• The utility to the customer of the customer service, such as an ATM network, or a product such as a media device, can be likened to the utility to the community of the public policy.
• The consumer’s freedom of choice to buy or not buy a consumer product can be likened to the citizen’s freedom of choice about whether to engage or not engage with the public policy.
• A consumer product flop can be likened to a government policy failure.

An obviously apparent point of difference is that governments have power to coerce the citizen to utilise public policy whereas the consumer product manufacturer relies upon voluntary uptake. But even here, the contextual difference is not as marked as it would appear to be.

• Democratic governments rely upon voluntary adoption or compliance over enforcement.
• Consumer product manufacturers rely upon voluntary choice to buy.
• The monetary profit for the consumer product manufacturer who relies on voluntary uptake of the consumer product is equivalent to the ballot box profit for governments whose citizens voluntarily uptake the public policy offering.

So, there is no real fundamental difference between service design processes in the consumer sphere and those that should be deployed in the public policy sphere. We can also see that the pitfalls in the design process that can lead to consumer product failure are similar to those that can lead to public policy failure. Some of the common pitfalls in the design process are:

What the commercial world recognises is that good design starts with a big idea for an unmet customer need. Consumer services such as an ATM network meet a compelling and enduring need for quick, easy and convenient access to financial services. Consider for a moment a successful consumer product – the iPhone. What Apple is known to do well is to tap into the end-user’s needs, emotions and aspirations. Successful production of Apple’s iPhone involves a design process that starts with building a strong connection with people who will use the product. Apple’s Steve Jobs has remarked several times that “Good product design starts from the outside and works its way inside”. This means the process is heavily informed by the desired experience of the end-user. The process for designing the iPhone successfully and seamlessly brings together the knowledge and expertise of interaction designers, industrial designers, engineers, technicians and marketing experts.

Let’s change context, where government is in the business of delivering services to the community – welfare payments, education, health, transport and border security. Some large government agencies in Australia have recognised a need for improved service delivery and are taking lessons from the commercial world. They are applying approaches to implementing government policy to ensure, as much as practicable, that the community has confidence in government and, when engaging with government services, has a good experience.

Typically, a government policy will go through a few phases (and hands) before implementation: policy design, legislative design and administrative design. Several government agencies are involved, each with different responsibilities in and different perspectives on bringing the policy into the world. Conversations between policy and administrative agencies are occasionally difficult because of political or power issues. Also, tension can arise between meeting the needs of the community and the possible cost of sacrificing government requirements and vice-versa. An integrated design approach and a user needs focus is a process by which both the needs of the community and the needs of government can be aligned through innovative solutions.

Much the same as the commercial world, a desired user experience can be a focusing end point for a coordinated policy, law and administrative design conversation. The critical ingredients to successfully designing government services and implementing public policy changes include:

• Policy agencies, administrators and the community having an equal voice and a common understanding of the policy idea and objectives.
• Policy agencies and administrators having an understanding of how the law can impact on community behaviours and decisions, and a real understanding of who in the community is affected a public policy.
• Research about how a public policy might affect the community. It should be focussed on understanding the context, needs and expectations of people affected, rather than simply their demographics.
• Research and community involvement, which drives the design of the experience and interaction with government services.
• A need to recognise, and wherever possible, to involve the community in the design process, as early as possible.
• How government can differentiate services based on user types or needs (segments or individuals).
• Administrative arrangements, such as systems, procedures, compliance strategies, education and information capabilities. These need to be developed to give effect to the law and enable and support the community to interact with government.

While the contexts are different, there are many similarities between how products and services are designed in a commercial context and how government services can be designed to meet the needs of the community. At ThinkPlace we design government services by following a disciplined design process that starts with building a strong connection with people who will experience the service. We believe that a good service design is one that is heavily informed by the users and their desired experience. Our process for designing services successfully and seamlessly brings together the knowledge and expertise of policy makers, administrators and the community. Community involvement in the process of designing and implementing public policy can ensure a unique and compelling experience of government services and as a result, governments have a better chance of staying in touch with the communities they serve. An integrated design process between policy makers and administrators can help get the conversation closer to a constructive collaboration across government to achieve the best outcome for users, and in the process, for government.

“People’s interactions with products can be better supported by thinking more holistically about their activities and processes rather than focusing on designing the thing as an isolated object ”

– Jane Fulton Suri

We talk about interactions and experience that people have with products and services. The question is often asked how do you show what an interaction or an experience looks like? There are many ways to answer this question and one of the most powerful techniques we use is persona development and user pathway modelling.

Personas

In the product and service design process we are keen to understand who is experiencing the benefits of the product or service. To explore this who we think about taking the experience to the level of everyday people like you and me. We want to generate deep human empathy and understanding so we develop personas. Ideally we draw from real world people and create profiles of people based on real world characteristics. These characteristics may be basic demographic details such as a person’s age, where they live, what they do, their cultural background and other important characteristics that may help us understand their needs and experiences with the product or service we are designing. This includes such characteristics as the extent of their technology saviness, what sort of skills they have or the preferences they may have.

For example, we developed a series of Practice Manager personas to help break up the homogenous organisational thinking about the world of medical practice, i.e., organisational members viewed the key users as General Medical Practitioners (GPs) and did not think about the other key people in a medical practice. The personas we developed zoomed in on the practice management user group. The characteristics we looked at included basic demographic details as well as their career into the medical profession, the scope of their day-to-day work and their technology saviness. This resulted in a variety of personas that illustrated very different types of needs and desires.

Pathways

“We shift our perspective from the massive totality of the system to the pathways of individual human experience” Richard Buchanan, “Interaction Pathways in Organizational Life,” in Managing as Designing, ed. Richard Boland and Fred Collopy, 54-64. Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.

The experience of an individual, or as described above a persona, can be mapped in ways to show the touch-points or the products and services they interact with to achieve a certain goal. That goal may be to pass through school with straight A’s, or to run a successful business, or to buy and sell property for a profit or to get the right medical advice to improve quality of their life. Clarifying the goal helps contextualise the design of distinct products or services. It helps designers reduce the noise of complexity and allows a human perspective to be held long enough to see what we might be able to do to make that experience dignified and valued. The idea of creating a pathway is both an analytical and creative process. It requires a deep understanding of users’ experiences, which can be based on interviews, observing people, shadowing people in their day-to-day activities and so on. Then, we can express this data as a visual model that allows closer investigation and exploration about that experience – as it happens to today, as we think it may happen in the future or as we think it should happen. This expression is all taken from the user’s perspective.

The pathway technique is an interesting, engaging, creative and expressive way to tackle business problems. Most business problems are complex, have many dimensions, and are not easily solvable. If we take a human approach and consider a person’s experience through this complexity, we can develop a pathway and then we can start to make real, practical and meaningful changes to that system.

A user pathway allows us to look at the whole system from the user’s point of view. The pathway map itself is simply a visual way of getting our heads around the complexity. Making sense of a complex system is sometimes easier when looked at from the user’s perspective. We can look at the combination of products and services that make up the system and the user’s experience through that system.

Constructing a user pathway forces an organisation to take an outside in view, rather than an inside out view. Whilst this sounds like a simple and logical concept, it is much more difficult in practice. It is much easier to think from the perspective of our own organisational structures, business processes and technologies. A well-constructed user pathway allows us to develop empathy and a real understanding of the user’s experience in an organisational system. If we can get into the user’s space and think about the product or service from their perspective, we are more likely to design and make things which the user finds useful, useable and desirable. User pathways are helpful tools for dealing with complexity and facilitate dialogue with end users. They also make sense of respective roles in implementation as the intent is delivered.

User pathways are used both to understand the current experiences and to identify points of opportunity to improve the user experience. The pathway map can help navigate the organisation to both the touch-points that can be changed and the back-end layers of organisational design such as business process, people and structures, technology and systems.

This sample pathway was developed for a project, which designed a complex government system that involved all Australians registering their personal and health-related information. The pathway visual captures general steps, which all ‘users’ would experience. It focuses not just on what they have to do as part of registering, but how they felt and the sorts of questions they might be asking throughout the process. As part of the design process, we also asked ourselves what is needed to deliver on this experience.

The creation and use of personas and pathways brings a human dimension into organsational deliberations about tackling complex problems, designing change and improving user expeirence products and services. It has been our experience that the development of personas and pathways engages managers and decision makers in understanding the real impacts of their decisions in the lives of the public they serve.

Here are eight features of design thinking and their benefit, compared with more conventional thinking.

Aotearoa, rugged individual. Glisten like a pearl. At the bottom of the world.
The tyranny of distance. Didn’t stop the cavalier. So why should it stop me.
I’ll conquer and stay free.

- Split Enz. Six Months in a Leaky Boat

The tyranny of distance has made Australia and New Zealand (Aotearoa) rugged “individuals”, historically known for our innovation or as kiwi Ernest Rutherford[1] once stated “Gentleman, we didn’t have the money, so we had to think”.

Foreground

In a speech on 12^th August 2010 to the Australia New Zealand School of Government, New Zealand’s Minister of Finance, the Honourable Bill English, stated that “We owe it to them (the next generation) to innovate, to take risks, to push the boundaries and to pay our own way. The clock is ticking.”

Earlier in his speech he also queried where we would look for new directions and ideas, stating “To be frank – they will not come from Australia and New Zealand.” He implies that this is because we compare ourselves with the US, UK and Europe who have burning platforms that call for cost-crunching innovations.

I disagree and believe that new ideas for the public sector can come from within Australia and New Zealand. Our countries have been very innovative in the past in both the public and private sector. We can continue to be so.

We do not need to be on the same intensely burning platform as our northern hemisphere counter-parts. We have powerful drivers of our own, and a track record of ingenuity and innovation. We can co-design with our insightful designers and innovators in the private sector. We can bring a unique New Zealand and Australia approach to innovating.

We only need to look at the Kiwi-Aussie Fred Hollows who looked at the poor state of eyesight in poor countries. He innovated to restore thousands of people’s vision using new operating techniques at very low cost.

Fred also challenged Kiwi-ex-Englishman Ray Avery to develop intraocular lenses in “one of the most poorest, most technically-compromised countries in the world”[2] Eritrea, and then Nepal. Not only did Ray build a factory to produce the highest quality lenses at a fraction of the normal cost ($10 to market), but also he created a knock-on global effect causing the cost of the generic lens market to plummet. There are many other such examples from New Zealand and Australia.

Private and Public sectors co-creating

We need to rethink our business models, products and services across our economies. We also need a strong, smart and enabling public sector behind us. Australia and New Zealand may have a “tyranny of distance” challenge to overcome. For the private sector this means not just filling up ships with goods but filling up bandwidth with IP and value-added goods. In the public sector, it means not relying solely on parachuted overseas solutions from larger more complex administrations but tapping into the rich seam of seeing things differently down-under and innovating.

While our comparator countries struggle to overcome the inherent inertia of changing large and complex administrative systems, Australia and New Zealand are small enough to co-create, prototype, refine and implement new ideas at pace. These ideas can be sourced from within our countries and also adapted from those emerging internationally.

So what is public sector innovation?

There is a growing awareness that innovation is just as important in the public sector as it is to a healthy private sector. The public sector is facing a perfect storm of unproductive operations, pressures to significantly reduce public spending and out-dated service experiences.

Public sector innovation is now seen as being critical to delivering excellent value for money over a sustained period of time. However as Gary Hamel once stated “Despite all the pro-innovation rhetoric, most still hold the view that innovation is a rather dangerous diversion from the real work of wringing the last ounce of efficiency out of core business processes.”

As in the private sector, the public sector embraces efficiency generating methods such as lean thinking, six sigma. These are great approaches for wringing the efficiencies out of where you already are; however they tend not to produce significant breakthroughs. These approaches rely on deductive and inductive logic where variation is the enemy and management by fact is the friend. The nature of innovation is to come up with new solutions that have not been thought of before in your context. As Roger Martin[3] puts it “you cannot prove a new thought in advance” you need to apply abductive logic, the logic of what could be.”

Successful innovation requires us to focus on what is desirable from a customer’s perspective, what is viable from a business perspective and smartly leveraging technology to its maximum.

Swimming in millions of innovation definitions

If you Google search innovation and design definitions, you will obtain in excess of one hundred million hits for both! Geoff Mulgan[4] is one of the definition authors. He elegantly states that public sector innovation is simply “new ideas that work at creating public value”. He also has authored a number of useful papers highlighting the challenges of innovating in the public sector.

The challenge becomes one of generating new ideas which are useful, usable, efficient and of value to our citizens. These ideas also need to make it from the drawing board to the street; they need to be implementable and implemented.

Where do new ideas come from?

For some people new ideas spring up randomly, but for others new ideas frequently occur in the shower, dropping off to sleep or walking the dog.  These tend to be random moments of inspiration and insight.

So how might we create “new ideas that work at creating public value” on a consistent basis? How might we improve our ability to innovate within the public sector?

Just as organisations invest in improving their ability to project manage after ideas are converted to scopes, so too can organisations invest in a capability to consistently innovate. As Kohli and Mulgan[5] state in “other fields such as science and medicine – innovation doesn’t happen by accident. There are well-developed systems to foster innovation”.

These systems and approaches involve improving the consistency of discovering new needs-based and problem-solving insights, generating new ideas, making them really fast through prototyping and developing useful solutions. This can be achieved in the public sector through the application of design thinking approaches and co-design capabilities.

Design thinking seeks to make these random moments less random and more intentional. Design introduces a broad-based approach to explore the user world, unearth insights, prototype possibilities and configure new activity systems to make them real. Design is concerned about the whole solution, made up of all its parts working in an integrated fashion. The discipline of design brings a mindset, methodology and a toolkit, which enables innovative solutions to be manifested on a consistent basis.

Looking through different eyes

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes

- Marcel Proust

A significant portion of policy and services designed for the citizens of our countries is conceived by people with great intent who reside in our large and/or capital cities. Although they have authentic intent, these people are usually not representative of the citizens they are designing for. They are looking through their own perspectives and experiences.

Hence, although the policies and solutions produced are workable, they are not always usable, understandable or desirable. The right intent but a lack of broad perspective or “new eyes” can lead to inside-out incremental solutions, which often complicate our lives and add to our compliance burden. We think we are helping, but often we are not.

Design provides a proven set of approaches to see the citizen’s world from new and insightful perspectives; it then translates those needs-based and problem-solving insights into a new activity system. This has been called taking an outside-in perspective or looking through a different lens.

Customers and public sector delivery staff are often the forgotten innovation enabler. Unless there is an explicit approach, this critical source of insight and ideas won’t be leveraged to its fullest potential.

The clock is ticking

In summary, innovation in the public sector is critical at this time more than any other time in recent memory. As Bill English states “the clock is ticking” and we cannot leave innovation up to future generations. Australia and New Zealand are innovative countries with down-under can-and-must-do talented people. If we are committed to consistently generating new possibilities and not just tweaking our current reality then design thinking is the proven vehicle for innovation.

The tyranny of distance. Didn’t stop the cavalier. So why should it stop me. I’ll conquer and stay free.

[1] known as the “father” of nuclear physics for splitting the atom

[2] Ray Avery. Rebel with a Cause. .Auckland, NZ: Random House, 2010.

[3] Roger Martin, The Design of Business: Why design thinking is the next competitive advantage. Toronto: Harvard Business Press, 2009.

[4] Geoff Mulgan, Chief Executive, the Young Foundation, UK. http://www.youngfoundation.org

[5] Jitinder Kohli and Geoff Mulgan. Capital Ideas: How to generate innovation in the public sector. July 2010. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/07/pdf/dww_capitalideas.pdf

Purpose

First, there needs to be a clear purpose for taking a citizen centric approach. There can be many purposes. One government may be seeking to demonstrate a different model of democracy, shifting the balance of power for decision making towards the community and away from government. Another government may seek to improve the current set of services by taking a citizen centric approach. Yet another might want to improve compliance with the law by making it as easy as possible to comply with the law. These are quite different purposes and will result in different focuses to the citizen centric approach. They may lead to different indicators of success for co-design.

Relinquishing power

Second, for leaders the decision to take a citizen centric approach can be daunting. Citizen centric means that the bureaucracy must relinquish some power. As the power shifts towards the community, the leader is admitting that he/she is not the authority. It takes significant courage to give away previous tight control of design decisions. It is much more comfortable to take a well reasoned analytical paper to the community and consult by asking for feedback than to take a blank sheet and co-design with them to reach a genuine citizen centric result. Being prepared to listen takes humility, placing the community’s needs above the needs of the organisation. Therefore, a commitment to co-design takes significant courage and commitment on the part of leaders at several levels. Leaders need to make space for a synthetic and creative process in what is often a highly analytical and risk averse environment.

Leading change

Third, the commitment to a citizen centric approach must permeate to the right levels. Governments comprise elected representatives and permanent administrative staff. Both groups must be committed to take this approach. Furthermore, within government agencies the commitment to taking a citizen centric approach needs to reach to the levels that are accountable for delivering today’s results. Staff at these levels (generally at the third or fourth tier) are under pressure to perform and have limited capacity to entertain ideas that won’t deliver a clear benefit.

Engagement

Fourth, it is necessary to spend time understanding the problem and the vision with the community rather than assuming that you know what the problem is.  Often, questions are asked that make sense to the organisation rather than to the community. The community does not see government as a series of separate agencies working in different jurisdictions. They see government as a whole and want to be treated that way. The differences between consultation, collaboration and co-design should be recognised. Consultation tends to be passive, seeking ratification for an idea that is already very well formed. Collaboration means working more closely with the community and researching with them what their needs are. Co-design invites the citizen into the design process more strongly. Co-design occurs when the government hands more control over to the community to develop their designs.

Evolution

Fifth, a citizen centric approach does not just happen once the decision to take this approach is made. It takes time and effort and the capability evolves over time. A relationship with the community has to be developed. Results need to be demonstrated. Practices improve and evolve over time. Successes occur and are built on. Failures provide an opportunity to learn and grow.

Capability

Sixth, engaging with the community is a process and a field that is emerging as a discipline. There are techniques that are proven and work. There are techniques that are new and emerging. There are techniques that are not effective. Therefore, a leadership commitment to taking a citizen centric approach must be rapidly followed by a commitment to build capability both in the organisation and in the community. There are specialised knowledge, methods and tools to be developed and deployed. There are also dedicated roles including design thinkers and researchers that are empathetic with people and are driven to understand the world of the citizen.

Sustainability

Finally, to make a citizen centric approach effective and sustainable, co-design must be embedded into the way policy and services are developed and delivered. Equally, capability development requires a sustained and significant investment as well as organisational evolution.

Conclusion

The concept of co-design with the community sounds simple. It is not. If it were, it would be widespread because there is no shortage of proponents for taking this approach. It is much harder than just a request for co-design take place. There are considerations of purpose, the need to relinquish power, the ability to lead change, engagement, evolution, capability development and sustainability. Organisations that have achieved success in this area have had a sustained vision and investment over many years before co-design has become the way of doing business.

This process of alignment between service definition and service delivery is part of organisational design, and a business process mapping is the key tool used to understand and defining effective business processes to drive effective service delivery. For new services, business process mapping makes the intended service real in that it defines the right mechanism for delivery. For existing services, business process mapping is an important tool for evaluating whether the internal alignment of resources and processes is optimised or could be improved.

This is why at ThinkPlace we view business process mapping as a critical link between service design and organisation design. It is one of five aspects of a holistic service design approach:

• service solutions;
• service portfolio and supporting systems;
• technology architecture;
• business processes; and
• measurement systems, methods and metrics.

Business process mapping— the ThinkPlace approach

The ThinkPlace approach is based on sound theory that we have drawn on to create agile and effective business process mapping. Theory suggests that process mapping is a tool that is used to develop a model showing the relationships between people, activities, information and objects that are involved in the undertaking of a business process. There are four perspectives that can be used to aid in mapping a business process:

• The functional perspective, which signifies the fundamental activities and related salient decisions and flows of information;
• The behavioural perspective, which signifies when, and how, the activities of the process are carried out;
• The organisational perspective, which signifies where, and by which role, the activities in the process are performed; and finally
• The informational perspective, which signifies the structure and relationships of the information that is influenced by the activities.

Our methodology delivers on these four perspectives without becoming a cumbersome process in itself. A process map is usually generated within a single day’s workshop. This approach in itself limits the depth of mapping to two levels: Level 0 and Level 1.

Level 0 provides an overview of the key phases and the roles involved in the process. It shows flows between activities and roles, but to keep the map clean, it doesn’t include the informational perspective.

Level 1 provides a more focused view of the process. This level of map zooms in on the Level 0 phase, gives more detail on the activities and includes all perspectives. Level 1 maps also provide a link to the procedures and guidelines. However, the mapping of procedures and guidelines are designated as Level 2 and are generally undertaken by our clients as an internal activity.

There are several steps that we go through to develop a Business Process Map.

1. Develop the intent of the mapping exercise. Why are we mapping the process? What happens currently? What would it look like if the process were ideal?
2. Develop role statements. Who has a key role in the process? Who is critical for the process to occur? With whom do these critical roles interact in the course of the process?
3. Develop the map. What are the activities, decisions, information flows and handoffs in the process?
4. Refine the map. What systems, tools and channels are utilised during the process?
5. Complete the map. What legislation, policies, frameworks, procedures and guidelines are in place to shape the process?
6. Provide recommendations for improvement. Where are the inefficiencies in the process? What doesn’t work? What does work that we shouldn’t lose? If the process were ideal how would it look?
7. Map the future. How do the recommendations change the process? What does the ideal process look like?
8. Feedback and refinement. Once this information is documented, ThinkPlace shares the map with the clients to gather their feedback and iteratively refine the process map.

Using both our knowledge of the services a business is offering and our knowledge of the business’s processes, we can assess how the business is organised. Organisation design is concerned with the structure, roles and positions within a business and their relationships to one another. There are always multiple different structures that could be chosen when redesigning an organisation. This usually means that there will be tradeoffs when selecting any final method of organisation design. If we understand the business’s service offering (service design) and how they deliver these services (via business process – business process mapping) we can make informed choices about how the business is organised (organisation design), and ensure alignment between the design of the organisation and the intended service delivery and service use experiences.

Whether it’s transacting with a bank, booking a flight, dealing with the medical system around a health issue, claiming government benefits or reporting on government obligations, services that help and delight us leave a lasting impression of responsiveness, ingenuity and kindness. Services that hinder or confuse us not only give us a poor impression, but actually stop us from working effectively with the service deliverer, even if we want to. In the world of service delivery, getting service design right is a critical part of an organisation’s success.

But getting the design of a service right is no small achievement. Designing services is complex, costly and challenging. This is because typically, a service represents a significant piece of business and technology engineering, and needs a range of skills, experience and opinions to be brought together to shape whatever’s being made. On the flip side, if a service is designed right, the value to the organisation and its customers can be enormous. It has never been more important to design services so that they deliver the right benefit to both the service deliverer and the service user.

Taking a prototype approach to the design of services is a powerful way of making sure that a service has the best chance of being delivered within budget and with an outcome that meets and exceeds expectations. It reduces the risk of failure by making issues and opportunities emerge early in the development process, at a point where it’s still possible to influence things dramatically. And it inspires creativity because it encourages teams to generate a lot of ideas and narrow them down to the gems, before they turn into capital-funded effort.

Traditionally, services are designed using a linear process where all the components of it are spec’d out, built, tested to make sure that they work, and then released into the chaos of a live environment. Later on, the service is evaluated. This is the point where organisations find out if the design has worked, using metrics or focus groups. The problem with this approach is that there is an upfront and risky commitment to an idea or approach and a significant investment to get to the working service. Once this commitment has been made, it is unlikely that there will be any big adjustments to the service design if it is found lacking.

And even if there is scope to make changes late-game, there are better ways to spend service development dollars. In a nutshell, a straightforward way to lower your risk is to front-load the exploration of ideas in the form of relatively low-cost prototypes, and take risks in exploring options before the significant investments are made. That is, take a prototyping approach.

A prototyping approach

There are many definitions for the phrase a prototyping approach. Based on my experience in the private and public sectors, best-practice prototyping usually has at least five common characteristics:

• Ethnographic research – prototyping processes often include field studies where researchers visit users and observe them. These observations are gold-mines of information about users’ typical needs, preferences, habits, belief and experiences, as well as the environmental and social context that they inhabit. This information can radically alter a project team’s perceptions of what they are designing, and what will work.
• Co-design – prototyping is not an activity that works well as a solo venture. Co-design is about bringing people together – people representing not just the intent of a service delivery project, but also representing the business and the users. Co-design also highlights the enablers and constraints (such as technology, legality etc.). When prototyping is based on a collaboration that harnesses the ideas, skills, experience and knowledge of a well-formulated group, the thing being prototyped will be far more creative and robust than something that lacks this rich input. This is especially true when the group has a facilitator that has strong experience in structured yet flexible design processes and can help it to work effectively.
• Iterative prototype development – a prototype is essentially a rough model of the service that is being created. The rough model represents the finished product, but is created quickly, as inexpensively as possible, and refined again and again. Through the process of refinement, two things happen.Firstly, the prototype matures. It may start out as a rough sketch on a whiteboard, showing how the service will work. Over time, it increases in fidelity, becoming more and more realistic and finished, until it becomes an accurate description of all the products (forms, call centre scripts, web pages, application user interfaces etc.) being created, as well as the business processes and user experiences that bind them together into an integrated service.Secondly, the prototype becomes optimised, becoming more efficient and effective in terms of what it needs to do to work for both the service deliverer and the service user.

• Usability testing – as the prototype matures, every iteration is driven by two forces – the collaborative refinement of co-design and the reality-check of usability. Usability testing is where real-life users of the service being prototyped use the prototype in development, to achieve a typical goal. This need not be a huge group, but it must be well-selected to ensure they are representative of the service users. Watching where the users succeed, fail, or just do the unexpected, provides valuable clues about the next step of refinement. This refinement could be anything from accepting what works to re-designing or even completely re-thinking the service approach.

• Prototyping economy – the fidelity and cost of a prototype should start very low and increase over time. Keeping prototypes as inexpensive as possible reduces change friction (the view that so much has been invested into an idea that it must be carried out even if it’s not the best solution). Investment in the solution is critical when distinguishing between a pilot and a prototype. A pilot represents a commitment to an approach and a final test. A prototype is a model that is meant to be used for learning and acts as a springboard to the next level of service understanding. In this context, failure and re-direction are both a good thing, because their implication is a better product at the end of the project, not of sunk financial and emotional investment.

What we prototype when we prototype services

If we consider the make-up of a typical service, it quickly becomes apparent that there’s a lot going on. A service has multiple components that need to be created or changed and integrated in order to produce something that meets both the organisation’s needs and the expectations of their clients:

• User interfaces, ranging from pixels (websites, software screens on a kiosk, computer, mobile phone etc.) to paper (forms, booklets), from faces across a front counter to voices over a telephone,
• Information (moving from client to organisation, between people and systems) that communicates meaning and drive,
• Business processes, which direct how information flows between people and systems, what happens to it, and how it gets transformed and used,
• Technology, which enables the processes and enacts them,
• People, in various roles, who drive the service using technology, information and processes,
• Societal controls – from laws to norms, customs and beliefs – which need to be incorporated into the weave of the design. They place constraints on the service and give it a context of use.

Somehow, all of this complexity needs to come together to give the users of the service an experience that is at a bare minimum coherent and useful. And at the same time, the service needs to accomplish the organisation’s business intent.

Iterative prototyping provides a means to model this complexity cheaply, explore it rigourously, get rich user and stakeholder input, deal with risk early, and achieve both practical innovation and a positive business and client outcome at the end of the project.

Traditionally, organisational change is designed using a number of lenses:

• Systems (what are the systems supporting the change)
• Structure (what is the structure required to support the change – roles and responsibilities)
• Program / project (what projects are required to give effect to the change – governance arrangements)

I am proposing another lens – Culture. This lens is about the people, their values, behaviour and their readiness for change.

You will often hear people talking about “organisational culture”, and the impact this culture has on how things are done in the organisation. Some of the culture descriptions with more positive connotations will be “recognition for good work, honest feedback, empowered”; and some of the culture descriptions with more negative connotations will be “micro-management, blaming, taking the credit for the work of others”. Some people will be finely tuned into the behaviours that underpin these descriptions and their responses will be influenced by them, while other people will be seemingly oblivious to these behaviours, or perhaps even provocative in their responses.

The more positive behaviours described will result in participants actively achieving in a user-centred design environment. They will take risks, be able to present work that is an early iteration and not “correct”, work constructively together, listen to and act upon the suggestions of all members of the group. The more negative behaviours described can result in a very distorted user-centred design environment. Participants may be reluctant to design and present products that are not completely polished and final, the iteration of products does not add value as any feedback can be personal, or only given by one person. As organisations are groups of people, not inanimate objects, each group of participants involved in a user-centred design experience will behave differently.  How do we ensure an effective design experience?

If the behaviour of the group is on the positive scale, the user-centred design experience has the potential to be creative, challenging and to result in more effective design experience for all participants. This will enable the group to capture the potential from opportunity. Therefore, when preparing for a user-centred experience, understanding the behaviour of the group involved influences the facilitation techniques that can be used.

The questions to be asked during a preparation phase, and these may be overtly of participants, or elicited as part of a conversation, include:

• How do you do things around here?
  • What happens if you make a mistake?
  • Who makes decisions – what level, what support etc?
  • What risks are managers prepared to take?
  • If you have a good idea, who gets the credit?
• What motivates people here?
• What is the absenteeism rate, and why do you think it is like this – what does this tell you?

The responses to these questions will provide significant insight into the positive or negative nature of the culture, and the readiness of the participant group for a user-centred design experience. A group with a positive nature will respond to the opportunity; a group with a negative nature will need some close guidance to help them maximise the opportunity of the experience.

It is also possible to understand the group behaviour by watching and listening to what happens in group activities and general plenary discussions:

• Who speaks first, and is there a consistent second or response person?
• Is anybody going to challenge the “manager”, and what happens with other participants when the manager is challenged?
• Is there a “leader” or “leaders” in the room, and are all participants active “followers”?
• Is one person having a significant impact on the behaviour of others, and what is that impact – are others immediately trying to pacify, or justify?

These behavioural nuances will impact upon the user-based design experience and have the potential to be a barrier to design.

Should the barriers be evident, the designers need to “manage” the barriers. This may involve:

• working with small groups, and ensuring the participants of the groups continue to change;
• using the small groups to design different parts of the change, and then bringing the concepts back to a plenary, using a voting system that allows all participants a number of confidential votes to evaluate the components of each design against an agreed criteria, taking the components with the most votes and putting them together to build the next iteration;
• moving the focus of the room from a “front stage” to all standing and working at a table with no leadership position, and have all participants working on something individual within the design.

The cultural behaviour lens is an essential consideration when planning for organisational change, and it is the lens that can be easily forgotten when designing change. Often the system, structure and program will be the lenses that have the obvious financial implications, and therefore they become the major focus for the decision-makers. It is the responsibility of the designers to make sure culture is included.

But a Thinkplace Blueprint is much, much more than a document. It is a process, a technique, an output and an outcome.

In fact, the process we go through to develop the Blueprint is as important as the final document itself – and nothing makes us happier than seeing a client experience first-hand the power of the Blueprint process in focusing effort and moving organisations quickly to meaningful solutions!

What is a Blueprint?

We like to think about Blueprints in the following terms:

• Blueprint as a process – the decision to deliberately develop an articulated view of a design problem and solution and to document that view.
• Blueprint as a technique – a collaborative design process which includes users, stakeholders and the organisation itself in a combination of research, analysis and co-design.
• Blueprint as an output – a series of ‘chapters’ that document the design process and depict the entire design problem.
• Blueprint as an outcome – the continued use of the Blueprint document to inform the build and implementation of the design solution and to communicate the solution to the organisation (including the continued evolution and update of the Blueprint document as appropriate).

In developing a Blueprint it is critical to understand that the document itself, though having some basic structure, needs to be relevant to the design process itself.

We recently developed a Blueprint for a client in three days that ran to around 10 pages. At the same time, we are working on a Blueprint that is three months in the making and the first draft is around 70 pages of detailed content. In each case, we are working on an output that is relevant and required by the client for that particular design problem.

In terms of what is inside a Blueprint, we would generally attempt to document a combination of the following features (or chapters):

• Scope – setting the scene for the focus of the design activity.
• Intent – a critical one page definition including short descriptions of the system in focus, boundaries and desired future state.
• Current State – the result of early design research. A comprehensive view of the current design, including business process maps, user experience and key data, as appropriate.
• Future State – conceptual design solutions at a high level that map the experience as it ‘will’ be.
• Pathways – client experience maps that combine the motivation, touch points and desired outcomes for every group interacting with the whole or part of the design solution.
• Product Breakdowns and Prototypes – more detail on the key elements that make up the Future State solution including prototypes developed during the Blueprinting process.

Each of these chapters will rely heavily on visual presentation of detailed data and on the client or citizen experience.

Why a Blueprint?

A Blueprint allows us to describe to the client the whole change that we are designing. Because of the type of content generated, we can illustrate the end-to-end story of the change. And we use the term story deliberately. Many project or program design documents go into great detail on the ‘what’ and the ‘how,’ without really telling a compelling story about the ‘why’.

A really great Blueprint creates a compelling narrative about why a change is required and then delivers the detail on how the change will be achieved. In describing the whole change you are actually forced to support a holistic design and to map and identify where things are connected.

A related and important outcome is to create shared understanding of what is being built, by whom and how. A Blueprint, just like the architect or drafting plans we derive the name from, is a map of what to build. By defining who and how the elements of the solution will be built, you are enabling design thinking to influence and improve the project management cycle.

We Blueprint so that design thinking influences the ongoing project management cycle right through to execution. To this end, having an articulated and agreed intent that is visible from design right through the build and evaluate phase is a key outcome of the Blueprinting process.

Why are they powerful?

There are a number of reasons our clients find Blueprints powerful.

Often the Blueprinting process and techniques are the first time an organisation has attempted to undertake interdisciplinary design. As part of a Blueprint process we will insist that representatives from a range of disciplines are involved. Lawyers, marketers, front line staff, IT and other systems specialists all come together to design the solution. This is another critical technique as the members of the design team will eventually become the champions of the design. Even the most holistic design ends up back with specialist disciplines for build and delivery, so Blueprint champions become a powerful force to remind the organisation of the design process.

Blueprints also become powerful communication and engagement tools. The Blueprint’s narrative should engage the organisation and excite people not only to deliver the change described in that Blueprint, but to be involved in their own process and bring design thinking to their everyday work.

Finally, Blueprinting tells a positive story. Showing Current State, but defining a Future State moves an organisation from the obsession with Risk Management to what we call Opportunity Management. Of course, thorough analysis and definition of risk is part of the design process, but a Blueprint offers a process and outcome that gets the organisation to ask “What is Possible?”.

Co-design is a high-engagement design technique that involves bringing people into the design process—both the people who will be eventual users of the new policy, law or service, and the people who will be delivering it. New policy, law or services constitute change, and it is critical to understand not only the impact of this chance, but also how to best approach it so that the change initiative has the best chance of having the intended effect.

Thus, the purpose of co-design is to bring user insight[1] into the design process, so that change is informed by these insights from the start. This increases the chances that the end result will makes sense in the context of the user, and is a more effective approach than designing from a set of assumptions that are put to the test only when the final solution is implemented and used by people. In other words, co-design is an approach for getting it right the first time.

Co-design is based on the belief that all people have different ideals and perspectives and that any design process needs to deal with these. Co-design seeks to uncover these differences and manages the process of converting these insights into direction and criteria for the change initiative.

Co-design:

• involves the people affected by the change in the design process—people in the community and people delivering the change
• requires that we step outside our world and into the user’s world—literally
• seeks to understand the whole system and the end-to-end customer experience, and then purposefully design all elements to create the desired change
• means taking time to understand the user’s world and model this understanding so it can be leveraged into services with high levels of acceptance and success
• requires empathy for the people using the service and an openness to different world views
• identifies the intersection of what is desirable, what is possible and what is viable

What does it look like?

Undertaking co-design means leaving the office and venturing into the world of the user. This can mean different things: from telephone interviews to traveling to the context in which the change initiative will be experienced, to bringing people to work together on prototyping ideas and possible options. Co-design is a dynamic and creative process through which we gains access to the community and draw out relevant information and insights. This might mean that there are different engagement activities that make up a co-design plan. We tailor co-design engagements to each situation, so our co-design technique toolkit grows and evolves with each co-design project.

To an organisation not familiar with co-design, the process of reaching out and interacting with people might seem chaotic. It is certainly a fluid process, but there is also a body of practice with specialised tools, protocols and techniques to manage the engagement.

The protocols used in co-design include approaches for protecting privacy, for gaining access to certain groups of people, for positioning the engagement so participants feel comfortable and are more likely to participate openly and for exploring possibilities while managing expectations.

The techniques span all aspects of co-design—(1) accessing the right people (the right people frequently include those who will be unsympathetic to the change initiative!), (2) drawing out information and insights that are relevant and (3) shaping this information and these insights into formats that capture what is important and provide momentum for design decision-making.

So co-design looks different from an internally focused design process. But it also feels different. One of the most powerful aspects of co-design is that it brings an element of empathy to the designers and change-drivers as well as authenticity to the change initiative. Co-design is an approach for getting real about what the change ought to be in the first place. It uncovers authentic areas of change opportunity, i.e., what are the real people and community problems and issues? It brings to the surface a range of change interventions that will connect with people and work, i.e., what is the difference that will make a difference? And it designs those change interventions to maximise adoption and compliance, i.e., how can the change be usable, accessible, easy to get right and hard to get wrong?

When do you co-design?

You co-design during the entire development process:

• to create a vivid picture of the context into which the change will be implemented upfront, before the change is defined;
• to define the form the change should take and define a blueprint that describes the change holistically;
• to ensure the usability, alignment and effectiveness of all change initiative components (i.e., enabling objects, environments, service delivery scripts and protocols, business processes, etc.) during design and implementation of the change.

At a strategic level, co-design can be used to uncover issues such as what is possible; where are the areas of opportunity to develop or rethink services and what new services are required? At this level, co-design asks the strategic questions: what are the real issues to address, what behaviour or outcomes do we seek, why do we need change, what does a future state look like, what intervention-types will achieve the future state and on whom should the interventions focus?

At a change initiative view, co-design can be used to define the criteria and qualities of the change initiative—what are the components and how are these best integrated to achieve the most desirable results?

At the design view, co-design is about engagement of users for evaluation of design in real terms. That is, in the real and often messy context within which the design lives. It is about removing judgement of how people ought to act, and understanding how people really act and why. By engaging people with prototypes of the change, it is possible to evaluate and refine potential solutions iteratively, getting closer and closer to be optimum design each time.

Some critical distinctions

Co-design, a worthwhile undertaking

Co-design is certainly a different approach to an inside-out, linear design process. While special capability is needed to apply this technique, more and more government agencies are adopting the co-design approach, and finding that over time, and with the right guidance, they can build and refine this way of working. And the benefits from successful implementation of co-design—increased community trust, better services, increased compliance, reduction of policy implementation failure etc.—make the journey worth embarking upon, to transform the way agencies conceive, design and deliver change.