This is the first post of a serie that talks about our perspective of design in organizations. Different projects in companies from different sectors, such as retail, finance, industrial, educational or technological gave us deep insights about new ways of understanding the organizational ecosystem.
In our ever-changing world, companies look like constantly forced to reinvent themselves in order to be successful. Companies and people that embrace naturally this reinvention process, and not the ones that are forced to do that, are those that are able to understand the complexity and create sustainable innovations and real impact in their surroundings.
Based on this we consider that organizations are live-systems that learn and change to adapt in a more and more open and global environments. In DOT we strongly believe that the companies that specially take care on designing this ecosystem are richer and fertile in creating new solutions. For this reason we put in the basis of our model the way of design the organization or maybe better called ecosystem (with all the elements of the organization as a living-system).
It can generate controversy to consider that the Strategy comes later. We can say that yes, the WHY (strategy) comes earlier than the HOW (organization/system); but the change in organization we are looking for requires deep change in the way of being (how) to create constantly new products, new solutions with radically different strategies.
Everything turns around the people, and it is the link with WHY we do things, HOW we do and WHAT we do. We need to design the best environment to make people feel courageous, with an entrepreneurial attitude, creating new opportunities with customers and connected with their own strategy.
Everything relies on “people designing solutions to other people”. Starting from this DOT, we work to design solutions based in a deeper understanding of people’s needs (from inside and outside company) and we merge strategy, organization and product/service design to foster people of the company delivering innovative solutions for people needs:
To tackle people’s needs and design innovative products and services, we need more than implement different tools and processes. We design the organization and the strategy differently to create a sustainable ecosystem that creates innovative solutions.
Intrapreneurial teams characterized by flexibility, innovation, and risk taking; aligned with the company strategy, really connected with the company´s why are the key players in this new scenario. Teams that get a deep understanding of the customer needs, and co-create with them new solutions. Teams that contribute to define the general strategy of the company; specially the why of the company that connects emotionally with clients. This intrapreneurial teams are the ones creating the future of the company empowering them to look for new solutions.
Creating a rooted culture that encourages innovation, that fosters creativity, experimentation and people have a special attitude and excitement to the possibility of building new solutions is the way to answer to the new paradigm. Designing a Connected Company, open to collaborate and innovate with other organizations and others disciplines.
This characteristics and others aim to fast track product and service development to take advantage of a new opportunity or to assess feasibility of a new business.
We will come to you to go deeper in each stage and understand better how everything is connected within the organization.
We create and destroy to make it possible.