What You Think is the Work is Not the work

Working change through the systems requires tenacity. Working it through the humans requires grit.

Leading IBM’s global transformation

That was my experience while leading IBM’s global transformation beginning in 2012. My colleagues and I helped thousands of interdisciplinary teams at IBM become more entrepreneurial, more agile, and more customer-focused.

I never had any doubt that the initial IBM teams exposed to design thinking would like it and take it up gladly. They would be handpicked, no doubt, and work with us willingly.

What I didn’t know was whether the positive experiences of these early teams would be impactful enough to begin to infect IBM culture. A lot of this depended on the designers we assigned to these teams. We needed them to be much more than highly skilled design professionals. We needed them to have the desire and mental fortitude to become valued teammates who could help initiate non-designers into IBM’s new design culture.

Our first cohort of 65 newly hired designers arrived in Austin in the summer of 2013 for an intensive 90-day designers’ camp. Nearly all of them were recruited straight out of some of the best undergraduate and graduate design programs in the United States, but we weren’t there to teach them about design. Instead, our objective was to prepare them for their added roles as cultural ambassadors and to acclimate them to IBM’s work culture. As early-career designers, they would be exposed to technical languages they’d never heard before and business practices they’d never experienced before. We also wanted to prepare them for certain IBMers’ indifference (or outright hostility) to the design skill set they’d been studying for years. We knew they would encounter engineers with decades of domain expertise who would be loath to see the balance of power shift inside their teams.

During the designers’ camp I told them, “What you think is the work is not the work.” That got their attention. “You think the work you’re about to engage in is about design. You’re wrong. That’s what you studied. That’s what you love. That’s who you are. That’s what you’re passionate about and what you want to do. That’s not the work. The work is everything you’re going to have to do to get your designs implemented. And many times, this will be in the face of open resistance.”

I explained that design within their Hallmark team would call on them to refine all their soft skills of empathy, collaboration, and teamwork. Getting to know their teammates. Learning how to advocate for their point of view, but also learning when to compromise in the name of “better,” even if not yet “perfect.”

Irresistible change

In our program of irresistible change, the job of a designer included developing the communication and leadership skills necessary to get their ideas across in an engaging way. I told them how I’d met corporate designers over the years who complained bitterly that their non-designer teammates, “just don’t get it!” In our program, it’s the designer’s job to inspire in their non-design teammates the desire to “get it.”

“The most successful designers in the world are the ones who master all these non-design domains,” I said. “This is the ‘work’ I’m talking about. Because it’s hard, it’s probably not something you’ve trained for, or that you’ll enjoy doing.” By the way, this goes for the new competency in any change program. The experts in the new skills must accept responsibility for the hard work of change, as opposed to the much easier task of delivering on their skills.

I told these young designers that to thrive as designers at IBM, “it will take backbones of steel.” Our hope was that the designers would use these 90 days to develop an esprit de corps. I wanted them to build professional and personal bonds so deep that they could lean on each other for support on days that went poorly.

One late afternoon during the second week of designers’ camp, I stopped by as a session was wrapping up at 5:00 p.m. In that moment, there was a rapid exodus of all the designers out of the building. No one hung back to talk with the instructors or lingered to talk with each other. They just rose from their seats and left. It was so strange that I made a point of coming back the next day just before 5:00 p.m. It happened again. Everyone, it seemed, just rose from their seats and took off. It was as though a factory whistle had gone off.

This bothered me immensely. There seemed to be no healthy tension or nervousness in anyone, nor any meaningful bonds between them, other than, perhaps, a “see ya tomorrow” that I’d hear. I got more upset the more I thought about it.

Over the weekend, I wrote my team a somewhat intemperate email demanding we meet in my office at 7:30 a.m. on Monday morning. “I am not happy with the demands being placed on the campers,” I wrote. “They are not being challenged; they are leaving early; and I believe we are failing them.” I wanted everyone in this meeting to get clear on my expectations: “I am certain in the campers’ ability to respond; I am not certain in our ability to lead.”

On Monday morning, I asked them all, “What is happening here?!?” To my mind, we had just 90 days to impress on these young people the difficulty of our mission—their mission. If we failed to make them ready, the teams they were assigned to would chew them up and spit them out. It was our responsibility not let that happen! We had to prepare them for the very heavy lifting they were on the front lines to do for us. Providing some happy-go-lucky experience—letting them just all punch out at 5:00 p.m. each day—was an abrogation of that responsibility. As I spoke, I grew increasingly outraged.

Then one of the camp’s designer instructors (I’ll call her Carol) rose to her feet and said she was the likely source of the trouble. She showed me a slide from her day-one opening presentation. It showed a clock with a hand set at 5:00 p.m. announcing the end of each workday. Carol said she’d been emphasizing the importance of work-life balance in the design profession.

I thought my head might explode. I went off on the whole team. “This is NOT a 9-to-5 job! In fact, I want these people to want to be at work from 8-to-8 if they need to! They need to know that that’s what it will take for us to win!”

Everyone got the message and left my office to prepare for the day’s sessions. At the end of that day, which stretched well beyond 5:00 p.m., Carol came by my office to tell me she had resigned. She assured me she had no hard feelings, but added, “You need lions, and I’m a kitten.”

It was, to my mind, one of the bravest and most honest things anyone who’s ever worked with me has done. I remember Carol fondly for it. But she was right.

Irresistible change requires lions.