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A while back, I hastily slapped up a sloppy post about transformation design. If you only read my post and not the RED document that described it, I’m sorry. I have no doubt I left you confused. Maybe even annoyed.I’ve continued to refine my description of TD since then in hopes of carving the elevator version explaining why it is important in the marketing and business space. What follows doesn’t feel perfect yet as it's not "bite-size" (so please lob your revisions and/or points of confusion at me), but it does fit on one 8.5”x11” in size 12 font:
WHAT IS TRANSFORMATION DESIGN?
Marketers shape fact. Traditional designers shape form. Transformation designers shape behavior - of people, employees, systems and organizations.
TD’s offering is not the tools, components, systems or experiences it creates to elicit the new behavior; the offering is the changed organization and/or individual.
This is critical because the right answer to a business challenge is not always a new product, market offer or brand idea. The right solution may be a new process, service offering, interactive platform, retail experience, product use, system approach or an entirely new business. In short, the solution may be a new and sustainable behavior – a.k.a, a transformation.
OUTSOURCING V. CO-SOURCING
Rather than acting as master designers who emerge from their black boxes to unveil their elegant solutions, transformation designers mediate diverse points of view and facilitate collaboration in defining the problem and prototyping the solutions. They create a neutral space where a range of people, whose expertise may have bearing on the problem, can work together.
This is called “co-sourcing.” Outsourcing is something done for you. Co-sourcing is something done with you.
BENEFITS
Applications abound:
Behavior has no boundaries; neither does transformation design. Its application ranges wide: marketing programs, social services, supply chains, product experiences, etc.
Co-sourcing builds capacity, not dependency:
Because individuals and organizations operate in an environment of constant change, the challenge is not how to design a rigid, end solution, but how to design a means of continually responding, adapting and innovating. Transformation design’s co-sourcing approach leaves behind (in organizations and individuals) not only the shape of a new system of behavior, but the tools, skills and organizational capacity for ongoing change.
More time spent solving, less time spent selling:
Participation in the process gives all stakeholders ownership of a vision and helps champion the chosen direction.
Less risk, less time, less cost:
TDs prototype ideas before committing all resources to the agreed upon solution. Doing so means they commit a little to learn a lot so they fail earlier to succeed sooner.
Deep change, not cosmetic change:
TD solutions are designed to create sustained change of behavior over time in our clients and/or their customers.
