ThinkPlace - Strong Economies

COVID-19 will change co-design and engagement…perhaps for good

Sashi Surendran — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 06:02:21 +0000

Australia

COVID-19 will change co-design and engagement…perhaps for good

Topics

Staying connected to the community is going to be different - for a few months at least.

In a matter of weeks, we have seen the COVID-19 pandemic disrupt some so-common-they’re-almost-invisible norms of societies around the world. Handshaking has wound down, strategic shopping has ramped up in ways both good and bad, and gatherings have become sparser.

Workplaces who have never even considered work-from-home arrangements are shifting staff from offices and cubicles into studies, lounges and kitchen tables, at speed.

In this atmosphere, the need to co-design, conduct research and test with ideas with users and communities has never been more important. But, over the last few weeks, you’ll know from experience that workshops are understandably attended with a sense of trepidation, and every errant cough or sniff is like a small shot of adrenaline to nearby participants.

What we’ve learnt from Airlabs

ThinkPlace’s Airlabs service is our 100% online workshop/research capability - was never intended as a response to a pandemic situation - we didn’t even name it until recently. But over years, we’ve used it in complex and sometimes sensitive policy spaces to convene groups, for the purposes of building insight and breaking through on hard problems.

When we designed Airlabs, we considered how we could replace elements of ‘physical conversation’ with new, natural-feeling ways of interacting, engaging and building a shared journey. It wasn’t always about one-for-one substitutions, but about “reimagining the workshop” or “reimagining the research session”, with technologies that let us do things you couldn’t do otherwise.

We worked hard to make experiences feel equitable and inclusive for all participants, to create engaging moments of insight, generating and using data and thinking generated in-workshop immediately and creatively.

New norms had to be created for virtual break-out spaces, tools like polls, back-channel conversations and ideation had to be woven in seamlessly. When using Airlabs to engage people experiencing vulnerabilities, we had to think about how we created authentic social safety and a sense of empowerment for everyone linked in.

We needed to think about breaks differently, and how people could be energised or just given some space to think and move around within the Airlab process.

The result has been a service that’s engaging, intense when it needs to be, compassionate when it needs to be, and that feels both very different and very natural at the same time.

Public good relies on, and emerges from, connection

From our early days, we have held the belief that bringing together many voices, with different expertise, interests and lived experience, is an essential part of solving complex societal problems. The business of government may skip a beat in the next week or two, but then it will have to go on and take on challenges that are not just novel, but potentially unimaginable even a few weeks ago.

We think co-design and user engagement should, and can, help chart the pathway through the pandemic, and for the work of government that must continue despite it.

We’re here to support you

As we are all trying to work through the COVID-19 disruption to continue delivering important services and functions to the Australian community, ThinkPlace is, and will remain, open and ready to support you.

Please reach out to us if you would like advice on how to shift co-design workshops, consultation workshops, research, user testing or training online, or to use our Airlabs service to stay connected to your ecosystem and to the people you are trying to help.

You can refer to the downloadable pdf below for more information for you or your organisation.

View our Airlabs guide

Get in touch about airlabs:

Australia: +61 2 6282 8852 | airlabs [at] thinkplace.com.au (subject: Airlabs%20Enquiry)

New Zealand: +64 (04) 472 1212 | info [at] thinkplace.co.nz (subject: Airlabs%20Enquiry)

Singapore: +65 9046 0340 | info [at] thinkplace.com.sg" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">info [at] thinkplace.com.sg

Internationally relevant

Position

Place this content in a specific position

Expiry

Wednesday, 18 March 2020

Apply to all regions

Dream of a better New Zealand society? Let's make it happen

Sashi Surendran — Fri, 28 Feb 2020 01:42:47 +0000

New Zealand

Dream of a better New Zealand society? Let's make it happen

Topics

codesign

Our world is complex, and change is hard… but not impossible.

The age of IoT, Big Data, Artificial intelligence, Robotics, Sharing Economy, etc otherwise known as Industry 4.0 is real and happening across our country in industries and our private lives.

Do you want to be part of making the change you want to see in our society? Do you want to work with us to envision Aotearoa New Zealand Society 5.0 - more equitable, sustainable and productive? Together, we can continue to evolve and build our collective wellbeing.

Japan and several other countries are already thinking about these very questions. As a society, we can ‘drift’ into this future and it will happen to us or we can be very intentional and navigate to it. In an increasingly more connected age of technology, we can become even more disconnected or we can do something about it.

To work on this challenge, ThinkPlace New Zealand is standing up a Society 5.0 design coalition. Together we will realise a vision of Society 5.0 where we resolve social challenges by incorporating the innovations of Industry 4.0 into the fabric of our social life.

Who could be in the coalition?

A group of 20 likeminded people with a mandate for leading change from 10 organisations who want more for this country and all of its people. A group who are willing to invest a small budget and some time to join us to seek an answer to the question we have posed.

Are you someone who cares about our social support for vulnerable people?

Are you someone who cares about our environment and planet?

Are you someone who cares about the wellness and health of our people?

Are you hungry for greater momentum?

Are you building industry 4.0 and also want bigger outcomes for this country?

How we will do this?

The work is a collaborative system design dropping out organisation specific initiatives that you can take into your own organisation’s strategic planning.

At ThinkPlace, we are a passionate group of subject matter experts in the areas of complex systems, human lived experiences and behaviour, organisation strategy and convening collaborative conversations.

The work will be informed by

A clear view of the current system and its flaws
A large-scale deep dive research project with New Zealanders
Merging qualitative and quantitative insights along the views of a number of subject matter experts across complex systems, human insight and behaviour change, organisation strategy and Industry 4.0.

What are the outcomes?

You will get a grasp of our society as a complex system and the possible initiatives you could explore to achieve your organisation’s outcomes and better equity, productivity and sustainability in Aotearoa Society 5.0.

Collectively, you along with other partners in the coalition will be able to see each other’s initiatives, minimising duplication and maximising collaboration so that we can use this country’s scarce resources more effectively and efficiently.

As current (and future) leaders of this country, you will get a holistic view of bi-partisan pathways to a better future.

Why work with us?

We don’t just bring complexity to the table but embrace it to have breakthrough conversations, surfacing what is and what could be. Our expertise lies in understanding people’s behaviour and needs, navigating areas of uncertainty.

Whether it’s world leading behaviour change to save lives, turning around a historically disadvantaged community or a new paradigm for environmental stewardship in NZ, we build partnership, confidence and hope by creating action pathways.

If you need to make your case with your organisation leaders, start the conversation today with a downloadable pdf below.

aotearoa_society_5.0_design_coalition.pdf

The investment is $40,000 per organisation and eight days in coalition working sessions spread across six months.

I’m leading this work and will be joined by three of my senior colleagues.

Get in touch with me if you want more info or to reserve two seats at the table.

Internationally relevant

Position

Place this content in a specific position

Expiry

Tuesday, 31 March 2020

Apply to all regions

Five steps to designing a successful business model

Daniel Silkstone — Mon, 16 Dec 2019 01:05:21 +0000

Five steps to designing a successful business model

Australia

At ThinkPlace we design change. New services. Organisational transformations. New business models.

And in each case there’s a common thread – a binding philosophy. We design in collaboration with the people who will be impacted.

That’s how we create change that lasts.

I’ve been thinking about that recently as we’ve been working with a large multinational company to create a new business model. So often business models are born in the boardroom; but whenever possible they should be born on the ground.

What do I mean by that? In this case, the work was for a company. It could, just as easily, be for a government department in Canberra or an NGO in Washington DC.

Working with the large food company, we were trying to build a new business model within an existing company structure. We wanted to get a different kind of product into the market in a different kind of way. A different way of marketing that product. A different way of distributing it. A radically different way of selling it.

We wanted to bypass the company’s traditional ways of reaching customers. Our task was to make the product nutritious, aspirational, accessible and affordable.

We saw an opportunity to build a new salesforce, hiring women from low income areas to sell the product to their neighbours and peers. If we could make it work this would result in a double-benefit: Better uptake for the product and a new source of livelihood for women in very low income communities.

This challenged our client to work differently, testing assumptions with people before the point where we had arrived at a perfectly thought through solution. It hasn’t been a smooth process but it has been hugely positive. So what were the ingredients of our successful business model design?

1. FIND A SPONSOR – AND THE RIGHT ONE

In this project we were fortunate to get a senior company executive on board very early. Not only did he care about the ‘what’ of the project, he cared deeply about the ‘why’. Finding and enlisting this person creates multiple positives. It meant that within the company the project had a champion, who has invested in promoting the value of the change to his peers at the top level.

His endorsement also sent a strong message to people throughout the entire organisation. For us, as designers, it provided the confidence to know that the project had strong internal backing. As consultants we should never just assume that because we are hired to complete a project or effect a change, that the organisation hosting us is on board with what we are doing or how we’re working. It’s up to us to help create the conditions that give us license to operate effectively.

2. BREAK FREE OF THE BOARDROOM

A new business model, like any other change, should be prototyped and tested. If you conceive how you want it to operate without talking to people on the ground there’s a good chance you’ll be looking at a failed implementation.

In this case, we wanted to try some ideas and put them out into the world. We wanted to test them with users to see whether they worked. There’s a leap of faith required here. For the company we were partnering with, and for many companies, there can be a nervousness about failing in front of users. But ‘failing forward’ (testing something, identifying why it didn’t work, tweaking it and then testing again) is the essence of good human-centred design. And guess what? When we tested our ideas, some of them didn’t work very well. That’s how we ended up with the business model that’s more likely to work.

3. COMMIT TO HUMILITY

As designers, it’s important that we come in knowing that there is plenty of expertise around us. We don’t know everything. Not all of our ideas will be better than other people’s and we need to be prepared to acknowledge that. I find that when you come in with this attitude you often see it reflected back. Mutual humility and openness breeds a culture in which experimentation and innovation are enabled.

In this case, the company had previously run a pilot project selling and distributing the same product we were looking at. We wanted to try some different approaches but were upfront about saying that testing would show us if our ideas were worth developing and scaling up. It turned out the new way of doing things outperformed the previous trial.

4. TAKE A TEAM APPROACH

Our preference is always to form a core design team for a project like this and to make sure there is good representation from the client within that team. When we’re doing discovery (talking with users about how they might experience products or services) voices from the client organisation are often part of the process. When we are coming up with prototype interventions and testing them on the ground those same team members are right there with us.

This means the client sees first-hand what works and what doesn’t. They are invested in the outcome because it is THEIR outcome. Taking this approach generates buy-in far beyond what you can secure by returning from your testing phase and briefing a project team on what happened while you were away from their gaze. Once again, it’s about breaking out of the boardroom.

5. INTELLECTUAL GENEROSITY HELPS

We’re proud of our methods. Time and again, we have seen them work to successfully design policy, strategy, catalyse organisational transformation and design compelling services and experiences. But they aren’t magic and they aren’t a secret we keep from our clients. For a core design team to work well there’s a capability exchange that needs to happen subtly (and sometimes overtly). We welcome the client and our partners into the design team, knowing they bring subject matter expertise and a sponsoring voice (in our four voices model we call this the voice of intent). But for that team to function at its highest level we also need to generously share ideas, mindsets and tools behind our version of human-centred design in complex systems. When we do this well the impact can be significant.

Seeing these methods at work underscores how much more effective they can be in creating lasting, positive change. Every ThinkPlace designer is (to a small extent) a teacher also. But we must always do it from a position of mutual respect.

Internationally relevant

Position

Place this content in a specific position

Expiry

Monday, 16 December 2019

Apply to all regions

Our three big ideas for the future of Singapore

Daniel Silkstone — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 06:00:22 +0000

Singapore

Our three big ideas for the future of Singapore

Topics

#innovation #globalinnovation

It’s an exciting time to be in Singapore – a city and a region that are rapidly changing and where a spirit of innovation and future-focused activity is working every day to make life better for those who live, work and create.

As a proudly Singaporean studio we are thrilled to be among so much of the great work that is going on. As Singaporeans and Singapore residents our goals as a team reflect the things that we want for Singapore itself. So when we sat down recently to set ourselves some ambitious targets it’s not surprising the form they took.

Three big ideas for the future of Singapore.

Video of Our 3 Big Ideas for Singapore

At ThinkPlace we don’t just set goals, we set OKR’s. What are they?

This method was introduced by Andy Grove at Intel in the 1970s and has been championed more recently by John Doerr. It has been used with success by everybody from Google and Uber to U2 frontman Bono.

OKR stands for objectives and key results. This process involves setting shared objectives for an organisation and then attaching them to key results that are specific enough to allow future judgement about whether your objective has been met. A characteristic of properly designed OKRs is that they must be measurable. It must be possible to look back and decide whether the objective was or was not reached.

OKRs are a great tool for driving strategic intent and making sure a team is locked in and focusing its energy and efforts on the things that really matter. We’ve found them hugely beneficial at ThinkPlace.

Why are we sharing these OKRs? Because to succeed in them we need people to collaborate with us. This is a call for people to join us, to work together and be part of something that really matters for the future of Singapore.

1. CONNECTING CITIZENS AND GOVERNMENT

We think we can play an important role connecting citizens, visitors and all sorts of people across Singapore with senior decision makers, to make everyone's life a bit easier.

There’s something really exciting about the way the Singapore government is engaging with citizens at the moment and we want to play a big part in pushing that further. Because we know that when government leaders get better at understanding the needs and experiences of people who use government services that the inevitable result is better services (and a better place to live). Codesign approaches hold much promise for the future of Singapore.

2. MAKING THE INNOVATION ECOSYSTEM A REALITY

There’s so much activity in this space, reflecting the Singaporean Government’s determination to be (or remain) a world-leader. All around us we see initiatives like Smart Nation, Digital Government Blueprint and Industry Transformation Roadmaps. All of these are ambitious attempts to try and get people innovating and connecting in Singapore. We know the intent is there but we believe there are still some big challenges to this happening.

A big question for us in the next few years is: How can we make Singapore genuinely the most interesting place to be innovating and collaborating anywhere in the world? From SME transformation to industry-wide collaboration, there is a lot happening.

If this is a space that you care about or where you are looking to make impact then we are ready and willing to apply our expertise in user research, design methodologies and innovation frameworks to help you make positive impact.

3. WORKING ACROSS ASIA

We’ve been fortunate enough to be closely involved with some of the most interesting and important transformations that have taken place in Singapore over recent years. Now we are taking advantage of Singapore’s connectedness to the region to try and spread the impact we can have.

Singapore’s future is fundamentally tied to the broader region. As neighbouring economies and societies develop and transform themselves the opportunities for regional collaboration and shared value are only increasing. We believe there is huge potential to work with more governments across the region, introducing design thinking and design methodology and citizen-centred decision-making. Our deep experience means we know that, more often than not, these approaches drive better policy and better outcomes.

These are our three big goals as we move towards the end of this century’s second decade and look forward to its next. They will drive our team and we will measure ourselves against them.

What are your goals, and how can we help you reach them, making sure that together we drive a better future for all Singaporeans?

Internationally relevant

Position

Place this content in a specific position

Expiry

Wednesday, 30 October 2019

Apply to all regions

Future strategy for a public health NGO

Sashi Surendran — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 02:49:22 +0000

Work

Future strategy for a public health NGO

Service

Strategy & policy designOrganisation Transformation

People

Sector

Healthy Societies

Safe Water and AIDS project is a Kenyan registered NGO with programs and research operating for 11 years in Western Kenya.

SWAP has a sustainable distribution model of health and hygiene products which are sold from door to door by trained community health promoters from 11 Jamii centers in remote and underserved areas. The organisation also has a research department evaluating the health and economic impact of health interventions, technologies and products.

Operating an NGO in western Kenya with more than 100 staff can be challenging, in particular when working in the space of public health and fostering local social enterprises. SWAP has been doing so for more than 10 years but was encountering some difficulties.

THE CHALLENGE

SWAP was finding it increasingly difficult to attract good quality community health representatives, they have had to navigate adverse market conditions, and the organisation has experienced higher than usual fraud and corruption.

ThinkPlace worked with SWAP and Innovations In Healthcare (SEAD) to run a user-centric strategic design process aimed at addressing these challenges.

OUR RESPONSE

First, ThinkPlace brought together the entire organisation to discuss the current competitive landscape and the challenges they are experiencing on the ground.

This was a critical contribution to the overall strategy as it allowed the staff to genuinely contribute to the strategic direction of the organisation, while generating excitement and engagement in their collective future vision.

ThinkPlace then facilitated a more focused two-day session with the senior leadership team. The original objective of this two-day workshop was to refine the strategic plan, but it became clear that in the backdrop of recent events, the leadership team was now fractured.

ThinkPlace facilitated the team to design strategies to improve on this entrenched dynamic so that the organisation could respond to these adverse events from a stronger position.

THE IMPACT

By pivoting on the focus of the workshop, ThinkPlace helped the team become stronger, be better positioned to work through these issues and re-center around the their “why”: the reason they were working with SWAP in the first place.

We also co-designed a comprehensive strategy which outlined how the organisation should respond to the challenges it was facing, and also grow and strengthen in the next three years. The full strategic document can be found here.

Internationally relevant

Place this content in a specific position

Expiry

Tuesday, 1 October 2019

Position

Apply to all regions

Helping businesses benefit from digital technology

Daniel Silkstone — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 23:23:00 +0000

Work

Helping businesses benefit from digital technology

Service

Experience & Behavioural DesignInnovation AmplifiedDigital

People

Sector

Strong Economies

Singapore is a nation that is pushing hard to build its digital future.

The Singaporean government has taken an active role, supporting the nation’s businesses and companies to embrace the efficiencies and growth possibilities made possible by emerging technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine learning and data analysis.

The response to this urging has been strong and enthusiastic but enthusiasm alone will not be enough to guarantee success.

While many businesses display a willingness to wade into these new spaces there are not always sufficient levels of knowledge or competency for them to do so with confidence.

It’s especially true for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) who often lack the resources to run detailed analyses of the opportunities and risks associated with specific technologies. They sometimes find it hard to know where and with who to get started.

At the same time technological innovators and vendors often have an incomplete understanding of the business problems they could be helping to solve. Experience and context is needed to allow them to better target their innovations and make products work in the real world.

THE CHALLENGE

It's not always easy for businesses and technology providers to work together to create new mutual value. It requires trust.

For these reasons the Singapore Government has established the Open Innovation Platform – a way to connect and facilitate partnerships between businesses with hard-to-solve problems, and technology providers who just might have the answer.

The platform is an initiative of Infocomm Media Development Authority.

OUR RESPONSE

ThinkPlace is supporting the program as a design thinking facilitator.

As part of the platform, we’ve been working directly with businesses and technology solution providers to help them engage with one another, and find what works.

We’re working with a variety of Singapore businesses across areas like construction, insurance, food, retail and sustainability. Using design thinking and other methods, as well as our extensive and diverse consulting experience, we’ve helped them make sense of what they’re seeking to achieve and how to engage the world of technology effectively.

HOW WE DO IT

The OIP is a strong platform for matching and catalysing business and technology partners. It’s based on a model, where businesses construct a design challenge around their problem, and offer a prize to the technologist that can best tackle it.

The process starts with problem framing. Together with IMDA, ThinkPlace works with businesses to help them refine their problem statement, ready to be published to the platform.

Some businesses have a very clear idea of the problem (having dealt with it for years) and we help them to put it into language that is clear for a technologist. With other businesses, we help clarify intent and craft the problem statement that they want to put before a techno

We use human-centred design techniques to ensure that requirements consider real world human needs and context. At other points, we’ll explore the system-level view, walk through critical business processes, and consider business risks. Once we’ve reached clarity, the agreed-upon ‘problem’ is then uploaded to the platform and the IMDA shares it with a global pool of thousands of tech providers, to generate a shortlist of interested parties.

At this point, we support IMDA and the business to evaluate potential solutions, and prepare the businesses to effectively interview a chosen few solution providers.

Once a partner is selected we help the business and technology providers agree to the terms of the design challenge, and the KPIs they are to meet in order to receive prize money.

Next, we assist the business problem owner and technology solution provider to design the solution. We bring in years of design experience to create a proof of concept or prototype (depending on the terms of the challenge) that is effective, efficient, ethical and provides a great user experience.

THE IMPACT

This project provides Singapore’s businesses with critical support from an independent trusted ally who can help them navigate a process that is absolutely necessary but often nervously engaged with and potentially fraught with risk.

“What they’ve really appreciated is our independence and our real commitment to trying to understand and address their specific challenges,” says ThinkPlace Singapore Managing Director Bill Bannear.

“It’s a great thing to have the confidence that you are buying something that is really going to help your business, not just being sold something shiny that you’ll regret investing in six months from now.”

For the technology solution providers, the program has opened up new business opportunities and a platform that makes it easy to co-create valuable products. The partnerships from OIP are already creating a portfolio of new business products, powered by emerging technologies, that will scale across the region.

Internationally relevant

Place this content in a specific position

Expiry

Tuesday, 1 October 2019

Position

Apply to all regions

The one algorithm we are still badly missing

Daniel Silkstone — Sun, 22 Sep 2019 23:56:13 +0000

Australia

The one algorithm we are still badly missing

Topics

#innovation #globalinnovation, human-centred design

We are seeing it constantly; the algorithms that decide which news to place in our feeds like nothing better, it seems, than feeding us news about algorithms.

I am fascinated by the pace of artificial intelligence discourse in everyday media and news. And I see huge potential for the shift that’s underway to unearth systemic root drivers using data in ways that the human mind can’t process.

Take, for example, IBM’s much-lauded Project Debater. This masterpiece of algorithm and programming – released in 2019 – has achieved plenty of fanfare. The promise it offers is tantalising: A tool that can help people make decisions about complex questions, weighing up evidence (in the form of big data) on a computational scale no human could match and using decision-making frameworks to provide advice that is said to be both evidence-based and “not clouded by emotion”.

It’s an interesting metaphor in this context, the cloud. More on that in a moment.

Amid all this change, as I read about new business ideas, services and their possible ethical implications, I can’t help but lean on my own world view, as a human-centred designer and sociologist.

What about Human Intelligence (HI) in this world of increasing AI? As humans, what do we bring? What can we add to both guide and complement the emergence of AI?

It’s important as a species to register our intent: that we are not designing for our own obsolescence when it comes to making sense of the world and working to improve it.

How might we be sure to preserve the role of us, as people, in the way we define and design solutions to our most pressing challenges?

Let’s get back to clouds. In 1966, Karl Popper wrote the famous piece: Of Clocks and Clouds. Decades later, the distinction it makes is still relevant.

Popper observed that clocks are precise mechanisms. It is clear what each component of the clock does and how changing that component will affect the clock as a whole.

Not so clouds! A cloud is composed of many different components and the individual behaviour of each is random and unpredictable. 

“Cloud problems” are complex. They feature interconnections and interdependencies that are unstable and unpredictable. Changing one part of this system will not have a predictable outcome for other parts. These problems cannot be solved in a linear, staged way.

Emotions, relationships, personal connections and private motivations, all are real parts of the problems we see. But most are below the surface. Sometimes invisible. All require human intelligence to build and deploy understanding.

The temptation here would be to presume that, while algorithmic understanding is emerging rapidly and constantly shifting we have “got the human part covered”.

That’s not what I’m arguing. While human intelligence is something we all possess (and something older than human civilisation itself) this does not mean that we don’t need to develop, update, rethink and redesign how we apply it.

For those who seek to make a positive change in the world, this is the truly great challenge of our time. At ThinkPlace we are increasingly working to pair our understanding of human behaviours and the social with the information-gathering and analytic power offered by emerging technologies. Together, both are stronger.

So I’m throwing out two challenges: How  might we increase our sophistication of HI as fast as we work on improving artificial algorithms? 

And how might we define HI in a way that means it is built into future decision-making so that AI will only work if HI is involved? 

Why does this matter? If we pay attention to HI as a critical partner to AI, then complex issues will be solved in dignified and socially sensitised ways, and we have a much greater chance of producing the results we most need. 

It’s possible that algorithms can and will get better at “cloudy thinking” to tackle the kinds of complex problems Popper identified (problems that we see are increasingly common and increasingly complex in the connected, globalised, digitally transforming world we now inhabit). But we know that humans offer some powerful capabilities right now that can be put to use with great impact.

What if we proposed HI as an algorithm too? At its most basic an algorithm is a recipe; a set of assumptions and instructions that can be applied to determine decision-making. So here’s a new recipe for a new human intelligence…

Understanding the social + enrolling the social + optimised collaboration capacity + strengthened learning models. 

Pause for a second and read it again. Think of the power this recipe might hold. If we start to think of things in this way, we can then devote meaningful attention to the work needed to create HI at the same rate we are furiously building AI.

Here’s an example. ThinkPlace recently led an award-winning project to co-create a Family Safety Hub for the ACT Government. The idea was to remove some of the friction or disconnection points between available services and resources for both survivors and perpetrators of family violence, increasing connection and accessibility to make seeking and receiving help a more seamless experience.

To do this we spent plenty of time speaking with survivors of family violence from a variety of backgrounds, as well as discussions with stakeholders in the system and even perpetrators themselves. The ostensible purpose of this was discovery. By seeking, gaining and synthesising insights from users of the system we hoped to use that understanding to create a better system (this is the heart of what human-centred design and co-design are all about).

But we quickly noticed something else we hadn’t built into the project intentionally. The act of coming together to discuss these matters in a shared and safe environment had value in itself. Lots of value. These “focus groups” became “conversation circles”. They physically and emotionally brought people together who would otherwise have remained disconnected and isolated.

To some extent, the research became the intervention. We are now following up how “conversation circles” (both physical and virtual) can be built into the future system.

I’d humbly submit that an entirely data-driven, algorithm-decided look at this problem would not have achieved the sense of collaborative catharsis that our process uncovered (and would not have been ready to pivot and capitalise on the value that emerged).

That’s why human intelligence will continue to play a vital role as our ability to tackle complex problems increases over time.

Responsibility for building this capability lies with leaders in organizational settings - government, corporate, community - to invest in the balance of HI and AI. 

It’s as leaders we can pay attention to how people in our organisations are given agency to be participants in this HI. It plays to very real areas of organisational culture expectations: as issues get more complex this requires even great HI. 

The cultural imperative to build HI - as a collective concept, in temporary and more permanent settings, can help us more fiercely focus on what matters. 

Nina is Global Chief Methodologist, and is driving new models for collaboration and innovation. 

Internationally relevant

Position

Place this content in a specific position

Expiry

Monday, 30 September 2019

Apply to all regions

Digital strategy for a scientific leader

Daniel Silkstone — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 05:43:40 +0000

Work

Digital strategy for a scientific leader

Service

Digital

People

Sector

Sustainable Environments

Whether it is predicting earthquake risk for heavily populated areas, identifying water resources far under the ground or searching for mineral deposits that can lead to valuable export opportunities Geoscience Australia has a critical role to play, providing geological and geographical advice.

So it’s no surprise that the agency’s slogan reads: Applying geoscience to Australia’s most important challenges.

A well-managed, sustainable and efficient digital investment that enables leading-edge science and its leverage will enable GA’s to meet the high bar set by its policy intent. It’s a strategic imperative that means the organisation must position itself well to navigate the digital transformation that is taking place across the globe.

THE CHALLENGE

ThinkPlace was engaged by Geoscience Australia in June 2018 to:

Develop a Digital Strategy for the organisation that creates a whole-of-GA vision for ICT, how it can enable science and policy outcomes, and how it can be efficiently managed and sustained in the future
Use a co-design approach to ensure that stakeholders are meaningfully brought along the strategic journey and that there is convergence on the vision and roadmap
Design the strategy in a way that is simple, content-rich, visual and that enables clarity among stakeholders

OUR RESPONSE

ThinkPlace used a rapid co-design approach, grounded in our world-leading complex systems design philosophy, which looks at an agency’s full ecosystem and higher-order outcome but also zooms in to understand the needs, preferences and experiences of individuals within and beyond the agency.

In this way, we ensured that we were creating the right impact and avoiding unintended outcomes.

HOW WE DID IT

Phase One - Intent and orientation

In the initial phase of work we rapidly orientated ourselves, consuming existing strategic, architectural, persona and Geoscience Australia program documentation to help us understand GA’s current position.

Following this we held an Intent Meeting with the Project Sponsor and Project Team to confirm the intent of the project to map out the context, scope, plan and priority stakeholders to to be involved in the process.

Phase Two - Explore

ThinkPlace conducted discovery research, including one on one interviews with internal and external stakeholders to understand their perspective on the strategic opportunities, barriers, priorities, current pain-points and inefficiencies, as well as anticipated initiatives, emerging demand or policy changes that needed consideration.

We also conducted a mini-workshop with the ICT and operations staff, to get their collective thinking on what could be different in the future.

Following the initial research we brought together GA's executive and other stakeholders for a Strategy Discovery Workshop.

This conversation helped establish important parameters for the work, and kick-started the strategy journey.

We explored questions such as:

What are the organisation’s (and its clients’ and partners’) strategic priorities and strategic risks, and how must ICT support them now and in the future?
How does ICT enablement work today, and what are the strengths, challenges, barriers and opportunities of the current model?
What is the future vision for ICT, and what shifts and initiatives would be required to achieve this at a high level?

Phase Three - Create

We worked with the project team to co-design the draft strategy, across 3 sprints:

Sprint 1: We confirmed what the strategy will contain, and developed the visual design and the content “spine” – the table of contents and key points for each section – and showcased it for the project team.
Sprint 2: We completed a first draft of the content, and showcased it to the project team and the project sponsor. This version was then refined based on the showcase feedback.
Sprint 3: We refined the strategy based on feedback and developed a final draft for review. We then showcased with the relevant senior executive, to undertake a final round of refinement.

Phase 4 - Close

We held a retrospective with the Project Sponsor and Project team to share what we had learned on our strategy design journey and deliver the final document.

THE IMPACT

ThinkPlace's expertise in co-design, and digital allowed us to create a strategy for Geoscience Australia that will enable them to sustain, grow and innovate their platforms, skills and approaches to realise the potential offered by the digital age.

Through the co-design approach ThinkPlace was able to create a strategy that was relevant and useful, with buy in and support from across the wider organisation.

Internationally relevant

Place this content in a specific position

Expiry

Tuesday, 17 September 2019

Position

Apply to all regions

Redesigning a critical interface with citizens

Daniel Silkstone — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 03:57:05 +0000

Work

Redesigning a critical interface with citizens

Service

DigitalInclusive Co-design & EngagementResearch & insights

People

Sector

Strong Economies

A year can be a long time when it comes to digital. A decade is more like an eternity.

So when a website becomes outdated and is no longer fit-for-purpose, the ripples of impact can spread throughout an entire organisation.

Such was the case at the Department of Finance, a critical part of Australia’s government interface with citizens that had not redeveloped its website in ten years.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the website was considered cumbersome to navigate and content difficult to find. And that meant staff spent valuable time responding to a high volume of support calls for low value tasks that an otherwise highly functional website would support.

Users would rather have dealt with their queries in a faster, more efficient manner. And staff would rather have had more time for complex requests that could not be dealt with easily by a website. There was a clear and demonstrated need for change.

THE CHALLENGE

Finance’s corporate website had last been redeveloped in 2008. Changes to the department’s functions, as well as ongoing content changes had led to the information architecture degrading since that time.

There wasn't a clear and supported guide for how content created and published, which had resulted in the current website being outdated and laden with poorly-targeted content.

The client had a strong internal desire to shift towards a self-serve model that reduced the demand for low value support to higher valued support.

The department was evaluating how it operates and supports the APS - and hoped that the website would play a pivotal role as a communications channel to signal the positive shift to the APS. There was also a strong push to align the future website with the next release of GovCMS.

OUR RESPONSE

ThinkPlace conducted a series of stakeholder engagement sessions to identify the goals and expectations of internal and external users of the Finance website through interviews, focus groups, workshops and contextual enquiry research.

Our design team took an agile-sprint based approach with weekly sprints involving development, usability testing, synthesis, showcase and retros with the clients and partner teams.

HOW WE DID IT

ThinkPlace began by conducting a Discovery workshop with about 30 external and internal stakeholders to understand the research insights, and identified and prioritised a set of design challenges and ideas.

Based on the insights gained through the research, we developed personas to understand the different profiles of users. These artefacts created a robust evidence base that was used to generate Information Architecture, navigation and content concepts.

The high value concepts were developed into paper prototypes and eventually HTML prototypes that were tested with about 28 internal and external stakeholders in a series of weekly usability testing sessions.

Information Architecture was tested through online tree-jacking tests that involved nearly 90 people. Content Guide Focus Groups were conducted with 20 content writers across Finance to build a content strategy and guide for users.

The whole report is great and has all the information we requested. I’ve already used it to have some high-level discussions with other business areas and they are all impressed with the direction we’ve plotted and the features we’ve been exploring. (client)

THE IMPACT

This project delivered a design that was evidence-based and which demonstrably improved usability and functionality of the website https://www.finance.gov.au/. A compelling co-designed content strategy was created to guide development work for the next phase.

The client and their stakeholders were impressed with the features we explored and the direction that we took the website in.

Internationally relevant

Place this content in a specific position

Expiry

Saturday, 30 November 2019

Position

Apply to all regions

User-centred research guides policy for the employment system

Daniel Silkstone — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 03:07:23 +0000

Work

User-centred research guides policy for the employment system

Service

Strategy & policy designInclusive Co-design & EngagementResearch & insights

People

Sector

Vibrant Communities

The young jobseeker scours yet another website, emailing her CV to a company that may not even have a vacancy. She visits his local service provider, sits at a computer and, in a single morning, applies for 20 jobs – knowing she will likely not get an interview for any.

After all, she has to meet her monthly requirement of 20 applications or her Newstart allowance will be cut off.

Across town, the HR director sifts through a pile of CVs. None have the specific qualifications he needs. He’s getting pretty tired of being inundated with scattergun approaches that never seem to lead anywhere. The volume of applications seems needlessly crushing.

Sometimes, a system is not working optimally for anybody in it.

That’s why the Department of Employment Skills, Small and Family Business has been working with ThinkPlace to rethink how its jobactive program works and who it works for.

It has been an ambitious piece of policy design but also more than that: a gold standard for how user-centred design and research methods can support, inform and drive policy creation to create better future experiences for both citizens AND government.

THE CHALLENGE

jobactive is an Australian Government program, administered by service providers and built on the concept of mutual obligation. The current contracts to administer it expire in 2022. In anticipation of that, the department wanted to move towards a system that lessened the focus on compliance and box-ticking for job seekers and genuinely engage with them to provide tools, skills and experience that would be more likely to lead to securing a job.

While service providers had a productive business model within the system, job seekers and employers anecdotally reported that it was not working well for them. For employers there was too much noise in the system. Too many applicants applying for roles they were not suited for.

This challenge represented an opportunity to apply the user-centred design expertise that ThinkPlace has accumulated over more than a decade to policy design in a high-impact space.

With this work, user-centred design has set a new benchmark in policy design. We have genuinely put the user at the centre. (project lead Mark Thompson)

OUR RESPONSE

Early on in this project the Department came to an important realisation.

While job seekers and employers were its two most important stakeholders the Department didn’t know nearly enough about them. What did they want? What did they value? What motivated them?

The objective of jobactive was to help jobseekers move off welfare and into paid employment as efficiently as possible. So what were the blockers and barriers that most often prevented people from making this shift?

Beginning in 2017, ThinkPlace worked with the department on a Discovery phase – using an innovative combination of behavioural insights, ethnographic research and design thinking methods we comprehensively mapped the job seeking system from both job seekers’ and employers’ perspectives. The unprecedented insights gathered in this phase were used to inform and drive a prototype for a new policy framework and a new jobactive.

ThinkPlace was then asked to engage with job seekers and employers from across Australia to test, revise and rework that framework.

HOW WE DID IT

Over the course of eighteen months, across discovery, prototyping and co-design phases we engaged with 140 job seekers, 72 employers and 69 provider staff members across urban and regional Australia.

ThinkPlace worked with the Department and Expert Advisory Panel to prototype and concept test policy options with job seekers, employers and providers. Through this process we developed a better understanding of what might work, what doesn’t work and why.

Working closely with the policy teams, we developed a number of scenarios and prototypes around key policy questions to explore, test and validate with users.

We wanted to know how jobseekers felt about the process of looking for work. What motivated them to look for and find work? More importantly, what were the blockers that limited their ability or motivation to find employment? How were people living with disabilities served by the system? What about people in remote and rural communities?

Some of these findings seem intuitively obvious but only in retrospect. The compliance culture of the current system was a significant demotivator. Applying for 20 jobs a month and routinely being turned down for all of them was a worse outcome for everybody than simply applying for ten positions that you are suited for.

It is via processes such as these that policy-making becomes immersive and responsive to the needs of those it is being formulated for. To enable this, we invited the department’s Expert Advisory Panel, policy and digital team members into the field with us to learn first-hand from the system users we were talking to. After each field work sprint we held walkthroughs to share insights, iterate our approach and identify the next round of policy questions to explore.

First hand engagement with users provides moments of deeper empathy and understanding that are hard to replicate and communicate through written reports alone - Project Lead Mark Thompson

To understand how a job plan could be more meaningful and effective for job seekers, we created cards describing goals, motivations and gathered their reactions and priorities, creating an understanding of the importance of agency and choice.

We complemented this iterative design-led research with behavioural insights survey of job seekers to understand the broad applicability of our insights.

THE IMPACT

By supporting the policy development process with user-centred insights from the start, our approach helped to identify hidden benefits that could be amplified in the future policy as well as risks that will need to be mitigated.

By amplifying the human stories and personal implications of policy decisions, ThinkPlace's design artefacts created compelling drivers for strategic decisions, effectively connecting evidence-based policy direction to senior stakeholders, the Expert Advisory Panel and the Minister and her office.

The series of user-centred design projects ensures that the Department has a rigorous and empathetic evidence base that articulates behavioural drivers and user experiences across different cohorts and personas. The artefacts and knowledge sharing created through these projects will form the cornerstone of a new and better employment services program.

Internationally relevant

Place this content in a specific position

Expiry

Tuesday, 17 September 2019

Position

Apply to all regions