What Is in the Way?
It is easy for us to say that “everybody designs,” but we know from our research that the reality of successfully democratizing design will be harder than it sounds. A series of things must happen for it to work.
First, we have to successfully engage a broader, more diverse set of stakeholders in the innovation conversation. A wealth of academic research testifies that difference provides the fuel for innovation. In interacting with and learning from people who are different from ourselves, we come to see new possibilities. But the same difference that fuels innovation also breeds conflict and mistrust. Tapping into the potential contribution that diversity represents can be especially difficult in the social sector, where differences can run deep and come with embedded values attached. Difference can quickly feel personal and threatening.
We have all been in conversations that made a situation worse instead of better because people with strong opinions disagreed. How do we ensure that our conversations don’t descend into arguments that push us farther apart instead of closer together in agreeing on solutions to critical problems? Even more elemental, how do we decide who to invite into the conversation in the first place? The answer is not “Everybody” for all issues—it is the right set of people for that particular issue. Even when we succeed in identifying the appropriate stakeholders, how do we encourage them to join the conversation? What if they have difficulty participating or communicating their needs—if they are disabled, poor, or sick, for instance? Or what if they are reluctant or fearful to join in? In part 2, we’ll look at the variety of ways social sector organizations are successfully addressing these questions.
Then, assuming we can get the right parties into the conversation, how do we keep their different worldviews from paralyzing progress? How do we help people escape the prison of their own perspective? As we think about generating solutions, how do we avoid focusing on the wrong problems or issues? How do we see together what none of us see separately? With so many options, how do we drill down to what really matters? Increasingly the big challenges we face in the social sector happen at the systems level. How do we get the parts of the system to talk to each other? How do we avoid a “build it and they will come” mentality?
As we move from designing to implementing, we face another intimidating set of challenges. What if the people we need to impact are afraid of change? Or what if we lack the organizational capabilities to successfully implement the new idea in practice?
All of these challenges to doing work that achieves a greater good—engaging a broader group of voices, achieving alignment and consensus, finding workable solutions that people will actually adopt—must be surmounted to make a reality of the idea that we are all innovators at heart.
That’s why we wrote this book.
Our path into the world of design thinking came entirely through the for-profit world. For almost a decade now, we have been studying design thinking as a methodology for improving business innovation and growth, examining its successful use in global corporations like IBM, Toyota, and 3M. Then we noticed that the most inspiring stories of all were coming from the social sector—from government, health care, education, charitable foundations, and the like. We realized that the fundamental reason design thinking worked so well in business—the ability to create better value for customers served—was even more urgently needed in the social sector. There, the problems were bigger and messier—and solving them mattered even more. We became fascinated by the ability of design to make the world a better, not just more profitable, place. As researchers and teachers, we wanted to know more details. Exactly what did these efforts look like in practice? Where and why were they working—or why not? What could we learn from them?
Our intention was to identify organizations outside the traditional, for-profit business sector—in areas such as health care, education, the arts, the environment, government policy, transportation, and social services—using design thinking approaches and methods to improve the quality of what they delivered, utilize their resources more efficiently, and create enhanced experiences for those they served. We wanted to codify and disseminate the kinds of opportunities they were pursuing and the kinds of practices they used in ways that would benefit other organizations and their leaders. As part of this exploration, we wanted to convene a conversation in which those involved in bringing the design thinking approach to the social sector could find a forum to share challenges and opportunities and to support and coach each other.
We had already seen evidence of the increasing interest in design thinking on the part of social sector organizations. Many participants in Darden’s massive open online course, on the Coursera platform, came from outside of traditional business and wanted not-for-profit examples of success. Design thinking consultancies such as IDEO and LUMA Institute were placing increasing focus on the sector, and even traditional strategy consulting boutiques like McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group were expanding their public sector offerings. IDEO offered an online course on human-centered design for social innovation, and various governments and nonprofits were opening innovation labs. Governments in Denmark, New Zealand, and Singapore were leading the way.
Much of the excitement around this topic within universities is being led by a new generation of students with heightened interest in social innovation. Even at traditional business schools like Darden, student interest in innovation in general is growing, and interest in social innovation and entrepreneurship is exploding. At one end of the demographic, young social entrepreneurs, like Blake Mycoskie of TOMS Shoes, create businesses that aim at doing good and making money simultaneously; at the other end, a growing number of highly successful individuals, like Bill Gates and Steve Case, want to leave a legacy, realizing that, without change, their children and grandchildren face ever worsening problems. All are looking for concrete examples of innovations that work in the social sector, stories that go beyond hype and accurately capture the learning process in action and the complexity and challenges inherent in these environments.
DESIGN THINKING IN NEW ZEALAND
How does design thinking help a government when what it is doing is working and also not working?
That’s the case in New Zealand, where, in one example, the Ministry of Transportation is living with the aftermath of its very successful stiffening of driver’s licensing examinations in 2003. Aiming to reduce one of the world’s highest mortality rates among teenage drivers, they created a graduated driver’s licensing system that is credited with significant increases in safety, decreasing the death rate of teenagers in automobile accidents by an impressive 66 percent.
But the law of unintended consequences has shown up with a vengeance.
The new system requires a series of tests, 120 hours of practice, and an almost two-year-long process to officially learn to drive, which is causing more lower-income, rural, and Maori and Asian youths to not even try to get a license and, instead, to drive without legal sanction.
And not getting a license, it turns out, is a kind of “gateway drug” for creating future personal and societal problems. A simple ticket for rolling a stop sign becomes driving without a license and carries a stiff fine; failure to pay these fines compounds the problem. In some marginalized communities, like the suburbs of South Auckland, only one in six drivers under the age of twenty-four has a license. Since about seven in ten jobs in New Zealand require a driver’s license for identification and security, the failure of Kiwi youths to obtain licenses has repercussions throughout New Zealand’s social, economic, and political realities. New Zealand, it seems, must choose its poison: road safety and youth alienation or high mortality rates.
Enter design thinking, and a commitment by the New Zealand government to a new, more human-centered mission: “making smart choices easier.” This government-wide initiative focuses on first understanding what motivates citizens to follow or not to follow any particular regulation, and then on helping these people to make be
tter choices in future actions. Figuring out the “why” causes each agency to seek out the unarticulated needs, desires, and problems of those they serve and has led to changes in regulations and, in almost all cases, to better compliance with laws.
In the case of the graduated license, it involved using design thinking to understand, and to iterate toward, ways that maximize the safety benefit of the driver’s licensing program, without inhibiting the ability to get a license. This work has spawned new initiatives, like the Community Mentoring program, in which the government partners with local organizations like the Salvation Army in Christchurch, a sporting trust in Auckland, and the mayor’s office in Gisborne. The program identifies and addresses the prime practical issues holding back youths at the local level by providing community volunteers to act as driving partners, with cars provided by corporate partner Hyundai and fuel by Chevron.
Reports from the mentoring program indicate that 95 percent of mentored youths pass the licensing tests on their first try (almost double the national rate among middle- to upper-income kids), but the benefits go far beyond that. In Gisborne, Community Mentoring is under the auspices of the mayor, and police are given hours on the clock to sit in the passenger’s seat while at-risk teenagers learn behind the wheel. This program is producing unanticipated benefits, shifting the dynamic between law enforcement and at-risk youths from negative toward positive. Hours together in the front seat have led to deepening relationships and to mentors’ attendance at high school soccer and rugby games, addressing issues created by low-income kids’ traditional first—and almost always negative—interaction with police, as part of a traffic stop or arrest.
It turns out that the law of unintended consequences sometimes has an upside.
So we reached out and asked people to tell us their stories—and did they ever! We were astonished at the scope and diversity of the efforts in progress all over the world.
We saw people tackling problems both large and small. In Peru, a country with one of the lowest blood donation rates in Latin America, a group of MBA students worked with the Red Cross to figure out why and what to do about it. In Cape Town, South Africa, city managers teamed with designers to address the challenges of refugee camps. In Istanbul, Turkey, a young manager who worked in vendor invoice processing for the city—inspired by a college class she was taking and a professor who encouraged his students to be agents of change—tackled bureaucracy and inertia to improve the process. And those are just a few of the stories that didn’t make it into this book!
Catalyzing a Conversation for Change across Difference
One discovery we made as we listened to these stories was the way in which design thinking was creating improved outcomes by providing the tools and process to foster a better conversation across difference. Sometimes those differences were within organizations themselves—across functional silos or different levels. Other times they were across different types of organizations, like government regulators and businesses, or were about differing stakeholder needs and trade-offs. They often turned out to be about local versus global, and even sometimes about science versus traditional values.
Design thinking’s greatest gift, we came away believing, was to provide a social technology that channeled conversations into more productive arenas and provided guardrails that made it feel safe for the individuals involved to talk about and work across their differences. It helped them find higher-order solutions that were better than what anyone brought into the room in the first place, solutions that made a difference in their stakeholders’ lives.
In part 2 of this book, we will look at a collection of stories that examine in depth how design thinking accomplishes this and addresses exactly those challenges to the greater good that we described earlier: engaging a broader group of voices, achieving alignment and consensus, and finding workable solutions that people will actually adopt.
At the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Ignite Accelerator program is democratizing innovation by inviting frontline employees throughout the country to tackle opportunities for innovation that they see in their own backyards, and building their creative confidence that they can succeed.
At the Kingwood Trust in the United Kingdom, we’ll find an organization that has succeeded in bringing new voices into the conversation by reworking traditional design tools to include in the innovation process the adults with autism they serve, along with their support staff.
The medical staff at Monash Medical Centre will show us how they have brought together clinicians from across specialties and helped them align their differing views to achieve consensus on changes both small (increasing hand washing) and large (redesigning their outpatient psychiatric clinic).
In Washington, DC, the US Food and Drug Administration will offer an example of how to use design thinking to turn adversarial debates into dialogues.
In Ireland, we will observe a community beset by economic problems and depopulation that is using design thinking tools to have a community-wide conversation about solutions, not just problems, aiming to strengthen the economy on the Ring of Kerry and provide opportunities for young people to stay.
At United Cerebral Palsy, we will drop in on a series of traveling innovation labs that aim to create a supply chain connecting entrepreneurs with engineers, people with cerebral palsy and their caregivers, and design students, to search for opportunities to improve the lives of people with a range of disabilities.
At the Community Transportation Association of America, we see the power of localized decision making that uses design thinking as a backbone to foster grassroots problem identification and solving to address the transportation difficulties faced by low-income workers.
In Mexico, indigent farmers and scientists come together to improve crop yields and income, using design thinking methods to both honor tradition and encourage adoption of advances in farming practice.
The Transportation Security Administration demonstrates how technology can make us more human and, in the most risk-averse of circumstances, advance innovation and trust.
Finally, Children’s Health System of Texas takes a deep look at the challenges of achieving population health and wellness in Dallas and teaches us how to enlist uncommon partners to assess and build the capabilities to meet the needs that design thinking has surfaced.
In part 3, we focus on what it takes to make design thinking a reality in organizations today. In this part, we take a deep dive into our own methodology, which focuses on asking four simple but critical questions as we enter the innovation space: What is?, What if?, What wows?, and What works? We illustrate the process in step-by-step detail by accompanying a group of educators at Gateway College and Career Academy in Riverside, California, as they use design thinking to reduce the dropout rate of at-risk teenagers.
We conclude the book with a look at how organizations can work to foster and spread the capacity for innovation beyond individual projects and teams. Though our research focus was to dig deeply into the actual approaches and experiences of social sector innovators—to be able to talk in detail about the specifics of how and why they incorporated design thinking into their work, the challenges they faced, and the successes (and sometimes failures) they experienced—we also, along the way, gained some insights into a higher-level how: how the organizations they worked within were facilitating—or stymieing—their efforts. We saw no one-size-fits-all approach being followed as they reached toward Innovation II mindsets and behaviors. Each organization seemed to follow its own path. This diversity of roadmaps is itself consistent with design thinking—responding to the particular personalities, preferences, and needs of its leadership and the nature of the challenges they face. And though we don’t advocate any “right” path or model, some general insights did emerge around the value of creating an organizational infrastructure for team formation, capability development and coaching, access to stakeholders, and resources for experimentation. We will see evidence of these in our
stories in part 2.
Another higher-level observation emerged about the direction from which these changes emanated. In most of our stories, innovation activities do have a single starting point, but they do not align with the normal juxtaposition of “top down” versus “bottom up.” Instead, they underline the important role each person can play in the reality of diffusing a design thinking capability throughout an organization. We observe small experiments at the front line, unleashing employee resourcefulness, while additions to organizational structure such as innovation labs and tournaments illustrate management’s commitment and provide cover and resources for grassroots efforts by employees interested in trying something new.
We see the combination of a loosely linked, almost viral movement by frontline and middle management innovation champions, supported by training and programmatic resources provided by senior leadership, as a highly effective approach. The government of New Zealand offers a case in point. Strong senior leadership there created infrastructural supports, like laying out a common set of national ambitions that required out-of-the-box thinking and enhanced collaboration across agency partners, partnering with innovation consultancies like ThinkPlace, and creating the Auckland Co-Design Lab. But the heart of the frontline progress in areas like driver’s licensing was driven at the local level. Arianne Miller, managing director of the Lab@OPM today, captured this interplay between top-down and grassroots movements when she reflected on the importance, but also the limitations, of top-down management:
It’s like a garden: somebody has to plant it—prepare the ground and scatter the seeds. But if you only look at what happens aboveground, you miss the point. The health of a garden is about the strength of the root system. Sure, you can stick a vase of beautifully blooming flowers in the ground and it looks great for a while, and then you wonder why it dies.
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