1. Tell us about Zilver Innovation’s design practices and describe why you do what you do.
Zilver is a creative consultancy specialized in ‘brand driven innovation’: turning vision into value. Brand driven innovation is based on the understanding that in order to innovate meaningfully and sustainably, organizations need a deeply rooted and shared vision. This vision helps to do what is required for successful innovation: take calculated risks, envision potential futures, work across silos, and understand what constitutes value to the customer and value to the company.

The brand driven innovation process consists of 4 stages:

1. First we help companies to build a shared vision by forming a deeply rooted understanding of themselves and their customers.
2. Second we help companies turn this vision into a roadmap for growth
3. Third we help companies design the products and services that make this growth tangible
4. Fourth we help companies orchestrate the touch points and implement the products and services we helped design in the third stage.

Our design background is very much at the core of what we do: we don’t only work in a visual, inspiring, and co-created way, leading to tangible and compelling innovations. Also our working methods, processes and tools have design thinking at the heart of them. What this means concretely is this:

• We treat our clients’ challenges as ‘ill defined problems’: an important part of our job is not only to find the right answer, but first to find the right question. Helping our client discover the exact nature of the challenge they are facing or the problem they are solving is an important part of the value we offer. As designers we are very comfortable with this fuzzy stage of the innovation process where we unravel the issue at hand and explore the questions behind the initial question. Our client however may not be used to this and may perceive it as an inefficient and time-consuming process. What we have learned at Zilver is to gain the patience and trust that allow us to take our client along in this journey. This involves close and open collaboration, a very clear process despite the fuzziness, and clear visualizations of results along the way, even if they aren’t final yet. When problem and solution co-evolve, it’s vital to spend a lot of attention to capturing and sharing progress.

• Our processes are iterative, non linear and often improvised. We don’t claim to have a one size fits all solution, and we don’t claim there’s an easy way out of complexity. Also, we dare to take a step back if a certain route doesn’t work and we keep testing and refining solutions. Again, we have had to learn to gain confidence from our clients that this is the right approach. One way we do this is to ‘productize’ our approach: we chop our process into byte size pieces, often captured in the form of tools used in client workshops, of which we can safely predict the results within a certain fault margin. We then go back to our studio, do our more open ended improvisational work, and come back again with a well-prepared workshop or tool to involve the client. So while the whole of the process may be organic and partly improvised, it sits in a well-defined framework and involves the client in finely orchestrated workshops and tools.

• We are optimistic prototypers. This means we firmly and fundamentally believe that things can be better. It also means that we like to try things out and we are not afraid to fail. When you’ve tried something, you’re already halfway to solving it. A prototype, or an idea, to us is a new way of asking the question, not necessarily a new answer. It asks: ‘would this work? Is this a potential solution area? Is a right way to look at the question? Again this is something clients aren’t usually comfortable with. It’s part of our job to make them feel comfortable with unfinished ideas and rickety prototypes, by showing how they form a vital step towards better products and services.

• We understand people. As designers we’ve always worked for and with real human beings. Not stats, not market segments or personas, but real humans of flesh and blood. We’ve discovered that our ‘design empathy’, as we like to call it, brings tremendous value to our clients. Our understanding for people has benefits in two distinct but overlapping areas: we help our clients get much closer to their customers by engaging them in design research, context mapping, diary studies, house visits etc etc. And we help our clients create a much stronger internal bond by making people from different backgrounds, divisions, functions and levels, work together around shared themes like customer understanding and vision.

2. What do you think are the current drivers of change in design practices at Zilver Innovation?
A very important discovery we’ve made since working with our partner agency ProtoPartners in Sydney, Australia, is this: it’s tempting to think of designerly approaches to problem solving as being diametrically opposed to businesslike approaches. Qualitative versus quantitative research, visuals versus text, creativity versus control, synthesis versus analysis, right brains versus left brain etc etc. But in fact the two need each other and work fantastically well together. This is especially true when it comes to the more numeric, quantifiable and measurable approach business managers naturally adopt. We’ve discovered ways to integrate these into our research and design processes and the results are fantastic. We now combine qualitative research and design intuition with very strict and well-defined numeric performance indicators, and solid business cases. This means we have a much more involved and committed management team on board during our work. And we’ve made it much easier for them to adopt the results of our work. I’d say that the adoption of quantifiable KPI’s into our design framework is one of the greatest drivers for our own growth at this point.

3. What excites you about design at the moment (this can either be your own practice at Zilver Innovation or other practices)?
The fact that slowly but steadily design is growing out of its straitjacket of ‘making things look prettier’ to actually helping to solve very complex human challenges. This has been my quest ever since the nineties, and it looks like we’re gaining ground. Design, and especially design thinking, is finding a foothold in health, education, finances, mobility, politics, urbanism and sustainability. It looks like it will be there to stay. Zilver’s movie ‘design the new business’ explores this topic. Watch it on www.designthenewbusiness.com.

4. What do you think the future practices of design will look like and why?
I believe in strong partnerships between design and business, design and the humanities, design and technology, design and entrepreneurship, design and economics. It’s for us designers to build these bridges and make them relevant. We have to stop moaning about being misunderstood, and reach out to make ourselves understood. I think designers and design have to stop thinking of themselves as a counterforce, protecting the pristine intrinsic qualities of whatever it is we’re working on, in splendid isolation and without any relevance to others. We have to become part of the companies we work for, the businesses they operate, the projects we are involved in and the problems we solve. In the future, design will no longer be a department in a company, but a quality you look for in anyone you hire.

In the spring of 2011, the idea for the movie was born. Through my teaching, writing and consultancy practises, I got more and more interested in how new design approaches are helping large organisations deal with complex issues. I saw product driven companies work to make the transition to a more service dominant logic. I saw technology centred companies aspiring to become more human centred, with technology as enabler. And I saw large companies struggle with the agility and entrepreneurial spirit that is required for relevant innovation.

So Zilver and 6 students from Strategic Design at TU Delft made a movie on the topic. It’s time to look back and reflect, and to look forward and anticipate!

First of all it is interesting to note how the movie itself, the actual 38 minutes of edited footage, seems to be just a little speck in the entire process. This process consists of two halves, that are mirrored around the thing itself:

1. The process of DthenewB team working together in conceptualizing, shooting, editing and discussing the movie. (see this ‘making of’ clip for an impression)

Behind the Scenes from DTNB from dthenewb on Vimeo.

2. The process of viewers around the globe screening, watching, discussing and commenting on the movie.

The first half of the process was great: exhilarating, hard, complex, more work than we ever anticipated, but very very inspiring and a great experiment leading to a nice little prototype of a documentary.

But it’s this second half of the process that is especially nice: people from Sydney to Helsinki, from Capetown to Singapore, from Barcelona to Virginia, have taken the time to assemble some people around a screen and watch and discuss the movie together.  And most of them have been so kind to share their findings with us. What we’ve learned is that the topic really jives with people (to quote Maria Bezaitis from Intel at 20:42 in the movie), and fortunately not only designers. The movie triggers good discussions around the theme of new ways of doing business, and the role of design approaches therein. In that sense the movie is a huge success: as a boundary object to open up the debate, something to group around with various people and exchange learnings and opinions.

At the Hogeschool Utrecht last week, students, teachers, entrepreneurs, business people and designers gathered to watch the movie and try out the worksop format we’ve developed. The discussions were extremely fruitful, applicable and inspiring!

And this is actually the part of the whole DthenewB setup that we want to expand. We want to facilitate the learning process (of ourselves and anyone interested in the topic) and enable the capturing of these learnings.  Therefore we’ve developed a workshop program and facilitators toolkit that you will find on a new dedicated section of the DthenewB website. The core of the programme will be the movie and the more in depth interviews we are currently editing. From there, the program offers various topics to explore in more detail, in the form of a training, a facilitated round-table discussion or a workshop. We’ve prototyped and tested parts of this new venture and we are very excited by the  first reactions!

But let’s be honest, there’s more than shiny happy people: criticism on the movie has been fierce. But also truthful and constructive. Here are some of the comments on the movie we got from people around the globe that we learned from the most:

• “You’ve only looked at large businesses, where are the SME’s?” True, we were especially interested in large companies and their change agents, because the issues they’re facing are so complex. A future project may focus on smaller businesses and the specific issues they are facing.
• “Why haven’t you portrayed the fear and the misunderstanding a lot of these people encounter in their work?”. Fair point, but we didn’t want to make a movie with ‘moaning people’ quoting Ralf Beuker in 20:44 of the movie) On the other hand, it shouldn’t be a success stories only movie. We may not have stuck the exact right balance.
• “It’s just a lot of talk, where are the examples?”. Again, fair point. It was hard to make a short movie with sufficient depth AND show a lot of case studies, within the time and budget constraints we had (Zilver financed this movie out of our own pocket). Although we have attempted to put in some case material I think the movie overall has turned out to be too abstract for some viewers. This is a great challenge for a next movie project: how to show the process and the outcomes in a visually engaging and concrete way (where typically between the two lies at least a year and some content is confidential).
• “It is unclear to me who you are trying to target with this movie”. We are targeting anyone who might be interested in how new design approaches are helping large organisations deal with complex issues, and how new agencies and schools are operating in this field. This includes a somewhat eclectic bunch of students, educators, consultants, managers, designers and so forth. I think the ‘complaint’ behind this question is: “I don’t feel you’re addressing me”. This question usually comes from people who are not seeing anything new in the movie, or who don’t connect to the topic at all. Fair enough, we have created a bit of a niche product haven’t we?
• “I hoped to find out what design thinking is, you haven’t given me the answer”. True. We specifically did not want to make a movie on what design thinking is but on what it does. Google ‘design thinking’ and you’ll get plenty of definitions (some better than others). Google “what does design thinking do for my company” and you get none. Ask a designer what design thinking is and he’ll more or less know the answer. Ask a business manager what design thinking is and he’ll say ‘who cares, just solve the problem’. To be honest, to us the debate on what design thinking is is rather like the plumber endlessly discussing his new wrench with you while all you want from him is to fix your faucet.
• “The sound of the movie sucks”. It sure does. We made the huge mistake of not investing in the right type of microphone. Sorry.

But, all in all, I learned a great deal from this project and the people we interviewed. Here are my key insights:

Océ

The days of push marketing are over, companies have to learn to identify their space in value networks. Transitions are not disruptions of your core business, they are your core business.

Volkswagen

If you want to innovate, it’s vital that you find the right stage in the organisation to play on. Designers build bridges between abstract and concrete, internal and external, idea and execution, research and development, etc. It’s not business and design, that are opposing entities, it’s more are you in the business of creating new things or optimizing existing things?

Alexander Osterwalder

People are building new businesses based on business models from the past. But if you want to innovate, you have to include new business models. And you have to involve designers. Designers have the right mind-set to fail and learn so you don’t fail big. And they have the tools and methods to help businesses create growth.

Frido Smulders

The debate on design thinking focuses very much on the creativity part. But design brings much more to the table than just creativity. It’s not about ‘thinking out of the box’ in a workshop or two. Design thinking is more complex and more interesting than that.

Jan Buijs

Designers have the ability to analyse and synthesise. This is a very valuable skill. But it’s not about taking the design route OR the business route, design is part of business, it supports business objectives. What designers contribute is both thinking and doing.

Ralf Beuker

Designers have to stop moaning about being misunderstood and instead add value to business. Everyone understands value. Where business thinking has the ability to make sense of the past through measurements, designers have the ability to make sense of the future through empathy and insight.

Claro Partners and Maria Bezaitis from Intel

A lot of services revolve around the understanding that there’s a shift from ownership to access to an experience. Combining business understanding and business model innovation with social insights and understanding. Clients are not buying design thinking from you, or research as such. They are buying outcomes and solutions. You can only get there through creativity and interpretation of data.

Damian Kernhan and Amanda O’Donell from Virgin Mobile

Making the complex simple is Damian’s core business. Differentiation requires a service design approach, leading to experience innovation that does impact the bottom line. Emotion is crucial in getting people on board to design the new business. The business approach and the design approach go hand in hand to deliver magic, yeah J

 In10

The shift from return of investment in a financial way to return on investment in terms of loyalty.

Arne van Oosterom and Ton Borsboom from Philips

Design thinking is not a method, it’s about finding the right method for the purpose and asking the right questions. More info on designers DNA which we co-founded: www.designersDNA.com. Product focussed companies are starting to embrace service design because products are becoming interconnected and become surrounded by a service eco-system. But it’s an emerging competence that needs to be learned. Designers as connectors between businesses and departments.

Engine

Design is a very human activity that helps organisations become more people centred. You can’t solve new problems with old solutions. Design is about finding new solutions. Design thinkers are comfortable with postponing the moment of pinning down the problem, to explore different ways of framing the problem to find newer and better solutions. It’s about balancing analytical approaches to problem solving with more design led approaches.

I’m very excited about this project and all that’s to come. Keep discussing, keep reflecting, and keep doing! And please don’t spare us your criticism! Or your thumbs up

The classes I teach in Delft revolve around the notion that designers have the right mind-set to solve complex business problems. We try to give them the confidence to leverage from this mind-set in the real world. We do this by making it explicit to them what it is and by giving them some of the essential baggage they will need to find their way in corporate organisations.

We explain what a design mind-set entails by talking about wicked problems, about how understanding a problem and solving it take place at the same time. We talk about how visualisation skills have nothing to do with design as aesthetics but much more with the ability to grasp complexity and frame it in simple relationships. We talk about prototyping in the broad sense of the word, as business activity, envisioning and testing potential futures that enable companies to choose the right way forward. And we talk about iterative processes, empathy, understanding, teamwork, and creativity.

Then, we take them on a quick tour through the areas of business where they will hopefully contribute in the near future. We talk about the fuzzy front end of innovation, where there is no problem or project yet, only the need, or urge, or directive, to innovate. We talk about the role of brands in organisations and society and how they relate to innovation and design. And we talk about the shift companies are making from product and technology focussed to people and service focussed.

I know that I practise what I preach in Delft with my company. But for students it may be hard to imagine what their working life will look like. So what better project to give them than to have them research:
- How what they are studying is put into practice.
- If what we teach them holds true in the real world out there.
- If companies are in need of their skills.
So they set to work in July 2011.

What is the “Design the New Business” project about? from dthenewb on Vimeo.

After many discussions, various iterations of storyboards, and many late night Facebook sessions exchanging documentaries to be learnt from, the students decided to focus on three main areas:

The first: Complexity is the foundation for the rise of design thinking. A design mind-set is essential in solving complex problems.
As Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie put it in their new book ‘Designing for Growth’: “We’ve come to
the end of the runway on maximizing productivity and re-engineering processes….The analytics-first mindset works fine for process improvement, but not for innovation. Our over-reliance on analytics denies our human capacity for creativity and results in uninspiring products and services, low growth, and pessimism about the future.”. Or, to paraphrase Marty Neumeier in ‘the designful company’: organisations are dealing with problems that are so complex, in a society that is even more complex, with customers having more say than ever, that managing your way out is no longer an option. “You have to design your way out”. In other words: design thinking is a mind set that can help solve problems that traditional, linear, ‘old’ management mind-sets can’t.
The movie sets out to discover whether this is true. The students aren’t raving about design thinking, but neither are they going to declare it dead like it was the latest fad as Bruce Nussbaum did in his infamous Fast Company post. They just want to know where design thinking’s at, in big multinational organisations that don’t have time for foolishness or fads.
So the students went out and interviewed key people at companies like Intel, Volkswagen, Océ, Virgin, and Philips, to find out whether their problems have indeed become more wicked, and to what extent designers, or managers with a design mind-set for that matter, have the answers.

The second: We need a new breed of designers and a new breed of business managers. And they need to become more alike. Or at least understand each other better.
We think that while many designers contribute immense value through the products, services, communications, environments and interactions they design, not all of them can help businesses solve their wicked problems. Nothing wrong with that, the world will always need highly skilled designers. But what does it take for someone with a design mind-set to actually contribute to the solving of wicked problems within large organisations? And what does it take for a business manager to embrace uncertainty, complexity, creativity, cross-silo teamwork, and prototyping? The students are talking to educators from institutions in Delft and Muenster to find out what the designer cum business manager of the future will look like. And how design and business education are shaping up to meet changing needs.

The third: the design mind-set is already playing a role in the new business. It’s already happening.
While the blogosphere can’t get enough of discussing the birth and early demise of design thinking, we see practitioners all over the world making a solid living on applying their knowledge and skills to real companies, adding real bottom line value to the balance sheet. They have a design mind-set and they are helping these companies grow.
The students are interviewing companies like Claro Partners in Barcelona, Design Thinkers, Zilver and In10 in the Netherlands, Engine in London, Alexander Osterwalder in Switzerland, and Protopartners in Australia. They are gathering case material that proves that design thinking in practice isn’t some fluffy magic wand but a solid foundation for processes and methodologies that help companies create lasting value for their customers.

The movie is in full progress as we speak. And I can tell you it’s almost like a design project: we had no idea what problem we were solving when we started, let alone that we could predict the outcome. Two months, thousands of air miles (remind me to plant those trees) and 30 hours plus of fantastic footage later we’re finding out that the problem we’ve uncovered (let’s make a movie to explore how design is meeting business) is no longer exactly matching our ambitions. The students are blogging, twittering and discussing the project on facebook like there’s no tomorrow. But now we are also thinking of a big screening event, including speakers and a lot of discussion. We have ideas for a teaching tool kit. We might even do local screening events around the world. But maybe, once the thing’s finished, we’ll be onto something new. Who knows, it’s a design process after all……..

But first, we, err… they, have a liiiiiiiiiittle bit of editing to do.
We will keep you posted, expected release: somewhere in October. Yes, this year.

In virtually every branding, service design or innovation strategy project Zilver does, customer journey mapping plays a central role. It’s a highly versatile framework that invites project teams to ask the right questions and find the right answers. It plays a role in several points in the project:

1. at the beginning, to assess what research needs to be done.
2. during, to map research insights and to generate business opportunities.
3. at the end, to map project results, design guidelines and innovation propositions.

What is it?

Customer journey mapping is a method for assessing, visualizing and improving customer experiences. It helps you view a product or service system from the customer’s perspective, thereby allowing you to identify opportunities for improvement.

The essence of customer journey mapping is that the relationship you build with your customer does not revolve solely around the purchase of your product. You can be of value to the customer both before and after the purchase. We call the string of events that a customer goes through in buying and using your product ‘the customer journey’. It is a journey that often begins before your product even comes into the picture, for example at home, on the couch, flipping through magazines for inspiration. And this journey does not end when the customer has purchased your product or service. To the contrary, this is where the usage, maintenance and maybe upgrading start. At the end of the journey, you always hope that the customer will find the way back to your brand. If you succeed at this, you will have built a sustainable relationship.

Customer journey mapping is not a tool exactly. It doesn’t provide a quick fix to a specific problem. It’s more a framework that allows you to get a grip on many different aspects of customer experience design. It is always about the customer’s experience, but it is up to you how you map that experience and what you map exactly:

You can use a very wide group of customers or a very specific type of customer. You could even choose to map the journey of a different stakeholder, like, say, a supplier. Likewise, you can analyze a highly specific situation, or you can choose to explore a more general journey. Then, for every stage of the journey, you can examine customer needs, your objectives, the customer’s objectives, the touch points that play a role, how these touch points are experienced, the emotions that are experienced, how your brand values are expressed, whether there are opportunities for innovation, what you wish to communicate, and so on.

This Slideshare presentation was made for TU Delft students of Strategic Product Design and Design for Interaction. It takes you through the why, how and what of CJM.

Why is customer journey mapping relevant?

1. To allow the customer to generate value
As Vargo and Lusch put it so aptly, we are moving from value in exchange to value in use. You don’t want to buy a car, you want to buy mobility. Rather than selling objects, organizations must develop eco-systems where customers can co-create value with them. This requires a holistic view of the eco-system that customer journey mapping can provide.

2. To create an integrated experience
Customers do not experience your product or service in an isolated fashion. When it concerns brand preference, they assess their total experience with that brand from beginning to end. If you can book a flight very easily and receive excellent assistance at the check-in counter, but, once on board, experience a horribly cramped seat and vile food, your total experience will be a negative one. So it is important for an organization to get a grip on the entire customer journey in order to ensure an unforgettable total experience.

3. To stand out in the market
In a saturated market with fierce competition, it is difficult to compete on product alone. The relationship you build with your customers before, during and after the purchase offers tremendous opportunities to differentiate yourself in the market.

4. To express your brand
Unique brands offer a unique product or service. But to truly express your brand and to take advantage of all opportunities to fulfil your brand promise, you need to look beyond your product alone. By identifying opportunities to do things in your unique way throughout the entire customer journey, you will create a stronger and more relevant brand.

When is customer journey mapping relevant?

Customer journey mapping can be useful for in a wide range of applications:

1. CJM as an analysis method
Sometimes, mapping is done solely to better project yourself in the life of your customer. This will often show you the areas in which your knowledge is insufficient, which can then be researched further. You can also use customer journey mapping to assess the current status of your brand, i.e. to create a snapshot of the status quo.

2. CJM as a visualization method
Modern organizations are full of complexity. And modern challenges are ill-defined and multi-facetted. Customer journey maps are a great way to make sense of at least some of this complexity. They can boil a whole lot of information down to one clear visual map. This alone is worth the effort.

3. CJM as a creative method
But customer journey mapping is also an excellent way to scout for opportunities to improve your offering or to develop new products, services or experiences. And it can guide the design of these products, services and experiences by providing focussed insights, requirements and guidelines.

How do you build a customer journey map?

To create a customer journey map, you carry out the following steps:

1. Choose your target group. Who do you have in mind for the customer journey? A customer profile (persona) or a stakeholder map can be helpful here.
2. Choose your theme. This could be a specific occasion, a specific experience or a specific type of purchase. If your theme is too general, the customer journey map will also be rather generic. It is better to make several maps for more specific situations.
3. Determine the phases that the customer goes through. Don’t confuse the phases with touch points. These may need to be redesigned, so they come later. Put yourself into the customer’s shoes and describe the phases she experiences before, during and after the purchase or use of your product or service. It helps to think of them as tasks: orienting, gathering information, etc. These phases form the horizontal axis of the CJM.
4. Decide what you want to examine for every phase. There are no restrictions, but the following steps yield a good foundation:

• What emotions does the customer experience during the different phases? You can map these in a graph, from very positive to very negative.
• What are the customer’s goals in every phase? What does she aim to accomplish?
• Which touch points does the customer encounter in every phase?
• What would be the ideal situation in every phase from the customer’s perspective?
• What is the difference between the current and the ideal situation?
• What opportunities for improvement can you identify?

These elements form the vertical axis of the CJM.
5. Fill the cells of the CJM. Do this as a team and involve as many different people as possible. Discuss why you include certain things. Take your time and do not attempt to finish it in one day. It is better to return to it repeatedly to view it with fresh eyes. Maybe you need to do some, or a lot of extra research to fill a cell.
6. Translate the CJM into a plan of action. What do you need to examine in more detail? What project steps do you plan to take? What ideas do you plan to implement and when?
7. Hang the map up somewhere where your colleagues can see it an can keep contributing to it.
8. Repeat step 1-6 for different stakeholders, different experiences etc.