Design Thinking for the Greater Good

by Jeanne Liedtka

  One Gateway student’s storyboard.

  The team found all of this ethnographic data invaluable. For some team members, it was a high point of the study. Joan explained, “I felt really great because, when we interviewed the students, I came to know them in a different way.” For others, it was a mix of highs and lows—anxiety beforehand, enthusiasm after. As Robin explained:

  For step 5, my first instinct was I was anxious, because I wanted the students to show up, but I was also excited to hear what they had to say, because I always know what they have to say is always the best part of it. So it was also a high for me when I saw that it was a breakthrough for the team.

  As the team invited the students into the conversation, the conversation broadened to include new perspectives they brought.

  Step 6: Identify Insights

  Now we reach what we consider to be one of the most important steps in the entire methodology. For many, identifying insights is probably the single most challenging aspect of the design thinking process. Superficial insights lead to obvious ideas, and without the discovery of new and deep insights, the remaining design thinking steps are unlikely to produce intriguing results.

  As you do your research into all your stakeholder groups—your colleagues, customers, suppliers, clients, partners, anyone who can affect your project—you can’t expect any of these stakeholders to hand you a significant insight. You are often searching for things that they themselves do not fully understand and can’t articulate.

  You can organize the search for insights in various ways, but all involve people working in teams. The “Gallery Walk” approach we often use involves putting the data on full-size posters and inviting an assembled group of collaborators to browse. Posters capture what you learned during your research and can be very low fidelity. The Gallery Walk is also a convenient method for inviting other stakeholders into the design conversation and reaching out to people who are not on the research team.

  One challenge of doing innovation work is that, over time, any team begins to see the world in new ways, but then they must attempt to communicate ideas to others who have not been part of the process. Engaging important stakeholders in the search for insights helps to ameliorate this problem and paves the way to alignment around new opportunities. But teams can also summarize the data in a dossier for members to review either before or during an insight session.

  In early July, the GCCA team began their search for insights. Joan compiled the notes, from both secondary and ethnographic research, into a packet for team members. They spent a day reviewing it. The team met on July 8 to look for insights and create design criteria. Because the team was small, Joan suggested that they simply read through the packets individually and write down what each person thought stood out. She also created a mini gallery with posters of some of the information.

  The session lasted a full day. In the morning, the team reviewed what they had done and read the packet of information that Joan had prepared. The team co-created a student journey, noting any ideas they found interesting or surprising, to help create on a whiteboard a journey map of a typical student experience. Thinking aloud about the level of anxiety students faced at each point, the team had their prime “aha” moment when they collectively realized that students faced high anxiety well before the first class. They all realized that this anxiety could best be addressed when the students registered, rather than waiting until the first day of school. The journey map helped them understand when anxiety peaked and illustrated the leverage points when counselors’ intervention really mattered.

  As team members devoted time to summarizing, they also discovered they were, as a team, solidifying their alignment about the current situation and the opportunities for innovation, as seen in many of our part 2 stories. At this stage, the design thinking process helps team members do the important work of curating—drilling down in a sea of different data points to determine what really matters.

  By the end of the day, the team reached consensus on a set of insights:

  • Students really valued assistance in managing practical barriers. “Just coach me how to get to campus” or “Coach me how to deal with all the social service issues” were typical requests. Some students were in the juvenile justice system. Others were in foster care. Some were homeless. They were really seeking services.

  • There were strong student voices on managing the various emotional barriers that individual students brought to school with them. Many students observed that, through their GCCA experience, they found the belief that they could actually succeed, even excel; they recognized their own value and intelligence. (Remember the storyboard?) Nearly as important, they observed that GCCA faculty, counselors, and peers believed that they could succeed.

  • Students did not want GCCA to be a continuation of high school. GCCA students enrolled because they sought the college experience that the academy promised, which the team knew was a core challenge. “Make this a college,” they urged. “Build our college culture.” “I’m here for college; don’t waste my time.” “Help me understand the expectations and opportunities.”

  Surprisingly, a significant cohort demanded that the academy hold their fellow students accountable. The strong personal accountability message surprised the counseling team. It appeared to reflect social perceptions and students’ personal emotions regarding their own accomplishments and how others might perceive their diploma. They were succeeding because of their hard work and managing barriers with the assistance of others (counselors, teachers, parents, and GCCA peers). They observed that some unsuccessful students might be too young or not yet mature enough to understand. Other students worried about peers that they knew wanted to succeed but didn’t turn in the work, even after working on it. While they wanted to be compassionate, students did not believe that relaxing GCCA’s expectations was the answer. They were at GCCA for college, and others needed to be, too.

  Step 7: Establish Design Criteria

  The results of insight identification in step 6 is not a set of solutions. Instead, it is a succinct expression of the job those solutions must do, in the form of design criteria to be created in step 7. The criteria capture the conclusions from the What is stage and provide the yardstick by which possible solutions will be evaluated. The design criteria do not tell you what to do or how to do it; instead, they describe the attributes of an ideal solution.

  For each insight found in step 6, the GCCA team considered the statement “If anything were possible, our ideal solution would …” and filled in the rest of the sentence on the basis of that insight. Like many other teams in our experience, they found it easy to translate their insights into criteria. Their ideal solution would:

  • leverage existing resources and events,

  • help students manage “practical” problems that inhibited attendance and academic success,

  • ease first-time students’ anxieties,

  • build the college culture,

  • communicate GCCA’s expectations clearly,

  • be compatible with existing technology platforms and policy, and be deployed before the start of the new term on August 28.

  The design criteria are the bridge between What is and What if. After weeks of work, the GCCA team was finally prepared to generate solutions. It was time to enter the What if stage and create some ideas to work with.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Four-Question Methodology in Action: Ideas to Experiments

  In chapter 13, the Gateway team laid the foundation for successful human-centered innovation by selecting an appropriate challenge that was well suited to design thinking, carefully planning the project, and conducting ethnographic research into the lives of the students they wanted to better serve. Armed with fresh insights and a solid set of design criteria created as they progressed through the first seven steps of the process, they were prepared to move into the idea generation and testing process.

  What if? Overview

 
; As we move into idea generation (finally!), we focus on brainstorming (step 8) and concept development (step 9). Separating brainstorming from concept development allows us to build more complex, multilayered solutions to the messy problems faced in the social sector. As we heard repeatedly in the stories in part 2, there are few silver bullets. Instead, we must look to construct portfolios of solutions and then let our stakeholders tell us which ones work best for them.

  In brainstorming, we focus on divergence, trying to generate as many and as varied ideas as possible. In concept development, we will look for ways to select the best of those ideas and synthesize them into packages of solutions that, together, achieve an impact that no single solution could. Think of the brainstorming results as being like the individual pieces of the Lego blocks you played with when you were young. Emptying them all on the floor was fun and made a dramatic statement, but it didn’t produce much that you could play with; it was only when you combined them in different ways to make a rocket or a pirate ship that things got interesting.

  Steps 8 and 9: Brainstorm Ideas and Develop Concepts

  Brainstorming has been around for a long time. Too often, however, good ideas are lost as a result of some common but ill-conceived approaches to it. We observe problems like the “boss effect,” where everyone waits for the most highly paid person in the room to pronounce a solution, or the shout-out problem, where loud voices overwhelm the conversation and contributions from introverts are minimized. Human dynamics often block full creative engagement and are hard to avoid or overcome, so you will need to work to mitigate communication issues in whatever brainstorming process you use. Approaches that incorporate silent, individual idea generation (on paper) followed by public sharing, insisting that everyone present get involved, minimize these impediments. Good brainstorming requires encouraging the right mindset, that of the creator, not the critic (the critical mindset gets a chance later, in the What wows stage). Like the Gallery Walk in step 6, it is also a great opportunity to invite a broader set of collaborators into the conversation.

  But, so often, the surprising out-of-the-box solution you’d hoped for doesn’t show up in brainstorming. Take heart. The outputs of brainstorming are usually too raw and incomplete to be exciting in and of themselves. In concept development, we take the most innovative ideas from brainstorming and thoughtfully combine them to generate creative bundles of solutions, which we call concepts. Concept development involves choosing the best ideas from brainstorming and assembling them into detailed solutions. It is analogous to a movie director editing the best takes into something creative yet coherent, dropping shots and scenes in the process. We want to construct multiple concepts so that we can offer multiple choices to our key stakeholders. Whereas insight identification and brainstorming are best done by a diverse group that includes people outside the innovation team, concept development usually is best done by the dedicated core team.

  But sometimes the ideas and concepts just show up, with little need to resort to the structured processes for steps 8 and 9 that we describe in The Designing for Growth Field Book. That is what happened at Gateway College and Career Academy. Joan Wells and her team rolled easily from the discussion of design criteria to the identification of solutions in a single day, on July 8. They started to list ideas on a whiteboard. As Joan described it, “All of a sudden, everybody’s minds clicked, and we had six or seven different points on the board that we thought were worthy.”

  The team did not feel the need to use formal brainstorming and concept development tools. The ideas just started to flow. Immediately after that session, the leadership team laid out a framework identifying what a solution needed to include and started working on the five concepts they had created. In one productive day they identified insights, developed design criteria, and generated ideas ready to be summarized and explored.

  Step 10: Create Some Napkin Pitches

  The napkin pitch provides a simple format for summarizing, communicating, and comparing new concepts. It provides a consistent template, so that side-by-side comparisons can be made across multiple concepts. The term napkin pitch derives from the notion that a good idea can, and should, be communicated simply—as on the back of a napkin. The napkin pitch enforces simplicity and helps avoid the temptation to stack the deck in favor of one option before others (especially key stakeholders) have an opportunity to validate your thinking. Equally important, it puts concepts into a distilled form that lets stakeholders focus on the essential elements.

  You will never have enough time, energy, and money to explore all the concepts you’ve identified. Consequently, the need to make tough choices among high-potential projects is inevitable. Some will need to be set aside, at least for now. One powerful concept in design thinking is that we explore multiple options while letting users validate them.

  By July 15, the GCCA team had finalized five napkin pitches. One napkin-pitch concept was titled “Welcome Meetings: One-on-One Counseling/Coaching Sessions.” It was designed to build the counseling connection earlier in the enrollment process. The benefit was early communication with students and the reinforcement of program expectations in a personal, face-to-face counseling relationship that would ease first-time students’ anxieties. This concept would shift the timing of existing counseling sessions to the beginning rather than the end of August. Instituting these welcome meetings would require the development of standard content to meet the design criteria identified in step 7. Crucially, welcome meetings would rely on the willingness of the counseling faculty, who not only would have new content to communicate but also would need to adjust their summer schedules. The rationale behind the idea was that better-prepared students would have less attrition and enhanced academic success, facilitating a better balance of new, transitioning, and continuing students in the school’s enrollment.

  The napkin pitch for Welcome Meetings.

  Another concept was called “Remind.com.” Named after an existing educational text messaging app, this concept involved the use of text messages to remind students of steps to get ready for school. These messages could include preparation/planning reminders, check-ins, campus news and tips, and even reminders to enjoy the rest of the summer. The goal was to reinforce the connection with entering students. The team hoped to connect with students early and build relationships before the beginning of school. Such regular contact, they hypothesized, would reduce student anxiety prior to the first day of class by letting them know what to expect and would help students begin to organize and prepare for the start of school.

  With these and other concepts in hand, the GCCA team was now prepared to test their ideas in the What wows stage.

  What wows? Overview

  In design thinking’s front end, we held the organization’s requirements and constraints at bay while we drilled down on stakeholder essentials. We were concerned that we might filter stakeholder needs through powerful organizational dimensions and never get to breakthrough thinking. But now, as we prepare for testing, we need to bring the organization’s requirements back in. A return to the design brief and criteria should remind you of the strategic organizational goals you wanted to accomplish on this innovation journey.

  We transition from idea generation into testing by first examining which of the portfolio of concepts we have created might reach what we call the “wow zone”—the intersection of what stakeholders want and what the organization can sustainably offer. As we prepare to enter the land of experimentation, we first surface the critical assumptions behind why we believe that our concepts should be successful for both the stakeholder and the organization. We then create visual prototypes that allow us to test our critical assumptions in a way that feels real to those from whom we seek feedback.

  In the wow zone, we are seeking the intersection of three critical requirements: what the stakeholder wants, what the organization can deliver, and a sustainable economic model for the future. In business, the need for a sustainable future would entail the
search for a profitable business model. In the nonprofit world, we still need a sustainable financial model underpinning our delivery of the concept. The only difference is whether we are trying to create a surplus for stockholders or to wisely use a set of resources, whether from donors or government.

  We treat our concepts as hypotheses in What wows and test them with small experiments in What works. But the design hypothesis that we are going to test is not the same as a scientific hypothesis. Scientific hypotheses are about securing better explanations for things that exist but that we can’t yet see or understand. We have nothing to test in a design hypothesis because the concept being tested is still a figment of our imagination. The only direct method for testing a design hypothesis would be to build it first—and that is precisely what we are trying to avoid! What we need to do, instead, is test our underlying assumptions about why the idea is good, rather than the idea itself. Let’s see what the process looks like in action.

  Step 11: Surface Key Assumptions

  As we have already said, all new concepts are hypotheses—well-informed guesses about what stakeholders want and value and what our organization can deliver. Projects regularly fail because reality turns out differently than we assumed it would. Consequently, design thinking tries to minimize failure by figuring out the assumptions behind our napkin pitches and testing them. By surfacing and testing key assumptions, we seek to discover which ideas are based on questionable premises before throwing money and resources at them.

  Think about the importance of trying to actively nullify a hypothesis. Dedicated researchers pay particular attention to why any hypothesis may not be true. That’s what we’re after in this step. Though it’s tough to seek flaws in our own brilliance, we must do so. We always hope our napkin pitches are good ideas, but quickly and efficiently weeding out bad ones is key. Venture capitalists may invest in ten projects, hoping that all will succeed, but know from experience that only two are likely to. Since they can’t know in advance which two it will be, figuring out when to stop investing in the other eight is just as important as—maybe more important than—backing the two winners. If you want to fail fast and cheap (that often-repeated Silicon Valley motto), then exposing and disconfirming false assumptions may be the most valuable activity of all.