Use Your UX Skills on the Inside: Becoming an agent of change in your organization

Jane wants change. Jane wants more specific project goals, influenced by more research. She wants to design beyond where she typically feels caged. Rarely does she feel like she’s sending goal-meeting, user-loving, outcomes-achieving stuff out into a very deserving universe.

Jane gathers an audience to pitch some ideas on changing things organizationally to help fix this. She walks into a cold room, blurts out facts around how logical her ideas are, peppering in some emotional anecdotes. She speaks out into the darkness of a silent room. 10 slides later, one stakeholder makes a binary statement about considering her ideas and balancing them with other priorities. Jane thanks her “1 shot” group and takes the slog of sadness back to her cube, lamenting that her organization will never change. Within two weeks, Jane has picked up her backlog of tactical design (“red widgets, please”) and her presentation joins the graveyard of good ideas.

So what happened? Jane is good designer for her company. Her ideas around change are good ones. Was it her company being resistant to change? Did they think her ideas were infeasible or wrong?

Perhaps the issue is something completely different. Perhaps it’s not about the quality of her ideas or something specific with her company. It could be, but the more likely reality is that she isn’t using her great design skills internally to affect organizational change.

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