Driving Organizational Change from Within, with Benji Wiedemann and Alex Lampe

In this podcast episode, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover talks with Benji Wiedemann and Alex Lampe about driving organizational change from within. Benji Wiedemann is co-founder and Executive Creative Director at brand and business consultancy Wiedemann Lampe. He brings over two decades of experience to helpbrands and organizations unlock cultural impact at scale. Alongsideco-founder Alex Lampe, Benji created Lemonade, an enterprise-grade digitalplatform designed to enhance collaboration and communication between teams,businesses, and communities throughout the creative process, drivingdeep-rooted and meaningful business transformation. Alex Lampe is co-founder and Executive Strategy & Innovation Director at brand and business consultancy Wiedemann Lampe. He brings over two decades of experience in building brands, digital ecosystems and tools that help organizations unlock transformation through design thinking, innovation, service design, and experiential design, while crafting and protecting their unique cultural identities. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to the HCI family of podcasts. We're your source for personal, professional, and organizational growth and development. We share our own original research, explore industry trends, and interview executives and thought leaders from across the globe. Join us for practitioner-oriented content around all things leadership, HR, talent management, organizational development, and change management. Maximize your personal and organizational potential with the HCI family of podcasts.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Benji Viedeman and Alex Lamp, welcome to the conversation today.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Thank you very much for having us.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  It is a real pleasure to have you with me. You're joining me from London. I'm south of Salt Lake City in Utah. And today, we're going to be talking about driving organizational change from within. I'm really thrilled to have a chance to sit down with you and have this conversation. A really important topic. I think everyone is grappling with constant and rapid change, and the pace and rate of change is just accelerating. I think the reality that we're in is that change is just ubiquitous, and it's around us constantly. And we have to learn how to navigate constant change, how to be ready for that change, and

• 1:20Speaker 00

  how to embrace it. But we're human, and humans tend to resist change. We tend to like at least the perception of stability and normalcy and, you know, control. And so, there's resistance. And as leaders, we need to find ways to be able to influence and drive change within our organizations. And that's a challenge. Anyone who's led an organization, who's led a team, knows how hard that is. So this is what we're going to explore together today. As we get started, I wanted to share Alex and Benji's bios with everybody. Benji Viedeman is co-founder and executive creative director at brand and business consultancy Viedeman

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Lamp. He brings over two decades of experience to help brands and organizations unlock cultural impact At scale alongside co-founder Alex Lamp, Benji created Lemonade, an enterprise-grade digital platform designed to enhance collaboration and communication between teams, businesses and communities throughout the creative process, drive in deep-rooted and meaningful business transformation. Alex Lamp is co-founder and executive strategy and innovative director at Brand and Business Consultancy Viedman Lamp.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  He brings over two decades of experience in building brands, digital ecosystems and tools that help organizations unlock transformation through design thinking, innovation, service design and experiential design while crafting and protecting their cult, their unique cultural identities. And this, that's just a snapshot, like little tidbit of both of their backgrounds and professional identities. I mean, there's so much more I could share about both of them. Um, but Alex and Benji, anything else you would like to share with the audience about your own backgrounds, uh, your, your, your consultancy before we dive on into the conversation?

• 3:12Speaker 01

  I thought that was pretty comprehensive, but just one note. So if you hear me, I'm Benji. So I'm the one with the German wang. Because I was originally born in, born in Germany, but I came here, I excelled myself in Germany when I was uh, eighteen and since then I've always lived and loved being in London.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  And I'm uh, yeah, so I'm Alex. So yeah, born and bred in the UK here. And um, my particular expertise in, well, love design. So, you know, we're both, we call it classically trained designers, but through the, through our career progression is getting deeper and dear, deeper into the strategic um, kind of underpinnings of any business and looking at that from a transformative state. And that brings together this expertise and knowledge of, of, you know, strategy, technology and design and how all of these feed into kind of a wider business context.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I love it. And I love how, you know, you frame kind of the, the purpose uh, of your consultancy and what you do. Um, and the, the combination of the design, the innovation.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  The experiential, the brand, you know, all of these different components, which I think are so important in in how we navigate the modern workplace, engaging with our customers, all of that. I think it all goes together. And and far too often, we, you know, we kind of pick at the edges of like different aspects of of what we need to be doing and we need to think more systemically, right? About because everything is connected and and when we when we only pick at one little piece, uh, it's it's kind of like whack a mole, right? Like, yeah, that one little piece is important, but when we only pick at one little piece,

• 5:02Speaker 00

  it's whack a mole. You kind of hit that one piece, but this other thing pops up over here and and you're only you only end up putting Band-Aids on things and you don't actually get any root causes of anything and and you don't really move anything forward. So I I love I love what you're doing. And and that that really leads me to the first question. I know everyone talks about change and everyone talks about transformation. That's these are buzzwords uh, that are out there in industry. Um, you talk about transformation a little bit differently. You frame it as brand-led transformation. Maybe talk to us a little bit about that. What do you mean by brand-led transformation?

• 5:40Speaker 01

  All right, um, Alex touched upon it. Now we are trained graphic designers, right? And as a graphic designer, you've got an inquisitive problem-solving mind and you try to find the simplest solution, the simplest, clearest solution for the problem that you're facing that can be highly complex in that world. It depends what organization you work with. Now Alex and I somehow consistently throughout lives have gravitated to increasingly complex problems. And that's a really important part that we move from the the the the need to simplify things, clarify things and communicate things through the design process. We move then deeper into organizational structure to really find out what is it we want to be saying

• 6:25Speaker 01

  with the delivery of the work. And that's where we found ourselves much deeper. In the design, in the brand strategy aspect of things. And so, once you start these conversations, you start shaping the organisational trajectory quite a lot more. And then there was a key moment in our lives, so we moved from design deeper into strategy that we realised, actually, what we're now doing is using brand as a lens to inform business strategy. And what we like to say is that at the heart of the brand strategy is good business strategy, but also at the heart of good business strategy is good brand strategy. So for us, these were very clear points to create a symbiotic relation.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  And what is really interesting, coming actually from the design point of view, that the only strategic execution the audience sees is in the experience. And that's where we come. We are able to articulate the experience through service design blueprints, through how, how this whole brand is experienced. And as you said earlier, the totality of it. Yeah. And how that really connects with the boardroom deep strategy. And what we realised, which is quite an interesting one, that when you walk in as a brand designer, people say, hey, we're getting creative, we're really getting new logos and new colours, et cetera. But you're using this really as a Trojan horse to get into very deep psyche of the business.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  And the reality is that the, the business that one deals with often don't talk a moment about where they're going, how they're going about it. And this is where this real transformational piece happens, is when we get people talking. And I think it's a bit like marriage counselling at times, where one sits together and works. You think, so it doesn't need to be on the confrontational conflict side, it's just, are we aligned? Where are we going as an organisation?

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest things, is a brand-led transformation starts to take people out of their organisational sight. Just think about the organisation through the lens of the audiences it's serving and all of the stakeholders and everybody it's communicating with. And that starts to dismantle these compartments, these, and sort of encourages companies to kind of think outside that organisation structure and think. About the value that they're creating and who that is for. And it's really around focusing not on the what they're doing. It's on the the value and the benefits that they're providing for their audiences, for the uh the people that they're engaging with. So it's it's really starting to focus on on the why and not the how. And that's really important. And that's quite difficult to do when they're in the trenches of of delivering

• 9:00Speaker 02

  their everyday jobs and thinking about their KPIs and delivering on on these on these targets is actually like just zooming out and understanding why we what are we doing.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, maybe talk a little bit more about that experience piece, because I you know, I think that's essential to, you know, in connection to the branding piece. Um but you you highlighted that. I'd love to, you know, double click on that and drill down a little bit more. Uh because I think that's so essential. We, you know, we often talk about user experience design. We, you know, we talk about employee experience within the workplace. Um, you know, and I think I think this this uh experience piece, certainly it's it's been talked about more and more in recent years. But I I I think it still does not get the attention it deserves.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  Um, because it's so fundamental to to kind of, it's so foundational to everything uh that happens. And and especially if we're talking about change, right? Uh, the experience becomes almost everything. And the even the the perception of experience becomes everything. Um, yeah, like what what's been your experience with dealing with experience as you as you're dealing with clients?

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'd say there's a number of levels. Okay, first level, which is becoming increasingly important with the work that we're doing at the moment, is is actually the brand architecture company. When you have a big group um delivering lots of different products, lots of different kind of across different sectors. It can become uh this this cocktail of different fragmented offers. So one of our first jobs is to really understand what is that brand architecture? How do we divide and present to the world a really cohesive um portfolio and offering of what that kind of entity, what that company is doing? That's that's the first level of that brand experience. And we often say that brand architecture is actually user experience. Okay, so when you To the website, a company or corporation or a museum, the first thing you're going to need to do is understand what are those different components?

• 10:57Speaker 02

  And this, this is a direct correlation, relationship with the brand architecture. But that's, that's almost one of the first things we start and is increasingly asked to look at, especially when you're looking at the structure of a visual identity and how it serves those different verticals and those different sectors. So that's, that's part one of that experience. Um, part two is of course that, that user experience and we touched on there, the, the service design of really thinking through what does that experience look like? And this applies to existing companies and brands as well as startups. So, you know, things that are being created, really thinking about the five steps of that process. How do they first become aware of you? What does that first interaction look like? What does it look like when you're actually engaged with that company?

• 11:38Speaker 02

  That process, you know, we always joke that is when we work with educational universities, that can be a 20 year experience, you know, going from undergraduate to alumni, it can be a lifelong experience. Um, how do we get people to return? How do you, how do you engage people to come back and, and, and repeat purchase, repeat visit, whatever, what are those reasons to return? And then finally, what happens when you leave? What, what does that exit process look like? Is it positive or negative? What, what does that look like and how can we include it? Now, by having that holistic view of a brand and that experience, you can then start to identify those, those bottlenecks, the opportunities, the points of distinction from competition.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  And so from a strategic lens, if you're considering the final execution, the final experience, you can start to devise these points of difference or these kind of articulations, how that might work.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  And just to add to that, what's really interesting, so I'm talking about the brand transformation side things. Often, the brand architecture isn't a direct reflection of the business structure. Um, often, so when we have these conversations at the C-suite level, looking at what the brand architecture is, well, that's not how our business is built. And this is a really interesting part because there are moments the business has organically grown, new groups have been developed, but actually to use the brand architecture to signal outwards.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  As Alex said, it can be, I know the expressed through website, et cetera. So how do people navigate services, products, et cetera? But that then can be kicked back into the organization. So how can we now create a reflection of this within the organization? And that's a very good example of how brand can really drive business transformation.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I appreciate that. I I think, you know, that's a really good way of thinking about, um. Well, it really gets to to the next question. You've already started to address it, but, you know, how can brand be used as the tool? Or as a tool certainly, but as maybe perhaps the core driving tool to help drive organizational change from within. You like, you know, that's really the focus of our conversation today. Um, and you you just mentioned, you know, like this brand is helping us drive transformation. And so if you're if you're leveraging brand to now drive transformation, to drive the change within the organization.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, talk a little bit more about that, you know, in in in some ways, it's it's used as a as a cultural lever, right? To drive cultural alignment. Um, uh, there there's other ways, but like, yeah, talk, talk through that a little bit with us.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Yes, I think the, you know, one of the first jobs is is really unpacking the purpose of that organization. So, you know, why why do they exist beyond profit? Um, that's really, really important. And then, you know, there's different ways of getting to that is is kind of almost asking, you know, people involved, you know, what would the world miss if we didn't exist? What is the value that that we're bringing to kind of our customers, our kind of stakeholders? And I think when we talk about purpose, you know, it it gets a bad name. I think it's overused. You know, everything has got a purpose. Um, the sync planter has got a purpose, but but what is that that purpose that can actually drive ambition? Um, what is that that reason for being as an organization? And then how does that then inform the the vision, which is, you know, what is our version of the world?

• 14:56Speaker 02

  What do we want that to look like, uh, you know, through the difference of our businesses making? Once we, once we articulated that and we've found a a vision that is both aspirational but also achievable, it starts to really focus that whole. Organisation around the decisions that they make. And in order to get to that trajectory, it's about saying no to this as well. I mean, strategy is about making the right choices and abandoning those things that are not right to align to that vision. And understanding how you play out against your competitive set. And so where the mega trends are, where the, you know, you talked about there's a lot of change, you know, thinking about in the context of AI.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  What is that vision that that keeps us above some of these other changes which are happening, which are which are more contextual. And then once you've got that trajectory, then you can start influencing behaviour of an organisation by creating that central calibration. Creating a set of values which are actionable, you know, we we always have this thing with with brand values and company values. That they're not just these one words like commitment, dedication and passion. They need to be actionable, actionable sentences that people can act upon. And then they they start to form then P P I's across the organisation. That people can actually change their behaviour and say, well, am I going to meet my objectives this year by doing X, Y and Z, which which will align to that greater purpose. So it really does become a chain, a brand for us is is not just external.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  It's not a, it's not a visual articulation of the promise. It's it's actually looking on the inside, thinking about how do you drive everybody, rally everybody, motivate them and align them for this this new drive.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, one of, you know, as we're preparing for this interview and I was looking over some of the notes. And, you know, one of the examples that I I noticed was an organisation that you've worked with, the Louvre Abu Dhabi. And, you know, one of, one of, you know, the the change approaches, the cultural organisations that you've worked with. Maybe talk us through, you know, a practical example of like how you've gone about this with with the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Because I think I think it's fascinating. Yeah, what does it look like in practice when you're doing this?

• 17:08Speaker 01

  That was a hugely exciting and transformative project for ourselves. And and as a business, we have had the privilege of working with multiple organisations that really help us grow as. Individuals to help us grow as like from a skill set and this team's not from people wise, but just from an understanding of our subject matter. And um we've worked with them or started work with the Louvre Abu Dhabi in um uh two years after the opening. And what we also have to just quickly say, so there's the Louvre in Paris. They've got another museum in Lens, which is uh West France. And then this was the first output outside of France. So it was one of the greatest intergovernmental agreements and projects outside of the um outside of France.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  So it was, and we, we, we didn't go into it blindly and we knew this was going to be quite interesting one to work with. And also kind of like the reason why we were appointed to do it, because we have um the quite simple strategy. When they said, how are we going to approach it, we said, we need to get people in the room and just start nodding. We just need to start to agree on very clear things. So when we started to work with them now, rewinding, it had opened. People had visited, but it hadn't really woven into the fabric of society. And when you're looking at that, there's a larger game at play. So until sixty five years ago, the UAE mainly were nomads moving around. Um and so their whole way of learning is way more story based.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  So there's something called the traditional Hakawati, which is the storytelling nature. So on camels around fires, campfires. So the language that they've developed is immensely depth. It's got such great depth to it, it's so broad and it's way, way, way more complex than nuanced than our language. And that's a really interesting thing to know. But now in modern days, there's a note that was taken to say, actually, this is really important to have a museum going nation, that we've got object based learning. But now that we are uh settled, we can introduce that now into society. So the real task of this is starting the journey of creating a museum going nation. That's a really important.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  And then we started work with them about the alignment. And one of the key things is, is what Alex mentioned, it's, it's bringing people together on. The journey and our whole approach is extremely forensic. So we spent a lot of time talking to people like you do when you say you double click. We double click a lot in these meetings, you know, and it's about deepening our understanding. And whilst you're doing that, you're getting groups together and get them to talk, get them to understand each other's point of view. That whilst you're in the day to day work, this is something also that we talked about. People are in their silos, not because they want to be, it's just by default that they've got a very specific mandate that they're following.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  And so there's not much time to actually zoom out and say, why are we here? So we were able to realign their real, their vision, why they exist and their vision and their purpose. Through all this like cross, cross the board engagement. So it was C suite, it was the catering companies, it was the security guards. They are the first people you would meet from the experience. Then we started bringing all of that together into a narrative, um, points of difference. And everybody started to understand this and we landed on a um, theme of like stories of cultural connections. Because it's the only museum in the world that shows three different objects side by side from different cultures of different time. And it highlights the components they have in common.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  So the key thing is like, isn't this wonderful that we have more in common than pulls us apart? That's the curatorial outcome. Now everything around then starts building from that point clarity. And what we then started working on with teams to embed this, how can you do your job? And enhance the stories of cultural connections in the day to day decisions. And this is a key thing now, we touched upon it, Alex said, so it's not just, the values aren't just words. How can you give it more purpose and meaning? And our key was to have people change their incremental day to day decision making. Based on the backdrop of that, like if, is there a way can we tell stories of cultural connection? Is there an option doing that, then we would choose that.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  And if you take that across the whole organisation, across time, that's how you create a really deeply rooted transformation. Again, using the ideal brand, so. We are not at the point of design yet at all. And then we start to come like going, so we now, what are the difficulties that you are facing as an organisation? And if anybody's listening who runs a cultural institution knows exactly what we're talking about when the output is immense and the team is very limited. So how can we create internal processes from commission to creation that are so streamlined and their timelines are tough? So we developed three different type of projects, one which is a really fast turnaround, it's got a really tight brief structure and a visual articulation that is really, really templated. So there's not much flex.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  And then we started building the next one. So that would take days, then weeks and then months. And everybody knows. So if you need something quick, that's how it's going to look. And if you need months, then that's what you need to also budget time wise for. And that really helped unpick it on an organisational level. So what we really did is designed the internal structure to being able to unpick it. Then we went into more the outside world. And that's when Alex worked a lot on the visitor experience, if you want to talk about that.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, less about brand transformation, but again, going back to your execution point with the experience point, it's no use having all of this really well articulated in the scratch there. If the visitor experience on grounds doesn't match that. So we looked at the whole visitor experience. An amazing architectural monument that has been created, but it's modeled around an, you know, a labyrinth structure. It's modeled around a soup, which is like a maze. And the whole premise was to get lost in art, which is a fascinating proposition. But people were literally getting lost and they couldn't leave. They couldn't find the toilets. So there's no point of orientation. So we looked at the whole visitor experience as well. And just another point, based on what Benji was talking about.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  And the Louvre is a blend of different cultures working there. You've got kind of local Emiratis, you've got expats. You've got people from all nationalities, you've got the relationship with France. And so part of the work that we did was bringing those cultures together. And we came up with this concept, the mindful museum, about, you know, treating each other with respect. Creating those boundaries and creating those rules of engagement as well. So that. That was a big part of what we were doing as well.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, as Alex said, the the the the stakeholders were so complex. It was from the architect Jeanne Vel to the Department of Cultural Tourism, the Louvre, the French government. It's it's it's sprawl and getting people into a room. And it's really about pattern detection. It sounds quite technical and it needs a lot of human um or emotional intelligence to say, this is, I think, where we are all agreeing with. We're saying it in all different languages, in all different ways. But if we strip back, and this is one of the key things, to how we approach these things, that we think in concepts that then get rendered in language. So how would this be in Arabic? How would this be in French? And how would this

• 24:31Speaker 01

  best translate into English, rather than trying to be clever within the wording, but it's actually the concept that is so clear that you use language to give it body and shape.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  I love it. I mean, that's such a great example. Um. This has just been a fascinating conversation. Unfortunately, I know at the time, I probably need to let you go. Uh. It's evening for you. You probably have a a busy evening and need to get back to to family, friends. Uh. Before we wrap up for today, though, I did want to give you a chance to share with the audience how they can connect with you, find out more about your work, your team, uh, and then give us the final word for today.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so um you'll find our website, be them in a lamp dot com, and I'm hoping you've got some show notes, so we don't have to spell that out for you. Um. You can also follow us on Instagram, um, LinkedIn, there's a lot of LinkedIn content. Um. Final word?

• 25:25Speaker 01

  What I like to say, where the mind goes, the body follows. And if we're talking about brand transformation, I think everybody talks about the body to say, okay, what does it look like? But actually, to give the time, the space and the grace for teams to come together to marinate in this, to say, well, where is our collective mind going to go into the future? And once you've got a circularity, a single point created together, co-created for the future, then automatically the body and the transformation will follow.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  I've got one more thing to add. That I think that's brand strategy needs to transcend leadership, Henya. So what I mean by that is that you create the strategy and that should be lasting for the next decade, next fifteen years. Of course, it's continually recalibrated, but I think you need to give it a chance and you need to have that direction of travel and that that is not kind of reinvented every time there's a new CEO or a new CMO because that loses the, you damage the integrity of the company's trajectory.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Dilutes equity and diffuses the meaning of the purpose.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  I love it. I love it. Good stuff. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. I encourage the audience to reach out, to get connected, find out more about what Alex and Benji can do for you. Check out their consultancy and as always, I hope everyone can stay healthy and safe, that you find meaning and purpose at work each and every day, and I hope you all have a great week.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  Thanks for joining us for this episode of the podcast. We hope you stay healthy and safe and please join us again soon.