cooper 1998; Long 2009; Goodwin 2009). In the Employee Persona I included specific features that characterize the profile regarding the employee-organisation relation such as

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• Level: which refers to the hierarchical position in the organisational chart, as previously described. • Department: which refers to the business function where the employee works. This is related to the specific expertise of each person. • Drivers: a set of drivers derived from the 4-Drive Model developed by Lawrence and Nohria (2002), that helps to analyse employees’ motivations in a holistic way and look beyond typical financial rewards. In particular it shows the deeper forces that guide choices of people in the workplace. • This feature provides information on the last type of knowledge diversity (Edmondson and Harvey 2018) which is (iii) separation (opinions, beliefs, values, attitudes). • Through the understanding of the main drivers that motivates an employee in his/her behaviour it is possible to conceive more aware design interventions. The drivers are: reward, power and career, knowledge/learning, relation with people, personal meaning and fulfillment, ethical values. 2.

3.

Collaboration Blueprint As Is: The second task was to imagine the journey of the project from the perspective of the persona just formulated. Therefore, each group designed the journey from a different perspective. The aim of this activity was to track a conjectural situation which was not ideal, but representative of a real circumstance with all possible difficulties and frustrations. The collaboration blueprint is a tool derived from the ‘service blueprint’. The service blueprint is a visual representation of a service or process function both above and below the line of visibility of the user and it is largely used in the service design field. The collaboration blueprint uses the same logic of a service blueprint, but instead of tracking touchpoints, backstage processes or systems, it is conceived to track interactions between people and ultimately to improve collaboration. In this sense, the collaboration blueprint is similar to an ‘interaction storyboard’. The difference is that the interaction storyboard has as subject-matter the product-service, while the Collaboration Blueprint has as subject-matter the collaboration itself. It is a framework composed by three main sections: (i) a line dedicated to track the persona’s journey as a storyline made of sketches and captions, (ii) a set of other lines dedicated to track the actions of the other people with correspondence to the actions of the main persona and (iii) an indicator of the emotional feelings of the main persona to be tracked on a gradient from very positive to very negative emotions. The emotional indicator is supposed to reflect the feelings that originate from the interaction of the main persona with the other people. The negative emotions could help to identify potential areas of improvement and that should be the starting point for the ideation activity. Behavioural Change Ideation: The following activity dealt with ideating possible solutions to the critical interactions tracked on the Collaborative Journey As Is.

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In order to do that, I provided each group with a toolkit called Behavioural Change Ideation Toolkit. The toolkit is composed of • Brainstorming Deck: a guiding layout that represents the logic process that leads from the ‘pain points’ to possible solutions. It is composed by: (i) a set of spaces to summarize the ‘pain points’ previously identified, (ii) an icon representing the pack of Behavioural Insights Cards that should work as stimuli for the brainstorming (described below) and (iii) a set of spaces dedicated to imagine solutions for each pain point. • a set of Behavioural Insights Cards: a set of cards that portrays a selection of behavioural economic principles on which to leverage to ideate solutions. Essentially, each card represents a principle through an evocative image and a brief description. • Those cards and the entire concept behind this activity has been designed on the basis of behavioural science principles and behavioural change techniques such as the EAST Framework developed by the Behavioural Insights Team (2014) and, in particular, the Behavioural Change Toolkit designed by Bridgeable (2017). As the website of Bridgeable states: “Each principle describes at a high level how the majority of people will behave under specific circumstances. In practice, these principles can (a) help you understand current behaviour, and (b) help you change behaviour by leveraging relevant BE principles at the right moment of decision making.” Since our aim was to leverage on BE principles for a very specific purpose which was enhancing collaborative behaviours, I adapted the cards by selecting the ones that I found more relevant for the goal and I created an original version adding the ‘collaborative tips’, which are tips to stimulate ideation on design solutions that could overcome those behavioural biases. I selected 12 principles among the total of 42 provided by the card set by Bridgeable (2017). Below I provide an example of the content of a card. Title of card: “ego depletion” Description: “the ability to make good decisions is a limited resource that can be drained by both decision overload and external fatigue.” Collaborative tip (added by us): “push people to delegate when possible and ask for support if necessary.” With the help of the deck and the cards, the groups envisioned a series of solutions for the ‘pain points’. 4.

Collaboration Blueprint To Be: starting from the design solutions generated in the previous step, this last format was used to map the new interactions that should occur when the abovementioned solution would be in place.

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This template has the same structure of the ‘As Is’ version, apart from the emotions line, which is substituted by the ‘solutions’ line. In this line, people were asked to insert the solutions envisioned that correspond to each step of the journey. Extended DD—Tuckman stage correlation 1.

2.

3.

Employee persona: define – convergent – storming This was the first activity that the participants needed to accomplish and, differently from the other projects, participants didn’t know each other. That meant that this activity was performed while the members were still getting to know each other. The definition of the persona was quite critical because people found difficult to define a profile without any reference. As said, people have either to think about themselves, if they could match with the characteristics proposed, or they had to think about people they know. Some of them reported difficulties in doing so and many groups discussed for a long time on which person to concentrate on. For this reason, the group could be considered between a ‘storming’ and a ‘forming’ stage, where people had different opinions, but they were not totally confident to share them with the rest of the group because they didn’t know each other. Collaboration Blueprint As Is: define – convergent – storming Once the persona was defined, the definition of the journey went slightly smoother, but it was still hard for people to imagine specific situations within a project, especially for the ones that never experienced such a condition. Therefore, each step of the journey was discussed, since the groups were depicting an imaginary situation, and the most influential people in each group prevailed. This task gave everyone the possibility to express a different view on the journey and the effort was trying to converge to a common perspective. Hence, we can say that the most appropriate Tuckman’s stage at this time was ‘storming’. The tool Collaboration Blueprint As Is supported and facilitated the creation of an unique story, it mitigated the ‘storming’ stage and it enhanced the transition to the ‘forming’ stage. Behavioural Change Ideation: develop – divergent – norming At this stage, the team already agreed on which were the pain points of the As Is journey, so that they could brainstorm on possible solutions leveraging on the BE principles. This phase went on fluently and the cards were effective in stimulating ideation. The groups used them in different ways: some reviewed them one by one and initiated a brainstorming on each of them. Some others started the brainstorming and then filtered their ideas through the lenses provided by the cards. The tools provided here didn’t impact the status of the group in a relevant way, the groups reached the ‘norming’ stage at the end of the previous session and they generally maintained this status. The groups appeared to work collaboratively for the same goal without any distressing conflict. When doing these considerations, we need to remind and

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consider that the groups were working on an imaginary situation, therefore they didn’t feel any personal or professional attachment to the solutions they were envisioning. Hence, the low rate of conflict can be partially explained by the fact that people were not so committed to fight for their ideas by confronting with the others. Collaboration Blueprint To Be: deliver – convergent – norming The generation of the Collaboration Blueprint To Be was the most spontaneous and intuitive task of the session. The groups at this stage already felt that the crucial ideas were taken, and they perceived the task not as generative and creative anymore, but compilatory. The emotional mood of the teams was less energic, the previous steps required an intensive effort and this last activity seemed to be focused on reporting what has been produced in a given format. In this sense, the tool Collaborative Blueprint To Be constrained the teams to detail and formalise their ideas through a journey, but the ideation phase was concluded and each team entered the convergent phase ‘deliver’ of the Double Diamond. As regarding the Tuckman’s stage, we can say that the teams were still at a ‘norming’ stage, without any significant evolution or change from the previous one. In order to shift to the ‘performing’ stage, the concept should be refined at a point that the team feels so solid about the objective that internal flexibility and autonomy becomes prerogatives. This condition enables the team to carry on all the subsequent tasks.

Final output The output of the workshop are the solutions identified by each group and formalised in the Customer Journey To Be. At the end of the session, each group presented to the rest of the participants its output and received feedbacks on it. The solutions were different in specific functionalities, but they can be clustered in two main categories. • Project management tools: digital tools that help teams to organise their work, assign tasks, improve communication among members and keep track of accomplishments. All the tools implied physical and digital interactions. Compared to the existent tools, the solutions conceived here included specific functionalities aimed at fostering collaboration. Some examples: a function that visualises the workload and suggests to delegate definite tasks to other team members that own the expertise needed; a rating system that gives points to members that help others; a visualization of the impact of each member on the others’ performance and more. • Virtuous rituals for collaboration: definition of rituals of team governance that can enhance collaboration in different steps of the project journey. Some examples: set up of informal moments to share feedbacks about the project pace; task exchanges among team members to increase empathy; introduction of new roles dedicated to the wellbeing of the team such as the ‘chief happiness officer’; celebration of failures during dedicated event formats such as ‘fuckup nights’ (Figs. 4.5, 4.6 and 4.7).

4.2 Project n.2

Fig. 4.5 Employee Personas

Fig. 4.6 Participants of the project n.2 using the tools provided

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Fig. 4.7 Behavioural change ideation toolkit

4.3 Project n.3a Company and consultancy name OTB Group and ccelera with Amploom. OTB group is an international fashion company, parent of different brands such as: Diesel, Maison Margiela, Marni, Paula Cademartori, Viktor & Rolf, Staff International and Brave Kid. It is headquartered in Breganze (VI), Italy. Ccelera is an IT consultancy that works with digital transformation projects based in Venice, Italy.

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Amploom is a service design agency based in Thiene (VI), Italy. Within this project, I was part of the design team of Amploom. Title “Design Thinking Workshop—Kick-off ”. Date and duration 1st session—27th and 28th of February 2019 (2full days). Level of analysis for the research Content and context. The project deals with HR topics, therefore my interest and analysis are focused both on context and content. Goal Redesign of five HR processes as part of an overarching project of HR transformation—generating new solutions. The project started because OTB Group management needed to improve some of their HR processes in order to be more efficient and engaging for the employees. Some of the problems were caused by the digital system that the company was using to manage those processes. The system was not facilitating neither HR managers nor employees, with the result that nobody was using it. An example is given by the performance management system. It was perceived as useless both by the managers and their subordinates because it was not empowering employees in improving their performance, but rather causing a loss of time in compiling checklists of goals. Therefore, OTB decided to initiate a digital transformation on all HR processes and they asked for the support of ccelera. After a first discussion with the HR stakeholders from OTB, the project manager of ccelera, Luca Nascimben, envisioned the necessity for OTB to roll out a broader transformation project, that could re-imagine the entire employee experience besides the digital system. The overall project took the name of ‘people transformation journey’ (label given by the key project stakeholders of OTB). Hence, ccelera partnered with Amploom to conceive a series of codesign sessions to be carried out with employees in OTB, both HR managers and not. The project has been organised as divided in two main parts that follow the DoubleDiamond process: 1.

The first part had the aim of creating a common vision on the five HR processes (here called modules) identified and coming out with a design brief for each of them (project 3a). The modules refer to those HR processes that define the main areas of intervention of most companies regarding the employee journey. I provide a brief explanation of each module below. • Recruiting: how to attract and acquire new talents, converting them from candidates to hires. • Onboarding: how to support new workers in the acquisition of the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviours in order to become effective organisational members and insiders. • Learning: how to train workers and enable them to expand their knowledge, update their skills and build their self-development path.

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• Performance management: how to create a working environment or setting in which people are enabled to perform to the best of their abilities. This relates also with how workers are evaluated, promoted or rewarded. • Talent management: how to create predictive succession plans and identify talents among the company population. 2.

The second part had the aim of designing the new employee experience starting from the design brief conceived for the five modules (the HR processes). For the second part, each module has been addressed in a different session. Project 3b is one of those.

Participants Internal – Middle management – Different business functions → middle/high variety. The participants were 24 employees mixed among middle and top management and among functions. There were a core group coming from the HR function and the others coming from other business functions. This mix among functions was conceived for bringing an external perspective to the Human Resource department. This mix was also replicated within the working groups. The groups were composed by 4 or 5 people where there was at least one HR manager. Each group was working on one of the modules in parallel. The inclusion of several business functions to contaminate HR processes demonstrated a genuine openness in consulting the internal ‘clients’ who represent the users. In this sense, we can consider it as a proper codesign session with the users aimed at generating new solutions. Nevertheless, within the groups each member played a specific role according to his/her position in the company. The HR managers played a key role in the groups. They were the owner of the processes and they were fundamental to unfold details about the current situation from the service ‘provider’ side. At the same time, the ‘users’ (other business functions) were fundamental to challenge the HR-driven vision bringing problems and wishes that HR were unaware of. Style of guidance Steering (designers). The facilitators were composed of a group of service designers coming from Amploom and ccelera. Each facilitator led one group through all the activities, leaving a prominent space to the participants, who were experts of the content, in bringing information on the current situation. At the same time however, the facilitators brought their visionary skills and ability of interpretation to the tables, steering the groups towards extraordinary views. The designers who facilitated were also prepared in the field of HR because they did a preliminary research about best practices regarding the five topics, therefore they could contribute also building upon content knowledge. Extended Double Diamond position 1stand 2nd diamond.

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This session was dedicated to building a common and shared vision (1st diamond) on the five topics and create a design brief (2nd diamond) that could guide the development of the new concepts. Tasks and tools After a plenary presentation where Amploom and ccelera introduced the design thinking approach and its application in the change management domain, participants started to work in groups, following the agenda below. 1.

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Memory Warm-up: the first exercise was a warm-up because it was aimed at getting to know each other and familiarise with the overall concept of ‘people transformation’. We conceived this task as a card game inspired by the popular game called ‘Memory’. The concept of the original game consists of guessing couple of cards that display the same image on a covered side. Participants by turn had to uncover two cards each, until all the couples were discovered. The ability lies in memorizing the images and their position so to spot couples. In our case the cards were produced by the participants themselves that has to create the content of one card each by answering the question: “What does people transformation journey mean to you?”. Once everyone answered the question, they had to flip the card and putting it at the centre of the table so that none could see the answer. Then, one by one, they had to uncover two cards and comment the answers they find. In this way, people started to share their thoughts and find similarities between them. The goal here, compared to the original game, wasn’t to spot couples but rather start to discuss and familiarise with the idea of transformation path that they all had to undertake in a near future. Moreover, the do-it-yourself cards were meant to give to the concept of transformation a co-created meaning instead of being vehiculated in a top-down manner. Vision: this activity was aimed at creating a shared OTB-representative vision about the specific topic of each module. We called this activity ‘Setting our Destination—the Vision’. Taking as an example the module of ‘Recruiting’, we launched a brainstorming where each member of that group had to complete on a post-it the sentence “For me recruiting is…” and “For me recruiting is not…”. In this way, all opinions were collected on the Vision Board. Through a discussion moderated by the facilitator we came out with a set of agreed visions on each specific topic. The vision for Recruiting was framed as “Recruiting is a cultural process that fuels the future of the company with new energy, ideas and competences, providing to people, company and candidates, a meaningful and engaging life experience”. Stakeholder Analysis: the stakeholder analysis was carried out using the same format used for project n.1, the Stakeholder Analysis Map. This framework is useful to map all the stakeholders involved in the solution to be designed according to two variables which are ‘interest’ and ‘power’.

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Those variables are placed on two orthogonal axis that shape a quadrant through their intersection. With ‘interest’ we refer to those stakeholders who are impacted by the process, meaning that they could be passive or active users, but they don’t have any power in changing or modifying that process. With ‘influence’ we refer to those stakeholders who are either the providers of that process/service or have strong influence in changing or modifying it. Therefore, they could be mainly HR managers or people in a position of power within the company. The map was aimed at identifying all possible stakeholders involved in the process and then selecting the most relevant ones to be analysed in dept in the subsequent steps. In this sense, the tool helped from one side to stretch the reasoning of the group to consider also those stakeholders who are not intuitively associated with that process. From the other side, it facilitated a discussion on the ‘importance’ of each stakeholder, because it provided a framework of reasoning around which the group could discuss and justify choices. The tool was indeed composed by a board representing the abovementioned axis, on which the group could place stakeholders written on post-its and move them on the board according to the discussion. Since we used the metaphor of the ’travel’ as storytelling for the entire project, we titled this activity ‘Setting our Destination—Who are our Travel Companions?’ Employee Personas and Value Propositions: starting from the results of the discussion of the previous task, each group identified three stakeholders on which to build the Persona profiles. The guiding principle was to spot the most relevant personas on which to do a deeper analysis and build the future solution. Once those three stakeholders were selected on the map, the groups had to build up detailed profiles for them. In order to do that, people draw from preliminary interviews they did within the company. This was part of a pre-work that we asked the participants to do with the aim of overcoming bias and assumptions and create profiles as much as possible close to the reality (Stickdorn et al. 2018). Just a very marginal part of the participants did the pre-work. They justified it by saying that they didn’t have enough time or that they already knew the profiles therefore they don’t need to do interviews. This attitude collided with the intent of this activity and the result was that the personas were just partially built with objective insights and real data. Moreover, since the interviews were carried out by non-professional designers, we could not rely totally on the information gathered, even if we gave the interviewers a guiding protocol. The tool used is the Employee Persona (same format used for project n.2), with an additional section called ‘Value Proposition’. The intent of this section was to formulate the value proposition that the solution should contain to answer the needs identified for each Persona. An example of value proposition for the Persona representing the manager that needs to hire a candidate for his/her team (module ‘Recruiting) was “A pragmatic process, a

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fast and comprehensive way of evaluating the candidates, straight to the point, without too many steps. Good candidates in short time”. Best practices Inspiration: the first day ended with a showcase of best practices on the five topics coming from a preliminary research that I carried out. The aim was to inspire the participants with innovative practices that could stimulate the ideation phase of the subsequent day. The practices were displayed as Best Practices Cards composed of a representative image, a brief description and a set of keywords that resume the innovative assets represented by the case. Examples of keywords are: ‘community-based’, ‘gamified’, ‘data-driven’, ‘self-directed’ and more. Those keywords were facilitating the uptake of the cases for the participants, thanks to an interpretative filter that we applied as expert designers. Insights Shopping: The first day ended with an activity aimed at sharing insights among the groups that worked separately until this point. This activity was conceived and inspired by the ‘World Cafe’ conversational process (Brown and Isaacs 2005), re-formulated in a less structured format. The design principle of the ‘World Cafe’ that was mostly recalled by our version was ‘connecting diverse perspectives’. We provided every participant with a card and asked people to take notes about interesting insights that they would have find in the work of the other groups and leave feedbacks on post-its. The groups disbanded and people were freely flowing from one table to the other to consult the other projects. The facilitator stayed at his/her original table in order to be available for possible questions. The entire process was made possible by the fact that all the outputs of the discussions were reported on the templates that were displayed on a vertical panel for each group in a synthetic way. Design Brief: The last activity of the session, that was the focus of the second day, was dedicated to build the Design Brief . The Design Brief is the document that outlines the requirements that the solution should satisfy. In this workshop it represented the final output and the summary of the work done. It is organised with an upper section dedicated to the value propositions and a lower section dedicated to the design principles. For each value proposition the associated personas is listed aside. The lower section is dedicated to the design principles. The principles are consequent to the value propositions and recap the overarching values that the solution needs to reflect. Those values are then detailed with a brief explanation. An example of the Design Brief of the ‘Recruiting’ module, refers to the paragraph ‘final output’.

Extended DD—Tuckman stage correlation 1.

Memory Warm-up: dialogue – divergent – forming The warm-up exercise worked as a way to familiarise with the overarching topic of ‘people transformation’ and get to know the other team members.

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It sets a light step forward in the understanding of the topic, but it could not be considered as a significant contribution in terms of content for the project goal. It was an activity strictly related to create an effective context because the aim was ‘forming’ the group. Hence, the Tuckman’s stage associated is ‘forming’. Vision: dialogue/direct – divergent/convergent – forming The creation of the vision implied both divergent and convergent phases, because it first dealt with the collection of individual perspectives and then with the formulation of a shared one. We were still at a group development stage where the shared final goal (the vision) needed to be delineated and actually this activity was specifically aimed at doing so. Therefore, we can state that the definition of a common vision closed the stage of ‘forming’ and set the evolution of the group to the next stage. Stakeholder Analysis: discover – divergent – storming The analysis of the stakeholder represented still a divergent stage because it fostered the span of possible stakeholders impacted and involved in each process, as it happened for project n.1. Even in this case, the tool helped to guide the discussion, but at the same time it provoked conflictual confrontations about the different perception of interest, influence and power of the internal stakeholders of the company. For this reason, the Tuckman’s stage identified for this phase is ‘storming’. Employee Personas and Value Propositions: define – convergent – norming Once the discussions to complete the Stakeholder Map were concluded, the choice of the personas on who to focus on went relatively smooth. When people realized that the stakeholder analysis was a preparatory task to the choice of the personas, they were keener to resolve conflicts and come out with the choice in a smooth manner. The characterization of the persona was quite harmonious because team members had an established stereotype in their mind on which they were agreeing. Even if, as previously mentioned, this is not ideal for creating a realistic and non-biased profile, it created cohesion among members, leading to the ‘norming’ stage. Best Practices Inspiration: develop – divergent – norming This inspirational activity was somehow anticipating the ideation phase, because it was aimed at giving stimuli on the characteristics that the final solution should have. It worked also as an empowering energizer to close the first day, useful to cool-down from the previous cognitively intensive activities and prepare for the following day. Insights Shopping: develop – divergent – norming Similarly to the previous task, this was also an opportunity to enrich the team work with external insights. The status of the group could still be considered as ‘norming’ because members were aligned on the goal (the value propositions), therefore they selected insights that they considered relevant for their focus. Design Brief: define – convergent – norming

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As the closing task of the session, the Design Brief represented a linear consequence to the previous steps. The teams worked harmoniously and spontaneously converging towards the final set of design principles. After this phase that could represent what Fisher (1995) calls the ‘final decision’, we could imagine that the teams would be ready to enter the stage of ‘performing’. Final output The Design Brief was the final output of the workshop. Each group produced a Design Brief according to the module assigned. All the Design Briefs were presented by each group to the rest of the participants. Those documents represented the starting point for the following session that was focused on developing the new solutions. As mentioned, the substantially new content produced for the Design Brief was the set of design principles. As an example, the design principles identified for the ‘Recruiting’ module were: • Fun, funny, easy: Enrich the process with new and funny activities for candidates and recruiters. • Inclusive: Create an internal community of employees and external community of OTB followers. • Human Touch: have just one point of reference. Have an empathic approach with candidates and future candidates • Fast and Simple: Useful, simple, intuitive and user-friendly interaction. Global system: same for all business units. Clear KPI: no subjective interpretations. Reduce back office time spending • Transparency: honest feedbacks to candidates. Honest description of the job position and career progress. Evidence on internal job posting process. Common process for all business units. Sharing information and best practices. • Long Term Follow-Up: Map and track good candidates. Nurture pipelines (Figs. 4.8, 4.9, 4.10, 4.11, 4.12 and 4.13)

4.4 Project n.3b This is the second part of the project articulated in the previous paragraph (project 3a). Company and consultancy name OTB Group and ccelera with Amploom. Same configuration of partners of the first part of this project: project 3a. Title “Design Thinking Workshop—Recruiting”. Date and duration 2nd session—26th and 27th of June 2019 (1 day and a half ). Level of analysis for the research Content and context. The content of the workshop dealt with one specific HR process to be redesigned therefore this project is relevant both on content and context perspectives.

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Fig. 4.8 Vision board

Fig. 4.9 Stakeholder map

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Fig. 4.10 Participants of the project n.3a using the tools provided

Fig. 4.11 Participants of the project n.3a using the tools provided

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Fig. 4.12 Participants of the project n.3a using the tools provided

Fig. 4.13 Participants of the project n.3a using the tools provided

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Goal Redesign of the ‘recruiting’ process—generating new solutions. This second part of the project had the aim of envisioning the new employee experience related with recruiting. The redesign had a predominant focus on a digital platform as main touchpoint. The platform had to be developed in collaboration with the IT consultancy ccelera. Participants Internal – Middle management and operational staff – Different business functions → middle/high variety. The participants were 20 employees mixed among middle management and operational staff from different business functions. As happened in the previous part of the project, there was a prevalence of HR employees with a mix of other business functions. Compared to the kick-off, this time we invited also a number of operational resources because they were the ones that had a direct experience with the process and they had a ‘user’ perspective on it. We formed 4 teams of 5 people each, where we wanted the following roles to be represented. • Ambassador: a person that participated to the previous session and was part of the group working on the recruiting topic. The role of this people was to ensure the consistency between the two sessions and represent this ‘bridge’ in each group. At the same time, we wanted to have a core pool of people with high commitment to the project, that would have enhanced the implementation phases. This was a declared role that those people knew they cover and for which they were assigned specific tasks that are explained in the paragraph ‘task and tools’. • ‘Persona-like’: a person that had very similar characteristics to each of the personas identified during the kick-off. Each team in this session would have worked on one of those personas, therefore we decided to have one possible ‘user’ at the table to codesign the solution. This was not a declared role because we wanted someone who could bring the perspective of the user, but at the same time we didn’t want this person to be marked as utterly adherent to the profile displayed. • Witness: this was a temporary role that allowed each team to enrich their work with a different perspective by acquiring a member coming from another team. This change happened at a certain point in time during the session that is explained in more detail in the paragraph ‘task and tools’. Besides those roles represented in each group, we foresaw other general roles. • Solution experts: three consultants from ccelera that were in charge of helping the participants with technocal doubts or clarification needs regarding the digital platform. • Workshop angel: a person (Luca Nascimben, the project manager of ccelera) who had the general overview of the entire workshop and assured that all teams were aligned. He was also responsible of spotting possible issues regarding specific teams or the general flow of the process besides keeping times assigned to the activities.

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Style of guidance Steering (designers). The facilitation and design team was the same of the previous session, each group was guided by a service designer (see paragraph ‘style of guidance’ of project 3a). Extended Double Diamond position 3rddiamond. This session was dedicated to design a new process of recruiting according to the design brief framed in the previous session. Tasks and tools We organized the workshop as 1 day and a half long so to start with an afternoon followed by a full day of work. We started with a plenary presentation introducing the methodology approach of design thinking, mainly addressed to the participants who didn’t attend the kick-off. Right after that, we asked the ‘ambassadors’ to present the personas that they framed during the kick-off. We did so to make them internalize and take responsibility with what they have designed. Moreover, we wanted the other participants to identify their colleagues as the owners of the project and feel ‘onboarded’ by them. The personas were crucial for the activities that followed because each group had to envision the recruiting experience from the perspective of one of them. Hence, we assigned to each group one of those personas. The functional role of those personas was specifically: (i) a recruiter, (ii) an hiring manager, (iii) a candidate and (iii) a retail manager/candidate (one group analysed both the experience of the candidate and the hiring manager in the retail environment). The process of the workshop covered the following steps. 1.

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Memory Warm-up: similarly to the one designed for the kick-off, this warm-up was inspired by the card game ‘Memory’. Compared to last time however, team members didn’t have to produce any content, but they were just asked to recall what the ‘ambassadors’ just presented regarding the personas. In order to do so, each group had a set of cards reporting the information of all the personas connected with the recruiting topic framed during the kick-off. The final goal of each group was to select the cards belonging to the persona that was assigned to that table. The exercise began with all cards sorted on the table flipped on their back, meaning that the information on the persona were hidden. Each team member, by turn, had to flip two cards and decide if they were referring to the persona of that table or they belonged to other personas and therefore they had to be discarded. This activity was an expedient to let people get to know each other and start to share some observations on the profiles they had to analyse. The Employee Journey As Is: each team had to trace the existing ‘journey’ with the recruiting process from the perspective of the persona assigned. The journey was composed of five parallel sections where the main one was dedicated to the (i) experience of the user and the others traced the (ii) related emotions, (iii) the

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interfaces of the platform, (iv) all the other touchpoints and, finally, (v) the pain points of the persona. The Employee Journey As Is consisted of a large horizontal wallpaper board that displayed the five sections that the group had to fulfil with the information required using post-its. In order to support the process of mapping the ‘as is’ situation, we ensured that each group had one computer available at its table to simulate the process from the digital channel. The section dedicated to trace the emotions was meant to help identifying the pain points, which are the critical moments of the experience where there is room for improvement. The first half day closed with a showcase of best practices that we did in order to stimulate the participants with the ideation phase of the subsequent day. The second day started with a presentation by the ‘ambassadors’ of the Design Brief that they produced during the kick-off workshop. The presentation of the Design Briefs was very important because the design principles contained in it should have been the guiding values for the concept generation. Last presentation of the morning was held by the “solution experts”. They presented the main features of the digital platform that could be adapted to the needs of OTB. The features were presented in an intuitive and simple format that was previously shaped by us in order to mediate the technical language of the IT consultants with the participants. 3.

Ideation: starting from the pain points identified, the goal of this crucial task was to generate solutions for the pain points, taking inspiration from the features that the digital platform offered. The solutions to be conceived didn’t have to be necessarily related to the platform because the final goal was to redesign the overall experience. However, the features were helpful for the ideation of the digital experience. In order to do that, each team was provided with: • Brainstorming Deck: a guiding layout that represents the logic process that leads from the ‘pain points’ to possible solutions. It is composed by: (i) a set of spaces to summarize the ‘pain points’ previously identified, (ii) an icon representing the pack of Features Cards that could stimulate the brainstorming (described below) and (iii) a set of spaces dedicated to formulate solutions for each pain point. • a set of Features Cards: a pack of cards that summarizes the features offered by the digital platform on which to leverage to ideate solutions. Each card represents a feature through an evocative image and a brief description. The Features Cards have been designed by us in order to create a boundary object that can foster the understanding of the technical features to nonexperts.

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My role as designer was particularly meaningful in doing this translation because I made those features usable and comprehensible by all the codesigners.

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The features were represented as ‘standard’ functions that the platform can perform. The task of each team was to rework those functions and adapt them to the needs of OTB. The rationale that lays behind this task and the tools used is comparable to the Behavioural Change Ideation Toolkit. Employee Journey To Be: once the solutions were conceived, each team had to design the new journey of the persona assigned, considering that the solutions just generated would be in place. The Employee Journey To Be format has the same configuration of the Employee Journey As Is besides the line of the emotions that were just a trigger to the pain points. In addition, this framework has one section dedicated to map the features used to ideate the specific solutions reported in the journey and another one that we called ‘wow, but how?’. This section was aimed at collecting all those solutions that were more visionary and less feasible in terms of time and budget. This line was specifically designed to boost the ideas of participants over the ordinary and avoid making them focus too much just on the digital platform. Yes, and…: Each team presented the Employee Journey To Be, focusing on the solutions identified. While one team was presenting, the other teams were called to give feedbacks with the aim of reaching coherence of the journeys. The feedbacks were collected on cards with the words ‘yes, and…’. This is a trick to give feedbacks that are constructive, and is known as one of the main ‘rule’ of design thinking according to HPI, Stanford d.schools and the famous consulting firm IDEO. All feedbacks were not shared verbally, but written and then collected in the box that each team had on its table, in order to be reviewed later by the team members. In this way, we allowed a collective sharing of opinions, but we limited the discussions within small teams in order to be more effective. In order to reinforce feedbacks sharing and enrich each journey with different perspectives, we temporarily changed some members of the teams. In particular, we asked three members of each team to choose other three teams to join and act as ‘witnesses’ of the work done at their table. The ‘ambassadors’ were asked to stay at their original table. By doing so, we enhanced the consistency of the different journeys and we allowed teams to confront with ‘fresh’ contributions. The Recruiting Journey: The final task was a sort of celebration of the work done. Once every team concluded the feedbacks session, everyone came back to his/her original team and acknowledged the changes that have been made. Then, we placed all the journeys on the same column and stuck them on the wall in order to frame the overall picture of the solutions conceived. This act was more a ceremony than a real task, because any additional content was produced, but it revealed to be very important for the enthusiasm of the

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participants. Part of the ceremony was also taking a picture of the whole group as a memory of the session. Extended DD—Tuckman stage correlation 1.

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Memory Warm-up: define – convergent – forming This activity is not clearly attributable to any specific feature of the process, because its main purpose was introducing the team to the session and the teamwork. However, since the activity was related with composing the personas profile, we can attribute this task to the ‘define’ phase. Hence, regarding the stage of team development, we should patently refer to the stage of ‘forming’. Employee Journey As Is: define – convergent – storming The definition of the journey ‘as is’ was definitely a convergent phase, where the team had to agree on the existing process and related experience of the persona analysed. In this phase, the team members, who were belonging to different business functions, shared their perspective on the process and in most cases they realized that they had very different viewpoint. At this stage they were already confident in sharing their thoughts and therefore they discussed deeply on the journey ‘as is’. This was also an occasion where they felt allowed to share problems and complications of their job ‘in a safe environment’ compared to the day by day. There could have been still some hesitation in being totally honest because of possible judgements of the other people at the table that could cover a position of power (this topic is further discussed in Sect. 5.4 ‘lessons learnt and discussion’). Ideation: develop – divergent – norming At this point the discussions were scarce because most critical issues were already explored during the ‘as is’ analysis and some divergent ideation was also anticipated while discussing the current situation. This is quite common and spontaneous when identifying problems and we wanted to keep track of ideas in order to deepening them later. For this reason, we set up the Idea Parking Lot, a space where we collected all ideas that came out during early stages to be unfrozen during the ideation phase. Team members were still diverging and bringing to the table different opinions, but the common direction was clearly stated in the ‘pain points’, so the members were ideating toward a declared common goal, therefore the group was ‘normed’. Employee Journey To Be: deliver – convergent – norming The teamwork went on smoothly in the last part of the session, imagining the future journey when the solutions conceived would have been in place. We could not say the group was performing yet because they still needed a strong guidance by the facilitator and we can’t say they were autonomous,

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flexible and totally confident with the task. The teams therefore were still at a ‘norming’ stage. Yes, and…The Recruiting Journey: deliver – convergent – norming The closing steps were just a confirmation of the status of the team. The fact that the teams were ‘challenged’ by new team members reinforced even more the ideas conceived and the commitment of the team toward the goal.

Final output The Recruiting Journey, meant as the fusion of the four employee journeys, was the final output of the session. This result would have worked as guideline for the development of the digital platform to be implemented by ccelera. The implementation of the platform it’s going to be done through three iteration cycles. Between those iterations, we planned a codesign session that we called ‘design thinking checkpoint’. During this session we would collect feedbacks from the testers of the platfrom (a subgroup of the employees that participated in the previous codesign sessions) and we would assess if the platform satisfies the requirements identified by the codesigners. In addition, we could modify the requirements or enrich them with additional inputs coming from the test (Fig. 4.14, 4.15 and 4.16).

Fig. 4.14 Employee Journey AS IS

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Fig. 4.15 Employee Journey TO BE

4.5 Lessons Learnt and Discussion Drawing from the experiments reported in the previous paragraph I came out with a series of insights and lessons learnt that I compared with other authors’ findings. These findings are the building blocks on which I developed the framework proposed as outcome of the Ph.D. research. The Problem space as the storming ‘Groan Zone’ Many authors are investigating the contextual impact related to specific phases of a project. In particular, when looking at team dynamics, there is an ongoing discussion whether conflicts are more boosted to arise by divergent or convergent phases. Since literature on conflicts in group dynamics distinguishes between task and relationship conflicts, I clarify that for conflicts I refer to task conflicts. In general, there is a tendency to consider convergent phases as more conflictual because they imply to come out with an agreement or decision. A recent research carried out by the Design Thinking research team at the Hasso-Plattner Institute (Ewald et al. 2019) shows preliminary results on how negative emotions of team members seems to be more frequently related with convergent phases of the design thinking process. Since negative emotions are seen to have high reciprocity with socio-emotional aspects such as conflicts, one could come to the conclusion that conflicts are more typical of the convergent phases. This is very much connected with the nature of the tasks being carried out that push the team towards comparing, discussing and selecting insights and therefore brings argumentative and judgmental pressure (Kim et al. 2012).

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Fig. 4.16 Final output of the project n.3b

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Nevertheless, I must acknowledge that the abovementioned research was carried out within an educational program, which is quite different from an organisational context. Even if the projects had real project partners from the industry, the project teams of students were external to the organisation, therefore not subject to all internal tensions and dynamics that characterizes an organisation. In this sense, I believe that HPI experiment could be considered as very similar to a simulation if we would like to analyse emotions in industry project teams (Shin 2014; George and King 2007). For the same reason, also project n.2 reported in this book has the same limitation. The mood that I observed during the project is strongly influenced by the simulated challenge and the context of a training. One of the emergent learnings that I acknowledged through the experiment is that the ‘problem space’, which is identified as the 2nd diamond in the ‘extended Double Diamond’, is generally characterized by a storming mood of the project team. One of the supporting arguments to this statement is the concept of ‘Groan Zone’ introduced by Kaner (2014). Kaner in his Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making affirms that in the ‘real life’ divergent and convergent thinking are not characterized by subsequent orderly and thoughtful steps, but they rather include at their connection a struggling moment. This phase is characterized by confusion and frustration given by “integrat[ing] new and different ways of thinking with their own” (Kaner 2014, p. 18). This is particularly true when the team is facing a difficult problem, that doesn’t have a straightforward solution. This kind of problems can be linked to the ‘wicked problems’ (Buchanan 1992) that design thinking aims to tackle. The ‘storming’ mood of the ‘problem space’ of the process, can be explained by the fact that people at this stage are analyzing the current (as is) situation they are part of a mixed group, where everybody is bringing their functional perspective within the company. In this sense, the creation of multidisciplinary teams can actually help to ‘break up silos’, but at the same time can foster a conflictual phase that brings to the table different interests. This is very typical of organisations, which are pervaded by controversial political forces. Most fathers of change management studies identify as one of the necessary steps to enact change unfreezing the current situation, therefore disrupting the organisational equilibrium (Lewin 1947; Schein 1987; Kotter 2014). This phase can be associated to the problem space of the extended Double Diamond. If we claim that conflicts, in these conditions, are more concentrated in the problem space, in the same way we could notice that in the solution space the team is already ‘normed’, because confrontations are mostly absorbed in previous phases. When going through the problem space we must therefore take into consideration the expected mood of the group and, as design facilitators, be ready to manage it. In doing so, we can relate to the concept of ‘flow’ originally introduced by Csikszentmihalyi in 1975 as part of the Positive Psychology theory. The ‘flow’ is defined as “the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process

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of the activity” (Csikszentmihalyi 1975). The author introduces a matrix where the axes are ‘challenges’ and ‘abilities’ and the balance between the two determines the state of ‘flow’. Even if the concept of flow has been initially theorized for individuals, it has allowed for a definition of group flow, known as ‘social flow’ (Walker 2010). Building on that, we can say that to manage properly the ‘storming’ stage when analysing the current situation, the designer should help to shape the challenges in a way that the group can work at its best conditions, which means it should experience the ‘social flow’. Boundary objects as enablers of group development The boundary objects I used, mostly tools, resulted to be very useful to facilitate the discussion among people from different business functions and hierarchies because they set a common language and framework around which to develop thoughts and opinions (Star 1989; Sanders and Stappers 2014). At the same time, some tools were sometimes amplifying or even stimulating some sort of emotional reaction in the group. One example is given by the Stakeholder Analysis Map, which forced the group to confront about the different roles and power of people within the company. Even if the tool in itself was not aimed at fostering a debate, it actually did that, both when used in the ‘problem space’ and in the ‘implementation space’. Nevertheless, I must say that the discussion was always task-related and anyhow necessary, both to advance the project and for the sake of group development. It is indeed demonstrated by most models of group development (see Sect. 4.2) that ‘storming’, even if conflictual, is a necessary stage that the group needs to undertake in order to perform later. Hence, if from one side some tools were enhancing debates, from the other side they gave order and guidance to them, while increasing the level of maturity of the groups. The tools also set a perimeter to the discussions, and they represent the boundary to the next project activity as well as the next stage of group development. This means that when a group accomplishes the task and agrees on the result of it (for example the Stakeholder Analysis Map or the Employee Journey As Is), the collective picture is made and the group will not come back to question those issues. The presence of tools also enabled the sharing of information among different groups. As an example, the Insights Shopping was an activity that optimized the collection of relevant insights from the other groups and at the collection of feedbacks, without entering in long and ineffective discussions. The constrain given by the cards forced people to write down and synthetize the insights they wanted to bring to their group, and this implied already a constructive interpretation on the work done by the others. The same happened for giving feedbacks. The cards provided guided the participants to frame their message starting with ‘yes, and…’ therefore suggesting a constructive commentary.

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Introspective group codesign in organisation as compromised When doing codesign, professional designers are prepared to interact with potential users during the design phase. When including potential users in the design activity, professional designers need to act in different ways according to the codesigners of each session. Sanders and Stappers (2008) listed a set of different approaches that designers can adopt to involve future users according to different levels of creativity. However, when we deal with projects that work on processes or services internal to the organisation, we actually consider some employee as users and other employees as providers (typically HR). In a codesign session for internal purposes, those two kinds of actors are seated at the same table. This is certainly empowering the design process, making it become a codesign session, but it could compromise group dynamics. When users are not external to the organisation, they don’t feel completely free to express their point of view. Within these conditions, employees can find themselves at the same table of their managers or the HR person which is in charge of evaluating him/her or decide for his/her future career. This is obviously creating a sort of conflict of interest which threatens the authenticity of the contributions. One demonstration of this consideration is the task of the Employee Persona. The Employee Persona was in both experimentation (project 2 and 3a-b) representing a person which had very similar features to a member of the project team. This was actually intentional to represent the user in the codesign activity. Nevertheless, if it is already difficult to create non-biased persona profiles when representing the user (Stickdorn et al. 2018), the task becomes even more critical if the persona to be represented has very similar characteristic to one member of the codesign group and s/he it’s not providing sincere information because s/he feels intimidated. The theories of creativity provide useful techniques to facilitate the emergence of different perspectives and overcome personal judgement. One above all is the popular Six Thinking Hats technique originally introduced by de Bono in 1985. We could take inspiration from this kind of techniques to develop a formula that enables people to express their opinion by detaching from their functional role and their personal judgement. The importance of participants and roles When it is possible to influence or be actively involved in the selection of participants and the composition of groups, there are two main criteria to take into consideration: the business function (von Stamm 2003) and the personality type of the members. Different personality types in fact relate to different preferred learning styles (Beckman and Barry 2007) and research shows that a balance between both functional representation and learning styles make teams performing better than more homogeneous teams (Kayes et al. 2005). According to our research on massive codesign (Meroni et al. 2018) it is of crucial importance to assign clear roles to the members of a group when different stakeholders are codesigning together. This is particularly meaningful when hierarchies of different kinds come into play. In our case, hierarchies are given by the status of

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people in the organisational chart and different levels were often interacting during codesign sessions. Within this condition, weaker parts need to be empowered and entitled, therefore “the assignment of roles (both fictional and functional) may be effective […] in fact it can help in the balance of power, giving a voice to weaker subjects, stepping into the shoes of others and representing all viewpoints and expertise” (ibidem). Referring to the projects contained in this book, the evidences of this argument can be found in project 1 and 3b. In project 1 (see also paragraph “Participants” of project 1) we decided to change the role of the CEO from participant to observer in the middle of the session. We made this decision because we noticed, together with the HR manager who was present during the activity, that the CEO was influencing too much the work of the groups. We wanted to assure the process to be fully participatory and the change we made actually allowed more authentic contributions. In project 3b the roles we gave were more articulated (see also paragraph “Participants” of project 3b). Each role was studied to make the teams and the entire group of participants perform at their best. In particular, the role of the ‘ambassadors’ was made to create a group of highly committed people that could represent the project and boost it to implementation. In general, the entire group was composed with the aim of enhancing a “bottomup” process development that could ultimately bring to implicit organisational change through design (Deserti and Rizzo 2014). The issue of roles and how to facilitate as much as possible the emergence of genuine contributions by all team members by avoiding intimidations of power should be further explored and researched. Teams need design facilitators As regards the facilitators, the experience with the two facilitators in project 1 (us as designers and the teambuilding coach), didn’t work as desired. Even if the activities were connected in terms of learning goals (see the paragraph ‘style of guidance’ of project 1), the two facilitators were following two parallel paths that never merged and they were perceived as disconnected by the participants. This consideration is crucial to define how the facilitation of a design project should be when the context level becomes central: either the two roles stay separate but the process needs to be designed in a more integrated way or there is the need to introduce a new hybrid professional (Auricchio et al. 2018). Another important consideration about the facilitation is that in the projects there were no dedicated facilitators for each team, and specifically designers, the quality of the content produced was lower than expected. In project 3 in fact, we secured the presence of one designer as facilitator in each group in order to guarantee the quality of the output. In the same way, also the contextual level suffered of the lack of the facilitator as leader in each group. In project 1, each team had an internal team leader, which was the project manager. In this case, since the session was not aimed at generating new concepts, the need

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for a designer was not essential. It was essential instead to have guidance in the use of the tools. This guidance was provided by us in plenary explanation of each task. I can’t report in an analytic manner the evolution of the group dynamics because I was not facilitating a single team, but I was monitoring the overall group, therefore I just gained a general overview. The ‘warm-up’ as vehicle to ‘form’ the group The ‘forming’ stage of any novice group is a delicate moment because it entails both the moment in which members get to know each other and the introduction of the topic and the work to be done. Since the codesign sessions can start at various stages of the extended DD depending on the goal of the activity, the ‘forming’ moment can match different phases of the design thinking process. In particular, it can occur at any point in time a new group is formed. It is therefore crucial the role of the design facilitator to guide the group in its formation. Both the approach of traditional facilitation (Sclavi 2008; Sario 2017) and codesign practices highlight the importance of this instance and offer several techniques to design and manage it. In our experience, we can define those practices as necessary ‘ceremonies’: “the beginning, whatever circumstance and participant we consider, needs an equivalent of an icebreaking practice: it is not necessarily enjoyable, but thought to increase empathy and trust between people” (Meroni et al. 2018). Practitioners in the field of design thinking are sustainers of the importance of warm-ups and they developed an abundant set of them over time. An extensive set of the ones used at HPI School of Design Thinking is provided by one of its coaches Tschepe (2018). Tschepe in his article also argues that warm-ups need to be used purposefully, however the set he proposes is merely context-focused, aiming to enhance group dynamics. What this book intends to add is a content-specific design and use of warm-ups, which could start from taking inspiration from the existing ones, but then leads to a conscious design or adaptation to the content of the session. Nevertheless, I believe, as designer, that the warm-up activity doesn’t have to be strictly functional to develop a certain part of the design project, but it should at least ensure a further step towards familiarizing with the topic, as it happened in project 3a with the Memory Warm-up.

References Auricchio V, Rossi M, Dezza G, Peretti Griva P (2018) Service design and human resource consulting: an integrated vision. In: Proceedings of the service design and innovation conference, Milan Beckman SL, Barry M (2007) Innovation as a learning process: embedding design thinking. Calif Manage Rev 50(1):25–56 Bell ST, Villado AJ, Lukasik MA, Belau L, Briggs AL (2011) Getting specific about demographic diversity variable and team performance relationships: a meta-analysis. J Manag 37:709–743

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Bridgeable (2017) Designing behaviour change toolkit—a guide to using behavioural economics with service design (s.d.). Retrieved from https://toolkit.bridgeable.com/ Bryson J (1995) Strategic planning for public and nonprofit organizations (rev. edn). Jossey- Bass, San Francisco, CA. Latest edition strategic planning for public and nonprofit organizations: a guide to strengthening and sustaining organizational achievement (Bryson on Strategic Planning) Brown T (2009) Change by design: how design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. Harper-Collins, New York Brown J, Isaacs D, the World Cafe Community (2005) The world cafe: shaping our futures through conversations that matter. Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco Buchanan R (1992) Wicked problems in design thinking. Des Issues 8(2):5–21 Cooper A (1998) The Inmates are running the Asylum, Sams Csíkszentmihályi M (1975) Beyond boredom and anxiety de Bono E (1985) Six thinking hats: an essential approach to business management. Little, Brown, & Company. ISBN 0-316-17791-1 (hardback) and 0316178314 (paperback) Deserti A, Rizzo F (2014) Design and the cultures of enterprises. Des Issues 30(1):36–56. https:// doi.org/10.1162/DESI_a_00247 Design Council (2014) The design process: what is the Double Diamond? Retrieved from: https:// www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/design-process-what-double-diamond Eden C, Ackermann F (1998) Making strategy: the journey of strategic management. Sage Publications, London Edmondson AC, Harvey J-F (2018) Cross-boundary teaming for innovation: integrating research on teams and knowledge in organizations. Hum Resour Manag Rev 28(4):347–360. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2017.03.002 Ewald B, Menning A, Nicolai C, Weinberg U (2019) Emotions along the design thinking process. In: Meinel C, Leifer L (eds) Design thinking research, pp 41–60. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3319-97082-0_3 George JM, King EB (2007) Potential pitfalls of affect convergence in teams: functions and dysfunctions of group affective tone. In: Mannix EA, Neale MA, Anderson CP (eds) Research on managing groups and teams, vol 10. JAI Press, Greenwich, CT, pp 97–124 Goodwin K (2009) Designing for the digital age: how to create human-centered products and services. Wiley Kaner S (2014) Facilitator’s guide to participatory decision-making, 3rd edn. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco Kayes AB, Christopher Kayes D, Kolb D (2005) Experiential learning in teams. Simul Gaming 36(3):1–9 Kim JM, Choi JN, Park OS (2012) Intuitiveness and creativity in groups: cross-level interactions between group conflict and individual cognitive styles. Soc Behav Pers 40(9):1419–1434 Kotter JP (2012) Accelerate! Harvard Bus Rev (November 2012). Retrieved from https://hbr.org/ 2012/11/accelerate Lawrence PR, Nohria N (2002) Driven: how human nature shapes our choices. Jossey Bass, San Fransisco Lewin K (1947) Frontiers in group dynamics: concept, method and reality in social science; social equilibria and social change. Hum Relat 1:5–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872674700100103 Long F (2009) Real or imaginary: the effectiveness of using personas in product design, research paper published in the Irish Ergonomics Review. In: Proceedings of the IES conference 2009, Dublin Mendelow AL (1981) Environmental scanning—the impact of the stakeholder concept. In: ICIS 1981 proceedings, p 20 Meroni A, Selloni D, Rossi M (2018) Massive codesign, a proposal for a collaborative design framework. Franco Angeli Design International Series, Milan, Italy The Behavioural Insights Team (2014) EAST. Four simple ways to apply behavioural insights Osterwalder A (2014) Value proposition design: how to create products and services customers want. Wiley

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Osterwalder A, Pigneur Y (2010) Business model generation: a handbook for visionaries, game changers and challengers. Wiley Sanders EB-N, Stappers PJ (2008) Co-creation and the new landscapes of design. CoDesign 4(1):5– 18. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710880701875068 Sanders EB-N, Stappers PJ (2014) Probes, toolkits and prototypes: three approaches to making in codesigning. CoDesign 10(1):5–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2014.888183 Sario PD (2017) Il facilitatore dei gruppi. Guida pratica per la facilitazione esperta in azienda e nel sociale. Milan: Franco Angeli (Group facilitator. Practical guide for expert facilitation within companies and social contexts—Title translated by author) Schein EH (1987) Process consultation Sclavi M (2008) An Italian Lady Goes to the Bronx. IPOC Italian paths of culture, Milano Shin Y (2014) Positive group affect and team creativity. Small Group Res 45(3):337–364 Star SL (1989) The structure of Ill-structured solutions: boundary objects and heterogeneous distributed problem solving. In: Gasser L, Huhns M (eds) Distributed artificial intelligence, vol 2. Morgan Kaufman, San Francisco Cal, pp 37–54 Stickdorn M, Hormess ME, Lawrence A, Schneider J (2018) This is service design doing Tschepe S (2018) Warm-ups in design thinking—more than just a game. https://uxdesign.cc/warmups-in-design-thinking-more-than-just-a-game-7f755fcc8497 van Dijk H, van Engen ML, van Knippenberg D (2012) Defying conventional wisdom: a meta-analytical examination of the differences between demographic and job-related diversity relationships with performance. Organ Behav Hum Decis Process 119:38–53 von Stamm B (2003) Managing innovation, design and creativity. Wiley, West Sussex, UK Walker CJ (2010) Experiencing flow: Is doing it together better than doing it alone? J Posit Psychol 5(1):3–11

Chapter 5

Proposal for a Human Resource Design Framework

Abstract This chapter contains the final version of the Human Resource Design framework, that has been developed as a result of the research and experiments conducted. The framework is presented through the categories used in the previous steps. The framework is intended to be used by design researchers or practitioners that have to undertake a project of organisational change. Section 5.1 lists a series of skills that, the professional that is expert in undertaking such projects, the human resource designer, needs to have.

The analysis conducted and the lessons learnt acquired from the participatory action research allow to hypothesize a framework of intervention for a professional that can be qualified as ‘human resource designer’ (see Sect. 6.1 for a detailed explanation of this profile), when addressing a Human Resource Design project (see Sect. 1.1). That is a project where: (i) design is applied to organisational change challenges with a focus on behaviours and interactions among people, also during the codesign activity itself; (ii) where the client and the designers are collaborating in the design activity and (iii) where the final goal is to increase wellbeing of employees. The framework can be adopted by consultancies working in the HR field that want to address experiential and contextual factors of projects through design elements. The framework I propose doesn’t represent the highest level of HRD, as it has been intended in Sect. 1.1. In fact, it was built by integrating reflections from the action research conducted with a limited number of cases, and therefore constrained by the specific opportunities. The constraints had to do with: • the specific outputs that the experimentations, being them real projects, had to produce according to the agreement with the client. For example, for project 3 we had to produce requirements for a digital platform, therefore the design activity was inevitably oriented to the digital touchpoint. • the timings, both in terms of duration and starting date. The duration of my intervention sometimes was too short to evaluate the work done. In project 1 for example, my intervention was limited to a workshop, therefore I wasn’t allowed and either involved in the subsequent evolution of the projects.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rossi, Human Resource Design, PoliMI SpringerBriefs, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87612-8_5

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Fig. 5.1 Proposal for a human resource design framework

• the people involved. I had different level of influence in choosing the participants to the workshop: in project 1 I had no faculty, in project 2 registration to the workshop were open so anyone could join and in project 3 I could just give some general criteria to the client for choosing the participants, but the final choice was in their own consideration. For all these reasons, I could not stretch the experiments towards the highest level of HRD even if that will be the object of further researches. However, given the abovementioned conditions, I worked on the peripheral elements of the models introduced by Sanders (2009) and Junginger and Sangiorgi (2009), which deals with tools (here including artifacts), methods and methodologies. I could not directly handle the levels of mindset and culture beyond indirect and untraceable impacts. This would be one of the further developments of the research, that would investigate the phase of ‘adoption’ of the framework (Fig. 5.1). In accordance with that, the client-designer relationship (Yu and Sangiorgi 2018) didn’t overcome ‘partnering’. As a designer, I was closely collaborating with the client throughout the design activity, where the client played an active role, but I could not achieve the level of ‘facilitating’. In my interpretation, also ‘facilitating’ belongs to the ‘adoption’ step of the framework, where the HR designer takes on the role of the coach who accompany the client in the new routines. The Human Resource Design framework is presented following the design phases of the extended double diamond and the related contextual factors (related to people in

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the research matter) to manage. For each phase the intervention model is structured on the basis of the categories used to analyse the projects of the action research, translated into a course of action, in particular the sections are: tasks and tools, participants, extended DD—Tuckman stage, style of guidance. The style of guidance adopted is characterized by a ‘designerly’ approach (Cross 1982) even when adopting the ‘facilitating’ style because the facilitator is an HR designer, who is naturally inclined to propose and provoke. This issue will be discussed extensively in Sect. 6.1. 1st diamond: Strategy The first macro-phase of an HRD project is about defining with the client the strategical scenario to be pursued. It is indeed important to clarify what is the new vision that should guide all the subsequent steps. The starting point could be a specific topic (ex. Recruiting) or the current vision of the company involved. Micro-phases: dialogue and direct These phases imply a divergent moment followed by a convergent one. In the divergent phase all participants are required to express their opinion on the specific topic. The approach in the divergent phase is ‘dialogic’ as formulated by Sennett (2012), different opinions are welcome in order to expand possibilities. Then, all the contributions are analysed until the group finds an agreement on the shared vision. Here a rather dialectic approach is taken in order for the group to converge (ibidem). In the direct phase (convergent) it is more advisable to choose a precise direction and discard the other options instead of merging different ideas and come out with a vision which is too wide and vague. If the group is unable to come to an agreement, the facilitator can propose to the participant to vote. This technique is very typical of the ‘steering’ facilitation mode framed by Meroni et al. (2018): “voting ideas and concepts rather than trying to converge toward shared ones preserves from losing the most original and groundbreaking inputs with distinctive features and unique meaning” (ibidem). Tasks and tools 1.

Organisational Vision: The goal of this phase is for the group to come out with an agreed and shared vision on a specific topic. The vision should be framed as an inspiring statement that describes where the company aspires to be upon achieving its mission. It should envision a scenario that depicts not just what the company wants to achieve for itself, but the impact it will have on the community (in this case, the internal population of employees). This task takes inspiration from scenario-building and future studies techniques.

A tool that can help to elaborate the vision is the Organisational Vision Board (tested in project 3).

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It has been tested in project 3. The tool consists in two sections where, at first, the participants have to brainstorm on their own vision about that specific topic. At the same time, they are asked also to think in ‘negative’, meaning that they have to brainstorm also on what should not be included by the vision. All the ideas are collected on post-its and placed on the two sections of the board. One is dedicated to the desired visions and the other one to what is not desired in the vision. Secondly, the group has to discuss and agree on a unique statement that would represent the final vision. Participants key stakeholders—internal—high hierarchical level—different business functions. This phase has a strategical purpose and it is one of the first activity to be done together with the company in order to clarify on both side (consultant—client) what is the goal to aim for. Hence, even if the vision is tacitly shared, this is the moment to communicate it and formulate it as a statement for the sake of alignment of both the client and the consultant. This first step involves the key stakeholders who commissioned the project, the sponsors (Aricò 2018) together with the other actors that cover strategical roles in the company, typically in a high level of hierarchy (top or eventually middle management) and representative of the main business functions. Within a codesign process thought to democratize the way solutions are conceived and decisions are taken, it is very important that the commitment towards the new direction comes from the highest levels of the company. One of the recommendations for companies to tackle the continued disruption of the market and stay competitive is provided by Bersin by Deloitte, 2016: “communicate shared vision and values from top leaders” and “encourage senior leaders to focus on strategy, vision, and direction, and teach them how to empower teams to deliver results”. Extended DD—Tuckman stage: forming Since this phase happens at the beginning of the project, people are excited for undertaking a new path and at the same time they feel still distant from the implementation and the effort required for change, therefore they feel in a ‘safe’ condition to express their idea without the perception of taking a decision that is inalterable. The mood is generally relaxed and harmonious, therefore we can define the status as ‘forming’. Style of guidance: steering The HR designer here is fundamental in the ‘direct’ phase. He needs to adopt a ‘steering’ style of guidance that can persuade and lead the group towards a direction that is the one that s/he sees as most promising. The leading role of the designer here also counterbalance the status of ‘forming’ that often flatten the creativity potential of the group.

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2nd diamond: Problem The second macro-phase aims at investigating the ‘as is’ situation and the specific problem to be tackled. This phase ends with the definition of the design brief, which is the description of the design challenge and its fundamental specifications. Micro-phases: discover and define The ‘discover’ is a divergent phase in which the participants take into consideration the overall set of options to investigate the context of analysis. It is a moment of unfolding all the elements that compose the organisational ecosystem and start to organize them. The ‘define’ phase leads the group towards the definition of the design brief. Tasks and tools discover. 1.

2.

Internal Stakeholder Analysis: the components of the organisation that are central for the human resource design are people. Therefore, it is crucial to start the analysis of the current situation by mapping the internal stakeholders and their relevance in terms of power and impact related with the project. The tool that supports this task is the Internal Stakeholder Analysis Map (tested in project 1 and 3), which is composed by a diagram with two orthogonal axes. The horizontal axis represents the influence/power of the stakeholders and the vertical axis represents the impact of the process/topic on them, labelled as interest. The stakeholders are represented with 3d mock-ups characters or postits that should be compiled by the participants. Once all the stakeholders are represented, the group has to move the characters according to the discussion until the members agree on the final position to best represent the balance of power and impact of that specific stakeholder. The Stakeholder Analysis Map is a tool adapted from the business administration and project management domains and in particular from the stakeholder management field (). define. Employee Persona: Once the Internal Stakeholder Analysis Map is completed, it offers a valuable framework for the group to decide which are the personas that are more representative to go deeper in the analysis of the problem. The map doesn’t necessarily suggest that the actors with higher influence or impact are the ones to be chosen, but the tool offers a frame for guiding the discussion and support the choice in any case. The Employee Persona activity is supported by a dedicated tool that has been tested in project 2 and 3 (see the description of those projects for further references). The persona is a fictional character whose profile gathers up the features of an existing social group. It is a very common tool for service designers. The Employee Persona has some additional organisational context-specific features which are:

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– Level: the hierarchical position in the organisational chart. – Department: to the business function where the employee works. – Drivers: a set of drivers that help to analyse employee motivation in a holistic way and look beyond typical financial workplace rewards. The drivers are: reward, power and career, knowledge/learning, relation with people, personal meaning and fulfillment, ethical values. They are placed on a ‘spider web diagram’ where each driver is represented as an axis where is possible to mark a score. When all scores are placed, their connection will depict a shape. This shape offers a visual and intuitive representation of which are the most relevant motivational drivers for that persona. These three employee-specific features of the persona provide insights to envision more suitable design interventions within an organisational context. 3.

Employee Journey As Is: the aim is representing the journey of the persona depicted in correlation with the colleagues with which he/she interacts more frequently. The final goal is to draw out the pain points of the persona.

The journey, which is represented by a large horizontal board, is composed of five parallel sections dedicated to trace: (i) the experience of the user, (ii) a set of other lines dedicated to track the actions of the other people with correspondence to the actions of the main persona (iii) the persona’s emotions, (iii) the touchpoints and, finally, (v) the pain points. All the sections are to be fulfilled with the abovementioned information in form of short text or sketches on post-its, besides the emotion stripe. The emotions should be traced as a continuous line that, according to each step, sets a mark on a gradient from very positive to very negative emotions. The spots that refer to negative emotions are the ones identifying pain points where there is room for improvement. Negative emotions and related pain points can be caused by the interactions of the persona with other employees of from other factors. Participants: codesigners—internal—mixed hierarchical level—different business functions Participants to this phase are at the operational level of the organisation, possibly mixed with some middle managers and, occasionally, a few representatives of the top management. Participants should be chosen by HR with the support of the HR designer with the aim to create a good balance of content expertise and context adaptability. Hence, the criteria to select people regards both the functional role and the personal attitude. As regarding the function, each group should have someone that has deep knowledge of the practices that are the object of the session. Regarding the personal attitude, the participants should have behavioural characteristics that are more favourable to embrace the design thinking approach, such as: openness, collaboration ability, flexibility, hands-on. In this way, it is more probable to assure a good quality of the design activity both on content and context level.

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Moreover, especially if there is a high variety of hierarchies, it is crucial to assign clear roles. In particular, if top managers are involved, they should not be part of any of the working groups in order not to influence them. They could eventually give sporadic contributions, during short visits to teams, but they should avoid to seat at any table. It is recommended to assign the role of the ‘ambassador’ of the project at least at one person for each group. They will be the reference point for the project, feeling a sense of ownership and commitment to it. Those people should be chosen among the others by the HR prior to the workshop. The HR designer can give some suggestions to the HR for selecting, but in this case, the choice is more guided by the HR, that probably have more elements and strategic reasons to assign those roles. Extended DD—Tuckman stage: (forming) and storming If it’s the first time that participants meet, they will go through a preliminary stage of forming that can be facilitated with a warm-up activity, but as soon as they will start analyzing the current situation about the topic, they will probably come out with different and conflicting perspectives. As much as the group feels in a ‘safe’ space where every contribution is not judged and it’s not going to interfere with the professional career of anyone, the more genuine information will be collected. With this regard, if tensions (meant as task conflicts and not relationship conflicts) arise at this stage it is a good timing and a good sign for the effectiveness of the team, because it means that members are engaged and in the right balance of ‘flow’. (Csíkszentmihályi 1990; Walker 2010). Style of guidance: facilitating In this phase it is important that the HR designer ensures that everyone is contributing and bringing his/her point of view to the table with the aim of representing the most realistic and complete picture of the current situation as possible. The goal is to facilitate the emergence of information by the participants without taking any stance. The participants are indeed the ‘experts’ in the specific content and they are the ones that better know the current situation. In this sense, the HR designer in this phase adopt more a ‘facilitating’ style of guidance. Meaning that the attitude of the designer is of ‘active listening’, “encouraging the free flow of thoughts and flourishing of empathy and sympathy between participants”. This attitude fosters the emergence of opinions and it is particularly recommended when the group is ‘storming’ because it “has the most to offer in situations that are charged with tensions and in environments that are rife with conflicts” (Sclavi 2008). Particular attention should be given to the weaker participants, who can be the lower in the hierarchy or the minority, in terms of business functions represented, within the group. This is important because usually they are operative staff and even if lower in hierarchy, they are the depositaries of the hidden concerns and ‘tricks of the trade’.

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The HR designer should be at ease with conflicts at this stage, his/her role doesn’t imply an active contribution, but more a mediation. If there are various groups, it is convenient to appoint one head facilitator that can keep timings and have a general overview of the process and the status of the groups. It is also the one that eventually points out critical situations to the design team. 3rd diamond: Solution This diamond is aimed at generating solutions and at envisioning new concepts for the future: the ‘to be’. Micro-phase: develop and deliver The ‘develop’ phase is aimed at generating solutions following the design brief identified. It is a divergent phase in which the aim is generating a high quantity of possible solutions to be later selected. The ‘deliver’ phase is dedicated to converging and selecting the most promising ideas. Tasks and tools develop. 1.

Change Ideation: in order to facilitate the generation of solutions, the teams can use the Change Ideation Toolkit (tested in different version in project 2 and 3). This toolkit is composed by: – Change Brainstorming Deck: a guiding layout that represents the logic process that lead from the ‘pain points’ to possible solutions. It is composed by: (i) a set of spaces to summarize the ‘pain points’ previously identified, (ii) an icon representing the pack of Behavioural Insights Cards (described below) and (iii) a set of spaces dedicated to formulate solutions for each pain point. – Behavioural Insights Cards: a pack of cards that portrays a selection of behavioural economic principles on which to leverage to ideate solutions. Essentially, each card represents a principle through an evocative image and a brief description. In addition, each card reports a ‘collaborative tip’, which is a suggestion to overcome the specific behavioural bias represented by the card and enhance more collaborative behaviours. This tip can be useful when the pain points reflect a problem of interaction, otherwise the team can consider just the upper part (see the description of project 2 for further references). deliver.

2.

Employee Journey To Be: this format represents the evolution of the Employee Journey As Is and aims at mapping the journey when the solutions brainstormed in the previous task would be in place.

This task implies that a previous activity of selecting the most promising solution has been carried out. The format of the journey retraces the Employee Journey As Is, apart from the emotions space.

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It provides instead a space where to insert the solutions selected corresponding to each step of the journey. Participants: codesigners—internal—mixed hierarchical level—different business functions The participants to this phase are the same that were involved in the analysis of the ‘as is’ situation. Extended DD—Tuckman stage: norming The mood of the group at this point should be stabilized into ‘norming’. Most of the tensions should be absorbed during the previous phase and the efforts are channeled into envisioning desirable solutions. Even in the convergent phase of ‘deliver’, when solutions have to be selected, preferences are likely to be expressed and embraced in a constructive manner. Style of guidance: steering At this point the role of the HR designer is fundamental for leading the group towards innovative solutions and come out with proposals as well. The designer can count on his ability of envisioning, while s/he can rely on his/her experience as innovator, contaminating and stimulating the group with best practices coming also from other fields, therefore acting explicitly as a ‘proponents with content’ (Selloni 2017). 4th diamond: Implementation. This diamond is aimed at developing strategies for the implementation of the solutions. It is a very analytical phase, inspired by business administration and project management techniques. Micro-phase: detail and deploy As for the other diamonds, this phase sees an alternance of divergent and convergent tasks in order to firstly investigate in detail the specific context in which the solution has to take place and secondly planning the action plan that will allow the implementation. Tasks and tools detail. 1.

Internal Stakeholder Analysis: this activity deals with the development or specification of the first analog analysis done in the ‘discover’ phase. The task starts from taking back the Stakeholder Analysis Map previously defined and updating or modifying it according to the new scenario that the Employee Journey To Be depicts. The goal is to adapt the map with accordance to the new scenario and enrich it with potential new actors. deploy.

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Transformation Action Plan: this activity aims at developing a roadmap of implementation focused on people that will be involved in each task and the role they will have within it.

The template requires to fill a section for each milestone of the project and related task. For each task the group has to specify the following roles in performing it: the leader, the main project team, the decision makers and the sponsors. Participants: key stakeholders + codesigners − internal − mixed hierarchical level – different business functions In this diamond, key stakeholders and codesigners come together to work on the final steps of the design of the HRD project. It is advisable to involve a subgroup of the total amount of codesigners that were participating in the previous phases, typically the ambassadors, who will act as witnesses of the work done until this point and represent the bridge between the diamonds. Extended DD—Tuckman stage: (forming), storming and norming When all participants meet together for the first time in the new configuration (key stakeholders and codesigners) it is recommended to do a warm-up to facilitate the ‘formation’ of the group. As regards the first activity about the Stakeholder Analysis, conflicts can arise due to the discussions about the positioning of the stakeholders on the map, as it happened at the first round of usage of this tool. During the subsequent stage of the Action Plan, conflicts should be already absorbed and conflictual opinions should have come to a shared picture, therefore the group is ‘normed’. Style of guidance: facilitating Here the HR designer comes back to acquire the attitude of an ‘active listener’ more than a ‘provoker’. He needs to be aware and be ready to manage possible conflicts and in this phase it is particularly relevant to come to a resolution because the group is already at an advanced step in the development of the project. Further phase: Adoption This further phase has to do with enacting the action plan that has been drew out. Since HRD projects have to do with change in the way people interact with each other, this phase will be characterized by behavioural change, including behavioural design intervention (for a deeper investigation of this topic refer to Sect. 3.5). From this stage on, the content and the context level start to overlap, because the content of the ‘adoption’ become people. This phase still needs to be understood in the way it will be carried out, guided and measured. If it still managed by the HRD, then the relationship with the client will evolve into ‘facilitating’ (Yu and Sangiorgi 2018), a relationship in which the designer act more as a coach that enables the client to put the change in plave, transferring capabilities through a consultancy which becomes closer to education.

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With this regard, it is still to be clarified if the facilitator of this phase is advisable to be a designer educated in behavioural sciences, a partnering between a designer and a professional coach with a background in social sciences or another professional profile (for a deeper investigation of this topic refer to Sect. 5.1).

5.1 The Rise of the Human Resource Designer Designers are nowadays living challenging times, riddled with complex, ‘wicked’ problems amidst advancing technological landscapes that are transforming: the object of design, the spaces in which it is conducted, the actors involved, the stages in which it operates and the value it delivers (Komatsu Cipriani and Rossi 2018). Complexity characterizes the challenges that our society is tackling: within this scenario organisations are no exception. Designers working with or within organisations are inevitably called to undergo more complex problems such as organisational change (Junginger and Sangiorgi 2009) than traditional design challenges and therefore they need to update their skills or acquire new ones. Recently Cipriani and Rossi (2018) developed a contemporary skill framework for service designers which includes a list of necessary skills that service designers need to own. The most relevant skills for the topic of this book are the ones connected with the role of the designer as facilitator of group dynamics and collective processes. This inevitably includes the ability to work transversally and interact with different disciplines (Krucken 2008; Eckert 2017) by owning the well-known t-shaped profile made popular by the CEO of the design thinking consultancy IDEO (Brown 2010) where specialization in one field of design (vertical stroke) is completed with the ability to collaborate with other disciplines (horizontal stroke). With regards to the areas of interest identified by my research, human resource design, there is the need to define what are those skills that characterize the professional figure who is specialized in this field. The ‘human resource designer’ needs to have a foundation background in service design, enriched with a set of skills that advance her/his ability with facilitation, through the acquisition of competences in human sciences, comparable to the abilities of an HR consultant, a coach or a trained facilitator. In fact, Auricchio et al. (2018) have recently discussed the integration of competences of the abovementioned professionals for the sake of optimizing the management of collaborative design practices. Nevertheless, they came out proposing a partnership of the two profiles when approaching projects. I hereby aim to specify and describe, instead, what are the peculiar skills of a potentially more hybrid professional profile that owns an updated and adapted set of skills as service designer, integrated with additional ones related with managing groups. This view doesn’t exclude the possibility of a collaboration between a service designer or a human resource designer with an HR consultant, especially for those projects that require a deeper attention towards group dynamics, but I believe that the proposed update of skills is anyhow useful to optimize communication and collaboration between the professionals.

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Fig. 5.2 The field of expertise of the human resource designer. Own elaboration

In other words, the human resource designer is a designer who is specialized in integrating the ‘content’ level of collaborative design practices (typical of the design profession) with the ‘context’ level (typical of HR consultants) (see Fig. 5.2). The interplay of contextual factors within teams, especially cross-boundary teams, have been discussed in a recent contribution by Edmondson and Harvey (2018). They studied in particular the boundaries that can be found in teams that entail different kind of diversities. In their framework, contextual factors are considered to include “the environment or larger social system in which the team is embedded, the characteristics of the task or work the team is tackling, the timeframe of the teaming effort, and the leadership or governance structure under which the team is acting” (ibidem, p. 354). With ‘content’ instead, I refer to the ‘object’ of the design activity, which in the case of human resource design deals with organisational change. Since the design activity, in our case, has to design elements of the context in which the process is happening (the organisation), content and context are almost overlapping and the distinction between them becomes increasingly blurred as the project develops. In my interpretation of contextual factors, I focus on people and their interactions. Another representative contribution that informed my proposed configuration of skills comes from the analysis by Minder and Heidemann Lassen (2018), who differentiate the facilitator’s attributes from the ‘process’ and ‘creative input’ perspectives. I believe that this overview could relate with the distinction between ‘context’ and

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‘content’, therefore I will draw from their scheme to enrich mine. However, my effort is focused on creating an integrated skillset where the separation between the two levels is smoothed. Many authors over years have discussed the emerging role of the designer as facilitator (Meroni and Sangiorgi 2011; Tan 2012; Manzini 2016; Selloni 2017; Yee et al. 2017), in my contribution I will refer to the framework that concern the style of guidance in ‘massive codesign’ practices. This framework helps any designer that facilitates groups to envisage the style of guidance which is more suitable to the situation. The style of guidance is determined from the posture that the designer adopts, being more an active listener, therefore (designerly) ‘facilitating’ or a thought-provoker, therefore (designerly) ‘steering’. Typically, the more familiar and congenial position for a designer is the steering style, where s/he contributes with concrete proposals, and leads the team acting as a ‘proponent with content’ instead of just ‘process facilitators’ (Manzini 2016; Selloni 2017) even performing a slight persuasion on the other participants. In my proposal, the human resource designer should more strategically manage different styles of guidance in order to best suit the specific stage of the project and the related contextual factors. With this regard s/he should acquire more awareness and confidence in performing also a more traditional style of facilitation, maintaining the distinctive designerly approach (Fig. 5.2). Hence, as in the words of Minder and Heidemann Lassen (2018): “Some designers may particularly be good at creating forceful new visions, but not necessarily good at managing the effect of these activities on the collaboration with non-designers. Further research is needed to increase awareness for the effect of creative inputs of designers on the collaboration process” (ibidem, p. 807). Given all the considerations above, below I summarize my proposal of peculiar skills that characterize the human resource designer: Management of codesign events Codesign sessions or workshop, are actual events. They need to have a clear agenda and structured ceremonies of beginning and ends like ice-breaking, warm-ups and wrap-up moments. At the same time, they have to engage people who participate besides producing results, some codesign activities are even more focused on engagement rather than designing solutions. An example is given by project 1, where the act of joining all the strategical representatives in the same room to envision the future of the company was already a result in itself. The importance of the excitement and energy of people was also demonstrated by the involvement of the teambuilding coach, that was fundamental to keep high the energy and fun of the participants. A right balance of intensity of the design activities with relaxing and fun moments is fundamental. (Meroni et al.). With this regard, it is important to be able to manage a variety of inputs and methods used in order not to create overpowering experiences and generate the opposite reaction of being perceived as confused. (Minder and Heidemann Lassen 2018).

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In order to be able to manage all the issues related with the event, the human resource designer should have knowledge on event design, management and organisation. Curiosity, public relations management and networking One of the major nurtures of innovation is known to be cross-pollination. Being curious, creating connections with previous experiences, being always up to date and provide external information or best practices is fundamental for the human resource designer. If a traditional facilitator is mainly focused on optimizing group dynamics and assure that everyone in the group contributes, the distinctiveness of a designer is to be visionary and bring to the table elements for discussion (Manzini 2016). In order to do so, it is fundamental to participate to events of knowledge sharing such as conferences, community meeting or networking events. The HR designer needs to acquire the ability to relate similar projects or spot what is the innovative insight that can be fruitful to a different domain. Regarding this, it is very important to be able to create connections with people, enrich the network and cultivate existing relations in order to be able to involve the right stakeholder when needed. As from the analysis on designers’ facilitation by Minder and Heidemann Lassen (2018): “data showed that by inviting influential, well networked experts, designers also put importance on up-to date relevant practice” (ibidem, 801). In the same way, the HR designer needs to have the capability of engaging internal stakeholders of a project both upstream to receive the buy-in and downstream to assure implementation (Auricchio et al. 2018). Trust and empathy activation Empathy is one of the key skills of a designer. In order to create solutions for the user it is necessary to ‘walk in her/his shoes’ and that is the reason why designers conduct ethnographic researches, interviews, observations and build ‘personas’. However, when involved in a codesign activity, empathy should be built also within the group of codesigners, therefore the HR designer should be a sort of influencer of empathic interactions within the participants. The use of some tools such as the Employee Persona are useful to foster empathy among colleagues and understand other perspectives. At the same time, in order for codesign to be effective, participants need to feel ‘in a safe space’, where they can freely express their opinions. The HR consultants who contributed to the article by Auricchio et al. (2018), recognize that the creation of an atmosphere of genuine trust is essential for clients to share what is really in their minds (Schein 2016) and they recognize in designers, their methodologies and tools, the ability to “creat[e] a participative atmosphere where everybody plays the same game and at the same level” (Auricchio et al. 2018). Therefore, reducing interpersonal barriers by using codesign artifices such as boundary objects (Star 1989; Sanders and Stappers 2014) and serious plays could be fruitful to overwhelm prejudices and reduce cognitive bias (Liedtka 2015).

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Examples of artifices that can be useful to build trust are ‘group contracts’ such as the Workshop Agreement used during project 3a-b. This agreement summarized the rules for an effective codesign session, like ‘defer judgement’ as well the roles within the session: “content vs method. We are experts in the method and we have an external point of view that can help you look at things from another perspective. You are the experts in the content”. Those sorts of deals can be considered actual ‘contracts’ as they have been defined in Transactional Analysis: “An explicit bilateral commitment to a well-defined course of action” (Berne 1966). Hence, the skill that the HR designer needs to own deals with the capacity to conquer trust and instill empathy between team members. In order to do so, it is important that s/he resorts to dedicated tools to achieve those purposes besides advancing towards the project outcomes. Synthesis and visualization mastery This is probably one of the most traditional skill for a designer. What I want to reinforce here is the ability to synthetize information of a tangled discussion or complex organisational processes. Being able to transform a conversation into a visual representation allows participants to elicit their mental models, build a common knowledge around a topic, stimulate the debate and create a common ground of understanding that supports decision making. Artifacts can range from maps to prototypes according to the shape which is more suitable and convenient for the specific purpose, the goal is to make tangible the intangible. As mentioned, designers are familiar and experienced in doing so, because giving shape to ideas is at the core of their profession, but within the role of facilitating a group they probably need to be careful and give importance to some expedients of form that make the difference. Some of them are clearly pointed out by Kaner (2014), that lists a series of pragmatic techniques to get the best out of a collaborative session. Some of them relates to verbal techniques such as paraphrasing the participants thoughts, mirroring their say, performing an intentional silence or acknowledging feelings. Some others relate with ‘chartwriting’ tips. Designers can be excellent at visualizing ideas but not at making them understandable to a diversified group. Using thick letters and markers, a clear calligraphy, distinct symbols and a meaningful colour coding is almost as important as the quality of the ideas shared. If an information is not well understood or codified it has very low probability to be taken into consideration. Another important aspect deals with the space setting. The HR designer should be able to give guidance on how to set up a space according to the activities that needs to be done or adapt the activities to the space given. In addition to that, the HR designer needs to know where to spatially position her/himself according to the group and the eventual whiteboard and in relation to the different activities to be done. Those techniques should be borrowed by the domain of traditional facilitations.

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Group and conflict management We understood that conflictual phases within teams are physiological. Therefore, if conflicts arise at an early stage of the process, they are symptoms of a growth dynamic for a group. This is often not the perception of a designer. The designer who doesn’t know about group dynamics and doesn’t understand the stages that a group has to encounter, can feel lost in managing conflicts. Seeing them just as negative factors, lead designers to try to solve them quickly, while, if managed well, they could lead to breakthrough insights (Auricchio et al. 2018). In general, we can say that the HR designer should acquire a basic knowledge of how groups evolve and how to predict or react to a specific mood. This knowledge could be useful also during the planning phase of a process, so that tasks sustain or trigger group development and improve performance. In this perspective, the tools specifically designed would work as accelerator of integration between people involved in the process, being designers or non-designers. Change orchestration Since Human Resource Design, as we have intended, results from the contamination of design with more collateral disciplines, it is necessary that the HR designer masters fundamentals of specific domains that have been discussed in previous chapters. Besides group psychology and dynamics, the HR designer has to gain knowledge about behavioural change and behavioural science principles because s/he needs to be able to leverage on those principles to envision change interventions. Complimentary to this, s/he has to be familiar with organisational change and change management. Even if the HR designer is not an economist s/he has to understand companies’ structure and the relation that HR has with the different departments. With this regard, the recent field of ‘organisational behaviour’ could offer the right lens on people inside organisations with a right balance between company infrastructure and behaviours (McShane and Von Glinow 2018).

References Aricò M (2018) Service design as a transformative force: introduction and adoption in an organizational context. Copenhagen Business School [PhD], Frederiksberg. PhD series, No. 39.2018 Auricchio V, Rossi M, Dezza G, Peretti Griva P (2018) Service design and human resource consulting: an integrated vision. In: Proceedings of the service design and innovation conference, Milan Berne E (1966) Principles of group treatment (2nd edn). Printing. Oxford, New York Brown T (2010) T-shaped stars: the backbone of IDEO’s collaborative culture. An interview with IDEO CEO Tim Brown, By Morten T. Hansen. Retrieved January, 2017, from http://chiefexec utive.net/ideo-ceo-tim-brown-t-shaped-stars-the-backbone-of-ideoae™s-collaborative-culture/ Cross N (1982) Designerly ways of knowing. Des Stud 3(4):221–227 Csíkszentmihályi M (1990) Flow: The psychology of optimal experience Eckert J (2017) The Y-shaped designer—connective competences as key to collaboration across disciplines. J Educ Learn 6:137. https://doi.org/10.5539/jel.v6n4p137

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Edmondson AC, Harvey J-F (2018) Cross-boundary teaming for innovation: integrating research on teams and knowledge in organizations. Hum Resour Manag Rev 28(4):347–360. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2017.03.002 Junginger S, Sangiorgi D (2009). Service design and organizational change: bridging the gap between rigour and relevance. s.l., International Association of Societies of Design Research Kaner S (2014) Facilitator’s guide to participatory decision-making (3rd edn). Jossey-Bass, San Francisco Krucken L (2008) Skills for design in contemporary society (translated from Competências para o design na contemporaneidade by Elidia Novaes). In: Moraes D, Krucken L (eds) Design e transversalidade. Cadernos de Estudos Avançados em Design. Belo Horizonte: Editora Santa Clara Komatsu Cipriani T, Rossi M (2018) Working with complexity: a contemporary skill framework for service designers. In: Proceedings of the ServDes service design and innovation conference, Milan, pp 105–116. ISBN 978-91-7685-237-8. www.ep.liu.se/ecp/contents.asp?issue=150 Liedtka J (2015) Perspective: linking design thinking with innovation outcomes through cognitive bias reduction. J Product Innov Manag 32(6) Manzini E (2016) Design Culture and dialogic design. Des Issues 32(1):52–59 McShane SL, Von Glinow MAY (2018) Organizational behavior: emerging knowledge, global reality, 8th edn. McGraw-Hill Education, New York, NY Meroni A, Selloni D, Rossi M (2018) Massive Codesign, a proposal for a collaborative design framework. Franco Angeli Design International Series, Milan, Italy Minder B, Heidemann Lassen A (2018) The designer as facilitator of multidisciplinary innovation projects. Des J 21(6):789–811. https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2018.1527513 Sanders EB-N, Stappers PJ (2014) Probes, toolkits and prototypes: three approaches to making in codesigning. CoDesign 10(1):5–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2014.888183 Schein EH (2016) Humble consulting: how to provide real help faster, 1st edn. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Oakland, CA Sclavi M (2008) An Italian lady goes to the Bronx, IPOC Italian paths of culture, Milano Selloni D (2017) CoDesign for public-interest services. Springer, New York, NY Sennett R (2012) Together: the rituals pleasures and politics of cooperation. Yale University Press, Yale Star SL (1989) The structure of ill-structured solutions: boundary objects and heterogeneous distributed problem solving. In: Gasser L, Huhns M (eds) Distributed artificial intelligence, vol 2. Morgan Kaufman, San Francisco Cal, pp 37–54 Tan L (2012) Understanding the different roles of the designer in design for social good. a study of design methodology in the DOTT 07 (Designs of the Time 2007) projects. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University Walker CJ (2010) Experiencing flow: is doing it together better than doing it alone? J Posit Psychol 5(1):3–11 Yee J, Jefferies E, Michlewski K (2017) Transformations: 7 roles to drive change by design. BIS Publishers, Amsterdam Yu E, Sangiorgi D (2018) Exploring the transformative impacts of service design: The role of designer–client relationships in the service development process. Design Stud 55:79–111. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2017.09.001

Chapter 6

Conclusions

Abstract This book covers just a limited part of the potential area of intervention. of HRD. The focus of the work was on a proposal of a framework that includes tools, methods and techniques to compose the superficial and most contingent side of an intervention of transformation, without investigating the substantial levels of mindset and culture (Sanders in Contextmapping/exploring co-creation on a large scale, keynote at symposium: design for, with and from user experience, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, 13 May, 2009). Further studies could enquire an evolved version of the framework that to enhance its impact through many dimensions.

6.1 From Project Teams to the Entire Organisation The unit of analysis are ‘project teams’ (definition and motivations are explained in details in Sect. 4.2). Those are group configurations that are relevant for analysing the contextual factors studied within this research: the diversity of the participants (referring to the concept of knowledge diversity as outlined by Edmondson and Harvey 2018 and adapted to the characteristics of this research in Sect. 4.3) and the different styles of guidance needed throughout the phases of the project. They are also representative of the so-called ‘agile’ organisational models that are characterizing contemporary organisations (as further explained in Sect. 1.2), where teams are formed ad hoc around projects and disbanded as soon as projects ends. The findings and the framework developed based on this unit of analysis could potentially be scaled to entire organisations, but they would need a further understanding of the different implications that such a different perimeter would imply. For example, it would be relevant to include a larger group of employees in the codesign of solutions for internal challenges, especially for those challenges that would affect the overall population of the company. Further studies can be devoted to investigating how the framework proposed by this research could be adapted to a massive scale, enacting a process that can fall into the spectrum of massive codesign (Meroni et al. 2018).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rossi, Human Resource Design, PoliMI SpringerBriefs, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87612-8_6

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6.2 From Short-Term Intervention to Long-Term Strategies As already mentioned, the framework proposed, offers a course of action composed of specific tools and techniques aimed at designing solutions for organisational challenges. The framework does not explore the subsequent stage of ‘adoption’ of the solutions. Solutions that would likely imply behavioral transformations in people such as the adoption of new routines and habits require a longer intervention, strongly characterized by an educational purpose. This intervention would be made of sessions of training and coaching and should include a structured model to test the impact of the solution on the target population compared to the initial situation. This phase that I identified as ‘adoption’ would require a deeper research in the field of behavioral sciences and a consistent involvement of experts in human sciences, HR management and coaching. This contamination is just partially been examined in the thesis and should be further advanced especially in the later stages of the framework. The collaboration initiated with the HR consultancy MIDA illustrated in paragraph 3.5 contributed substantially to the development of the HRD framework in the version presented in this study, but it has the ambition of further exploring the ‘adoption’ phase that is currently under investigation and development. Future progresses of the research could possibly define a more advanced version of the HRD framework that will include a proposed course of action to manage and perform the ‘adoption’ of the designed solutions.

6.3 Impact Evaluation Together with the need of investigating the ‘adoption’ phase there goes the necessity of adding evaluation metrics to measure the impact of the interventions. The KPIs to consider could change according to each project, but there could be a general guiding path to follow for measuring the success of the change. This path could provide criteria to choose specific timings and methods to carry out the evaluation. One of the methods used from consulting firms that undertake change management projects is the A/B testing. A/B testing consists in the comparison between two groups of people where one group has been subject to the intervention and the other one is continuing to perform in the traditional way. The test has to be conducted keeping out all variables others than the ones examined by the test. Methods to measure the ‘adoption’ of a change intervention, such as A/B testing should be investigated more in deep by data scientists or experts in business analytics together with behavioural scientists. This part would add a fundamental element to the framework that will allow to measure the impact of any intervention.

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6.4 Implications in Education As outlined Sect. 6.1, the human resource designer should own potentiated as well as different skills compared to other design professionals. This means that programs in design education could include additional modules that specifically address the training of those new skills. Besides the specificity of the human resource designer that implies basic expertise and knowledge of HR management and organisational behaviour, a general training on design facilitation is needed for all specializations of the design discipline, since co-creation and codesign processes are becoming the common approach to undertake design projects. In the first case, concerning the training of a specialized professional as the human resource designer, I envision a dedicate specialization path. For the latter case instead, I imagine an additional module focused on facilitation for traditional design training. In the practice, private organisations are increasingly asking for expertise in collaborative design and there is the tendency to train internal facilitators or ambassadors that could spread this expertise within the organisation (see Sect. 1.2). This is also demonstrated by the multiplicity of executive trainings offered on the market by different kind of organisations ranging from Universities to independent private institutes.

6.5 Implications in Practice In the world of practice, the human resource designer could well respond to those demand of contemporary organisations and specifically of Human Resource Department, which have been extensively outlined throughout this research. Human resource designers could cover roles within organisations and apply their work to the same environment they are working in, within the Human Resource Management function or any other related unit of the organisation. Alternatively, they could also work as consultants and bring their expertise to advise other organisations that are dealing with a transformation. The kinds of transformation projects that organisations are facing today can be triggered by either BtoC (customers) or BtoB (employees) needs. In the first case, the need for an internal transformation is the consequence of a change that is happening on the market and therefore requires the organisation to adapt accordingly in order to fulfil the new demand. In the second case, the symptoms of change arise from inside and reflects the needs of current and future employees. Usually, the processes of transformation within organisations were managed by human resource consultants or change management experts. Nowadays, those processes are increasingly led also by designers, who need to acquire new skills or adapt the existing ones to the specific field (see Sect. 6.1).

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6 Conclusions

However, even a trained human resource designer could need to pair with a professional in another field in some occasions, especially if the project is of high complexity either from the social or the organisational point of view. The configuration of the alliance, the dynamics occurring and roles still need to be understood and explored further to complete the picture and be able to drive any Human Resource Design project.

References Bersin by Deloitte (2016) Global Human Capital Trends 2016. Deloitte University Press Edmondson AC, Harvey J-F (2018) Cross-boundary teaming for innovation: integrating research on teams and knowledge in organizations. Hum Resour Manag Rev 28(4):347–360. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2017.03.002 Meroni A, Selloni D, Rossi M (2018) Massive codesign, a proposal for a collaborative design framework. Franco Angeli Design International Series, Milan, Italy