The What, Why and How of Design Thinking and Collective Impact part 2 of 3

In the last blog post, the Acumen/IDEO Design Thinking class (map) was looked at as part of the Living Cities online Collective Impact Course and compared with a similar program previously offered by the Stanford University dschool.

The stated NCP goal in taking a design thinking class the first time was to see how it could be incorporated into a community-based direct deliberative democracy approach to community governance. Design Thinking has had its own NCP wiki-page for some time. It has been of interest and relevance to New Community Paradigms for the reason that it is seen as being both solution oriented and inclusive, intentionally bringing in a variety of perspectives to face a challenge, not limited to only those with particular areas of expertise. Making it potentially useful to a diverse group of community members coming together to discuss problems, say with traffic and school crossings or other community challenges.  

Greater use of design thinking could scale from improving individual user interface with a particular app to helping to implement larger scalable, community-based, collaborative efforts such as Collective Impact or The Next Systems Project by deeply understanding the needs of the community. Another developing premise is that design thinking can help navigate the maze of complex ‘wicked’ challenges facing our communities. The Acumen/IDEO course comes closer to achieving those goals.

Important lessons were still taken from the Design Thinking Action Lab. The Stanford University d-school approach cited in Incorporating Design Thinking into New Community Paradigms emphasized the importance of drilling down to the individual.

Design Thinking demonstrates that there is an important difference between designing for individuals as the average of a class or for a group of individuals and instead designing for one specific individual. The later is more aligned with a human-centered design or user-centered design perspective by emphasizing a deeper understanding of problems from the perspective of different stakeholders, not as a member of a class or a category, but as a unique individual. It can be applied in this way to the creation of innovative products, services and processes.

Looking for extreme users can also help provide insight in understanding the experiences of people at the statistical edges, “(P)eople who are in extreme positions one way or the other are exhibiting needs more acutely than the average person,” according to Andrew Haeg, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Center for Collaborative Journalism at Mercer University. 

The Knight Digital Media Center believes that design thinking can develop better solutions for community organizations, especially foundations, and community media. This perspective can be extended, according to the Knight article, “Can design thinking power better solutions for community foundations?”, to small groups of people by diving deep with them to really understand their day-to-day behavior, their context, how they feel, what they do and how, instead of talking with a scientifically representative sample. 

The Incourage Community Foundation’s initial goal was working with the community of Wisconsin Rapids on developing new ways of listening, talking and interacting, so as to encourage a culture ripe for self-organizing and collective action. The impact of their work with residents was increased through incorporating adaptive skills and design thinking. Applying adaptive skills prepared the ground so that a human-centered design approach created deep roots helping to transform the people and the culture of the place where they worked and lived. Design thinking can help community foundations frame the question, “How might we craft information solutions that meet the deepest needs of our community?” 

If Design Thinking could be implemented in a community setting it then could perhaps develop into a needed skill by community development workers in the public and private sectors but not on its own. It needs to be integrated with other approaches to community building and change. The primary bias for this blog has been towards systems thinking and more recently, Collective Impact. While it might seem that design thinking is being relegated to a secondary role it has, I believe, the potential to be a significant catalyst.

Since October of last year, this blog began, with A Map for Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking, a more concerted effort of proposing models, such as Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking map, integrating systems thinking with a system of deliberative and participatory or direct democratic community governance. These maps are made up of Causal Loop Diagrams, involving feedback within the system in question.

Within that map, the role of "Civic and Community Groups" is envisioned as being the juncture between the two foundational reinforcing loops R1 Deliberative  Democratic Dialogue and  "R2 Working with Systems Thinking”. This would involve working with "Systems Thinking Facilitators" and other community government "Staff" on the development of specific proposals for projects, programs or policies which would come from the community or from selected or assigned leadership in the community. The actual creation of the projects, programs or policies should require the use of design thinking.  This, it can be argued, would support both the implementation of systems thinking in a complex and participatory mode within Jackson’s SOSM Framework. It could also assist in integrating Community Groups into a system of Community Based Virtual Systemic Inquiry. 

There are capacities that are important in both systems thinking and design thinking, including the importance of mindsets, whether the seven mindsets of the IDEO approach to design thinking or the foundational mindset of the system thinking iceberg. This might mean that design thinking could help in overcoming, though likely not eliminate, the inherent and sometimes conflicting dichotomy between hard and soft system thinking approaches, (approaches which can be seen in the general tendencies of people) as was discussed in A Map for a Pathway to New Community Paradigms. It could also be helpful, if it follows IDEO’s balanced pragmatism, with overcoming potential stumbling blocks with working with community activists that might arise if there isn’t a set discipline to walk the space between stifling creativity and becoming too attached to an idea that isn’t going anywhere,.

The community impact of design thinking could also be extended further. Art as a Path of Social Disruptive Innovation Towards New Community Paradigms asserts that communities should add artistic thinking to design thinking and systems thinking as means of generating public involvement and community innovation. These three types of thinking can be seen as being both independent and integrated at the same time. 

Design thinking could help ensure that artistically inspired endeavors properly focus on important community needs and systems thinking could help in understanding the impact on the larger environments. Ideas such as those found in the Debunking 10 Myths of Innovation by Richard Evans, President, EMCARTS INC could contribute insights that could be of great benefit to communities. 

A number of other organizations have been able to tie an artistic mindset to community related concerns. They could then work to better integrate the talents of artists and cultural organizations toward helping people engage in civic and community life.  Animating Democracy, a project of Americans for the Arts helps to identify, develop, and advocate for public and private sector policies, practices, funding, and initiatives that advance the role of the arts in fostering citizen participation and social change. Art VULUPS does so with geography, environmental science, land use planning, sustainability, art and creativity concepts.

Artistic thinking can help reach deeper insights, generate more ideas and seep into the community's fabric so that its influence becomes one more of dispersion within a complex community system rather than a transfer of information from one institution to another. An artistic perspective should not be left to the end though but made foundational in community design through design thinking, systems thinking and other approaches to achieve Collective Impact through new community paradigms.

Learning more about What is Design Thinking?

A couple of posts ago in New Community Paradigms Design Team at Design Thinking Action Lab more was written about the online course on Design Thinking Action Lab taught by Leticia Britos Cavagnaro that I started to participate in through the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (aka dschool). That post focused on the Learning Squad that I was endeavoring to create. The New Community Paradigms Learning Squad ended up with five total members, all from California. We have been at it for some time now and have begun working as individuals in terms of class credit but in support of each other on the first phase of the class project.

First though, what is design thinking? Design thinking is a creative means or methodology used in defining and solving problems, particularly complex or wicked problems from the perspective of human-centered design, also called user-centered design.

Design thinking is different from what we may normally think of as design, which is a matter of using a specific set of skills, such as graphic design, in the crafting of products and services.

Design thinkers, do not have to be designers in the usual sense, but instead can come from a broad range of disciplines and through training acquire a 'design mindset'. Then bringing together their different experiences and perspectives, they collaborate in learning to apply a process of design that combines both creative and analytical thinking to defining and solving significant, complex and wicked problems.

I thought that there might be some possible relationship to systems thinking which I am also learning more about. Both have a collaborative basis. Systems thinking arguably works on a more macro level which is understandable since systems thinking looks at systems as a whole. A more micro-focused means of collaboration has also been seen as being needed and a possible choice that has been considered is design thinking.

Now though, having learned more, I would say that design thinking goes beyond being micro-focused to drilling down into the community at a subatomic level of design by focusing on a specific individual. Design Thinking demonstrates that there is an important difference between designing for individuals as the average of a class or for a group of individuals and instead designing for one specific individual. The later is more aligned with a human-centered design or user-centered design perspective by emphasizing a deeper understanding of problems from the perspective of different stakeholders, not as a member of a class or a category, but as a unique individual. It can be applied in this way to the creation of innovative products, services and processes.

Design thinking is also more concrete in its application than I perceive systems thinking, which can be pretty conceptual. While design Thinking can make extensive use of prototyping, which can be done through virtual modeling, this is always only a step in the process taking a secondary role to empathizing with the stakeholder. Overall, design thinking is a far more in the field, hands-on approach.

What New Community Paradigms wants to strive for is to go beyond bringing individuals to serve as members of a design team and incorporate design thinking into a communal setting so that it could be used as needed by a community.

However, no matter how viable design thinking is as a means of addressing challenges, it makes no matter at a community level if we cannot get enough of the right members of the community into the same room. So learning about design thinking is only a first step. There is also a need to determine a way to incorporate into a community-based setting.

Design thinking can help even with this particular challenge by assisting with the designing of flexible workspace, connecting different people and devising a common process of creative and innovative problem-solving.

There will undoubtedly be challenges in creating a platform for meaningful, self-directed community engagement that is inclusive of a variety of perspectives and even different agendas. Usually, we get engaged at the behest of someone else for a specific project, cause or event like an election. This new path would not only require a ‘design mindset’ but a different type of ‘community mindset’. Connections would not only have to be based only on past shared history or similar experiences but on a shared community outlook or common purpose as well.

New Community Paradigms not only seeks to change what we are doing in local community governance but also how we are doing it. Networking is likely going to be an essential component with small groups networking into increasingly larger ones but still keeping their own identity based on a social trust different from the political quid pro quo of current local government politics.

At this early point in the class, another working premise is that design thinking could help communities navigate the maze inherent with complex ‘wicked’ challenges. One related question raised by the class forum is ‘How comfortable are you with uncertainty?’ Will consider examining that question in light of the complexity question in a future post.

The What, Why and How of Design Thinking and Collective Impact part 3 of 3

The previous blog post continued the discussion on design thinking and Collective Impact making the argument that design thinking should be integrated with systems thinking (as well as artistic thinking) to have the greatest impact on addressing the complex, wicked challenges facing communities.

The idea of combining design thinking and systems thinking has been around for some time with Innovation as a learning process: Embedded Design Thinking by Sara L. Beckman and Michael Barry from 2007 or Systems & Design Thinking: A Conceptual Framework for Their Integration by John Pourdehnad, Erica R. Wexler, and Dennis V. Wilson from 2011.

Part of the problem is agreeing on what they are separate so as to enable agreement on what they are combined. Practitioners are fairly comfortable with some ambiguity in their own field but misconceptions about the other could make cooperation difficult. The supposed Lessons Learned — Why the Failure of Systems Thinking Should Inform the Future of Design Thinking, from June of 2009, by Fred Collopy would seem to give neither side much hope since design thinking still seems in the same boat as systems thinking.  What Collopy doesn’t seem to have considered is that each could learn from each other, particularly if they were used to target the same challenges addressed under Collective Impact. 

The first step is to determine What is Design Thinking, Really?, from back in July of 2010 in which Venessa Miemis cites the term design thinking as referring to a set of principles, from mindset to process, that can be applied to solve complex problems, coined by IDEO’s David Kelley. 

She goes on to review Change by Design, by IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown, getting to the meat and potatoes of addressing Collective Impact concerns with chapters titled ‘The New Social Contract,’ ‘Design Activism,’ and ‘Designing Tomorrow – Today’, framing the opening pages of the book:

What we need are new choices – new products that balance the needs of individuals and of society as a whole; new ideas that tackle the global challenges of health, poverty, and education; new strategies that results in differences that matter and a sense of purpose that engages everyone affected by them.

The perspective had of systems thinking is important in this partnership. Some seem to wrongly assume that systems thinking only addresses well understood problems, with one best answer to that problem and the path to finding that answer being linear. Others believe that systems thinking involves making changes to a system that will lead to the elimination of a problem identified within one of the system components. Russell L. Ackoff though admonished us to Never improve a part of the system unless it also improves the whole. The fact that these errors or disagreements over definition are not only limited to those on the design thinking side of the issue complicates things.

Systems Thinking and Design Thinking from Triarchy Press correctly defines a systems thinking approach (in contrast to taking a reductionistic approach to complex systems like a business, separating it out into component parts and trying to manage each part as well as possible) as looking at relationships (rather than unrelated objects), connectedness, process (rather than structure), the whole (rather than just its parts), the patterns (rather than the contents) of a system, and context. While its definition of design thinking as using the definitions and assumptions of systems thinking and focuses on applying them to innovative processes for problem-solving and decision-making is arguably too restrictive.

Design thinking is about empathy and systems thinkers are the better for it makes the argument that “The combination of design and systems thinking can deliver a truly holistic understanding of a current system, generate ideas that will transform the system while yet continue to maintain a whole systems view to ensure the new system is sustainable.” This is not merely a touchy-feely appeal and this blog is not backing away from the need for the proper type of business discipline in the public sector. Empathy according to MixMashups' Gary Hamel drives innovation. 

In more recent articles, arguments have been made for design thinking to take lessons from systems thinking. In a Fast Company article of May of this year, Why Designers Must Put Invention First, Paddy Harrington quotes Charles Eames who said, "Eventually everything connects—people, ideas, objects, etc....the quality of the connections is the key to quality per se." The Eames office had a diagram of three overlapping circles representing the interests of the design office, the interests of the client and the interests of society as a whole, that explained their approach to their practice. Their work, the Eames said, was at the intersection of the three. The Eames talent, however, provided them the luxury of choice. 

Realistically, one won’t have the luxury of choosing clients if pursuing social change through design thinking and Collective Impact. How then Paddy Harrington asks can one, “...(establish a purpose that drives our practice more deeply and lets us work with more self-determination?” His answer is that Eames' approach is still the best guide for staying on course: first, connect everything in order to understand relationships, influences, and possibilities. In Richard Saul Wurman’s view, ”...[Eames] was selling his ignorance and his desire to learn about a subject. The journey of not knowing to knowing was his work."

Harrington further addresses embracing complexity and uncertainty citing Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, who wrote:

"Categorizing always produces reduction in true complexity…Any reduction of the world around us can have explosive consequences since it rules out some sources of uncertainty; it drives us to a misunderstanding of the fabric of the world."

In response, Paddy Harington advises that “Rather than simplify a complex situation, we must start with a certain kind of fearlessness in the face of the unknown and establish tools to help us find answers in the absence of tangible information. And once we embrace that unknown, it’s the methodical application of those tools toward solutions that point us in a better direction.” This is a perspective that NCP can agree with, seeing Complexity as Cradle for Creativity and Innovation in moving from incoherent complexity to coherent complexity.

In the Fast Company article, Why "Design For Development" Is Failing On Its Promise, also from May of this year, Panthea Lee writes about noticing her colleagues wrestling a growing nervousness about how much design can create positive change and with the ways that, "design for development" is falling short of its promises.

She cites possible market-based reasons for this. In functioning markets, the user or customer is made powerful because of control of the money to spend. The users of a development program have no money so are often marginalized and powerless with no voice to compel governments to listen to them. Commercial projects have a clear idea of their user or customer and clear measures of success. Public sector design projects have no set "bottom line.” How does one then define the metrics for "improved governance"?  She recognizes at the same time that democracy requires people driving for themselves and that it is not simply a matter of having an easy answer or to "know the right solution. ” This means moving beyond defined terms of "evidence-based design decisions" and the desire to "drive positive change" so as to create a shift in what the work is serving.’’ She goes on to argue that, “(T)he world’s most intractable problems are deeply rooted in massive systems, while design is a discipline focused on the edges”. 

“Traditional design focuses on creating and improving society’s outputs and interactions, such as a sleeker mobile phone or a more efficient way to buy

coffee. When these skills are translated over to the public sphere, design 

still tends to focus on outputs instead of the real systemic problems.”

The Stanford Social Innovation Review makes the argument that design thinking applied to Collective Impact is capable of Turning Empathy into Action and lists the positive contributing attributes of each. 

It is this blog’s position that to be capable of, for example Solving Democracy’s Design Problem and moving from actual systems in the world such as Public Participation Designed for Entrenched Incumbents (Stafford Beer’s POSIWID) to more idealized, yet viable visions of Designing Public Participation Processes Map will require systems thinking as scaffolding for such a large, collaborative and scalable undertaking.

The What, Why and How of Design Thinking and Collective Impact part 1 of 3

The next three blog posts are going to take a closer look at the Design Thinking component of the Applying Business Concepts to Community Engagement map featured in the last post. This post will give a taste of what the course offers, what was different with another design thinking course and what is different from the usual standard government approach. The next two posts will focus on the why and how of design thinking as it relates to Collective Impact.

The Acumen’s Human Centered Design course (map), based in large part on The IDEO Field Guide to Human-Centered Design (map) was basically audited this time, due partially to lack thereof, for access to materials it might provide and to compare it to the Design Thinking Action Lab course taught by Leticia Britos Cavagnaro completed two years ago through the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (aka dschool). 

The New Community Paradigms Design Team at Design Thinking Action Lab blog post began the series on the Design Thinking Action Lab online course. The story continued with Learning more about What is Design Thinking?, and the creation of the five member, all from California, New Community Paradigms Learning Squad. The series was completed with Incorporating Design Thinking into New Community Paradigms which has the distinction of being the most viewed post by far of this blog’s existence. While not all of the resource links in the blog posts survived and the specific course has not been offered since, there is now the dSchool boot camp bootleg publication and alternative offerings. 

Perhaps the most significant difference between working through the two design thinking courses is that the Acumen/IDEO course is primarily designed with a group-guided learning structure, in a collaborative hands-on environment working on one project. With the Design Thinking Action Lab, we worked on our own individual projects for class credit but supported each other as a group through the phases of our class projects. Support was only  virtual though. The limitations with such an individual approach, not only to design thinking but to Collective Impact were recognized in the last post. The actual Acumen/IDEO course also seems to provide more written material from what I remembered of the Stanford course. 

The IDEO Field Guide shares the philosophy of design and the seven mindsets that set IDEO’s approach to design thinking apart: Empathy, Optimism, Iteration, Creative Confidence, Making, Embracing Ambiguity, and Learning from Failure.

                                                                                                 page 10, The Field Guide to                         Human-Centered Design

Other course materials cover the three main phases of design thinking: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation that according to Acumen/IDEO all design challenges move through. Similarly with the Design Lab, the first phase was framing or defining the problem by establishing empathy with the ultimate stakeholder. The challenge could be examined through different lenses and stakeholders by talking to them and learning about their perspectives so that one discovered their unique problems needing to be tackled.

Government very often takes a one size, or more to the point ‘our’ size, fits all approach. Government programs are usually designed to fit the specifications of funders or overseers, too seldom truly focusing on user needs. It has been a common philosophy of government that if you set the program resources up so as to keep those deemed undeserving out then the rest of the program will be able to take care of itself. 

The next step was Ideation with the Acumen/IDEO or Ideate with Design Lab, which for the Design Lab assignment consisted of coming up with 50 ideas that could address the specific insight derived from the empathy and definition stage. From the 50 or in my case 35 ideas, three were chosen as most practical, most disruptive and a favorite. From those, two were selected for the next stage of the assignment Prototype and Test. 

The fundamental idea taken from this next stage was of a failing forward, and fast approach. The Acumen/IDEO Human-centered design approach involves tinkering, testing, and failing early and often. Acumen/IDEO also emphasizes the power of tangibility, to ‘make it,' the human-centered design process being about making ideas visual, tactile, and experiential by making it. 

This means not only making tangible prototypes of ideas but sharing what has been made, and further iterating based on the feedback obtained because one hardly ever gets it right on the first go.

And we know that making an idea real reveals so much that mere theory cannot. When the goal is to get impactful solutions out into the world, you can’t live in abstractions. You have to make them real.

                                  page 20, The Field Guide to                          Human-Centered Design

The concept of prototyping or pretotyping to fail more efficiently, effortless and at far lower costs was also explained, through the Design Lab course, by Alberto Savoia, Google's Innovation Agitator and Engineering Director, through his "The Pretotyping Manifesto" which was presented to the Stanford Graduate School of Business in January of 2012.

This is an approach followed by many innovative companies in the private sector but still seems inexplicable to many if not most in city hall. Government institution management is often not comfortable with an iterative process concerning the creation of something, wanting instead a final finished product without mistakes to be presented to the city council and public. They are often fine though with an iterative process of very small changes in how they do things.

This often means that once a course of action has been decided upon early in the process that everything is then done to justify that decision including selling it to the public. The notion that an idea should be allowed to fail and then try another one is inconceivable because it would mean that upper management or the city council had been wrong about something. At least this dismal perspective seemed truer when the design thinking blog series was first written. There does seem to have been some positive changes realized throughout the public sector though whether it is moving towards being enough is still a question.

It further requires being capable of frequently shifting gears, between what IDEO calls diverging and converging, moving from concrete observations to highly abstract thinking, and then back again throughout the process's three phases, and spending a surprising amount of time not knowing the answer to the challenge which  is unlike other problem solving methods. Raising a related question by the Stanford class forum, also asked by the Acumen/IDEO course, ‘How comfortable are you with uncertainty? ”

Perhaps the most important difference is not in the courses themselves but that Acumen is not an academic institution but a dedicated change agent one.  They believe in the importance of incorporating the principles of design thinking when creating solutions to problems of poverty so that low-income communities are provided with choice, not just charity and are seeking others with this mindset through free courses, including this one, at www.plusacumen.org

This means that they go beyond a project-based focus to a practical one of we can make an actual impact on the world focus.

Human-centered design is uniquely situated to arrive at solutions that are desirable, feasible, and viable. By starting with humans, their hopes, fears, and needs, we quickly uncover what’s most desirable. But that’s only one lens through which we look at our solutions. Once we’ve determined a range of solutions that could appeal to the community we’re looking to serve, we then start to home in on what is technically feasible to actually implement and how to make the solution financially viable. It’s a balancing act, but one that’s absolutely crucial to designing solutions that are successful and sustainable. 

                                                                                                  page 14, The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design

Incorporating Design Thinking into New Community Paradigms

It was back about six weeks ago that starting the online course Design Thinking Action Lab taught by Leticia Britos Cavagnarot through the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University was mentioned in a couple of blog posts, New Community Paradigms Design Team at Design Thinking Action Lab and Learning more about What is Design Thinking?

Now the course is finishing up and the final assignment is to reflect on your experience with the design challenge and how you might apply the skills and mindsets of design thinking to your own work and interests.

In the early stages of the course they had us do some self-reflection about what we wanted to get out of the class and we then went on on to form Learning Squads. I started one named New Community Paradigms. For myself, the basis for both was this New Community Paradigms effort. It seems right then to return to this blog and have it be the platform for the final official review of the class. There will though be further explorations of what was taught in the class in future posts. There was too much for just one blog post.

My personal stated goal for the Design Thinking class was to see how it could be incorporated into a community-based direct deliberative democracy approach to community governance. Design thinking is an excursion into another previously unexplored arena, among those so far ventured into include ‘Livable Communities,’ ‘Placemaking,’ ‘Radical’ Community Engagement, and ‘Systems Thinking.’ Although I already had knowledge of Design Thinking and considered it as potentially being an important component of New Community Paradigms, this was the first time I had attempted a course on it.

I started at a reflection and formulation stage and I am still there but then I didn't expect the course to fit immediately and smoothly into my current efforts. I hoped that what I would learn could later be incorporated as both means by which I further developed those efforts and as its own end alone. That much as been achieved, now it is a matter of implementing it.

There was further self-reflection as to our individual approach to inquiry or the space of inquiry to be defined by three words, which for me due to an introverted and introspective personality type, were exploring, internalized, reflection. All happening within an environment encompassing space, people, and process dedicated to Design Thinking. There will be more reflection on these aspects with future blog posts.

With that as a basis, we began to explore a specific problem set or design challenge. I use the term problem set because it was crafted to encompass a wide and diverse set of issues within an important aspect of a great number of people’s lives, the transition from college to work. The focus, however, was on the process or the journey not the product or goal and not so much on asking the right questions but asking the questions the right way.

As was said in the Learning more about What is Design Thinking? post.

Now though, having learned more, I would say that design thinking goes beyond being micro-focused to drilling down into the community at a subatomic level of design by focusing on a specific individual. Design Thinking demonstrates that there is an important difference between designing for individuals as the average of a class or for a group of individuals and instead designing for one specific individual. The later is more aligned with a human-centered design or user-centered design perspective by emphasizing a deeper understanding of problems from the perspective of different stakeholders, not as a member of a class or a category, but as a unique individual. It can be applied in this way to the creation of innovative products, services and processes.
The purpose of addressing the problem set from the perspective of a unique stakeholder was to allow us to go through the Design Thinking process. The first phase was framing or defining the problem by establishing empathy with the ultimate stakeholder. The challenge could be examined through different lenses and stakeholders by talking to them and learning about their perspectives so that one discovered their unique problems that needed to be tackled. Government usually takes a one size or more to the point our size fits all approach. Government programs are usually designed to fit the needs of funders or overseers but very seldom is there a true focus on user needs. It has been a common philosophy of government that if you set the program resources up so as to keep those deemed undeserving out then the rest of the program will take care of itself.

I am not going to go into details of my particular project wanting to focus instead on the process but my interview was productive. However, I made the mistake of being too restrictive in selecting collected data to put on the final empathy map. I just needed a bigger map. More data or information would have helped to provide a clearer picture of the stakeholder for whom I was designing. The creating of this picture of the stakeholder reminded me largely of the Appreciative Inquiry approach. This is another yet known but unexplored arena to which more attention needs to be paid.

The next step was Ideate which for the assignment consisted of coming up with 50 ideas that could address the specific insight derived from the empathy and definition stage. Again, the focus was not on coming up with a single best fit answer but to generate an overabundance of ideas extending from the practical to the fantastical to the disruptive. Idea generation exercises included imagining addressing the challenge with a million dollars or if a 5-year-old had to implement it. Again, this is not something in which most city halls would care to partake but then most city halls are not bastions of innovation. For my part, I was only able to come up with 35 ideas. Partially because I left it too late and got burnt out before the deadline but perhaps also because my empathy and framed or defined insight was too focused limiting the possibility of generating ideas. Perhaps not an issue if one comes up with a viable idea but as will be shown later the ideas I finally implemented had limitations.

From the 50 or 35 ideas, 3 were chosen as most practical, most disruptive and favorite, and from those 2 were selected for the next stage of the assignment Prototype and Test. The fundamental idea I took from this stage was of failing forward, and I should add fast. This concept of prototyping or pretotyping to fail more efficiently, effortless or at far lower costs is further explained by Alberto Savoia, Google's Innovation Agitator and Engineering Director, through his "The Pretotyping Manifesto" presented to the Stanford Graduate School of Business in January of 2012.

At this stage, we were to build inexpensive, make that cheap throwaway models of what we were proposing as solutions or approaches to the insights through the ideas that we had generated. This is an approach followed by many innovative companies in the private sector but still seems inexplicable to most in city hall. In my experience, management was not even comfortable with an iterative process concerning the creation of something, wanting instead a final finished product without mistakes to be presented to the city council and public. This meant that once a course of action was decided upon early in the process that everything was done to justify that decision including selling it to the public. The notion that an idea should be allowed to fail and then try another one was inconceivable because it would mean that upper management or the city council had been wrong about something.

There was also a significant error in application with my own two prototypes, one an online platform similar to LinkedIn but dedicated to the stakeholder’s industry and the second being on online management training program similar to a combination between the Sim games and Second Life. The prototype format was a mock up of computer screens for both ideas by which I mean a series of text boxes with appropriate sounding titles and associated notes.

Both were well received by others in peer review for what they were designed to do but I realized after having gone through the process that they came up short regarding actually addressing the stakeholder’s immediate problem. They might have if they had already been built and partaking in the building of them could have potentially helped the stakeholder but the stakeholder did not see it that way. Wanting instead to depend upon their own set of skills despite any obstacles that may or may not arise. In actual field testing this would have meant putting my solution aside and looking for another by coming up with more ideas or revisiting the empathy and frame or define phases.

My idea could then be evaluated for implementation at a later stage, that however would have meant broadening the stakeholders who likely would have had other concerns. One of the artificial aspects of the class is that every project was able to see, at least virtually, the light of day. In a community setting, with large, diverse groups and competing interests, perhaps nothing gets done. From a community perspective, this is not necessarily a bad thing. It may be necessary and proper for other elements of civil society to step in to address certain challenges.

I already listed the difficulties that government and other more bureaucratic institutions might have in implementing Design Thinking processes. There could also be potential stumbling blocks concerning community activists doing it if there isn’t a set discipline to walk the fine line between stifling creativity and becoming too attached to an idea that isn’t going anywhere. If Design Thinking could be implemented in a community setting that could then become a needed skill by community development workers in the public and private sectors.

In this particular academic case though this is the end of the process, reflecting on what could have been done differently and how it could be applied to our own specific interests. I believe that this process could be applied in a larger community setting although most of us were only able to work on projects on our own.  If we had worked together in groups, which seems to be more the norm for on-the-ground groups, there would have been far more ideas and many of our own ideas would have had quick but well deserved deaths early on in the process but the focus would be on the lesson not on the failure. The six person Design Thinking team is, I have to presume, optimal but in a community setting, particularly one with an established direct deliberative democratic approach to community governance, would then be evaluated for how it fits with the community’s vision and principles and further for how well it worked. Actual Stanford students have actual Stanford professors to do this with them. The final point that needs to be made is that when this balance of creativity and practical and useful outcomes is maintained the results of Design Thinking can be impressive as the upcoming PBS documentary Extreme by Design will demonstrate when it is aired in its entirety in December of this year. Future blog posts will likely feature snippets of the documentary.

The course will remain open providing the opportunity for further inquiry and reflection how Design Thinking can be incorporated into New Community Paradigms. Areas of interest in which I see Design Thinking being applied are Participatory Budgeting and more generally in addressing wicked complexity challenges by breaking them down into more addressable chunks.

New Community Paradigms Design Team at Design Thinking Action Lab

Just started, as was mentioned yesterday, an online course through the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (aka dschool), Design Thinking Action Lab taught by Leticia Britos Cavagnaro.

While past posts have followed and commented on Design Thinking, this is the first course attempted on the subject.  This then is another new area of exploration. Though, if one does decide to immerse one’s self in the concepts and methodologies of Design Thinking then Stanford is the place to do it.  

The ongoing New Community Paradigms effort not only supplied the name for the newly formed class team but also the rationale behind it.  This was also included as a part of the more personal introductory ‘Reflect on Your Mindset’ assignment. 

Design Thinking is interesting and relevant to New Community Paradigms because it is both solution oriented and inclusive, intentionally bringing in a variety of perspectives to face a challenge.  Just as important, those perspectives are not limited to only those with a particular area of expertise.  This means it could prove useful to a diverse group of community members coming together to discuss problems, say with traffic and school crossings or other community challenges.  

The New Community Paradigms Team now has two other members, both from California, with two additional Californians expected soon as well as another team member from Vellore, India. I sent out an additional seven other invitations. Teams are allowed to have up to six active members.  I read somewhere on the course site that there are 20,000 plus people taking the class.  The class is available to anyone on the globe but one could imagine 20,000 in a common geographical location.  There are hundreds of groups of learning teams being formed.  The New Community Paradigms team started forming later than a number of other teams.  There was no connection with any of the other team members before this. One was contacted through a random search of California students who weren’t on a team yet. The rest requested to be on the team. The point is that the connections were not based on past shared history or similar experiences but a shared outlook or common purpose, perhaps. 

This illustrates some of the challenges of creating a platform for meaningful, self-directed community engagement that was inclusive of a variety of perspectives and even different agendas.  Usually we get engaged at the behest of someone else for a specific project, cause or event like an election. New Community Paradigms not only seeks to change what we are doing but also how we are doing it. Networking is going to likely be essential with small groups networking into increasingly larger ones but still keeping their own identity.  No matter how viable Design Thinking is as a means of addressing challenges, it makes no matter if we cannot first get enough of the right members of the community into the same room so learning about Design Thinking is only a first step.  Also need to determine a way to incorporated into a community based setting.  

It is expected though that Design Thinking can help with that challenge by assisting with designing flexible workspace, connecting different people and devising a common process of creative and innovative problem solving.  

Another area with which Design Thinking can have an impact is with the concept of complexity.  At this early point in the class a working premise is that Design Thinking could help navigate the maze inherent with complex challenges.  One related question raised by the forum for the class is ‘How comfortable are you with uncertainty?’  Will look to examining these questions in future posts.

Final Draft NCP Fantasy Systems Thinking Team

The last two blog posts selected four of the five for the proposed NCP Fantasy Systems Thinking team, two new and two from the SP UK course selection leaving, Sir Geoffrey Vickers, Peter Checkland, Stafford Beer or somebody else new for the last position.

The SP UK course, using Ray Ison’s chart, placed Forrester and Meadows, the first two selected, on the ontological side of a Y-axis of a systems thinking chart of influences, and Ackoff and Argyris, the second two selected, on the epistemological side, though still fairly close to the ontological. The X-axis of Ison's chart is developmental influences, growing in these instances out of Operations Research and Complexity Sciences respectively.

Sir Geoffrey Vickers could be seen as a foundation of the SP UK course’s approach to systems thinking. Admittedly, very little is known about him and there has been no exposure to his work before this. A good part of his work was on Appreciative Systems and Behaviors. His school of Social Systems though is placed by Ison on the ontology side in between Systems Dynamics and Information Sciences, Management Sciences and Management Learning.

Vickers corresponded with another contender from the SP UK list, Peter Checkland, who is squarely on the epistemological side. They discussed the relationship between systems ideas and real-world experience. Checkland, similar to Ison and the SP UK course, saw differences between what could be termed hard and soft systems perspectives, with soft systems treating the definition as a question of epistemology, as in what can we know or find out about the world? A hard or dynamic system takes a more ontological approach. The differences between the two approaches are provided by Dr. Mike Yearworth in a chart (slide 5 adapted from Checkland & Holwell, 2004).

The Viable Systems Model (VSM), developed by Stafford Beer, was featured in the blog post Systems Thinking - Sailing through Wicked Problems on Complex Seas. VSM has been seen as a dynamic system, though according to Ison is epistemologically based, said to be not a method or process but a model.

"It is an organizational representation of the elements and interactions considered essential for any system to be viable or autonomous".

“A viable system being one that is organized and operates in a manner such as to survive in its changing environment. Adaptability is one of the prime features of systems that survive."(Adapted from Wikipedia)

This video explanation on the Basis for the Viable Systems Model is narrated by Beer, himself.

The final selection for the team, however, is Michael C. Jackson, who, as featured in the post Enabling a Better Tomorrow through New Community Paradigms via Systems Thinking, developed another type of System of Systems Methodology (SOSM) framework. Jackson’s framework, rather than being divided between ontology and epistemology then defined by developmental influences, is defined by simple systems versus complex systems and by the type of relationship between participants, whether unitary, pluralist or conflictual (my preferred term, Jackson also used coercive). Jackson, as he explained in Critical Systems Thinking: Beyond the Fragments sought to,

"Relate developments in systems thinking to an increased sophistication in coming to terms with extreme complexity and an increased awareness of difficulties posed by the divergent values and interests of stakeholders.”

Jackson's framework puts Forrester, Meadows and Beer together under complex and unitary. Peter Checkland assumedly fits under Soft Systems Thinking, incorporating a pluralist perspective ranging from simple to complex. Vickers, Ackoff and Argyris assumedly fit somewhere in between (unfortunately, the original creator Systemswiki is no longer in existence).

Ison’s chart places Jackson, himself, under Critical System Thinking which seeks to bring unity to the diversity of different systems approaches by combining systems thinking and participatory methods in addressing challenges characterized by large scale, complexity, uncertainty, impermanence, and imperfection.

By incorporating nonlinear relationships, feedback loops, hierarchies, emergent properties, it seeks solutions to the issues of inclusion, exclusion and marginalization as determined by boundaries and their consequences.

How Jackson influences the approach the NCP Fantasy Systems Thinking team takes in applying systems thinking to real world situations and systems is the question. Understanding needs to come before enabling.

Despite an admitted bias towards what could be considered hard or dynamic approaches to systems thinking with the intention of understanding or diagnosing problems and solving them, NCP has been exposed before to the soft systems thinking side, most directly through the newly revised Dialogue, Deliberation, and Systemic Transformation (DDST) which it needs to be confessed has, until recently, been left grossly neglected. As was said in Using Systems Practice to Unravel Complexity (Hands-on) in learning about a situation, one can expect new insights and expect to redraw (one's maps) to incorporate those new insights. Redraw, however, can refer to far more than just a map, it can also include correcting basic material and revising premises and conclusions.

DDST, originally in Hackpad is now in Dropbox Paper. NCP sought to provide and develop a concept map of the intentional transformational process to take a complex world through to what was seen as "the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible."

Jackson's System of Systems Methodologies, again as discussed in Systems Thinking - Sailing through Wicked Problems on Complex Seas, suggested two potential pathways that could be created by following two different approaches, one hard systems thinking, Creating the Future and one a soft systems thinking approach, Transforming the Future.

These were then combined together under Bridging Creating and Transforming the Future (a multiple causes map), revealing where the maps intersected and where they diverged was with complexity appearing at the juncture at which obstacles could arise creating tolls to further progress or at which the two pathways could be bridged and further developed.

Previously though, the Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking Kumu map recognized that interactions would be done by groups of diverse, independent agents, not as single entities but would be pluralist, possibly conflictual and very likely often complex with two Casual Loop Diagrams, R1 Deliberative Democratic Dialogue and R2 Working with Systems Thinking. The process would be both ontological and epistemological in nature.

These two foundational reinforcing loops were later considered as creating a juncture between Design Thinking, Collective Impact and Systems Thinking with "Civic and Community Groups" being at the center in the blog post, The What, Why and How of Design Thinking and Collective Impact part 2 of 3.

The actual creation of community projects, programs or policies was envisioned being likely assisted with the use of design thinking, involving working with "Systems Thinking Facilitators" and other community government "Staff". The development of specific proposals for projects, programs or policies would come from the community or from democratically selected or assigned leadership in the community. It could also be useful in assisting in integrating Community Groups into a prototype system of Community Based Virtual Systemic Inquiry (influence map), again supported by the implementation of systems thinking in both a complex and participatory mode within Jackson’s SOSM Framework.

Achieving the challenge of actually implementing new community paradigms is far more complex. The paradox is that one has to deal both with the complexity of the situation being faced and the seeming complexity of finding the means of dealing with it through systems thinking.

The blog post The What, Why and How of Design Thinking and Collective Impact part 3 of 3 recognized that systems thinking alone is simply not enough. Systems thinking not only requires other disciplines and methodologies through which transformation and change can be implemented effectively, but should explicitly subordinate to a role of support, serving either as scaffolding for such efforts or strengthening the systemic infrastructure of such efforts.

As an example, the entire series of Systemic Design of Public Participation was seen as a viable vision for Solving Democracy’s Design Problem by addressing Public Participation Designed for Entrenched Incumbents as instances of espoused claims (examples of Stafford Beer’s POSIWID) being detrimental. Designing Public Participation Processes Map proposed to be a means of moving to a more viable, yet nonetheless more idealized system.