Cense

Innovation to Impact

Designing for Humans: Considerations for Innovators

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Over at our sister site Censemaking we wrapped up a series called Design for Humans. The focus of the series was on different considerations that we must make in the process of designing useful, impactful things for the world around us.

Strangely enough, we often don’t do a good job at designing for humans with our services and products. In the process of innovating, we make many assumptions about how the innovation will be received and the impact it will make.

There are reasons why real substantive change is actually very difficult to generate. Humans are difficult to work with and to influence and the more we can design for how humans actually live, think, work, and play the more likely our change-making efforts will yield positive results.

Deeper Research

One of the ways to do better design for humans is to conduct detailed research. This goes beyond a few focus groups or observations toward more fuller engagement with different audiences. Strangely, many of us actually don’t really know what we want. We think we know what we want or that we know how to articulate what we want.

Research in this context involves the time, care, and attention to who people see themselves and who they act as. This is about our imagined reality and our lived one. (The two intersect and diverge through our days and life).

Many of our purchases are based on decisions that involve aspiration, comfort, fear, convenience, ethics, and utility in different combinations. These are both our own and the ones that we adopt from others depending on our situation. Individual decisions are very often tied to collective ones. If we do not understand the different groups we are affiliated with or aspire toward being a part of, we lose much of what is known about what drives a decision.

If we do not take the time to understand who it is that we are speaking with or seeking to influence — their individual set of values, beliefs, and experiences — then we will create a ‘mass’ for a ‘mass market’ that is unlikely to be receptive.

Luck and Science

A great deal of impactful design is based on a dance between luck and science. Viral marketing campaigns are more brilliant in retrospect than in advance. As Tendayi Viki and Mitch Joel recently spoke about in their conversation on innovation, most great innovations look absurd in advance and clever in retrospect.

This means great design is about framing the ridiculous.

It also means ensuring that, practically speaking, we must consider the very way we humans think, feel, and live — which is often ridiculous to the outsider. Great campaigns and products tap into this.

They also are about luck. Designing for luck through great observation, research, testing (prototyping), and ongoing evaluation ensures that what we put into the world has the potential to succeed in making some positive difference, not necessarily that it will no matter how good it is.

Whether its luck, perception or something else we find ourselves recognizing that the gap between what we think is valuable and useful and what others think (or are willing to consider) is large. The Chasm illustrated above is real and rather than engage in a futile effort to design around it, we need to recognize that there are sharks in those waters.

That’s what they did in the film Jaws. When we design for that, we design for humans (and sharks).

If you’re looking to create something more human in your work and need help, contact us and we can help make sure you don’t get eaten by the sharks you’re swimming with.

Images by Business Illustrator used under license.

Surfacing Your Organization’s Identity

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Have you ever asked questions about your organization’s identity before?

Who are you?

What do you stand for?

What kind of things motivate you to action and direct your attention?

The answers to all of these questions shape what we do in our work. Organizations that have a clear sense of what they do, why they do it, and who they do it for tend to succeed. The reason? These organizations have greater alignment between purpose and strategy. In short: they have an identity.

Our identity — who we think we are — is a powerful guide for our behaviour. So how do we answer this question in our work?

Bulls Eye

A simple starting point for finding what matters and moves you is to use a Bull’s Eye diagram. A Bull’s Eye Diagram illustrates priorities through three layers of importance. All that is needed is a diagram of the ‘target’, sticky notes, and a space to organize the notes. The example below is done using the Mural tool and a pre-set template for ease of use..

A Bull’s Eye diagram can be used with individuals or groups. We often use this for a project when a client is struggling to identify what is both important and necessary for their work.

We also recommend that you use the Bull’s Eye diagram at the start of an engagement.

Once the items from the sticky notes are placed, it’s easier to see themes in the ‘data.’ This approach allows organizations to see what their members think are most important. It is the aggregate of these ideas that shape the culture of an organization and when you know what they are it’s easier to design with them.

With this knowledge in hand your organization can better design a purposeful strategy and make your identity aspirations a reality in practice.

We help organizations to design their culture for success. If you want help using this or other tools like it, contact us.

Evaluating Learning for Innovation

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Learning is at the heart of innovation. Our definition of innovation is contingent upon it:

Learning transformed into value, by design

Traditional approaches to learning tend to focus on two things: recall and performance. Thus, we look at knowledge-based tests (consider most of what we took in grade school and college or university) or performance assessments (reviewed accomplishment on a specific task or problem set).

What is often absent from both of these is a consideration of the context and the learner themselves. It’s one thing to be exposed to information or demonstrations of how to do something, yet it’s entirely another thing to actually learn it.

Assessment of Learning: Questions to Ask

Our assessment of learning is inspired by this approach and informs the questions we ask about learning:

  • Exposure. What level of exposure did we have to the material or experience? How did this exposure treat our sense of understanding of the problem and the context? What salient information did we attend to during this exposure? How (or were) we attentive to what was presented to us and what was the context in which this was presented?
  • Connection. How is what we are exposed to related to what we’ve already experienced? In what ways does this new material fit with what we have previously learned? Where does this material or experience fit in shaping my goals, intentions, or general direction for myself or my organization?
  • Reinforcement. What activities allow me to apply what I’ve been exposed to in new ways and in practical ways repeatedly (including fitting with what I already know, whether a theory or practice-focused material)? What systems are in place to allow me to integrate what I’ve been exposed to into my current understanding of the situation? What activities have been set out to enable recall and re-visiting materials in the near and longer-term?
  • Application. What opportunities do I have to apply what I’ve learned into shaping a new understanding of a problem or steps toward addressing it? What opportunities are present to reflect and integrate this application of knowledge or skill into my existing repertoire of practice or understanding?

Without these, there is a decent chance we will undergo some form of performative learning — doing activities that look like learning but aren’t really effective. Taking workshops on topics that are not relevant to your work or set up too distant from the problems you’re seeking to tackle is one way. Filling your days with reading articles, watching webinars, taking courses, listening to podcasts, and viewing videos on some material without a means to organize and integrate that into your experience.

You will retain some, but probably not enough to warrant your time and energy. Furthermore, this kind of ‘filling’ of your attention actually serves to decrease the likelihood that you’re able to use this because of the sapping of energy from your brain. The more we expose ourselves to, the more energy is required and eventually we’ll be depleted enough that things won’t stick.

Ask yourself these questions above next time you’re looking to really, truly learn as an individual, team, or organization.

If you’re looking to learn more, do more with what you have, please contact us and we’d be happy to discuss ways we can help you be a better learner and innovator.

Better learning comes from better systems, by design. we can help you build them.

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 Design Quality Control

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You want and need help in transforming your organization or business line and are seeking a consultant to help you. What should you look for? Let’s look at questions and issues you may want to consider when starting an innovation journey.

We break it down into three (plus) areas: Design research and foresight, service development, and evaluation.

Design Research

Design research is about exploring the problem or circumstance that you’re looking to intervene in through introducing a new product, service offering, or policy (which we’ll refer to as an innovation).

Design research is much more than ‘doing your homework’ and is meant to work with any marketing and financial studies you may have done. Design research is about exploring your end-user(s) — both identified and potential additional users. Responsible design research is also about looking at who else your innovation affects.

It will incorporate systems thinking into the process by considering the various ways in which your innovation affects and is affected by the various interconnections around it. For example, your service might be tied to other things (e.g., supply chain, regulatory issues, community norms) and good design research will help articulate these and allow you to map and model systems using visual tools.

Your innovation design team should have skills in design and research and understand a variety of methods and approaches such as quantitative analysis, qualitative data collection, sensemaking (for innovations dealing with complex situations), and behavioural science. The last point — behavioural science – is what allows you to understand what, why, and how an individual or group will choose to engage with your innovation and serves as a foundation for the next stage of work: service development.

But first, let’s go a little ahead into the future to look at the other part of design research: foresight.

Foresight

Strategic foresight is an approach to research that looks at the trends and drivers that influence specific domains of interest like your market, community, or social life as a whole. It draws on a variety of data sources such as published reports, publicly available (or privately held — if you have access) databases, as well as a series of exercises and activities that allow you and other stakeholders to envision what possible futures might look like.

The UK Social innovation agency Nesta has a useful, accessible primer on some of the methods that are used to envision futures.

Future-thinking is important because your innovation will always be applied to tomorrow, not today. Sustainable, effective innovations are those that meet emerging needs not just present ones. Foresight considers how and why things might change and, when combined with strategy and behavioural science, allows you to shape the design of your innovation to better anticipate and (hopefully) meet those changes as they emerge.

Service Development

Service development can include everything from exploring the physical space where your innovation will be deployed to undertaking usability research on digital platforms. The range of practices associated with what is more commonly called service design are many and when enlisting support to design your innovation it’s critical to ensure you have the right talent.

Service design often seeks to develop models of your intended users based on the design research you’ve undertaken. This can result in tools such as personas that provide evidence-informed caricatures of your users that you can use to develop and test scenarios.

Service design methods incorporate visual thinking methods and tools and design thinking by exploring the research, developing ideas, testing and trying these ideas out in ways that inform strategy, and then deploying them into the world. Having a design team with skills in design methods, facilitation, and visual presentation will make this much easier.

Visuals can include everything from simple (but illustrative) maps like the image above to more sophisticated visual models, ‘gigamaps‘, and storyboards.

Evaluation

Last and certainly not least is evaluation. It’s one thing to design an innovation, it’s another to know whether it does what you think it does. Evaluation allows us to assess what kind of impact our innovation has on the world, what processes lead to that impact, and what aspects of our service, product, or policy are most likely influencing this impact.

It is through evaluation of our innovation that we are better able to fine-tune, amplify, or retract our offering to ensure it’s creating the most benefit and not doing harm. Evaluation also allows us to understand what hidden value our innovation might be offering, to articulate your return on investment (ROI), and to widen your perception of what your innovation does and could do.

Bringing in design firms that do not build in professional-grade evaluation to the project is like doing half the work. What good is your new product or service if you have little idea how or whether it works in the real world over time?

These are some of the things that anyone looking to develop an innovation in-house or with a consultant team needs to consider. We have a lot of resources on our learning page on some of these methods and tools as well as overall approaches to supporting groups in asking better questions prior to engaging a contractor.

This is what we do. If you want help with any of this and doing good, quality service design, design research, evaluation and foresight, please reach out and contact us. We’d love to hear from you.