Cense

Research.Design.Impact.

Creating Design Pathways for Learning

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Capturing learning requires a focus on the journey, not end. Thinking like a designer can shape what we learn and how.

Learning is both a journey and a destination and it’s through recognizing this that we can better facilitate intentional, deliberative learning to support innovation and development. By approaching this journey through the lens of service design — as a design-driven evaluation — we can better design the data and insights that come from it to support learning.

What is learning?

Learning comes from perception, experience, feedback, and reflection. You first encounter something and perceive it with our senses (e.g., read, observe, hear, feel), experience something (e.g., movement, action, tension, emotion), which gives you feedback about the perception and experience that is synthesized through reflection (e.g., memory, comparison with related things, contemplation).

Evaluation is principally a tool for learning because it focuses our perception on things, monitors the experience, provides the feedback and can support reflection through offering a systematic, structured means to makes sense of what’s happened.

Evaluation is simply the means of answering the question “what happened?” in a systematic manner.

For those developing an innovation, looking to change, or seeking to improve the sustainability of our systems, answering ‘what happened?’ is the difference between real impact and nothing.

Mapping the journey with data

A journey map is a tool that is used in service design to help understand how service users (e.g., clients, customers, patients, students) might encounter the service and system to achieve a particular goal. These can be displayed visually with great artistry (see here for a beautiful example of the Indigenous cancer patient journey in BC) or simply with boxes and arrows.

It is one of many types of maps that can be created to illustrate the ways in which a user might navigate or approach a service, decision, or pathway to learning.

For innovators and evaluators, these tools present an opportunity to create touchpoints for data collection and deeper understanding of the service throughout. Too often, evaluation is focused on the endpoint or an overall assessment of the process without considering ways to embed opportunities to learn and support learning throughout a journey.

We feel this is a lost opportunity.

Without the opportunity to perceive, gain feedback, and reflect on what happens we are left with experience only, which isn’t a great teacher on its own and filled with many biases that can shift focus away from some of the causes and consequences associated with what’s happening. This is not to say that there isn’t bias in evaluation, yet what makes it different is that it is systematic and accounts for the biases in the design.

Service design meets evaluation

Design-driven evaluation is about integrating evaluation into the design of a program to create the means for developing systematic, structured feedback to support learning along a service journey. One of the simplest ways to do this is to build a layer of evaluation on the service journey map.

Consider a detailed service journey map like the one illustrating the patient journey map cited above. Along this windy, lengthy journey from pre-diagnosis to the end, there are many points where we can learn from the patient, providers, system administrators, and others associated with the health-seeking person that can inform our understanding of the program or system they are in.

By embedding structured (not rigid) data collection into the system we can better learn what’s happening — in both process and effects. Taking this approach offers us the following:

  • Identify activities and behaviours that take place throughout the journey.
  • Provides a lens on service through the perspective of a user. The same service could be modelled using a different perspective (e.g., caregiver, healthcare professional, health administrator).
  • Identifies the systems, processes, people, and relationships that a person goes through on the way through, by, or in spite of a service
  • Allows us to identify how data can fit into a larger narrative of a program or service and be used to support the delivery of that service.
  • Anchors potential data collection points to service transitions and activities to help identify areas of improvement, development, or unnecessary features.
  • Provides a visual means of mapping the structural, behavioural and social processes that underpin the program to test out the theory of change or logic model (does it hold up?).
  • Offers opportunities to explore alternative futures without changing the program (what happens if we did X instead of Y — how would that change the pathway?).

These are some of the ways in which taking a design-driven approach and using common methods from service design can improve or enhance our understanding of a program. Not a bad list, right? That’s just a start.

Try this out. Service design tools and thinking models coupled with evaluation can provide access to the enormous wealth of learning opportunities that exist within your programs. It helps you to uncover the real impact of your programs and innovation value hidden in plain sight.

To learn more about this approach to evaluation, innovation, and service design contact us. We’d love to help you improve what you do and get more value from all your hard work.

Photo by Lili Popper on Unsplash , Billy Pasco on Unsplash and  Startaê Team on Unsplash . Thank you to these artists for making their work available for use.

Innovation’s Single Biggest Question

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There is not a bigger question for innovators — social, product, service, policy — than What are you hiring this [ ] to do for you? 

Let’s break this down a little and then explain why we ask that at the beginning of any engagement and all throughout from the first meeting to the final run of the evaluation data. The question gets us to shape what and how we might design our innovation while the answer is about the ways we tell what kind of value it generates and the impact it produces.

What’s in a question?

The start of the question is about you, the aspiring innovator. This highlights the role of the creator and reminds us that we are generating this ‘thing’ by procurement, by design, or by simply encouraging something to be made. Without us (i.e., you), nothing changes.

The active use of hire is about the reality that we are paying for innovation through our time, our energy, our focus, our social (and often political) capital, and our money. All of these could be spent elsewhere. Design is an investment and it’s purposeful. Asking this big question gets us to pause and think deeply about what we’re putting into innovation and what we’re looking to get out of it.

The [ ] is the thing you’re hiring — the proposed service, experience, product, policy, or ecosystem — and is what you’re purposefully bringing about. This is your idea manifest into something real.

The last part is ‘to do for you‘ is active: it’s about ensuring that you’re clear about what purposes it serves. No matter how beneficial your planned innovation might be for others, you are ultimately asking it to serve a role, fill a need, for you. It is you that wants to solve a problem, build a market, or prevent something from happening, and this requires some clarity to innovate well.

What’s in an answer?

Innovation is not just creating things, it’s about evaluating the things we create. If our novel products, services, experiences, and policies don’t generate value for people, they aren’t really innovations. It’s just stuff.

An evaluation perspective on the question asked above might look at things like:

-The roles people played in the innovation process, including the skills they used, experiences they had, and the insights that they gained along the way. This learning is what feeds into our understanding of how an innovation develops along with the people and organization it is a part of. All of that is part of the innovation dividend or ROI.

-The resources used as part of the ‘hiring‘ process like money, time, human resources, and other capital; all can help look at the value of the initiative to see if the costs and benefits make sense.

-What ‘things’ are produced — the prototypes, their functioning, their benefits, and weakness — as well as provide a means to document the iterations, the steps taken, the new ‘offshoots’ that might emerge, and the resulting products, services, experiences, and policies.

-Lastly, the innovation needs to fulfill some requirements or expectations and evaluation looks at what it does in the world, for whom, under what conditions, and what other impacts might emerge unintentionally. This helps assess risks, benefits, and find new opportunities for further development and innovation.

Better questions, better answers

Innovation is what will drive much of the future value of your organization. It’s what allows you to build, grow, adapt, or sustain what you’re doing because even if you don’t feel a need to change, everything is changing around you and sometimes you need to change just to stay where you are.

By asking this one simple question you might find answers that will lead you to much better innovations to shape and create that future.

We help our clients ask this question. If you want our help, contact us and we’ll gladly help you ask better questions for better answers.

Design Skills for Evaluators: Design Loft 2017

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The Design Loft @ AEA 2017

The Design Loft returns to the American Evaluation Association’s annual conference on Friday, November 10th. The Design Loft will be held on the Mezzanine Level of the conference hotel (note: an earlier program had the Design Loft located on the Exhibition Level). There is a new session every hour.

The Design Loft was launched in 2016 in connection with the Presidential Theme of the American Evaluation Association’s annual conference that focused on evaluation + design. The one-day ‘pop-up conference’ was a huge hit with attendees looking to learn more about design and pick up a skill or two. The Design Loft format is simple: every hour on the hour from 9 am to 5 pm (the last session starts at 4 pm) a different design skill is profiled in a 45-minute, hands-on workshop that allows attendees to meet others, laugh, and gain a practical ‘tool’ for their evaluation practice.

Program

The Design Loft is an experimental space intended to provide conference attendees an opportunity to learn specific tools, techniques, and strategies from the field of design that may have application to evaluation practice.

The Design Loft was first launched in 2016 as an experimental ‘pop-up’ conference within the main annual convention as a means of providing hands-on, practical opportunities for evaluators to learn about design methods and tools that can benefit their work and advance innovation within the field. This year the focus of the Design Loft will be applied to the conference theme of Learning to Action.

Each session runs for about 45 minutes, which will allow attendees to take an ‘active learning break’ between sessions during the conference program. It’s a quick hit of excitement, activity, and learning for action.

AEA Conference Program Description: The Design Loft @ AEA

What is design all about and what can it offer evaluators? The Design Loft is an interactive space where attendees can come and experience design firsthand as part of a series of engaging, short workshops aimed at exposing evaluators to simple tools, techniques, and approaches to using design in practice.

Cameron Norman Ph.D. MDes CE, Principal of Cense Ltd., a Credentialed Evaluator, 20-year AEA member and a professional designer, will guide participants through an interactive, hands-on training experience in a small group format.

The Design Loft is a space for creative thinking, innovation, practical learning, and fun and whether Design is new to you or you wish to broaden your toolkit, time hanging out in the Loft will add much to your evaluation work and budding practice as a designer.

Principles

Design is a structured approach to learning about a topic, identifying needs and developing solutions and responses to problems through the active construction of models and prototypes. Design thinking is the way of approaching this creative process that can be employed by designers and non-designers alike using some of the following principles:

  • Embrace whimsy
  • Show don’t tell (make things visible and tangible)
  • Bias for action
  • Culture of prototyping
  • Time constraints
  • Fail fast to succeed sooner
  • Moving from fail-safe to safe-fail
  • Systems thinking

Schedule of Events

The Design Loft runs Friday, November 10, 2017.

9:00 am:     User Personas: A persona is a tool in design that envisions a typical program user by constructing a profile of their behaviors, perspectives, and lifestyle relevant to the topic drawing on user research. These fictional characters are based on evidence and user-data collected by the design team and can help program designers and evaluators understand and anticipate the issues

10:00 am     Attractor Mapping: Where is the action happening and how we can understand where to focus our energy and evaluations when looking at a complex system? Where might we focus our design and evaluation efforts when so much is going on? This simple, visual approach to system mapping will show us how.

11:00 am     A Day in the Life: What does the typical user of a program go through in their day? How might the reality of a user’s day-to-day experience influence the design of a program and what might it mean for evaluators seeking to understand that experience and its relationship to program outcomes better? This session will show how a simple walk-through of a program using visual tools, acting out, and hypothesis generation might enable program planners, evaluators and collaborators to see new possibilities and insights.

12:00 pm     Journey Mapping: This method helps tell the story of a program user’s experience with a program by tracking the encounters that a person might go through along the program. This allows evaluators and designers to analyze the various touch-point an individual might have with a program and create the right kind of program and data collection opportunity. This allows the evaluator to see where problems and opportunities might lay before implementing a program or looking retrospectively at an existing program.

1:00 pm      5 Whys: This simple set of questions gets us to tap into our inner 5-year old and inquire about not just why something is happening on the surface but toward a more deeper understanding of the cause of a problem. By getting closer to the root of an issue, we are better equipped to design programs that make transformational shifts, not cosmetic ones and evaluations that have the power to transform people and programs alike.

2:00 pm      Role Playing: This physical form of problem exploration and prototyping literally has participants acting out specific actions or scenarios to gain insight into design opportunities, constraints, and challenges. This workshop will provide a perfect mid-afternoon break to get up and move and learn how a simple, imaginative approach to getting out of our head can yield insights and opportunities that will create programs that will resonate with our whole selves.

3:00 pm      Paper Prototyping: This ultra-low tech model of prototyping uses simple tools to construct mock-ups of envisioned products allowing for a quick, low-cost way to see opportunities, challenges and needs without resorting to expensive, time-consuming and potentially harmful full-scale prototypes. Working from an example, participants aid design and assess potential strategic options in a quick, low-cost and effective manner.

4:00 pm      Storyboarding: Movies and plays t and what is needed to make it come alive. We can take the same idea and apply that to evaluations. Visualizing an activity or program through simple drawings — no matter how simply done — can be an engaging way to gain insight into attitudes, beliefs, assumptions, and relationships between concepts, project components, and people. This technique will show you how a simple drawing can yield enormous information to guide a program design and the evaluation questions that follow from it.

Budgeting for event success

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Among the most important elements of any project or procurement plan is the budget. A budget not only accounts for costs but also helps articulate the drivers of those expenses, forcing project planners to consider the logistics behind what goes into a project and (hopefully) what comes from it.

One of the mistakes that organizations make in budget development is that it is too often done apart from the planning and operations of the project, particularly with events. How often do we see well thought out project plans scuppered at the last minute because, upon running the numbers, it was determined there weren’t enough funds available to execute the project as designed? Or the intensity, quantity or quality of program components are reduced to save money after the fact?

It’s about more than money

Budget setting is about more than money: it’s about impact. It’s been estimated that 80% of the environmental impact of any product (or project) is determined at the design stage. Whether that number is specifically correct or not, it’s not hard to see evidence of the impact of design on what comes next. Once the budget and other parameters are set it is the work of project staff to figure out how to work within those parameters to achieve a result: that’s the power of the design to shape the outcome.

While money is important, one of the often forgotten budgetary items is time. There used to be a product called the Tim Timer that was a small desk clock that allowed you to input the average cost per hour of time spent per person attending a meeting and then tracked that for the length of the meeting. A meeting of 10 senior managers who might make, on average $80/hour, meeting for two hours would result in a meeting cost of $1600. If half of those managers didn’t have to be there, that means $800 was wasted in just two hours. When we factor in lost productivity for those two hours and the accumulated impact on morale and motivation of attending more meetings that mean little, the costs rise.

When we factor in lost productivity for those two hours and the accumulated impact on morale and motivation of attending more meetings that mean little, the costs rise.

Time and impact

Consider another example: hosting a learning event. If the focus is on introducing people to new content, most planners will focus on the curriculum. However, consider the possible aims: to increase the knowledge, skills, and capacity of attendees to do something. If that is the case, a curriculum is only part of the issue. How the event is organized, how it is facilitated, how the discussion is supported, what learnings are captured, and how attendees are prepared in advance to learn and supported afterwards in integrating that learning is all part of achieving that objective.

This requires consideration of how the event is designed for learning. Each of the elements above can be managed well and skillfully or ignored and poorly executed. How often have we been to learning events that simply didn’t prepare us for learning at all despite having high-quality content available? How much did we retain, forget or ignore as a result?

This is about budgeting not only money but the time, care and attention required to make the most of the investment in learning and people. One example of how these considerations fit in practice is in the CoNEKTR model of learning developed for busy people, diverse groups, and complex problems. CoNEKTR brings together the science of complexity, social networking tools, and design-driven approaches to social learning and innovation in ways that maximize the time and energy of event participants.

Strategies for better budgets

To effectively build budgets that will create the greatest benefit for the time and money spent, consider these tips:

  • Bring together those with the knowledge of the finances, logistics and strategic intent in co-developing the event plan early in the process
  • Consider both the cost of time and the opportunity costs associated with the event
  • Price your event based on value: what are you expecting to get from your investment?
  • Evaluate the impact of your investment to align your future plans with the outcomes of your current event. This determines how well you managed to accomplish what you set out to do
  • Invest in time and focus. If you’re organizing the event in-house, is the focus on the event drawing you away from other things related to the operations of your business? Do you have the time to invest in delivering the value you seek from the event?  Ensure that you can focus on the event, its purpose, and its outcomes without distraction.

If you need help building better value for your events, facilitating networking, measuring outcome and creating memorable, impactful learning opportunities connect with us and see how we can help you focus and do more.

Engagement for ideas

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Engage everyone in idea creation

Among the biggest success factors in any organizational change initiative is engaging staff and stakeholders in participating in the change process; this is true for idea generation through the design cycle to implementation and evaluation. How do we overcome the challenge of disengagement to produce productive creative, innovative ideas in our organizations?

Beyond brainstorming

Ideas are usually the starting point for any change initiative. Ideas produce the raw content of problem identification and the seeds for solution generation. Brainstorming is often the means people first think of as a way to generate ideas and explore concepts. However, there are some substantial problems with this approach and some ways around it.

Brainstorming has been widely criticized for good reasons. Among them: it favours those voices who think (and speak) quickly, speak early, often and loudly. Those early suggestions drive the conversation for what comes next, creating a path dependency that’s hard to escape once initiated. If you’re a quieter, perhaps more contemplative person, you’ll find that you are either late to the conversation or not included. From Jungian Personality Theory, this indicates a bias towards extroversion over introversion, which excludes about 40 per cent of the population according to some estimates.

This approach also favours what Min Basadur would classify as an ‘generator’: someone who’s work style preferences favour idea generation. Those from the other quadrants in the Basadur Profile, particularly ‘conceptualizers’ and ‘optimizers’ (ones who’s work style preference leans toward processing and organizing information) are less likely to respond quickly.

Ideas in private and public

Another problem with many ideation strategies is that many really useful ideas are a bit heretical or outlandish. While design thinking writers often refer to the need to generate ‘wild ideas’ without criticism or judgement, the truth is that’s a lot harder to do in practice, particularly when there are power dynamics in the room, reputations, and the real fear that comes with change and challenges to established practices. The public nature of the ideation process favours transparency, but induces self-censorship and produces disengagement for many and hyper-engagement for a few.

A solution is to have those involved in the process generate ideas independently and anonymously contribute them via a suggestion box (digital or analog). Keep the suggestion box open for a defined period — we recommend no more than one week or as short as three days. This allows time for those who are more reflective to mull through their ideas and contribute them, while those who are more quick to generate ideas will not be affected.

These are then collated independently by someone neutral to the problem and solution set and organized thematically. This has the advantage of potentially embedding some of the wildest ideas within a small set of other ideas that might seem far less threatening. If you create a category of ‘wild ideas’ the risk is that the entire category will be dismissed. A more public, but elaborate, means of doing this can be found in the CoNEKTR Model described elsewhere.

This process can be repeated over the design cycle at different stages – anywhere diverse perspectives and feedback is needed.

Overcoming biases to better ideas

The bias toward ‘rapid ideation’ in design thinking systematically excludes people in favour of a well-meaning intention of trying to avoid participants ‘over-thinking’ a problem. While that might happen, it still prevents many from engaging in the process fully because of personality, work preferences, cognitive style and social pressures.

The strategy listed above is a simple, but highly effective means of getting lots of ideas and engaging your entire team in the process. Try it out. You might be surprised what ideas come from it all.