It’s the ethical question I ask myself most.

1 year on, we’re learning that Family by Family works really well for sharing families – the families who have come through the other side of tough times, and help other families do the same. Family by Family seems to be working well for some, but not all, seeking families – the families who want things to change. But if the rate of change is greater for sharing than seeking families, are we continuing to perpetuate the inequality gap?

It depends how we measure inequality.

There’s outcome inequality. There’s opportunity inequality. There’s political inequality.

Outcome inequality is why I got into this work – but redressing it comes with some very real, and very serious, moral dilemmas. Whether you measure outcomes by income, or by our far more ambitious standard – thriving, unless the rate of change for the ‘bottom’ is greater than the rate of change for the ‘middle’ and the ‘top’, then outcome inequality will only increase. Should you hold down the rate of change for a segment of the population that’s motivated and hungry for more? That has expendable income? That has a history and culture of taking up opportunities?

Rather than ‘hold down’ the middle and top, the solutions we’ve co-designed attempt to leverage the resources of the ‘middle’ and ‘top’ for the ‘bottom’. To put the connections & capabilities afforded to the ‘middle’ and ‘top’ to a different and more social use. But, at the end of the day, will redistributing connections & capabilities change outcomes and close gaps? We don’t yet know.

What worries me is that there is so little discussion in the ‘social innovation’ community on redistributive mechanisms – or other mechanisms for redressing inequalities. If anything, most of the ventures I see coming out of so called ‘social design’ processes have no mechanisms for engaging the hard to reach, let alone meaningfully closing inequality gaps.

Social ventures like Hour School out of Austin Center for Design or The Amazings out of SideKick Studios in London come from a well-meaning place. Hour School came from a project on homelessness. But it’s a platform for well-connected, motivated people with expendable income to learn from each other. Money can be raised for a few projects with homeless charities – but the scale of the benefit for the ‘middle’ and ‘top’ clearly outweighs the ‘bottom.’ Similarly, The Amazings leverages motivated, self-confident retired folks for the benefit of well-connected younger people with expendable income.

Both of these ventures are nice – and will do good things for people. The question, is what people?  They cater to people like me, and my parents. They aren’t catered to the people we’ve gotten to know in our latest ageing & caring project. People like Barbara, the 75-year old Scottish woman who never leaves her house, is 10K in debt, and depressed. People who don’t sign up to things. People who don’t think they have anything to give. People who have very real barriers to participation. People who don’t own a computer, or a smart phone.

Our challenge is to find ways to engage, and prompt meaningful change with and for people like Barbara. It can be incredibly frustrating work. There’s always ‘another’ barrier in the way that needs designing out. And designing out these barriers takes time, persistence, and focus. We’re fortunate to work in an environment that gives us the space to do so. Sometimes it means saying ‘no’ to offshoot opportunities that emerge, that are easier to monetise and scale. Most of the time it means solutions that are a bit clunky, that aren’t as simple as online platforms, that require different revenue generation models. That require making a clear and compelling moral case for change – for investments from those institutions with a clear interest in averting social problems & addressing inequality, or from institutions who are part of the problem. Indeed, we need to innovate the way in which we make the case for fundamental change. Change that’s not just a nice add-on, but change that disrupts and dismantles things.

In a couple of weeks, our Radical Redesign Team will release our latest attempt to do that. For the past  2 months, we’ve been working with Barbara and 40+ folks in caring roles & relationships to co-design 6 solutions. 6 solutions to enable great living for people far from great living. These 6 solutions come from our analysis of what capabilities & resources people who are far from great living lack – open mindsets, motivational relationships, vibrant networks, and developmental services. Our goal is to build those capabilities & resources.

Whether we can is a question for prototyping – and beyond. Whether doing so will redress outcome inequalities is the big, still unanswered question.

A month ago, I met a family who has moved three times in the last year because their learning disabled child keeps getting expelled from schools. They have no family or friends nearby.

A year ago, I met a young mum on the brink of losing her kids because she couldn’t keep a clean house. She’s estranged from her mum and dad.

The older man, family, and young mum all live in Australia. A country with the second highest standard of living in the Western world. Unless you are an Aboriginal Australian, in which case, your life expectancy rivals Sub-Saharan Africa.

The older man, family, and young mum receive state funded social services. Aboriginal Australians, living on the lands, are subject to state interventions.

Something is terribly wrong.

It’s true I live and work in a place with a lot of wealth, with well functioning democratic institutions, and with robust social safety nets. And it’s also true that injustice is very real and very much happening here.

The injustice I see isn’t just people left behind by economic growth, but people kept down (often unintentionally) by the very safety nets set-up to help them.

There’s a narrative about socio-economic development that assumes attending to basic needs -  to food, housing, safety – must come before meeting higher order needs. Maslow’s Hierarchy says so. And yet what happens if the way in which we attend to basic needs prevents so called higher order needs from ever being met?

The older man who sits alone in a recliner chair is not all that hungry for food. He’s hungry for a reason to keep eating. This is not the life he imagined for himself, and not the life he wishes to lead any longer.

The family who keeps moving receive benefits from a myriad of government agencies, but no one has been able to address the reason for the constant moves.

The young mum with an unhygienic home has exhausted all of the state’s options. She’s been warned. She’s been brought to court. She’s been assigned social workers. None of the thousands of dollars already spent on her have addressed the real inequality – her lack of social networks, her lack of education, her inability to pay for the kind of household support that most middle class families have.

How could not having ‘household support’ be an inequality we seriously need to redress? Since the state started using its most extreme power – breaking up the family – without first putting in place the same supports that a family with greater wealth and privilege has.

I believe this is fundamentally wrong.

If we are seriously interested in combatting injustice in our own backyards, than we have to look at what causes the real disparity in life outcomes. And that real disparity comes not just from lack of access to food or housing but from the lack of social supports, experiences, and opportunities.

If we are seriously interested in combatting injustice, then we have to recognise that the social safety nets we’ve created perpetuate, and in many cases, contribute to the real disparity in life outcomes.

In others words, we have to recognise that our industrialised approach to social services is often wrong. We have to face up to the moral dilemmas ‘modern’ society has created.

These moral dilemmas underpin the ‘social design’ work we try to do. They have informed our value set – a value set that enables us to make decisions about the projects we choose to take on, the people we choose to work with, and the solutions we co-create.

Over the past week I’ve come to understand what happens when ‘social design’ is taken up by organisations with a different value set.

For the past several months we’ve been working with a government agency that has its own internal co-design unit. This agency values ‘efficiency’ and ‘innovation’. At the beginning of the project, we could fit within their innovation frame. But then we started spending time with people, in their homes, and observed how the social safety net was failing to improve life outcomes. Such observations – and the ideas that these observations spawned – were simply too far from the ‘efficiency’ and ‘innovation’ value set to be acted upon.

I’ve been feeling both disappointed and outraged. Disappointed that we won’t be taking a project forward. Outraged that values like ‘efficiency’ and ‘innovation’ comes before values like ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’.

It got me thinking. Where is the outrage in the social innovation & design thinking communities?

Outrage seems increasingly hard to find. At the same time that social innovation and design thinking are increasingly easier to find. Business schools are clamouring to teach social innovation & design thinking. Austin centre for design has launched a new 10 day program in design & public policy. Stanford’s d.school is promoting its new online curriculum. Major consultancies like Deloitte are adopting design thinking. Governments are setting up centres for social innovation and public sector design.

Whilst the methods are new and shiny, the value set underpinning them appears to be the same old, same old. My hunch is that the lack  of outrage has an awful lot to do with these same old values. Values I’ll call managerial – like creativity, collaboration, competition, value for money, customer and user and human and people and citizen centred. Values that are all about the ‘means’ with which we do things, rather than the ‘ends’ we’re trying to achieve.

The public sector is riddled with the remnants of once new and shiny methods: service integration, new public management, lean project management, etc. Each new method comes and goes, all the while inequality widens and the industrialised approach to social services remains firmly intact. In other words, the ‘means’ change and the ‘ends’ stay quite the same.

It’s not that I don’t believe in ‘social design’ methods – in starting with people, making ideas real, and iterating those ideas over time – but I believe in them insofar as they shake up the status quo, narrow inequalities, and set new social standards. The danger comes when these new design methods make social services more palatable, more attractive, and thus more difficult to challenge.

Of course not every social service needs such deep challenging. Some just need incremental improvements. But how do we know which deserve to be improved, and which deserve to be fundamentally re-conceived? When are we right to challenge the means, and when are we right to challenge the ends?

Answering these questions requires developing a critical, ethical voice. And using this voice to make some tough decisions. Decisions around what work to do, who to work with, and what solutions to invest in. Decisions that go beyond the ‘innovation’ trifecta of what’s desirable, feasible, and viable – to what’s morally right.

Sadly, there are few deliberate mechanisms for developing this critical, ethical voice. (AC4d’s course reader on ‘design ethics’ seems to be missing the ethics part). Over the coming weeks, I’ll post a series of provocations about how we might go about doing so. From a personal perspective, and an organisational perspective. I’ll talk about the very real discomfort of working in, with and for organisations that come at this work from a different value set, and think aloud about what an organisation that practices an ethical value set might look and feel like.

1. Hunch 1 – to see is to believe
2. Hunch 2 – to codify is to learn
3. Hunch 3 – prototyping creates buy-in

To see is to believe

Ethnography, co-design, prototyping. Our hunch has always been that seeing these methods in action shifts decision-makers’ perceptions about their legitimacy and value. That’s why we think immersive projects are the best way to embed these methods within organisations. For the past couple of months we’ve been running an immersive project within government. Not everyone involved in the project has been able to see the difference between our bottom-up methods and conventional, top-down methods.

That was on display this week.

Even as government invests in some of our bottom-up methods, it’s not yet divesting from the same-old, same-old. The same-old, same-old was a staid focus group. For nearly four hours, a group of women who had never met each other, convened in a conference room, and answered a series of structured questions posed by a man in a suit, whilst more people in suits (me included!) looked on. This whole exercise was labelled ‘customer engagement’.

What came from this form of ‘customer engagement’ was pretty superficial. Rather than learn how government might help these women lead different kind of lives, we learned in what formats they like to receive information. Never mind if information is the solution. Or that the preferred format probably depends on the content of the information. Or that understanding preferred formats would be more usefully tested by showing what the information might look like, rather than talking about it in the abstract.

Maybe we just need to revise our hunch. Seeing both methods in action is the best way to shape belief in bottom-up methods? We shall see.

To codify is to learn

The irony is that to teach team’s to apply bottom-up methods, we’re using a kind of top-down approach. For the past 5-6 months, we’ve been prototyping a set of teaching tools & experiences with our Radical Redesign team. Tools have included frameworks (e.g 6 mechanisms for behaviour change); brief books; and articles. Experiences have included camps, classes, and mostly, project work with ongoing feedback.

Our goal has been to add depth & rigour to what’s quite a nascent field. We’ve wanted to take the creative, organic nature of design and scaffold it with some of the analytic reason of the social sciences. For some in our team, though, we’ve put far too much scaffolding up. They want to ‘do’ first and ‘codify’ later.

Philosophically, the ‘do first’ attitude really jives with what we’re all about. Yet Chris and I have both seen a lot of well-intentioned ‘doing’ that is, at best, wonderfully naive and, at worse, ineffectual – that reinvents the wheel without drawing on the lessons from other disciplines. Particularly when you’re in the business of behaviour change, as we are, there is so much to learn that can’t always be induced from the ground-up. As we say a little too often, “you don’t know what you don’t know.”

How, then, can we enable our team to discover things for themselves whilst also exposing them to what’s already out there?As it’s our first attempt to codify what’s out there, no doubt we’re going a bit overboard (and no doubt that’s my social science influence.) Given how little is codified in this space, perhaps that is not such a bad thing. Although, as was made apparent this week, it’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. Time for Prototype #2?

Prototyping creates buy-in

Being part of a prototype can be cumbersome, and at times frustrating. Not everything works for you. Yet, as we’ve seen with Family by Family in Marion, it’s also pretty rewarding. You see it take shape around you. It gets easier and better over time.

We’ve long guessed that part of the success of our prototyped solutions is the co-design & prototyping process. When you start to scale a solution, and no longer need as much co-design & prototyping, how do you create that same sort of buy-in and engagement?

This week, we saw what happens when you don’t have a front-end co-design & prototyping process. Family by Family is up & running in Playford – but we’re finding it’s taking a bit longer to find sharing families (the ones that have been through tough times and are ready to share their experiences with others). Although we used ethnographic methods as part of our Playford scoping project, we didn’t build up as long a relationship with families or continually test elements of the model. Families weren’t able to get as clear a sense of what we’re all about.

Going forward, it seems we need to iterate Scoping Projects so they engage more families, in an ongoing way, before expecting families to take on roles. We also need some different versions of Scoping Projects – in areas where there are lots of existing services for families versus areas with very few services for families. That means also working with funders to understand these different timelines, and the many steps it takes to create change.

Ah, well, just another week. Thankfully we’ve got a day off on Monday to recuperate, and start to rethink.

“Yes,” I replied, “it’s just talking with people.”

For the past couple of months, we’ve been building civil servants’ capacity to Work Backwards. At camps and in classes through TACSI, we’ve underscored how Working Backwards starts with people. We’ve developed offers & value propositions for recruitment, crafted materials for dinners & ethnographies, and practiced observational and open question-asking styles.

But, the preparation inspired anxiety and fright.

A few weeks ago, we set up shop in front of a supermarket and started chatting to people. Chats turned into invites for dinner, and dinners into day-long ethnographies. It turns out just getting out there and interacting with everyday folks wasn’t all that anxiety-provoking or frightening. Actually, the team thought it was fun. They realised it was “just talking to people.”

We’ve gotten so used to talking up. To convincing, persuading, and making proposals to the bosses above us that we seem to have forgotten that not everything requires a structured questionnaire or talking points. It just requires ourselves.

Co-designing solutions with people requires that we be uncertain and vulnerable – two traits that aren’t really part of traditional, bureaucratic organisations. And yet, we’ve seen staff of traditional, bureaucratic organisations do both, really well.

Way back in April, as we were collating the lessons learnt from co-designing Family by Family, we set ourselves a challenge: how could we more systematically build capacity, within government, to make policy backwards?

Having spent the past several weekends with civil servants, I think we’ve managed to build individual & team capacity. Getting out of the office, and actually doing real project work, has shifted mindsets and behaviours. Shifting organisational mindsets and behaviours has proven more stubborn.

It makes sense. Most organisations are designed for stability – to exist in the face of staff coming and going. While we’ve tried to engage different layers of the organisation, at various points in the project, we haven’t (yet) differentiated our message for each layer of the hierarchy. Nor have we identified the mindset & behaviour change required at each level.

At the top of the hierarchy – the political level – I wonder if we shouldn’t try a bit of triangulation. By triangulation, I mean the strategy that Bill Clinton’s advisors tried in the 1996 re-election campaign. Whilst it’s certainly not a popular political term, and has debatable value when trying to steer a political party, it offers some useful strategies for planting ‘new’ ideas within the political establishment. Rather than present his ideas as totally different from the opposition, Clinton ‘owned’ his opposition’s end point, and offered a different means to getting there. In our context that might mean more clearly showing how co-design gets to the leadership’s political and policy goals more effectively. In would also mean reframing risk – and showing the risks of continuing in the same old way.

At the near top of the hierarchy – the executive management level – I wonder if we shouldn’t try a more analytic approach. An approach that looks critically at the relationship between problems and methods. From what we’ve seen, executive managers are exposed to a particular set of methods – from management consultancy to lean project management – and indiscriminately apply them to the problems at hand. Perhaps we need to give managers the opportunity to look at where these approaches have been used in the past, to what results, and their limitations.

At the middle of the hierarchy, I wonder if we shouldn’t try a more supportive approach. One that coaches mid-level managers to recognise good work, fend off red tape that threatens that work, and strategically interpret what’s happening on the ground for the executive management level. At the moment, we interface with the middle of the hierarchy when we need to troubleshoot something, or gain permission. We’re not offering guidance, tools, or a platform to vent, strategise, and generate ideas.

At the coalface – the level we’ve been spending much of our time with – I wonder if we need to over-emphasise one of the 6 behaviours we try to teach: storytelling. The other behaviours are people, team, analytic, generative, making. We’ve seen these behaviours grow as staff actually do the work. But storytelling requires understanding how much to push the existing reporting formats & structures. Finding different ways to package and deliver information is pretty key in organisations whose bread and butter is information & knowledge.

Being able to do all of this – to work at the top, near top, middle, and coalface – points to a different structure and sequencing of projects. How such a project might unfold, I don’t exactly know. We’re in the very early days of figuring out what’s next for InWithFor – and how to iterate this approach in some new contexts. Wherever we are, the approach is unlikely to look exactly like it does now.

We set out to understand what great living looks like, and how to enable more people in caring roles and relationships to experience it. Love-ins, lobster, and racing cars tells the stories of the people we’ve met, and identifies 7 opportunities for getting more people towards great living. Over the next two months we’ll bring these 7 opportunity areas to life, and start co-designing concrete solutions.

The report is the first major product to come out of  the Radical Redesign Team. That’s the team we’re building at The Australian Centre for Social Innovation. Alongside the caring project, we’ve been designing and prototyping a curriculum for training interdisciplinary teams to do this kind of work.

And, for the most part, it seems to be working. The Radical Redesign team has upped the ante. We’ve got more constructive critique coming from within the team – helping us to slowly make our way through a lot of the black boxes of doing co-design work. Black boxes around analysis, integrating literature with ethnography, idea generation, etc. I think that’s helping us to have far more breadth and depth than we usually do.

What do you think? Have a read of the report. Give us your feedback.

I’ve stepped off a 17-hour plane ride and into the Mission district, and I’m struck by how such a small thing can displace the ordinary. Displacement is the theme I keep coming back to as I reflect on 2011. 2012 is just a day old, and I’m left with the question: can you make displacement part of the routine?

From Libya to Egypt, we’ve seen major displacement. But whilst power has been dislodged, routine has proven much more stubborn. A change in leadership hasn’t always equated to a change in behaviour. Shifting who makes decisions isn’t the same as shifting how decisions are made. To do that, you have to discard ingrained templates, and continuously rewrite them. Transformative events don’t necessarily equate to transformative practice.

That’s certainly what we’re learning, in a very different context: Australia. There we’ve been building interdisciplinary teams, inside and outside of government, to Work Backwards. To take social challenges (e.g family crisis, carer stress) and develop solutions from the bottom-up. Solutions that prompt behaviour change with and for people and the systems around them.

Over the past year, we’ve been trying to move from a ‘transformative event’ headset to a ‘transformative practice’ headset. In our first few years of working together, Chris and I organised our work as a series of intense, experiential events – from recruitment stalls at shopping centres to ethnographies at people’s houses to co-design workshops to stakeholder workshops to 6 weeks of prototyping. The events were all strung together with a narrative and a theory about how change happens – but we were the ones that did the stringing together. Everyone else was an actor, but not necessarily a director.

Not surprisingly, we often found ourselves burnt out at the end of projects and without a team ready to take the solution to scale, or to further spread Working Backwards.

A ‘transformative practice’ approach is all about enabling people to organise the work, not just participate in the solutions. It’s about teaching a group of individuals to blend their skills, challenge what they think they know, and develop a new intuition. In other words, it’s about changing individual and group behaviour. Indeed, what we’ve come to realise is that in order to co-design solutions that change peoples’ behaviours, we first have to challenge and change our work behaviours.

We’ve had a first go at articulating those work behaviours, and assembling them into a loose curriculum. You can read draft 1 here. We’ve also been prototyping the curriculum with three different teams: the new Family by Family Team, TACSI’s expanded Radical Redesign Team, and the Department of Human Services’ Team.

Whilst the Family by Family team is learning and spreading a defined solution, TACSI’s Radical Redesign Team and the Department of Human Services’ Team are learning and applying a more open-ended methodology. TACSI’s Radical Redesign Team is doing so from inside a small, nimble organisation. The Department of Human Services’ Team is doing so from inside a huge, bureaucratic organisation. Despite the obvious differences, three things have struck me. Three things I hope we can find new ways to address in 2012.

1 Down 

Central to Working Backwards is starting with the people experiencing a social challenge. All three of the teams get this – and are passionate about the concept. But, they are still ingrained to look ‘up’ rather than ‘down’ for approval. How can we enable a team’s first instinct be: how will people respond to this idea, rather than how will my boss respond to this idea? And how can we ensure people are confident to just get out of the office and start talking to people as a way of developing their ideas? The Radical Redesign Team spent a couple of weeks in the studio crafting recruitment messages, but after a morning trying them out in the street came back with loads of better ideas they could present back to us. It’s not that we’ve completely done away with vertical accountability and hierarchy, but that the best ideas don’t often come from there.

2 Behind

Most work is task focused – there’s a long litany of things to just ‘get done.’ That’s probably why we’ve found it challenging to train teams not to implement tasks, but to identify & bring to life the premise behind the task. So for example, every week the Family by Family team runs a Yarn Over Dinner for families to swap stories and skills. One of the premises of the dinner is to expand family’s natural capabilities. Of course, on the surface, it looks like a dinner with some fun activities. It’s easy to get swept up in the organisation of that dinner and the planning of those activities. But, it’s also easy to miss the point behind the dinner and the activities. You see, rather than train the FbyF team to run a dinner, we’ve tried to train them to create experiences that build family’s natural capabilities. The goal, across the three teams, is to be able to identify, and re-design, both the intent behind and the execution of tasks.

3 So What

Ultimately, we do work to try and prompt change with and for people, practitioners, and policymakers. That means our measure of success isn’t about how much we’ve done, but about what our activities have enabled. To know that means asking the ‘so what?’ question a lot. Sometimes we’ve done a poor job of encouraging teams to ask that question amongst themselves. And we haven’t always helped team’s learn how to gauge whether their activities are contributing to  change. For example, the Department of Human Services’ Team often has to report their activities up the chain of command. It’s much easier to talk about the number of workshops held, or the number of families recruited. Helping team’s find out and tell the ‘so what’ story  isn’t just an exercise in better communication, but an opportunity to identify ways to create more change.

We’re continuing to work in, with, and for The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI) as the Co-Leads of the Radical Redesign Team where we’re training teams, inside and outside the public sector, to use the Working Backwards Approach and applying the approach to two social challenges: (1) improving the lives of carers and the people they care for and (2) improving learning outcomes for children starting school.

Stay tuned for more New Year’s reflections.

Play film on Vimeo

LOOPS was designed as an alternative to universal youth services. It aimed to develop young people and their communities through shared and surprising experiences. We, the young people and their parents all saw it as a more developmental alternative to bringing young people together to play pool and hang out at youth-only clubs.

We had great fun working with young people in Brighton and Croydon to co-design and prototype LOOPS and we were proud of what we did – but the funders decided not to invest in taking it to the next stage. Taken to it’s conclusion embracing LOOPS would mean them decommissioning centre based youth services and investing in an entirely new kind of ‘youth worker’. It was too radical.

When we developed LOOPS outcomes for young people in the UK were amongst the worse in the West. They still are. Following the English riots earlier this year the imperative to explore new approaches to youth development in the UK are clear. We wish Participle best of luck in their application to NESTA’s ‘Innovation in Giving fund’ to get LOOPS moving and more young people in the UK thriving.

Sixteen Days, Eight Cities, One Question

Oakland, Calif., was the last stop on our 16-day North American tour. In a stark basement office, three blocks from the train station, we heard a different answer to our question, “Where do good ideas for solving social problems come from?” By the time we arrived in Oakland, weʼd posed that same question to foundations, social venture funds, social innovation hubs, academic centers, government units, and community groups in Austin, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, Boston, New York City, and San Francisco. Working for the last year in Australia, and for four years before that in the UK, weʼre interested in where and how ideas emerge in different contexts, and when and how promising solutions scale.

Solutions, most people told us, came from entrepreneurs and experts. Ideas for those solutions came from…well, no one could really tell us.

That was until we met Maurice Miller and Mia Birdsong, founders of the Family Independence Initiative (FII), late in the afternoon of our final day in the US. They were adamant about where ideas didnʼt come from.

“In America, we have had a 47-year war on poverty. Everybody knows we have not impacted poverty. It is actually totally logical to go to families and say, after 47 years of the smartest people with a lot of money and resources trying it their way, it’s your turn,” Miller said.

FII gives working poor families the resources to find and implement ideas that get them out of poverty. For FII, the best ideas come from people who are experiencing social challenges themselves. FII learns from and pays families, rather than researchers or consultants. By collecting data directly from families about what works (and when and where), they hope to influence how welfare systems operate. Solutions are the product of ideas developed and tested by families.

Like FII, we think itʼs critical to invest in bottom-up ideas and solutions.

What we saw in most of the organizations we came across, such as Root Cause, New Profit, and the ASH Center for Democratic Governance, were sophisticated methodologies for selecting and scaling solutions—far more sophisticated than those we encountered in the UK or Australia.

What we didnʼt see was the same level of sophistication or rigor in developing and testing ideas.

The big social challenges of our time—problems like educational disengagement and chronic health disease—are defined by their complexity. They have multiple, interlocking causes that render any one solution or theory of change incomplete.

That means that solving the big social challenges of our time requires change at multiple, interlocking levels: at a system, community, family, peer, and ultimately, individual level. At the end of the day, unless children participate in learning, or people eat and exercise differently, educational disengagement and obesity will remain so-called intractable problems.

Enabling people to shift their behavior works better when they see the value of such change and take ownership over the change process. In other words, itʼs much easier when people are the source of ideas for what should change, and when and how that change happens, provided we are also able to remove barriers at the broader system and community levels.

We use the word co-design to describe an approach of working with people to develop and prototype the ideas that will enable them to live the lives they want. We use the word coproduction to describe solutions that tap into peopleʼs natural resources—their skills, experiences, time, and money—to enable different outcomes. Ideas may take the form of new roles, interactions, materials, services, and policies. Solutions may take the form of new networks, platforms, organizations, or movements. In our work at The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI), we’ve spent the last 12 months co-designing ideas with families. Now, weʼre working with families to spread and scale a new network of families helping families, and beginning a new project with older caregivers and those they care for to develop and test ideas for improving relationships and outcomes.

A handful of institutions outside of North America are investing in co-design—ironically without investing in the sophisticated mechanisms we saw in North America for scaling the solutions that co-design may yield.

Back home in Australia we met with Lynelle Briggs in her fourth-floor, corner office that overlooks Canberra’s still lakes and rolling hills. After a long career as a public servant, Lynelle was about to retire as chief executive of Medicare Australia. There, she helped to establish the countryʼs first co-design unit inside the biggest government department: the Department of Human Services.

She explained, “The journey of moving towards co-design was one of being frustrated with what we had and thinking we needed something better. Co-design means that people in the community have the opportunity to engage with us in the thinking about policies, the design and choice of what policies are most suited to them, and the design of the services as they are delivered, and give us feedback after they have got them.” For Lynelle, co-design isnʼt just a fancy word for consultation; it’s a concept that requires re-sequencing how services are designed and delivered.

Government investing in processes, rather than just solutions, was deemed near heresy in the US. Even progressive city departments on the West and East coasts expressed deep skepticism that government could play a constructive role. The assumption was that government—at any level—was too risk-averse and bureaucratic to generate ideas by working directly with people. Michele Jolin underscored that view in her Summer 2011 Stanford Social Innovation Review article “Social Innovation in Washington, D.C.”: “Although government lacks the flexibility and tolerance for risk that are critical to innovation, government investments can be structured to fund evaluation and support scale, both of which are critical in later stages of the innovation cycle.”

Australia provides an instructive counterexample. Government investments can be structured to support bottom-up idea generation. What the co-design unit can do from inside the federal government and what TACSI can do outside of state government is demonstrate that starting with people—not just with entrepreneurs or experts—produces better results.

It took over ten years for FII to gain national attention and convince major funders that working with families, from the ground-up, produces better results. Experts and entrepreneurs were no match for families themselves. We hope it takes far less time to convince social innovation organizations in North America to invest in where ideas come from, and to convince social innovation organizations in Australia to invest in scaling solutions that work.

That’s what it all comes down to. Spreading the methods we use, and the solutions that come from those methods, requires awesome people. People who hungry to learn, ready to take risks, critical questioners, energetic doers, and able to draw on all of their different life experiences.

We’ve spent about 100 hours over the past four months finding these people – first, for the new Radical Redesign Team at The Australian Centre for Social Innovation and then, for the Family by Family start-up team.

Meet the 7 new radical redesigners on page 14 of our latest TACSI paper. Meet the 3 new Family by Family coaches in this video here.

In both instances, we ran a pretty rigorous and quirky recruitment process. We didn’t just want CVs, cover letters, or portfolios. We wanted applicants to show us how they worked. We asked applicants to answer short questions using whatever medium they liked, to respond to hypothetical situations, and to show us work that prompted change as well as work that missed the mark. At interviews, we asked applicants to critique policy, to generate ideas, and in the case of Family by Family, to be interviewed by families themselves.

Doing all of this meant we were able to look at people as people, rather than filter people by professions and qualifications. The Family by Family start-up team includes a visual artist, a hairdresser, and a teacher. The Radical Redesign Team includes a business analyst, an educationalist, an engineer, a fashion designer, a graphic designer, a jack of all trades, and a community coordinator. They are (hopefully) bringing all of themselves to the role – not just what they were ‘trained’ to do.

And we are (hopefully) bringing out everything they have to offer by structuring the work environment differently. Learning is an inbuilt part of all the roles. Radical Redesign team members will take classes 1 day a week, attend immersive learning camps, be part of reading groups, and have access to bespoke online materials. That’s all alongside doing a real on-the-ground project.

The ‘learning’ offer is what seemed to attract people to apply. We had over 100 applicants from 15 countries for the radical redesign team. They wanted to work somewhere that invested in them – not just in the work.

And, sadly, that seems quite novel in the ‘social change’ field where the work is so important and under-resourced that the people behind the work can be forgotten, or worse, deemed expendable. All of the ‘social innovation’ organisations I’ve previously worked with innovate in their work product, but not in their organisational practices. This is even more pronounced in the public sector where rules and regulations too often prevent managers from thinking differently about their best resource: the people that do or could work for them.

We talk about the solutions that come from our approach as co-produced – as tapping into people resource – so it only makes sense to find new ways to unlock people resource in the workplace. Over the next 12-14 months, we’ll prototype some new ways to do that inside both innovation organisations and government organisations. Soon we’ll release our draft learning framework. And in October, we’ll host our very first immersive learning camp! Expect some missteps, and loads of learning. Our hunch is that by learning how to develop teams, the solutions teams come up with will be more effective and scalable.