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From zero to award winning: How Pitney Bowes changed corporate culture with design thinking
1. From Zero to Award-Winning
How Pitney Bowes changed corporate culture with design thinking
Sara Conklin
Client-Centered Innovation Manager &
DesignThinking Democratizer
#bigd20
21. Actions Outcomes ResultsEnergy
72
LPS
LPS = LUMA Program NPS
“I am so thrilled to be
given these tools.”
Faster
Time-to-market
Reduced
Time to align & prioritize
Time to develop and test
Design defects
Increased
Client input
Employee engagement
It’s working
Employees who believe
PB is client-focused
78%
80%
2018 2019
Clients
Net Promoter
Scores
25. Articulate a
Purpose
Get Started
Make it Stick
Tie to strategic
transformation goals
• Strategy
• Partner
• Executive support
• Energize engagement
• Go beyond skills
• Keep it relevant
• Blend booksmarts with streetsmarts
1
2
3
I'm Sara Conklin and I'm at the helm of democratizing design thinking at Pitney Bowes.
I want to tell you about Lee. Last year, Lee had a big problem. One of the PB call centers he runs was having a massive amount of agent turnover. He just could not keep people. Not only was it expensive to keep recruiting and replacing them, it was impacting the experience of clients who called in looking for help. This was bad for clients, bad for the call center agents, and bad for our business.
This went on for months. Lee tried everything he could think of. He tried asking the agents what was going on, he tried offering solutions... Nothing was working. He was banging his head on a wall.
As luck would have it, during this time, Lee joined a burgeoning design thinking culture change movement at Pitney Bowes.
I want to tell you about this movement, give you insight into how we did it, and share how it’s impacted Lee and many others across our company.
At Pitney Bowes, our mission is to "Reduce the complexity of shipping and mailing." Since our start in 1920 with the first postage meter, we have transformed the way businesses send packages and mail. If you've ever worked in an office and used a device to print a stamp, or if you've ever ordered something from companies like Nordstrom or Victoria’s secret and many others, you've enjoyed a service powered by PB.
A few months ago on April 23, PB turned 100 years old. In the years leading up to this milestone, like many old companies, we underwent a digital and business transformation to stay relevant in the modern world. Our products, services, technologies, and business models all changed so we could keep profitably delivering relevant value to our clients.
The only thing that didn't change much was our culture. At PB, we have a pretty awesome culture. Starting with our core principle to "Do the right thing the right way," our culture is ethical, loyal, and innovative. But about 2 years ago, we realized there was something missing: Client-focus. And without that, we were delivering client experiences that fell short. Clients were getting frustrated. We knew that, without action, they would start to leave. To stay relevant and build a legacy for our next 100 years, we needed to build on our culture to put clients at the center of everything we do.
To do that, we turned to design thinking. When I say design thinking, I'm talking about an approach to problem solving that keeps humans at the center. Not just for designers, design thinking is marked by behaviors such as Empathy, Collaboration, Questioning, Imagination, Visualization, and Iteration. As you may already know, design thinkers follow principles such as broadening the aperture on a problem before diving deep, taking time to frame and reframe problems, and iterating toward creative solutions through a series of small bets.
Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash
At the time, our senior executive team had just established a Client Experience Center of Excellence, led by our VP of Experience Design and staffed by me and one other person. It was we who believed that a culture of design thinking could help us turn things around for our company. To make this happen, we articulated a purpose, got started, and made it stick.
First, we articulated a clear purpose that our stakeholders would understand because it was tied to what they cared about.
At that time, we already had a small but mighty Experience Design team known across the company for helping teams craft great client experiences. That team of experts was already using the principles of design thinking every day, but it wasn't enough. We needed to bring along teams and leaders across the company so we were all practicing human-centered behaviors every day. We needed to democratize design thinking so people would have the mindset, skills, and tools to bring design thinking to their everyday work.
But we knew our stakeholders didn’t care about design thinking. They cared about the outcomes that a culture of design thinking would create, like client satisfaction, operational efficiency, and revenue – key elements of our strategic transformation.
Armed with a clear and relevant purpose, we rolled up our sleeves and got started.
We had 3 people, limited bandwidth, and small budget. To get started, we need a strategy, a partner, and executive support.
We started with strategy. We knew that to democratize design thinking did not mean everyone would be a design thinking expert. Who in the company needed to be involved, and what outcomes did we expect them to deliver? To answer this, we created a vision that would help us and our eventual executive sponsors involve the right people in the right ways.
Next, we considered possible partners. To make the impact we needed, we wanted to leverage a tried-and-true approach that had a high chance of both early and sustained success. We researched, we benchmarked, and through this process, we ourselves underwent a transformation of our own. With backgrounds in Experience Research and Design, we knew a thing or two about design thinking. But in evaluating potential partners, we had to be humble about our own expertise. I remember this feeling of sudden insight when we stopped thinking about design only as a process with diamonds or hexagons, and started thinking about it behaviors that apply to anybody in any role. In the end, we chose to partner with the LUMA Institute, who approaches design thinking in this way.
Finally, we needed executive support. It's one thing to say that client experience matters and quite another to invest resources like money and time. After socializing our plan first with our own inner circle and then through successively broader circles, we pitched the initiative to key executives. We didn't exactly ask to proceed but simply stated our intention. And they didn't exactly give us permission, but they didn't say no. We took that as a yes and forged ahead.
Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash
With our partner LUMA, we planned our first 2 pilot programs. These were energetic 2-day workshops followed by a series of coaching sessions. We were careful in selecting the 40 participants for these pilots, and the choices we made helped solidify our executive support.
First, we pulled in key people like our head of Learning and Development, whose expertise might help us and whose support we would need. Second, we pulled in client-focused hand-raisers from many functions and business lines who we thought would be most vocally supportive once they’d gotten their feet wet. Third, we invited a couple of cross-functional teams who regularly work together, increasing the chances they'd bring design thinking back into their everyday work.
The pilot sessions were a success. There were a-ha moments. People experienced problem-solving in ways far different from anything they'd done before. "Yes," they said. ”We need more of this." And coming from diverse functions and teams made their upvotes far more compelling than if they'd come from our design team. With that, we eeked out the little bit of momentum and buy-in we needed to schedule more programs, and the democratization began.
But we were not done. Culture is not changed through training alone. To take this from a nice little training program to a broad-scale, meaningful culture change that sticks, we had to do 3 more things: Energize engagement, go beyond skills, and keep it relevant.
Energizing engagement is about both maintaining the excitement of the people in the program and sparking new interest in others. We’ve done both of these through storytelling.
As more cohorts came through the program, we did the time-consuming work of calling them weeks and months later and asking how it was going. We heard stories of design thinking reducing time-to-market, building empathy within a team, driving more and better client input. Many of these were smallish, quick wins, but we shared them broadly and loudly - at leadership updates, through written articles, through video snippets. This got the word out - we started to see more people raising their hands in new areas of the company. Senior leaders started asking how to get their people trained. We were getting momentum and engagement from around the company. People wanted in.
This was great, but we also had to continue to engaging those who were already in. They needed practical support to help them bridge the gap from their old way of working to this new way. Culture change is not about a 1-time win, it's an ongoing commitment. So we had to help people keep at it.
To do that, we established and nurtured a community of practice. Members reach out with questions, tips, and tricks, and we offer coaching and training refreshers. Monthly, we run a Meetup where members swap stories, give and receive feedback, and dust off some cobwebs. We keep it all interactive and focused on their real, practical needs. It's all optional for them, but they keep showing up and asking for more.
A second way we made it stick was to create conditions for systematic success by going beyond just teaching skills. We tackled this in a couple ways.
First, we engaged people at all levels, from individual contributors up to senior executives. At the leadership level, we facilitated sessions for the company's top 100 leaders at their annual meeting. This was important to drive a shared language and enough understanding that they could support their teams to try this out without fear of failure.
At lower levels, we offered additional training at different levels of commitment and rigor, from a 30-min webinar, to more in-depth online learning, to the full 2-day workshop. This laid out a learning pathway in which people could engage in a way that was right for them.
Second, we developed a group of internal design thinking, facilitation, and teaching experts. We love our partner LUMA's design thinking coaches - they are awesome - but we share with LUMA a goal to create enough in-house expertise that that we really own it here. Many on our Experience Design team were already experts, but we needed them to use the same shared language, and to have experts beyond that one team. So we offered pathways for advancement within the program. Our Instructors and Facilitators are now teaching and coaching our next generation of design thinkers.
The third way we made design thinking stick was to keep things relevant. We did this with a drumbeat of storytelling within the curriculum itself.
As people came through the program and applied design thinking to their work, we began incorporating their stories back into the curriculum. And we started to talk more about how design thinking relates to the processes people already use in their day to day work, like Lean Six Sigma or Agile. And we found it was easier for people to see the relevance when taught in the context of a problem space they could relate to. We started to collect PB design thinking "lore" that we could plug into our learning programs to best relate to each specific cohort.
We also showed relevance in the way we executed the program itself. We drank our own champagne and designed the program as a service just like we might for a client. The trainings and workshops themselves were human-centered in the way they helped people learn. We considered the whole experience, from the tone of our emails to the gluten-free options offered at the workshop lunch to humanize every touchpoint. Our learners experienced what it feels like to be part of something human-centered.
So, we articulated a purpose, got started, and made it stick. Where are we now?
Well, it's working. We see this in 4 ways: Energy, Actions, Outcomes, and Results.
First, we see tremendous energy and momentum. People love it. The vast majority rate the program a 9 or 10 out of 10 based on likelihood to recommend. We are invited speak about design thinking to teams across the company and senior leaders are asking how their teams can get involved. People get it, and want more.
Second, that energy is driving more human-centered innovation. Employees have said this in a corporate-wide survey. Externally, the Design Management Institute and Design & Innovation Awards have recognized our program.
Third, the change in behavior is leading directly to outcomes for our teams and clients. Design thinking adopters are generating these outcomes.
And finally, those outcomes are helping to improve our relationships with our clients and generate more revenue. It’s working.
This hasn’t happened over night, and we still have a way to go. Culture change takes time. We’ve learned we have to be patient with the pace of change. But we've built a strong foundation and we're excited to see how this program drives the culture change we need to build a legacy for our next 100 years.
So what's next for us?
We’ve reached an inflection point, from us pushing design thinking to our organization pulling. And, we’ve learned a lot in these 18 months about what works best to develop confident and competent design thinkers.
So, we’re now in the process of enhancing the program so we can sustainably scale it. We’re partnering with HR to re-look at our participant pipeline. We’re pursuing virtual collaboration tools to reduce the friction people feel in changing their ways of working. And we’re enhancing our curriculum to help people not just "do" design thinking but "become" design thinkers.
The most important change is a greater role for coaching and mentoring. We’ve learned how critical it is to blend booksmarts with streetsmarts. It's not enough to "get" design thinking in a classroom; one needs to "get it" through real-world experiences and feedback. We’ll soon be piloting a mentoring program that offers learners the feedback they need and mentorship roles for people who want to pay it forward.
Back to Lee. Soon after coming through our program, Lee took some simple but powerful design thinking approaches to his team. Using ethnography, he empathized with them - something he hadn't been able to do before. Together, they surfaced out the issues - issues that were nowhere close to what Lee had thought. And within 2 months, both agent attrition and average call handling time plummeted because experienced agents could solve more clients’ problems faster.
This is Lee’s team, and this one of the many stories that has become part of our design thinking "lore."
If you want to get started driving a culture of design thinking at your organization, I can tell you that this is what has worked for us. We positioned it as part of a bigger transformational goal, something leaders had already wanted but needed help executing.
We paved the way for systematic change by including all roles and functions, selecting the right partner, promoting business outcomes (not design thinking).
And we designed the program as a service, just as if it were client-facing. We energized engagement, we taught more than skills, we showed the relevance, and we are increasingly blending booksmarts with streetsmarts.
On a personal note, it's been incredibly rewarding. Leading this program has been my all-time favorite role in my 16-year career. If you're giving this a try, I wish you the best of luck, and please do let me know how it's going.
