Thomas Carey is co-Principal Catalyst for the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, Executive-in-Residence with the Monash University Faculty of Arts and a former Associate Vice-President at the University of Waterloo.
Anahita Baregheh is an Associate Professor at Nipissing University’s School of Business and WINCan’s Research Director.
Jennifer Justice is an Accountant with Kendall Sinclair Cowper & Daigle LLP in North Bay (Ontario) and a graduate from Nipissing University’s School of Business.
This post presents the third element of our proof-of-concept test of our prototype professional development Ladder of Opportunities in Workplace Innovation through identifying suitable case stories in the work domain of Accountancy. These tests were intended to identify how well the framework fits with what we know about workplace innovation in a specific workplace domain and to identify some of the context-specific issues to be addressed for the framework to be used productively.
Our search for case stories of Design Innovation for Accountancy was also intended to explore the availability of case stories that might be used as Illustration or Practice cases in our Instructional Model for Adaptable learning resources and activities. Previous posts looked at Job Crafting and Innovation Adaptation (including specific examples from the Audit area) and the next post in this series will consider Intrapreneurship in Accountancy .
A Design Innovation Example of Creating Better Work in Public Sector Auditing
This Design Innovation case story focuses on an innovative method applied in an audit of the EU system of CE marking…CE stands for ‘Conformité Européenne’, meaning ‘in compliance with EU law’. By affixing a CE marking in the form of a logo to a product, the manufacturer declares that it complies with all applicable EU health, safety and environmental protection requirements. This logo is compulsory in all 33 countries of the European Economic Area.
[All text in italics has been excerpted and/or adapted from Meijer-Wassenaar & Van Est 2019].
A Supreme Audit Institution in the public sector has ultimate authority to audit the way taxpayers’ money is collected and spent. The case story described here developed a new approach to auditing for a supreme audit institution, the Netherlands Court of Audit, and addressed the question of “How can we imagine the role of design in audits? “
“Design thinking is a relatively new phenomenon in audit”. Here is how the authors of the case story – one an auditor, one a designer – describe what makes the combination of designing and auditing quite challenging:
One important distinction between auditing and design thinking is the way of reasoning. Most auditors start with deductive reasoning: they know the what (standards) and they compare this with the how (reality) to discover the unknown outcome (does reality comply with the standards?). When auditors want to know what patterns lead to the outcome (why doesn’t reality comply with the standards?), they use inductive reasoning: they discover unknown patterns that, together with known elements, lead to a known outcome…Designers, however, discover unknown elements and unknown patterns that lead to a [newly] known outcome.
The audit process began in the traditional way with two questions:
Why is it that products that do not meet EU health, safety and environmental protection standards are nonetheless sold?
What is the government doing about the problem – and what should it be doing?
The key contribution of the design thinking used in the case story lies in reframing the problem. Following traditional thinking, the auditors would likely have recommended that the various governments involved receive improved data on the problem and described what data was required.
However, the new approach to the auditing task developed in this case highlighted that for an audit to have an impact, more needs to be done than simply writing down the findings in a report. Using design thinking, the problem question to be addressed was itself redefined as:
What could we do to convince the inspectorates that the solution was in the data?
As a result, we did everything to ‘make people care’: we made engaging infographics, we followed a product journey to give the data more meaning, we searched for collaboration on the problem, and we complemented our report with workshops about our analysis of the data in order to help inspectorates learn.
In our judgment, this case story provides a good example of Design Innovation in Accountancy, where new approaches for auditing were developed to create more effective audit results.
(While Chartered Accountants have a primary role in Audit activities, the NCA staff involved in this case story included economists, social scientists, data analysts and other professionals.)
References:
Meijer-Wassenaar,L. and Van Est, D. (2019). The adaptation of design thinking in auditing. Presentation at the Academy for Design Innovation Management Conference, London June 2019.
The purpose and use of the CE logo above is defined in European Commission. (n.d.). CE Marking. https://ec.europa.eu/growth/single-market/cemarking_en
A Case Story We Couldn’t Use: Design Thinking for an Audit Monitoring System
When we found a case story about Design Thinking for an Audit Monitoring System [Pradini et al 2021], we thought the topic – and keywords like human-centred design and interactive prototyping – showed promise as an Illustration or Practice case that would resonate with learners in Accountancy (both students and working professionals). The case story described how each of the classic Design Thinking activities (Empathize, Ideate, etc.) were carried out in a project that engaged professional accountants in developing an innovation for their workplace: a new software system to share audit information across the team and their management.
However, on closer examination this potential case story fell short on several dimensions:
The primary goal of the innovation design was expressed in terms of improving organizational performance. There was very little exploration of how the new design would improve the quality of work life for the accountants who would use it.
There was insufficient evidence provided about existing alternatives to designing the new system: were there off-the-shelf options on which an Innovation Adaptation could have been based?
Both of the above shortcomings seemed likely to have been side-effects of a third aspect that we noted: the involvement of the accountants struck us as oriented mostly to their role as users, not as co-designers. For example, in the Ideate activity of the Design Thinking model employed, the user role is described as brainstorming and the output is described as a technical flowchart, not the collaborative process or resulting scenarios and visual narratives we were expecting.
Similarly, in the Prototype activity the prototype was made according to the researchers’ perceptions after which there were suggestions from users for improving the prototype.
These concerns led us to question the degree of fit between this case story and our goal of illustrating “employee-led” innovation (rather than a process led by external designers, however much that may have employed good user-centred design methods). Employee initiative and co-ownership of the process are key elements in the process of enabling employees to take on more pro-active and participatory roles. The larger organizational goal is to develop “self-reliance” in employee-led workplace innovation (although not necessarily “self-sufficiency”: the employees may still call on expertise beyond their own group, but it should be their decision to do so).
Our conclusion was that this case story should not be used as a base for an Illustration or Practice case to address the context-specific work domain of Accountancy, However, our study of this particular case story reminded us that this issue – of the roles of employees within a work group versus roles of design professionals external to the work group – is a topic of active discussion in the Design Thinking community (whether or not improving quality of employee life is an explicit goal).
For example, in a recent study of “Genuine Co-Design” in a healthcare setting [Eriksson 2021], the researchers explored what affects participants' transformative processes [that lead] towards genuine participation in co-design processes. Their conclusions included the insight that co-design activities have to support not only users, but all participants, shifting their perspectives beyond their own domain's rules, motives, objects and division of labour…to support users' participation as equal members in design teams.
References:
Eriksson, S., Wallgren, P., Sandsjö, L., & Karlsson, M. (2021). Genuine co-design: an activity theory analysis involving emergency nurses in an interdisciplinary new product development project of a novel medical device. International Journal of Human Factors and Ergonomics, 8(4), 331-369.
Pradini, R. S., Aknuranda, I., & Setia Budi, A. (2021, September). How Can Design Thinking Improve the User Experience for Audit Monitoring System?. In 6th International Conference on Sustainable Information Engineering and Technology 2021 (pp. 23-28).
(A note on terminology: Our first case story showed a successful use of design thinking to create innovative models and methods for a class of audit processes in the public sector. The second case story in this post focuses on the use of “Design Thinking” within an accounting firm, using this capitalized form to denote one specific set of popular approaches to structure and apply design thinking in organizations.
We hope this use between the similar wordage for different concepts, chosen by the two teams in reporting on their case stories, was not a source of confusion. For the purposes of this post, you don’t need to understand the differences between these terms to understand why we felt the first case story worked as an example of employee-led workplace innovation and this second one fell short.
If you do want to delve further into the differences, this previous post – by our workplace partner Karel Vredenburg of IBM Canada – distinguishes between two forms of design thinking: Human-Centred Design and the kind of Design Thinking intended in the second case story.)
This project was supported in part by a grant from eCampus Ontario’s Virtual Learning System program.
[TC2]Link to 2022.02 when available