This article is written by Karl Satinitigan, former Director at the Office of Senator Bam Aquino, Senate of the Philippines.

What’s the worst start to a workshop you can think of? For me, having someone loudly yell “NO!” is certainly up there, and that’s unfortunately what happened to me when I was introducing human-centred design to a group of higher education stakeholders from a local state college in 2016.

As I was introducing the why and the how of the workshop we were about to run, an agitated participant wondered out loud why a government unit like ours was asking people like him what to do. “Government already has the answers and we should just implement them!” he said.

This isn’t the first time in my six years of mainstreaming human-centred design in government that someone has challenged the relevance of these efforts (though it is perhaps the loudest). In this article I want to offer five strategies that you can use to get your colleagues and your organisations to use HCD.

Ironically, the first lesson is what I hadn’t managed to do that day: know your audience. One of the first steps in any design thinking process is empathy building. This can be as simple as reading the standard bio of your workshop participants, but I learned that taking time to meet them individually beforehand is a lot more effective. This pre-work will cost more resources, but the investment you make in identifying the quirks and motivations of key members (if not all) of your audience will allow for a more productive session when you bring other participants to the table. Curating who goes to which groups and activities was crucial for our team. This usually determined whether a design initiative was effective or not.

Not everyone is ready or willing to think differently right away. Some need permission to relax and unlearn some habits and mindsets that may no longer be relevant

But like that fateful workshop with a loud “No!”, you sometimes have surprise guests and for this I share lesson number two: Calibrate the design thinking tools at your disposal to each audience.

First, this means expanding your toolkit to include as many tools as you possibly can. For the service design team that I built, we learned about applied theatre improvisation techniques, service blueprinting methods and liberating structures usually applied to non-policy fields. Second, this means matching the right tools and the right facilitators to the right audience. This is where observing others and participating in other design initiatives comes in handy. This also requires trial and error, and lots of practice. And if you know your audience well, you can design the process with multiple alternatives in case something unexpected happens.

One of the most eye-opening lessons I learned was from Jake Maguire of Community Solutions, a non-profit working to end homelessness: some people need permission to innovate. The institutions we grew up with tend to dissuade us from innovating — from traditional public schools that promote rote memorisation to bureaucracies that prefer the status quo. Before inviting anyone into a human-centred design initiative, I believe in lesson number three: give everyone time to get confident.

Taking the time for individuals to arrive at the same level of creative confidence unleashes a lot more insights from the process

Not everyone is ready or willing to think differently right away. Some need permission to relax and unlearn some habits and mindsets that may no longer be relevant. Still others like that special guest of ours prioritise different values from you. Taking the time for individuals to arrive at the same level of creative confidence unleashes a lot more insights from the process. This could be as simple as that popular wallet design exercise or as powerful as a series of sessions on appreciative inquiry.

Mainstreaming a different way of understanding and solving problems, however, requires the whole of government. And governments are huge. As someone who was new to government when we first got into design thinking, I had to learn that governments are not homogenous, that each level has its unique culture and sets of unwritten norms.

These observations lead me to lesson number four: appreciate all levels of the bureaucracy. Not everyone is lucky to rebuild governments from scratch and so we have to work with existing structures. We were lucky to have access to each level of the government agencies we partnered with. This was partly due to the unique political configurations at that time and partly due to the non-controversial nature of the issues we were grappling with.

The champions we engaged also became evangelists within their level of government and beyond, helping us promote human-centred design even further than originally planned

But at any point, we could have ignored a particular level and just gone directly to those at the frontlines of the agency, those closest to the problem as some advocates would say. Thankfully we did not because working with all levels — national, regional, provincial, municipal — made it easier to institutionalise some of the reforms we worked on. This ensured that these reforms were protected even during leadership transitions.

All of the public servants we worked with were citizens too, citizens who love their country and their communities. Bureaucracies can seem overbearing and intimidating but specific citizens run them, and they can relate better to the stories of fellow citizens.

Keeping this in mind brings me to lesson number five: identify champions. I learned this from my boss who encouraged us to identify real stories in order to help fully illustrate the reforms we wished to pursue. The champions we engaged also became evangelists within their level of government and beyond, helping us promote human-centred design even further than originally planned.

With open minds, hearts, and wills, our team eventually won over that participant who said “No!” We empathised with his frustration that government action tends to be slower than ideal, and that this process may even delay that further. But we also shared how governments do not necessarily have the answers, nor are they great at implementing them once they do. We shared why this requires citizens like him to participate in policy design initiatives such as ours, and why they ought to be at the centre of these initiatives. In the end, he accepted our invitation to co-design, and I believe we became better practitioners of the craft. Now as to actually mainstreaming human-centred design, we still have a long way to go and a lot more to learn. — Karl Satinitigan,

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