Building and tending bridges: Rethinking how consultants support change

Design Management Journal, Summer 2003 by Mulhern, Tom, Lathrop, Dave

For Steelcase, the relationship with Conifer Research is not so much about products as it is about methodologies-ways of bringing together and exploring existing resources to generate new understanding and insights. It's a collaboration that produces what Tom Mulhern and David Lathrop call "experience bridges"-paths that reveal untapped creativity and innovation.

We were first flung together as client and consultant in late 2001. We had worked around each other and knew a lot of the same people, but we had never worked together.

Our mission: Partner with Steelcase customers to radically boost the value they get from our knowledge of how furniture and workspace design affect the productive capacity, organizational effectiveness, and job satisfaction of workplace end-users.1 Our goal has been both to differentiate the value Steelcase brings, and to use the knowledge we gain over time to innovate product and service offerings.

The challenge: Do this in a very resource-constrained environment with a fluid mix of internal and external resources, including customers, dealers, designers, researchers, and external consultants.

The results so far: Eighteen months down the road, the end-user perspective on the workplace is rapidly moving from the edges into the mainstream of Steelcase culture and work practice. End-user knowledge is having a dramatic impact on product development, sales, and internal perspective.

Along the way, we have uncovered and have begun to apply some tricks we think are worth sharing with those who, like us, labor in the trenches of design, innovation, and change. These tricks should be of special interest to initiatives that blend external consultants, corporate staff, and teams from operating units.

Background

For more than 20 years, Steelcase has actively focused on understanding the physical, cognitive, social, and cultural context in which its products are used. So, for Steelcase's industrial design and R&D groups, putting the end user first was not new.

What was new was putting the user at the official center of the corporate strategy. Steelcase's CEO, Jim Hackett, had challenged the enterprise to focus its energy on transforming the end user's experience at work. All projects would now be assessed not only on their financial impact and relevance to Steelcase's economic buyers (facility and procurement managers), but also on the value they create for the employee in the workplace.

Dave and his colleague, Jack Tanis, engaged Conifer Research (Tom and partners Anne Schorr and Ben Jacobson), seasoned practitioners of end-user research, to help the organization rise to this challenge.

Our goal: Bring the outside in

To this point, the end-user perspective had often been brought to Steelcase by a host of brilliant, innovative, but generally outside resources, with the outcome generally packaged as a "deliverable." We saw that if we were to achieve the impact we sought, we as consultants (Dave, internal; Tom, external) would have to inspire insiders to take up the cause, while preserving the rigor and science the prior mix of internal R&D and external specialists had brought to the table.

Some fast failures: Identifying the gaps to close

We identified three key "insider" groups at Steelcase, whose engagement with end-user knowledge would be critical: product development, product marketing, and field sales. The question was, how could we engage most successfully with these groups?

The first and obvious option was what Dave came to call the "knowledge pill." We were often asked, and agreed on a few occasions, to package up "everything we know about end users" and present it. This proved less than effective. For instance, a collection of "Patterns of User Behavior" delivered at a leadership meeting successfully stirred the pot, but ultimately provoked far more questions than answers. When end-user knowledge was reduced to "big ideas" or "headlines," it often lost the visual, experiential richness that gave it value and authority in the first place.

Similarly, attempts to incorporate user insight into exciting scenarios and prototypes were sometimes greeted with interest; but they were often perceived to be "design-speak," or too conceptual and lacking in real-world product development constraints. These attempts sparked critique and controversy more often than action. The "knowledge pill" was doing little to bring the reality of the user's voice into practice.

Another way to engage was via an active learning program designed to help internal groups better grasp the potential value of end-user insight. This, too, we tried, launching a series of familiarization workshops at Steelcase University in Grand Rapids. In these workshops, teams of architects, designers, product managers, and executives got a taste of what it was like to approach the workplace as social scientists. They observed and learned from patterns in real work settings. We had introduced the methodology and inspired people with the potential, but we still had not created the sustainable impact we sought.