s p o n s o re d c o n t e n t
It Takes a Village Service designing organisational change at BBVA
What does it mean to ‘design at scale’ in a 132,000-employee organisation? Two years ago, BBVA, one of the world’s oldest and largest banks, launched a grand experiment to find the answer. During that time, because of the sponsorship of top management including the Chairman and CEO, the design team grew from a Mary Wharmby is a design leader, strategist and educator with almost 20 years experience leading teams in the creation of engaging and impactful products and services. As Head of Design Transformation at BBVA she leads a team dedicated to driving innovation by strategically infusing design across the entire organisation.
Anxo López, Ph.D. is a service and strategic designer with ten years’ experience working on both sides of the profession: as consultant and now at an in-house team leading design strategy for BBVA’s Design Transformation team. Throughout his career he has dedicated special attention to the promotion of design as strategic activity for companies and institutions.
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handful to over two hundred, design evolved from downstream production to core strategic capability and design methodologies went beyond the Design Department to permeate the entire organisation, reshaping skillsets, processes and culture. Together, these changes have resulted in a more innovative and competitive organisation. — BBVA’s big learning? Meaningful change means orienting everyone around the customer. Design Transformation: A Trojan horse Organisational change is defined as “a process of profound and radical change that orients an organisation in a new direction and takes it to an entirely different level of effectiveness.”1 But change is hard. According to McKinsey, one third of change programmes fail.2
1 http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/ transformation.html 2 https://www.mckinsey.com/businessfunctions/organization/how-we-help-clients/ transformational-change
John Kotter, a professor at Harvard Business School, has worked with dozens of companies to develop an eight-step model of change: create urgency, form a powerful coalition, create a vision for change, communicate the vision, remove obstacles, create short-term wins, build on the change and finally, anchor the change in culture.3 Similarly, McKinsey has a five-step strategy: set strategic objectives, assess current capabilities, create a portfolio of initiatives, create an
3 https://www.kotterinc.com/8-steps-process-forleading-change
