IAG's purpose is to make your world a safer place. To achieve its ambitions, IAG has been on a journey to become a customer centric organisation. For all this to happen, human centred thinking needs to occur in all areas of the business. In 2014, a Human Centred Design HCD program was brought in to IAG to increase people’s exposure to and use of design thinking.
Despite its widespread advocacy and attendee numbers approaching 1000, the program’s ongoing delivery and use was resource intensive and yielded mixed outcomes: Resulting design practices primarily took the form of large workshops, lacked a rigorous mindset, and favoured outgoing personalities. For the program to show sustainable value, it needed: a structured yet approachable path from learning to practice; alignment with professional design methods; and a feedback mechanism that would both improve and meaningfully expand it.
The goal was to not turn IAG employees into designers, but to solve the following problem: How might we broaden IAG's perspectives to encompass design into their work?
The project involved a team that previously facilitated or participated in the original program. Their focus was to apply HCD to the program's design. This involved understanding how IAG employees learned, practiced, and/or benefited from HCD. These insights were coupled with a critical look at the previous program’s contents and tools. With support from Learning and Development and the Design Centre at IAG, along with agency Neo, the team created and tested potential solutions within the workplace, improving with each iteration. The result is a system with a stable framework that has become highly utilised and continuously evolves under the name Design Community.
The Design Community enabled IAG employees to incorporate design into their work, ensuring that customers are at the centre of decision making. The team was made up of a diverse range of IAG colleagues from several divisions and levels. Each person on our team had been on their own journey discovering and applying design. Coming from different background disciplines had allowed us to work cross functionally to deliver on our value propositions, applying our varied experiences and points of view to solve complex problems.
Our Design Community system was made up of 8 areas that helped us enable IAG employees with design. They are often interconnected depending on the scope of work. The solution was continuously evolving adapting to the needs of the business and was never just handed off and considered "done".
Impact of Design Community on people ranged from influencing an individual's capability development to a larger team's ways of working.This impacted a range of role types, from people who faced customers day to day to those who made high level strategic decisions.These people came from a range of functions including:
Group Finance
Group Learning & Development
Group Risk
Data & Technology
Digital
Product Innovation
Strategy & Innovation
Enterprise Delivery
Operational Partnering
Customer Enablement & Experience
79% of participants reported the courses significantly changed their understanding of Design. A subset of these moved on to applying this understanding into their day-to-day work, and others deepened their knowledge by participating as co-trainers on some of the courses.
“A great introduction to design. Had enough detail to get a good understanding of the design process, and opened the door to want to learn more. The pace was good - moved quickly so we didn't get bored, and I was impressed with how well it was managed remotely via Teams (which is not an easy thing to do!)”
Amanda W Design Training Participant
Our Comms offering was designed to foster our Design Community through IAGs internal social page. Regular communication created hype and engagement around Design topics across various mediums and reached members from every division of IAG. Analytics highlight that our approach to communication generated consistent user engagement throughout the Design Community's existence. Design Community members were very active and consistently engaged with posts. Only 1% of posts did not have a reply. Our Comms offering helped every division and function at IAG connect with each other, further building on our vision.
We created a weekly ongoing design support mechanism which helped employees apply service design techniques in their work, further solidifying the application of design at IAG. By providing a hands on avenue which guides the application of design in a real scenario, we not only solidify knowledge of what we teach, we also influence the output of design to correspond to the Design Centre’s high standard of excellence. Our impact aligned to IAG's strategy as it's through others. Often at times, things can evolve from our Support offering to one or more of our other offerings.
An example of this is when a group from the NZ Enterprise Delivery function came to Design Drop-In (a weekly session where anyone at IAG could come and share a real scenario where they are trying to use design to solve a problem) to discuss a problem they were trying to solve. This led to on going support sessions to embed design practices in their way of working, solving the right problem, with the customer front of mind. The output was NZ Enterprise Delivery remodelling their delivery framework to include the customer.
“Love working and learning with / from you all over the past year on the Risk Profiling work. Looking forward to lots more opportunities for learning and applying design thinking over the coming times.”
Carolyn B Senior Specialist, Operational Risk Transformation - Regular attendee of Design Drop-In sessions
Events connect IAG employees to each other, building a common mindset via the introduction and exploration of specific design-related topics. This is done by hosting regular highly engaging group sessions that involve a mix of information, activities, and reflection. Topics are wide and varied, and are currently delivered as focused, interactive sessions where employees can informally learn about and participate in topics and activities related to Design.
82% of participants reported they felt very connected from our events despite it being virtual. Events were delivered with internal and external specialist on the subject. Event topics included: Storytelling, Experimentation, Creative Curiosity, Drawing for Story, Personas, Creative Confidence & Curiosity, Creativity & Design (event tailored for SheEO), Amplifying Design with Creative Intelligence (tailored for CX Collective)
The work we did in this space was well recognised and our reputation extended beyond IAG. For example, we designed and facilitated an interactive virtual session that focused on helping bring curiosity and creative confidence into peoples work, life and ambitions for the SheEO Australian Summit, a gathering for women working on The World's To-Do List.
The Design Community team partnered closely with a number of groups across IAG on projects. The results were outstanding for not only participants’ personal development but also actively contributing towards key measurable deliverables.Some verbatims from those we partnered with include:
“[The deep dive had] great presentation style; was relatable; good command of the material. Helped audience and colleagues put together the design jigsaw puzzle, which can be intimidating.”
“[The support sessions] ...focused on how to make the techniques tangible and useful for our particular circumstances.”
Anthony F - Lead on Enterprise Delivery Project - Enterprise Delivery
A wide variety of IAG employees had participated across the different offerings of the Design Community. Training had been attended by 580 people in 5 locations in a single year. From surveys conducted, 92% reported the modules as significantly changing their understanding of Design. People were moving from workshop-only formats to more rigorously considered projects, or applying specific design methods to their roles. Participation in the Design Community offerings had grown from separate, interested individuals to larger collectives across business divisions. Despite ongoing realignments within IAG, enthusiasm for understanding of HCD had increased, with participants helping to facilitate and improve the program.
This output led to us winning the Good Design Australia 2019 award for the category design strategy for our successful approach and implementation of design capability uplift from the Human-Centred Design (HCD) Community at IAG.
The system empowers employees to enhance their existing roles with design mindsets, approaches, and practices.