Patterns
IBM, one of the world’s largest companies, had just set out to create a sustainable culture of design. Mission number one was to attract and activate thousands of new designers in the next two years.
“Lemme ‘splain….
No, not enough time.
Let me sum up”
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IBM popularized the phrase “Good Design Is Good Business” in the 60’s and attracted luminaries in the field like Elliot Noyes and Ray Eames, but by 2010 design was isolated to the smallest pockets of IBM. New design-minded leadership had emerged and with the mission of creating a sustainable culture of design at IBM. Step one was hiring and training 1000 designers.
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How were we going to compete for design talent with companies like Facebook and Google, when our research was showing us that most designers under the age of 25 didn’t even know what IBM does? Could an onboarding program help with recruiting? We had reason to believe it could.
Once we persuade new talent to join our team, how could we prepare them to work in an environment that has little understanding of the proper role of design? Generally speaking environmental gaps like ours are not solved by training, so mitigating this gap became a guiding objective of the program.
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Our solution was to create an immersive experience that allowed recruiting to cast the widest net possible. We would take creatives of all types, and prime them to apply their craft as part of software teams. We expanded upon Design Thinking, building a curriculum that reinforced the skills our designers would need to be successful in a highly distributed global company…that knows very little about design.
Inigo Montoya, son of noted sword designer
We started by adding three rituals and patterns to the traditional model of Design Thinking, and then used scaffolding techniques to progressively teach how to perform design it in increasingly complex environments. As our development path matured we deconstructed the ‘stages’ of design completely to better match the emerging needs of continuous delivery
We would further assist the recruiting team by making the onboarding experience as enriching as possible- These new designers would be given real projects and real authority within weeks of joining.
Having got our head around an education strategy that would close knowledge gaps. We needed to solve the environmental gaps.
For this we favored discovery based learning. We would divide the cohort of 80 into four sections, each led by an expert designer, and give them real projects curated from a incubator program created for this program. This allowed the designers to demonstrate skills, practice social learning, and most importantly, build habits and support structures for dealing with same environmental friction they would experience in their career at IBM
Having designed the experience to build a community of peers, we needed to go further. Research was showing that this generation shared more with their families than ever before, so we allowed them to invite their friends and families into their professional lives.
Following SAM, an agile approach to improving educational offerings, we researched how learner and teachers progressed through our program. The results we surprising. For instance, the noisiest part of the program, employee deployment, was in fact a high-point from the students perspective. The teachers, however, felt under-supported. Acting on the this research we went on to win prestigious design and education awards.
Impact
The word of mouth, and recursive recruiting from graduates of the Patterns bootcamp had a profound effect on recruiting. The energy, investment, and trust we placed in our new designers drew more talent to us.
The incubation projects directly led to IBM Cloud, Watson Assistant, and other flagship IBM products. Thanks to these successes, the demand for designers skyrocketed and helped fund the next iterations of the program. Over 300 new professionals have been through the program in the first 4 years.
The connections and bonds formed by this intense experience allowed us to beat industry retention rates. Working at IBM was intense, but the Patterns program had prepared them and they were eager to promote this experience with their friends
Read about one employee's 6-week journey into Enterprise Design Thinking
300+
New professionals educated in 4 years
