now that your plans are in place, we want to give you just a few more things to think about as you get ready to head into action with your team. ErIC Folger, a good friend and an experienced designer has given a lot of careful thought as to how to introduce design thinking into your organization. Let's check in with ERIC. Now one of the challenges of integrating a design project within a large organization is one getting people who are not familiar with the way that you're approaching the problem to sign off on it right right away. They're, they're suspicious that you're going to take longer, it's going to cost more, it's going to be inefficient or the result is going to be something that's touchy feely and not actionable, right? Or there's no metric that can be applied to it. And going up against that initially is enough to stop most design projects within any organization, especially large ones. And so I had a particular experience with a large financial institution in Sydney Australia, where they were interest in having better products for their customers, but they didn't know what that meant. And for the most part, the approach had been how do we market better to our customers? So, using users based design was really about how do we understand more about the psychology of our customers so that we can market our product, we can actually couch our product in language and visuals that makes it seem more appealing than it is. They weren't actually interested in changing the product itself. So the first challenge was saying, well, let's not do that yet. Let's back up a step and let's understand what are the issues that our customers are having in the first place because it may be that they want a better product or it may be that they desire to understand the products that we have currently better or it may be something completely different. So the first step was to do some ethnographic research really just go out and talk to people who were affected by insurance products in this case. Now. That was a big challenge because I couldn't in this case get any funding to go do that. This the marketing budget was the only budget that I could use to try and do that. And it was already sequestered to do mailings and you know, direct mail and other forms of marketing. So what I did was take one other person that I had with me and my team and we just took a couple days off and went out to customers and these were customers who we had on our, you know, already bought our products and they were people who were potential customers. And there were people who never were interested in an insurance product at all. And we sat down with them for about three or four hours at their homes and we talked to them about what motive them motivated them in life, not about what were their insurance needs or or what was, you know, keeping them from, you know, you know, asking for more home insurance or, or additional car insurance or something like that. So the effect of that was you come back with enough information that tells you, this is what's driving people's decision making. These are the things that they're concerned about. And one of the things that we found out about was not that people didn't want insurance is that they were completely intimidated by the products because I didn't understand them. Well now we had a problem. Now we had something that we could go after, that's something that you can bring to the table. You know, a senior executive in the organization when they're told the reason your product isn't selling as well as you think it might is that your customers are actually, it's, it's opaque to them. They don't understand it and they couldn't understand it. And the way that you show that is just show a little bit of film of someone reading the product disclosure statement and then not even getting past the first page you say, well, if they can't get past the first page, how well are they going to do? So that is good And it gets people interested in, there's some potential here, but it doesn't guarantee that you're going to be able to do anything with that project. The next step is to show, well, why, why is there a fundamental efficiency in doing this? Right? Great. You make a better product, customers are more, you know, they like it better. Good. But is there still might be a marketing way to get around that problem. So the next step we took was going to the consultants in our call centers who are explaining and selling this product. Now we asked them to do the same thing where they went through the product disclosure that ostensibly they are experts at and read a random page and explain what it meant and they couldn't do it. Now, that's really dangerous. Because now we're talking about something in the insurance industry called x ratio, which is if you make a mistake describing a pro or a part of a product to a customer and it says your, you say it's covered, you're covered for this and they're not effectively you're going to get sued as a company and you're going to pay out that that amount. Now ex gratia for this organization was I think the least. It had been in several years with about $30 million a year. Now that's a lot of money, right for anybody, even a billion dollar company wouldn't mind saving $30 million dollars every year. Now, that was only due to mistakes that people were saying in describing the benefits for the products that were sold. So just tightening that up alone would save millions of dollars, You know, it may not save all of it because there's lots of problems with that can that can come up, we're human. But if you don't even have a product that's understandable, then you're guaranteeing that you're going to be spending a lot of money just making up for those mistakes. So now you have something that you can go to senior management and say the project that I have is to end expression. You don't talk about user centered design, you don't talk about, we need to make the product better where most of these kinds of projects really benefit from a guerilla approach. You want to be under the radar. You don't want to give yourself a lot of limelight yet. And you have to have something that you can hang that on. Like in this case $30 million of x ratio was a strong enough message that you could do that. Now. Every program I've ever worked with in every organization has something like that. Where it's a big enough deal. It pushes the buttons of people who have the, you know, the hands on the purse strings. Once you have that, okay then you can start a process of building a team to start doing some real research. You can get, you know, in my case I used the marketing team to help build some focus groups where we were talking about the product but I was able to go in and create the protocol about the questions that we asked. So they were no longer something that you would say. If you had the choice between two products, would you choose the one that blank or the one that blank, which were typically what we're asked in focus groups instead, we said, here's a paragraph, you know, from a potential product, what does it mean to you? And so they would read through prototypes of changes to the way that we're approaching this problem and we were able to quickly understand where they understanding the process of what this product meant or were they getting hung up on Burbage real benefit to doing this. Is that by defining the problem as a cost problem within a an organization, you basically get the permission to go investigate it further, but the result is that you're actually solving a customer problem that also solves a cost problem. It's a win win for everyone. So the business case by default has always been defined by what either reduces costs or what makes more money. What we're trying to say is that the business case is about how do you improve the experience of people humans in a way that actually is profitable
