Cense

Innovation to Impact

Using Timelines To Track Activities

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Just as parents will use pencil notches in a wall to track the height of their children as a developmental marker, so too can innovators and evaluators use timelines to help gather and track the development of programs and projects over time.

A timeline is a simple linear visual that gathers activities together that uses time as the variable of distinction.

What makes a timeline useful is that it provides a visual display of temporal relationships between events, activities and outcomes. It makes explicit what we might have in our heads, but are also prone to confusing and forgetting over time.

When to Use Timelines

Timelines are useful in a variety of situations:

  1. Projects with activities that can be organized into a sequence (whether planned or not). They are less useful for projects where there are many activities happening simultaneously.
  2. Projects with a long time horizon.
  3. Projects operating in an environment with many different levels of activities and influences. For example, when there are external factors like policy decisions that have discrete times attached to them and can influence a project’s course, this is a good use of a timeline.
  4. Projects that have a story to tell that involves a beginning, middle, and end.

A timeline can help provide anchors between project activities and events — whether those are policy-related, tied to human (or other) resource use, environmental disruptions, seasons, or cycles. They can help provide hypotheses between causes and consequences or explain mediators.

For example, one non-profit project we worked on had a planned roll-out that was moving along well until their funder abruptly cancelled the program that they relied on. This meant that the six-months after that announcement involved finding new sources of revenue, reductions in staffing, and changes in some activities, yet also persistence in trying to adapt to the situation and still execute the original plan. By showing the data on a timeline it helped explain what happened to project activities, outputs, and outcomes within a certain time period and how that related to the overall project plan.

Examples

Below is an example of a timeline that illustrates distinctive markers along the route. These are clearly defined events that took place on specific dates. The selection of events includes those deemed to be meaningful and significant to the project.

What makes a timeline a powerful tool is that there are many different ways to illustrate events. The example above is a relatively straightforward set of data.

Below is another example that involves much more data and in different forms. This example creates a hybrid of timeline and categorization exercise.

Creating Timelines

There are many templates and tools that can be used to help develop visual graphics. The examples above are from Lucidchart, however, tools like Miro, Mural, SmartDraw, PowerPoint, Google Draw, and many others have templates that can be modified to create useful timelines. These are all simple tools that can be manipulated easily so you’re able to build them as you go.

If you are looking to develop more sophisticated models, we suggest employing a visual communicator or graphic designer to take advantage of the many ways you can represent temporal data.

The result is something that is engaging and can easily be discussed or presented to diverse stakeholders involved in a project who might be able to validate, contribute to, or constructively challenge the arrangements. We find this to be a powerful way to organize our findings, refresh our memories, and recognize all of the activities that go into a project.

Documenting Innovation Development

Lastly, if you are developing an innovation where there is no clear ‘end’ known at the beginning, timelines are useful in telling the story of the project and documenting the different pivots, changes, adaptations, and their consequences. A timeline can be a powerful asset to Developmental Evaluation and a complement to the Living History Method that we often employ in those kinds of evaluations.

A timeline can honour all the work you put into coming up with your final product and can be an engaging way to get people involved in celebrating, documenting, and tracking what you do and create.

We use these all the time and can help you track and evaluate your project. Contact us and let’s talk about timelines, innovation and impact.

Context Setting

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In any innovation project, there is a need to set the starting point so you know where you’ve come from in understanding where you are and where you are going to.

We’ve often referred to this as setting a baseline. Another way to frame this is about setting the stage for what’s to come — your context. One of the tools to help you do this is to prepare a Living History document — a master document that tracks your activities, decisions, and observations along the journey. This is part of a larger effort to evaluate and tell the story of your innovation.

However, context-setting is more than that. Starting a business in the middle of an economic crisis or a pandemic is not the same as doing it in the middle of a boom. Measuring the early success of an ice cream shop that opens in Canada in January is different than one that opens up during the summer months. The same product and service, a very different context.

Starting Out

Where to begin?

The first thing we suggest you do is try to view your current situation and context through the eyes of a stranger. Imagine you are coming upon a place or situation for the first time. What are you noticing?

That beginner’s mind is something that we use in Design Thinking all the time to help us ask better questions. It helps us to be mindful of our environment and ourselves and allows us to ground whatever actions we take, strategies we create, and directions we follow in the present reality — not just possibility. As innovators, we often are primed to see what could be at the expense of what is.

We don’t want to lose that, just to put it aside at the beginning.

This involves asking questions like:

  • What is this [ ] for?
  • Why is this [ ] done the way it is?
  • What do these [people, things, tools] do?
  • What is important to the people around me in this situation?

Simple questions like this can lead to profound insights about something you thought you knew. Add in some observations — without judgement — by simply describing the things you see in front of you and you’re ready to start organizing and sensemaking.

STEEP-V

We like to use the STEEP-V framework to help you organize some of what you see. STEEP-V is a means to record and organize information based on a variety of different factors present in a context. These are:

  • Social
  • Technological
  • Economic
  • Environmental
  • Political
  • Values

By organizing and inquiring about your context using these categories we start to see what kind of situation we are in and what are the areas of focus of our clients and community. It helps us to understand why people might be more inclined to act, think, strive in particular ways and how what we are doing with our innovation can meet people where they are at to bring it together.

By combining some inquiry-based questions and STEEP-V you will draw a picture of the current context that you can use to populate your Living History document and use as a point of comparison down the road.

By understanding the context in which you are launching your innovation you are reminding yourself of the constraints, enablers, and situations you’ve designed your product or service for. Later — months or years later — you might find that things have changed. With this baseline, you can then do this context-setting again to see whether you are still designing for it — or for the past.

Persistence: The Innovation Process Outcome

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When looking to evaluate innovation many seek to find numbers related to product adoption, revenue generated, people reached, when what they ought to consider first is process outcomes.

Sustainable innovation — a process, practice, and culture of design-driven creation — is the most valuable outcome for any organization. Innovation is not about creating a single item — product, service, policy — it’s about doing it regularly, consistently, over time.

Regular innovation only comes from persistence or what Seth Godin calls The Practice.

Measuring the practice — the amount of activity, persistence, and consistency of effort — is what any organization should be evaluated against. It fits with what we know about design thinking, performance and innovation: the more ideas you generate, the more prototypes you create, and the more attempts you make the more likely you are to have better ideas, more successful products, and create transformation.

Coming up with a single successful innovation is mostly good if you’re seeking to be bought up by a competitor and, while that can be lucrative, it’s not a sustainable strategy and is contingent on having one very good idea. Having many good ideas and having them implemented into practice is what creates sustainable, resilient organizations. It is what allows organizations to adapt in times of crisis and create new opportunities in times of contraction within your market.

This is what a culture of innovation is all about.

Metrics of Effort

There are many metrics and methods that can help capture the effort of your team in developing that culture of innovation. These can be used to complement questions we might ask about design thinking. Here are a few:

  • Number of attempts
  • Number of ideas generated / ideation sessions engaged in
  • Number of concepts proposed and prototypes developed
  • Background research gathered (e.g., artifacts)**
  • Consistently of application (i.e., ongoing use of a process and fidelity)
  • Number of solicitations for feedback from internal and external sources
  • Integrations within existing processes and tools
  • Materials used
  • Evaluation designs created for products or services
  • Evaluations implemented
  • Number of products launched outside of the organization
  • Number of new innovations generated (may be products, processes, or policy improvements)
  • Persistence of effort (e.g., continuity of activity, sequencing, and time-spent)

** note that research can be a trap. It’s easy to get stuck in over-researching something. While important as a product, it’s only useful if the research converts to real process or product efforts.

These are part of an Innovation Implementation Index that can help you to assess what innovation activities that you are undertaking and whether they are leading to an actual output or outcome.

By looking at not only what you do but how often and persistent your efforts are you will later be able to assess how your organization adopts, builds, and benefits from a culture of innovation.

Are you looking to build this with your organization, unit, or team? Contact us and we can help you build, assess, and sustain a culture of innovation in your organization.

7 Questions to Evaluate Design Thinking

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Design thinking is much more than sticky notes, whiteboards and creative exploration. It’s impact can be felt in the outputs and outcomes tied to actual product or service and much further if we allow ourselves to focus on that.

Here are 7 questions that we ask of design thinking that focus on the learning outcomes and uncover the true impact of creation, design, and execution, which is a big part of what design thinking is all about.

By asking these we can better tap into the true return on investment of design thinking as a transformative approach to learning, not just product or service design.

  1. What do people learn in the process of engaging in design thinking?
  2. What new skills to people acquire, develop, or refine through design thinking?
  3. How are the lessons from engaging in design thinking applied to other subsequent products?
  4. What is the effect of design thinking on the mindset of those involved in a design-oriented project?
  5. How does the co-design process influence team development, cohesion, creativity, and innovation performance?
  6. What role does design thinking play in shaping the innovation culture (e.g., creation, execution, delivery, and evaluation) with an organization?
  7. How does design thinking contribute to the implementation of innovations?

Evaluating the impact of your products or services is always important, but if you focus only on that you will miss some of the biggest benefits that design thinking offers your organization when done well.

If you need or want help in learning how your team learns and amplifying the effects of design thinking, contact us and we’ll help you out.

Note: This article was inspired by a recent post on our sister blog, Censemaking, which focuses on ideas, commentary and issues tied to innovation.

Camera Work and Cultural Probes

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Gathering insights about how people live, work, socialize and experience their world is one of the principal challenges facing innovators, design researchers or those looking to do design-driven evaluation. It’s easy to forget that most of us have access to a powerful tool for data gathering on our phone or in the body of a camera.

Camera work can be a great means for capturing social life and patterns. Whether it is through using a process like Photovoice or using it as part of an array of data gathering tools, cameras are often forgotten when we think about how to learn from our users. Let’s look at one way we can use cameras to support understanding our users’ context better: The cultural probe.

The Probe

A camera (or phone camera), notebook, and instructions are all that’s needed for your prospective users to turn their lives into an anthropological adventure. This method is user-focused and meant to involve your prospective users taking pictures and notes and thoughts about what they are recording. The instructions are tied mostly to the basics of photography (e.g., consideration of light, framing, and ethics of taking pictures of others, in certain settings, etc.).

Instructions can also focus participants’ attention on specific things. For example, you may wish to have your participants focus on a topic, setting, context, interaction, or situation — anything you want to learn more about. Keeping it too general is often not a good idea and can be anxiety- or confusion-provoking in your participants. If they are too specific, you might lose some of the creative possibilities.

The probe part of this method is the ‘thing’ you want your participants to focus on. The cultural part comes from what context, framing, explanation, or interpretation participants (and others) bring to the photos.

Interpretation & Expression

What makes the cultural probe method useful is that it allows for a guided activity that has a standard format while producing artifacts — pictures — that delve into the uniqueness of your users’ lives.

What participants choose to take pictures of can be instructive. It provides an opportunity to discuss why something was included and why other things might not be.

What context the photos were taken is also helpful as it indicates priorities, habits, situations, or choices that the participant makes.

Photographs provide a means to ask questions about what is in the pictures, how things are framed, and what kind of reflections are made by participants from the photos.

This method can also be used in group settings where people agree ahead of time (with the right to withdraw agreement, of course) to share some of the photos they take. It can be useful in times of conflict or ambiguity when participants themselves aren’t sure what is going on and collective sensemaking is needed.

The camera is a powerful tool. Its insights can help us design services and products better, create and learn more from people, and provide a means of qualitative evaluation data, too.

We love this method. If you want help using cameras as a storytelling, design, or evaluation tool contact us and we can help you along.