GCDesign

[govcandesign-blog]

NRCan’s Innovation Lab on Science-Based Public Engagement

By Sarah Fraser and Janice Cudlip

For the past four years, NRCan has been experimenting with a game-based learning activity to support successful integration of science and policy: the Science and Policy Team Challenge.

The Team Challenge generates great ideas, and helps employees develop better networks and a deeper understanding of the department’s role and mandate. In addition, they put in surprising amounts of effort (including their own personal time) and they highly value the experience, passing on their enthusiasm to others.

But, how can we do this with fewer people, shorter timelines and in a more compact format? This is what a group of 5 employees from NRCAN came together to test drive in October 2013.

More and more literature in the business and technology world, and now the public service (see Blueprint 2020) is pointing to use of new approaches to tapping dispersed and diverse expertise for solving increasingly complex problems that touch multiple mandates.

The idea of a “challenge lab” or “design lab” moves beyond simple idea generation to prototyping of actions, products or processes. The process involves six steps:

1. Gather your team and define the issue 2. Design the lab 3. Test and refine the design 4. Attract participants 5. Generate prototypes and pick a winner 6. Share the results and process evaluation with participants and decision makers 7. Test the best prototype in the real world

Essential Ingredients for a Design Lab

A designing group who have their “seek approval” reflex in check A clearly defined problem Test audiences Lab participants, both subject matter experts and non-experts Established, but minimal, limits

The design team, made up of Janice Cudlip, Sarah Fraser, Marianne Trépanier, Vanessa Greebe and Alison Bird, wanted to work with a topic that would a) allow us to test our model, b) generate useful solutions to a real problem, and c) draw on our strengths.

We landed on an issue that intrigued us all: despite lots of available information, Canadians are generally not prepared for an Earthquake or other natural disaster. The question for the design lab was: What could NRCan do to get 80% of Canadians 100% ready? With a clearly defined issue that touched us as individuals, members of our communities, and professionals we were confident that we could attract expert colleagues to participate in this experimental event.

Over the course of 8 weeks, each team member contributed between 10 and 16 hours to the design of the lab. Friends and co-workers helped us test our plan and provided essential feedback. Twenty colleagues from across the department participated in the lab, both in the room and from regional centres.

The session started with a shared experience – a ShakeOut earthquake simulation – which helped participants connect with disaster preparedness on a personal level. Teams were asked to generate at least 10 ideas in response to the challenge question and explore how one of these ideas could be prototyped and tested.

The concepts which emerged were thoughtful, relevant and reasonable. The results of the lab were shared with participants and senior managers, and have had an influence on how the department approaches science outreach.

We approached this event as an experiment, and discovered that:

* Design labs are a dynamic way to get people to search for solutions together. The lab brought people together across the department and from different functional communities, generated creative, tangible ideas and offered a format that gave people time to think, and think in new, different ways.

* Pilots and tests are very helpful when thinking through something new: we tested our design twice, and it changed both times, and ended up with something different than what we had imagined at first.

In the current environment, we cannot escape the need to collaborate and share scarce resources – to achieve our goals, we have to learn how to work better together. The collaboration model we tested is designed to deliver highly productive interactions without requiring the establishment of group governance or a long-term commitment to an issue. It also generates ideas that are ready to test, making it easier to translate the output of a working session into activities to be considered for piloting.

Janice Cudlip is the Manager of the S&T Liaison Office at NRCan Sarah Fraser is an Analyst in the Government Operations Sector at TBS

[govcandesign-blog]

Designing a Prototype Change Lab

Brian here...Our last post mentioned that I have been contributing to the creation of a Change Lab within my organization.

Building on the Gov3.0 coursework from last winter, I thought a lot about how a lab could work within a single department of the Government of Canada. After participating in the Labs for Systems Change conference hosted by MaRS Solutions Lab in the spring, I continued discussions with current and former members of other labs around the world, and read about their experiences in order to hypothesize what would fit a Government of Canada (read: Westminster) context. The presentation (slideshare) embedded below reflects this learning.   

This presentation remains a work in progress. I hope, given the current attention on labs, it might help others to share this research and highlight some key elements and success factors in setting up a lab.

In the spirit of open source collaboration - “many eyes make for fewer bugs” - suggestions and feedback are welcomed. I want to know if this resonates with your experience? Do you have suggestions for areas of future research or data sources that should be reviewed or integrated? Is anything missing?

Feel free to post comments below, email GCDesign at [email protected], or get in touch with me on twitter @BrianEnright.

[govcandesign-blog]

GC Design Studio is a go!

After many months navigating approvals, GC Design Studio has found a home!

We are ecstatic to announce that the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS)  is sponsoring four assignments to work with a policy/project team and departmental representatives on an internal red tape reduction initiative as announced in the Clerk of the Privy Council's Destination2020 report. Thank you to all the Policy Igniters who voted for us, colleagues who supported us and friends who challenged us and cheered us on.

Blaise Hébert and Sage Cram are the first two employees of GC Design Studio.

  As you may expect from nerds who spend their Sunday afternoons debating accountability and legitimacy (as pictured above), we were busy while negotiations were underway.

One such investment was participating in the Gov 3.0 class led by President Obama's former Chief Technology Officer, Beth Noveck. From January to April we discussed and debated the problem that GC Design seeks to solve. The way that the class was structured meant that we spent about 80% of the semester looking to other industries and experts to redefine our problem statement and 20% thinking about possible solutions.

The most valuable parts of the course were working together as a team and the feedback we received from our professor, as well as from Alan Kantrow, Director of Learning and Communications at NYU’s GovLab, who prompted us to “prepare for ‘yes’” when we visited him in New York city in April (as pictured below with teaching assistant Mehan Jayasuriya).

  GC Design is not just a studio

  We decided at that time that, while GC Design could be a physical space, it definitely had to be a mental space, a safe space, and a space dedicated to design during our working hours.

Not all GC Designers will get to work in GC Design Studio; at least, not this year. However, each person has built on what we learned together. Each of us is finding ways to integrate design methods into a greater part of our existing jobs. Separately and in pairs or groups we've also branched off and worked on related projects.

Judy Maclean integrated design into her strategic communications planning. Meghan Hellstern took a full time job as a solutions designer, became active in the #psilabs space and got accepted to Studio Y for next year. Brian Enright and Sage Cram participated in Employment and Social Development Canada's Blueprint 2020 exercise and helped gain approval for "a "Change Lab" to try new approaches that bridge policy, program and service perspectives in solving client problems" that was announced in the Destination2020 report. Thomas Gohard and Laura Wesley continue in the Web Standards Office at TBS, helping departmental clients find ways to integrate design into their Web development processes. We also added a new person to our team, Chris Scipio, who is successfully bringing design thinking to Justice Canada’s Policy Bazaar and sharing his exploratory research on GCPEDIA, the Government of Canada’s internal wiki.

  Design Jam @ CodeFest2014

  We've also been looking at sharing what we've learned about applying design to government programs, services and policies. To that end, Meghan and Laura from GC Design collaborated with other CodeFest organizers to put together an internal policy-focused Design Jam.

The event explored potential ways to improve the Treasury Board Policy Suite by considering the needs of policy users and creators over three half-day sessions (July 30 and August 14-15). The first session was a workshop to identify and define user needs. The other two afternoon workshops involved teams competing to develop ideas that best responded to both user and organizational needs.

Read the resulting ideas in the Design Jam Final Report or check out the video from the design jam (embedded below) by our friends at Carleton’s design lab, 1125@Carleton.

  Join us and keep in touch

  If you’re a design facilitator or practitioner, consider joining our community of practice to support and learn from one another by adding content to GCPEDIA about design methods that are appropriate for use in the public sector and other resources, such as case studies or links to sample projects.

For those with less time to commit but who still want to stay in touch, in addition to following this blog, you can also follow us on Twitter (@GovCanDesign) and join the conversation using the hashtag #GCDesign. You can also email us at gcdesign (at) googlegroups (dot) com with questions and ideas.

If you're interested in a broader discussion and community, join the Ottawa Design Meet-up group or Design Thinking LinkedIn group (which are both thankfully run by others, given how busy we’ve been!).

[govcandesign-blog]

GC Design: Retrospective Blog Post for Gov 3.0

Hi Gov3.0,

Update for you from Canada. We came back from New York ready to present tons of ideas to our Government of Canada colleagues. For their benefit and yours, here is our story from the beginning. Over the course of three short months, Gov 3.0 drastically helped us reframe our goals, helped us gel as a team, advanced our thinking considerably, and prepared us to handle getting a “yes” to our idea.

In October 2013 we assembled as part of group of like-minded peers who had been working separately as leaders in our fields of user experience design, policy analysis, and interface design. We competed in a Government of Canada-wide competition called Policy Ignite where public servants present innovative ideas to policy nerds from across the Canadian federal government. Amid dozens of applications, ours was accepted and in December we gave a short presentation making the case for the Government of Canada to create a Design Lab for policy and service innovation. Drawing on examples like Denmark’s MindLab and the United Kingdom’s Design Council, we made the case for applying design, something that many of us had already been applying on a smaller scale in our day jobs, more broadly to government programs, policies, and services.

We won, receiving popular vote among the audience, and have since been invited to present in a number of other circles. This included a Dragons’ Den of senior management who endorsed our idea, as well as others that were presented as a result of Policy Ignite.

A few weeks later, in early 2014, we jumped at the opportunity to participate in the Gov 3.0 course. Once accepted, one of the first things we did was write a blog post about how excited we were to participate.

For the next assignment, we wrote about the problem we were passionate about solving.

Professor Beth Noveck’s feedback challenged our assumptions and encouraged us to be more concrete. We struggled with this internally: how could we be more tangible with our problem? Were we coming at this from the right angle? Were design methods and safe spaces still the solution to our problem? What was the problem anyway?

Our discussions became quite high-level and meta for some time; for a brief moment, it seemed we had lost our way and become entangled in defining the issue we wanted to solve. In response, we stripped down our problem statement. One of our team members challenged us to each define our understanding of the problem in 140 characters or less. Our collective tweetables were compelling but also reflected significantly different perspectives and experiences. Through this exercise and deep discussion, we regained focus and set out to prototype how a “lab” could create a safe space to embed design methods more intentionally within the Government of Canada.

At the midterm presentation, we made the case for a government-wide design lab. Pitching this concept got us thinking about the challenges that might confront a lab based in a physical space, as our envisioned lab would be. How could we ensure success? How could we ensure that potentially disruptive solutions that may emerge from such labs would be seen through to implementation?

Gov 3.0 encouraged us to undertake a literature review of our project, so we performed a great deal of research and wrote case studies on active and defunct labs in other jurisdictions. We explored how they were governed, how they determine what projects they work on, the methods they employ, and how they ensured solutions are implemented. We sought out commonalities, exploring why some labs found success and why some labs were disbanded.

As part of the course, we were encouraged to reach out to mentors who could help us move forward our projects. The reality was that most of us had already been actively engaging experts. For example, in April 2014, Meghan organized a sold-out event with Joeri van den Steenhoven of the MaRS Solutions Lab and many of us were in regular conversations with experts across a range of fields. We wrote another blog post about the influence and support of our mentors.

Following these efforts we started preparing for our final presentation in New York City at the final Gov 3.0 class. Our project proposal outlined a prototype lab for the Government of Canada based on our case studies and conversations with experts. In it, we presented how we might respond to receiving the green light to create our design lab. We reframed our problem, updated our solution, and outlined how the success of the lab would be contingent upon assembling the right team, equipping them with the right tools, deciding on the right projects, and ensuring solutions are implemented.

In May we travelled to New York City (on our own dime) to present our final project and meet our classmates (and Beth Noveck!) in person. We presented our prototype for a whole-of-government design lab that plugged into existing governance structures within the Government of Canada. We explained how many problems don’t necessarily need a lab and outlined how a lab could on-ramp projects and partners. Two key aspects of this process were the option for clients to discontinue at any time as well as a focus on working with partners to off-ramp the solutions into implementation.

While in New York we also teamed up with the Parsons DESIS Lab and Civic Service to present our experiences using design methods in government at a Civic Service Forum event attended by more than 40 civic innovators from New York City.

We returned to Ottawa a week later, just in time for the Clerk of the Privy Council to release the Destination 2020 report which officially announced the creation of a number of labs in the Canadian federal government. As a result of this announcement it did not appear that our vision of a whole-of-government lab was likely, so we set out to revise our prototype to share what we had learned along our journey in the hopes it would be helpful for future labs housed within only one organization.

We revised our final presentation to outline how governance of a lab in a departmental context might work, using MindLab's initial structure as an inspiration. Drawing on Australia's DesignGov work, we reworked the presentation to emphasize the need to create project criteria. Additionally, based on key success factors of a number of labs, we recommend a three-step scaling model that could improve the resilience and longevity of labs to ensure they don’t take on too much too soon.

Our revised prototype is something that anyone can use and build on. It may not be perfect or work in every context, but at the very least, it is intended to get people thinking about the ingredients for a successful lab.

Most recently, we returned to Policy Ignite where we updated members of the Canadian federal government policy community on how busy we’ve been, sharing our ongoing commitment to growing the capacity for design methods within government.

The vast majority of our work to date has happened from the sides of our desks; a lot of hard work on evenings and weekends. Ideally we want to devote all of our time to growing GC Design. However, we also realize that this would only be possible with dedicated day jobs that allow us the time and space to dedicate our working energy to this cause - something we currently lack.

Until then, our plan is to build a network of design thinkers and policy innovators within the Canadian federal government. We want to help positively influence the success of labs across government both here in Canada and elsewhere. We want to see design methods embedded as a legitimate tool for policy development worldwide. Design methods are on the radar of decision makers now more than ever, and labs (and similar concepts) are popping up both locally and around the world. To ensure this momentum continues, it is imperative that we start demonstrating results, which is why we will soon be posting case studies on DesignGov.com to share our examples and successes more broadly.

The time to get plugged in is now. How can we help you? Email us at [email protected] or check us out on GCpedia.  We are available for a tweet, email, chat, to help with a workshop you’re planning, or even the right job offer - whatever you need to help achieve the vision of bringing new ways of working and design methods to government.