Speaker: So you've done incredible research, real stories from real people.
And your boss leans over and looks at you and says, but what's the ROI of that?
Jerry?
Today I want to talk to you about what to do when your
leaders only think in numbers.
Welcome to this is eight CD folks.
I'm Jerry Scullion, and this is your daily dose of human-centered design.
Let's get into it.
I try to keep these episodes under five minutes.
Intentionally.
'cause I know we're all busy.
The world is, you know, getting a little bit more crazier by the day.
But I, I want to try and give you something to kind of lean into, to
try and help inform that change.
This is one of the most common challenges I hear from designers and change makers.
You know, working with a leader who lives and breathes
spreadsheets, KPIs, OKRs, ROI.
Everything needs a number attached to it or it does not exist in their world.
And honestly, I have a lot of empathy for that person.
They are not really being difficult.
They were trained this way.
They were rewarded this way.
Their entire career has reinforced the idea that if you can't measure
it, it really doesn't matter.
They don't get anything else at the end of the day.
For doing anything different.
They just want to make sure that they're gonna bump those numbers.
So when you walk in talking about empathy or lived experience or
qualitative insight, you are speaking a language that does not register.
It is not that they disagree with you folks, it is that they're literally do not
have a category for what you're saying.
They just don't have it in the toolkit.
So here is what.
I have seen work, and first of all, stop asking them to care about empathy.
I know that sounds really counterintuitive, but start with what
empathy saves, not what empathy means.
Connect your research findings to the metrics that they already track.
Reduction in complaints, call volume, rework costs, time to
resolution, et cetera, et cetera.
Even cost per transaction or cost to serve.
If your research has really uncovered that users are confused by a
particular step in a service, do not present it that users are frustrated.
Present it as this step generates 40% of our inbound calls, and each call costs
the organizations 12 Euro to handle same insight, but just a different framing.
And that framing is something that they can actually act on.
Second, learn their language before you expect them to learn yours.
Sit in their meetings, read their reports, and understand what they're measured on.
And when you can map your findings to their world, everything changes.
And third, remember that this leader is not your enemy.
They are actually your best translator once you have won them over.
Because when a metrics driven leader starts putting design
outcomes into numbers, everyone else in the organization listens.
They carry the credibility that you as a designer might not
have just yet in that context.
Just yet, the goal is to not make them care about design the way that we do.
The goal is to make design visible in the language that they already trust.
Now I wrote about the five leadership types that you'll
encounter in the newsletter.
The metrics leader is just one of them, and the link is in the show notes if you
want to learn more about the other four.
And that's it for today.
If you found it useful, share it with someone who needs to hear it.
And if you're not subscribed to a newsletter, go over and check out that
brand spanking new website at www dot.
This is hcd.com
and I'll talk to you tomorrow.