Human-Centred Design Community
What is Design Community?
The Human-Centred Design (HCD) Community at IAG is a people-based system of training, events, and support designed to uplift the capability of design thinking across IAG. The system empowers employees to enhance their existing roles with design mindsets, approaches, and practices.
Challenge
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?
Context: IAG is Australia's largest insurer, with over 10,000 employees.
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, innovation needs to occur in all areas of the business. The Design Community through its Service Design and Creative Intelligence capabilities provides the means to achieve this.
In 2014, an 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 Design Community Team was to guide, coach, and facilitate connections between the community, business experts and the Design Centre to enable smarter design.
Role: Design Community Manager & Creative Intelligence Lead
Team Builder, Visual Designer, Facilitator, Experience Creator, Change Champion, Cross-Functional Collaborator, Researcher, Quality Gatekeeper, Process Optimiser, Scenario Planner, Relationship Alchemist, Knowledge Nurturer, Coach.
Timeline: August 2018 – September 2021
The things I designed: Human-Centred Design Frameworks, Partnership Model, Design Community System, Interactive Prototypes, Workshops and Co-creation Sessions, Rituals and Ways of Working, Feedback and Metrics Mechanisms, Templates, Design Library, Training Programs, Handbooks and Tools.
What does applying HCD in a large organisation look like?
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 Solution
The Design Community enabled IAG employees to incorporate design into their work, ensuring that customers are at the center 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 eight pillars 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.
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Built employee understanding and capability of design techniques that put the customer at the centre of decision making through an rigorous evidence-based approach. Training courses ranged from general awareness to in-depth practice.
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Grew awareness of design and its benefits to IAG employees through various methods and channels.
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Assisted the practice of design at IAG through mentoring, guiding, or connecting.
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Focused, interactive sessions where employees could informally learn about and participate in topics and activities related to Design.
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Work that the Design Community team actively participated in, which includes a combination of applying and supporting people to use design.
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Work that was done across each of the 7 different areas to evolve materials and approaches based on the changing needs and demands within IAG.
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Assessing and understanding the impact of the Design Community offerings on IAG employees and teams.
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Team-approved materials that were managed and leveraged to improve people’s learning and application of Design.
Impact
Through our custom built offerings, there was a wide variety of impacts on individuals and teams across IAG. The number of people either working with or interested in the use of Design significantly increased across IAG, uplifting people's mindset and problem solving ability to include the customer at the centre of decision making. Here are all the brands we worked with within IAG: NRMA, CGU, RACV, WFI, Coles Insurance, NZI, AMI, SGIO, SGIC, SWANN, and SUU.
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.
Overall impact of Design Community to the business was achieved through the community of practice offerings.
Outcomes
Accessible and Inclusive Training
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.
The Design Community team adapted all training courses to be more accessible and inclusive for all IAG employees, regardless of geographic location, demonstrating our scaled impact by spreading the voice of design throughout the business and enabling more people to experience their own a-ha moments with design.
“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!)”
Participant | Design Training
Communications (Comms)
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. Our Comms offering helped every division and function at IAG connect with each other, further building on our vision.
Community members can connect with the Design Community team and other members through multiple platforms:
Design Community Yammer Page
Design Community Mailbox
The Double Diamond Newsletter
Design Drop-In weekly support sessions
Slack channels
1:1 sessions on MS Teams or face-to-face
Support
When people start to apply design they invariably will have questions. This is why we provide support! 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. Sometimes, these sessions lead into 1:1 catch ups to provide more personalised guidance.
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 Senior Specialist in Operational Risk Transformation engaged the Design Community for support with their work on a Risk Profiling project with the objective to understand the experience of people applying the Risk Profiling process. The Design Community guided the Risk Specialist through the application of the Double Diamond process, enhancing their problem-solving skills and providing project support. This approach enabled the Risk Profiling project team to narrow their focus, build a desired solution, and address the correct problem.
This Design Community Member participated in most of our offerings, was a regular attendee of Design Drop-In, and helped co-facilitate Design Fundamentals Training.
“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.”
Design Community Member | Operational Risk Transformation
Events
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.
Design Community events have had significant impacts on IAG employees across several areas, within their role as well as their personal development. Here are our findings:
Increased awareness of Design through participation
Application of Design and Creative Intelligence Principles in day to day work
Participant commitment to further building upon their practice of design
Word of mouth promotion
Increased demand for future events
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.
“I enjoyed it all. I loved the energy, the experience, and knowledge! The activities were all well created and gave great purpose!”
Event Participant | Creative Curiosity
Projects
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.
An example of project partnering is ‘Make it Stick’ – an initiative aimed at redesigning IAG’s Customer Connections (embedment) program to make it scaleable and more inclusive across the enterprise. How might we connect IAG employees to the customer’s experience of the journey to enable them to make informed choice?
To do this, the Design Community team worked with the Customer Enablement team to apply a design-led approach to the initiative. While working on the project the Customer Connections team were able to practice design skills such as, problem framing, setting research objectives, effective questioning on interviews, synthesis, brainstorming, and experimentation, on a business problem. One outcome included having an experimentation framework where they could try and measure new ideas to improve the ‘Make It Stick’ program.
“The Design Community have provided material support and expert leadership to the CFO Creativity Working Group taking a team of accountant’s, investment managers and other various finance folks and helped us create a plan and vision to embed creativity into CFO.”
Project Partner | Operational Partnering, Group Finance
Achievement
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.
Reflection:
Building and nurturing a design community of practice (CoP) has been an immensely enriching experience, fostering a vibrant ecosystem of collaboration, continuous learning, and innovation. Our Design Community is grounded in a shared vision and open communication, cultivating trust and collective motivation. By focusing on scalability and sustainability, we have maintained our core values while expanding our impact. Leveraging our understanding of the broader organisational system and integrating Human-Centred Design principles, the Design Community has driven transformative change and created lasting value for the organisation and its members.