Cense Ltd.

Inspiration, Innovation and Impact

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.

Personas: Visualizing Your Audience & Customer

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When we design any service or product we are creating it with someone in mind. Personas are a design-oriented approach that can enable us to envision this ‘someone’ – our markets – to better design our products and services for them.

Whether it is a new software product, a grant-making project, a collaborative initiative, or a social policy — any product or service is designed for some person(s) and groups. The more we can anticipate what the needs, wants, and preferences are of this group and how they live, work, and play — the better fit we’ll have.

Personas are a visual way to develop hypotheses and insight into what our customers, clients, and audiences might think, act, and use .

Personas: Qualities

Personas provide evidence-based insights that help us reframe
challenges by creating caricatures that are rooted in data and observations and can provide us with a means to anticipate how or why these individuals might engage with our products and services.


• Personas are not just descriptions of what we already believe about our audience. They come from the perspectives of our actual users. They may challenge or differ from the usual categories we rely on to think about our users.
• Each persona represents a group of users with similar characteristics,
habits, needs, and/or goals. Demographics may or may not play a key
part in a persona.
• Users also differ in important ways from each other; personas highlight
differences that matter.
• Personas are formed by bringing together multiple sources of
quantitative and qualitative data from diverse internal and outside
sources. If the data is not available, then design research is recommended to gather what’s required to make informed decisions.

This might include: surveys, published research from elsewhere, government or external reports, key informant interviews, field observations and direct observation or engagement with users.

Design Steps

Personas begin by looking at the data you have available and, where necessary, gathering more data to ensure you have a reasonable sample that captures both who you believe is your primary user and those who might be potential users.

Examine patterns and look for qualities among the sample — those individuals and groups that are represented in the data — that might go together. This includes things like:

  • Demographics – those that matter related to your product (e.g., age, sex, gender, race, ethnocultural heritage, income, sexual identity, education, employment)
  • Personal Identifiers (e.g., lifestyle behaviours, consumption patterns)
  • Experience with product or service. Are they experienced or new? What knowledge do they have or need to use it? What motivation might they have to use it?
  • Aspirations. What does the product or service solve for this individual? What does it bring to them or allow them to achieve? What are their goals?
  • Fears and Hopes. What are the ‘pain points’ or the things that will attract or detract users from engaging with your product?
  • Skills and Knowledge. What do users know, need to know, and what skills are necessary to engage with your product or service?

Next, sketch out the user. Make them visual — a look or feel and even a name. You might find yourself coming up with many different personas and this is helpful do allow you to determine the differences that make a difference. For example, if you find that the use of your product isn’t highly influenced by a certain demographic quality then that persona isn’t as affected by what you choose on that issue.

Once your personas have been developed, it’s helpful to consult with actual users that represent those personas in some form to test or validate some of the assumptions you used to develop those personas. Personas are not representative of actual people, they are combinations of qualities so the fit doesn’t have to be perfect, just coherent. Coherence is what you’re looking for.

After this, refine and design. Take what you learn and start designing your product or service for these users.

Sample

Below is an example of what a Persona could look like. The example below is modified from a real project undertaken by Cense Ltd and uses the example of volunteerism within a particular community as the focus. It represents one of many personas that were developed as part of an understanding of the issue. In this case, there was considerable data available on users which made it possible to give a confidence score out of 10 based on how confident the team felt the persona adequately represented characteristics of actual users.

What you’ll find is that by undertaking this research and the process of envisioning your users and potential users you can create a better fit with your product, higher adoption rates, and far fewer problems down the road.

This is a highly participatory process and when combined with the best data and developmental design approach increases the learning of your organization as well as creating better, more innovative products.

Want to apply this to your work and need some help? Contact us and we can help. This is what we do.

Better Data Collection

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With so many people working from home and using their communication devices to do many of the tasks we once did in other ways or are now doing much more often or differently it’s tempting to think: it’s a perfect time to reach people for my research project.

That might be true, but it’s also fraught with problems. Before you set out on your ethnographic journey through the lives of your stakeholders or prep Surveymonkey for its journey through the jungles of the Internet we suggest you take a pause and consider the following before venturing forward.

  1. Context counts. Every time we engage in social research we must account for context. In the current situation with a global pandemic, we don’t know what the context is. The epidemiological, social policy, economic, and communications landscape is changing day-to-day and is influenced on a global level. With so many areas changing at once, the ability to gauge or even state the context becomes nearly impossible without resorting to over-generalized or vague statements like “complex” or “uncertain”.
  2. ” Seeing is not the same as looking”. Physician and economist Anupam Jena provides a great example of how we can miss the forest for the trees without examining some of the things that are hidden in plain sight. In times of profound transformation, we might need to re-think what it is we see as that will shape what questions we ask, what data we gather, and what answers we discover.
  3. User-experience. What is the state of mind of those who are answering your survey or responding to your interview? You might be speaking to someone who hasn’t left their house in three weeks. They might have people nearby all the time. This will determine the willingness or ability to respond, the kind of answers that are provided, and the openness of the response (for example, people might not want to share highly personal data on a shared computer or where people might see them entering or speaking about it).
  4. Sensemaking. When we don’t understand the context or its entirely new we look for what we know. The challenge right now is that we don’t know what it is that we’re looking at. Unless our research or evaluation work is focused on the now and understanding how and what we are doing at this moment, about this moment, and for this moment we risk developing data that is examined through the lens of history (what we’ve done before), which will be another context altogether. We’ll be making sense of the past through the lens of today.
  5. Attention. Are we paying attention? When so much of what we are exposed to now is coming through screens — big and small — there is a likelihood that we are reading things quickly. Electronic reading is not the same as reading paper-based text and tends to encourage skimming. When what we have read is — save for the back of the cereal box at breakfast — almost entirely digital (for many of us) the likelihood of instructions being skimmed might be higher. Proceed with caution.
  6. Health. Lastly, how well are we? When the effects of being inside, isolated, and perhaps exposed to a virus are real, present and pervasive, your audience might not be in the state where the depth and quality of thought are what we need to get the responses we want. Many of us are not our usual selves these days and our responses will reflect that.

See differently, think differently and that goes for how we assess and do our social research.

Photo by Stanislav Kondratiev on Unsplash

What is design thinking? A look at universities

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Our principal, Dr. Cameron Norman, was recently interviewed for University Affairs magazine on the topic of design thinking. Speaking with journalist Tim Johnson, Dr. Norman discussed what design and designers offer those seeking to tackle complex, thorny problems.

[Dr Norman] notes that designers, especially product designers, are typically experts in conceptualizing problems and solving them– ideal skills for tackling a wide range of issues, from building a better kitchen table to mapping out the plans on a large building. “The field of design is the discipline of innovation,” he says. “[Design thinking] is about taking these methods, tools and ideas, and applying them in other areas.”

The concept of design thinking is something that’s quite new within the academic world and Johnson’s article highlights some of the academic work that is taking place in universities and beyond to understand the role that design thinking can play in tackling complex, even wicked problems.

What presents challenges and opportunities for academia is that problems and design thinking require, by necessity, collaboration and interdisciplinary contributions:

Proponents of DT posit that, with its emphasis on teamwork and its problem-based approach, design thinking is particularly well-suited to solving “wicked problems” – those big, ill-defined, complex, multi-faceted issues that don’t have a clear solution. U of T’s Dr. Norman points to climate change as an example. “There’s no climate change discipline,” he says. “We need everyone from scientists to citizens to politicians. And within universities, you have geography and sociology and biology – you name it – there’s somebody who can play a role.”

However, it’s the approach to the problems itself that also changes the perspective as noted by Greg Van Alstyne from OCAD University’s sLab:

[Design thinking] focuses on collective goals and places a premium on sustainability, community, culture and the empowerment of people, says Greg Van Alstyne, director of research and co-founder of the Strategic Innovation Lab, or sLab, at OCAD University. “It means you go about your problem-solving in a more holistic way. We can say ‘human-centered,’ but it’s actually ‘life-centered,’

By taking a systems perspective on the problem, the problem solvers and the solutions, design thinking is opening up new opportunities for academia and business alike. Indeed, the future of both institutions might be designed quite differently as design thinking moves between them, through them and from the outside to the mainstream.