DESIGN THINKING FOR THE GREATER GOOD
DESIGN THINKING FOR THE GREATER GOOD
Innovation in the Social Sector
JEANNE LIEDTKA, RANDY SALZMAN, AND DAISY AZER
Columbia Business School
Publishing
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press
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EISBN 978-0-231-54585-3
Source of the LUMA Institute planning tools in chapter 6: Innovating for People: Human-Centered Design Planning Cards. Copyright © by LUMA Institute LLC. Reprinted by permission of LUMA Institute LLC.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.
A Columbia University Press E-book.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Part I. Why Design Thinking?
1. Catalyzing a Conversation for Change
2. How Do We Get There from Here? A Tale of Two Managers
Part II. The Stories
3. Igniting Creative Confidence at US Health and Human Services
4. Including New Voices at the Kingwood Trust
5. Scaling Design Thinking at Monash Medical Centre
6. Turning Debate into Dialogue at the US Food and Drug Administration
7. Fostering Community Conversations in Iveragh, Ireland
8. Connecting—and Disconnecting—the Pieces at United Cerebral Palsy
9. The Power of Local at the Community Transportation Association of America
10. Bridging Technology and the Human Experience at the Transportation Security Administration
11. Making Innovation Safe at MasAgro
12. Integrating Design and Strategy at Children’s Health System of Texas
Part III. Moving into Action: Bringing Design Thinking to Your Organization
13. The Four-Question Methodology in Action: Laying the Foundation
14. The Four-Question Methodology in Action: Ideas to Experiments
15. Building Organizational Capabilities
Notes
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the assistance and support of the people who shared their stories with us, and we deeply appreciate their generosity and candor. Their honest recounting of their experiences, complete with the ups and downs involved in tackling tough problems, is just more evidence of the courage we saw them exhibit throughout their stories.
Despite heavy workloads, they took significant amounts of time to give us detailed accounts of their work, shared their project artifacts, and contributed the rich detail found in the stories in this book—all so that they could offer examples so that others could follow in their footsteps. Research projects like the one just completed can span years, and we are grateful for those who stuck with us until the end and to those who picked up where others left off.
It is also impossible to thank the dozens of thinkers we spoke with about stories that did not end up in this book, for various reasons. Their insights and thoughts both led us to other sources and impacted the direction of the writing. Their efforts to utilize design thinking to address society’s problems were often just as inspiring as the stories we chose to include in this limited volume.
Our deepest thanks also go out to Stephen Wesley and Myles Thompson at Columbia, and to our editor Karin Horler, whose wise advice and editing make us sound so much better than we deserve. And we thank the Darden School of Business and the Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, without whose support this book, and the research behind it, would never have happened.
Finally, we thank all of you who practice collaborative creativity in the social sector. You are making our world better, and we appreciate it immensely.
From Jeanne
First, a profound thank-you to my coauthors, Salz (my partner and chief inspiration in life as well as design thinking) and Daisy, both wonderful colleagues who participated from the earliest stages of the research. To my wonderful children and their wonderful children and partners and all my beloved Loudkas, who bring such joy to my life every single day. To my colleagues at Darden who have been a source of inspiration, learning, and encouragement for the past twenty-five years, most especially the LOCAs. I consider myself blessed to have found a home at such an extraordinary place, amid such extraordinary people. And I thank my parents, who always believed in me and who taught me to believe in myself. Finally, I want to thank my private design posse—the wonderful cast of characters who know so much more about design and innovation than I and who have taught me everything I know and have opened doors that made this work possible—Rachel Brozenske, Ed Hess, Karen Hold, Josh Marcuse, Arianne Miller, and Tim Ogilvie.
From Daisy
Collaborating across distance and time is neither simple nor straightforward, but it is easier and significantly more enjoyable with the right partners! Humor, of course, helped; it is always a balm.
To Jeanne, for the tremendous opportunity to work on this book and in design thinking. It has been educational and inspirational above and beyond design thinking, and I am immeasurably grateful. To Salz, for always being forthright, an admirable quality, particularly as it comes with a charming Southern accent. There is nothing better than an unvarnished opinion with a view to making things better, and a willingness to see differently. To all those who are practicing design thinking and engaging in the conversation it sparks, thank you for sharing your experiences, wisdom, and questions—and for making the world a better place, and me a better design thinker. I dedicate the work to my father, Samir, a businessman who was both kindhearted and prescient with his innovative ideas and business models, and my mother, Nadia, who has spent her entire life fighting for the greater good.
From Salz
While I, Randy Salzman, will always be grateful for the love of my children and family, I must single out the driving force in both my life and this book—Jeanne Liedtka. She, primarily, devised the splendid four-question, fifteen-step model of design thinking that makes teaching collaborative creativity effective, and she is, and I hope will continue to be, an inspiration to many, especially me, because she is a “George” who has successfully taught herself to be a “Geoffrey.” I must also thank my other coauthor, Daisy Azer, whose calm demeanor on several occasions, and persistent questioning on others, drove rational thinking back into the occasionally irrational reality of three people—two of them married and both too headstrong for their own good—attempting to write three hundred coherent pages. Daisy also deserves thanks for the extreme effort she put into ensuring the illustrations, graphics, and photographs are readable and effective, not to mention legal. Thank you both.
PART I
Why Design Thinking?
CHAPTER ONE
Catalyzing a Conversation for Change
The Case of the Smoking Cucumber Water
The article in the Washington Post seemed innocuous. It described high hopes for the 2012 opening of the new innovation lab at the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the agency charged with overseeing the education and development of all federal employees. Located in the subbasement of OPM’s DC headquarters, the Lab@OPM was hardly sumptuous, occupying just three thousand square feet. Renovation costs barely topped $1 million (not enough to even register as a decimal point of OPM’s $2 billion budget that year), and almost half
of that was to remove the asbestos in the ceiling. Total headcount was six employees.
But the article’s passing reference to a pitcher of cucumber water apparently attracted the unwanted attention of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which formally requested that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) conduct a full audit of the year-old lab. For the next nine months, lab staff spent much of their time talking to auditors rather than encouraging innovation. Eventually, the GAO audit produced a largely favorable review of the work of the lab, but the only widely publicized finding was the GAO’s criticism that the lab had failed to implement a “rigorous evaluation framework” in its less than eighteen months of existence. The Post’s “Federal Insider” columnist reported this while ridiculing the “Silicon Valley buzzwords” behind the vision of the “so-called innovation lab.”
Amid the hoopla, it was overlooked that a lab staff member had, in fact, purchased that cucumber with his own money at Safeway and had cut it up himself to add to the tap water in the pitcher. And in the background was general frustration with the OPM in other areas, like retirement claims processing and security clearances. “It gave them their shot at us,” one lab staffer commented ruefully.
Doesn’t that just say it all about the challenges of doing innovation work in the social sector, of trying to design for the greater good?
Good work by dedicated people gets caught in the cross fire of politics and media, the right intentions and their complex reality sidelined by a combination of circumstances that few in the business sector would ever deal with.
The cucumber water story has a surprisingly happy ending. The GAO accountants in charge of the audit quickly grasped the challenging nature of the Lab@OPM’s work and were impressed. The extraordinarily resilient lab staff soldiered on to make significant contributions to the state of innovation in the federal government, which they continue today.
But when you talk to government innovators in DC, you can still sense a kind of posttraumatic stress syndrome, traceable back to that cucumber water, just below the surface. We have no way to know how many potential innovations in Washington have been lost to the fear of audits or public criticism.
We live in a world of increasingly wicked problems. Nowhere are they more evident than in the social sector. Whether we look at private or public efforts, across sectors like health care, education, and transportation, at the global or local level, organizations of all sizes and stripes struggle with thorny issues:
• stakeholders who can’t even agree on the problem, much less the solution;
• employees who are reluctant to change behaviors and take risks, who are often rewarded for compliance rather than performance;
• decision makers who have too much data, but little of the kind they need;
• leaders who are more likely to have short tenures and whose every move is scrutinized by funders, politicians, bureaucrats, and the media; and
• users of their services—students, patients, customers, citizens—whose expectations are sometimes rising as fast as resources to meet them are declining.
And to face this scenario, would-be innovators are armed with an outmoded tool kit premised on predictability and control, optimized for solving tame problems, in a world that offers fewer and fewer of them. Our goal in this book is to offer a new set of tools—ones better suited to the complexity and messiness of the challenges that social sector innovators face. Standing still is no more an option in the social sector than it is in the for-profit world. Innovation is an imperative.
THE LAB@0PM
The Lab@OPM has gone on to become a driving force behind innovation in the US federal government. We think of it as patient one in the viral spread of design thinking in DC—it is where innovators caught the fever for human-centered work. Scratch the surface of almost any interesting innovation success story across a wide variety of government agencies in Washington and you’ll find the lab’s guiding hand. The seed for the lab was planted in 2009, when President Obama appointed John Berry as director of the OPM and gave him the mandate to “make government cool again.” As the government’s chief “people person,” Berry was responsible for recruiting and developing almost 2 million federal employees. Berry brought a young Stanford grad, Matt Collier, on board to help in this effort.
In 2010, they took a tour of Silicon Valley, visiting the usual haunts—Google, Facebook, IDEO, and Kaiser Permanente’s Garfield Innovation Center. All of these companies had carefully architected their work spaces to support and encourage collaboration. “They were the kind of places that made you want to come to work,” Matt observed. When the OPM team thought about what they wanted to bring back to the East Coast, the notion of space and the IDEO-inspired design thinking approach were at the top of their list. As he explained:
We didn’t want to create just another meeting space. It was more about what we wanted to do in the space—to try to build a design thinking practice, to build a little IDEO inside of government, to bring that capability in-house. It was set up like a teaching hospital: we will do some teaching, but we will also do some application.
The lab staff selected LUMA Institute as their partner. They were drawn to LUMA’s reputation as an education company whose goal was to build capacity in human-centered design for individuals, teams, and organizations.
The lab has survived—in fact thrived—despite the GAO audit during its infancy and the change of senior leaders at OPM. Matt has a theory why:
It began as a political appointee–driven initiative that was rightly and appropriately embedded into the bureaucracy. The reins were handed over to the senior career leadership—not in a burdensome way but in a way where they wanted those reins. And everyday employees within the lab’s orbit were equipped and, indeed, expected to apply design thinking in service of their work and that of their colleagues. Because of that, the lab has survived. That was a huge success. Had we not given leadership over to career executives, the lab and all of the design thinking activities that went along with it could have easily gone by the wayside.
In facing challenges both obviously large (fighting hunger and poverty, encouraging sustainability) and seemingly smaller (getting invoices paid on time, increasing blood donations, decreasing hospital patient stays), social sector innovators are deciding that design thinking has the potential to bring something new to the conversation. They are bringing together people who want to solve a tough problem—not hold another meeting—in a world where forming a committee can be seen to count as action.
Design thinking is being used today in organizations as diverse as charitable foundations, social innovation start-ups, global corporations, national governments, and elementary schools. It has been adopted by entrepreneurs, corporate executives, city managers, and kindergarten teachers alike. In just a small sample of the stories we will discuss in this book, we see it helping impoverished farmers adopt new practices in Mexico, keeping at-risk California teenagers in school, reducing the frequency of mental health emergencies in Australia, and helping manufacturers and government regulators in Washington find common ground on medical device standards. Across these vastly different problems and sectors, design thinking provides a common thread. Maybe we could even call it a movement.
The shift under way seems to us, in fact, much like the one that created the quality movement. In the same way that the arrival of Total Quality Management (TQM) revolutionized the way organizations thought about quality, design thinking has the potential to revolutionize the way we think about and practice innovation.
Let’s take a quick look at the quality parallel. TQM had a transformational impact and drove a paradigm shift (not a term to be used lightly) about quality, from the old quality assurance mindset (scholars call this Quality I) to a completely different conception of what quality meant and whose job it was (Quality II). In Quality I, quality was seen as the domain of a small group of experts. In Quality II, quality became everybody’s
job, and TQM made that possible by providing a language and tool kit for solving quality problems, which everybody could learn. TQM democratized quality.
WHAT IS DESIGN THINKING?
Design thinking is a problem-solving approach with a unique set of qualities: it is human centered, possibility driven, option focused, and iterative.
Human centered is always where we start—with real people, not demographic segments. Design thinking emphasizes the importance of deep exploration into the lives and problems of the people whose lives we want to improve before we start generating solutions. It uses market research methodologies that are qualitative and empathetic. It is enthusiastic about the potential to reframe our definition of the problem and engage stakeholders in co-creation.
Design thinking is also possibility driven. We ask the question “What if anything were possible?” as we begin to create ideas. We focus on generating multiple options and avoid putting all our eggs in one particular solution basket. Because we are guessing about our stakeholders’ needs and wants, we also expect to be wrong sometimes. So we want to put multiple irons in the fire and let our stakeholders tell us which work for them. We want to manage a portfolio of new ideas.
Finally, the process is iterative. It conducts cycles of real-world experiments to refine ideas, rather than running analyses using historical data. We don’t expect to get it right the first time—we expect to iterate our way to success.
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