Cense

Research.Design.Impact.

Innovation: Why Starting Points Matter

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If you’re looking to measure some form of progress or impact connected to your innovation (a product, service, or policy) then paying attention to the starting point is critical.

Evaluators call this a baseline and it’s maybe the most important line you can draw. A baseline is really the point of comparison for all you do. When speaking about improvements or change, this is the point you refer to when making those claims.

For something so important, it’s remarkable how few organizations capture baselines well. Let’s look at what it means and how you can do a better job of determining your innovation’s baseline.

Setting a baseline

An ideal baseline is set as far back from the present as possible at the start of your innovation journey. However, as many journeys have starts, stops, and tangents it might be that the start of the innovation journey actually ‘begins’ mid-way through a timeline.

If you are already started your innovation journey, the best time to set a baseline is now. It’s possible in some cases to use retrospective data (looking backward) to assess a baseline, however that can be fraught with certain biases that are unhelpful. If looking retrospectively, consider neutral data points like dates and times, concrete descriptions of product work, and use verifiable sources of data (e.g., work activities, prototypes, expenditures) to support that work.

When setting a baseline, there are some other tips we advise to enable you to capture the most possible useful data you can. If you are innovating in a human system, it’s possible that the innovation may have many effects that go beyond the most obvious so collecting the right data to capture these effects at the beginning is key.

  • List out the resources that have been assembled to develop the innovation such as people, space, and other capital (e.g. funds). These are your starting inputs into the project.
  • Gather a project plan or schedule of activities early to help determine what happens after the project begins. This will help determine where deviations from the plan take place, when, and help you trace back what happens if or when those changes take place to the strategy. Capturing deviations is critical because it helps you go back to see what adaptations you make at the end. Without this data, these activities might appear to be random or haphazard.
  • Capture cultural/environmental factors. Using the STEEP-V (Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political, and Values) model is helpful in knowing what to pay attention to. One of our clients experienced a major, unexpected removal of funding due to rapidly changing political priorities of a government that was supporting their work. By capturing these broader situational variables you can place your innovation work in a context.
  • Document the state of your organization’s readiness and preparedness, which may also include an assessment of innovation readiness. Many innovations fail not out in the market, but within the design studio. Changes to organizational priorities, resources, and personnel can scupper, delay, or change the plans for an innovation. Capturing the state of the organization is an important point as it will allow you to see where things go off track or where they are enabled because of the organization.
  • Develop a project charter and theory of change. While a project may change direction many times, a baseline assessment can help you reflect the desired outcomes and original purpose of the innovation — which are quite likely to change over time. Having this in place can help explain what changes take place and what adaptations take place.

Baselines are the key point for making any claims of change, improvement, or transformation. They are the point where we say “in relation to what?” when speaking about change.

Give yourself some time and use the baseline assessment as a chance to spur reflective and strategic planning about your innovation. You will be grateful you did and amazed at the results later on.

If you’re interested in learning more about baseline development and its role in supporting innovation evaluation, contact us and we’ll gladly help.

Photo by Suad Kamardeen on Unsplash

Creating Design Pathways for Learning

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Capturing learning requires a focus on the journey, not end. Thinking like a designer can shape what we learn and how.

Learning is both a journey and a destination and it’s through recognizing this that we can better facilitate intentional, deliberative learning to support innovation and development. By approaching this journey through the lens of service design — as a design-driven evaluation — we can better design the data and insights that come from it to support learning.

What is learning?

Learning comes from perception, experience, feedback, and reflection. You first encounter something and perceive it with our senses (e.g., read, observe, hear, feel), experience something (e.g., movement, action, tension, emotion), which gives you feedback about the perception and experience that is synthesized through reflection (e.g., memory, comparison with related things, contemplation).

Evaluation is principally a tool for learning because it focuses our perception on things, monitors the experience, provides the feedback and can support reflection through offering a systematic, structured means to makes sense of what’s happened.

Evaluation is simply the means of answering the question “what happened?” in a systematic manner.

For those developing an innovation, looking to change, or seeking to improve the sustainability of our systems, answering ‘what happened?’ is the difference between real impact and nothing.

Mapping the journey with data

A journey map is a tool that is used in service design to help understand how service users (e.g., clients, customers, patients, students) might encounter the service and system to achieve a particular goal. These can be displayed visually with great artistry (see here for a beautiful example of the Indigenous cancer patient journey in BC) or simply with boxes and arrows.

It is one of many types of maps that can be created to illustrate the ways in which a user might navigate or approach a service, decision, or pathway to learning.

For innovators and evaluators, these tools present an opportunity to create touchpoints for data collection and deeper understanding of the service throughout. Too often, evaluation is focused on the endpoint or an overall assessment of the process without considering ways to embed opportunities to learn and support learning throughout a journey.

We feel this is a lost opportunity.

Without the opportunity to perceive, gain feedback, and reflect on what happens we are left with experience only, which isn’t a great teacher on its own and filled with many biases that can shift focus away from some of the causes and consequences associated with what’s happening. This is not to say that there isn’t bias in evaluation, yet what makes it different is that it is systematic and accounts for the biases in the design.

Service design meets evaluation

Design-driven evaluation is about integrating evaluation into the design of a program to create the means for developing systematic, structured feedback to support learning along a service journey. One of the simplest ways to do this is to build a layer of evaluation on the service journey map.

Consider a detailed service journey map like the one illustrating the patient journey map cited above. Along this windy, lengthy journey from pre-diagnosis to the end, there are many points where we can learn from the patient, providers, system administrators, and others associated with the health-seeking person that can inform our understanding of the program or system they are in.

By embedding structured (not rigid) data collection into the system we can better learn what’s happening — in both process and effects. Taking this approach offers us the following:

  • Identify activities and behaviours that take place throughout the journey.
  • Provides a lens on service through the perspective of a user. The same service could be modelled using a different perspective (e.g., caregiver, healthcare professional, health administrator).
  • Identifies the systems, processes, people, and relationships that a person goes through on the way through, by, or in spite of a service
  • Allows us to identify how data can fit into a larger narrative of a program or service and be used to support the delivery of that service.
  • Anchors potential data collection points to service transitions and activities to help identify areas of improvement, development, or unnecessary features.
  • Provides a visual means of mapping the structural, behavioural and social processes that underpin the program to test out the theory of change or logic model (does it hold up?).
  • Offers opportunities to explore alternative futures without changing the program (what happens if we did X instead of Y — how would that change the pathway?).

These are some of the ways in which taking a design-driven approach and using common methods from service design can improve or enhance our understanding of a program. Not a bad list, right? That’s just a start.

Try this out. Service design tools and thinking models coupled with evaluation can provide access to the enormous wealth of learning opportunities that exist within your programs. It helps you to uncover the real impact of your programs and innovation value hidden in plain sight.

To learn more about this approach to evaluation, innovation, and service design contact us. We’d love to help you improve what you do and get more value from all your hard work.

Photo by Lili Popper on Unsplash , Billy Pasco on Unsplash and  Startaê Team on Unsplash . Thank you to these artists for making their work available for use.

Innovation Value Hidden in Plain Sight

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Evaluation is more than just a means to measure impact; it reveals hidden value within the innovation process and destination.

Evaluation is often considered to be something that is done to or of something when it is completed. This is the innovation’s destination. For some, evaluation is about understanding the process — what happens along the way to developing a product. This is innovation’s journey.

But what if there were products (and outcomes) in the journey? This is where evaluation can provide deep insight into the true value of innovation.

The reasons to consider bringing evaluation more fulsomely into the entire innovation process from end-to-end are many.

  1. It increases your organization’s mindfulness about what it does, what it is doing, and what it seeks to achieve.
  2. Through paying attention to the process more systematically and with discipline (which is what evaluation is all about) it’s easier to spot patterns in the use, development, or understanding of your product by different audiences involved in the innovation process. This allows you to better see different perspectives.
  3. It documents the small accomplishments that are part of a larger whole by recognizing the work that is done in pursuit of innovation (and not just the final product). Doing this ‘shows the work’ of innovation, rather than leaving it to a final, finished product to do that.
  4. It engages your innovation team by showing progress measurably and keeping them engaged, particularly when the development cycle might take a long time and have periods of uncertainty associated with it.

Pulled together, evaluation can also tell the story of your innovation. When we consider that upwards of 80 percent of innovation efforts yield no viable product, it is easy to dismiss the work that goes into it as inefficient, wasteful or having low value. Evaluation captures the value that is in the innovation process, documents it, and provides insight to help drive the direction of innovation.

One final value point is that many solutions might exist within that ‘80%’ failure space, but haven’t been fully articulated or for which the value isn’t apparent until later. Often we see a design process yield many possible directions for action that get prototyped only to see that the best option is in one of the un-chosen options afterward.

This happens not by chance, but through designing an evaluation system to accompany and even integrate with your innovation development process. By adding evaluation into the process throughout, you’ll find much more value in all of the work that you’re doing.

It’s all hidden in plain sight (if you know how and where to look).

Interested in learning more? Contact us and we can show you how to develop the systems to get more value from your innovation efforts.

Photo by Ewan Robertson on Unsplash



Paying Attention to our Work and Ourselves: A Disruptive Conversation

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Our principal, Cameron Norman, recently joined Keita Demming for a Disruptive Conversation as part of his ongoing podcast series. Listen in and learn about how mindfulness, design, psychology, and paying attention to our change efforts can improve what we do and how effective we are with what we do.

Stop Doing the Wrong Things Righter: A Disruptive Conversation with Cameron Norman

A New Year, A New Journey

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Light up your 2019

For some reason the number 2019 looks funny. It seems hard to comprehend that somehow we arrived at a calendar year that has these four numbers all together. It’s probably going to be even stranger to see 2020 come when we celebrate the new year at the end of this calendar, particularly when we look back on all those 20/20 plans that were generated to coincide with the year. How did they turn out?

As strange as this number is, nothing compares to the actual times we’re living in. Social complexity arising from human migration, transforming economies, technology, shifting social roles, climate change, and mass urbanization (to name a few contributors) means that we often find ourselves in places and times that feel strange. Strange-making is often considered to be one of the qualities of good design: it makes the familiar feel different by introducing new things — products, services, ideas — into our life.

For us, 2019 is going to be a very strange year for these reasons. We’ll be introducing a lot of new things that have been in the works for years. It’s time to — as Seth Godin implores any innovator, creator, or entrepreneur to do — ship.

We will be launching new products to help you understand, adapt, promote, and sustain positive change. There are going to be new ways to learn all about what change is and how to make it happen. We’ll also be providing new ways to get the support you need to do the work — to ship — your ideas and innovations (making change happen).

At Cense, change is what we’re all about. So as you change your calendar, your plans, even maybe make some new year’s resolutions, stay tuned and take us along with you.

Note: For anyone who’s looking to use the time that comes with the new year replacing the old, we’d like to recommend this simple, free downloadable booklet that is worth spending a couple hours with as you reflect on what you did last year and what you aspire to become this year. Thanks to the folk at Yearcompass.com for providing this resource. We hope it’s helpful to you.

Happy New Year and best wishes for a healthy, exciting, creative, and prosperous 2019 from us at Cense.

Photo by Ricardo Rocha on Unsplash