“I used to keep in my shell heaps…now we’re doing more things together and we’re building that mother-son relationship”

Seeking family mum Jessie tells the story of the change Family by Family created for her and her son Beau in Adelaide newspaper The Advertiser. Read Article.

“Family by Family’s evaluation tells a powerful story of a social program working where other well-intentioned programs have struggled.”

Economist and TACSI Chair Nicholas Gruen writing in the business pages of  Australian national The Age.  Read article

“this could be the solution to the problems with child protection that have plagued us for decades”.

Jay Weatherill, Premier of South Australia speaking at our first birthday event.

“One of the most inspiring approaches to assisting very vulnerable families…that I’ve come across in four decades.”

Emeritus Professor Dorothy Scott OAM in the Family by Family documentary. Watch the doco

A year ago, Family by Family moved from a small-scale prototype to a bigger-scale start-up. We shifted from a prototyping team of 3 to a start-up team of 7. We expanded from 1 location to 2 locations. We went from working with 20 families in the prototype to nearly 70 families over the course of the last year.

Family by Family grew on the basis of a hunch – devised and revised during our prototype – that families helping families was an effective way to prompt lasting behaviour change.

Now, 1 year later, we have some really solid evidence to support that hunch. An independent evaluation of Family by Family has found that 90% of families are achieving the goals they set. To achieve their goals, families are shifting their beliefs and behaviours. They report greater confidence; more control over their decisions;  feeling more positive about the future; and spending more quality time together. The mechanisms by which Family by Family is creating change are: increased choice, strengthening attachment between parents and children, enabling behaviour modelling; facilitating goal setting, accountability, and reflection; increasing reciprocity; and improving practical assistance.

Family by Family isn’t just shifting outcomes for end users, but for other key actors too. Sharing families – the families who have been through tough times and come out the other side – are also reporting some pretty significant changes. Changes in their families, in their own self development, in their kids, and in how they interact with the community.

One sharing family said, ““Since becoming part of FbyF, I was able to realise that I was valued as a mum and that I actually am doing a good job, good enough to try and help others and their families.”

Another sharing family noted, “I used to be just a stay at home mother with no real chance of doing anything else. Since FbyF I’ve done a Foundation Course and started a Bachelor in Behavioural Science at Flinders University.”

You can hear the families talking about change in Family by Family’s new documentary!

It’s much easier to service an immediate need – for food, for shelter, for respite – then it is to shift the underlying reason for that need.

We’ve found this to be particularly true in the ageing & caring space, where the underlying situations tend to feel a bit stuck. There is an unchangeable outcome at the end of ageing & caring: death. Not only is the end outcome fixed, but the context around that outcome can appear rather fixed. People’s relationships, their family dynamics, their values, their eccentricities have a long history.

Here’s one version of a story we hear often: Grandma Jo has been diagnosed with dementia. It’s getting progressively worse. Grandma Jo has always played the role of strong matriarch – and really values her independence and being in control. She’s long clashed with her daughters – their patterns of behaviour are well established. So too are her and her daughters’ conceptions of what caring looks and feels like. There’s a prevailing sense of ‘just getting through’ and ‘managing.’ Even the word ‘optimizing’ seems too optimistic.

Existing services service the existing reality. Meals on Wheels keeps Grandma Jo fed; day centres give Grandma Jo somewhere to go during the day; Respite gives her daughters a break to do the shopping and errands. Whilst these services are critical for getting people through the day, by an large, they don’t prompt change. They don’t shift conceptions of care; the distribution of care amongst family & friends; or the balance between caring and great living.

These are the goals of Weavers. Weavers are people with lived caring experience who share their know-how with families to reshape caring situations.

We’re in month two of prototyping Weavers with our Radical Redesign Team at the Australian Centre for Social Innovation. Much of what we’ve tried hasn’t worked. In many ways, we’ve fallen into the same traps of servicing needs versus shifting underlying situations. We’ve struggled to persuade families that there can be another way – that small changes are possible and of value.

Indeed, after more than 8 weeks, we’re left with two big questions: How do we actually create change? And, then, how do we engage families in that change process when they are resigned to nothing changing?

Weavers Mike, Liz and Jenna

To date, we’ve focussed on a particular mechanism for change: peer-to-peer conversations to prompt insight & small actions – be it adopting a different mindset, trying a new strategy, or asking something different of a family member or friend. We’ve mainly attracted family members who are in the thick of caring. So far we’ve connected up 3 family members with Weavers for a “meet & chat.”

There have been many more families whom we’ve met in supermarkets, at GP surgeries, and at craft groups who have not been interested in a “meet & chat”. From them, we’ve learned that timing is everything. There seem to be small windows of opportunity when these older families are open to things changing – after hospitalization, when rails are added to the bathroom, when medication levels are adjusted, after the death of a family friend, etc. Identifying and leveraging these context-specific ‘windows’ seems to be the difference between engagement and disengagement.

It’s not just the ‘offer’ to families we can tweak, but the ways we get at change. What if it’s not just a peer-to-peer conversation that’s transformative but some combination of….

• Offloading & validating your story
• Visible examples of alternative caring models
• Time, space, tools for self-reflection
• Time, space, tools for whole family reflection
• Skill & confidence building within the family
• Ongoing moral support & camaraderie
• Expert guidance & facilitation

When, how, and for whom these mechanisms are deployed clearly matters. For example, how might family members get exposed to ‘visible examples of alternative caring models’ before the start of their caring journeys? How might other family routines – sorting out wills & paperwork for example – serve as a prompt for developing a set of principles around caring? How might family members get equipped with skills for starting conversations about caring in the same way you get equipped with first aide training, CPR training, etc?

Given the diversity of families, and of caring situations, what’s clear is that one change mechanism and one kind of offer won’t work for all. That’s leading us to see Weavers as a collection of people, stories, tools, experiences, and events – for different members of a family network, before & during the caring journey, who may be at different stages of change: pre-contemplative, contemplative, preparing, doing, & troubleshooting.

Usually prototypes help us to narrow our change focus & user base. In this prototype, we’re widening our change focus & user base.

We’re in new territory.

Mike, Liz, Margaret, Carla, Lou, and Tricia became the first 6 Weavers. Ever.

For 3 days, in a gallery-turned-living room in Port Adelaide, we began testing the training behind the Weaver role. We made 2 significant iterations to the learning framework, and 3 significant iterations to the materials we’re using.

We see Weavers as the ‘midwives’ for caring. They are people with lived caring experience who use their know-how to help activate friends & family new to caring roles. In Australia, there’s 2.87 million people in caring roles. Their wellbeing is worse than any other group. Existing services focus on the individual carer, or the individual cared for person. Weavers will (hopefully) work with whole networks of friends & family. Weavers will (hopefully) help to redistribute the caring load. Weavers will (hopefully) help to shift the dominant perception that nothing can change, finding ways to balance caring with great living. Read more about Weavers here.

It’s a big vision.

There’s 10,000 midwives in Australia. Over time, we want as big a network of Weavers.

This week, we also started to re-calibrate our Radical Redesign team to take that vision forward.

The question we’ve been asking is: How do we enable our Radical Redesign team make social solutions really happen?

Our goal in setting up the Radical Redesign Team at The Australian Centre for Social Innovation was to find a way to co-create new social solutions, and build a team that could re-apply the methodology.

We’re privileged to have a very competent team – many of whom have moved to Adelaide to join us. A team who, in their words, ‘swarms’ to get things done, has some awesome people skills, and an increasingly sophisticated sensibility around behaviour change. What Chris and I haven”t (yet) done is enable an entrepreneurial team who fights to create change. Few on our team have experience launching their own businesses, starting groups or organisations from scratch, mobilising folks around their cause.

And we certainly haven’t been making it easier for them to gain that experience.

Chris and I are often accused of of holding onto too much control and having too high standards.

They are fair points.

Whilst we’ve long recognised if we wanted the solutions and methods to spread we’d have to loosen up some control, not surprisingly, it’s been hard to make that happen.

There is some amount of conflict between spreading the approach, and raising quality. We set up InWithFor to try and raise the quality of social problem-solving.  To move beyond ‘design thinking’ as hype. To ask the critical questions. To be transparent about failure. To relentlessly try to do better.

Our leadership approach, then, has been a mixture of what you might call an apprenticeship model, a professorial model, and a management model. Up until this point, we’ve tried to get on with the project work and have the team come along for the ride, show examples & offer some new frameworks, and set tasks & give feedback. We’ve done these three things to mixed effect. We’ll do different next time!

We’re now in a different phase of the project – prototyping – one where there are real opportunities (rather than hypothetical) for more team members to take ownership & leadership. That means Chris and I need to change our behaviours.

• Talking up the vision & ambition much more
• Creating a narrative that’s about entrepreneurialism & making stuff happen
• Encouraging great work & acknowledging distance traveled, whilst also being clear about distance to go
• Not interjecting unless asked, or at an agreed upon point
• Offering more examples & bits of inspiration for what it could be
• Holding team members to account when deadlines aren’t met – rather than doing it ourselves
• Allowing for failure that’s not about prototyping, but about the team not stepping up
• Refocusing the team from internal relationships to external relationships

Unfortunately leaders in the innovation space don’t have a terribly good track record of shaping staff. Steve Jobs was known for being an incredibly harsh manager with the highest of standards.  We do want to shape the team, and be encouraging, whilst at the same time raising their game. One of the differentiators between what we do and existing community services is the high performance we expect, and the start-up culture we try & cultivate. It’s not a 9-5 job. It’s not about getting tasks checked off a list. It’s about creating something new, from scratch. From what we know in the tech start-up space, that takes crazy amounts of grit, focus, passion, and some amount of luck. And it’s not for everyone.

The next 4 months, then, are critical for us. Can we shift our behaviours enough to enable the team? Can we learn something new about the best fit between team members and leadership approaches? Can we launch 2 new social solutions? Can we generate enough excitement to start to scale those solutions?

When they started, back in 1987, the family owned only 40 cows. Few local farmers knew what biodynamic farming meant, let alone why you might want to switch over. That was until local farmers started hearing stories. The vet told them the Paris Creek cows were never sick. And any passerby could see that their fields were greener. Slowly, biodynamic practices spread. In 2002, a third farm converted. Paris Creek held reading groups with local farmers; they shared their emergent learning; they modelled different practice. Now the neighbouring farms supply Paris Creek with the majority of the milk they need to make their growing range of milk, yogurt, and cheese products.

What does yogurt have to do with social change?

In both cases, success depends on spreading better practice.

There’s spread that happens naturally, over time, as better practice supplants less effective practice. Yet raising the bar from the bottom-up doesn’t always work. It works when the ‘market’ incentivises what better practice yields. But as long as the ‘paying customer’ of social services (in Australia, that is predominately government) makes purchasing decisions based on how many people are served, rather than on what outcomes the services enable – there’s little impetus to convert to better quality practice. Compare that with the local farmers who had an incentive to convert their practices to get to a better quality of milk – after all, they knew they’d have a paying customer.

We’re finding output-focused funding is especially true in the ageing and caring space, where for the past several months we’ve been working on a project to improve outcomes for people in caring roles and relationships. Service providers receive funding to deliver a certain number of hours of care to a certain number of older people. There are over 300 different service providers in South Australia, and more than 3000 nation wide. There may be loads of ‘choice’ on paper, but on-the-ground, practice looks and feels similar. That’s because end users – the older people – aren’t actually the paying customer. Government, the paying customer, isn’t all the discerning, and has few mechanisms in place to systematically get to better practice.

We need to create mechanisms to get to better practice. From the bottom-up, and the top-down.

That’s the conclusion we came to after our Radical Redesign Team spent six-months hanging out with older people and practitioners. We co-designed a set of 6 solutions – what we’re calling The Great Living 6 – to create change from the bottom-up. These 6 solutions are tied to a single theory of change. A theory of change that says great living outcomes are the product of adopting certain behaviours (initiating, enjoying, exchanging, adapting, and shaping experiences) and having certain non-financial resources (an open mindset, motivational relationships, vibrant networks, and developmental services).

Each of the 6 solutions, detailed in our newly published Prospectus, are interactions designed to shift resources and behaviours for different segments of people. Take, for example, Weavers. Weavers is a solution designed for people new to caring roles, and aims to activate friends & family to play a part. We hope Weavers won’t just change outcomes for the carers we’re able to work with, but will inspire existing respite providers to engage friends and family in new ways.

But even if the 6 solutions were to shift behaviours, and inspire practitioners to shift their practices, it wouldn’t be enough. The extraordinary growth of the ageing population over the next 40 years necessitates continuous innovation and top-down changes to how services are bought and measured.

That’s why we’re also introducing something called The Great Living Company. The Great Living Company would be a new kind of entity set-up to co-design and prototype bottom-up solutions, as well as invest in different kinds of teams, culture, and measurement tools to drive radical change. As we argue in the Prospectus, we’ve created 30 more years by investing in public systems and biomedical research. We think it’s time to create new ways to live out those 30 years by investing in local networks and social innovation. Simply putting more money into service delivery and traditional research will not automatically lead to radical new practice.

Now that we’ve published the Prospectus, TACSI is looking for investors and partners. We’re opening up our ideas at a much earlier stage than we ever have before.

It’s exciting, and a tad bit frightening. The solutions visualised in the Prospectus may look real, but they still require lots of testing and iteration.

A week ago, we ran our third learning camp for the Radical Redesign Team. This one was called Prototyping Camp. As part of it, we headed to Paris Creek Farms to learn their approach to testing, iteration, and growth.

At camp, we set-up our own pizza chain and prototyped ordering & kitchen systems.

Here were 3 key messages we tried communicating at camp – in preparation for prototyping the Great Living 6 solutions.

(1) Everything can be prototyped. We’ve started to talk about prototyping for change, prototyping for growth, and prototyping for spread. Prototyping for change means testing roles, tools & interactions in order to learn whether they spark behaviour change. Prototyping for growth means testing the systems that are needed to run those interactions for more people – anything from hiring to training to contact management. Prototyping for spread means testing business models – anything from revenue generation to franchising contracts – so the interactions can scale with fidelity (i.e. so they still spark behaviour change).

(2) Prototyping is a loop. It starts with articulating a hunch. “I think stuck older people will engage with therapeutic interventions in the form of books & film.” It moves to generating and testing plausible alternatives. Then, to measuring & deciding between alternatives. And finally, circles back to revising the initial hunch. Good measurement is key. And incredibly challenging in the social space, where we’re often measuring things that aren’t readily observable (e.g changes in attitudes and beliefs), and where measurement is itself an interaction that can be designed and prototyped!

(3) Prototyping comes from a mindset that embraces failure, and does not expect success. In science, this is known as falsification. When you do an experiment, you invalidate hypotheses that aren’t true. Indeed, the point of experimentation is to reduce some of the uncertainty that exists in the world. So crossing stuff that doesn’t work off the list is success. It gives us ideas as to what might work – and therefore gets us closer to better, more effective practice.

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.