How do you get 400,000 employees at one of the world’s most storied blue-chip tech companies to adopt design thinking as a tool to transform the culture of its workforce?
When entrepreneur Phil Gilbert was brought into IBM, which in 2010 had acquired his firm, Lombardi Software, he was convinced that his days were numbered. Tasked with teaching Big Blue how to grow as fast as his business software processing company did, he felt out of place: “I pretty much knew that I was a square peg in a round hole,” he says.
Speaking at Fortune Brainstorm Design in Macau on Tuesday, Gilbert noted ruefully that businesses typically enlist him “when some effort is failing.” IBM wanted him to replicate the secret sauce that made his Austin-based Lombardi so agile and its products so beloved by customers.
The reinvention required a radical approach. In 2012, appointed as the company’s general manager of design, Gilbert brought design thinking to IBM’s entire employee base. His first barrier? How to get “400,000 people to do something when none of them report to you,” he recalls.
His answer wasn’t to follow the usual corporate top-down mandate methods, but to treat the change program as a product, IBM as a marketplace, and teams as customers. Instead of using a technology-first approach, he focused on empathy and user outcomes.
And breaking from corporate operational tradition, he also allowed employees to opt in rather than be forced to participate. “It gives them agency, and having agency makes all the difference,” he told the audience.
Design thinking became an organizing principle at IBM, putting the customer at the center. The company went on to hire over 1,000 designers to embed into cross-functional teams with engineers and developers. Results included faster product launches, better alignments of project teams, and accelerated product development cycles.
Northwestern Mutual
Fellow panelist Tony Bynum saw at his employer, Northwestern Mutual, the need for a center of excellence to represent a “single source of truth.” He founded the company’s Design Thinking Center of Excellence in 2020, after realizing that his small team, which was interacting with other groups, was using different languages, methods, and tools.
The aha moment for Bynum came with the idea of shifting away from outputs to outcomes. Using traditional methods was akin to the old fable of a group of blind men getting a different understanding of what an elephant was by touching different parts. “We’re all touching the same elephant, and every person’s perspective has merit and value in reconstructing the elephant,” Bynum said.
Bynum, now the director of Chicago-based Institute of Design’s new Executive Academy, argued that “dexterity” is the key attribute that leaders need to succeed amid ambiguity and complexity. He described this as “using design-led capabilities to become ambidextrous, meaning you can perform and transform.”
A successful leader in a culture of change requires “humility, bar none,” as a critical attitude, Bynum said.
Gilbert concurred with Bynum that humility is the “new name” to use in driving cultural change. “We need humility first with ourselves, and then with our users.”