Learn all about Design of Work Experience (DOWE) in the forthcoming book, Culture Your Culture: Innovating Experiences @Work, from Emerald Group Publishing, authored by Karen Jaw-Madson, Principal, Co.-
Organizational culture isn’t just a hot topic—it’s an untapped asset and potential liability for all businesses. And yet, for all its potential to make or break, few know how to manage cultures with proficiency. Culture Your Culture: Innovating Experiences @Work provides the much-needed “how-to” with Design of Work Experience (DOWE). Tapping into human-centered design, interdisciplinary innovation concepts, and other research, this leading edge approach partners employees and their employers in unprecedented ways to co-create solutions and differentiating experiences that are customized, relevant, and profoundly impactful to the organizations for which they are intended—all while building employee engagement, learning agility, and capability.
Be open to changing mindsets, for this is not your typical business book. Part-business case, part-instructional, and part-commentary, the guidance offered here puts your organization--not some detached case studies—at the center to envision how DOWE can help you design solutions and experiences unique to your context.
Culture will no longer be esoteric or intangible, but overt, meaningful, fully leveraged, and truly experienced. No more hacking through trial and error to a culture that lacks sustainability. We can practice the management of culture and organizational change through lived experiences, with intention, rigor, and discipline.
Leaders, managers, teams, and employees alike will benefit from understanding the need for this approach, how it’s defined, why it works, and what to do to successfully tackle business challenges and positively influence lives with this innovative model—if you are willing to do the work to get there.
ENDORSEMENTS
"This is a book that deserves to be primetime on the bookshelf every change leader! It’s the most powerful and pragmatic synthesis—it unites the best in today’s design thinking, the strengths revolution in management, appreciative inquiry, and the positive psychology of human innovation-- I’ve ever seen. With this book you will find that change is more about innovation than intervention, more about creating than solving, and more about home grown rather than decontextualized solutions from elsewhere. If you are looking for a design-inspired and strengths-based change management model, then look no further. Karen has gifted us with something that works and shows us the future of organization development and change."
--David Cooperrider, Distinguished University Professor, Case Western Reserve University &
Honorary Chair, David L. Cooperrider Center for Appreciative Inquiry at Champlain College
"We are living in the age of design. This new age has expanded design thinking well beyond products. Karen Jaw-Madson's well-written book takes us to new applications of design thinking to the nature of work itself providing fresh ideas especially regarding culture change in organizations. Her book is not a manual, rather an innovative way of thinking about changing organizations."
--W. Warner Burke, PhD, Professor, Organization and Leadership, Teachers College, Columbia University and Associate Editor, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science
"Karen Jaw-Madson has created an inspiring and compelling framework, using the bedrock foundation of design thinking, that enables organizations to create effective cultural change through a method she has named DOWE. DOWE is designed to help leaders by guiding them through a systematic, step-by-step course of action, mapped to the needs of your organization, that enables the creation of a vibrant and successful company culture."
--Dennis Boyle, Founding Team Member and Partner, IDEO
"Culture Your Culture is an extraordinarily practical guide to driving transformational culture change through Design of Work Experience (DOWE). It leads you to ask, “How DOWE do it?” and to answer, “By reading Culture Your Culture!”
--Ian Ziskin, President, EXec EXcel Group LLC, and Advisor, Author, Board Member, Coach, Consultant, and Former CHRO
“Culture Your Culture distills Karen’s decades of experience and thinking into a practical process for using design principles to enhance your culture through the work."
--Dr. John Boudreau, Professor and Research Director, University of Southern California
"Culture Your Culture invites readers to see problems as opportunities in our ever-changing work environments by creating meaningful experiences that allow people and businesses thrive."
--Tina Seelig, Stanford University School of Engineering, Author, Creativity Rules
--David Cooperrider, Distinguished University Professor, Case Western Reserve University &
Honorary Chair, David L. Cooperrider Center for Appreciative Inquiry at Champlain College
"We are living in the age of design. This new age has expanded design thinking well beyond products. Karen Jaw-Madson's well-written book takes us to new applications of design thinking to the nature of work itself providing fresh ideas especially regarding culture change in organizations. Her book is not a manual, rather an innovative way of thinking about changing organizations."
--W. Warner Burke, PhD, Professor, Organization and Leadership, Teachers College, Columbia University and Associate Editor, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science
"Karen Jaw-Madson has created an inspiring and compelling framework, using the bedrock foundation of design thinking, that enables organizations to create effective cultural change through a method she has named DOWE. DOWE is designed to help leaders by guiding them through a systematic, step-by-step course of action, mapped to the needs of your organization, that enables the creation of a vibrant and successful company culture."
--Dennis Boyle, Founding Team Member and Partner, IDEO
"Culture Your Culture is an extraordinarily practical guide to driving transformational culture change through Design of Work Experience (DOWE). It leads you to ask, “How DOWE do it?” and to answer, “By reading Culture Your Culture!”
--Ian Ziskin, President, EXec EXcel Group LLC, and Advisor, Author, Board Member, Coach, Consultant, and Former CHRO
“Culture Your Culture distills Karen’s decades of experience and thinking into a practical process for using design principles to enhance your culture through the work."
--Dr. John Boudreau, Professor and Research Director, University of Southern California
"Culture Your Culture invites readers to see problems as opportunities in our ever-changing work environments by creating meaningful experiences that allow people and businesses thrive."
--Tina Seelig, Stanford University School of Engineering, Author, Creativity Rules
Q & A
1. How does a company define its corporate culture when it has to deal with global operations, outsourced staff, challenges posed by a #MeToo environment, a shift to rely on technical instead of human solutions, varying needs for a diverse team, and increased competition in the marketplace?
There’s a lot to break down in this question because each of these conditions are big, complex challenges in and of themselves. That being said, it speaks to how hard it is to stay in business today, and how organizations have to contend with both external pressures out of their control and internal pressures tainted with problems of their own making. One of the key points in this book is that every company has their own unique combination of these—their own context—therefore, they must intentionally define their unique culture and work experiences to meet these challenges most productively. Another point made in the book is that each of these challenges are impossible to solve individually, so organizations should reframe their thinking and focus more on creating the best version of themselves according to their own context, neutralizing these problems in the best ways possible.
2. You created a concept and process called DOWE, which brings business strategies, company values, and culture to life at an organization. How does it work?
The only way to fully appreciate DOWE is experientially, but in a few words, it takes a deep understanding of an organization’s unique context to mindfully co-design an aspirational future with intention and the needs of both the business and people in mind. As it is with all innovation, thinking outside the box with creativity is a pre-cursor, and implementing it successfully brings it to fruition. You need both DESIGN and CHANGE, as well as the people part, CAPABILITY and ENGAGEMENT, to innovate culture.
3. The DOWE process is comprised of four major components. What are they?
The four main components are the combination of DESIGN and CHANGE processes enabled by leveraging and building CAPABILITY and ENGAGEMENT throughout. This is complex work that needs to be explored in digestible, focused, parts. While I don’t want these to be oversimplified, I hope they are at least memorable. When you dig deeper, you will see the next level of the process is segmented into 5 phases: UNDERSTAND, CREATE & LEARN, DECIDE, PLAN, and IMPLEMENT. All the phases are organized as a series of iterative learning loops, each with its own specific set of activities, as defined in the book.
4. Why learning loops?
One has to read the book and live through the experience to fully appreciate the answer. Learning is defined by changed behavior. One encounters new information or knowledge and because of that, there’s a different result. What does learning have to do with DOWE? Everything--from a company understanding who they are today, to creating what might work for an imagined future, to planning for change and implementing it, all while leveraging and building engagement and capabilities. Throughout the entire process, a new body of knowledge is being built upon itself and moving toward a new future. Building happens iteratively and progressively in ways where learning is revisited, reconnected, and reapplied as much as needed--hence the learning loops.
5. Based on your research and 20 years of experience, you haven’t found a book or heard of a corporate culture that offers a method by which an organization can design its own solution based on its situation. How did you come to develop such a unique approach?
As I said in the book, DOWE is built upon a foundation of what has been studied about organizations for over a century—it is an inevitability being called out. Many scholars and practitioners have done some great work in this space, and this is my contribution. I expect things will also evolve from here. On the personal side of things, I was fortunate to have a great education and a career that exposed me to so much real-life application. I’ve always enjoyed learning too. The catalyst to bring my thinking together into this one book began with my exposure to design, and it snowballed from there. This book was written for a number of reasons, but one of them was a frustration that despite so much talk about good and bad culture, many companies are still hacking their way through it. Providing a step-by-step, how-to for culture will focus efforts, add purpose and intention, integrate, and ensure both relevancy and positive impact.
6. You say companies should not fall into the best practices myth. What is that?
The myth starts with the belief that something accepted as best practice will guarantee success when it’s adopted wholesale. There’s at least a few problems with this thinking. First, just because a lot of people are doing it, doesn’t mean it’s the best practice—all it implies is that a practice went viral. No entity is authorized to certify what is actually the best practices, though acceptance as canon counts for something. Second, in this age of differentiation, it’s counterproductive to do the same thing everyone else is doing. You’ll lose the war for talent if you aren’t special in your own way. That brings me to my next point: adopting something with no customization and without understanding or consideration for your own context can be lazy and even dangerous. How can one expect something to work the same way from one place to the next, especially when people and culture are involved? That could backfire in the worst ways. So instead of being right for everybody, best practices end up being at least a little wrong for most. There are good best practices out there, but as I say in the book, the answer for your organization “might be that there is no one solution but rather the right combination of solutions.”
7. How can a company increase its employee engagement?
There’s a lot out there about what defines employee engagement and its benefits, so I won’t belabor it. I’ll start with this instead: cultivate an authentic relationship between your organization and your employees, recognizing that success comes from true partnership—where one cannot succeed without the other, so we must help each other. The practice of DOWE encourages the conditions for this through empowerment, co-creation, people-centered design, and change management. To the leaders of organizations (who are representatives of the company and find themselves so lonely at the top), I ask, what would be so scary about engaging your people on important topics they care about? A transaction doesn’t automatically bring permanent employee engagement. If you want true engagement, then enroll people to co-design the solutions they are expected to implement. It truly is about an ongoing relationship built upon consistent patterns of behavior that cultivates (rather than erodes) trust, both ways. Like any relationship, it must be sustained on an ongoing basis.
8. What tips do you have for leaders, managers, and executives seeking to lead and practice change management?
My first tip is to actually do change management in the first place. So many organizations force changes through without consideration for the people they depend on for the success of the change. Use a deep understanding of the context and its people (as you get with DOWE) to plan for change. Think through what you’ll do and how you’ll do it as an organization. Consider the possible reactions to the changes and prepare responses for them. Anticipate (as best you can) the unintended benefits and consequences. Implement changes well with the agility to shift or adjust as necessary. Ensure that enough is done on an ongoing basis to sustain the changes for as long as you need them. The book also comes with a change primer, which not only explains the conceptual background for DOWE’s approach to change, but also provides foundational understanding for change management.
9. What mistakes must managers avoid when implementing a shift in service or product offerings?
Most companies will make the effort to ensure a smooth transition with their customers, but they neglect the need to connect with their own employees first. Both need engagement and change management. Managers also need to look at the capabilities of their employees to make the shift, whether that means repurposing and leveraging what exists, or developing new capabilities. This is often neglected or short changed by laying people off and hiring new ones without consideration for the disruption or transition. When it’s done poorly, both customers and employees leave for competitors. Now that I answered the question, I’d like to suggest reframing it: How can managers support the successful implementation of a shift in service or product offerings? That’s where I think energy should be spent: instead of avoiding mistakes, set the conditions where those mistakes won’t happen.
10. As a woman of color, you must have a perspective based on your research and experience about what corporations can do to not only create a more diverse workforce but to harness it for greater productivity?
For years, I’ve said that you can recruit until the cows come home, but you’ll never be finished if you don’t set the conditions for diversity to thrive. Recruiting for diversity (while important and required by law) should go hand-in-hand with the creation of an awesome culture. You’ll find that the awesome culture will make it a lot easier for you to recruit for the diverse talent. Furthermore, a lack of diversity and the inability to leverage diversity is ultimately a cultural challenge. The culture of the organization has to drive diversity, and if it doesn’t, there needs to be a cultural change.
11. What type of work culture and experiences are you trying to create when implementing DOWE?
At the risk of sounding too optimistic, I want to enable organizations to create cultures and experiences where business and people truly thrive, the kind that make life and work meaningful. I write that the mythical alignment of the right people in the right job in the right organization in the right environment is possible, because I’ve seen it first-hand. It begins with a great culture manifested in equally great experiences at work. People look for this every time they change jobs. There’s also a huge body of work out there arguing for and advising on how to find career happiness, so I believe there are lots of other idealists out there who share my optimism. DOWE is my contribution to this cause.
12. For entrepreneurs seeking to start a thriving venture, what would you advise they take into consideration when it comes to culture?
Startups and other new ventures often think they are too early to think about culture. The reality is that if they are mature enough to put together a business strategy, mission, and vision, then it’s time to do culture as well. Healthy cultures begin with healthy dynamics on the founding team. Sadly, I have witnessed things fall apart with promising new businesses because the founders can’t get along. Intended culture should be in place before the hiring frenzy begins, and it must be a strong enough imperative to ramp up with the business through rapid growth. I’ve just described three opportunities--or “on ramps” as I call them--to begin culture work in the startup stage: with the business strategy, the founding team, and before rapid growth. In the book, I discuss timing when it comes to culture—the answer is that there’s never really a wrong time to begin. The sooner the better! The real question is whether it’s done at all.
13. Do companies know when morale is low? If they become aware of it, what should they do to give it a boost?
It’s pretty evident when morale is low. Any ongoing pattern of negativity should be a concern because over time it becomes part of the culture. The issue oftentimes is whether the company wants to pay attention and do something about morale. Be careful--like it is in change management, if you try to address it poorly, it’s worse than if you do nothing at all. Both paths are ill-advised, in my opinion. DOWE gives organizations an opportunity to re-engage employees and bring the company closer when it’s most needed--in the midst of difficult times. Building walls, practicing avoidance, or denying the reality of the situation only serves to worsen the damage done. With DOWE, you are course-correcting and creating circumstances for different outcomes in the future.
14. How would you mentor a start-up when it comes to developing leadership teams?
In a mentoring situation, I ascertain the intentions and the aspirations of the founders, as well as the overall context of the start-up. That determines the kind of intervention and the tools that they may need to develop their unique team in both dynamics and capabilities. No one approach is ever the same, and the key is in curating the solutions specific to the organization for which it is intended. If one is looking for a start, the book contains a template for a team charter. This tool isn’t the answer—that comes from the negotiation of working norms and the commitment that comes forth from the development of the charter.
15. How do you bring new perspectives to old challenges for companies that know they need to improve but feel stuck?
There are times when a new beginning or direction is sparked by questions I ask to provoke and generate profoundly different thinking, uncover hidden assumptions, or reframe previously unconsidered perspectives. Sometimes an intimidating challenge can cause that stuck feeling and it takes some guided iteration to come out of it. Many companies don’t realize that the solutions exist within their own capabilities and all that’s needed is the ability to tap into them, and the openness to think differently.
There are at least two aspects of DOWE that brings forth new perspective: a) an unprecedented, deep understanding of the company that builds organizational self-awareness through the Culture Study and b) the innovation generated by the CREATE & LEARN phase.
There are at least two aspects of DOWE that brings forth new perspective: a) an unprecedented, deep understanding of the company that builds organizational self-awareness through the Culture Study and b) the innovation generated by the CREATE & LEARN phase.
16. How does design encourage the ability to creatively synthesize solutions that are based on a deep, empathetic understanding of people and their needs at work?
I write that design’s greatest gift is its mindset. Design is multidisciplinary. It takes learning from all different perspectives and creates new combinations of ideas and concepts. Design is empathetic. It sees things from the user’s perspective and creates solutions to address unmet needs. It “thinks like a traveller” to observe what might be overlooked by the rest of us. It uses both divergent and convergent thinking with agility to experiment with and connect ideas. Applied to culture, it has the potential to change the game in ways we’ve never seen before.
17. Why don’t organizations know and value their employees as much as their customers?
Part of it is that companies sometimes take their people for granted. They are too busy with the business of business that they forget that they need people too. When things blow up, they are forced to pay attention, but unfortunately by then the starting point is in the red. Part of it comes from ignorance, when you don’t know what you don’t know, it’s easy to dismiss it. If you don’t know your employees, it’s easy to dismiss them. If you don’t know how to manage culture, it’s also easy to dismiss its importance. Both are inexcusable excuses in today’s day and age. There’s plenty of examples and evidence to show that valuing people is good for business. Those that are successful in spite of themselves might be falling short of their true potential, and it’s only a matter of time before the bill comes due. So rather than avoid the dreaded “or else,” I implore companies to think about creating the best version of themselves, one that they (and their employees) can be proud of.
18. What stands in the way of companies when it comes to co-creation, where they bring together different groups of people to solve problems or come up with new solutions?
For starters, two things: narrow thinking and a lack of commitment to true partnership. Co-creation is a practice that requires openness—to new ideas and perspectives, as well as new people. Insular thinking doesn’t even consider co-creation as a possibility. Co-creation is a partnership, working together toward a common cause. When an organization doesn’t really see, value, or act as if the partnership is there, using the language is not only just talk, but a broken promise—not to mention what else you miss out on when it comes to the diversity of perspectives.
19. Can you provide examples of how DOWE addresses organizational tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes?
Behind every contradiction and paradox is a difference between where an organization is and where it wants to be, a difference between what is said vs. what is lived. There’s a dissonance that needs resolution. The DOWE process digs into these complexities through the People & Context learning loop, makes sense of it, and articulates it through the Culture Study. From there, the organization designs a desired future that resolves them. Tension, where people are heavily invested in opposing positions, may be different story. Both may want to do a good job for the company, but they need to work together to balance each other out. HR and the business functions they support, audit and finance, manufacturing and quality control, to name some examples. These tensions are neither good nor bad. Their partnership must be maintained, however, or they deteriorate. There are other times a carefully maintained tension can be a good thing, such as between managing people and empowering them at the same time. Managing culture (as DOWE equips organizations to do) balances and sustains tensions purposefully.
20. How is the workplace a collection of smaller, interwoven experiences that make up an overall experience?
In the broadest sense, every interaction, process, practice or endeavor at work is an experience, and each presents opportunities to be intentionally designed for optimum results. Over time, consistent patterns between each of these smaller experiences feed into one’s perception of the overall experience. If you have positive interactions across multiple areas, then you’re more likely to see everything as generally positive and to look for evidence to support this perspective. It goes in the other direction as well. Likewise, when it comes to culture, there are sub-cultures that form within an organization that either support or contradict one’s expectations. If an organization is intentional about all this, then they are more likely to leverage their culture and the associated experiences as assets and promote alignment.
21. When does brainstorming work best?
Brainstorming works best when there’s truly no pre-defined decision or answer. If there is, I would say don’t bother, it’ll be a waste of time because you won’t be able to take advantage of it. What’s great about brainstorming is also what’s great about DOWE: the connecting of people, ideas, and people with ideas in ways that can’t be achieved alone. Brainstorming also works best when people do it well—that is, truly allowing creativity and generative thinking to take its course without censorship, politics, or dysfunction. Only then can the “power of the whole” truly be realized.
22. The power of DOWE hinges upon experiences, solutions, and strategies created from a deep understanding of the current context. Why do you say it begins with seeking first to understand and resisting the urge to go straight into seeking a solution to a problem?
We miss so much when going straight from problem to solution, especially when the solutions are pre-determined up front. Unconscious bias compels us to solve what we assume are the problems without really understanding them. In the absence of that valuable knowledge, we risk missing the mark on successfully addressing the issues. The DOWE process requires mindfulness, perhaps to a degree like never before. Paying attention to the “what is” can uncover the complexities, root causes, and assumptions that are sometimes hidden despite their obvious influence. Rather than solving problems one at a time (often creating new ones in the process), DOWE challenges organizations to design for the best version of themselves, one where the problems can’t exist. From a change management perspective, the present is so critical to forging the path to the future. Change and the people you need to get behind it won’t happen painlessly at the flip a switch. From a continuity standpoint, the connections have to be made between the current and the future state.
23. You say that creativity is the precursor to innovation. What’s the difference between the two?
I agree with those that see creativity as the fuel and the innovation as the result. The act of innovating--to innovate--employs creativity to produce innovation. Creativity is something we are all capable of, but we all need practice to be proficient--just like how one hones their art or learns a new skill. You move from invention to innovation when you hit that critical tipping point with adoption. That’s why with DOWE it’s about innovating experiences at work—they have to come to life through change and be a part of the culture.
24. What role does play have in the DOWE process?
Play is a learning loop that takes place after the Brainstorm during the CREATE & LEARN phase of the DOWE process. It is a necessary next step because it builds intimacy and assuredness in the generated ideas. As a purposeful action, play explores the ideas with rigor to add substance, make connections, and promote tinkering to understand how they might work. It is learning and creativity in practice. The implied levity promotes a comfort level where people can focus on the learning and ideas without a fear of failure. Play is not intended to judge the value of the ideas—that takes place later in the process.
25. If the team gets stuck in the implementation plan of their blueprint, what advice do you offer?
First, identify and address any mental blocks that are causing the stuck feeling. Is it a matter of framing or mindset? Or a self-fulfilling insecurity? Perhaps a “can’t do” attitude? In these moments, we are our worst enemies, being trapped in prisons of our own making. Once mental blocks are cleared, re-loop back and iterate your way out of it: re-read the book, go back to the users or the user data, revisit your actions and framing, tinker, tweak, play and experiment with it until you get over the hump. Before you know it, you will see again why iterative learning loops are a part of the process.