Designers as in-house innovation consultants

Kevin McCullagh

View article on LinkedIn18 Jul 2024

Design is in the doldrums and needs a reboot. Last year, it was Big Tech layoffs; this year, it’s the management consultancies cutting back, with designers disproportionately affected. Beyond the economic cycle, there are also concerns that business is breaking up with design. Some design leaders regret that design grew in the 2010s at the expense of devaluing it to a set of quickly learned tools and frameworks – while downplaying well-honed sensibility, judgement and craft. Add the dark cloud of generative AI hovering over everyone’s future, and the sense of malaise is palpable.

One way proactive leaders are experimenting with reframing and adding value to their teams’ value proposition is to train their senior colleagues to play a wider role in their organisations as in-house innovation consultants.

To be clear, this is not about being an internal design consultant. These consulting projects do not involve designers designing products and services for customers, but collaborating with colleagues in cross-functional teams to tackle complex internal operational and change challenges, such as:

Testing and learning how to best introduce GAI into innovation and product development across the organisation
Improving the staff onboarding experience
Developing and bringing to life a new vision for part of the company
Developing an architectural brief for the design of a new office space for the company
Exploring how suppliers can be better involved in the innovation process
Planning how a company anniversary might be marked and celebrated across the company and its customer and supplier base

The types of projects to which these designers add the most value are not highly technical. Instead, they cut across departments and involve a subjective human experience, as opposed to drilling into narrow financial or engineering problems.

What really distinguishes consulting projects from traditional design work is the shift from the designer mindset of ‘owning the problem’ to the consultant mindset of ‘owning the process’. The consultant’s job is not to solve the client’s problem but to help the client and cross-functional team get to a solution.

These experiments with designers acting as in-house consultants reflect a broader shift away from an overreliance on external consultants. Since the 2008 financial crisis, companies have used in-house consultants to reduce spending on pricey management consultancy firms. It makes sense to add the right kind of designers who have gained skills in consulting principles, processes and tools to the professional mix. If done well, it delivers more effective solutions, raises the design team’s visibility and impact, and develops and retains top design talent.

The case for in-house consultants in general

Before we get into the case for designers as in-house consultants, let’s first look at the pros and cons of in-house consultants in general, along the eight dimensions:

Knowledge: External consultants can bring more cross-sector knowledge, but internal consultants tend to have deeper sector and organisational knowledge. Also, externals usually have limited time to fully understand the problem space or explore and develop innovative solutions.
Relationships: Internal consultants are much more likely to have trusted relationships with at least some of the managers who will need to create and own the change. External consultants can easily overlook the hard-won relationships and shared values – often unwittingly.
Confidentiality: Senior management may be more comfortable entrusting the project to trusted insiders.
Credibility: Recommendations made by an external firm tend to be given more weight, as they are backed by the firm’s brand status and tried-and-tested processes and perceived to be more objective.
Resource: External firms can usually access more consultants faster than their internal counterparts. They can also focus on one project, whereas internals tend to be stretched across many.
Follow-through: Internal consultants are well placed to stay in contact with an initiative over its duration. By contrast, externals are expected to make an impact quickly… and then move on.
Cost: Internals are seen as more accessible and cost-effective, whereas externals are ‘on the clock’, expensive and rationed.
Motivation: Internals are more likely to have the organisation’s best interests at heart, whereas externals are incentivised to maximise fee income.

It all boils down to what works best for a project – using your team, hiring external help, or doing a bit of both. It depends on the project’s needs, available resources, and how much you can spend.

The case for designers as in-house innovation consultants

Not all senior corporate designers are well-suited to the somewhat different business of innovation consulting. A great designer will not always make a great innovation advisor, and vice versa. The types of designers most likely to make great consultants are:

Experienced: They have proved to be effective problem solvers across a wide range of challenges.
Strategic: They see the bigger picture and have good commercial and organisational awareness.
Personable: They are good at listening, asking questions and building relationships.
Collaborative: They are team players and good at working with colleagues in other functions.
Persuasive: They are confident, articulate and good at influencing others, especially senior managers.

Clive Grinyer, a design leader who led cross-functional teams at Cisco and Barclays, reflects that the designers who succeeded in these roles were ‘motivated by long-term impact, had guile and resilience, and were opinionated and confident enough to lead’.

Designers’ soft skills count in consulting – much more than their tangible craft talents. A former head of a design-led consulting team at a leading tech firm underlines the point:

‘I began by recruiting designers, but it quickly became apparent that many internal designers didn’t have all the capabilities. They didn’t have the facilitation skills or know-how to conduct themselves, for example, debating and challenging professionally. So I hired design strategy consultants from some established firms and supplemented teams with external consultancies.’

That said, the right kind of designers often possess highly under-valued strengths that make them effective innovation consultants.

These powerful capabilities can be welded far beyond traditional product and service design projects. However, many designers are only partially aware of possessing them and tend to focus on their more tangible craft skills.

The skills designers need to become credible consultants

While some designers will take to internal consulting, they still need to acquire some core consulting skills to become credible alternatives to external firms.

Client centricity
The biggest shift for new consultants is moving from designing for users to solving operational problems for internal clients who expect a professional service. From college, designers have long been encouraged to emphasise working with users. By contrast, consultants emphasise working with their internal clients. Professional services firms, such as management consultancies, school their junior consultants in the concept of client service, the name given to building trusted relationships and providing a professional experience.

Consulting process
The consulting process has many similarities with the design process. Still, the key difference is that instead of the designer solving the problem, the emphasis is on the consultant guiding a cross-functional team step-by-step to solve it themselves – and usually owning the implementation of the solution or change. This is a big shift for designers who are used to thinking of themselves as problem solvers in the room; now, they guide a team through a problem-solving process.

Data analysis
Designers tend to have relatively informal and less robust ways of sourcing, collecting and organising information relevant to their projects. When working with a cross-functional team, their colleagues will likely expect higher standards. This does not mean that the consultants must become data analysts. However, they need to know how to frame the right questions to ask of data, discuss and interpret data, and weave data into stories that support their recommendations.

Workshop facilitation
Many designers are familiar with creative workshops, which often amount to extended brainstorming or ideation sessions. Innovation consultants use a wider range of workshop types, emphasising collaborative learning, problem-solving and ownership throughout the project journey.

Influencing
Even company insiders find it tough to get the organisation’s gears to turn enough to deliver real change. Success requires a canny mix of charm, guile, planning, and persistence. Of course, coordinating this campaign does not rest solely on the shoulders of the consultant, but they do need to marshal the team to do it effectively.

These skills are critical to consulting success, and the right kind of designer can develop them through training and on-the-job coaching.

Christine Ruf moved from being a design leader to what she calls a business partner at Philips, focusing on long-term transformation. She reflects on her journey:

‘I realised that design on its own had limited impact and that designers can’t solve complex problems on their own. I learned to celebrate designers’ strengths in integrating multiple perspectives and visualising complex challenges, but also recognise the creativity and capabilities of other functions. I also learned that the most important focus of my creativity was how best to design the process so stakeholders across the business would fully own the solution and deliver the change.’

Addressing two challenges

The case for in-house consultants being more cost-effective, confidential, knowledgeable, and having continuity and networks to support implementation is clear. So, let’s focus on mitigating two critical challenges – credibility and objectivity.

Credibility
The most significant and intangible barrier to the success of an in-house consulting group is the risk of not being taken seriously by senior management, compared to bigger management consultancies, and therefore only being considered for relatively low-priority projects.

The critical job here is to clearly articulate to senior management the consulting team’s purpose, focus, expertise, process, and clients—which parts of the organisation it will work for. For example, it might be to focus on urgent and complex cross-functional problems that have a significant human experience element (i.e., not narrowly technical or financial). This consulting proposition, which should be clearly linked to the company’s strategy, can be used to recruit internal sponsors, which are vital to the consulting team’s success. ‘You need aircover, as the value of the internal team is not immediately perceivable’, stresses Sean Carney, former Chief Design Officer of Philips.

Another way to bolster the team’s credibility is to include professional consultants, by hiring them onto the consulting team or including external consultants in project teams. This blended approach adds three benefits. First, the designers have been trained in consulting skills, processes and tools, which are more comprehensive and tried and tested than Design thinking. Second, it does not rely on the limited toolbox of user research, brainstorming and prototyping but leverages a cross-functional team’s collective knowledge, capabilities and creativity.

Depending on the organisation’s experience with Design Thinking, another potential issue to address is the question – isn’t this just Design Thinking repackaged? While innovation consulting does involve designers tackling non-traditional challenges, there are two significant differences. First, the designers have been trained in consulting skills, processes and tools, which are more comprehensive and tried and tested than Design thinking. Second, it does not depend on the limited toolbox of user research, brainstorming, and prototyping but rather harnesses a cross-functional team’s collective knowledge, capabilities, and creativity.

Objectivity
A reason often given for hiring external consultants is to gain an outsider’s perspective. Rightly or wrongly, senior management often believes that in-house consultants have been captured by groupthink and internal politics.

This perception can be hard to shift but can be mitigated. Any consultancy training should highlight the principle of professional integrity and the skill of tactfully pushing back or giving frank feedback. A good consultant does not always give clients what they want!

Cross-functional teams containing multiple perspectives and data points from around the organisation also reinforce the perception of objectivity. Sean Carney underlines their importance:

‘One other key learning for me is that any Innovation team has to be truly multi-disciplinary. Design can certainly host the team, but it needs to be staffed with a good cross-section of experiences and capabilities if the output is going to have impact.’

A third way of bolstering the team’s perceived objectivity is to build compelling cases supported by data. Internal consultants have an advantage over external consultants because they usually find it easier to access internal data sources.

Benefits and dilemmas
Moving from an internal designer to an in-house consultant is as much a change of mindset as the acquisition of new skills. However, the upside for the organisation, the design team, and the individuals involved is considerable.

The organisation acquires a new cross-functional resource with the potential to be more capable and cost-effective than externals. The design team is adding value across the organisation beyond its core competence of experience design. Individual consultants get to enhance their talents, step up to higher-level challenges and open up more career options.

Jean-Jacques L’Henaff, Leader at Lixil Global Design Americas, puts it well:

‘Designers are trained to think holistically, and their position within an organization gives them a deep connection to both the brand purpose and the operational side of the business. With proper training on client-oriented techniques, they can become a powerful tool to unlock value far beyond conventional design-related issues.’

Establishing an in-house innovation consulting team involves resolving many implementation questions, such as:

Where in the organisation should it sit? Should it be owned by design or a more central function?
Should the designers involved be part-time or full-time consultants?
How should projects be identified and resourced?
How should the consulting team manage its limited resource of consultants?
Should projects be billed internally, and if so, how?
How should success be assessed and consultants incentivised?

All will depend on the specifics of your organisation and your design vision, but will further integrate design into the business.

Design needs a reboot
The days of insisting that design is central to business success and pointing at Apple are long gone. So is evangelising empathy, journey maps, and user testing, which are now well understood and integrated. As Carney puts it, ‘We need to be optimistic about our future, but we need new thinking – we need to pull our socks up!’ Expanding the design team’s internal offer to include in-house innovation consulting could provide one part of design’s new value proposition.

Kevin

Kevin founded Plan in 2004. Before this, he was a director at product design consultancy…