Cense

Innovation to Impact

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.

Innovation Design Quality Control

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You want and need help in transforming your organization or business line and are seeking a consultant to help you. What should you look for? Let’s look at questions and issues you may want to consider when starting an innovation journey.

We break it down into three (plus) areas: Design research and foresight, service development, and evaluation.

Design Research

Design research is about exploring the problem or circumstance that you’re looking to intervene in through introducing a new product, service offering, or policy (which we’ll refer to as an innovation).

Design research is much more than ‘doing your homework’ and is meant to work with any marketing and financial studies you may have done. Design research is about exploring your end-user(s) — both identified and potential additional users. Responsible design research is also about looking at who else your innovation affects.

It will incorporate systems thinking into the process by considering the various ways in which your innovation affects and is affected by the various interconnections around it. For example, your service might be tied to other things (e.g., supply chain, regulatory issues, community norms) and good design research will help articulate these and allow you to map and model systems using visual tools.

Your innovation design team should have skills in design and research and understand a variety of methods and approaches such as quantitative analysis, qualitative data collection, sensemaking (for innovations dealing with complex situations), and behavioural science. The last point — behavioural science – is what allows you to understand what, why, and how an individual or group will choose to engage with your innovation and serves as a foundation for the next stage of work: service development.

But first, let’s go a little ahead into the future to look at the other part of design research: foresight.

Foresight

Strategic foresight is an approach to research that looks at the trends and drivers that influence specific domains of interest like your market, community, or social life as a whole. It draws on a variety of data sources such as published reports, publicly available (or privately held — if you have access) databases, as well as a series of exercises and activities that allow you and other stakeholders to envision what possible futures might look like.

The UK Social innovation agency Nesta has a useful, accessible primer on some of the methods that are used to envision futures.

Future-thinking is important because your innovation will always be applied to tomorrow, not today. Sustainable, effective innovations are those that meet emerging needs not just present ones. Foresight considers how and why things might change and, when combined with strategy and behavioural science, allows you to shape the design of your innovation to better anticipate and (hopefully) meet those changes as they emerge.

Service Development

Service development can include everything from exploring the physical space where your innovation will be deployed to undertaking usability research on digital platforms. The range of practices associated with what is more commonly called service design are many and when enlisting support to design your innovation it’s critical to ensure you have the right talent.

Service design often seeks to develop models of your intended users based on the design research you’ve undertaken. This can result in tools such as personas that provide evidence-informed caricatures of your users that you can use to develop and test scenarios.

Service design methods incorporate visual thinking methods and tools and design thinking by exploring the research, developing ideas, testing and trying these ideas out in ways that inform strategy, and then deploying them into the world. Having a design team with skills in design methods, facilitation, and visual presentation will make this much easier.

Visuals can include everything from simple (but illustrative) maps like the image above to more sophisticated visual models, ‘gigamaps‘, and storyboards.

Evaluation

Last and certainly not least is evaluation. It’s one thing to design an innovation, it’s another to know whether it does what you think it does. Evaluation allows us to assess what kind of impact our innovation has on the world, what processes lead to that impact, and what aspects of our service, product, or policy are most likely influencing this impact.

It is through evaluation of our innovation that we are better able to fine-tune, amplify, or retract our offering to ensure it’s creating the most benefit and not doing harm. Evaluation also allows us to understand what hidden value our innovation might be offering, to articulate your return on investment (ROI), and to widen your perception of what your innovation does and could do.

Bringing in design firms that do not build in professional-grade evaluation to the project is like doing half the work. What good is your new product or service if you have little idea how or whether it works in the real world over time?

These are some of the things that anyone looking to develop an innovation in-house or with a consultant team needs to consider. We have a lot of resources on our learning page on some of these methods and tools as well as overall approaches to supporting groups in asking better questions prior to engaging a contractor.

This is what we do. If you want help with any of this and doing good, quality service design, design research, evaluation and foresight, please reach out and contact us. We’d love to hear from you.

Evaluation for Change

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Change is everywhere it seems and while it can be said it is the only constant what we are seeing is an increase of change on a massive scale.

However, as the protesters across the United States, Canada and beyond are making clear: there is a big difference between talk of change, the process of change, and the outcome of change efforts. Evaluation can be a powerful tool to help us distinguish these things together as they can be conflated too easily.

Here are three things to consider when seeking to make these distinctions that can be applied anytime, but become more salient when focused on large-scale change efforts where much is happening simultaneously.

Document your baseline

A baseline is a starting point and while it would be great to have data from yesterday, if we are seeking to gather change-related data today that means this is your baseline. Too often baselines are forgotten because any effort to measure or track change needs to answer the question: change in relation to what?

How? Pick the most convenient, proximate moment to gather data. Aim to capture descriptive data of what is happening, time data (see below), and also any numerical aspects of the phenomenon you can. These can be such things as cases of something, number of participants involved, descriptions of the current situation. From this, you can later build a backstory that can help lead to the present moment.

For example, George Floyd was arrested and killed by a police officer on May 25, 2020. It is possible to use that as a baseline for what came next and later build the backstory by showing the many different incidents of a similar nature that may have happened locally, nationally, and beyond to illustrate historical patterns of things like police behaviour, protests, violence, racism or otherwise depending on what changes one seeks to make.

Gather real-time data whenever possible

It’s tempting to gather data after an event (e.g., protest, policy decision, etc.) has taken place (and sometimes that’s unavoidable), however, there is much evidence that we lose perspective and critical information in our post-event reflections that often fail to capture critical details of what actually happens. Aim to get data whenever you can as early as you can.

How? During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen many examples of this with live reports from doctors, nurses, and other caregivers working the front-lines of healthcare responses. We’ve seen infectious disease specialists giving interviews on television, exchanging data and opinions via email and Twitter, and through first-hand accounts of citizens dealing with the various policy decisions made. These micro-narratives can make for a strong experiential case for what is happening and what effects the event is having. Reviewing social media posts, proposing online diaries (e.g., selfie video testimonials) or using ‘speakers corner‘ sites or physical booths to allow people to document what they feel, think, say, and do in real-time will provide a more accurate and adaptive means of understanding what is happening as it happens, rather than just retrospectively.

Timestamp your data

Time is a critical contextual factor that can help us understand what happens, why it happens when it does, and to better make sense of the outcomes. The Greeks classified two types of time: Chronos (‘clock time’) and Kairos (‘relative’ time). Determining what time (as in an hour, date etc..) can help you to organize things in chronological order and see relationships between change-making efforts. Relative time — proximity — helps us see the effect of certain activities in relation to others.

How? Modern recording tools often have this built into them, but for the evaluator it is important to record when things happen and document the sequencing of things. Big events like the two we’ve used — the race riots and pandemic — have so many moving parts that it quickly gets difficult to remember retrospectively what happened in what order. This is critical if we want to develop a theory of change or explain what happened as part of the change process.

These three things are all simple and can be done with tools like phone cameras and gathering things in a spreadsheet. More sophisticated ways are available as well and, ideally, there is a method and plan prior to a change initiative taking place. But as we’ve seen, sometimes change just happens. If it does, you’ll be ready to capture it and learn from it before it comes to pass and be able to tell if it doesn’t.

Stay and be safe.

If change is something you need help understanding and documenting, don’t hesitate to reach out and contact us. Evaluating, supporting, and guiding change efforts is what we do.

Photo by mana5280 on Unsplash