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Research.Design.Impact.

Breaking the Ice

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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.

Systems Diagrams Made Simple

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Sketch diagrams are powerful tools for visualizing complex programs and systems. This simple technique literally gets people on the same page.

Mapping out a service or product ecosystem can be a complicated endeavour. There is the entire field of systemic design that focuses on tools and strategies to engage users for starters. There are approaches like synthesis mapping and service design canvases that can help us walk through the various aspects of a system to find points of leverage, threat, and opportunity.

Nearly all of these methods and tools require user orientation and training — sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. However, in many of our engagements, particularly in healthcare, we find the time (and attention) is so limited it becomes difficult to engage participants using methods that require considerable instruction.

It’s here that we introduce a technique and tool called the system sketch map.

Sketch mapping

A sketch map is a multimedia system map that is created by using any form of representation such as blocks and arrows, stick figures, or elaborate illustration and can be developed at any moment. A sketch map gets participants past the challenge of having to learn a technique or representation convention and can be particularly useful for those participants who feel unskilled at drawing or visualizing their thoughts.

This works well with professionals who may find themselves uneasy about using visual media or do not consider themselves ‘creative’. (Note: Everyone can draw. It’s important to emphasize that this is not an art project).

The exercise works like this:

Begin with the instructions: Draw your system.

That’s it.

Some guidelines: 

  • Any visual formalism can be used. One can even combine visual approaches together.
  • Emphasize the simplest media possible: Pens and paper (or crayons), sticky notes (or stickers) are among the best tools because they are flexible, colourful, and can be combined easily. These are also inexpensive and easy to obtain.
  • Large format paper (e.g., newsprint) or whiteboards are best to use as a canvas to facilitate group participation
  • Group participation is key
  • There are no right or wrong ways to do this. Whatever participants wish to include in that system is all that matters.
  • Give participants a time frame (usually 30 – 50 minutes works best) and try and ensure there are between 4 and 6 people in the group.
  • Emphasize DOing over THINKing. It’s easy for groups to try and do this ‘right’ and analyze everything. The use of simple, inexpensive materials allows people to create ‘do-overs’ easily, erase material, revise and recreate things.
  • Lastly, strive for ‘good enough’ and ‘coherent’ over ‘excellent’ and ‘complete’ (which are highly relative in this context).

What is interesting is that the participants define what their system is and what goes in it. In making these choices it becomes evident what they see as most essential, important, or relevant.:

A completed sketch map then allows everyone (the facilitator and participants) afterward to ‘interrogate’ the map (not the map makers) and ask questions like “does this choice of colour mean anything?“, “is the distance between these two things represent some kind of scale?“, “what might be missing from all of this?”

This interactive discussion process allows everyone to explore what gets placed at different positions, sizes, in different colours, and what gets included and left out of the map. It allows for the use of symbolism (conscious or not), metaphor, and representation without having to shape or bias the participants toward using a particular way of visualizing the system.

What it is, is what it is.

This simple technique can yield enormous insights into the assumptions, structures, relationships, actors, and core components associated with a system and do so within one or two hours and with a small budget.

For more information about sketch mapping and how it can help you with your work or just for more on innovation methods, tools, and strategies, feel free to contact us. We’d love to hear from you and can help.

Photo by Danae Paparis on Unsplash and Kaleidico on Unsplash

Evaluation: The Innovator’s Secret Advantage

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I have a secret….

Innovators are a hopeful lot. They are looking to find an advantage by creating something new that will improve their current condition or at the very least prevent their current situation from deteriorating. Sometimes you need to change to keep things the same. 

Evaluation is one of the hidden (maybe secret) advantages from those innovators who are looking to sustain their work over the long haul. For those who are looking to innovate in human systems, evaluation might be the only thing that allows an idea to scale beyond its current implementation. 

Why? How? And what does this look like? We will begin a series looking at the Innovators Secret Advantage and how evaluation can and does play a role in supporting good design, measuring impact, guiding strategy, and informing the development of new ideas. Over the next few weeks we’ll be introducing ten points to illustrate how evaluation can take your ideas forward and create the impact on your clients, the public, your market, and the world. 

Sound good? Stay tuned and the secrets will be revealed. Through case studies, practical examples, evidence, and theory we’ll illustrate how to use evaluation to support and amplify your innovation with humans, products, services, and policies. It’s time that evaluation’s advantages are accrued to everyone, not just those ‘in the know’. 

And, if you’re in the area, our Principal, Cameron Norman, will be speaking on this topic at the upcoming Service Convention Sweden on November 28th, 2018. Get a jump on what’s to come!  

Image Credit: Sai De Silva on Unsplash

Better data visualizing, better impact

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What good is a program evaluation if its findings aren’t used? Not much. Even as an accountability mechanism, evaluations have the potential to demonstrate the impact a program is having in the world and reveal new insights to guide strategy in ways that few other things can. Although there are many ways to convey evaluation findings, one of the most typical is through an evaluation report.

A good report should not only reflect what happened in the program but also inspire its readers to take action based on the report. This involves making sure the key points are made, but also that the findings are communicated in ways that can be easily understood by audiences who may not have access to the evaluator or program staff (which is why reports are written and codified and why, despite their limitations, are unlikely to disappear).

There are courses aimed at preparing stronger evaluation reports, best practice reports,  tools for creative visualization and entire literature fields based on knowledge translation. But if you want to create real impact, you need to deliver knowledge to where it is intended for purposes that may not be fully known because great data reports create possibilities, not just communicate results.

Just as the image above illustrates the many ways light and structure can be reflected, so too can the contents of an evaluation report inspire new ways of seeing programs, data, and strategic opportunities. It all comes down to how the data is presented and in what measure. To support this, we present some tools, people and resources that can help you in making better use of the opportunity that an evaluation report offers through visualization and better communication design.

Resources

Stephanie Evergreen’s a specialist in data visualization for evaluation. Her website features a lot of great resources including links to her books, resource cards and includes tips and tricks to take everyday data and transform it into something attractive, engaging and more useful for audiences.

Kylie Hutchinson, an evaluator and a passionate advocate for better communication in program evaluation, has produced a wonderfully appropriate new resource for evaluators called the Evaluation Reporting Guide that is available through her website. It is a useful guide for being more innovative in the way evaluation findings are reported and comes from someone who knows how to do it.

Kumu is a tool that takes networked data and allows anyone with a basic understanding of network theory to create useful, interactive visuals that can be manipulated and presented in different formats for audiences looking to see the bigger picture.

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic writes a wonderful blog on how to tell better stories through data combining data visualization with tips on narrative writing that can help even the least creative person imagine new possibilities through the data they have available.

Sometimes it’s just about seeing examples. This post from Import provides some classic examples from the history of data visualization and the latest research to illustrate how data has been used to showcase findings from research and evaluation in creative ways to tell better stories.

Lastly, no commentary on ways to see data differently would be complete without a mention of the incredible works of Edward Tufte, one of the pioneers in data visualization and author of some of the most beautiful, provocative works on the subject ever written.

Creating pictures, telling stories.

Each of these resources provide different ways to see, play with, and present evaluation findings and data. There is no ‘right’ way to do it, rather there are many ways to tell stories and some will resonate with your audience. Data visualization and creative report writing is only good if you know what your audience wants, who they are, and what their motivations are to engage with your content.

The best visuals will not help if you aren’t delivering a product that an audience is ready to see or able to act on, but it is a start. A better looking, more coherent report told through visuals utilizes more of our senses and provides greater opportunities for more people to engage with its content by relying on more than just logic, ‘hard numbers’ and evidence to include things like narrative, emotion, and relationships – the things that make us all human whether we are a data whiz or not.

If you’re looking to make more impactful use of the knowledge you have in your organization, connect with us and we can help you to take the best of what you know and transform it into stories about what you do to those that matter.