Here is an excerpt from an article written by Ashlea Powell for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Every design project extends beyond the brief. No matter how straightforward and discrete a project seems at first, it will unfold in the context of a complicated, networked, and messily human organization. That means that part of a designer’s job must be to design tools, conversations, experiences, and environments that help the organization embrace innovation and change. At IDEO, we think of this as designing interventions.

We approach intervention design in a variety of ways, depending on the shape and scale of the organization and the innovation we are working to enable. But every intervention involves designing experiences for a project’s stakeholders that go beyond logic and engage the emotions inherent in the question “Why should we change?”

Here [is] the [first] of three main tools we use:

Transformative empathy: When stakeholders are having trouble imagining things being different than they are, or when they are extremely removed from (and even judgmental of) their customers, the experience of being wholly immersed in somebody else’s perspective can free up their thinking. The desired outcome is that stakeholders come away from the experience in agreement about the challenge we are solving and with a felt understanding of why things need to change.

More than any organization I’ve worked with, Weight Watchers employees are in tune with their customers’ needs and feelings. That’s because so many of them are members. But even for them, over time, it’s easy to lose touch with the intimidation and anxiety new members feel the first time they cross the threshold of a Weight Watchers meeting.

A few years ago, Weight Watchers engaged IDEO to create a vision for the future, which often implies a digital future. However, our early research pointed to some real value in taking a hard look at the meeting, the central feature of the Weight Watchers experience. With that in mind, we designed an intervention for our client team: a visit to a mega­church in Dallas, TX. A mega­church shares qualities with a meeting – convening people with a shared goal, while also triggering similar insecurities: “Do I belong? How should I behave?” We hoped it would remind our team of New Yorkers what it feels like to arrive at a Weight Watchers meeting for the first time.

Our hypothesis proved correct. The IDEO and client teams looked for every excuse possible to get out of attending the service at the mega­church. “There’s so much traffic, is it really worth it?” “We can just stream it on our phones!” We all but turned around on our way there. But we made it, and were surprised by how embraced we felt as we crossed the threshold. Even though we were late, parishioners greeted us at the door, provided us programs for the service, and guided us to an available pew – with no questioning looks, which was our unspoken fear. We all left with a new perspective, and without saying anything to each other, we knew we had to redesign the experience of showing up at a Weight Watchers meeting.

The transformative empathy intervention shifted the focus of the design challenge to not only include Weight Watchers’ digital future, but also the meeting room.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Ashlea Powell is a Senior Director at IDEO New York with a background in writing and design research.