The First 60 Days
By: Katrina Alcorn
Tags: Design Thinking, Design, Leadership, IBM

“What is your vision?”

Since I joined IBM as General Manager, Design almost two months ago, I’ve heard this question over and over. From the dozens of designers I met in Austin my first week. From participants in the all-hands meetings at which I’ve spoken. From a producer with the CBS show we sponsor, “America By Design,” and most recently, the Fortune reporter who interviewed Phil Gilbert and me for a story about the past, present, and future of design at IBM.

Week 1 at IBM — photo from fireside chat in Austin, TX with IBM’s Inhi Cho Suh and Phil Gilbert.

My answer, in one form or another: “I don’t know yet. I’m in listening mode.”

I know…Not a very satisfying answer. But it would be pure arrogance to march in as The New Kid and declare that I know what needs to be done without doing my homework. After all, IBM has a rich, textured, 100+ year history of design and innovation which I’m still learning about. Moreover, I’ve worked with dozens of companies as a consultant and in-house design leader, and I can assure you there’s no single template for how to do this right. IBM is a pioneer in enterprise design with one of the largest design practices in the world, and we will continue to chart our own path.

Having a vision starts with having clear values. So let’s start there:

“What are your values?”

I value authenticity, trust, and humility. These things go together, and lay the groundwork for innovation.

We must be able to come together, from diverse backgrounds, and feel we can be our authentic selves in order to fully engage with each other and build trust. We must have a baseline of trust in order to have hard conversations, share risky ideas, and challenge ourselves and each other. We must have humility to truly listen to each other and to our customers.

I believe good ideas can come from anywhere, at any level of the corporate hierarchy and any discipline, but we won’t hear the ideas if we aren’t willing to listen. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard great ideas that started with “This might be a crazy/dumb/wild idea but…” We only hear those ideas because it feels safe enough to share them.

These values are a compass for me in how I show up as a leader.

Now let’s tweak the question a bit further:

“What are you focused on?”

This I can answer in a little more depth. Here’s how I see the challenge ahead, what I’m doing, and the questions I’m asking.

THE CHALLENGE

The challenge in 2013 was very clear: to build a sustainable culture of design and design thinking throughout IBM. It took eight years, but with Phil and his team leading the way, we did it.

We hired hundreds of designers. We built a beautiful flagship studio in Austin that practically begs people to work more collaboratively. And then we planted the seed for similar studios all over the world. We created the enterprise design thinking framework to scale our human-centered work and trained hundreds of thousands of people inside and outside the company. We helped our senior executives understand that design is not just how things look and feel. It’s how they work. It’s how we create strategic value for the business. We built a thriving practice of approximately 3,000 designers and design leaders who are now embedded in every part of the company. This program was written up in Forrester Research and Harvard Business School as a model for innovation. We put design back on the map at IBM, and put IBM back on the map for the design industry.

2021: Put design to its highest and best use

Now our job is different. We’re not building from scratch. We have an incredible asset, and our job is to make sure we are putting it to its Highest and Best Use.

Highest and Best Use is a concept coined by economists in the 1800s. Today you hear real estate developers use this term to talk about getting the most value from an asset — in real estate, this means a piece of property.

Our “asset” at IBM is our design practice ­­– our talent, our culture, our approach to design. The big challenge for us now is this: How might we position design to solve the right problems for our customers, and solve them well? If we put design to its Highest and Best Use, we will catalyze IBM’s transition to reestablishing itself as a Product Company, and the global leader in Hybrid Cloud and AI.

WHAT I’M DOING

I’m approaching this challenge exactly the way I would approach any new design project. Only in this case, rather than designing a piece of software or a branded event, we’re designing design itself. It starts with the loop.

Image of IBM Enterprise Design Thinking Loop

Observe

The left side of our Enterprise Design Thinking loop is called “Observe.” This is where I’m spending most of my time right now. My job is to learn everything I can about where and how design is happening around the company, what is working, and what can be improved.

I’ve set up one-on-one meetings with more than 50 designers and design leaders, GMs, SVPs, and of course, Arvind, to understand what they need from design and how it’s working today. I’m setting up Round Tables with design leaders (and one focused solely on research) to have a group discussion about the current state of design. I’m participating in product reviews and readouts from all our core design programs — including the Carbon design system, our Accessibility program, Racial Equity in Design, and our work on education and designer careers. My team is doing a review of past surveys of our design community and may put together another one to fill the gaps in our knowledge. And as a big believer in learning by doing, I’m proud to say that I just earned my first IBM Enterprise Design Thinking Badge (Practitioner Level).

Along the way, I’m getting help and guidance from many generous and knowledgeable tour guides including Doug Powell and his entire team who know just about everything there is to know about design at IBM, LaNeise Boyd who has helped me navigate the labyrinth of people and process at IBM, and Arin Bhowmick and his team who have welcomed me to their design reviews and shown patience as I ask lots of newbie questions about what they’re working on.

Reflect

In between the learning and listening, I’m looking for themes.

· How is design working with key partners such as those in product and engineering?

· Do we have the right number of designers and design executives, and how do we know?

· How are we leveraging our vast knowledge of customers, and sharing it with stakeholders within and outside of design?

· How is this knowledge shaping decisions about what deals we pursue, and what gets roadmapped?

· Is design empowered to not only design the thing right (right side of the loop), but also design the right thing (left side of the loop)?

· Where are the bright spots, where we can amplify exceptional work happening in one group to other parts of the company?

· How might we make our business stronger while adhering to our values about fairness, equity, and the social good?

Make

I’ve set myself and my team a deadline for January 2022 to present the first version of our Vision for Design @ IBM. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts here in the comments on what we can do to put design to its Highest and Best Use. IBMers, you can also message me directly on Slack.