People support what they create.

Delivering a Brand Promise

For Studio BC/C 2019-20

Background

After rebranding Karins Engineering, Studio BC/C saw an opportunity to take the engagement further by planning the organization’s growth around the fulfillment of their Brand Promise.

I took a mandate for seismic change and executed against it with a 9 month strategy engagement bringing me 1,500 miles across the state and into relationships with every stakeholder in the company.

Challenge

Physical distance, decentralized leadership and recent acquisitions left the firm’s 6 offices functioning more as a franchise network than a unified company. After two acquisitions, managers, engineers and leadership had grown distant from the company’s vision. And client service, although great, was inconsistent across offices. The talent and accumulated wisdom was stuck in siloes and I saw an opportunity to call leadership and talent in to rally around a company vision through collaboration, exchange and ideation.

Discovery & Planning

Unifying the organization required defining the organizing vision for the company. Brining a strategic vision to growth across financial, organizational and operational business areas required 3 executive planning sessions where we defined visions for the future and clarified with actionable goals, resourcing and innovation needs.

Research

Internal strengths and weaknesses
Competitive analysis of external opportunities and threats
Market opportunities through client interviews
SWOT analysis

Strategic Activities

Clarified primary business and organizational purpose
Clarified business vision
Identified core values
Clarified success metrics

Karins Way Program

Standardizing Karins’ operational procedures across 6 offices and delivering their brand promise at every client touchpoint.

Organizational Challenge

Change by mandate produces speedy, efficient and structured change but is disempowering and loses engagement quickly. Change by influence is empowering, grows engagement and produces sustainable solutions but doesn’t work without consistent, centralized focused, something the firm’s leadership didn’t have to spare.

Solution

I designed a 6 month collaborative innovation that allowed teams to work across offices to identify and propose solutions hit to strategic goals.

Program Research

To give the program guard rails and define success metrics for senior leadership, I planned a series of 12 discovery sessions to give the project guardrails, recording operational strengths and weaknesses. I created a complete list of operational weaknesses, matched them to relevant business vision touch points and wrote and prioritized future states in response. These then served as the innovation prompts for the project’s 3 innovation and tester teams.

Program Design

Organizational Tension

I designed the program using remote collaboration tools and a structure that blends IDEO’s organizational change design with an innovation community model.
The program uses iterative prototyping to test low-fi solutions for feasibility while generating stakeholder buy-in and collective envisioning around the firm’s brand promise. The program is designed to invite voices and diverse perspectives from across the company into the innovation process, creating shared ownership.
That looks like:

- Grounding leaders in the real needs of the engineers to fulfill their brand promise
- Developing empathy for other stakeholders
- Surfacing insights to create solutions that are wanted and needed
- Developing mindsets that turn client needs into human-centered solutions