Written by Ezequiel Williams
DTG commonly works with innovation, HR, education, marketing, sales, consulting, and IT teams, but we seldom hear from operations teams. This made us wonder whether operations leaders might not recognize a role for design thinking and other collaboration and innovation methodologies.
To learn more, Ezequiel Williams interviewed DTG collaborator Brandon Wetzstein to get his perspective on applying innovation methodologies and mindsets with operations teams and leaders in general. After spending many years in the retail industry operations with multiple Fortune 100 companies like Best Buy, Target, and Starboard Cruise Services, he now specializes in designing and facilitating custom workshops using LEGO Serious Play to unlock the potential of teams and organizations.
They discussed some common challenges among operations teams in particular and what leaders in general can do to foster better communication, collaboration, and innovation among their teams.
EZEQUIEL:
What is your point of view of operations and the role of the operations team in an organization?
BRANDON:
I think of operations as the skeleton or backbone of an organization that holds everything together. They’re the ones that make sure that everything works, connects, and comes together. All of this can be quite challenging. Early on, I bought into the misconception that working in operations is purely about functionality and not about creativity or play. I thought that creatives were the ones that got to think of wild ideas and do the fun stuff, and I had to be in one camp or the other.
Once an organization’s vision is set and the strategy is built, then the operations team has to figure out the “how” and put all the pieces together. More often than not, the people figuring out how the pieces come together put together a very unrealistic picture. This happened often in my days in retail when, in theory, all these plans were supposed to come together and work correctly—but, in practice, that seldom happened. Don’t get me wrong, much of what operations teams do is great. However, when writing and defining a process it is easy to look at the world in black and white terms, forgetting about the gray areas. So it is not uncommon for analysts to design processes with this type of mindset, only to recognize all the variables that were left out once the process is rolled out to the real world where there are customers, other stakeholders, and many other factors and variables that the analysts did not take into account. In fairness, it’s just not possible to anticipate every variable that may jam up a process. But this is one of the reasons why encouraging creativity, flexibility, and clear communications among operations team members is important because a good team will be flexible and able to successfully adjust on the fly.
EZEQUIEL:
The operations team needs to serve and satisfy different groups of stakeholders. I’m curious about your perspective on common pains related to serving multiple stakeholders that you found in the world of operations. Do you have some illustrative stories to share?
BRANDON:
One common challenge is communication and coordination between business units early enough in the planning process so they can get things right. One memory that comes to mind is a time when I was working in retail and we would handle a big product launch, and effective coordination and planning between operations and other teams was lacking. I remember a time when we were handling a product launch for a very in-demand product, and this was at a time when online ordering was starting to get popular. The merchandising team, whose job it was to drive revenue and sell as many products as possible, wanted to open as many sales channels as possible and drive sales until stores sold out. Unfortunately, from an operational standpoint, it was just not that simple and these teams were not in sync.
The operations team had to consider the times when the product became available while balancing online orders with in-person traffic. And not just regular foot traffic, but long lines out the door since this was a particularly in-demand new product. So we had a limited quantity of product available and a ton of frustrated shoppers who were either lined up outside the store or online but not able to get what they wanted because we had not prepared adequately. This created a lose-lose situation largely because we did not have sufficient data to plan accordingly. The lesson learned for me was the importance of getting someone from operations involved in planning with other teams as soon as possible because they will be able to shape plans that yield much better results. People in operations teams, especially in corporate environments, generally come from the field or at least they are in touch with the field. So they have that field experience that helps them know what to look for or where to pay attention as things are happening. There is a lot of value in getting an operations person involved in the design of something as early as possible to drive the results the sponsor team is looking for.
EZEQUIEL:
You touched on planning and process design in your example. Are there any common challenges you encountered with that aspect of operations?
BRANDON:
A common challenge faced by many teams in companies is achieving the right balance in designing the way things are run. There’s a tendency to over-design. For example, one of the projects I led in one of my corporate roles was to really reduce the amount of processes because these had built up to a degree that was just confusing to everyone. There was no way anyone was going to sift through a 500 page binder every day!
That experience really drove the point home for me of creating general guidelines instead of having an overbearing number of processes. If I was managing an operations team today, we would aim to have as few processes as possible. Instead, we would design a framework with a very solid set of guidelines where they were absolutely necessary. The benefit of this approach is that it would give operations team members general rules of thumb and the flexibility of making decisions based on what is needed in a given situation. Of course, sometimes there are rules that have to be followed no matter what due to safety or regulations. Beyond that, just try to get good leaders, give them the right scope, and let them make the right decisions.
EZEQUIEL:
You now specialize in using LEGO Serious Play with teams to increase and accelerate communication and collaboration. Tell us about your journey with this toolkit and deploying it with teams.
BRANDON:
When I discovered LEGO Serious Play, I felt like a light bulb went off above my head. Imagine a model of your entire organization built on a table out of LEGO bricks, whether it be by department, or maybe from an identity and purpose standpoint. You can explore questions like: Who are you at your core? Who do you want to be? Who are you when you’re at your best? And you start seeing this complex interplay of how you can utilize these Lego bricks as an anchor to take away a lot of the confusing parts of the conversation and just focus on what the solution is. In the process of getting to the solution, you have to get through a lot of individual builds. That means you have to work with your team. You get to understand and share about yourself in a very concise and simplified way, you also get to understand everyone else’s at the same time.
This level of alignment, this level of clarity, and then this ability to really navigate these complex environments—it just feels like complete magic to me. Because once you get done, you kind of step back and take a look at what you’ve built. And not only is it very representative of everyone’s thoughts and opinions and ideas in the room, but it’s also a highly aligned solution because you all built it together. You’ve all put in the work. It doesn’t look anything more complex than what a five year old could do Lego wise, but it’s the meaning that’s embedded in those bricks, and it’s the process that everyone goes through to walk out the other side and really focus on that next step.
EZEQUIEL:
In your experience, what benefits can methods like design thinking and LEGO Serious Play bring to an operations leader and team?
BRANDON:
I think it’s really about providing space and tools to allow people to communicate and to get out of their own way. Because if we think about it, a lot of the things that stop us from communicating or from sharing effectively with others are self imposed, but some of them are very real, especially in the workplace.
So it’s about tools, environment, mindset, and creating space and capacity to play and and exercise imagination. On one hand, operators are the people who are writing the rules of how things should be done and driving execution. But they also have fantastic ideas. In fact, they have tons of ideas since they see how things work. But they don’t necessarily see the space as a “playground.” They don’t know how far they can go in trying to build something new. And is it really worth taking that risk? Those are a lot of tough things to work through if you’re not in a place and under leadership that is giving you that space.
EZEQUIEL:
Innovating or doing something new often requires us to face uncertainty, and that is something most human beings really do not like to do. It can be really scary to be open to doing experiments and seeing what happens. What is your approach to coaching people through uncertainty and building up a level of comfort where they feel they are able to open up to new ideas and fast experiments?
BRANDON:
It helps when the environment in the organization is set up to provide psychological safety for teams. Dr. Amy Edmondson writes about this in her book The Fearless Organization. The core idea in the book is that the highest performing teams out there have the highest psychological safety. And this is backed up by a study Google conducted called Project Aristotle. The gist of psychological safety is that you are in an environment with people that trust each other and where you can bring your whole self to work. And this offers people the freedom to take risks, speak up when they see something that is not working or to offer insights or new ideas.
I think it’s important to start small when introducing design thinking or other innovation tools in an organization. When I worked at Target and first started to introduce design thinking to the operations team I started with short events to start introducing the core concepts and mindsets like developing empathy, prototyping and testing. Eventually I found a cohort of people to champion design thinning and over time we built up to a full day workshop where we brought in store managers to really build empathy for them among the operations team and pulled them in to co-define solutions for them. The leadership really supported this approach and that helped in making it much more acceptable and made people want to be part of it. A key element to creating the right environment is having a leadership team that is supportive and very vocal about establishing that culture of trust and innovation.
EZEQUIEL:
That is another great example of a leader creating that positive environment for collaboration and innovation. That said, let’s acknowledge that management is really hard. And often we come across leaders who want to foster an environment to encourage creativity and innovation for their teams, but may be at a loss about how to get started. What are some beginning steps you would recommend a leader take to start on that journey?
BRANDON:
The first step is asking lots of questions. This may be hard or counterintuitive for some leaders because since grade school we are all taught that we must have the one true answer for everything. But as a leader it is not so much your job to have the right answer, but to help everyone else find the right answer. So asking lots of questions and letting your team find those answers is important.
The other recommendation is about establishing that psychological safety. Of course, being very clear with expectations and communication with the team is also crucial. The approach doesn’t have to be very structured. It’s more about being open and available to the team.
EZEQUIEL:
This has been a great conversation. Before we wrap, is there anything else you would like to share with our audience that we didn’t cover today?
BRANDON:
Two things that I value the most—and that we should find within ourselves and help other people do the same—are our curiosity and humility. One quote I have been thinking about for a while says something like, “as your island of knowledge grows, so does your shoreline of ignorance.” I just find this really fantastic to think about and remember that every single person you meet is an expert in something. There’s something wonderful about cultivating curiosity and humility. They help us just grow immensely from learning from each other and working together, because it’s those collaborative approaches when we all use our best strengths and are how we get the best out of whatever challenge we’re trying to solve.
Author Ezequiel Williams, DTG Senior Design Facilitator, is a business strategist, service designer, ethnographer, and innovation consultant passionate about helping organizations better understand their customers and employees to build solutions people really want. He works with leaders to solve complex problems using a unique mix of design thinking, anthropology, and business tools.