A Flywheel Model of Change Management Inspiring traditional change management through service design In this article, we discuss that service designers are particularly well equipped with skills and tools to create change in organisations and can do so more explicitly by applying a flywheel capability model to their work. Susan Bartlett is CEO at Bridgeable. Susan has a track record of delivering remarkable customer experiences and kickstarting cultural change within organizations. She has overseen large-scale transformation initiatives across industries. susan.bartlett@bridgeable. com
Terri Block is Director of Design Strategy at Bridgeable. Terri designs and oversees projects in Bridgeable’s healthcare practice that intersect strategy, service design and organizational change and learning. terri.block@bridgeable.com
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“We need a new organisation-wide training strategy. We have been training the most critical teams in the organisation in the same way since the 1980s and we need to move out of the dark ages. Problem is, the teams are so used to the way things are done. How can we build the strategy in a way that brings people along as we go?” This was a question one of our clients posed to us when considering how she would redesign training for an entire department of a Fortune 500 company. Inherent in her question are two principles that drive our perspective on change management. Firstly, it is the people – not the initiative at hand – that play a leading role in enacting change. Secondly, change management needs to be baked into the initiative itself and not treated as a separate activity. We’ve seen executive teams spend months designing a strategy or new initiative in isolation from the organisation, conduct a grand unveiling of the transformation agenda, and then
focus on typical change management activities such as socialisation and training. The trouble with this approach is that it separates change management from the initiative itself, assuming that people will come along after the ‘grand reveal’. Even if they do, the energy can be hard to sustain. Perhaps more importantly, this approach misses the opportunity to design user-centered change management activities based on real insights about how employees and stakeholders react to the new initiative. Finally, this approach to change management can disillusion employees who are experiencing change fatigue1 — which is the opposite of inciting stakeholder desire to participate in and lead the change. At Bridgeable, our model of organisational transformation finds its roots in Jim Collins’s seminal book, Good to Great, and we argue that in this model, service design is itself a powerful tool for delivering change management, and an antecedent for transforming
