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Stakeholder alignment with Appreciative Inquiry

A large part of Design leaders role in organisation is communicating. I usually say jokingly that a large part of my job is talking...a lot.

The larger the organisation the larger the network of stakeholders that need to be managed and informed. Trust and relationships  needs to be carefully cultivated. Communication is a key part of this.

I have found that approaching stakeholder relationships as a coach is much more effective than anything else. Coaching aims shows people the path to the right answers, not the answers themselves. Few stakeholders want to be corrected or to be educated in design.

Design Assessment Framework

About three years ago I found myself in a situation where I asked myself this same question. I was leader a UX team and was wrestling with trying to increase overall impact in the organisation.

Are we getting the impact from UX that we want? Or do we know what we want?

After a discussion in Sweden and on various Slack groups, I decided to ask a wider group of people and created the European UX impact survey to try to get some better information.

Looking at the results and through all of the conversations since then, I have come to realise that all although this is interesting metric for organisations it is an oversimplified view.