RE:DESIGN "MOVES"
Forty years of experience with redesign tells us that there is no simple formula to accomplish redesign – “A + B + D = Design” simply does not exist. We do find ourselves however utilizing favorite “moves” or methods - based on the above architecture.
Here are a few that have served us well. Using some of these might help you create new solutions - “by design.”
TURN UP THE VOLUME ON CUSTOMER VOICE
Approach the Get Curious step with an inquisitive set of ears. You will want to know what the key stakeholders think, so ask. Ask for their ideas on what needs to change, but don’t stop there. Include the positive. Use appreciative inquiry or other techniques to find examples of what is working (and should probably remain). Above all, ask for their aspirations… what the system, service, or problem would look and feel like if it was working brilliantly, just like they always imagined it could.
Many methodologies exist for gathering opinions. We prefer one-on-one interviews and focus groups, but will use surveys if large numbers of responses are necessary. Remember: gathering feedback from customers and compliers is critically important. It is especially powerful when the problem owners – or their staffs - gather it themselves. (After hearing unfiltered feedback from customers, they’ve been known to start making requested changes immediately!) And, in synthesizing opinion research, including direct quotes (without attribution) is a powerful design tool. Customer and compiler ideas and situations – told in their own words - frequently push designers inside the Lab to think of possibilities beyond the norm.
WORK RIGHT TO LEFT
Keep the end in mind. We have found that it is much more powerful to focus on producing improved outcomes for people than it is to start from today’s problem and brainstorm improvements from there. Once you get the outcome clear, work “backwards.” Ask designers: “What might produce that outcome? What factors might have the greatest impact?” This inquiry often changes the focus of the design work.
To illustrate: When working on new solutions to a Washington State budget shortfall, the question in the room that was stymieing designers was: How do we address these rapidly rising health care costs? When the question was changed to: What produces health? they scrambled to find this information: “According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, four big factors influence our health: personal behavior, the environment (elements in our air, water, homes, communities, workplaces and food that cause disease), access to health care, and our genetic makeup. Of these four, personal behavior accounts for 50 percent of the variance in our health, the environment and genetics about 20 percent each, and health care only 10 percent. Nevertheless, we spend 88 percent of our health resources on care, but only 4 percent on changing personal behavior.” The designers decided to focus the design more in buying “health” and new ideas emerged – e.g. influencing personal behaviors, paying medical providers to produce health rather than fee-for-service, etc.. Their big “Aha!” was that their most important design goal was not health care for citizens, but health.
SURFACE ASSUMPTIONS AND UNWRITTEN RULES
A former colleague of ours was known to frequently say: “Unstated assumptions are predetermined disappointments.” In design work, we have found a corollary: “Surfacing assumptions provoke new design solutions.”
At the beginning of many (not all) Design Labs, we ask designers to write down the assumptions they – or others - hold about the design challenge at hand. We then methodically decide to purge each assumption, park it, or turn it on its head! It’s a pretty freeing exercise. Sometimes assumptions surface halfway through a Lab. For example, let’s revisit the New York Property Tax Design. As you recall, the design challenge was clarified upfront. It became to “design a system of property tax equity whereby people across the state pay the same property taxes for properties of the same value.” But, during the Lab we kept getting stuck. When we finally asked why, the answer was that it would be too expensive to move to a new reassessment system. After surfacing this worry, that assumption was turned on its head - “What is the cost of continued inequity?” One financial person in the Lab instantly became intrigued by that question. He made a quick calculation that the cost of continued inequity – calculated using the cost of administrative or legal challenges to property tax assessment, and refunds of back taxes when successful – was as high as $650 million. Suddenly, the price of new reassessments seemed affordable.
GIVE CUSTOMERS THE MONEY
Sometimes changing the assumptions produces a completely different design. The leader of Lutheran Social Services of Minnesota asked for a fresh look at the system of services for people with developmental disabilities. The input from stakeholders and others caused one designer to observe: “What I hear is that we think that disabled equates with unable, and that disabled individuals are destined to be consumers of services. What if we started from the assumption that disabled individuals are able – and capable, with assistance at times, of being producers of their own lives?” The design that resulted inverted a whole hierarchy of outcomes: from the LSS organization and the State spending the most dollars on programs to keep people with disabilities 100% safe (a highly expensive proposition) to creating individual budgets whereby people with disabilities could purchase the level of safety, home, and quality of life they chose within the same dollars. Many of the aspects of this designed have been implemented. This design won a Public Policy award of the year; it became a National Lutheran Social Service model; and most importantly, hundreds of people with disabilities in MN are living lives of their own choosing. CEO Jodi Harpstead says of this design: “When I look at the Board Outcomes for which I am accountable, the outcomes realized through the “My Life My Choices” design far outstrip what we ever could have accomplished via one-on-one service alone.”
E-MOVES
Have designers create a new app (on paper) for the customer to use (i.e. self-service). Doing so caused a powerful “aha” moment inside a design for youth at risk of, or experiencing homelessness. The “Not even one night” app caused all the Designers to sit up and add their ideas.
CLARIFY AIM
For each design project, develop a short set of questions of what you would like to know more. Don’t be afraid of appearing ignorant. Once we were asked by the New York Office of Real Property Taxation to help them design a more equitable property tax system. One of our own team members shyly admitted: “I don’t know what property tax equity means.” We decided to ask New Yorker stakeholders what they thought it meant. So, we started the design process by asking various stakeholders: “In your own words, how would you define property tax equity?” We think everyone was surprised when we synthesized their answers into ten different definitions! The discussion that resulted – and the choice of which definition to use - was extremely important to this design effort’s success.
Strategy Mapping
Every organization has a strategy or strategies they are using to achieve outcomes, even if they are only implicit. Strategy mapping makes those strategies explicit, re-examines them and tests alternatives to see if there are better pathways to the outcomes.
Back in 1997, then New Zealand’s Minister of State Services (later Prime Minister) Jenny Shipley urged her departments “to stand back and ask how quickly and effectively could we achieve the Government’s outcomes if things were done differently. I have to confess these moments are rare in my experience.” She added, “However, I live in hope that this will change.”
That desire is what redesign and strategy mapping asks of us as well.
Not enough is known on how one develops good strategies. As Mintzberg discovered, strategic planning literature is often silent on the actual step of creating strategy:
“The whole planning exercise, as we have seen, was programmed in great detail.... Except for one minor detail: strategy formation itself. Somehow the ostensible object of the whole exercise got lost in the exercise. Nowhere was anyone told how to create strategy. How to collect information, yes. How to evaluate strategy, yes. How to implement it, for sure. But not how to create it in the first place. Every writer literally talked around that step. ...” (Mintzberg 1 , p. 296-7.)
And I thought I was the only one who had missed that class period!
Strategy mapping is one tool redesign practitioners have used to develop new or renewed strategy. This technique has been especially worthwhile in the fourth - Get Real - phase of Design work.
Thus, once you have defined the design challenge in the Get Clear step, you begin the search for new or renewed solutions. The heart of Get Curious is listening and learning from existing and emerging practices that appear to work well -- both within your own system or organization and in other jurisdictions -- even other countries.
Strategy mapping then uses the ideas taken from that learning, as well as newly created ideas from the Get Crazy step, to show the key outcome and the potential strategies with the highest leverage to reach it. Simply stated, strategy mapping is a visual mapping of the pathway to a result. It shows a “theory” or picture of causality, based on those proven and promising ideas. Or, as one person in Washington State said to me when I was explaining strategy maps…. “Oh, you mean show the things we know make a difference in the outcome!”
Exactly!
1. Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (New York: Free Press, 1994). A thorough dissection of the flaws of formal strategic planning, in which readers will find much wisdom about how strategies are actually developed and refined.