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How Design Thinking Aids a Digital First Culture
How Design Thinking Aids a Digital First Culture

August 1, 2019

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My favourite Chinese proverb says ‘May you live in interesting times.’ I believe that time is today. Especially for the IT sector. The one phenomenon in technology that’s caught everyone’s attention is digital transformation. Turbulent, innovative, agile and uncertain, but very interesting. Industries like finance, healthcare, education and retail have already embraced it, and almost all organisations today have a singular goal: becoming an independent technologically enabled enterprise. Bringing modernized, sophisticated tech to companies that used clunky systems and floors filled with servers is not easy, and most leaders, while reducing operational hurdles, forget what’s most important: the people. Big problem there.

Embracing digital first cultures

If I had to define how massive a culture change digital transformation brings, I’d say it is tectonic. A digital first culture is radically different from the traditional, and very evidently so. For one, there’s no room for silos. When you think DX, think of the 3 Cs: Collaboration, Co-operation and Constant Innovation. Think more action oriented steps, and less planning. Disruption and scalability are at the heart of the digital experience. Take it one step at a time, not all at once to avoid legacy messes. As a leader, it is your job to articulate the changes required, stay on top of action points and then align it with business objectives. Fostering delegation over control is the hardest part, for employees will often be disgruntled about new processes and modern ways of functioning. Agility and productivity comes at a cost, and here, that cost is getting people out of their comfort zones to tackle what daunts them. Remember, culture will always lead execution, not the other way round. It’s almost paradoxical that an innovative culture is not fun to implement at all. It’s a rather tedious job. So how do you go about it?

Breaking free of tradition with design thinking

Imagine digital transformation as a complex jigsaw puzzle. In that case, design thinking would be the centre piece that completes it. Why? Because they have the same focus: ensuring operational excellence through a human centred philosophy, while fostering creative problem solving. A culture backed by this approach transcends design and aesthetics, letting people explore different pathways, even if they lead to the same solution. It’s also a methodology that’s more emotional than transactional, more humanized than rigid. All this contributes to psychological safety at the workplace, and that’s imperative to maintain, especially while dealing with culture changes like these. Design thinking balances experimentation with discipline, and while there’s tolerance for failure with this approach, there’s no tolerance for incompetence. Candid, not nice. And it’s the candid that always overtakes the nice in terms of impact. Always.

Impact on consumer experience

Digital transformation alone involves a number of operational, governance related and finance related risks. Add design thinking to that, and the magnitude of the risks increases even more. But these risks are definitely worth taking, solely because of the way in which they impact the end user’s experience. In a traditional IT culture, you’ll find defensive customers, insights gathered through secondary research and a focus on in house offerings. With DX and design thinking, the focus shifts to the consumer entirely, and operates upon first hand interactions, in depth research & understanding, ideating and frequent user testing. So essentially, this means agile, empowered workforces within a collaborative environment of flat hierarchies, that warrants easier decision making. Design thinking acts as the foundation, and a digital first culture ensures continuous improvement and enhancement at all levels. This bypasses the linear approach of optimizing consumer touch-points individually and gives you a re-imagined, holistic customer experience. And that’s the way forward for us: creating a customer experience that truly stands out, that makes consumers feel like we care. An experience that matters, just as much as the people who are behind it. If you can achieve that, times will definitely get interesting for you, take my word for it!

Anupam Kulkarni is the Co-Founder and Director of iauro Systems. 


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