• SOLVING SOCIAL PROBLEMS & IMPROVING PROBLEM-SOLVING
• WHY?
• WHO?
• HOW?
• WHAT?
• WHERE?

The ’6′ – our current approach to problem solving

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As InWithFor, we’re continually improving our approach. Sharing what we do is a key part of that. There are six principles that differentiate our approach from what we’ve done in the past and the social innovation we see happening elsewhere:

1. We blend policy thinking, design doing, social science and business
2. We work backwards: building from problems to outcomes, outcomes to practice, and practice to policy
3. We prototype new user experience, practice and policy all at once
4. We create project teams with local people, practitioners and policymakers
5. We measure social impact
6. We work internationally

We do three kinds of work to develop and promote good problem-solving:

• We raise awareness for working backwards through speaking, writing and making films
• We build the capacity to work backwards through teaching and learning-by-doing
• We enable change through running, embedding and supporting new kinds of policy and practice, including new social enterprises.

You can read more about our projects here

1 Blending policy, design, science & business

What we do is driven by the dynamic between critical policy thinking and creative design responses, supported by social science and business expertise.

Policy thinking helps us to ask tough questions and look at underlying logic and assumptions; it provides us with the space to confront our values about what constitutes good living and good practice. Design doing gives us the tools to work with people in their everyday lives, to visualize and enact how things could be different.

The social sciences allow us to draw on international best practice, to learn about what interventions are effective and how to measure effectiveness. Business expertise helps us ensure the viability and sustainability of solutions.

Our project stages & methods

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2 Working backwards

Policymaking approaches move from analyzing the social problem to designing and then implementing new policies, often failing to understand how policy affects peoples’ lives and practice. Service design approaches move from understanding how people experience the problem to designing and then prototyping new practice, often failing to affect policy in a way that sustains new practice. By contrast, we work backwards:

Comparing our approach with policy making & service design

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We use prototyping to work out what solutions look and feel like; to identify outcomes; and to develop the practice that best supports those outcomes and then the policies that best support those practices.  We end with a redefined problem, reset outcomes, and a demonstration of new ways of living and doing for people, practitioners and policymakers.  Here’s an example from a project we ran whilst working for the UK social enterprise Participle.  You can read more about it on Participle’s website.

Example: Resetting problem, outcomes, practice & policy for Youth Services

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3 People-practice-policy-prototypes

The interactions between policy, practice and people are difficult to predict and easy to distort. That’s why we believe making things real is the best way to learn. Throughout our process we constantly move between discussing abstract ideas and making concrete products – things like job descriptions, promotional materials, metrics and backend technology – so we can test how solutions play out in context and in real time.  Working in this way helps us understand how practice affects outcomes, model costs and minimize the risk of things like metrics perverting practice.

4 Working in, with and for

We start by embedding ourselves in the local context, and building a project team able to approach the problem inside-out and outside-in. That means we partner with community leaders, practitioners, service managers and policymakers to do the work, and then draw on international thought leaders and change-makers to challenge the work. All along the way, we’re engaging with people in their everyday contexts: the front room, the front desk, the back office, and the boardroom to co-design, test and improve solutions. By project end, we don’t just have a prototyped solution but a local team ready and energized to make the prototype happen.  You can read more about the teams we work with here.

5 We measure social impact

We’re pretty picky about what counts as a solution to a social problem. We think solutions are practices that bring about sustained social impact; they are not just innovative ideas. That leads us to try and measure social impact over time. A lot of existing measurement fails to pass the ‘so what’ test: so what if more people sign-up for a service, how good is the service? Instead, we use the ‘what’s different’ test: what has to change at a policy, service, community, family, and peer level in order for people to have the capacity to live different lives? Answering these questions requires that we codify outcomes, blend existing data sets, construct new measures, and put these measures together into a logic for change that can be tested and improved. Ultimately good measures are those that users find meaningful and practitioners find actionable.

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