Design Thinking for the Greater Good

by Jeanne Liedtka

  These challenges felt like a serious setback to some members of the team. Miguel experienced this period as one of his worst moments in the design process, thinking to himself that, after all their work, they were going to have to start over. Robin felt the same way: “I remember the realization that we couldn’t replicate the fall. It was a real low for me.” Kathleen echoed their sentiment: “I felt low as we started to plan the second learning launch, because it became really apparent that we couldn’t just replicate the first one. And I remember feeling ‘Was it all for nothing?’”

  Yet the team persevered, adapted and invented ideas to deal with the new challenges and launched a successful spring term. “We launched, and I was back to feeling positive,” Kathleen noted. Miguel experienced the same effect:

  Once we launched in January, I felt positive again. And now, having gone through it once more and doing the third learning launch, it feels so much easier. Yeah, we will tweak things, but we know that we have a goal that we want to accomplish and I think it’s kind of baked into our process now. Now it’s “We need to get together and figure out welcome week.” It’s just a whole different feeling.

  One remaining important goal was to better understand differences among students. To do this, Joan turned to the persona tool:

  We know we have many different types of students, many different needs, many different backgrounds. That’s our next phase for the recruitment project. When you bring our students into the room, the diversity of reasons that they’re behind, and their needs, are just incredible. We have students that are just incredibly shy and they are bullied. We have students that were engaged in problem behavior and now they’re getting back on track. Throughout our whole process, not only recruitment but student-support services messaging, the speakers that they bring in, or the extracurriculars that they do, it will be influenced by understanding the various personas that are represented in our student body. I think that would be a huge cultural shift for us to move to that level.

  To accomplish this, a new group, separate from the original GCCA design team, was set up, with Joan again acting as chair. Robin also joined the new team. The new team first went back to the online learning world to view the segments on Darden’s advanced discovery tools. They also used the instructional materials for the tools included in The Designing for Growth Field Book. They then reviewed the original ethnographic data gathered the previous summer, along with other relevant GCCA reports. The group wanted to move quickly to experiment with the persona tool, listing dimensions of potential difference among the students that they thought might be useful.

  Two personas emerged quickly: Family Ties Miguel and Artist in Residence Robin. Others followed as the team continued to reflect on the students’ motivating, and sometimes competing, interests and commitments. Eventually, the team developed seven personas, on the basis of their observations of behaviors. Team members then asked and answered a question about the jobs to be done: What did each want the GCCA experience to help them do? The group also discussed the journey of each persona to and through GCCA.

  Example of a student persona developed by the team.

  When the group sensed that they had identified a comprehensive set of personas, they sought feedback from other key stakeholders. All responded that the personas seemed to mirror what they had seen and helped them to better understand the students. Joan explained:

  We learned a great deal from the deep dive into our ethnographic research. We believe it revealed real differences within our learner population. We have years of survey and student data. Though extremely valuable, our summary statistics do not bring home our learners’ needs, goals, or jobs to be done as well as have the personas. They talk to us and, clearly, are more than the sum of their barriers, needs, or goals. They give new meaning to our collective commitment to be learner centered.

  GCCA made significant changes as a result of this new work. They removed “at-risk” from the school’s mission statement, feeling that it not only adversely labeled their students but also mislabeled them, for reasons Joan explained:

  We now understand that “at-risk” doesn’t meaningfully apply. The seven personas represent learners seeking programs and services to accomplish education and career goals. At the same time, they seek assistance in managing and completing jobs to be done that may limit access or engagement within traditional educational contexts. We are chartered to help them connect to resources, navigate their journeys, and succeed.

  Step 15: Design the On-Ramp

  The final step in the process, designing the on-ramp, often constitutes its own mini design project. Having worked to create a value-enhancing idea, we are now no longer recruiting users to help test concepts but are creating mechanisms for would-be clients to find us. Getting the idea in front of a large group of potential prospects is the ultimate goal of designing the on-ramp. Of course, if the team members have done good stakeholder assessment throughout the earlier steps, they have laid the groundwork, and, in the case of a small, focused target group like GCCA’s, awareness and understanding of the new concept may already exist. In this step, innovators seek a strategy to make users aware of how the new concept meets their needs, to convince them to try it out and, hopefully, to have them become advocates for it with others just like themselves.

  Ironically, today, when seemingly everyone has access to so much information, when communication channels are everywhere, bringing a new idea to the world may be harder than ever. The clutter of ideas is so immense that, like shampoo shoppers in a grocery store aisle, even many who want to test a new concept can get overwhelmed by the number of possibilities and therefore return to their old, “safe” solutions. Solving the on-ramp issue, in effect, is a new design challenge. It often requires as much creativity as the creation of the concept itself.

  For the GCCA team, which had spent two semesters learning how to best serve the school’s incoming students—and with a commitment to continued learning—step 15 was not critical. They had already ramped up the services in real life. Most projects, however, serve larger client bases than students in a single community and therefore need to develop a plan for taking their now fully developed idea into the real world.

  Reflections on the Process

  Looking back over what the GCCA team had learned on their design thinking journey, Joan offered some reflections on the benefits of the process for the team. She first focused on the benefits of the structure it provided and its emphasis on the end user:

  The design thinking framework helped us tremendously. It gave us a process and a framework that was systematic. I think there’s always a tendency to run off and solve the problem before thinking about it. As we started the project, it was really in recognition that, by default, not by intent, the school had moved towards an attitude of “Let’s just bring them in and try to hang on to whoever we bring in,” with an almost fill-the-seats mentality. And we wanted to wrestle some of that back. We are a group of people who are totally focused on the learner, but as we were doing our day-to-day, almost bureaucratic enrollment stuff, it was being lost. So design thinking really helped us refocus on the learners that we were engaging and ask the questions of what value we are providing even at that very beginning stage.

  A second benefit, in her view, was the power of small bets and quick experiments:

  The team recognized that they didn’t have to do lengthy studies to figure out what to do, that the value was in learning what we could as we were working. We didn’t want to go live necessarily as quickly as we did, but students were coming. We might as well, we thought. If we keep doing what we were doing in the past, we’re going to lose them anyway. And we weren’t causing any major ripples in anybody’s world by just focusing on our students.

  Finally, Joan noted design thinking’s impact on the leadership team itself:

  The design experience gives management a common vocabulary to communicate with employees and team members. The language of the new leadership team ha
s changed. They talk about resetting their lens. It’s a reset in recognition that even though this group of educators is really learner centered anyway, there are times you have to ask, “Hey, wait a minute, have we lost that learner lens?” It is focusing on the learner and what learners need. And then there’s also the back and forth between the tools and the process steps. The process provides a framework to follow as we work through various problems.

  And, as Miguel reflected on the process, he saw it evolve:

  Maybe we jumped in a little quickly as we felt that time crunch. It was fast, and maybe we didn’t do the process as thoroughly as we could have, but the things that came out of it were really good. I think the second time around we learned and we got different people involved, invited more voices from the staff. That was a really good learning experience, and I think that’s going to show as we see the ownership of the process start to transition. I’m hoping to see the evidence of this positive experience bleeding over into other problems, other problem-solving efforts.

  Shelagh Camak, the senior administrator who had requested the work, reported the team’s reflection on its project journey and later iterations: “We are in a really good exciting place. It is a good tactic for all of us to really learn the process and understand it much, much better …We are all learning it together.”

  Joan shared some final thoughts:

  GCCA has grown beyond a replication site. Our horizon has shifted from realizing an effective Gateway to College option for the communities served by Riverside City College to embracing GCCA’s potential as a “skunkworks” organization. With the knowledge and expertise gained from over twelve years of experience, GCCA seeks to design innovative solutions for the learners it enrolls. Its understanding and empathy for these learners, as well as its commitment to action research, including design thinking, will enable GCCA to pursue a trajectory that works for students and informs its college and community partners as each seeks to meet the needs of our students.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Building Organizational Capabilities

  We began this book by noting how a cucumber might derail social sector innovation efforts, even those we need the most. As we conclude, there seems little doubt that bringing creativity to any organization is difficult, but especially so in the social sector. Even Steve Jobs might have been stymied by cucumber problems if he’d started out buried in a governmental bureaucracy or had to overcome inertia in a hospital or school system. No one knows, or perhaps can even anticipate, what will stall the innovation process when there are vocal and diverse stakeholders, competing definitions of the problem, entrenched politics, and risk aversion at play—or even simply a Washington Post reporter adding color to an article.

  Design thinking works to identify and address these issues as it emphasizes understanding all key stakeholders’ deepest motivations and iterating through potential solutions to satisfy them. But moving solutions into action is rarely easy. No one can force a manager to expend resources or compel an organizational board desperate for dollars to fund a new idea. Since no one can identify every barrier to building a new future, the process we’ve outlined aims at understanding this reality and anticipating and addressing possible issues. We hope that you don’t face your own cucumber problem, but probably you will—and we hope that our stories help you, like the Lab@OPM, to succeed in spite of them.

  In part 1 of this book, we expressed our belief that design thinking helps deal with these realities by catalyzing conversations for change across difference. In part 2, we looked in depth at a variety of organizations using design thinking to address challenges to the greater good. In part 3, we explored one suggested process for structuring these conversations. In this last chapter, we first examine the big-picture takeaways from our design stories and then look at how organizations can better support these efforts.

  In chapter 1, we made a promise: that design thinking could help innovators convene conversations that truly engage diverse stakeholders to build higher-order solutions collaboratively—because of their differences as well as despite them. This chapter looks at how the practices and outcomes in our stories come together to achieve this. We conclude by suggesting some actions at the personal level that will foster your ability to make an impact.

  How Does Design Thinking Help?

  As we look back at the big picture of design thinking’s contributions, we see it accelerating innovation efforts in a variety of ways. Let’s look at each in turn:

  Producing More Creative Ideas

  How has design thinking helped our innovators improve the creativity of their ultimate solutions? First, design thinking encouraged enhanced creativity by keeping teams in the question long enough to reframe the boundaries of their challenges. Staying with What is before asking What if? encouraged Children’s Health System of Texas to take a deeper dive into the lives of patients and families, leading to the realization that a larger focus on community-centered wellness (rather than building local clinics) held the key to reducing inappropriate emergency room usage. It also triggered a reexamination of the assumptions behind their medical care model—assumptions that turned out to be erroneous. Living in the problem space helped the US Transportation Security Administration recognize that they needed to ensure that innocent travelers remained calm in order to make malevolent intent more visible and to improve security. For the Texas Coastal Bend group, working with the Community Transportation Association of America led them to a new question: Could they transport future trainees instead of workers?

  Second, design thinking enhanced creativity by using data from stakeholder ethnography to formulate design criteria that guided idea generation. Deep immersion in stakeholders’ worlds, rather than imposing experts’ views, led to crucial insights. When the doctors at Monash Medical Centre did the difficult work of uncovering Tom’s actual treatment experience in outpatient psychiatric care and looked at it from his perspective, it changed the nature of the solutions they sought. What was missing, the clinicians realized, was a sense of care for Tom’s long-term problems, and this need became the prime criteria for designing the new future that became Monash’s Agile clinics. At the Whiteriver Indian Hospital, Marliza Rivera stepped away from her own comfort with technology (and what cognitive scientists would call an “egocentric empathy” bias) to acknowledge that her beloved kiosk idea, inspired by urban Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital, was unlikely to be workable for those she served—primarily tribal elders intimidated by technology. Since an electronic kiosk might make the situation worse for her primarily elderly clients, her story illustrates the downside of focusing solely on a “best practice” approach to innovation.

  Third, design thinking, through its emphasis on broad stakeholder engagement and co-creation, tapped into diverse perspectives to find higher-order solutions, first by assembling a diverse team and then by providing a conversational framework to help team members leverage their differences. CTAA insisted on diverse teams at each location, sensing that these varied individuals, many of whom had never met, would educate each other in ways that would produce higher-order, more systemic solutions and might form bonds that would equip them to work together on future problems, not just the present ones. Design-led conversations at the US Food and Drug Administration encouraged diverse stakeholders to come together to pursue important outcomes, like emergency preparedness, from a more systemic perspective. This collaboration, in turn, allowed them to surface and address root causes of the lack of preparedness. In that process, even the FDA itself discovered that regulation, its raison d’être, was not always the best solution. During these conversations across difference, design thinking avoids reaching for early, often mediocre compromises, seeking instead solutions that resolve unwanted trade-offs.

  Reducing Risk

  How does design thinking help innovators reduce the risk of undertaking innovation? Here again, design thinking’s contributions are multipronged. First, it allows the formulation of better ideas
for the reasons stated above: it encourages deeper exploration of the problem space, and it promotes user-driven ideation that leverages team diversity to identify higher-order solutions and keeps idea creation based in the reality of user needs. Starting off with better ingoing ideas goes a long way toward reducing the risk of failure. In fighting our own tendency to project our worldview onto those we are designing for, design’s ethnography tools help us find solutions that users find acceptable.

  Then, the testing process during What wows and What works adds an additional dimension that minimizes risk. Given the uncertainty of the innovation environment, no matter how good our exploratory work is, we can expect to be wrong. Despite our efforts to better understand stakeholders’ jobs to be done and their experiential journeys, some of our solutions will still miss the mark. Successful venture capitalists expect the businesses they back to fail far more frequently than they succeed. Thus, for them, knowing when to stop investing can be as critical a skill as knowing when to start. The same is true for innovators. Consequently, helping to improve hypothesis-testing skills is critical. Here, design thinking tools minimize common decision-making errors.

  For more than fifty years, cognitive scientists have explored a set of well-recognized flaws in decision makers’ hypothesis-testing abilities. These flaws include overoptimism (the planning fallacy), inability to see disconfirming data (hypothesis confirmation bias), attachment to early solutions (endowment effect), and a preference for the easily imagined (availability bias). Design thinking’s hypothesis-driven approach mitigates the impact of these biases by stipulating that innovators develop multiple concepts, create prototypes, surface unarticulated assumptions, and actively seek disconfirming data.