Design Thinking Meets Kotter: Human Centric Change Management.

Change management is always challenging. We often read about how change fails to deliver on its promises. Regardless of one’s best effort, it usually ends with winners and losers. Having recently learnt design thinking, I wanted to know if there is scope to marry design thinking principles with change management using the popular Kotter's eight-step method.  
For those unfamiliar with the Kotter model, Kotter advocates eight stages for change management, and they are: 

1. Establishing a sense of urgency: This is done by examining competitive realities, current or potential crises, or major opportunities. 
2. Forming a powerful guiding coalition- involves assembling groups of people with enough power to lead the change efforts. 
3. Creating a vision- a vision to help direct the change and a strategy to accompany the change 
4. Communicating the vision- sharing the vision through every forum available and teaching new behaviours through the examples of the guiding coalition 
5. Empowering others to act on the vision- getting rid of systems and structures that undermine the vision and encouraging ideas and risks 
6. Planning for and creating short-term wins- creating opportunities for visible improvements. Recognising and rewarding employees involved in the improvements 
7. Consolidating the improvement and producing more change requires increasing credibility to change systems and structures that don’t fit the vision. This includes hiring and promoting employees who can implement the change and reinvigorating new projects and change agents.  
8. Institutionalising new approaches-articulating the connection between the new behaviours and company success.  

Further details about the Kotter change management steps can be found here 

On the other hand, design thinking is a creative way of solving problems by understanding the needs and perspectives of the users. It has five key stages. 

1. Empathise: This stage involves understanding the users' or stakeholders' needs, expectations, and behaviours. It focuses on building empathy with the target users and gaining a deep understanding of their experiences and motivations. 
2. Define: In this stage, the problem is re-framed and defined in human-centric ways. It involves synthesising the information gathered during the empathise stage to determine the users' core problems and challenges. 
3. Ideate: During this stage, brainstorming and creative problem-solving sessions generate a wide range of ideas. The goal is to explore and create innovative solutions to the defined problems. 
4. Prototype: This stage involves creating quick, low-fidelity prototypes of the potential solutions. Prototypes can take various forms, such as sketches, wireframes, or physical models, and are used to visualise and test the ideas. 
5. Test: The final stage focuses on testing the prototypes with real users to gather feedback and insights. This iterative process allows for refining and improving the solutions based on user feedback, ensuring that the final product or service effectively meets the users' needs. 

Further details on design thinking can be found here.  

At first glance, design thinking and change management seem unrelated. Design thinking appears to focus on the individual user needs, whilst change management focuses on organisational challenges. Leadership is a central theme in Kotter's model. It emphasises the role of leaders in guiding the change process, aligning the organisation, and inspiring others to contribute to the vision. While design thinking doesn't explicitly focus on traditional leadership roles, it does emphasise collaboration and multidisciplinary teams. Leadership in design thinking is often distributed among team members, each contributing their expertise.  

However, by examining their principles together, we can discover a harmonious marriage that focuses on human-centric change management. There must be a subtle shift in mindset and approach for them to work together. Each step of Kotter's framework can be re-framed through a design-thinking lens.  

1. Rather than exploring an urgency for change, we instill a sense of curiosity. This means looking at the competitive and unseen realities, acknowledging the current problems as prescribed by Kotter and exploring the unknown through genuine curiosity. The five whys may come in handy here to get to the novel behind the known. If we imagine for a second that the organisational challenge is like an iceberg, the visible bit of the iceberg is the current realities we know. The invisible bit is what design thinking helps us to explore. Design thinking experts purposefully delay 'the' answer to give themselves time to explore other potential answers. Still, in this case, we dig deep into the realities of the situation, which invokes the need for change.  
2. How about enabling a collaborative environment instead of forming a powerful guiding coalition based on relative power? The winners and losers I described earlier often come from those who feel left out, either because they are not part of the coalition or don’t have the power to influence the change. Design thinking sees all parties as stakeholders. Instead of a guiding coalition, we have stakeholder collaboration, which enables the changing environment. 
3. The collaborative process from the first two steps becomes the catalyst for co-creating a mission for change. A quick caveat here: a vision can be created without the fusion of design thinking and Kotter. The enabling environment created by design thinking supports a better outcome. Design thinking enables the organisation to move beyond the aspirational state of a vision to the declaration state of the change. The first two steps clarify the vision of the change sought, and this stage defines the purpose of the change.  
4. There is a limited need to communicate the vision with this fusion. This is an opportunity for colleagues to experience the direction of travel. Design thinking advocates using visuals, prototypes and interactive experiences to explore every user journey. Communication at this stage could move from an intellectual understanding of the change to an emotional connection by using experience, surpassing traditional communication methods.  
5. Rather than empowering others to act on the vision, design thinking techniques, such as co-creation workshops and collaborative problem-solving, enable individuals at all levels to engage in the change process actively. It's about fostering a culture where everyone feels ownership of the change initiative. Kotter comes into its own during this phase, as the leaders can focus on eliminating systems and organisational structures that undermine the vision and supporting people to push the boundaries of the possible and risk.  
6. This stage becomes an opportunity for rapid prototyping, quick experimentation, and learning. Stage six for Kotter talks about quick wins, but it is important to note that merging both worlds may also involve momentary failure, which should be welcomed. Using design thinking avoids the need to plan for and create short-term wins. Short-term wins are actively sought and are aligned meaningfully with the stakeholder's needs. Meaningful wins remove the need to reward employees, as everyone is involved. Rather than recognition and reward, this stage is about celebrating every successful win and failure, given that this stage is about learning.  
7. This stage is redefined from one-time consolidation to having the mechanism for continuous feedback and adaptations. Iteration is sought at this stage of Kotter, but design thinking enables this to happen seamlessly, increasing the credibility of the change. Hiring and promotions result from organisational needs rather than solely to promote or reinvigorate the change.  
8. This step becomes an opportunity to anchor the new approach rather than institutionalising it. Stages six and seven would have provided opportunities to articulate the connection between the new behaviours and company success. This stage is more about ensuring that the change initiative is anchored and continues evolving in response to emerging challenges and opportunities.  

This blog post advocates the integration of both approaches. Still, it acknowledges that there are situations where the nature of the change may not lend itself to integrating both approaches, for example, in the cessation of business, which results in staff redundancy or other binary decision changes. Where the full integration may not be practicable, design thinking methods can be employed during the early stages of Kotter's model to understand better and inform the vision for change. The key is to leverage the strengths of each approach in a way that aligns with the organisation's challenge, culture and context with a human-centric approach.  
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Integrating design thinking and Kotter's Change Management model presents an exciting opportunity in the ever-evolving landscape of change management. This marriage of methodologies provides organisations with a powerful toolkit to navigate change successfully, promoting innovation, empathy, and user-centric solutions. As organisations strive for agility and effectiveness in managing change, the marriage of design thinking and Kotter's model emerges as a promising strategy for the future. ​

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