Enhancing the implementation of organizational change by visual thinking

Abstract

The world around us is constantly changing. Organizations are forced to change with it in order to stay successful. How these organizational changes should go are often captured in a vision or a strategy. The key is to get on board all of the stakeholders, starting with their own employees. This is often not as easy as it looks like. Jam visual thinking helps organizations to deal with complex changes by guiding them through a design process in which visualizing is an important tool to create clarity, ownership and enthusiasm. Once Jam helped them to create their vision and provide them with a visual tool to communicate their story, the time has come to transfer this story to the rest of the organization. This is called the ‘implementation phase’ of change. This thesis holds a designers’ study on ‘how to implement changes into an organization using visual thinking’. In other words, how can Jam help their clients to implement the intended change by using their expertise of visual thinking? The scope is to design a product which Jam can offer to their clients in order to make the first step towards implementation. The goal is to inform, enthusiast and activate internal stakeholders to increase the chances of successful implementation. To get a grip on the world of organizational change, an extended analysis is performed. The problem as researched from different point of views i.e. visual thinking, change management and corporate anthropology. Some of the main insights are the following: People want to have a say in the subject to feel ownership and overcome fear or stubbornness The employees should be addressed both as a group and as individual Clear communication and commitment of a core team (e.g. managers) is key Fun and relatedness are important aspects for enthusiasm A visual and iterative way of working allows people to make their own story Based on all insights, a toolkit that provides employees to explore the vision and share their own ideas is designed. The toolkit will be used in a workshop-setting and stimulates employees to take a closer look at the vision and define their own role within implementation of the future plans. This workshop is organized based on a design process with elements of visual thinking, meaning an iterative way of working, alternating constructing and deconstructing the subject, combining visual and textual ways of communicating etc. A ‘line of ambassadors’ is created by organizing a series of workshops, each facilitated by a different person assigned at the end of each workshop. In that way, the group of involved stakeholders keeps growing over time. The product is prototyped, tested and redesigned several times. Finally, most goals were reached when considering short-term usage. When the product would be developed further, the recommendations in the end of the report would be a good starting point.