Cense

Innovation to Impact

Activity Analysis

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This simple technique is among the most powerful at eliciting a lot of information. When we look at an existing service, it may be easy to describe what people do to deliver, manage, and receive the service in simple terms. For example, an exchange between a bank teller and a client might be described as simply as a person walking up to a desk, asking for money, inserting their bank card, receiving money from the teller, and leaving.

An Activity Analysis would break this down even further. It would involve tracking the experience of the client. It would denote what the client did from the moment she entered the bank, what she saw, what she smelled or experienced, her feelings or thoughts, and the steps she took toward the desk.

You might ask how long she took, whether she stopped en route to the desk, knew where it was (did she ask for directions?) or did she wait in line and for how long.

We can also track what the teller was doing up to and including the moment of engagement with the client. What tasks was she doing? Where was her focus? What is she thinking or feeling?

This is a micro-method version of A Day in the Life, which is another method that helps us understand what our service clients do and use.

How to do it

Activity Analysis can be done as a group, facilitated by a leader to help organize and manage the activity. It’s a great way to get people talking about all that is going on with the actors, the environment, and the tasks. By opening up the discussion and walking through each step in the journey through the service with each actor, everything that shapes the environmental conditions, and the tasks that are performed, you’ll reveal an enormous amount of data about what actually transpires with even the simplest transaction.

This can be used to seed further questions like:

  • What infrastructure is needed to support the interaction?
  • What would be ideal?
  • How might this interaction look different?
  • What other variables could affect the journey and the outcome?
  • What could be done or introduced to make this better?

Activity analysis is something that can be done in small groups over the course of 20 to 60 minutes, depending on the complexity of the task and the amount of knowledge the participants have of the task or activity.

This simple analysis can reveal information about flows, resources, outcomes, and processes that are in place to support your service and help you see what’s not only in place, but what is possible, too.

This can be a great way to bring people together as well as lead your service design and evaluation efforts. If you want to implement this approach in your organization and need help, reach out to us. We’d welcome hearing from you.

Narration Interrogation

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Police (and some parents) know the secret to spotting a lie in a story: ask someone to repeat that story backwards. As it turns out, it’s a lot easier to concoct a false story going forward than it is backward because of the way we logically connect events in our heads.

This same technique can be used to help spot gaps in logic. Even if we’re not lying to one other (or ourselves) we may find some parts of the story that don’t quite make sense. This gap in logic is not uncommon because as humans we often will fill in the story because of how we are wired for narrative coherence as a species.

Narrative interrogation is a way that we can walk through the story of our program or service to help us identify the key elements that are present in most good stories and how or whether we have them organized (or have them at all). Unlike real interrogation, this is not aggressive or adversarial — rather a way to explore stories through inquiry.

Story Elements

Some of the key elements in a good story are:

  1. Actors. These are your protagonists (the leads), the supports, and the chorus — those in the background. Ask yourself who the main actors are in each scene of the story (e.g., who has the problem that needs solving? What are they looking for? What is their motivation?). This is where using personas can be helpful to fill in the details about these characters.
  2. Relationships. How are the actors related to each other? Are they working collaboratively or competitively and do they need each other? Are there roles that individuals fill? Are there special qualities to their relationship (e.g., power, partnership, etc.).
  3. Setting and Structures. Where are things taking place? Do people need a particular service or product in a specific setting or context? Articulating these will also help you to frame the way in which system structures shape the interactions between the actors and help contribute to or facilitate the problem (or solutions).
  4. Time. Determining when things are to happen and how that temporal aspect shapes everything is important. Does timing matter? Does the amount of time matter? is the problem and solution one that is highly dependent on when something happens or not?
  5. Arc. The last piece is creating some form of coherent story arc between them all. Tying them together helps us understand who is involved, what they are interested in or seeking, why they have the challenges they do, how they are going about things now (and how we could change that with an intervention of a product or service) and the ways in which that will be affected.

Together, this starts to generate a theory of change and helps us connect what we’re seeking to do through our innovation (service, product, policy) and what is needed by those we are aiming to serve.

Using the Method

Stories are told by people, not objects, so this is one method where speaking with individuals is key. Involve those for whom the story matters in the telling of that story. This might be customers or clients, service operators, managers, or founders; it depends on what story you are looking to hear. The aim is usually not to capture everything, rather keep it focused on a specific aspect of your innovation. It might be in use (customers or clients), the development (product team) and marketing, or in understanding the purpose relative to the organization (e.g. senior management).

Using an open-ended approach — free-form — ask people to speak about the topic using a story lens:

  1. Start with the beginning: what is the first thing someone needs to know. This might be the choice to start the project, the moment the ‘problem’ appeared that required a solution, or even the backstory. This is something that the storyteller determines on their own.
  2. Focus. Encourage the person to speak in a manner that focuses on the purpose, however, ask points of clarification when it is unclear what the connection is at different parts. Good stories often involve non-sequiturs and so do poor ones; it’s important to know which one it is.
  3. Reflect back. Once the story is told, re-cap the logic of the story from front to back and
  4. Go backwards. This is the ‘interrogation’ part of sorts. Ask people to retell the story backward from the end. For example, ask what happened right before the conclusion of the story and then what happened before that and before that. It’s similar to the reverse of A Day in the Life method.

What you might find is that the story has different descriptors, relationships, or emphasis when told backward. These allow us to see different configurations of the issues that are associated with the story. It’s not that the person is necessarily lying or keeping anything from you, it’s about the limitations of narrative in that it only works with one set of issues connected logically at a time. Going backward allows us to see things differently, expanding our view.

The interviews and conversations with those involved should be informal and relaxed and can go into as much depth as you want. Generally, this is an approach that makes for a good ‘coffee conversation’ of about 30 minutes. It also can be done remotely, if necessary. It can be done internally by staff associated with the project or externally by an outsider. If the story involves highly sensitive subject matter or material, it is best to use an outsider to the project.

Learn more from your program, your people, and your work with this simple, powerful method for design exploration and research.

We help with storytelling through data. Contact us if you want to implement this with your organization.

Perspective Taking: The Power of Ten

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Great innovators often see problems or solutions that others miss. This is as much about perception as it is anything else.

To illustrate the power of perception, consider the famous perceptual illusion below which profiles a young girl and an old woman (or “wife” and “mother in law”). The image, which dates back to 1888, shows how the same image can produce two very different stories about the subject matter.

There’s a way to create the same effect by looking at a situation through the lens of time. The Power of Ten is a perceptual forecasting and innovative technique that can help you can perspective on a situation, a product, or service by looking at the effects in layers, each offering a new possibility.

How to do it

The Power of Ten technique is simple. Take the current situation, topic, product, or service and forecast what might happen in ten minutes from now, ten hours, ten days, ten weeks, ten months, and ten years.

In some cases, you’ll find little effect or difference between the two and in others the differences are dramatic.

Consider waiting times for a service call. In that case, ten minutes might be a long time and ten hours is insufferable. If you are on a waitlist for an elective surgery, ten days might be incredibly fast, ten weeks reasonable, and ten months is anxiety producing.

What about a particular situation? Consider the dynamic situation that unfolded with the COVID-19 pandemic and policies that affected how and where we work. Time perception changed, value changed (e.g., Internet access), and certain things like parks, groceries, restaurants and bars, and video conference tools all changed their value in a matter of days, weeks, and months in different ways.

The Power of Ten activity is designed for you to forecast and spend some time thinking about what will something look like, feel like, interact with, and impact the world at each of these different scales.

This simple exercise will allow you to see constraints, opportunities, effects, and interactions that are either not present or imperceptible at one scale at other scales. This allows you to see connections between things that were not perceived before.

This is best done as a group and can be performed in a short time as a facilitated activity or at a distance.

If you want to see possible futures using this approach and want help, contact us. We can help you multiply your perspective by a power of ten.

Note: This exercise draws inspiration for a video first produced in the 1970s by the legendary design partnership of Charles and Rey Eames for IBM.

Predicting Next Year’s Top Story

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Foresight can involve complex data gathering, sensemaking, and design and also be something as simple as developing the headline for next year’s news.

This simple technique can get your organization started on futures thinking and provide a way to connect the present situation with trends that you are seeing in your industry and the world to strategy and aspirations. This technique gets you to imagine the headlines of the future (what people are writing or saying about your enterprise) and walking back from that or projecting forward to fill in the steps that led you to that outcome.

Setting the Stage

This is an activity that is best done as a group anywhere from 4 to 12 people and can be done in as little as an hour, although it can be done over a longer period of time in single or multiple sessions if you wish to go deeper into the assumptions and models for the future.

It’s important to frame the exercise by choosing whether you want headlines for the organization or a specific project or product. It doesn’t matter who these imaginary headlines are to be written by (e.g., journalists, industry professionals), however, it does help to imagine what context they are to be written (e.g., news media, business press, industry news outlets, professional associations, peers). Make whatever context you pick clear even if it is in multiple contexts.

Next, set a time horizon for the headlines sometime within the next 6 to 12 months.

Lastly, this is often used to frame positive outcomes. However, after you’ve determined what success looks like it is worth considering repeating the exercise at a later date (e.g., one week later) with the converse: focusing on headlines that report failures, disasters, or problems. This can help your team see threats as well as possibilities.

The materials you will need are pieces of paper (preferably sticky notes because they are easily portable and can be re-arranged) and a whiteboard or flipchart/newsprint sheets of paper and markers for a facilitator (who can be external or a member of the team) and the team/participants.

Activity

Individually, have participants brainstorm headlines they imagine for the time horizon you have set. Give them about 5-10 minutes and ask participants to strive for volume — lots of ideas — over quality.

As a group, post together (with stickies) or share the ideas that individuals have generated. This can be done by having individuals post up their sticky notes on a wall and then later organized or by doing successive round-robin reporting where everyone presents a single idea in as many rounds as there are ideas.

We suggest having the group vote on headlines that they like, elicit the strongest reactions (positive or negative), or are the most provocative. Aim for 3-5 headlines. With these headlines explore as a group some of the assumptions that are in place for this headline to come true. The aim is to answer the question: what would have to happen for this to become a real headline?

Why?

This activity helps you set and frame a goal for your organization, project or product. It can help elicit information about what kind of aspirations, assumptions, and ideas that your team has about what you are doing. It will also allow to identify what kind of relationships, resources, or facilitators are needed to get from where you are to where you wish to go over the time horizon you’ve picked.

If you do the negative case headline, this technique can help frame what kind of necessary activities are required for success and where they can possibly go wrong. it will allow you to identify threats and risks associated with what you’re planning to help account for that in your plan.

This simple technique is powerful and can be used in a single session, with multiple units, or as part of a planning exercise and the dividends are great. It’s fun, creative, and informative.

If you want to see more about what this can do, contact us and we’ll gladly help you set up a foresight scan and strategic plan for your project or organization based on this kind of futures thinking.

Innovation Talent Inventories

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Faced with a situation or opportunity that demands you try something new or change what your organization does, the type of knowledge, skills, and experience required is often different than what is used to maintain the status quo. One of the most overlooked places to look for this talent is right under our noses — or beaks — and that your birds of a feather might be closer together than you knew.

An innovation talent inventory is an exercise that organizations are advised to undertake every 6-12 months (depending on the level of dynamism within the organization and industry) to assess the talent within your organization.

Why an Inventory?

Talent acquisition and retention is a costly part of organizational development. Hiring staff often means looking at a variety of skills, yet may only enlist a few of them for a specific job. Over time it becomes easy to lose track of or forget that your team may have skills and experiences that can be brought to bear on your current project.

The process of undertaking an inventory is also a means of recognizing and reminding your team of who is on it. By looking at your staff through the lens of innovation, it’s also possible to identify attributes that were not germane at hiring or recruitment but have evolved into a need at the present day. Whether its a certification course, extra-mural activities like coaching sports, or experience working in a particular sector, these previously non-recognized experiences can now serve to support your team’s innovation project.

Undertaking an Inventory

There is no prescriptive means of undertaking an inventory and we recommend the following:

Informal interviews. Simple coffee-time conversations can make a big difference and have the added benefit of allowing your team to build trust and commitment to the innovation project in the process. Toronto-based software firm Freshbooks encourages their team to go on ‘blind dates’ (not real ones) over coffee with staff in other departments so that they can learn from each other. Informality allows for conversations to wander to different parts of a persons’ career that might have been previously unexplored.

Resume reviews. Whether it is looking over your team’s personnel files or LinkedIn pages (all with permission and consent of your team, of course), a review of the current set of listed skills, experiences and certifications can jog your memory about what talent your team already has. Being transparent about why you’re doing this and ensuring that any exploration is done solely for the purpose of the innovation talent inventory is essential. This can be a powerful means for team and trust-building if done right and harmful if done poorly.

Surveys. A simple exploratory survey asking individuals to identify skills and abilities (less about knowledge) can catalogue your teams’ ideas and suggestions. The one risk with this approach is that many staff might still see themselves in their current role and frame their responses according to that. Like with the interviews, focusing on a person’s journey rather than their current destination is key.

Visual Mapping. Another fun and informative strategy is to use visual maps where individuals either self-plot or are plotted on a map of the situation. Plotting out the needs, wants, and opportunities on a simple large-sheet of paper and then having individuals place themselves closest to where they fit related to those needs, wants, and opportunities can be highly participatory. This works by having the page posted on a wall in a common area for a few days (e.g., coffee room) or using an electronic tool such as Miro or Mural.

Together, you will find yourself and your team learning much from what you already have and putting underused or unknown talents to work to help take your idea forward. You’ll know so much more about what you already know (and didn’t realize).

Need help putting this together? Contact us and we can show you how to engage your team and learn more, together, to set yourself for innovation, by design.