When Your CEO cares about Design

Essential Ingredients for Culture Transformation & Momentum

This Case Study is also available for download at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

In 2014, I was thrown into the center of something rare & extraordinary. I was asked by our executive leadership to help #activatedesign across all of eBay’s companies. What does that mean? It turns out that raising awareness for design thinking across a large corporation has a lot to do with leadership, community building, and thinking like a filmmaker.

I had never applied design thinking to culture before, at least never at this kind of scale. I knew I needed help and guidance. Enter John Maeda, an epic design leader and CEO whisperer. He would be my coach and guide. Through his leadership and encouragement, we began to reveal a narrative of change & transformation. We didn’t know how it was going to work, but along each step of the way, new opportunities mysteriously emerged. Reflecting on the progress we made in year one of a multi-year journey, a few key ingredients were needed for the progress to take hold.

(John Donahoe and John Maeda at the 2014 Leadership Summit)

Ingredient #1: The CEO sponsor

John Donahoe is one of those natural leaders. Over the years he had developed a curiosity for design. From his friendship and discussions with Brian Chesky, a designer/founder from Airbnb, they talked about how design and system thinking is essential when designing end-to-end experiences. Brian showed John how they were inspired at Airbnb by the storyboarding process of movie-making. Airbnb was beginning to map out its entire customer experience this way as a ‘customer story’. This later became known as project ‘Snow White’. John’s curiosity peaked and so he gathered his internal design leadership together to talk about a multi-year culture change. When your CEO cares about design, momentum begins to build. But as internal leaders, we couldn’t do it alone. John made a brilliant move to bring in a credible external voice. He invited a great teacher of design to offer guidance & listen to the community. The Design Advisory Board was created.

Ingredient #2: The Independent Design Voice

When John Maeda arrived, I asked him, “Now what do we do?” He said, “Let’s go talk to all the designers.” And so we did. 45 days later we had gotten in front of the entire design & UX population, which was several hundred strong. Some of them were found in tiny pockets all around the world. We met writers, designers, researchers & creatives. We listened to their stories and began to reveal their work. John would conduct many of the interviews in person. The more we listened, the more we learned. We began to write all of these stories down and publish them internally on a blog. The stories revealed great themes and honest accounts of work that were happening all over the world. Then something magical happened. The CEO and his leadership began to read the stories. The work from all these designers across the company began to be seen & heard.

The CEO would write personal notes of thanks to the design community, thanking them for their contributions & their commitment to customers. The designers were beginning to believe.

(Interviews with designers across eBay's companies)

Ingredient #3: A Community Willing to Believe

By this time, the word had spread inside the company that change was happening. You heard it, but you couldn’t yet feel it. Feelings are stronger when you experience it firsthand. This is exactly what happened when we decided to hold our first-ever Product & Design Summit. It was a full-day in-person gathering. There were External & Internal speakers, but most importantly we were able to bring to life the story of John Donahoe and Brian Chesky. They gave an honest in-person account of how the design came to life in the topic of each of their journeys. At the end of their fireside chat, they were several deep with members of the community waiting to get questions answered and ‘selfies’ with their leaders. It was at this moment that people leaned in and believed it was possible. They felt it because they witnessed it.

The community has to come along with you. This created momentum but also showed the CEO something else. There was a community that WANTED to be led. Four weeks later we did a full-day workshop of design thinking with the top 200 leaders of the company. Momentum was gaining.

Ingredient #4: A Cinematic Mindset

Many of these moments unfolded as cinematic scenes in a large Culture transformation movie. Some of these moments were planned, while others were not. John Maeda and I would brainstorm these fantastical scenes and wonder if we could ever get them to happen. We knew we had to plan them and hope we could create the conditions for ‘magic’ to happen. We filled spreadsheets with moments on paper and mapped them to a timeline. It was like making a movie filled with scenes that you had no idea were going to play out or not. All we could do is hope to set the stage correctly and hope the conditions were right. If we got it right, we’d have cultural magic and tangible progress.

(Watch the 2014 Design Salon Dinner & Awards)

So we built a discipline to document everything. We had beat reporters and designers contributing stories. We had photographers shooting ordinary events. We thought of everything as making a 'Behind the scenes' documentary. Some of it worked, and some of it didn’t.

In one of the final (hypothetical) scenes, we imagined an end-of-year salon dinner hosted by the CEO to congratulate the progress and to validate the community. That (if it happened) would be amazing and would only work if real progress and event preceded it.

(screenshot from ebay.com/design)

And so it did. In December of 2014, Designers from across eBay’s companies met to celebrate a year of #activatedesign and the momentum generated behind their playbook. ebay.com/design and paypal.com/design were announced to the world, creating two destinations that will evolve and grow. The Salon dinner was hosted by John Maeda and John Donahoe as a celebration of the Global Design communities and the progress of 2014.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED

• You can apply design thinking to solve all kinds of problems, even to those of cultural change & People. I learned that I love this kind of problem.
• Top-down sponsorship AND bottoms-up effort is essential to make meaningful culture transformation progress. The two need to meet in the middle.
• An Independent, neutral expert can be a catalyst to help things along (like an epic & selfless design leader).
• Cultural transformation is an ongoing effort that ultimately attracts great talent, improves engagement, and has built a stronger reputation. The flywheel of product success is made on such things.

I'm thankful for a year of learning & growth and the opportunity to witness some extraordinary acts of leadership. Here's to 2015.

OTHER REFERENCES/LINKS

• Download this Case Study, now available through the Stanford Graduate School of Business
• eBay Design Playbook: ebay.com/design
• The Next CEO Whisperers: Designers - Techonomy

Do you have tips or advice on elevating design & culture at your company? Please comment or tweet @danemhoward