“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.

In June, as part of Ageing project we posed the question: If you could improve outcomes for one group of older people who would it be: non-joiners, culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) older people, carers and cared for, or indigenous older people? We spoke to people in government, local services, at home and online. Most people said: every group. When we asked people to prioritise, carers and cared for repeatedly emerged.

Unpaid carers are the main source of help for people experiencing challenges with day-to-day living. 46% of people in need of help with day-to- day activities, like getting around and taking care of themselves, rely solely on family and friends to get by. 48% depend on a mix of family, friends, and formal services. Only 3% depend exclusively on formal services Unpaid carers are Australia’s largest aged care workforce. Without unpaid carers, demand on services would far outstrip supply.
But unpaid caring is not without its own costs. Carers are more likely to experience lower levels of wellbeing and increased levels of chronic disease than non-carers. One-third of all carers are severely stressed and depressed. Carer stress is a major determinant of cared for older people entering into more expensive, and often less effective, residential care.

This paper identifies the core questions that our project on carers and the people they care for will seek to answer, and highlights opportunities to shift policy, practice, and most importantly, people’s lives.

In the video hear from Brenton Caffin, CEO of TACSI and Carolyn Curtis, director of Family by Family talking about Radical Redesign Approach and the development of Family by Family.