An international upskilling program to foster innovative workplace culture
Using our Opportunity Accelerator to build HCD and innovation capability while solving real business challenges.
Industry
Financial Services
Duration
4x 4 hour workshop sessions
1x 3 information session
Deliverables
5 x concepts presented to organisational leaders
25 x participants upskilled
Impact
Teams learned how to apply HCD to solve real organisational challenges
Shifted organisational mindset towards one that is innovative, problem-solving, and human-centred.
Empowered and equipped teams to shape work and take ownership of initiatives
WHAT was the problem
It takes a bold leader to commit-to and then walk-the-talk on the tricky task of fostering an innovative workplace culture. Picture then, the boldness needed to embark on an international, cross-cultural innovation-uplift initiative, conducted entirely remotely, and… bilingually.
This was the ambitious challenge WAVE was given by our client, regional president of the company. He wanted to boost the company culture to be more collaborative, proactive, and innovative, since he was observing challenges such as:
A preference to do things ‘how we’ve always done them’, rather than question and improve inefficient, outdated processes
A siloed way-of-working that made it difficult to take a collaborative approach to shared problem solving
Difficulty thinking in terms of what customers want - and how this could create value - rather than thinking in terms of what the organisation delivers
APPROACH we took
Introducing the WAVE Opportunity Accelerator
Shifting a company’s culture to be more innovative isn’t simple, but the value gained by empowering employees to seek out ways to improve is immeasurable. Wave’s Opportunity Accelerator program - which was employed for this project - has been used to uplift the innovation and human-centered capabilities of hundreds of Australian professionals across many industries. Through this learn-by-doing approach, we help organisations achieve a collective mindset shift with minimal disruption, setting the conditions for the successful long term launch and uptake of impactful innovations.
Partnering to set the program up for success
In order to conduct the accelerator remotely, bilingually, and cross-culturally, we partnered with the Institute of Executive Coaching and Leadership (IECL). Thanks to IECL’s deep expertise in organisational coaching and facilitation, their exceptional translation capabilities, and their inherent cultural sensitivity, we were well-positioned and supported to deliver our Opportunity Accelerator program to our Chinese participants.
Safely taking participants outside of their comfort zone
From the get-go we set the tone for an undertaking that would shake up entrenched assumptions, mixing and dividing the cohort of 25 participants from all areas of the organisation into small teams, and providing each with their own innovation challenge to address. The accelerator is purposefully designed to take participants ‘safely’ out of their comfort zones in order to challenge old ways of thinking, while practising the new in the context of real, very tangible business challenges.
Setting up the teams to solve real world business challenges
The organisational challenges the teams addressed through the accelerator program were varied, ranging from ‘How might we process sales so that all departments can work more cooperatively and cohesively together?’ to ‘How might we enhance brand reputation and influence in order to be a more competitive company?’.
Following our proven HCD methodology to prove assumptions methodically
Each project we take on at WAVE follows a sequence of stages that de-risk innovation and help us navigate from uncertainty to certainty; ‘Frame’, ‘Discover’, ‘Create’ and ‘Deliver’. Participants in the Opportunity Accelerator follow the same sequence, applying human-centred innovation methods and adopting the necessary mindsets to eventually develop concepts to solve their challenge in the ‘Create’ phase. These concepts are then pitched to organisational leadership so that ideas with potential can progress to the Deliver stage.
VALUE we created
Positive feedback from all those involved
The feedback from the program was extremely positive. A survey on how the 25 participants felt about the accelerator resulted in the below word cloud:
Increased understanding of HCD and application to everyday work
Participants stated how important they found what they learned about human centred design, with comments including ‘I am already using these learnings in my work, but also my life at home’ and ‘we have come out understanding very important new ideas’.
Increased networks and collaboration
Participants valued the opportunity to interact with workers in areas of the organisation they had never had contact with before, reporting new perspectives as they broke through the structural siloes in pursuit of understanding the problem. In return, those they interviewed across the organisation to understand the human experience of their team challenge described extremely positive feelings about being included in the process.
EMPOWERMENT we embedded
Embedding ownership of the outcomes into our client’s hands
The cohort completed the accelerator over four sessions delivered via Zoom, learning the human centred principles and associated techniques required to break their challenges and concept development into Leaps of Logic, rather than Leaps of Faith. By practising the methods and completing tasks in the context of real organisational problems outside of the sessions, they took on ownership of the approach. The concepts created through the process were pitched to a panel of representatives including leaders from the organisation’s European headquarters, who assessed the potential for further development.
Project Reflections
The international appetite for innovation
WAVE’s Opportunity Accelerator has been delivered across a wide range of industries to hundreds of participants in Australia. It has achieved consistent success and positive outcomes for organisations seeking to shift their people’s mindsets. This particular Accelerator presented some big ‘firsts’ for WAVE; our first internationally-conducted accelerator, and our first accelerator delivered in a language other than English. Conducting it internationally wasn’t a logistical problem - we’ve run many fully-virtual accelerators before. The question was whether the material we usually deliver would translate well cross-culturally, and have as much impact as it does for our Australian participants. This resulted in some post-project reflections we explore below.
Translation is extremely nuanced
Effective translation goes beyond simply substituting one word for another - a factor that is critical when you are discussing the principles of innovation before making them tangible and real-world-relevant through prescribed activities. To ensure maximum clarity, we started by making every piece of accelerator material accessible in both English and Chinese - possible thanks to the exceptionally high standard of translation provided by IECL. This included live-translating spoken content, the accompanying slides, templates, supporting video material, and written instructions.
However, what was more powerful in conveying meaning was IECL’s ability to leverage commonly-held Chinese cultural concepts, values and idioms. This helped participants to more quickly make sense and absorb the very new and unfamiliar principles, methods, and tools we were sharing. For example, WAVE’s framing of de-risking innovation as taking ‘Leaps of logic’ instead of ‘Leaps of Faith’ is grounded in the well known Western idiom ‘Leap of Faith’ from Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Rather than attempting to explain the idea from the ground up, our IECL colleague chose to leverage the chinese phrase "Bu Bu Wei Ying” [步步为营] which roughly means ‘Advance a little with the army, stop and see it’s safe before advancing again’. This familiar saying helped our participants more quickly understand the concept we were explaining.
IECL ultimately provided invaluable contributions to the success of this accelerator, combining their deep expertise in coaching with their shared cultural worldview to support the cohort through the steep learning curve that all our accelerator participants must navigate.
Collaborative discussion, sharing ideas and collective reasoning are invaluable both for embedding new learnings and for innovation.
Collaborative discussions help with absorbing information, and leverage a group’s varied expertise to stress-test and refine new ideas. We sought to initiate open discussion after delivering the theory as usual, but found the cohort seemed reluctant to join in spontaneous public discussion. Our co-facilitators made the observation early-on that the Chinese education model generally favours students receiving and memorising quantities of knowledge before applying it for themselves alone.
Comparatively, in western classrooms, students are often encouraged to critically engage in discussion and debate what they learn. This is supported by pedagogical research looking at the difference between Chinese and Western styles of teaching. With the help of our co-facilitators, we addressed the hesitancy to enter public debate by encouraging discussion of the theory in their smaller teams, and then inviting teams to share what they discussed when they returned to the broader cohort. This created some clarity on the task and their thinking, and built confidence through more private conversations before speaking in front of the larger group. At WAVE, we never apply a “one size fits all” approach to our work. We’re always looking for ways we can use what we know, and adapt it to best meet the needs of our clients.
This case study was compiled by India Read, Service Designer and Opportunity Accelerator Facilitator at WAVE Design. India is passionate about understanding how the systems we can’t see impact our lives, and how we can work within them to create meaningful and lasting positive outcomes for diverse stakeholders.
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