Redesigning Routines

Redesigning Routines: A visual thinking service for Ink Strategy to activate organisational change

Rutte, Willemijn (TU Delft Industrial Design Engineering)

Calabretta, Giulia (mentor)
Guerreiro Goncalves, Milene (graduation committee)
Schreuder Goedheijt, Martijn (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Integrated Product Design

2019-05-02

Organisations need to go through continuous change in order to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage. This change is often expressed in a vision which should engage and involve all stakeholders. However, implementing change successfully turns out to be a challenge since two in three change processes stall. Ink Strategy is a visual consulting agency that helps organisations to formulate their vision. They use visual thinking to create a shared image of the vision, with a tangible visualisation as concrete output. This is accomplished in co-creation sessions with their clients. While vision formulation is important, Ink aspires to extend their service to later phases of the change process. They want to offer a more holistic solution to their clients and collaborate on longer projects. However, Ink’s clients approach them as visualisers and not change consultants. To overcome this, Ink needs to discover the needs of their clients and develop their service accordingly. Therefore, the aim of this research is to investigate how Ink can extend their visual thinking services to add value in later phases of the process of organisational change. To reach this aim, literature research, internal and external analysis, observations and client interviews were performed to find the strengths and weaknesses of Ink and the challenges their clients face in the change process. Ink’s strengths and their clients’ challenges were matched to form opportunities. The most promising opportunities for Ink Strategy are:
Planning the change;
Translating vision to daily work;
Training ambassadors;
Training and activating people;
Sharing results;
Changing daily work routines.
These opportunities provide a general answer to the aim of this research. The opportunity “Changing daily work routines” was developed into the new service “Redesigning Routines” to show more specifically how Ink can extend their portfolio. Redesigning Routines is a service that follows Ink’s services on vision formulation. The aim of the service is to translate the abstract vision to concrete, daily work, help people to understand the values that drive their behaviour and give them direction on how to change. This is achieved by a workshop with a co-creative, visual approach. The workshop provides a safe space for reflection, helping people to make their values explicit and formulate concrete steps for change. The end result of the workshop is a visualisation of a newly designed work routine, that is in line with the new vision, and a concrete list of actions to ensure people will start to experiment with desired behaviour. Eventually, this should result in behavioural change among employees, to accomplish the company vision. The service connects well to Ink’s current portfolio since it bridges the gap between an abstract vision and concrete, daily work that needs to change. The service mostly helps to empower people: it helps them to understand underlying values that drive behaviour and to gain direction on how to change. This approach might be rather unique: consultancy firms do provide services on change activation, but they do not consciously take into account the underlying needs of employees.

organisational change
organisational routines
visual thinking
change
routines
behaviour
values

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:71f4d8ad-93a8-4b54-92e4-6dbaa701dc09

Student theses

master thesis

© 2019 Willemijn Rutte