Design research, installation design

Failure is Fine - Case Study

As an SF-based internal design and culture team, most of our culture and design work rarely ever made it out to our global offices, especially our mostly non-English speaking Tokyo office. A project manager and I were tasked to fly out to Tokyo with open minds to find out what that office could benefit from, whatever it could be.

After conducting interviews with our Tokyo employees and digging into research, I designed an interactive installation that would introduce a practice of sharing failures to encourage psychological safety. It never fully gained traction, but the process of tackling such an ambiguous goal was filled with learnings along the way.

Identifying pain points

Before going to Tokyo, we had little knowledge about the office and dynamic. In addition to interviewing a few employees that used to work in Tokyo to get an overall sense of their experiences working there, I worked with Design Research to create a field interview.

Research goals:

• Discover any pain points around work itself or working at the office

• Find ways to improve collaboration and cultural connection

Research

After working with our People Analytics team to dig into Pulse scores over the last few quarters (survey sent out quarterly to employees to track eSAT and other data points) and conducting interviews with half of the office, a few themes emerged from the data:

Top four pain points:

• Office space not meeting needs: Amenities were lacking, not enough meeting rooms

• Challenging Market: Reaching sales quotas in the Japanese market is challenging and stressful

• External Disconnect: Felt disconnected from other global teams

• Internal Disconnect: Little collaboration / engagement with each another, frustration with slow decision making and conflict resolution

After evaluating where we could make the most impact, we decided to focus on addressing Internal Disconnect.

Establishing success criteria

What would it look like to address Internal Disconnect? I looked at what the most successful, collaborative, and fast-moving companies had in common.

Regardless of industry or culture, the most successful organizations all had Psychological Safety, the belief that one can take risks without fear of humiliation or punishment.

My hypothesis: Introducing a practice that encourages a healthy mindset towards failure will be the first step of many towards a team that is more connected and collaborative.

• Challenge #1: There was an added layer of difficulty of this experiment being in Japan - where culture is based on self-blame, self-dependence, and keeping group harmony at all costs.

• Challenge #2: The Tokyo office was mostly Sales employees - meaning each person’s primary focus was on hitting their sales quotas, even if it meant taking less risks.

• Challenge #3: How would the introduction of a practice from an outsider be received? The most effective changes come from within a team.

Goals

That employees would:

• Share a healthy mindset around failure

• Feel more connected as a team

• Make decisions more quickly

Measured by:

Pulse Survey results before and after, along with interviews with employees after.

Proposal

I wanted to introduce the idea of sharing failures and risks, but in a format that would be familiar to Japanese culture and celebratory in nature. I was inspired by the shrines in Japan where people come to write down their wishes and hang them up.

Visual Inspiration:

Wish / Prayer walls in Japan

Interactive gathering places

Fun Shapes / Colors

Installation Concept

rules of engagement:

• Each person writes on a magnetic card: “What was a risk I took or a failure I had this month? What did I learn?”.

• Everyone (no exceptions!) must contribute at least one entry to the board each quarter. Can submit anonymously.

• The head of Japan and our co-founder have to contribute the first stories.

• The stories will be shared out each quarter at All-Hands.

Making it happen

• Pitched idea to our co-founder, HRBPs for Japan, and Head of Japan and got approval. Also asked our co-founder Arash for the first failure to be shared.

• Identified key people to execute this proposal: Tomoko, the office manager, Head of Japan, other key people in office known to be culture ambassadors to promote the practice and be the first to contribute their own stories.

• Designed and produced board with my project manager.

• Worked with Comms to create speaking points for Koki to kick off project at the Tokyo All-Hands.

Conclusion

The project launched for about a quarter and a half but was discontinued because of the COVID shutdowns. But ultimately, it failed to get enough traction while it was still running.

A few contributors:

1. Moving too slowly: getting HR approvals and the production time of the installation took away time I could have used to experiment and pivot strategies.

2. Needed to work in tandem with other strategies/efforts.

3. Not being there in person: I couldn’t be there in-person to observe interactions or how it was rolled out.

If I had to do it all over, I would have instead created a prototype to run in our own office where I could observe and alter it, and then roll it out to other offices. Or, I would have started with a verbal practice instead of going for a physical installation right off the bat.

Either way, it was a risky move to pilot something overseas, but we’ve been looking into reviving the concept digitally, company-wide in the future.

More Work: