Cense

Innovation to Impact

Bundles and Stacks

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Two powerful approaches to creating healthy habits are to bundle or stack behaviours together, by design. If we can learn to connect what we do in small ways to other things we can make big changes more easily.

For innovators seeking and making change, these two approaches can help break down a big goal into small, manageable actions.

Bundles

A bundle is a way of tying together two behaviours that don’t normally go together for positive benefit. It takes something you dislike and pairing it with something you like. For example, imagine doing uncomfortable rehab exercises while watching your favourite TV show. Maybe listen to your favourite music while doing your taxes.

There are many activities in our work that are tedious, unpleasant, or undesirable to do. By bundling those with something you do enjoy it can make those unpleasant tasks easier to do.

Consider the barriers to your service that might be unavoidable: how can you bundle those with something positive? How can you make the worst, but necessary, aspects of what you offer, better?

By considering a bundle, we can design for positive outcomes in spite of issues we cannot design around. This is particularly relevant for healthcare (e.g., dental visits, medication taking) or activities requiring paperwork or queuing.

Stacks

A stack is pairing small activities together to produce a larger effect. For example, consider listening to podcasts or e-books while running. This allows you to learn and exercise at the same time.

Another example is drinking a glass of water every time you check your email. This one accomplishes the goal of keeping you hydrated while ensuring you don’t check your email too often (preventing frequent trips to the bathroom).

We can design our ‘stacks’. Practically, this means creating an inventory of jobs to be done and pairing them together when possible. By simply knowing what has to be done we can create stacks that get tasks done together.

Design Considerations

The key to both activities is to break down what has to be done and mapping it out. This can be done using simple paper, sticky notes, a whiteboard, or tools like Miro or Mural. This activity has the added benefit of articulating what has to be done. It is a useful awareness-building exercise to reveal all the tasks and subtasks involved in our work.

Once completed, consider pairing tasks and activities together. What pairs might work? What systems can we put in place to help make things easier?

After pairing, the next step is to prototype and evaluate Try things out. If you wish to drink water with email, consider setting a glass or your favourite mug beside your computer. Create the prompts to remind you to try things out. These are new behaviours so it may take some time to get it right. If, after many attempts, the behaviour hasn’t changed (the bundle didn’t take, the stack didn’t work), try a different one.

The key is to keep trying. Whether this is for individuals or organizations, the key is to keep trying and learning. The more attempts you make, the more you will learn and the more likely you will succeed.

This behavioural strategy is both simple and easy to try and test even if changes are often difficult. If you need help in making these changes and designing for them, contact us – this is what we do.

Using Theories for Change

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The concept of Theory of Change is meant to provide program planners and evaluators with guidance on how to make sense of the mechanisms that guide how something transforms. Theory of Change as a technique is usually visual, participatory and consultative in nature, and is something that is developed alongside the program itself. What is given less attention are the change theories that underpin a Theory of Change.

Confused? You’re not alone.

Clarifying this is critical if your Theory of Change is to have any meaning.

Change Theories & Theory of Change

Change theories are based (largely) on psychological and sociological evidence applied to human behaviour at different levels. These levels include:

  • Individuals
  • Groups (e.g., teams, families)
  • Organizations
  • Communities
  • Societies & Systems

Some change theories will apply at all of these levels, while some are designed more specifically for a specific level. For example, Kotter’s 8-step model for leading change is primarily an organizational change theory.

Change theories are meant to describe what is to change and explain how change is to come about. These serve as the bedrock for what a Theory of Change is meant to convey. A Theory of Change links the structures and resources tied to a specific program, unit, or process with various change theories to explain why it should facilitate transformation.

Design Considerations

While we might have a viable change theory, we might not have a strong design. We often see organizations that seek to make changes that their programs or policies were not designed to accomplish. For example, cognitive rational change theories are built upon the basic assumption that knowledge informs attitudes and beliefs which influence behaviour.

If your program or service doesn’t have a design that facilitates information accessibility that allows your end user (those who are the focus of your service) to understand and use that information, it’s unlikely we will see change. Just-in-time knowledge delivery (e.g., doing a Google search) implies that people have the means (e.g., tools and technology), the literacy, the skills, and the opportunity to access and use that knowledge, otherwise it’s not likely to facilitate change.

Being able to locate a family doctor isn’t useful if you can only do it at a time and place when such a professional isn’t needed.

Theories of Change can help us plan our programs and service offerings and plot the points of impact, but without good change theories and design considerations it’s quite possible we won’t achieve what we set out to do.

Want to learn more about how to develop Theories of Change and what an understanding of social and behavioural science and design can do to help you learn and create impactful programs? Contact us. We’d love to connect.

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

Evaluation’s Hidden Value: Clarifying Your Strategy

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Evaluation is more than just the assessment of merit, worth, and significance of a program, product, or service. Although these are the primary functions of evaluation, it can serve far more than this when designed and implemented in the appropriate manner.

Evaluation focuses attention on the things that your organization builds, has built, and implements and the purpose and role(s) they serve. In doing so, evaluation serves as a primary support tool for strategy. In order for an evaluation to do its job, it must be aligned with the purpose of the thing it is evaluating.

For example, if an evaluation is being asked to assess behaviour change, the focus of the program or stimuli (e.g., app, message, etc..) for that change is a core part of the strategy. By matching the program components with the activities and intended outcomes, evaluators can help determine the degree of alignment and assess (and advise on) the likelihood of success before any data is collected. It is through the data — the evaluation itself — that this alignment and the assumptions behind it are tested.

Theory into practice

The process of aligning the planned activities with the outcomes is part of what a Theory of Change is designed to do. To illustrate, consider a program designed to promote some kind of behaviour change (e.g. engaging in a new activity, doing more or less of something, etc..). For a change to take place, there needs to be a certain logic in how the intervention (i.e., the activity or service) is set up based on some established design principles.

We also know from the wealth of knowledge of behavioural science, that there are many different ways to promote change and that some are more efficacious than others. A skilled evaluator can help determine whether the approach being used is likely to produce the desired change by building out a Theory of Change and then matching that with the appropriate outcomes.

This is what the heart of a strategy is all about: aligning the resources, intentions, and actions together to produce an outcome.

Like the image above, evaluation helps peel back the top coat to reveal what is happening underneath. It helps take the mystery out of why programs work or don’t work and what the reasons are why people do things (or don’t).

It’s one of the reasons why we bring strategy, evaluation, and design work together. By connecting them, you get far more performance out of your program than if you just keep the cover on.

To learn more, contact us and we’ll be happy to show you what’s under your hood.

Image credit: Nathan Van Egmond

Engagement for ideas

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Engage everyone in idea creation

Among the biggest success factors in any organizational change initiative is engaging staff and stakeholders in participating in the change process; this is true for idea generation through the design cycle to implementation and evaluation. How do we overcome the challenge of disengagement to produce productive creative, innovative ideas in our organizations?

Beyond brainstorming

Ideas are usually the starting point for any change initiative. Ideas produce the raw content of problem identification and the seeds for solution generation. Brainstorming is often the means people first think of as a way to generate ideas and explore concepts. However, there are some substantial problems with this approach and some ways around it.

Brainstorming has been widely criticized for good reasons. Among them: it favours those voices who think (and speak) quickly, speak early, often and loudly. Those early suggestions drive the conversation for what comes next, creating a path dependency that’s hard to escape once initiated. If you’re a quieter, perhaps more contemplative person, you’ll find that you are either late to the conversation or not included. From Jungian Personality Theory, this indicates a bias towards extroversion over introversion, which excludes about 40 per cent of the population according to some estimates.

This approach also favours what Min Basadur would classify as an ‘generator’: someone who’s work style preferences favour idea generation. Those from the other quadrants in the Basadur Profile, particularly ‘conceptualizers’ and ‘optimizers’ (ones who’s work style preference leans toward processing and organizing information) are less likely to respond quickly.

Ideas in private and public

Another problem with many ideation strategies is that many really useful ideas are a bit heretical or outlandish. While design thinking writers often refer to the need to generate ‘wild ideas’ without criticism or judgement, the truth is that’s a lot harder to do in practice, particularly when there are power dynamics in the room, reputations, and the real fear that comes with change and challenges to established practices. The public nature of the ideation process favours transparency, but induces self-censorship and produces disengagement for many and hyper-engagement for a few.

A solution is to have those involved in the process generate ideas independently and anonymously contribute them via a suggestion box (digital or analog). Keep the suggestion box open for a defined period — we recommend no more than one week or as short as three days. This allows time for those who are more reflective to mull through their ideas and contribute them, while those who are more quick to generate ideas will not be affected.

These are then collated independently by someone neutral to the problem and solution set and organized thematically. This has the advantage of potentially embedding some of the wildest ideas within a small set of other ideas that might seem far less threatening. If you create a category of ‘wild ideas’ the risk is that the entire category will be dismissed. A more public, but elaborate, means of doing this can be found in the CoNEKTR Model described elsewhere.

This process can be repeated over the design cycle at different stages – anywhere diverse perspectives and feedback is needed.

Overcoming biases to better ideas

The bias toward ‘rapid ideation’ in design thinking systematically excludes people in favour of a well-meaning intention of trying to avoid participants ‘over-thinking’ a problem. While that might happen, it still prevents many from engaging in the process fully because of personality, work preferences, cognitive style and social pressures.

The strategy listed above is a simple, but highly effective means of getting lots of ideas and engaging your entire team in the process. Try it out. You might be surprised what ideas come from it all.