By Boris Chen, vice president at XPLANE

The more profound the change, the greater the effort needed to ensure long-term adoption of the changes. To foster sustained, significant enterprise-scale change, we’ve found the following general principles to be successful. Ultimately, the specific mechanisms and approach for delivering education, monitoring performance, and making corrections need to be calibrated to the organizational culture, the individual’s demeanor and job role, and the company’s measurement and communications infrastructure.

ENGAGEMENT
Buy-in is key
In order for employees to embrace and become part of the change process, they must understand and “buy-in” to the rationale for change. Employees need to believe the changes are appropriate to the job, corporate direction and culture before they will be willing to change how they think and do things.

People support what they help build
Employees are more apt to maintain changes when they are involved in developing those changes; finding ways to do that increases buy-in and advocacy for the changes.

Nurture peer support
People are more likely to support changes when their peer group provides encouragement and support. This community effect has been shown to be a major driving factor behind changing even the most deep-rooted behaviors, including: adopting a new diet, losing weight or quitting smoking.

EMPOWERMENT
Reinforce positively, coach proactively
We believe sustaining change happens through positive recognition and encouragement. Organizational change can take months, often years, of sustained focus and effort to see the desired impact. Setting short- and long-term goals and measuring progress regularly reinforces the behavior change.

Cater to individual learning modes
We know that different people have different ways they learn best. Some learn visually, such as reading a guidebook, while others learn audibly, such as listening to a podcast. And there are some who learn experientially, trying things hands-on. Catering to different learning modes maximizes the opportunity for an individual’s understanding.

Provide change support systems
Employees are more likely to maintain changes when they have easy access to the tools, templates, and continuing education to reinforce the changes made. And that also means providing enough channels to answer questions they might have, especially around the rationale for the change.

COMMITMENT
Walk the talk
Leadership must be seen supporting and living the changes. Doing so will demonstrate to the rest of the team the importance of the new changes.

Not “one and done”
Changing mindset and behavior is an experience that takes time, patience and repetition to achieve. Too often, change is treated as a singular event. The most consistently successful change efforts apply enough resources to nurture what can sometimes take months, if not years, to change.

Be consistent in rewarding desired behaviors
People tend to act in alignment with how they’re measured. Avoid confusion by being clear in the expectation and resulting measurement. .

Do you agree or disagree? What other principles have you found to work?

In May, XPLANE’s public Visual Thinking School (VTS) focused on the topic of “Designing for Behavior Change” – in other words, “how do you get people to behave in a certain way?” Over 40 people gathered at our Portland headquarters to explore the challenges and possible solutions behind what drives behaviors and how we might design to create certain behaviors inside organizations. Attendees rotated between three of possible six exercise stations for 15 minutes at a time where they considered behavior patterns and influences among different analogous models: kids and dogs, abstract (or blue sky), personal work experience, ethnographic observation, best learning experience and hospitality industry. The result was a collection of recommendations and visual sketches depicting a variety of models that span push, pull, and self-motivation, whereby organizations might create environments and circumstances that yield intended behaviors.

Public VTS is held monthly at XPLANE. For information on upcoming sessions, please check our Facebook page.

Teradata is the world’s leading analytic data solutions company. From its inception, the company has had a different way of seeing the problem of data processing, making it the golden standard in the data warehouse industry. Teradata started with a unique design approach for a relational database focused on being the best analytical engine while all other databases were designed to process transactions. Over the years Teradata’s leaders have put in the time necessary to create a system that requires minimal management and administration, even in the most complex environments, to save their customers time and money. The Teradata team is smart, making their systems not only blazingly fast, but completely automatic.

Over time, competitors have repeatedly increased processing power in an attempt to keep up with Teradata, but based on software and/or management processes, bottlenecks are inevitable, as these companies don’t have a completely parallel mindset and innovative focus on analytics solutions – although many claim that they do. This increasingly crowded and cluttered market prompted Teradata to put a concerted emphasis on clearly articulating its value and competitive advantage.

As Teradata prepared to launch Teradata Intelligent Memory™, its latest innovative database technology, it was critical that they clearly articulate automated self-management and the superior foundation in the Teradata Database, and that the only vendor in the data warehousing space that has it is Teradata. To address this need XPLANE created two animations articulating Teradata’s value propositions and an illustrated map that showcases the unique layers of service that the company delivers in response to its customers’ analytical needs.

“XPLANE allowed us to depict the essence of our offer without the technology details” said Chris Twogood, Vice President Product and Services Marketing, Teradata. “They enabled us to explain the benefits and differentiation of a sophisticated concept in a way that anyone can grasp in a two minute video.”

We are delighted to welcome Mark Hardaway to the XPLANE team. Mark joins us as vice president of business development in EMEA. He is based in London and makes an excellent tour guide should you ever find yourself in the area!

Prior to XPLANE, Mark held both senior management and consulting roles and his experience spans both the private and public sectors. He has worked extensively across Europe and the US for Oracle Corporation and Deloitte Consulting as well as in the UK.

At XPLANE he will be responsible for growing and overseeing client engagements throughout EMEA. Get to know him a bit better here:

Why XPLANE?
Two things: firstly, although I often used a visual approach in communicating/articulating ideas, concepts and value propositions, I felt XPLANE was unique in that it puts visual thinking at the core of its value proposition and service offerings. Secondly, the core company values of empathy, integrity and respect.

What makes you a changemaker?
I believe business improvement is brought about by using three core ingredients: people, process and technology. I have seen projects fail where the best processes and technologies have been adopted, but the people did not share in the business vision for the future. I use my core skills of listening, empathy, building trust and a passionate belief in the outcome to help educate, motivate and encourage people to ”buy-in” to that vision and join the business on their change journey.

Who are your mentors?
My former boss Juan Rada –SVP Oracle EMEA and good friend Marlin Yuson –Design Director at Cartier.

What word best describes you?
Tenacious

Any pet peeves?
Being late for anything and general rudeness

Person most interested in meeting?
Anyone alive or dead whose determination led to achieving his or her goals. For example: Alexander the Great for doing what the enemy least expected, and Aung San Suu Kyi for her dogged determination and belief in what is right at great personal sacrifice.

A Few Favourite Things:
Quote
Einstein has a couple of great ones I like…
“Everything must be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
“If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.”

Web site
LinkedIn

Cause
The Salvation Army and St Martin-in-the-Fields. Both of these organizations help homeless people get back on their feet without judging.

Movie
Two timeless movies I enjoy watching again and again are “I Am Love” (“Io sono l’amore”), and “In the Mood for Love” by Wong Kar-Wei. I also enjoy the escapism of science fiction especially the latest Star Trek movies.

Music
My tastes are eclectic, ranging from classical, to pop and jazz, depending on my mood and the situation. I am a great admirer of Elvis Costello and Jools Holland, who both have made the transition from contemporary pop to jazz.

Restaurant
Anywhere offering simple food with excellent ingredients. Two favourites:
Yoshino, a London Japanese restaurant where the manager has become a good friend and La Guinguette, a traditional bistro in the small coastal town of Aigues-Mortes in southern France.

Vacation spot
On or near the water, unspoiled, inaccessible, and close to nature. Hydra Island, Greece, is a favourite because there are no cars–only mules.

Peter Cheese, CEO of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development in the UK and the MIX, authors this thought-provoking column on why behavioral change is so difficult yet so critical to achieve ongoing innovation, adaptation and collaboration. How easily do behaviors shift in your organization?

What’s so hard about corporate change?
Fortune
I don’t think any of us in the business world need to be persuaded of the importance of becoming more agile and adaptive. Fast-pace change, uncertainty, and volatility are the lexicon of our work lives.

What most will acknowledge, though, is that change is hard. “We’re good at the smaller change, but we’re not good at the big strategic change,” or “we start change programs, but we never seem to finish them properly,” or even “we’ve got too many change initiatives but are still missing the point.”

The evidence backs these perceptions. A 2008 study by IBM of more than 1,500 executives across 15 countries found that almost 60% failed on at least one major objective or failed entirely. More recent research by the University of Oxford reported that IT projects typically take longer than planned and cost more, with only 16% of projects hitting their targets.

As a driver of business change, M&A has also struggled to deliver value for shareholders. Most research since the 1980s suggests that as much as 70% of deals have destroyed rather than created value. A Cass Business School study, reported in CFO Magazine in June 2012, examined more than 3,000 UK acquisitions by UK companies between 1997 and 2010, and found that successful deals create more value than unsuccessful deals destroy, but still acknowledged that the failure rate was around 60%.

If managing successful change is at the heart of being adaptive, why are the failure rates apparently so high? And what are some of the barriers to creating truly flexible organizations — organizations where change is not only welcomed but seen as energizing and engaging?

The typical culprits tend to fall in one of four categories: A lack of vision, middle management permafrost, a lack of understanding about change, and a lack of good methods to measure and implement change.

To encourage innovation, companies have to be able to collaborate, work across boundaries within and between organizations, to bring together disparate experiences and perspectives, and to properly empower people to come up with ideas and make change happen. In other words, we have to build different corporate cultures and ways of working.

These elements are the “softer” side of adaptability. But they are also the most critical enablers of change, and they are harder to understand and to put into effect, which is why they are so often underestimated.

Change Track Research in Australia has the biggest base of data I have seen on how change really works. They have tracked hundreds of change programs of all types over a wide range of companies for 10 years. This has provided great insights into what really are the major influencers of change.
Change Track’s findings reinforce the point that things like a lack of management commitment, passion, and involvement are the greatest barriers to change.

So, how do we create the kind of environments and organizations that build trust through consistent commitment and passion?
First, we have to identify the real cultural norms of an enterprise. Are people really empowered or are they constrained by limited authority, freedom, or just plain untrusted? Has the organization built processes that can manage complexity but are actually disempowering?

Companies must build management commitment from the top, and that means building trust from top down. Managers need to communicate the following message: “I trust you to do the right thing, to react to the situation, or develop the new idea, but I will also support you if mistakes happen.” All within reason, of course.

Managers must also reinforce these commitments and behaviors through the right processes and systems. These are, for the most part, done with the help of HR — performance management, learning, leadership development, and so on.

Another approach to encourage change is to start with experiments and projects outside the mainstream of the business, where rules are set aside in the interest of encouraging more radical thinking and innovation.

If, as some like to suggest, HR is the custodian of corporate culture, then HR should be helping to articulate and understand these “softer” enablers of change and bring them to life.

One of the great ironies at XPLANE is that while we are well known for simplifying and clarifying our client’s value proposition, commonly referred to as “the elevator pitch,” our own elevator pitch is surprisingly difficult to succinctly articulate. But as with our clients, we’ve used visuals to help.

And as we’ve evolved our services and value for clients, we’ve needed to evolve our graphical depiction of our core value.

For years, we used this graphic to talk to clients about what we did:

As we’ve evolved however, this graphic has become less accurate in depicting the value we bring to clients today. We used to frame our value as, “the people who are great at pulling relevant stories out of mountains of content in order to produce compelling deliverables like maps, brochures, websites and animations.”

As we’ve continued to evolve from primarily a design studio into a more strategic design consultancy, our clients have come to understand that underlying their desire to communicate with greater clarity is a deeper need to address ambiguous, ever-changing environments in a way that keeps people aligned, focused and inspired.

It was never just about the artifacts – our value was always in the ability to help clients navigate and drive the people side of change.

Our most recent evolution of these additional values is now depicted in our latest visual elevator pitch – the value of co-created solutions, multi-disciplinary teams and people-centered design.

Co-created solutions: When dealing with complexity and ambiguity, solutions cannot be outsourced or created in a vacuum. This is where the principles of co-creation come in. When the solution is co-created it brings with it a pride of ownership and support from the client, and a practicality and usefulness that solutions built from outsiders seldom achieve.

Multi-disciplinary teams: Marrying subject matter experts with experts in different disciplines creates a formula for fresh thinking, innovative ideas and opportunities to come up with something new, inspiring and effective.

People-centered design: People willingly dropping or adopting the right behavior is the critical (and oftentimes missing) ingredient to any change. The newest process or greatest technology won’t really move the needle if people don’t embrace the change required of them. Our approach focuses on insights and empathy gathered from the broader organization and affected stakeholder groups, to ensure that what we bring to people will be well received and acted upon.

This newer graphic places more emphasis on the people side of the equation of complexity, clearly showing the involvement of the client in the solutions created. And our results are now noticeably focused on internal benefits of adoption of the change desired as well as all the typical measures of business success.

You can download our latest one-pager here, which showcases this image in the context of our company overview.

There is no doubt this graphic will continue to evolve, which brings up one of our final value proposition elements — the value of rapid prototyping and iterative design. Sketches like the ones in this post, though they reflect a lot of thinking and synthesis of information, are relatively easy to draw up, share and solicit feedback on. This allows us to learn quickly, and swiftly create the right solution.

Let us know what you think of our latest value proposition sketch and the values it reflects. Are these what you think of when you think of working with XPLANE? Are these the elements you think set us apart from others? Inquiring minds want to know. pdodson@xplane.com.

XPLANE recently sponsored and participated as a conference exhibitor at the 2013 Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP) Global Conference, one of the largest gatherings of professionals focused on revolutionizing results and igniting changes within their organizations.  This year, conference presenters included Erik Wahl, internationally recognized author, entrepreneur, graffiti artist and featured TED presenter, and David Rock, co-founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute and author of “Your Brain at Work.”

The theme of the 2013 conference reflects the importance of change in moving the global economy forward. Attendees heard new ideas on how to change habits, understand the human brain at work, and identify organizational belief systems that impede progress. You can learn more about this year’s conference by visiting ACMP’s website here.

More than 30 professionals gathered at XPLANE’s Portland office to participate in April’s Visual Thinking School (VTS): Music, Ethnography & Design.  The April session was designed and run by Dave King, vice president of client services, and Roel Uleners, senior consultant, and required participants to create a poster visualizing a product or service idea for a distinct American subculture.

To create their posters, teams were given the lyrics to five popular songs representative of a particular subculture. Musical genres explored were country, rap, R&B/hip hop and heavy metal. Teams examined, deconstructed and synthesized the song lyrics to reveal the assumable values, themes and imagery of that subculture. The end result varied from apps to websites, and consultative services to physical products.

VTS is held the first Thursday of every month in our Portland office, and is open to the public. If you are interested in more information, please contact Dave King.

Three years ago, XPLANE opened its office in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The office represented XPLANE’s strong growth in Northern Europe and desire to have a closer presence with key customers.

Today, we are proud to tell you that the office is expanding as a result of continued client growth and the need for additional staff. XPLANE is bringing on new local talent and relocating two members of our U.S.-based team to Amsterdam. Shawn Wright and Charyl Looper are relocating to Amsterdam from Portland, bringing the number of current full-time staff to four.  We recently had the opportunity to talk with Shawn about her relocation plans:

Q&A with Senior Project Manager Shawn Wright

Q: What prompted you to take the leap and move to Amsterdam?
A: This is an incredible opportunity to work professionally in another culture and also to help build XPLANE’s reputation globally.

Q: What does the move mean to you?
A: Personally it means leaving friends and family behind, and starting anew! It’s scary and exciting at the same time.

Q: What will be your role in the Amsterdam office?
A: Senior Project Manager and all-around support person where needed.

Q: Shawn, you lived there before – tell us about that experience.
A: This is actually my third time living and working in Amsterdam – though only my second time with XPLANE. When I came over here three years ago, it was a short-term stay of six months, during which I was part of a three (eventually four)-person team that was helping establish XPLANE’s presence in Amsterdam. Since then the team has moved into an office located along the famous canal, the Herengracht, which is where we plan to call home for a very long time!

Q: What are you most excited about?
A: Everything! I love Europe, and Amsterdam in particular. While I already feel completely “at home” here, I find myself walking around in a constant state of amazement and wonder. My favorite thing? Not having to drive anywhere!

In late March, President of XPLANE, Parker Lee, was invited by the Moscow business Wonderfull project lab to present XPLANE’s thoughts on visual thinking at a Visual Thinking Live! event.

This was the first event of its kind in Moscow, bringing together illustrators, designers, creatives and entrepreneurs. Visual Thinking Live! was designed to share new tools and techniques to help ignite creative thinking and visualization. XPLANE was invited to participate and offer some context on how visual thinking impacts behavior. Parker’s presentation helped guide listeners through techniques that will enable better organizational performance and empower change.

The event gathered 600 people in Moscow’s Artplay creative cluster, at the center of the Russian capital, and another 620 people tuned in to watch the event as a live webinar.

Maria Stashenko, co-founder at Wonderfull project lab and host of Visual Thinking Live! praised the event. “The presentation made a great impact on the minds and hearts of all our 600 participants in the hall and even more who watched our digital channel,” she said. “All the information was new to us, precisely selected and connected to each other, and perfectly structured. This was an invaluable knowledge brain shake!”

For more information on Visual Thinking Live!, check out the program release, found here.