Culture Change
Speck Design
Culture Change
Speck Design
The consulting arm of Speck Products, designers of the original iPhone cases, Speck Design has expertise in mechanical engineering, interaction design and research, and serves inventors, startups, and companies.
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I was originally recruited as lead IC to up-level the work of Research Insights, lead research studies, analyze and synthesize, and share the results. I helped pitch and sell new work and defined methodologies that would allow the company to differentiate its offerings for a possible acquisition.
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While at Speck Design, led the design research track on a cross-disciplinary program working with organizational development and change management consultants to help change the culture of a Fortune 500 high-tech company (13,000 employees). To address this challenge, we created a hybrid of design thinking and change management.
Challenge
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We were the 3rd team hired to change the culture of a large organization, so we needed a new approach.
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Culture change was a different kind of work that our team had not done previously
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We needed to figure out how to map design thinking process to management consulting practices.
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The was a completely different kind of research and it was not clear how it related to product research.
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Can design offer a new perspective on how to change culture inside a large organization?
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Key Activities
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Developed a highly innovative culture change methodology
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Conducted observations and interviews.
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Mapped out organizational process describe the organizational obstacles and patterns of influence to communicate to C-Level.
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Developed persuasive insights and frameworks
Methodology
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In this culture change project, “users” were employees of a company. Both leaders and teams were interviewed, observed, and coached. The culture was the “product.”
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Interviews of 48 leaders
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Observations conducted of16 meetings across different organizations (Finance, Brand, Strategy, Legal, Executive Team)
Language was one one aspect of expressing the internal culture at this tech company. Positive and negative attributes of culture emerged.
This framework visualizes the problems within the culture across the various stages of delivering their mission (clear focus, innovation, decision-making, execution, validation, and launch)