Design Thinking for the Greater Good

by Jeanne Liedtka

  Building on Traditional Systems with Modern Ways and Technology

  MasAgro is looking not only to increase food productivity and sustainability but also to increase the farm income for these small farmers. One example of efforts to increase farm income builds on the traditional, indigenous system of farming in Latin America, called milpa, which combines three staples in a field. Maize is grown along with bean plants that climb on the maize stalks and pumpkins on the ground. MasAgro introduced fruit trees to the traditional mix. Hunt shared:

  When you combine maize, beans and pumpkin, you get a pretty rich diet. What we’re doing is taking that very rich traditional system and respecting it, refining it, and improving the economic well-being of those still practicing it. We respect this system, we want to work with this system, farmers want to maintain their systems, but how can we leverage this system for a bigger benefit?

  The traditional crops feed the family, while the fruit trees add to the market opportunity, increasing the farming income, particularly for small farm holders. In Hunt’s view, this represents a historic opportunity:

  With NAFTA, the bigger farmers, with access to roads and credit, are turning to fruits and vegetables to serve the US and Canadian markets. This opens the opportunity to connect these residual, neglected, poor communities, not only to improve their technology but, more importantly, to link them to markets. That’s the bigger perspective. It’s an opportunity for the neglected to join the global economy. The opportunity is there, but that doesn’t mean that they can access it. And to access it is not only having access to the market; it’s having the right product of the right quality, et cetera. And that’s where we come in.

  As Carolina explained, this modification of the milpa system is an example of how the hubs allow for sharing and learning in both directions. The hubs also allow for successful local technologies, such as the milpa system itself, to be emphasized and scaled with help from MasAgro. In addition, Carolina explained that MasAgro offers continuity. Successful programs and projects that might have been lost with a change of government and policy are sustained through MasAgro’s ongoing presence and influence. “MasAgro provides an umbrella to these local innovations,” Carolina noted.

  Another example of building on tradition is the naming of the seed varieties. Although accurate noting of the date that seeds should be planted is an important agronomic technique, it can be hard for farmers to remember new dates for different varieties. MasAgro made an agreement with seed sellers to name seed varieties in the Oaxaca region after saints, to make it easy for farmers to remember to plant that type of seed on the saint’s day. Connecting to the area’s deep-rooted religious and cultural traditions changes what might otherwise be a challenge or a chore into a meaningful action. These small gestures demonstrate an understanding of local culture and a willingness to help farmers in a manner that is respectful and sensitive to the local community.

  Many of the thousands of farmers in the MasAgro program are also using technology to help them farm. Technology allows for data-driven farming and creates an opening for MasAgro’s certified technicians to work with farmers across Mexico. More than twenty thousand farmers are registered in standardized electronic logbooks, which help to track data and improve farming. In addition, farmers receive agronomic climate information via the MasAgro mobile phone service, which uses GPS tracking in the phone. For example, in 2014 MasAgro started offering GreenSat, a program that allows wheat farmers to fine-tune the optimum amount of nitrogen for their crops with the help of data from satellite images. Hunt described how it works:

  We have a whiz machine, a handheld device that looks like a big water gun, called the GreenSeeker, which zaps the ground and gets a reading of what the fertilizer needs of a particular patch of ground are. This replaces taking a soil sample to a lab. But GreenSeekers require tender love and care, cost several hundred dollars, and require expert use. You zap and get a reading (and test and test the accuracy of the reading and refine the GreenSeeker), and zap and zap, and soon you have quite a comprehensive georeferenced soil fertility map.

  A great innovation, but how to get the information to farmers? One of our scientific whiz kids, with the freedom to think and innovate and test, came up with an app. Any farmer can load the app on their cell phone, push it, and get a fertilizer recommendation for the patch of land the farmer is standing on.

  As with all programs, MasAgro’s intent is to closely monitor the results of this innovation and to adjust accordingly. As Hunt explained, “We continually test and ask and test and ask and test and ask, until we seem to be getting it right.”

  For example, MasAgro recently made a foray into social media. The original idea was to target policy makers and farm leaders to form a social network. After a few months, MasAgro noticed that the concept had virtually zero participation from the targeted groups. However, a rich network of extension staff was using the platform to exchange information. As a result, the social network changed direction, becoming a platform to share and exchange best farming practices. MasAgro experimented and learned.

  Partners in the Value Chain

  Beyond advising farmers, MasAgro looks at all factors in the agricultural journey, from seed selection and planting to the consumption of the final product, while also offering additional support for financial needs and market access. Through this holistic systems perspective, MasAgro endeavors to understand the needs of participants in the value chain, from those who crush the maize into flour to the restaurant chefs who use it to craft original menus.

  The MasAgro value chain.

  MasAgro researchers in the Socioeconomic Studies group consistently review the value chain to see what the market is purchasing, what channels are being used, how the product is used, and where farmers might gain opportunities to participate. With extensive research, they help farmers select the right seed for the right market. Furthermore, they help with access to markets: MasAgro may aid a farmer in choosing a crop variety that results in a higher market value, or farmers may be directed to a market that values the farmer’s existing crop and may pay more for it.

  For example, MasAgro will test maize with tortilla manufacturers to better understand the desired qualities of maize in a tortilla. Armed with this information, MasAgro technicians can guide farmers to select seeds that will offer the traits desired. One farmer, for example, switched from a low-value maize to a higher-value colored maize that is desired by tortilla makers for special-occasion tortillas. Another example, from Oaxaca, was a switch to a native maize that is preferred by high-end chefs serving elite restaurants in the United States. A switch to a different variety or a different market, or both, can result in a 25 percent increase in income, which can then transform lives, with broad-ranging effects. Hunt noted, “Very often, an increase in family income leads to an increased investment in schooling for the children, in particular for girls, who may not otherwise attend school.” This is one more example of the kind of positive yet unintended consequences we have seen in other stories.

  Not only are farmers earning more income by adopting better farming techniques; they also are better able to engage in postharvest activities that lead to increased income, such as constructing metal silos to protect their crops from insects and rodents. Silos not only allow farmers to protect the household and market food supplies but also offer flexibility in timing so that growers can sell their crops when pricing is favorable and thereby increase their income. In addition, the introduction of silos may support local small businesses. MasAgro offers a training program in which locals learn how to make silos to sell to other local farmers.

  Partnering to Learn and to Disseminate Information

  A network of partnerships, implemented over time, is critical to MasAgro’s success. Itself the result of a partnership, MasAgro partners with national, state, and local governments as well as with other international organizations and with local partners, which may be researchers, civic or church groups, farmers’ association
s, or universities. These relationships enable MasAgro to train technicians and extension workers who will learn from and disseminate local best practices. These partners reach out to local farmers with greater impact and accelerate the learning.

  To develop local partners, MasAgro offers training at various levels of intensity. As we shared earlier, a local farmer who takes the lead in investigating a new technology will work with a trained MasAgro technician to refine that technology in light of the local needs. The farmer may then be trained to share the refined technology with others, creating a viral spread of the new approaches. Local farmers may also be trained to share specific information, such as facts about the agricultural calendar or techniques to keep in mind when planting crops. A second level of training is more extensive and may take up to a year. A third level of training is for elite technicians, who will then train other trainers.

  Because the trained partners often have deep local roots and are familiar with the people, ways and traditions, and dialect of a region, they are well positioned to serve their local communities. Ultimately, they both serve and belong to the group. Trained partners, whether they are certified MasAgro technicians or extension staff, assist by connecting farmers with what they need, such as seed tailored to the region’s climate, or specific machinery.

  In its partners, MasAgro looks for best practices, whether local or international. As Hunt put it:

  One of the benefits of an international organization is that we have the benefit of that search for best practices on a global scale. We might find small machinery that is working in India or China and bring that into Mexico, or find a way that farmers are organizing in the Punjab and bring that to Mexico.

  Here we see the idea of repertoire operating at an organizational rather than an individual level. In the same way that Dr. Melissa Casey at Monash Medical Centre was able to connect two disparate worlds because of her unique life experiences, MasAgro is able to reach across its global experience base to offer a portfolio of tailored local solutions. In fact, the hub system was actually developed in Ethiopia by MasAgro staff, who then went to Mexico to establish the hub system while tailoring it for the local environment. Currently, MasAgro is working with the Guatemalan government to create locally adapted innovation systems similar to but not exactly the same as those in Mexico.

  Transforming Lives through Small Experiments

  MasAgro focuses on three main indicators to evaluate progress: yield increase, income increase, and adoption rate. These indicators are chosen, refined, and agreed upon with top officials of the Mexican ministry of agriculture. MasAgro tracks and reports on these indicators on a quarterly and annual basis. In addition, the agriculture ministry has hired an independent group of Dutch academics to review the data.

  The success metrics that MasAgro has achieved are compelling.

  Success Metric

  2011

  2014

  Participating farmers 4,000 228,495

  Certified MasAgro technicians 32 150

  Extension staff 100 2,300+

  Hectares with MasAgro technologies in use 22,000 849,638

  Partners (public and private organizations) 50 170

  Demonstration plots (hectares) 40 1,350

  Increase in income (in US dollars) $4.3 million $165 million

  Number of MasAgro beneficiaries 16,000 915,000+

  Ultimately, engagement in the hubs is appreciably higher, as indicated by the numbers of participating farmers, certified MasAgro technicians, extension staff, and partners. More hectares and demonstration plots of land are using MasAgro technologies. MasAgro beneficiaries have grown at an enviable rate. Hunt shared:

  We started by measuring our impact in terms of hectares or acres where at least one of our technologies was being implemented, but more and more we are measuring by the number of technologies that are being adopted in any particular patch of land.

  Perhaps the impact of the program explains its 46 percent adoption index within three years, which, according to Bunmei, the external consulting firm that conducted the study, is unheard of. Comparative rates, the firm noted, would normally be in the range of 10 to 15 percent. Rates of adoption vary according to how easy it is to adopt an innovation or technology, the influence of early adopters, and the cost versus the benefit of adoption. The hub system propels the adoption of innovative technologies through training and local networks that support the practice of farming from end to end.

  The project began in 2010, and although the results for 2011 were promising, the more dramatic increases occurred by 2014. In 2016, the Monterrey University of Technology and Higher Education named the MasAgro project one of the ten projects that are transforming Mexico. The innovation network created by its hub system is a powerful model for any organization seeking to catalyze the adoption of innovative technology.

  Reflections on the Process

  There is much to learn from the partnerships, co-creation, prototyping, and experimentation that shaped MasAgro. It takes a global village, working in cooperation with local communities, to solve complex problems and increase both productivity and long-term sustainability, protecting and nurturing both people and the planet. MasAgro is an innovation system that consistently seeks to enhance outcomes and impact. It blends scientific research and practice with local environmental concerns, traditions, and culture to present a compelling future. The MasAgro system allows farmers, including indigenous Mexican farmers in remote areas, to actually see a brighter future with their own eyes, rather than taking someone else’s word for it.

  Through its massive experimentation hubs, MasAgro has woven a system that allows an extensive network of partners to co-create with native farmers, learn what works, and disseminate best practices, whether these are local or international. With each partner and each hectare, MasAgro builds on its learning and success. As a result, it has improved both productivity and sustainability while advancing research and helping small farmers in remote or neglected regions develop the confidence to try the offered methods. MasAgro takes the local versus global conversation we started in chapter 9, in discussing the Community Transportation Association of America, to a new level. It offers a global repertoire of options while allowing solutions to be customized to an individual farmer’s needs. The system is local and global simultaneously.

  But, as with so many of our stories, the most compelling impact is at the human level. In the words of one farmer, “For the first time, I’m producing enough to feed my family, to feed my animals, and a bit extra to put in the market.” That little bit extra may be the first step in transforming lives.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Integrating Design and Strategy at Children’s Health System of Texas

  THE CHALLENGE TO THE GREATER GOOD

  Too often, innovators create breakthrough solutions that organizations are incapable of successfully implementing. Even great ethnographic research that produces an understanding of stakeholder needs and generates appropriate solutions goes nowhere if an organization lacks the will, strategies, and capabilities to successfully execute new ideas. Design and strategy are not the same thing. Strategy reminds us who we serve and builds the capabilities to make it happen. Design tells us how to serve them, and the insights from design thinking inform the question of what capabilities to build. How do we tie design thinking that analyzes users’ needs to the strategic process that steers organizations toward new futures and business models?

  DESIGN THINKING’S CONTRIBUTION

  Design thinking can do more than increase the potential of individual offerings and conversations to create value; it can drive fundamental changes in strategy. When Children’s Health System of Texas identified the need for a new business strategy to address the worsening quality of life for children in North Texas, the hospital embarked on a multiyear customer-centered design thinking program that caused leadership to examine and rethink the fundamentals of their entire business model. Partnering with the Business Innovation Factory (BIF
), Children’s Health integrated design thinking with the hospital’s strategic process to assess and build the capabilities to deliver a transformational new approach to health care that focused on facilitating family wellness rather than on providing individual medical care.

  When the Children’s Medical Center of Dallas became the Children’s Health System of Texas, the name change was not about changing the mission. Launched by a group of volunteer nurses in 1913, the medical center was the first free “baby camp” in the Southwest, an open-air tent hospital dedicated to the care of babies from poor families. A hundred years later, the mission of Children’s Health remained the same: “to make life better for children.” As a teaching and research institution and the sixth-largest pediatric medical center in the United States, Children’s Health had clear challenges: the Dallas children they served faced some of the most troubling health indicators in the United States, with nearly 30 percent living in poverty, as well as having lower life expectancies, higher rates of chronic conditions like asthma and diabetes, and spiraling obesity problems.