#gcdesign

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?

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.

Hi there. We’re GCDesign, a team of six Canadian public servants who are interested in applying design thinking to improving government policies and services. Our project for Gov 3.0 is called Design Thinking for Policy and Service Innovation. Below we’ve collected some of our initial thoughts on the course from each of our team members. We also tweet using the #GCDesign hashtag so please feel free to follow along!

Brian Enright: “I applied to Gov3.0 looking to expand my toolset and to learn a method to push forward GCdesign’s collective goal of improving the process by which programs, policies, and services are created within the federal government of Canada.

As a team, we’ve been working towards a solution to this problem for a couple months, and as individuals, we’ve been working on this for much longer. Last October we assembled as part of group of like-minded peers to compete in a Government of Canada-wide competition called Policy Ignite where individuals or teams present an innovative idea to policy nerds across 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 UK’s Design Council, our presentation made the case for applying what many of us have been working on as leaders in user experience design, policy design, and interface design,  and applying these skills more broadly and intentionally 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, including a Dragon’s Den of senior management who committed to implementing the idea in some capacity. We have since seen our idea take on a life of its own with a number of federal departments investigating implementation of their own labs. In this success, we are starting to face new challenges as we attempt to bring innovation to a large system that is good at resisting change. As a team we defined our original challenge as getting senior management to take our disruptive idea seriously, it has now shifted towards ensuring implementation is adequately setting it up for success and even questioning if our solution is the right one for the problem we all originally came together to solve.“

Laura Wesley: “Personally my challenge has been with the level of abstraction around our project, as well as the similarities in so much of our other work - GCDesign proof of concept, the policy ignite/dragons’ den experience, connecting in with other designers on their projects. In an attempt to pull away from a solution, and focus on the problem, the problem space has grown quite large and very difficult for me to wrap my brain around, especially with so many other ideas and priorities swirling around in there! Federal service offerings are already difficult to grasp - legislation, policy, transfer payments to others who deliver services - how are we to involve people in decision making if we can’t narrow in on one thing?

I work best when I focus in on one thing and then extrapolate out learnings from that experience. I also prefer to develop a body of work behind me that I can compare, contrast, discuss, observe objectively. This is new and exciting territory... there is a zeitgeist around us pulling and supporting the direction we are taking. However, it also seems to be tricky timing as others come to similar conclusions of the need, with less idea of how to meet it. I’m anxious to get to the part where we can point to something concrete and say “Here’s one example of the HOW.” I love the challenge. As always, I wish I had taken on fewer commitments so I could focus more on enjoying that space between knowing and not-knowing. I’m comfortable with not knowing the answer. I just haven’t dedicated enough space in my mind to really be present in that moment for this course.”

Rubina Haddad: “I really like the fact that this course is helping us focus on the problem - one of the biggest lessons from university was that in order to come up with any kind of solution you need to first completely understand every aspect of the problem and immerse yourself in it. What is currently happening, and what is the specific problem that needs to be solved and why.  As Laura said, I think we are struggling with targeting a specific problem because our big problem is very broad.“

Meghan Hellstern: “There’s this quote (of uncertain origin) that keeps floating around in my head: “fall in love with the problem, not your solution.” Though I certainly have theories, I’m not certain why it’s often so easy to jump straight to a solution or why it’s often so challenging to spend time on defining the problem rather than charging ahead into creating and solving. Whatever it is, I suspect it’s the same thing that drives what I call ‘tool talk’ - the desire to chase the shiny tangible package, to drive the problem from the solution rather than vice versa. I find myself fighting this constant urge to talk solutions yet the rational side of me clearly sees the logic in the quote - that, in order to be truly effective in problem solving, we need to make sure we fully understand the problem we are setting out to solve. We have to be so deeply in love with the problem that we will only accept the best possible solution for it, even if it’s not our solution. We need to be so impassioned that we want to see that problem solved no matter what it takes, even if it means that our role in solving it may be diminished or possibly nonexistent.

If we don’t fall in love with our problem, we risk spending effort only to produce so-called ‘bandaids’ - solutions that only superficially address an issue when, to carry the medical metaphor forward, the root cause is a much deeper sickness. I think we owe it to ourselves and the problems we seek to solve, not to mention the people impacted by those problems, to ensure that we are answering the right question before we invest an incredible amount of human capital, time, money, energy, sweat, blood, tears, and passion into a solution.So far, Gov 3.0 has been a great catalyst in helping me realize the value of falling in love with the problem, and I can’t wait to find out how that will affect the overall direction and approach our project takes.”

Blaise Hébert: “The part of our problem that I’m struggling with, is about understanding the degree of system wide change that is required in the government structure in order to accomplish new positive results. For example, if we are facing more “wicked” problems that are becoming more complex as a function of time, shouldn’t we be exploring how to adapt our structure to accommodate said complexity? More specifically, how do you add a design lab component to the existing policy development structure, without causing enough significant harm, and at the same time making it’s products survive implementation?  It’s hard to change one, without changing the other. I know that it’s unrealistic for me to think that this class will be able to to give me all the answers, but  the insight I gain from my peers, might be the clincher I need to build and support a solution.”

Sage Cram: “Narrowing the problem down is hard, really hard.  On the flip side however, having opportunity to spend time to work on it, share it, discuss it and whittle it down to its essence is rather luxurious. So seldom in my life as a public servant am I afforded the time to properly think my way around what I’ve been working on. We’re taking turns leading homework and for fun last week I asked everyone to frame the problem into the format of a tweet, I wanted to see how much we differed on our problem statement. It’s amazing how 140 characters really makes you zone right into the core of what you’re trying to say.

This course has also been a great voyage of discovery for me being part of this team. We all came to this course with a similar interest and passion but we all have such varying backgrounds, skillsets and knowledge that the process of working out our problem has in turn shown us where we need to step up and take charge and when we need to sit back and learn from each other. This is probably as valuable as the course itself.”

Here's a Vine that will tell you a little more about us: