Design Thinking for the Greater Good

by Jeanne Liedtka

  On June 5, 2014, the expanded GCCA team met to discuss step 2, determining the scope of their project, which they had initially framed as “helping disengaged learners connect to GCCA diplomas and successful college experiences.” They invited Jill Marks, the founding director of the school, who was now serving as the Gateway to College National Network’s California regional coordinator, to join them in the scoping exercise, as they experimented with broadening and narrowing the challenge. In the conversation that ensued, each team member brought personal perspectives to the definition of GCCA’s recruitment/retention problem. Reflecting her new position, Jill brought the network perspective and consistently urged the team to consider a broader definition of the opportunity, while others identified specific barriers that would narrow their study, such as transportation and family issues. It was a long afternoon, as Joan explained:

  We actually spent much more time than we expected on how to scope our idea. We went back and forth quite a bit. We would sometimes branch into, “Well, maybe we need to focus better on the messaging to the high school counselors?” When you start talking about the recruitment funnel, it gets kind of mixed in with marketing and that superficial kind of marketing. So we did do a couple of go-rounds where it’s just a messaging thing. We also know that our school is both to serve learners but also to disseminate information and change policy. So we moved up into broader issues like the role of the community. Then we pulled back down to our learners and issues like “What is actually the word on the street among the learners?”

  At one point, the team focused on the issue of student readiness: were students just not ready academically to start the foundation term? Students begin GCCA with a foundation term experience, which is a cohort-based semester with an intense curriculum in math and English to prepare them for college courses. They also enroll in a GCCA college-level guidance course to work on life, study, and time management skills. A few who are academically prepared may pick up an additional college course during this first term. After successful completion of the foundation term, students continue advancing through a guidance curriculum and enroll primarily in college courses with other community college students.

  The team considered whether students were not turning in work or not attending class because they couldn’t do this work. Eventually, faculty members at the table convinced everyone that this was not the real issue. Students were able to do the work, but other aspects, like barriers to attendance that students faced, hindered their performance.

  Guided by the template in The Designing for Growth Field Book, these far-ranging conversations about scope helped the team to explore student problems more deeply, as they struggled to identify the particular problem or opportunity that they wanted to focus on.

  Step 2: Scope template.

  By the end of the day, the team was exhausted and overwhelmed by the myriad possibilities for framing GCCA’s challenge. Team members decided to take a break and come back fresh the next morning. In hindsight, Joan believes that the time for overnight reflection made a big difference:

  With an overnight to reflect, we came back the next day and decided to focus on the opportunity to push the counseling curriculum further into our recruitment pipeline. It was probably that overnight, but we had a kind of “aha” moment and said, “Why don’t we just focus on what we can do with the group that’s coming in the door, that we will register at the end of July? Focus on what we can do to fix that part of the process and learn from that.” We settled on learning what we could from the students in that particular incoming class and improving their success.

  The decision to narrow their scope—to focus specifically on the incoming foundation cohort—allowed the team to move into action and gave them permission to think small. Team members didn’t need to start with the whole recruitment and enrollment cycle if they weren’t ready to go there. Their decision to look at just a slice of the process allowed them to do something quick for the next cohort of incoming students and learn from that.

  The scoping process accomplished much more than just setting a focus for the project, Joan believed:

  Scoping, for me, was just this really rich conversation—it was a real breakthrough for us. We really wrestled with issues and came together as a group. It was supposed to take an hour or two and it took us across two days. But we needed those two days, and that conversation was an important one for the organization. It also became, for me, part of an ethnographic interviewing process: I was learning how my teammates viewed the problem, what they were frustrated with, what they thought the most common challenges to students were. And that’s where this new team kind of gelled—we became a leadership team.

  Here we can see how the design thinking process accomplished several of the goals that we talked about in parts 1 and 2. It helped the team continue to push their definition of the problem and to search for a scope for their efforts that would both encourage their creativity and allow them to work within the boundaries of the time and resources they had. At the same time, the discussion engaged the team, allowing each member to fully share their own perspectives and views. Most teams, when they stay with this kind of open-ended exploration of the problem space, eventually find themselves beginning to align, as the GCCA team did. If this alignment doesn’t occur, we suggest that the team may need to pursue a more experimental approach, moving to step 3 with several alternative framings of the problem.

  Step 3: Draft Your Design Brief

  In our design thinking methodology, the design brief is a short write-up that clarifies the project’s intent, underlines the questions a team wants to explore and the stakeholders to explore them with, and postulates what success might look like (though not yet how to get there). Like virtually everything else in design thinking, the design brief is actually a work in progress, and it can—and likely will—change as you work through the creative process and your understanding of the issue evolves. Indeed, you might consider the design brief a tool for managing risk throughout that evolution, because it prevents you from veering off on interesting tangents. As teams map unfamiliar terrain, re-framing problems into possibilities and imagining alternative futures, checking in with the design brief keeps the team headed in the right direction, focusing on the desired outcomes and how to get there.

  Just because—or especially because—you are working in the uncertain environment of Innovation II, your management of the project needn’t be similarly chaotic. Just the opposite, in fact. Many key elements of the design process are uncontrollable, so it is all the more important to drive ambiguity out of the management of those elements. Literally, the design brief gets everyone on the same page, ensuring clarity, control, and transparency in the management of the project. The design brief, in short, is the North Star of the project, providing a constant answer to the question “Where are we headed?” It should be brief yet complete and should be revisited at every key milestone during any design thinking project.

  HOW MUCH DEBATE IS ENOUGH?

  One of the judgment calls in design thinking is when to allow debate and when to put it aside. An important goal early in the process is to surface the diversity of team members’ perspectives on the problem. This will naturally encourage a certain level of debate among competing definitions of the problem, which is good.

  What we want to avoid at this point is debates about different solutions. Debates about the definition of the problem tend to broaden the discussion and open up new perspectives. Debates about solutions, on the other hand, tend to narrow the discussion. In addition, we want to encourage listening to understand each other’s perspective rather than to demonstrate the superiority of our own position.

  Still, at some point, the team will need to move on. If debates remain unresolved and alignment isn’t happening, we suggest moving to the next step: trying to design a plan that will allow you to gather data to explore the different areas of opportunity. In the design thinking process, we want to avoid getting stuck in nonproductiv
e debates. Move on, learn more, and then revisit.

  After the extensive conversations in step 2 around the scope of the project, Joan found it easy to draft a design brief, and she circulated it to the team the next day.

  Design Brief

  Project Description Despite current practice, students still have trouble understanding and overcoming barriers. Our hypothesis is that we can reduce attrition and promote success through our recruitment process—in an open access enrollment context?

  Preliminary research indicates that attendance and academic habits (productivity) limit success.

  Can we do something in the recruitment process to address these two barriers to success?

  Scope Initial focus on the incoming class of 2014 Focus on what action can be taken in the recruitment phase (prior to 1 week boot camp) to prepare students to attend, engage and complete assignments

  Constraints Open access mandated Counselors are on 11 month contracts

  Faculty are on 10 month contracts

  Target Users Learners GCCA Counselors

  Parents

  Exploration Questions Explore the human dimensions of our recruitment-acceptance-enrollment process. What are the primary drivers of attrition in the first 30 days?

  What barriers to attendance and completing assignments limit student progress?

  What barriers to attendance & homework completion can be addressed between the lottery date and Day 1?

  Expected Outcomes Lower attrition rates Improved academic success

  Success Metrics Pipeline metrics, TBD At 30 day point, end of term, start of second term

  Step 3: The design brief template.

  Step 4: Make Your Plans

  Design brief in hand, it is now time to plan your assault on the details of information gathering. You’ll want to consider three primary aspects of planning: a people plan, a research plan, and a project plan.

  Though we have called the design brief the North Star of the process, the people and research plans may be even more critical at this stage than the design brief itself. You can always alter aspects of your design brief quickly at your keyboard, but it takes time and resources to go back and locate new stakeholders to interview or observe at a later stage in the process, if you missed them in the first round. So think carefully about these elements. When you’re making the people plan, consider everyone whose cooperation you need in some form—customers, colleagues, partners, frontline workers, administrators, and anyone whose input might help you discover new insights around your area of opportunity or problem. Their comments will give you the input you need to create the research plan and to begin to consider what tools you’ll use in your project plan.

  On June 12, the GCCA team met and drafted their project, people, and research plans. In their people plan, they identified five key stakeholder groups, each with its own point of view, who had substantial influence on the process:

  • New students, who faced significant hardships and who, the team hypothesized, might not fully understand the commitment needed to succeed and might not trust educators. They were likely anxious about entering the program, fitting in, and performing academically.

  • The parents of students, who the team thought probably shared students’ concerns

  • GCCA counselors, who were generally caring and supportive, but overworked and frustrated at the lack of commitment from some students

  • GCCA faculty—again caring and committed—who believed that students must learn to be accountable and were disheartened when students failed to keep up

  • Community college faculty, who shared the characteristics and views of GCCA faculty generally but who also believed that everyone should be treated as a college student, receiving no special treatment

  Step 4: The people plan.

  The team thought about the new behaviors that might be required of each stakeholder for eventual project success, what they needed to learn about each group, and how to build empathy with each.

  As team members prepared their research plan, they first focused on already available secondary data and the existing literature. They considered how to find and connect with critical stakeholders in a more human-centered, less statistical approach. They knew that individual stories about actual students and their needs, and even people’s offhand comments or actions, often revealed unarticulated needs and desires. They had an almost overwhelming amount of secondary data to work with: various reports from the Gateway to College National Network and substantial literature on achievement gaps. But they were looking for insight on a deeply human scale.

  As they created their ethnographic plan for primary data gathering, they were forced to make compromises on some of their ideals. Because it was summer, for example, they had little chance to speak with GCCA faculty and counselors. Fortunately, several team members had counseling backgrounds. As they planned interviews with students, they also reluctantly gave up the idea of doing one-on-one interviews or interviewing students who had exited the program, because of timing issues and regulatory constraints. Joan regretted this loss:

  I really wish we were able to do the one-on-one ethnographic interviews with the students, particularly those that we lose. We don’t know what’s driving them leaving school—attendance is just kind of the bucket we put them in because we don’t get to know them well enough. Maybe it’s the family, or a transportation issue? Not being able to get in and really do the ethnographic interviews is a reality, but it’s frustrating.

  Despite these compromises, the team believed that they could learn a lot by meeting with existing students in groups, and they decided to schedule the meetings as “pizza lunches” to encourage attendance.

  WHEN IS GREAT THE ENEMY OF GOOD?

  As the GCCA team’s experience reflects, the design of research almost always involves compromise. We frequently see people hesitating to do any ethnographic research because they can’t do perfect ethnographic research. Think back to Eli MacLaren’s advice in the Children’s Health System story: just get out there and talk to somebody. Any conversation is a move toward goodness.

  Step 4: The research plan.

  The project plan can be the most challenging to devise, because it asks you to consider which tools from the design thinking tool kit to customize for your own journey through the four questions. Throughout the stories in part 2, we saw many of these tools in use; among the core tools are ethnographic interviews, jobs-to-be-done analysis, journey mapping, direct observation, and personas. The GCCA team decided to emphasize a combination of ethnographic interviewing and journey mapping. Though they loved the idea of creating personas, they felt it was important to keep their first pass at the method simple and decided to save this additional step for later.

  Now the team was ready to move into action and explore What is?

  What is? Overview

  The first four steps in our design thinking methodology have aimed at ensuring that would-be design thinkers engage in the process with an appropriate challenge to tackle (step 1), an understanding of the many levels and facets of that challenge (step 2), an aligned view of the project’s targeted stakeholders and what success might look like (step 3), and a set of thoughtfully completed planning documents to guide them (step 4). Having completed these steps, the GCCA team was ready to spend time in the What is stage, exploring their challenge in depth without trying to generate solutions. Innovative solutions, they believed, would arise from deep insights into the lives of the students they wanted to support. They were not yet looking for answers; they were looking for insight into the students’ current reality.

  Step 5: Do Your Research

  Human-centered design is built on a foundation of empathy. Our goal is to develop a deep understanding of our stakeholders and their lives, to see them as real-life human beings. Without deep insights about the current reality of stakeholders, our imagination starves.

  From June 19 to June 26, the GCCA team conducted ethnographic research with representative fa
culty, counselors, and students. An extended pizza lunch with students was a big success. The open lunch was scheduled on a day when about thirty-five students were on campus for a guidance class or other reasons. Students were invited to the lunch and were told a bit about the project. Almost all students who were invited came, and candor was not a problem. They came in small groups and kept coming over the course of the two-hour lunch. The session started with a group of eight students and grew as more students joined. Some students stayed the whole time. Shelagh, an experienced facilitator and ethnographic interviewer, expertly brought out their experiences. She led the conversations, and Joan took careful notes.

  They also decided to give students the option of creating a storyboard. Most chose to just talk, but in one session a young man sat very quietly in the front, drawing. By the end of the session, his storyboard told his personal tale. The storyboard described his insecurity about school and his doubts about his capabilities. He’d missed the first day of class when he started at GCCA, and the teacher called to see why he wasn’t there, prompting him to come the second day. When his first English and math assignments were returned, and he saw that he had done well, he had an epiphany: “I’m worthy. I can do it.”