How to land “the emotional why” of company change
- As General Manager of Design at IBM, Phil Gilbert fundamentally changed how nearly 400,000 employees worked.
- As a first step Gilbert gave his program for “irresistible change” a brand — and teams bought in willingly.
- Under the program name Hallmark — “the perfect blank-slate word” — IBM’s transformation revolved around a crucial point of focus.
To choose the ideal brand name for change at IBM, we needed to identify a name strong enough to travel the globe with a minimum amount of unwanted baggage. We needed a name that would encompass everything important about our change initiative, so we ruled out including words such as design or design thinking. We were more than that, and the name needed to reflect as much.
We had to take stock of the values we would want that name to represent. Initially, I considered the potential benefits of a name that might confer a sense of company continuity and familiarity. Perhaps it should invoke IBM’s nickname, and we could call our project teams Big Blue teams. But the risk would be that while dropping the baggage associated with “design,” we’d be taking on some new Blue-colored baggage instead. Maybe people are tired of hearing about Big Blue. What if some old-timers recoil at misusing the name, as though we were trying to put new wine in old bottles. Some might be offended by an upstart office appropriating the hallowed Blue nickname. “Wait a minute. Aren’t all our project teams a part of Big Blue?”
There was another brand value that was much more compelling than continuity: that of exclusivity. The highest value products in any marketplace are the ones that have cachet. Think about Louis Vuitton or Rolex. People opt into these brands because of their reputations for high quality and limited availability. That’s the same brand reputation we wanted for our change program.
Essential to making change irresistible is the perception that a team’s admission into the change program is a badge of distinction and achievement. We would be starting out with a limited number of teams, and we needed to attract a lot of project leaders willing to compete for those few slots. Having far too many applicants would provide us with the opportunity to review the applications critically and ensure we were working only with teams that were highly motivated to learn these new and unfamiliar practices. Competition amid scarcity would also enable us to choose a good mix of project team types.
What kind of name would reliably and unambiguously convey that feeling of status and exclusivity? We’d want a brand name that would make the members of our accepted teams feel proud they’d been admitted. And would be a name with no baggage, no past associations, no prior significance within the organization.
We ran some names through searches on the IBM intranet to rule out words already in use for employee awards and honors. The list narrowed from there. For a while we considered the word Signature, but we settled on Hallmark.
As we saw it, Hallmark was the perfect blank-slate word. A hallmark is a sign of distinction, nothing more, nothing less. It’s simple to spell and easy to say. Within IBM, the one thing you’d know about teams with the Hallmark designation is that they had been specially chosen through a competitive process for an ambitious project aimed at changing IBM’s future trajectory.That’s all anyone needed to know. These are teams of distinction, and if you want your team among them, just fill out the Hallmark application form.
Hallmark was a neutral shiny vessel into which we could pour the values of the Hallmark program and its teams. In the same way that you can’t separate the glamour of Jane Birkin from the limited edition Hermès Birkin bag, we would attempt to fuse the many positive existing elements of IBM’s culture with the new provocations that our program brought to create something new, valuable, and desirable. Hallmark stood for more than design and design thinking; it would stand for everything else needed to deliver great outcomes, too. Hallmark would become the gold standard for how teams worked at IBM.
Looking back, I can’t believe I didn’t see this from the start. The product approach to creating irresistible change depends on having a memorable brand, no different from any other product. In fact, if I had it to do over, I would have named our office the Hallmark Program Office on day one, just for the sake of brand consistency.
An important and immediate benefit of having the Hallmark name was that it gave me a much-needed point of focus whenever I had to communicate the rules and responsibilities for teams to be admitted into the change program. Under the Hallmark name, it was easier to communicate the underlying values of user-centricity without getting into the weeds debating features and functions of design. Branding our program offered the advantage of discussing it on its own unique terms of culture and values. Under the Hallmark banner, the program would represent a higher aspiration than the implementation of design thinking. The cultural priorities Hallmark represented would be clear.
This unlocked a new, more powerful way for me to tell the story. I remember addressing a town hall that summer and speaking in my customary informal way about our plans. Later that day, when I sat with a group of site leaders for a question-and-answer session, I was shocked by how their questions expressed mistaken assumptions about what I’d said earlier. Some of them “quoted” me in ways that completely misconstrued my meaning. As I attempted to set them straight, in the back of my mind I imagined what all the other people in the town hall had made of what I’d said. Were those people now passing on their mistaken assumptions to others, who in turn were misunderstanding them and acting on them?
When you speak more to the emotional why of change, to your values and aspirational intentions, people will respond with their hearts as well as their heads.
But when I began speaking of Hallmark values, I avoided these kinds of problems. We all want our leaders’ words to turn quickly into action. That behavior is at the root of organizational effectiveness and efficiency, but only if those words are carefully chosen and properly understood. If you can keep the conversation on values and the program’s intention, it’s more difficult to be misconstrued than when you assert specifics about, say, design or program implementation, which may not be universally applicable to every situation.
This is a particular discipline of change communication that the Hallmark brand facilitated. Change leaders often dive straight into discussing only the new methods and processes, overlooking the value in existing culture. This both alienates those who built that culture and ignores the real-world context where changes must be integrated. Moreover, technical teams often assume they understand these new concepts through their own experiential lens, leading to costly misunderstandings and lost momentum.
Don’t get me wrong — I enjoy sharing ideas and discussing all the tools and techniques that went into our work. I loved our designers and the work that they were doing and was very involved with the team responsible for our design thinking practices. I would spend hours with them. But getting into conversations with the broader community at IBM about such things was unlikely to reflect intention and advance the cause of change.
It’s akin to praising your product’s features, as opposed to promoting benefits in terms of brand values. You probably love your product’s features but they’re all about the factual what of change. When you speak more to the emotional why of change, to your values and aspirational intentions, people will respond with their hearts as well as their heads. The why message is more inspiring, more memorable, and is more likely to move people to action for change.
