5 design thinking strategies for citizen-centred outcomes

This post is written by Stephanie Nemcsok, Senior Innovation Designer, The City of Calgary.

• The problem: Sometimes ideas and strategies are generated in the name of innovation and then nothing happens.
• Why it matters: It’s critical that projects are developed _with _key stakeholders, including citizens, through to implementation and impact.
• The solution: A human-centred approach to innovation, which leads to better outcomes for all stakeholders.

In 2019, I joined The Innovation Lab, a small consultancy at The City of Calgary that supports internal City staff to solve complex challenges by applying innovation methodologies and building innovation capabilities. Within a month of joining, it was clear that The Lab’s approach was no longer resonating with many internal stakeholders. It had a growing reputation as a place where ideas are generated and then nothing happens. A lack of tangible impact can be a real challenge for embedded design labs in civic government and The Innovation Lab was no exception. As embedded labs are not problem owners, they often lack the permission space and resources to follow through to implementation. For us, drawing a through-line to citizen impact was critical.

Here are some lessons from our journey over five cross-corporate design thinking cycles that may help you along your path using design thinking for citizen-centred project outcomes.

Lessons from our journey

1. Be consistent and over-communicate your process. Having consistency for a design thinking process that your team follows is helpful, as due to the nature of complex project work, the day-to-day often looks quite different with each project. The Innovation Lab team carefully chose the language and framing for our process to resonate within our context and at different levels of the organisation. For example, The Innovation Lab’s process starts with Understand, rather than Empathise, because the institution’s memory is long and it is important to respect the prior work on a challenge in order to save time and foster investment from subject matter experts.

The Lab team first shows the design thinking process in a linear way when onboarding partners, as that is most similar to the project management processes they know. The three phases - Discover, Design and Deliver - are how we communicate with senior leadership and project sponsors about a project’s progress through reports and slide decks. Discover and Deliver require large resource investment during a project and The Lab team has found that senior stakeholders will ask for a report if one doesn’t proactively come. Throughout a project, The Lab team speaks with the project team about the iterative nature of the design thinking cycle and introduces the nonlinear visualisation of that process later on to project partners. That way when the cycle inevitably loops back, it doesn’t read as an unrecoverable failure, but rather an efficient use of resources - not going too far down a path that will be costly to recover from. Overall, showing the process early and often gives colleagues a map and a mental model for the territory they’re covering, some for the first time.

2. Be a partner, not a consultant. Accountability for solving a messy, complex challenge is scary, especially when business-thinking approaches that City employees traditionally rely on have failed. Add to that the feelings of being over capacity and being overwhelmed from trying to solve the challenge in isolation. Taking this tough starting point into account, The Innovation Lab reframed our City project collaborators from ‘clients’ to ‘partners’. Using the word ‘client’ suggests a hands-off approach and research shows us that innovation rarely survives a hand-off. The word ‘partner’ emphasises that The Lab team is along on the journey - “we’re in this together”. The shift from ‘client’ to ‘partner’ goes against the grain of traditional consultancies and some of the other enabling services in The City of Calgary. Yet, The Lab team is discovering that this partnership framing fosters greater trust and reduces competitive and territorial instincts that inevitably crop up in a traditionally siloed bureaucracy with limited resources.

The word ‘partner’ emphasises that The Lab team is along on the journey - “we’re in this together”.

Additionally, by partnering on an innovation project, we invite our City colleagues to co-design with The Lab team, to see the messy middle as the team pivots through safe-to-fail experiments. How could we hope that civil servants with traditional business or policy backgrounds embrace innovation without experiencing it fully? By partnering, The Lab team is able to open up permission space and capacity to build innovation skills in our colleagues to modernise government sustainably. This is where embedded innovation labs demonstrate their value and can create that through-line to citizen impact, by fostering sustained innovation in civic government, in a way that an outsourced consultancy never could.

3. Broaden the data with design research. The City of Calgary has internal teams leading public engagement and city-wide, statistically significant research, which The Innovation Lab is privileged to partner with on projects. The Innovation Lab brings Design Research, a suite of applied ethnographic research techniques that are not public engagement as it is traditionally understood, to supplement the data provided by other enabling services at The City. Design Research brings other ways of knowing into our context. The way a citizen will contribute to a survey is quite different from the kind and quality of data they share during an empathy interview or a cultural probe. Indeed, what people say or think they do is often very different from what they do - just think how often you say you exercise versus how often you actually do from week to week.

When we expose ourselves to more ways of knowing about the lived experiences of citizens we are designing with, the impacts are more resonant and more relevant because we more fully understand the scope and breadth of the issues they face. For example, on one project The City of Calgary was seeking to understand social and recreational needs in an inner-city community. The residents in the area stated that they needed to keep an ageing pool in their community to meet their needs. Through The Innovation Lab’s Design Research, the project team learned that the residents had a strong community identity of a place where neighbours support neighbours and don’t let each other down. They shared that they didn’t use the pool, but they thought their neighbours needed it, so they agreed to save it. That insight informed the project communications and prototypes that ultimately led to collaborative solutions with communities, identifying service alternatives and targeted investments to maximise community and social benefits in the neighbourhood. The project won a national award for its citizen-centred approach. \

4. Leverage the system to bring more on the journey and get better results. The Lab’s neutral, facilitative position on projects fosters more effective cross-corporate collaboration to get to better outcomes for all stakeholders. At the start of a project, The Lab team will apply an equity lens to the project team and stakeholder work, as having the right people in the room matters. Often during a citizen-centred design thinking cycle, internal stakeholders will identify processes that would benefit from critical review and redesign to function better. As a result, The Lab team will invest in deeply understanding both citizens' and internal stakeholders’ needs through design research on complex challenges.

In addition, given the size and complexity of the civic government system, The Innovation Lab shares and invites feedback on the results of the Define stage on projects, really casting the net broadly to gather the wealth of knowledge and critical eye of relevant subject matter experts across the Corporation. By leveraging The Lab’s network and going broader, The Lab team is able to add in perspectives and narratives that the project team could never have in isolation, given the size and complexity of the system in which we work. Socialisation of the work at this stage reduces risk, increases buy-in and generates future projects for The Lab.

5. Bounded optimism to maintain momentum and get results. It can be hard to be an optimistic civic government employee. Many of our colleagues have long careers at The City and, while those high retention rates are tremendous for retaining talent, they can pose a challenge for innovation. Taking a design thinking approach to innovation helps infuse possibility in new ways, as design is inherently optimistic. One of the key design principles The Innovation Lab team brings to project work is a relentless optimism that things can be better. To prevent the toxic positivity trap, the team bounds that optimism to make it relevant to the project context and where the project partners are at in their journey. Throughout a project cycle, many systemic factors slow down projects and urgent priorities that appear, taking key contributors away. The Lab team has found that having optimism and the ability to try new approaches in government that add value and can still deliver on tight timelines, while maintaining a focus on equity, helps to keep complex projects moving. Exposing the possibilities for a better future for more of our colleagues through socialising project work builds momentum and identifies champions for change - yet another important factor in the through-line to impact.

Citizen expectations for great programme and service delivery are continuously increasing, as private-sector organisations deliver exceptional customer experiences and citizens want the same from their governments. Civic governments are seeking to meet those expectations while evolving traditional business thinking approaches to include more citizen-centred tools. The design thinking process offers civic government leaders a flexible approach that compliments other enabling service offerings and delivers results for citizens and internal stakeholders alike.

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(Image Credit: Unsplash)