Cense

Innovation to Impact

Sensemaking in Crisis

by

Sensemaking is a social process that helps us make sense of data, information, and knowledge in a time of complexity. It’s used often in innovation contexts when we are fitting data to a unique situation.

The RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) a UK-based charity and think-tank has recently updated and revised its collective sense-making framework which provides a clear example of ways to consider change-making and leading in times of crisis.

The 2×2 framework, presented below, helps to frame activities that may have stopped or started during a crisis and what activities we may wish to amplify, end, abandon, and re-start.

Developmental Thinking

What the RSA framework embodies is what we call developmental thinking. This is the kind of thinking embedded in Developmental Evaluation, design and innovation. This thinking is about taking information and feedback from the activities in the system and making adaptive, strategic decisions to keep the organization developing (evolving) through learning.

Learning is about taking action based on new information and in some cases — such as those in complex situations with lots of change and activity — this learning must come from sensemaking. It tells us when to stop, start, pause, and wind-down activities.

The RSA proposes conducting this sensemaking over time through a process that is akin to developmental design and developmental evaluation through the crisis which, in the case of events like COVID-19, might be protracted and evolve. As noted below, it also recognizes that sensemaking is tied to systems thinking where events (the most visible parts of a system) are actually built upon larger sets of behaviours, structures, and paradigms.

To make use of this requires a monitoring and evaluation system tied to an overall developmental, design-driven process. It’s not difficult, but it does require substantial mindframe shifts and organizational supports. Yet, the payoff is that your organization is adaptive and working with what’s happening and what’s emerging, rather than stuck trying to make what used to work come alive in an environment that has not only changed, but might be different altogether.

If your organization needs help in reshaping your work to make the most of what you have and pivot to what’s needed next, contact us. This is what we do.

What Went Wrong? A Question For Futures Insight

by

In five years, what did we get wrong?

This simple question can be a powerful vehicle for understanding the way in which things in the future might — and might not — unfold. Foresight is a complicated process as we are asking to see into a horizon that hasn’t yet taken place. Rather than predict the future, strategic foresight is about anticipating possible futures.

What this means is that it is possible — indeed, quite likely — that what we think will happen won’t come to pass as we thought. However, we might also foresee certain things that allow us to prepare. For example, we might be correct to see the growing trend toward working remotely while being incorrect about the reasons that drive it and the timing (e.g., pandemic).

All of these are based on assumptions about what we anticipate happening.

Asking the question about “what didn’t go right” or “what did we miss?” begins the process of allowing us to ask more detailed questions about our assumptions. It can allow us to identify where the areas of friction might be, the critical and less critical uncertainties about our models of the world lie, and what might have been missed as we envisioned the connection between now and the future.

Asking what we might achieve is useful. Asking what might go wrong is prudent. Ask them both.

Visual Thinking

by

Service and product design involves creating something, envisioning it’s use, consideration of its effects, and hopefully seeing it achieve a goal. When we are creating or planning our project we need to consider all of that on top of the many ideas we have about what that product or service ought to involve. That is a lot to hold in our heads at one time.

This is why designers often rely on visual thinking and communication to help illustrate these ideas as systems. The benefits of this approach are many and include:

  • Providing a way to communicate your thoughts in multiple dimensions. Time, space, sequence, and effects are all different considerations for service design and visualizing that allows us to see these all in one space. Our language is linear, visualizing allows for linear and non-linear effects.
  • It creates a space for everyone to participate. Whether you are a skilled visual communicator or someone who hasn’t drawn anything by hand in 20 years, nearly everyone can draw. Visual thinking tools can provide a means to literally get people working on the same page. Simple methods like the Sketch Map are easy to employ and get everyone sharing ideas together.
  • Visual language – such as that illustrated by XPlane in their useful guide to visual thinking transcends spoken words and allows us to communicate even when our shared spoken language isn’t strong.
  • Visual thinking allows us to use metaphors, express complex emotions, and connect physical and emotional things together during a service journey in a way that is difficult to convey through oral or written language.
  • Visuals provide an artifact that can be interrogated, explored, and reviewed from many different perspectives allowing people to point to objects, relationships, and structures and ask about their purpose, illustration, and meaning without requiring much technical understanding of the problem-domain (allowing outside and alternative perspectives to meaningfully contribute).
  • It also provides a means to generate a shared understanding of the system boundaries, components, and purposes that guide your development of the service. It gets people on the same page metaphorically and literally.

Visual communicator Angelika Skotnicka provides a strong case for why we want to consider visual thinking and how it is done from the perspective of graphic recording.

Consider ways to bring in visual thinking to your project planning, service design, evaluation, and strategy development. It is low-risk, high-reward and is an engaging, low-cost, and often enjoyable way to generate enormous insight quickly and effectively.

Try it Out: A Tool

One of the best, low-friction tools to help you get your teams up and running is Milanote, which can allow you to brainstorm, plan, and design strategies using a web-based interface that allows you and your team to see your ideas on a canvas that can be edited, shared or adapted from a template.

Using tools like this can be a great way to practice visual thinking and build some of that ‘design muscle’ that we all have, but might not realize it.

Want to learn more about how to apply visual thinking to your work? Contact us and we can help you bring your ideas to light visually and more.

Innovation Strategy: A Tool

by

Innovation development and execution are highly affected by what kind of environment you operate in. For innovators in business, the public sector, and healthcare questions abound like:

How can we determine what kind of market — whether it’s products, services, and policies — do we want to focus on? What does innovation look like in each of these? How do we align who we are with what we want to do?

We have developed a new tool for helping you navigate the various markets you are in, could be or would like to be in. The tool is available by clicking on the link.

Blue Ocean Strategy Framework

One of the popular approaches to conceptualizing the domains of organizational strategy is the Blue Ocean strategic model developed by Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne. The model distinguishes Red Ocean from Blue Ocean environments or marketplaces where businesses compete**.

(** or any organization seeking to differentiate itself in the marketplace of ideas and attention — it’s not just for profit-seeking ventures)

The Blue Ocean Strategy Framework presents a dichotomy between zones of competition and makes the distinction that organizations are either creating their own path or competing within existing contexts.

This dichotomy is useful for business but neglects much of the work that is done within social innovation and public sector innovation where there are spaces of co-creation and collaboration that exist with and among partners by design and necessity. In these areas the need to work together across contexts and often in ‘co-opetition‘ where organizations who might compete for resources at one moment might also rely on those others to succeed.

To help understand this we’ve developed a useful framework (or canvas, when used as a tool) for considering two additional areas to address when developing a strategy. This framework — presented visually below — introduces two new zones of strategy that complement the red/blue ocean strategy.

Beyond Oceans

The two additional zones include the Green Forest and an interstitial area akin to the Gulf Stream or Atlantic Drift ocean currents that carry water from both zones, greatly influence the climate beyond them and provide a unique ecosystem between them.

The Green Forest is an environment that feeds off the ocean and the nutrients from the currents. It’s those areas of collaborative innovation where no single organization can create a true difference on its own and where there might not even be an advantage to doing so.

Organizations might operate in many different areas depending on their size and configuration, however, the projects and work that is done and the strategy required to generate it might require the kind of mapping and zonal ‘marking’ that allows it to avoid confusion and discover the needs and challenges it faces more effectively.

Consider using this model in your work. None of these are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ rather they describe environments and contexts of strategy that can guide your innovation development and deployment. Knowing what environment you are working within allows your organization to better strategically align its planning, resources, and operations to suit that context and succeed.

Note: Are you interested in exploring different strategic domains and want some help applying this framework to your organization? Contact us and we’ll show you navigating these different terrains can help you see more and do more in your organization than you ever thought possible.

Photo by Aviv Ben Or on Unsplash and by Fezbot2000 on Unsplash

Breaking the Ice

by

Meetings, events, and other facilitated face-to-face gatherings only work if people engage with each other. Doing this requires some kind of interest or ability to connect with one another in person. While there are certainly some people who have little difficulty engaging with new people in unfamiliar settings, many struggle.

This is where the icebreaker comes in.

Software and services firm Atlassian has prepared a great list of practical exercises to help spice up the usual icebreaker. These can be taken as they are or adapted for use at your next meeting or event.

Surprise

The first cluster of these uses the notion of ‘surprise’ to get people talking about something that is low risk but also gets people curious. For example, questions like these are nearly impossible to predict answers to and also can enlist some creativity in responses without necessarily revealing too much about a person.

  • What animal would choose to be, and why?
  • What is your superhero name?

Fun

Another theme within these techniques and tools is fun. One of the approaches to fun is to leverage surprise with an activity that allows people to share in an experience. An example is co-creating something. While design often looks to create the best of something a fun way to engage small groups is to create the worst of something.

This approach is similar to the program flipping exercise we do as part of the Design Loft Experience where we ask participants to design a program in a way that takes the current expectations and makes them a little worse. Do it over and again and you create a space for fun, creativity, and a chance to explore an issue in further detail.

Make your next meeting different and engaging by introducing surprise and fun to the way that people connect with one another.