A Human-centered Ecosystem
A measured approach to validation
IBM had invested in a digital credentialing platform. The enthusiasm many executives had for this highly visible way to motivate and assess their teams was not shared by most of IBM’s design community, which considered digital badges to be at odds with human-centered goals. Our solution gave managers and learners all the value of digital credentials while cleverly avoiding the the many pitfalls. Along the way we uncovered fundamental truths about the nature of human centered organizations.
What is misguided is the common belief that as long as everyone is an expert in design thinking, the organization will successfully become human-centered.
-Human Centered Organization, Co-authored by Sean Pizel
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IBM’s Design Education team had been closing corporate design knowledge and skills gaps with bold and effective programs. Early on in the mission, IBM had acquired a digital credentialing platform and for many reasons, many of them educational, education teams were asked to use it.
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Go ask a designer what level design badge they have achieved. It will be an awkward, and probably unpleasant conversation. And while our courses were teaching design thinking, a sort of layperson’s approach to design, the idea that anything design-adjacent would be reduced to badges threatened to undermine the very design transformation that our education programs were supporting.
The world expects linear progression, and motivated learners want “the next badge.” This wasn’t just a problem with learners…. educators get trapped in this mindset too,.
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We established two credentials that helped solve our immediate tracking and motivational needs for what we thought were our beginner and expert level badges.
But as we started to further develop and support the path between them, we realized that our mental model was completely wrong.
When we realized that the badges described a role-based ecosystem of skills, not a linear progression, we completely changed how we represent and measure the adoption of new behaviors across teams.
With the launch of the Design Thinking University MVP, we designed and published the Practitioner and Coach badges. We had also at that time, imagined a Leader credential, but we were not prioritizing any learning path for it at the time.
We envisioned growing the hugely successful Design Thinking Immersion Course into a learning and credentialing platform. The next credential, the Co-creator Badge, would required evidence of successful practice. This credential was thought to provide a waypoint between Practitioner and Coach credentials, which signified knowledge and proficiency, respectively. And while that was true, we were still missing a key point. It wasn’t until we were investigating skills gaps in managers that we realized our mistake. We were teaching distinct skills that each needed their own learning path. While our education and transformation needs required us to track expertise in coaching, and only exploratory skills co-creation, one is not simply the more experienced version of the other. The jobs to be done were related, they were like two different dishes whose base was the same mother sauce, but nonetheless were fundamentally different.
This was a powerful organizing principle for our education portfolio, allowing us to better assess the skills gaps, not just of individuals, but of teams and their leadership. We set out to improve the learning paths that had been designed with the inferior mental model.
Only the CoCreate skills mapped directly to what was traditionally thought of as design thinking. What phrase described these broader practices of deploying and growing teams, educating and consulting? We named it The Human Centered Organization and set out to document what that meant, what the key practices were, and why it was important.
Impact
Much has been made of the effect of IBM’s design transformation using traditional business metrics. The digital credentials were a powerful motivational tool that amplified the enablement efforts that powered this transformation. Virtually all of IBM, and some half million others, have now achieved and shared our credentials.
Moreover, our reluctance to credential skills within a domain that must remain organic and human, forced us to deploy these credentials with such care and attention, that we ultimately developed an industry-leading understanding around the purpose of human centered organizations, and the corporate development programs necessary to achieve it.
