17 Nov 2022

Empowering teams without creating chaos

In our second webinar for Customer Centricity Month, Stu Tayler, Practice Director at cxpartners and Andrés López Josenge, VP of Design at Visa Europe, discussed the Governance dimension of our Customer Centricity Model. The specific focus of the session was how you can empower teams without losing control and creating chaos.

  • Stuart Tayler

    Practice Director

    Stuart Tayler

  • Andrés López Josenge

    Visa Europe

    Andrés López Josenge

What is governance?

According to the Chartered Governance Institute for UK and Ireland, corporate governance is:

The system of rules, practices and processes by which a company is directed and controlled.

It can be easier to understand when you see it isn’t working. Often in our consulting work at cxpartners, we observe leaders feeling underwhelmed by design teams’ output, and frustrated that it’s not producing the right business results. But when you speak to those design teams, you hear that “People at the top just don’t ‘get’ design”. Nobody is happy.

Looking deeper at the problem, we see the following things happening. People at the top may have good intentions, but somewhere down the management chain, people start prescribing solutions. Then, fixed deadlines and budgets are added, probably to give the impression of certainty to unlock investment. Delivery teams are now just focused on implementing features.

In these scenarios, delivery teams can become overwhelmed by a never-ending backlog. Quality inevitably drops as people feel more squeezed. As quality drops and deadlines are pushed, leaders are pulled into conversations and focus only on what’s being delivered. They start making design decisions. Delivery teams and designers end up demoralised – there’s no chance to be creative; they’re simply fulfilling someone else’s orders.

De-centralising control

So what’s the answer to this situation? In our The State of Customer Centricity whitepaper, de-centralising control was one of our five keys to Customer Centricity. By this, we mean empowering teams and giving them the freedom to make decisions about the products they deliver.

We found that organisations that performed higher in Customer Centricity were more likely to give delivery teams autonomy to make decisions. The reason that this leads to Customer Centricity is that decisions are made by the people closest to customers. Grounding decisions in user insight means decisions are of better quality.

One of the top scorers in our Customer Centricity survey was Octopus Energy, and this idea of de-centralising control is key to their success. They told us that:

We talk a lot about freedom and responsibility. To give people freedom and responsibility, to let them go and have conversations and come up with good solutions.

Octopus Energy

So from the delivery team’s point of view, this sounds great – creative freedom! But from a management point of view, this is unsettling and counterintuitive – to improve governance, you have to give it up? So how do you stop it from descending into chaos?

Balancing autonomy and alignment

To empower teams effectively, you essentially need to balance autonomy with alignment.

There are a range of ways to do that, but the following are the five that we’ve found to stand out.

  1. Mission
  2. Vision
  3. Outcome focus
  4. Service design
  5. Process

Mission

First is Mission. The following are mission statements from some well-known companies:

To organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Google

To create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.

Airbnb

These missions focus on why the organisation exists – they inspire people, and in doing so, it creates alignment.  Missions should be created and driven by leadership – it should be something they believe in. But we believe good missions are also based around people. Here’s an example, from one of our clients:

We empower people to save and invest with confidence.

Hargreaves Lansdown

Vision

A vision takes the mission and makes it more specific. It describes the future the organisation is trying to create and can look years into the future, allowing them to be ambitious. The critical thing about visions is that they aren’t a specification. Instead, they are designed to provide context and direction for autonomous teams. If they dictated a solution, it would disempower teams.

Ways of communicating a vision could take the form of photos, videos, a prototype or a storyboard, for example. Importantly though, they should be based on user research.

Outcomes

The third fundamental way to balance autonomy with alignment is by focusing on outcomes over outputs. This aligns the organisation around delivering customer value rather than delivery for the sake of it, which can lead to demoralised “feature-focused teams”.

Many believe that Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are the best way to enable an outcomes focus. But we’ve seen them misused. Their objectives can be vague, and the key results can be so high-level that they can be twisted to suit the things people are already doing. As a result, there isn’t a true shift to thinking about outcomes.

But we can improve how we think about OKRs. Joshua Seiden – who literally wrote the book on “Outcomes over Output” – describes outcomes as:

A change in human behaviour that drives business results.

There’s a useful clarification here – we’re not talking about the business results e.g. reduce costs. We’re talking about the behaviour that will lead to those results e.g. reduce support calls.

Service Design

Fourth is Service Design. We often see that organisations have established multi-disciplinary product teams working in lean, agile ways. They may have an OKR system in place and may even be outcomes-focused. However, they can still suffer from alignment issues. For example, a common problem is that different teams within the same organisation may be working on the same problem or part of a journey without being aware of it.

This is where Service Design can help – by orchestrating different product teams’ efforts into a coherent, ‘whole service’. Service Designers can help identify duplicate effort, but also gaps where there isn’t a product team focused on an important need.

Process

Finally, we have a process, which Steve Cable and Paul Burrows discussed in our previous webinar. A clear process framework – like GDS’s Discovery, Alpha, Beta and Live – helps teams to retain autonomy. Firstly, it sets the expectations of stakeholders. In a Discovery phase, teams will be focused on learning about users and their problems, not delivering solutions. If stakeholders are clear about this, it means they’ll understand not to expect changes to business results immediately.

Secondly, a process framework like this also helps to establish trust. If leaders are confident that teams are following best practice and the right process, they’ll be reassured. They can focus on understanding where teams are in a process, rather than getting involved in design decisions.

We’ve been working with an organisation to help them shape an approach to continuous delivery. After piloting ways of working, we created a process framework and documented it in an online playbook. That then helped subsequent projects run more smoothly. A really important aspect of this is that this is bespoke to the organisation: It was written after a pilot. And then it was iterated upon after subsequent projects. It’s what works for that particular organisation.

This leads me on to a word of warning:

We shouldn’t let process undermine a focus on outcomes.

Best practice evolves as we learn more about what works and what doesn’t work and as we integrate ideas from different disciplines. We need to allow process to be flexible.

Unlocking the value of Customer Centricity

So, to summarise. To de-centralise control, you need to balance the need for autonomy with alignment. And to do that, we recommend:

  • Having a clear mission and purpose, focused on people.
  • An inspiring vision driven by customer insight that doesn’t specify details.
  • Focusing on outcomes, through tools like OKRs that monitor changes to human behaviour.
  • Using service design to coordinate product teams.
  • A clear process to set expectations and establish trust.

By balancing de-centralising control, you should be able to unlock the value of Customer Centricity.

Governance in action – Visa

Andrés introduced himself and told us about his role as Head of Design at Visa in Europe. His focus for the webinar was process and people, which, to him, are the core of governance.

Process has been at the fore for the last few years. But Andrés warned that it’s very easy to fall in love and be religious to a process, but we must be cautious. He quoted Professor Feynman, saying:

Be careful when you blindly follow the masses. Sometimes the M is silent.

Sometimes we see success in other companies, and we think that the ‘perfect process’ will work for us. But adapting something which was probably made specifically for someone else does bring some problems.

Discover, Design, Develop

Most processes fall in line with the discover, design, develop approach. To understand and help it work for Visa, they deconstructed this. They looked at each phase and asked what are the activities, deliverables, and people that can deliver upon these? Once they deconstructed this and broke this down into components, they had something akin to a design system, but for process.

Having these components allows them to work in creative ways and be nonlinear. They can pick and choose depending on what the problem is. And they don’t have to play in sequence. Of course, some moves are riskier, but it’s all about bringing creativity back, not being religious to a process and crunching through a problem.

Design In vs Design Out

The design team at Visa does stellar work for their clients and partners. But they started to wonder whether they should be applying those principles of deconstructing process to their internal work. They call this Designing In. This approach allows them to look at things differently every time they encounter a project or an initiative because every project and initiative is different.

Appreciate and Appropriate

Andrés advised to appreciate other processes and appropriate them, but don’t just imitate them. Instead, understand it because you can take the pieces you want and find your own process. You can then put that into your system; if it enriches, it will stick there.

De-centralise the Centralised

Visa has de-centralised the centralised. They have a slew of existing and new product developments, and they’ve taken their designers out to them so they can work as bespoke individual teams. They can take their model of how they go about those, break down problems into smaller pieces and then use the component framework to go about and fix those.

But they’ve also centralised the de-centralised. Those products and initiatives now come through a project house at Visa, giving them full viewership of what’s happening.

Often companies will unknowingly duplicate or even triplicate projects. Or some initiatives look similar that should be done together. By de-centralising their talent but centralising the workflow and ensuring that all projects come through one centralised fashion, they know they’re doing things the right way. And they’re doing things once, not three times.

Just like the Seven Samurai by Kurosawa – it’s a small, functional team, and each member has their bespoke expertise.They come from different parts of the organisation. And putting those in and forming that cocktail comes out with those great results.

Screenshot from the movie Seven Samurai, by Akira Kurosawa

Scale Org and Composition

Visa also look at how to scale those mini orgs and the composition of those groups. They don’t dictate how many people from each discipline should be in those teams – it’s organic. Every product is at a different stage and has a different need.

Additionally, these teams fluctuate – they grow with the ebb and flow of the initiative as they go through. So it just grows organically with the product and with the service itself.

Go Rogue

Visa are more than willing to go rogue on initiative if they think they should try something new. Design has become too corporate; sometimes, you can fall into de-risking too much or playing too safe. Some of the best designs were accidents that just occurred, and all of a sudden, magic happened. So they’re trying to bring that back to their practice. To invoke the go rogue. It doesn’t mean they go rogue every day and every hour of the day, but they’re not afraid to do so.

Customer Centricity Month 2022

To find out how you can drive your customer centricity strategy forward, check out all four of the webinars that we held during Customer Centricity Month. Available to watch on demand here:

Learn more about Empowering teams without creating chaos

Stuart Tayler

Reach out to Stuart Tayler

Practice Director

Related blog articles

Our latest blogs

Read our latest blogs on LinkedIn

You're looking at blogs in our archive.

Our more recent blogs are on LinkedIn. Follow us for our latest thinking on inclusive design, Financial Services, and more.

LinkedIn