The Mercer team kept the funding issue in sight but never allowed it to halt their brainstorming and assumption testing. “Design thinking helped us think bigger and participate better and to begin working collaboratively across different areas,” Cheryl continued. “That was very important.”
Traveling Full Circle in the Texas Coastal Bend
Another JAMI project, covering eleven thousand square miles in the Coastal Bend region of South Texas, faced an even more challenging problem than Mercer County’s job–housing disconnect. With virtually all of the jobs near Corpus Christi an hour or more away by car, the rural Coastal Bend region had the lowest per capita income and the second-highest number of individuals living below the poverty level in the Lone Star State. Taxis were out of the question for the majority of workers, and the area was too sparsely settled for effective transit service. The commuters who managed to get to Corpus Christi primarily did so in crammed and unreliable carpools.
During the What is phase, the Coastal Bend team applied the learning from the webinars and coaching, and interviewed stakeholders, including those at colleges who needed to hire janitorial and other service staff. They built personas of low-wage workers. Two of the team’s insights generated particular interest: (1) people were uninformed about even the weak transit options available; and (2) the affected colleges and schools, especially, wanted additional transportation possibilities.
Brainstorming at the November summit first expanded and then narrowed their focus. The Coastal Bend team ultimately arrived at multiple concepts, one of which arose after the summit, during a subsequent CTAA webinar. As Martin Ornelas, director of the Transportation Coordination Network of the Coastal Bend, described it, the team felt frustrated, “like a circle trying to receive a square peg.” Someone said employment was low not because people couldn’t get to jobs but because no one could get to training centers. A team member responded that her college’s training classes were sparsely attended, which caused a third to wonder, “Is it the rule that our project has to transport workers?” That constraint, it turned out, was not in the request for proposals. CTAA’s stated goal for the JAMI was “to support communities in designing new or improved employment transportation service delivery solutions.”
This was Coastal Bend’s “aha” moment, which shifted the team’s thinking. Martin said:
We went in with an idea we thought would work, and we ended up with something quite different. That was a very clear example of the evolution of our concepts throughout the process. Intellectually, all the design thinking stuff sounded like a college-level exercise that was fun, but then it turned out to be very practical.
THE TEXAS COASTAL BEND PROJECT
Problem: Insufficient transit service from rural, low-income counties to job and higher education centers in Corpus Christi, over an hour away.
Reframing of design criteria: Low-income, rural youth have little conception of job possibilities and few ways of getting to those jobs.
Changing perspectives in brainstorming: Leaping to the next generation, the team considers an idea to help high school students learn about public safety career possibilities through community college classes.
Concept: A daily hour-plus bus run from rural towns to a summer public service academy for high school students, funded by police and fire chiefs concerned about finding the next generation of employees.
Learning launch: Extending the public service academy transportation program to more counties and more students, including heavy promotion.
Iteration: Parlaying local success into a federal grant to run daily bus service from rural high schools to two city colleges more than an hour away, providing transportation for both students and low-income employees, thereby addressing the original problem.
Next iteration: Finding nongrant funding to continue the bus service while adding additional pickup locations.
Looking for an answer to What wows?, the Coastal Bend team took three napkin pitches to the relevant stakeholders. Idea 1, a vanpool for a local hospital, didn’t excite the head nurse, who had never before thought about how her employees got to work. Idea 2, pitched at the chamber of commerce, also failed to resonate; workforce transportation was interesting to the chamber but was not a primary concern. But idea 3, providing transportation to a public service academy aimed at high school students, gained instant traction. High school kids jumped on the concept of transporting them to the Del Mar College Public Safety Academy for a summer program for students interested in public safety careers. Perhaps the students, not yet jaded by the daily grind, visualized the concept with more imagination, allowing them to grasp the team’s storytelling easier than nurses and executives who didn’t want another concern put on their plates. Martin remembered:
The idea was very tangible and very quickly validated by those who would benefit from the service. We were kind of reframing it in real time when one of the kids said, “We’re going to be gone all day,” and we realized he meant, “I’m going to be starving.” Then it was a matter of solving the practical kinds of things, like food.
The biggest reframe came when one team member met with a county fire chief concerned about his staffing problems. This encounter led to a transportation forum with area fire, police, and rescue personnel. The chiefs soon figured that forty potential recruits a few years out were worth some investment today. They funded bus drivers from two locations, and a small bet was launched. Students were delivered from two high schools to the Public Safety Academy. Fueled by donated lunches coordinated by an area health service, students learned how to use firefighting and police equipment, rappel from buildings, take fingerprints, give elementary first aid, and even complete some bureaucratic functions of public service.
Aware of the photographic opportunity, the Coastal Bend team publicly promoted the project as an investment in children and community-wide improvement. A media day and a well-attended graduation ceremony helped spread the word, and the project expanded in 2014, taking more students from more high schools to the summer academy. Buy-in came from both ends as students talked about the fun they had learning radio codes, fingerprinting, and forced-air breathing, and officials got favorable publicity for being farsighted. The feedback allowed the team to form additional partnerships with other city governments, the courts, the district attorney’s office, private developers, and another economic development commission. Martin told other teams during a webinar:
That was certainly one of the lessons that was not anticipated—the increased level of engagement by community leadership in making this a success, not only morally, by participating; financially, by contributing; and also by rewarding these students as they returned to their communities.
Another unanticipated benefit, Martin noted, was that, by registering at Del Mar College to attend the Public Service Academy, rural kids received free access to Corpus Christi–area transit, which introduced them to available public transit options. Even more significant, students were given a sense that they could succeed in a university setting.
Building on the second year of the academy’s success, Del Mar College has now revised its class times based on transit, high school counselors have begun promoting the Public Service Academy, and the Rural Economic Assistance League, a local nonprofit, has been prompted to expand bus service to three more counties. The summer academy bus link has been expanded to reach seven of the twelve counties in the Coastal Bend region. The academy’s success led the JAMI team to seek and obtain a Federal Transit Administration operating grant for daily bus service linking Del Mar College and Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi with Coastal Bend high schools.
Meanwhile, the summer academy trips are continuing, with more area police and fire departments donating funds and support, further underlining the proven success that laid the groundwork for the now-daily commute runs for college students and workers. So the learning launch of buses that took high school students to a summer camp has come full circle, leading to additional
opportunities for low-income job holders, the original mission of CTAA’s JAMI, all the while injecting creative thinking into all aspects of Coastal Bend transportation. “After the design thinking training, now we start with one idea and get three or four,” Martin observed.
The benefits of creating a local network of relationships able to move on and solve new problems is also evident in subsequent initiatives happening in the Coastal Bend region. When Martin’s organization, the Transportation Coordination Network, needed space to train dispatchers and drivers for the oil and gas industry, he called another JAMI team member, Anne Cunningham, from Del Mar College. Anne quickly found space for the dispatcher training and piggybacked on it to provide course credit and state certification for enrollees. What had started as the need for a room morphed into a recruitment tool for the college, while professionalizing area trucking and transit.
Another outgrowth of the JAMI design thinking conversation in South Texas was a new development, the Natatorium in Alice, Texas, built as a multimodal transportation site to encourage all transportation options, even muscle-powered options. JAMI team member Gloria Ramos and Martin took city and county officials on a trip to a multimodal transit center in Brownsville, Texas, to see and understand how mass transit, bike and pedestrian transportation, vanpools, and private carpools can actually enhance economic prospects. These officials had been introduced to the JAMI work through the Public Safety Academy’s media day and graduation ceremony. Next, they became involved, stepping up to become champions for future “out-of-the-car” thinking by insisting that the state’s Department of Transportation provide alternative transportation to the Alice facility. Martin explained:
Our “prototype” was a field trip [to Brownsville], and we had people see what we were talking about when we talking about multimodal. You need to see it, feel it, touch it, and at least imagine the inner workings, and we were showing our officials that “now you can imagine what we can do here in Alice.”
The cultural change in the Coastal Bend region isn’t complete, of course, but mindsets have altered across the community. Even a particularly skeptical partner came to recognize the power of design thinking. Martin reported:
She had the planner mentality, and they think with different parts of the brain. We had to say, “Wait, you stop our dreaming when you get to that specificity. Right now, it’s imagine time.” Now that we’ve gone through the process and she’s seen the product, she’s got the details and the metrics she needs. Once you learn its components and you apply them, design thinking becomes a way of doing business, a way of thinking, especially in the area of community empowerment. It’s a great way of getting from point A to point Z.
He continued:
I really think we were blessed by being accepted to participate in CTAA—maybe not in the formalized, structured way, but in a way that the outcomes are plentiful and that, through the results of that process, it has facilitated other work.
Martin, like many who have used design thinking, noted the “iceberg” effect, in which unforeseen gains lie beneath the surface:
No one ever thought that simply taking the academy kids through the Del Mar College registration process would have benefits. But just getting the Del Mar identification was very impactful on them because many of them had not ever stepped on a college campus and never expected to. Their level of pride was immeasurable but very tangible.
These kinds of unanticipated benefits, Carolyn said, are reasonably common when design thinking is applied, but they can rarely be predicted. Understanding the unarticulated needs and desires of people is the only way to discover solutions that can work, she argues, and for that reason, CTAA has become, as she described, “the empathizers in chief.”
Reflections on the Process
By insisting on an assortment of activities and perspectives on each team, and then providing the structure of a problem-solving methodology that was both human centered and flexible, while allowing for reframing of the situation when a unique understanding or opportunity arose, CTAA reached out from Washington, DC, into communities around the country and changed the conversations, demonstrating the best of what it means to be both local and global. Rather than dictate, CTAA guided and trained, promoted and supported, but left the thinking and doing to truly diverse local teams.
“The growth of the relationships is bountiful,” Martin observed, noting that the new networks formed in his region have led to increased ability to fund projects as well. “We were able to secure two additional grants. Without any hesitation, the partners continue collaborating in every possible opportunity. We have a third grant submitted.” Coastal Bend is now focusing on health improvement through transportation mobility management.
In her role as an educator, Carolyn spends time thinking about how local mobility leaders across the country can apply the values and phases of design thinking. “I’m trying to figure out what are the basics, so people can benefit from the process but don’t get overwhelmed by it. A few key activities can go a long way toward solving complex mobility challenges.” Those activities include having in-depth conversations with customers and stakeholders to gain insights into their lives, considering a number of options, identifying key assumptions about potential solutions, and testing those assumptions before launching a solution. She explained, “Just a few small steps. Otherwise, folks are like, Whoa, this is too complicated for me!’ So I just keep simplifying to the most essential activities to conduct that will make a difference.”
In transportation, officials often lack opportunities to work at the systems level. As a result, piecemeal solutions that target just one part of the problem can seem almost inevitable. Design thinking’s up-front exploratory stage, as we have seen in earlier stories, helps truly diverse teams arrive at shared views of current reality—especially with regard to the lives of the people that the team members intend to serve—and create innovative solutions to even unidentified problems. In a climate of tough political realities and limited budgets, it can help teams reduce risk and arrive at practical ideas, balanced within an understanding of resource limitations yet encouraged by a shared vision of a better future. Design thinking’s bias toward action and experimentation can help build enthusiasm for change within the larger community and produce more desire for involvement in co-creating a new future. Carolyn explained:
When local mobility leaders join with other community leaders to inquire deeply into people’s lives through journey mapping, ethnography, and stakeholder feedback, projects can advance in our political culture and minimize the transportation challenges often faced by on-demand, low-paid hourly workers. We want to support change makers who apply for our team-based institutes by giving them additional strategies to improve mobility in their communities. We want them to be confident that they can lead a group through often complex challenges. But we also—most importantly—want them to touch base with the real users, to have an expansive view, and then to figure out “what wows” for the population at hand.
For participants across the seven teams, it was a powerful experience. Linda Moholt, from Tualatin, Oregon, a low-wage suburb of Portland, reflected:
It’s been a wonderful experience. This project, this ability to work with design thinking, allowed us to create a pilot project, which we submitted and got a doubled grant. And more important than getting the doubled funding was that it brought local partners to the table to help initiate and execute the new program. We’ve absolutely used every piece of the [design thinking] training to write the grant in a different way, to bring the partners to the table, and now we’re going into full operational mode…It’s been an incredible experience.
“Every grant we do has design thinking in it now,” Carolyn said. “Give people the tools to be community conveners—that’s the premise of our training. What we are really trying to do is change the conversation.”
“Our whole goal was to get the teams to feel confident that they could think anew about ways to meet thei
r communities’ needs,” Amy added.
To us, it certainly looks as though CTAA is succeeding and, in the process, calling into question the old truism that only action needs to be local; their work shows us that thinking can reside there, too. CTAA’s experience demonstrates that identifying and solving problems locally, rather than globally, has big advantages.
CHAPTER TEN
Bridging Technology and the Human Experience at the Transportation Security Administration
THE CHALLENGE TO THE GREATER GOOD
“Build it and they will come” is an innovation philosophy that is probably as old as humankind. While producing some outstanding products, it often subjugates the human experience to technological possibilities and regularly produces products, services, and strategies that no one wants. Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of technology-driven innovation. How do we blend human needs and technological possibilities?
DESIGN THINKING’S CONTRIBUTION
Technology-driven and user-driven innovation might appear to anchor opposite ends of the innovation spectrum. But what does innovation look like if these two forces work together? Few organizations today face thornier challenges than the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Established to safeguard America’s transportation system after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, TSA’s airport policies and procedures have raised the ire of travelers.
Design Thinking for the Greater Good Page 20