GC Design: Retrospective Blog Post for Gov 3.0
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.
