Cense

Innovation to Impact

Concept Scenarios + Storyboards for Service Design

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If you are looking to generate a sense of what your planned service looks like in practice why not draw it out?

Filmmakers know the importance of the process of storyboarding.

A storyboard is simply a visual representation of what you expect might happen from moment to moment in a service encounter. Storyboards allow us to ‘see’ the service before it’s made and spot potential issues tied to use, resources, interactions, and possible touch-points.

A storyboard tells the ‘story’ of your customer or client and you and your staff as you walk through the service. Storyboards require that you start to develop a vision — literally because it’s being drawn — of who you are seeking to serve.

This builds on the use of personas (which we’ve discussed before) and allows us to visualize relationships between these imaginary participants using data and how they interact with our products and services.

As we can see from the image below when we storyboard we also start to sequence steps involved in the service. For example, when we think of getting a coffee it’s easy to look at the act of ordering and receiving it, yet so much more is going on.

Kumar, V. (2013). 101 Design Methods. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons (p.239)

Concept Scenarios

A concept scenario is a form of storyboarding that begins with data collection and organizing ideas together — often through the use of a whiteboard or visual tool like Milanote. By pulling together ideas in discussion and through examination of concepts tied to your service or innovation, we develop the raw material to put it together with a narrative.

More traditional storyboarding starts with a story and pieces together the elements into a narrative and extracting concepts from it, concept scenarios are more of the inverse. Both yield storyboards. What concept scenarios do is help us to piece together concepts and identify where assumptions might need rethinking.

This method is participatory and involves a few days or weeks to fully undertake depending on the amount of detail you need, the availability of research opportunities, and the resources (human and otherwise) to come together and visualize ideas together.

Practice Notes

Concept Scenarios begin by doing background research and learning about what it is that you are looking to develop and eliciting the various concepts associated with that — asking who, what, where, when, and why. This involves research and then synthesis of this research and group-based discussion to pull concepts together.

A whiteboard or digital space to add those ideas together is a strong asset to support this work. Simple words on a sticky note can work to record concepts and allow for manipulation and movement when used on a tool like a whiteboard or tool like Miro, Mural, or Jamboard.

Next, select the concepts you are most attracted to and best fit with what you’re looking to do.

Step three is to begin imagining scenarios where you might put these concepts together. Consider the key interactions and relationships that are involved, the timing of what is to happen, and the actors involved.

The next step is to visualize these into a series of panels (see above) and illustrate the ideas in a narrative.

The last steps involve interrogating the scenarios to see how they hold up to assumptions and start asking questions about what might be missing and what else might be needed to make the scenarios more realistic or why or how they might be achieved if they are novel or innovative.

Reference: A great summary of this method can be found in the 2013 book 101 Design Methods by Vijay Kumar.

We do this work with our clients. If you want help to learn the method or to use it as part of your service design, strategy development, or evaluation contact us. We can help.

Cover photo by dix sept on Unsplash

Innovation Case Studies

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If you’ve ever taught a course on an applied subject matter you’ve probably considered introducing case studies.

Case studies are systematic accounts of an activity and aim to provide evidence to illustrate or support an example of something. This might be to show a problem-solving approach, an introduction of a new technology, or demonstrate a particular implementation success or failure.

The case study approach is a core of what Harvard Business School uses and has been replicated in the Harvard Business Review and many other business journals. Harvard even has a structured method that has been adopted by business schools (and other faculties) worldwide.

Case studies are meant to provide us with guides based on practice to help us think through things, follow, or avoid. While this might be true in the abstract, our experience is that they are far better at stimulating discussion in class settings, but lousy at providing innovators with real guidance on what to do.

Partly, this has to do with the stories that are told and partly it’s because of the questions that are asked of the case examples themselves.

A New Case Study Approach

There is another way to approach case studies for innovation.

Innovation is always context-dependent. Complex contexts are those where there is a lot going on at multiple scales, intensities, and connect many different entities like people, organizations and networks. Increasingly, this is what describes the context in which innovators work.

This represents many if not most markets, public policy landscapes, schools, and care institutions today. If you’re involving humans, you’re involving complexity. This requires an approach to understanding and making sense of what happens that accounts for complexity. Consider the Cynefin Framework as a guide in assessment of what kind of situation you’re in.

So it makes sense that case studies — which are designed to take lessons from one context to apply broadly — reflect lessons tied to what’s special about a specific context and not try to reflect too many others.

By understanding what’s special we can better understand what’s general by allowing us to recognize the patterns that make something different and common not one or the other. It sounds simple, but it’s actually something that is lost in the current case study method.

We offer some questions to consider when you look at any case study — including the ones that you write for yourself – to better get value from an case to apply to your own situation. These questions can help you to get to a sense of where an innovation sits within a system and what barriers and facilitators were in place to shape the context, the actors, and the situations that define a case (and are often neglected).

Questions for Cases

For the sake of brevity the term innovator is used to reflect an individual, group, or organization who undertake the design, creation, implementation and ownership of the innovation — which can be a product, service, or policy.

  1. What kind of relationships or ecosystem is the organization/innovator a part of? (Innovation doesn’t exist in a vaccuum — it’s critical to understand what influences were available to shape the culture of innovation creation)
  2. How were these relationships leveraged, connected, or served in the development or execution of the innovation? (Innovations are a culmination of relationships in their creation, growth, and realization into a market to different extents, but never without them so they ought not be ignored).
  3. How was the innovation implemented? (This helps us understand the viable actions that were taken and how much was dependent on other things, what role happenstance (luck) played, and what degree the plan met reality)
  4. How much risk did the innovator assume? (This allows us to gauge how much motivation, fear, and pressure the innovator was under)
  5. What was going on in the immediate environment during the development and implementation of the innovation? (This reflects situational, policy, climate, and local contexts)
  6. What learning processes were put in place? (This speaks to the matter of sustainability and determines if this is likely to be a one-off or something that might be sustained)
  7. What outputs, outcomes, and impact was achieved? (Did the innovators capture what was produced and what effect it had on the world around the innovation, not just whether it was sold or bought)
  8. What evolved? (Scale isn’t about just ‘more’, but whether it evolves to meet the needs)
  9. What is the fit and the purpose? (Innovation is all about fit for purpose and these need to be articulated to assess whether or where it fits and what the purpose(s) are)
  10. Is there a ratchet? (A ratchet is something that gains leverage the more it’s used. Is there something that allows the lessons of the innovation development or the innovation itself to take something — the organization, people, or product/service/policy further with leverage?)

Try asking these of any case study and you might find what’s missing and what you can ask of your own work to learn more, do more, and innovate better. Case studies often reflect ‘one-off’ events that are highly constrained and not always transferable in what can be learned and applied. By asking these questions you might find answers that can help you make more from your own situation.

If you want help asking and answering these, contact us and we’d be happy to help you.

Designing for Humans: Considerations for Innovators

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Over at our sister site Censemaking we wrapped up a series called Design for Humans. The focus of the series was on different considerations that we must make in the process of designing useful, impactful things for the world around us.

Strangely enough, we often don’t do a good job at designing for humans with our services and products. In the process of innovating, we make many assumptions about how the innovation will be received and the impact it will make.

There are reasons why real substantive change is actually very difficult to generate. Humans are difficult to work with and to influence and the more we can design for how humans actually live, think, work, and play the more likely our change-making efforts will yield positive results.

Deeper Research

One of the ways to do better design for humans is to conduct detailed research. This goes beyond a few focus groups or observations toward more fuller engagement with different audiences. Strangely, many of us actually don’t really know what we want. We think we know what we want or that we know how to articulate what we want.

Research in this context involves the time, care, and attention to who people see themselves and who they act as. This is about our imagined reality and our lived one. (The two intersect and diverge through our days and life).

Many of our purchases are based on decisions that involve aspiration, comfort, fear, convenience, ethics, and utility in different combinations. These are both our own and the ones that we adopt from others depending on our situation. Individual decisions are very often tied to collective ones. If we do not understand the different groups we are affiliated with or aspire toward being a part of, we lose much of what is known about what drives a decision.

If we do not take the time to understand who it is that we are speaking with or seeking to influence — their individual set of values, beliefs, and experiences — then we will create a ‘mass’ for a ‘mass market’ that is unlikely to be receptive.

Luck and Science

A great deal of impactful design is based on a dance between luck and science. Viral marketing campaigns are more brilliant in retrospect than in advance. As Tendayi Viki and Mitch Joel recently spoke about in their conversation on innovation, most great innovations look absurd in advance and clever in retrospect.

This means great design is about framing the ridiculous.

It also means ensuring that, practically speaking, we must consider the very way we humans think, feel, and live — which is often ridiculous to the outsider. Great campaigns and products tap into this.

They also are about luck. Designing for luck through great observation, research, testing (prototyping), and ongoing evaluation ensures that what we put into the world has the potential to succeed in making some positive difference, not necessarily that it will no matter how good it is.

Whether its luck, perception or something else we find ourselves recognizing that the gap between what we think is valuable and useful and what others think (or are willing to consider) is large. The Chasm illustrated above is real and rather than engage in a futile effort to design around it, we need to recognize that there are sharks in those waters.

That’s what they did in the film Jaws. When we design for that, we design for humans (and sharks).

If you’re looking to create something more human in your work and need help, contact us and we can help make sure you don’t get eaten by the sharks you’re swimming with.

Images by Business Illustrator used under license.

Designing for Awful

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One of the most profound, fun, and engaging techniques for creating an attractive service or product design is oddly focused on the exact opposite: Designing for Awful.

How to use this

This strategy is as simple as it is effective. When workshopping ideas allot some time to have participants develop ideas and designs for the worst possible version of the thing they are designing.

This is a flip of a traditional ideation session where people try to develop suggestions for what to focus on, whom, and what the best use of resources might be. In Designing for Awful, we do the opposite. It is used usually in tandem with ideation sessions that are focused on surfacing ideas in general.

This can be used to frame a service, product or describe the experience of doing something like a survey or participating in an event. It’s a simple, fun, and sometimes counter-intuitive way to surface assumptions, biases, and qualities in what we want, need and don’t want in our design.

Like any ideation-focused exercise, it must be managed appropriately. Individuals need to feel safe in surfacing ideas, free to discuss them, and preferably, offer an opportunity to share at least some of them anonymously. People generally have a lot of fun with this simple exercise.

Benefits

The benefits of this are many.

Firstly, it focuses on the things we tend to avoid — unpleasant feelings, experiences, or sensation — and thus, might be missed in consideration of our design.

It also overcomes an optimism bias. Design is largely a positive-oriented practice where we look to solve problems, not make them. Designing for Awful helps us to move around this bias by looking at what is not addressed.

This approach is also excellent for helping surface values in practice and in specific terms. To illustrate, it’s one thing to speak in a positive or affirmative tone such as a statement like “we value inclusivity.” Designing for Awful could lead us to be specific “Our service is inaccessible to someone with a mobility disability” or “it is sexist” or “our product can only be used by people who are right-handed.” By surfacing what makes something not work we are better able to see what will.

This approach is also excellent in helping, paradoxically, surface what we want by framing things in terms we don’t want. How often have you met someone who first tells you what they don’t want in something before they get to describing what they want?

This allows people to have a little fun and we find that some people are more bold and assertive with their creativity in the negative, than the positive and this technique lets that come out.

Lastly, the exercise can be a useful way to surface who needs to be at the table moving forward. We find that the need for having the voices of certain individuals, groups, roles, or departments in the discussion is better clarified when we consider how bad things would be without them.

Try this out at your next design session or team meeting as part of a check-in and you might find some laughs and some deep insight along with it.

If you want to inspire new thinking and better design in your organization for engagement and impact, reach out and contact us. This is what we do.

Seeing Futures: The Long Now Approach

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No one can see the future, but we can gain a glimpse of what might come and how what we are doing today might take us there by using this technique or tool called The Long Now.

The Long Now involves taking an idea that might be on the horizon or emerging and envisioning what it might look like when adopted and carried into the future. The approach is inspired by long-term thinking and gets us to frame ideas that might be attractive, threatening or unclear today and builds a future for them over time.

Designing with the Long Now

Identify a trend that is emerging and is likely to affect the near-future (e.g., 6-12 months). This could be anything within a STEEP-V (Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political or Values-based trends) framework or something similar.

Now imagine that phenomenon coming into being. This means that children born today will only know the world with this in their lives. They and everyone else will grow up with, interact with, adapt to, adopt, and work with this ‘thing’ in their lives.

Imagine what kind of barriers, enablers, and circumstances will accompany this new thing.

Then imagine what it will look and feel like in five year increments as it evolves along.

To illustrate, consider those people who first encountered the Internet in the early 1990’s and then what it looked like as the decade moved on to the dot-com boom and bust, the dawn of social media, the rise of the app and mobile handset and so on. That’s a retrospective look. What you are doing with The Long Now is creating a prospective, visionary look.

Sketch out a series of snapshots at 5-year intervals that allow you to highlight and uncover ways in which this idea will interact with the systems — technological, social, cultural, and environmental — around it. (Five Year intervals are chosen because it’s enough time to see change, but close enough to be able to stitch together patterns of plausible development between them)

What this approach can do is help see threats, opportunities, and identify possible pitfalls, benefits, and choices that could affect the design of something moving forward. It also is useful as a means of assessing the plausibility or viability of something that is emerging. Could it be a fad or does it have the means to be adopted into the fabric of everyday life?

Taking The Long Now approach provides a small window into a much larger, unknown world ahead to help strategize, design, and anticipate possible futures.