We think it’s best to avoid bad language
Making good problem-solving clear isn’t helped by the fact that many words can be used to describe what we do. Here are a few you may have heard; social innovation, design thinking, service design, service transformation, public sector reform, co-design, co-creation, transformation design, radical redesign. We’d struggle to explain what they all mean so when talking and writing we find it better to minimise the buzz words and make liberal use of real life examples.
We think it’s good to tell stories
We find that the approach is made clearest when illustrated through the real life stories of people from past change-making projects: Mike, the CEO, who totally changed his assumptions over course of a prototype; Maggie, the service provider, who initially saw the prototype as a threat but eventually became its greatest champion; John, the lonely housebound older person, who found a friend through a project to develop a telephone based social networking service. Our stories are drawn from our own practice, including projects with young people, older people, families, substance users, teenage parents, and everyday citizens.
We think it’s good to talk about big and small, near and far
Effective social innovations can scale in many ways; they may require new organisations or new technologies or they may be something as seemingly simple as enabling a new kind of a relationship between worker and user, or even between neighbors. We like to highlight the potential range of innovations from our own work and from the work of others, from developed and developing world contexts. You can read examples we’ve been collecting here. If you’ve got your own favourites please tell us about them.
We think it’s good to talk about the time things went wrong
We think stories about when things don’t work are much more interesting and valuable than the things that do work. Our current approach is informed by our portfolio of failed projects: social innovations that failed to make a lasting social impact. We find that audiences relate to stories of policies that failed to do what they intended because they were not tested with people and practitioners. We can also talk about white elephant design projects that developed compelling user experiences but never went anywhere because they failed to connect with policy.
We love to talk!
Over the last ten years we’ve regularly promoted good problem-solving in the UK, US and New Zealand. We’ve run workshops at the house of commons, addressed the white house, given keynote speehes for the big international organisations, and designed events for senior civil servants. We’ve also run events at our fair share of draughty church halls, industrial estates, fields, community centres, colleges, theaters, art galleries, trade shows, online and even on a bus.
Next →
Talking and writing is the first of the three kinds of work we do. We see it as a prelude to working with people, practitioners and policy makers to build capacity for good problem-solving and to enable change through people-policy-practice prototypes.
What we do → We promote interest → We build capacity → We enable change
Main image: The Public Office © Kable
| Speaking, writing, events & films | |
|---|---|
| WHY | To raise awareness of good problem-solving. |
| WHO | Practitioners, managers, community leaders & policymakers intent on social innovation. Supported by Organisations who promote social innovation & public sector reform. |
| WHAT | Writing, speaking & lectures, events & film making. |
| OUTPUTS | International examples, scenarios, exercises, presentations, visits, reading. |
| OUTCOMES | Participants have …
|
© Kable
The Public Office
EXAMPLE EVENT
We worked with Kable to develop and run The Public Office, a high-profile event introducing user-centred approaches to senior UK civil servants. The event was sponsored by Accenture, Nortel, Microsoft and EDS.
The initial event took place in a custom designed space at a procurement trade show. The 3-hour workshop started with 6 films made to document users’ experiences of public services; a ‘weekend dad’ who felt he was fighting the system to look after his son, the family of a prisoner, and a woman struggling to manage care for two older relatives with her own life and health issues.
After watching the films, we introduced participants to innovative international examples that illustrated new ways of doing are possible. We challenged participants to identify how a user-centered project could help them achieve their aims and explored what it would take to make that project happen.
Following the initial 3-hour event, The Public Office went on the road and workshops was repeated for local authorities.
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