Design Thinking for the Greater Good

by Jeanne Liedtka

  Convinced of the value that design thinking could bring to their work, CTAA partnered with Peer Insight, a DC-based innovation consultancy that fuses design thinking with entrepreneurship principles. Together, they developed the Design Thinking for Mobility tool kit, and Peer Insight trained twelve CTAA staffers to facilitate use of the same four-question design thinking methodology that we have talked about in earlier chapters, with the goal of empowering local communities to seek their own solutions.

  Amy Conrick, Carolyn’s colleague at CTAA, commented on how deeply the value of community self-governance was embedded in their approach:

  From its beginnings, CTAA believed strongly in the power of self-help, giving communities the tools, support, and education needed to create local solutions. Through its decades of work, it also recognized that no outside organization could ever know a community’s characteristics, needs, and resources better than those living within the bounds of that community. An old saying in the transportation business that reflects the uniqueness of each town, city, and village is “If you’ve seen one community…you’ve seen one community.”

  In 2012, CTAA made a commitment to the design thinking process, with the aim of taking local teams beyond action planning into actual implementation of solutions. Carolyn worked with Amy to launch the Job Access Mobility Institute (JAMI), which used a design thinking process to lead discussion and programming to address the transportation issues faced by unemployed and underemployed people. The proposal listed the objectives for the institute:

  • bring together broad-based regional partners from the transportation, employment and training, economic development, and business sectors, and others, to solve a specific job access mobility challenge in their community;

  • catalyze innovative employment transportation service delivery solutions that respond to the transportation challenges of job seekers and low-income workers;

  • teach a user-centered design approach for creating or improving job access services; and

  • model a process that partners find both rewarding and compelling, in both the near and long term, to create solutions to other mobility challenges.

  Carolyn explained their rationale:

  Our whole goal was to get the teams to feel confident that they could think anew about ways to meet their communities’ needs. A lot of times, everyone is being told, “Here is the solution, and now you fit the people in it.” We wanted the process to develop through the variety of minds on each team seeking to understand the low-income experience. Our whole emphasis at CTAA is about being customer centered, and design thinking is a great process for that. We want to help people think based on what the customer needs and not so much what a funder requires. That’s easier said than done, because your funding is very important. But if you give the design process a chance and you price things right, somebody will buy it, whether it’s an agency, a foundation, or the end user. The inspiration is just to try to do things that are new and different and that better serve customers who have complex mobility needs.

  This emphasis on bringing together diverse community players was a long-standing value at CTAA, implemented long before design thinking arrived on the scene. Design thinking seemed well suited to the task. Concepts like journey mapping and jobs-to-be-done analysis, which are new to many fields, have long been in use (under different names) in the transportation field because of the nature of transportation itself. “Mobility is so connected to origin and destination and trip purpose,” Carolyn explained. “Nobody wants to just take the bus—why are they taking the trip?” The need for this kind of broader systems perspective was especially evident when the focus was on lower-income employment opportunities, with the biggest issues for low-income workers consistently being transportation and child care. “People’s lives cross systems, and you can’t create change alone,” Carolyn observed.

  In spring 2012, having obtained Federal Transit Administration funding, CTAA sent out a request for proposals, encouraging applicants to form diverse teams within their communities, with the aim of helping low-income workers and others with less mobility get to jobs. CTAA’s intention was to use the JAMI process to spur conversations among people representing different parts of the systems, who did not generally work together. Galvanizing these kinds of networks, they believed, created a long-term capability for local problem solving that had positive impacts on the community and that reached far beyond the specific area of opportunity in any current request for proposals.

  CTAA analyzed the submitted JAMI proposals and selected seven teams from different settings around the country—from urban New Jersey to sparsely populated Texas counties, and from trendy Marin County, California, to low-wage suburbs of Portland, Oregon. Teams were chosen on the basis of CTAA’s assessment of their commitment and readiness to bring a design approach to solving a job access mobility issue identified within their community.

  THE JOBS-TO-BE-DONE TOOL

  The jobs-to-be-done tool looks at why people do the things they do. What is the job that they want the solution to help them accomplish? Jobs can be functional—like getting to work on time, in the CTAA case. But often the most important jobs are emotional—reducing the anxiety that comes from being late for work, for instance. Paying attention to both the functional and the emotional aspects of the stakeholders’ needs is often critical to value creation.

  Team composition requirements for the Job Access Mobility Institute.

  TEAMS SELECTED

  • City of Tualatin, Oregon

  • Essex County, New Jersey

  • Kerr-Tar Workforce Development Board region, North Carolina (Caswell, Franklin, Granville, Person, Vance, and Warren counties)

  • Marin County, California

  • Mercer County, New Jersey

  • Northeast Iowa (Allamakee, Clayton, Fayette, Howard, and Winneshiek counties)

  • Texas Coastal Bend (Brooks and Jim Wells counties)

  The program they designed used a series of explanatory webinars, Skype meetings, and in-person visits to gather data and inform the What is stage of the research, followed by a summit that would bring all seven teams together to the DC area to envision What if. After the summit, teams would again meet online for additional webinars and, supported by CTAA facilitators, complete the What wows and What works stages.

  Timeline for the Job Access Mobility Institute project.

  To begin, teams developed their design briefs and began their exploratory research. The webinars helped the teams to scope their challenges in order to identify the specific opportunity they would explore and plan their research strategy. As they selected particular design tools to focus on, Carolyn urged groups to consider journey mapping:

  I find journey mapping one of the most powerful tools. When I do my training, I always show the journey map example of a low-wage mother with two children, trying to get to work. I make a point of conveying that it’s really great to improve an experience within a single touch point, but the impact will be greater [if you are able] to improve the whole journey! If you can just have someone take a free shuttle trip instead of a cab, that’s fantastic. But what if you worked across the whole journey and solved for the child care and other challenges at the same time? How could you really improve the experiences of residents in low-wage jobs?

  A mother’s journey map.

  As they went to work, the teams’ perspectives on problems became more complex. Amy, who also facilitated one of the teams, offered an example:

  My team was looking at improving options for non–car owners to travel to work. Their original challenge focused on getting more funding to expand employment transportation options. The economic development representative on the team noted that when employees lacked a way to get to work, it led to employees being late or absent, or sometimes even quitting, which impacted a business’s bottom line, yet few business leaders considered this as an issue of concern. Another member observed that many in the community thought that how “those
people” (that is, people without access to cars) got to work was not their problem.

  This discussion caused the team to reconsider their direction: before they pursued funding to expand employment transportation options, they needed to build awareness of and empathy for workers who didn’t own cars. They reframed their question to “How can we build community support for expanded employment transportation options?” As Amy described it, “They realized this was the question they had to address first if they ever wanted to be successful in answering their original question. And that refocusing led the team’s research in a totally different direction than originally planned.”

  The teams’ creativity often extended to how they accomplished their data gathering, not just the insights themselves. Marin County, California, for example, hired and trained homeless people to conduct interviews to learn more about the issues keeping the truly poor out of the workforce. They believed that these peer-to-peer conversations would yield more honest and accurate information than if their own staffers conducted them. (Marin County would bring their homeless part-timers back a year later to spread the word about their transportation project’s learning launch.)

  Learnings coming out of the What is stage varied across the seven teams. The team from the Texas Coastal Bend, for instance, discovered that the area’s existing transportation services, though admittedly meager, were almost unknown to the heavily rural Spanish-speaking population, many of whom were without vehicles and were experiencing some of the highest poverty levels in the state. Another important learning was that area schools and colleges were desperate to get their entry-level employees consistent access to work. They were unable to depend on weak transit operations that offered no evening or weekend service because of budget cuts. Hence, large numbers of the working poor struggled with almost two-hour commutes, often shared, in run-down vehicles. When that car needed repair—a fairly normal occurrence—business and school operations were impaired by employees’ inability to get to their jobs on a reliable schedule.

  In late November, teams convened in Washington, DC, for the 2.5-day Job Access Mobility Summit, for detailed work in the second phase, What if. All teams engaged in brainstorming ideas at the summit, sharing their ideas with other teams and CTAA advisors, in addition to prototyping two or three solution concepts. Being together cemented a strong esprit de corps across the seven teams. In several subsequent webinars over the next year, they would thank CTAA for forcing them into the “non-smoke-filled room,” as one team member joked.

  Returning to their own localities, teams were supported via webinars and virtual meetings with CTAA advisors. The teams further developed their ideas, sometimes reiterating several times, including revising their design briefs as well as their concepts. “Ideas are not eureka moments,” Carolyn explained. “They come from recombining old ideas and technology from the past. It’s about combining several ideas together, coming up with a solution platform.” Teams were then asked to surface assumptions, which she considered especially critical:

  When we teach, we’ll ask, “Why did you choose that idea? What’s behind it? What makes it a good idea?” That’s why we need to specify the design criteria—because then you can allow multiple ideas in and then see where they take you. Rather than landing on an early solution, we supported the teams in considering more than one solution.

  Prototyping, in order to test these assumptions, came next. Each team was offered $3,000 to develop materials to put before potential customers and stakeholders for feedback and input. Carolyn considered this step essential in reducing risk:

  The idea is to just go out and try something in a low-fidelity way before you launch it. This gives you the time to de-risk the solution and to improve on it so that people will want to use and support it. That is what we were trying to incentivize.

  Developing actionable ideas was a focus throughout the process. The way to succeed with funders, Carolyn and Amy believed, was not to design for them, prioritizing their perspectives and desires over the needs of users of the service. Instead, they wanted the teams to demonstrate to funders that ideas derived from a deep understanding of the transportation needs of low-income workers could succeed in practice and could accomplish the funders’ larger objectives. “Showing the funders the research they’ve done, what they have done to de-risk the program, is critical,” Carolyn believed. “From the very start, we talk in terms of desirability (people want and need your service), feasibility (they have the partners to stand it up), and viability (it is financially sustainable).”

  To help teams think in compelling ways about these three aspects of success, CTAA had developed a reporting system that used color coding for each. On a monthly basis, each team was asked to capture their thinking, using a “building blocks canvas,” a version of the Business Model Canvas (similar to the one used in the HHS Ignite program in chapter 3) that CTAA had adapted to their purpose.

  Ultimately, all seven teams came up with valuable ideas and described a new sense of teamwork and cooperation among their teammates, few of whom had known each other prior to the design thinking exercise. Two teams—New Jersey’s Mercer County and the Texas Coastal Bend—immediately found funding to support the scaling of their learning launches.

  Following the Dollar in Mercer County

  Mercer County knew its issue going in: most low-paying jobs were in two new industrial parks off I-95, without transit service available during shift-change times, but most low-income families lived in older urban neighborhoods nowhere near I-95. Most industrial park workers survived on irregular and often unreliable carpools, and workers who could get to transit faced $25 one-way “last mile” cab rides to and from work. The team’s early emphasis, however, was on how to educate employers about these transportation issues and how to communicate the availability of possible new services to potential employees accustomed to believing that jobs at the industrial parks were off-limits because of transportation issues. A survey of businesses in the industrial parks revealed higher turnover rates than desired, at least partially driven by transportation problems. Though most businesses had no idea how much individual turnover was costing, estimated expenses to train each new employee ranged from $11,000 to $15,000, according to two employers. Up to half of employees arrived in informal carpools, and the two largest employers had a 2:00 a.m. shift change, long before NJ Transit began running buses anywhere.

  Learning what both businesses and low-paid employees needed, through surveys and ethnographic interviews, allowed the team to devise four different concepts, one of which was a shuttle service from the nearest transit stop, Hamilton Square, to the industrial parks. When one employer, Amazon, offered to fund the shuttle, the team elected to focus on that concept during the What works phase. They pushed NJ Transit to commit to timely bus service in order to assemble employees at the shuttle’s origin point. That key assumption—that NJ Transit would alter its schedules and times to fit Amazon’s shift changes—wasn’t fully tested until NJ Transit joined the Mercer team and the first ZLine (as the new service was called) prototype shuttle rolled.

  THE MERCER COUNTY PROJECT

  Problem: Low-paying jobs in business parks along interstate highway are far from population centers and transit service.

  Concept: Begin a shuttle service, funded by Amazon and called ZLine, from a nearby transit hub to the business park, and alter the NJ Transit service to that hub.

  Learning launch: The ZLine shuttle opens in July 2014. Within six months, it carries 250 people each day, 40 percent of whom say the shuttle is crucial for their employment.

  Iteration: ZLine service is expanded to include a second vehicle. Transit timing is improved. More round-trips are offered.

  Next iteration: Getting other industrial park companies to be aware of and willing to help finance ZLine service.

  Only months into the learning launch of the new ZLine shuttle service, demand forced the operation of a second van. Today, the shuttle operates seven days a wee
k in the morning and evening hours, and NJ Transit ridership is up significantly. With the shuttle subsidized by Amazon, employees save a $20 to $25 daily cab ride from Hamilton Square and face fewer issues with unreliable informal carpools.

  CTAA’s insistence on team diversity proved crucial to Mercer’s success. Even though the Mercer team didn’t originally include a member from NJ Transit, the team, especially the chamber of commerce representative and the community college job training rep, bonded quickly. Midway through the process, the team was expanded to include NJ Transit and the state’s Business Action Center. The governor’s office eventually named the Mercer team the state lead for dealing with workforce transportation issues, and other communities now come to Mercer County for advice on transportation for low-income workers.

  Cheryl Kastrenakes, executive director of the Greater Mercer Transportation Management Association, was enthusiastic about design thinking, noting that her JAMI team could not have solved the issues without the “fun and collaboration” it brought. She offered:

  My main takeaway was starting with understanding the end user, even their mental state. You’re designing something for them, and that’s where you have to start. You’ve got to let go of the constraints, like money, and just throw “it” out there. It’s really hard to tell people in the public sector not to think about money, to just come up with the ideas and then “we’ll see.” Money is always the issue.