Building Design as a Practice in the Public Sector
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How do we build long-term support for practices that can take time?
Design perspectives and ways of working are growing as a practice in the public sector. We’ve seen how taking a user-centric approach to tackling complex challenges can result in time and cost savings while dramatically improving people’s lives. But how do we build long-term support for practices that can take time?
We were inspired by civic innovation leader Stephanie Wade’s session at Rosenfeld’s Civic Design conference where she shared five ways to build and sustain design in government.
Integrate design with key innovation skills
Design is even more impactful when we embrace key innovation skills, such as data analytics, behavioural economics, agile development and futurism, and bring them into the design process.
“By bringing in data analytics, we’re able to define the ‘what’ behind the challenges that we want to tackle,” says Stephanie Wade. “We’re able to build an understanding of the size of the problem before we get started.”
Measure impact early
To measure impact effectively, we need to generate a baseline of how a problem is affecting a community before we start working on interventions so that we can see the short and long term impacts.
“It also gives us the opportunity to build buy-in with our government colleagues because they tend to speak in numbers. When we’re able to speak in their language and show them something that is concrete, we’re able to generate increased interest and enthusiasm in our work,” says Wade.
Identifying and measuring impact early reduces risk. With the ability to easily identify what’s working and what isn’t, we’re able to rapidly iterate when we need to.
Tell your story
Build long term support for your work by not only sharing ideas at the start and results at the end of the project. Share stories about the meaningful connections that were made along the way and moments of realisation about complex issues that moved the project forward. Showcase your work with field photos and direct quotes.
When you build empathy with stakeholders that don’t get to experience the day-to-day ongoings of your process, they can feel more connected to your work. It also sets your design process apart from other ways of problem solving in government.
Getting people out of the office and into the community to see and connect with people is one of the best ways to tell your story. Show how the design process is different and how you are engaging people in new ways so that the community is no longer represented only by statistics in a presentation. These key stakeholders will drive momentum to grow and sustain your work.
“Telling your story is one of the most important things civic designers can do to build long term support for their work, and it is the one activity that is often the most overlooked,” says Wade. She suggests building time into your project plan to tell the story so that key moments are captured while you’re in the middle of it. “You’ll capture critical moments when it’s fresh.”
Teach others
Taking the time to teach your project team and stakeholders how to use human-centred design processes will build long-term capacity. Teams will be able to bring this approach back to their day-to-day roles and sustain these ways of working in government, which will build strong advocacy well into the future.
Stephanie Wade shares a number of ways to teach design processes:
• Develop stand-alone bootcamps and other forms of training within the organisation to build excitement for this way of working.
• Create and run idea competitions and reward early adopters for applying design.
• Host open office hours or lunch-and-learns to create opportunities for colleagues to ask questions in a safe environment.
Plan ahead
“Start thinking about advocating for long-term sustainability growth early and often.” says Wade. Build a broad base of support across senior leadership, elected officials and department heads.
Alongside storytelling, present cost savings and efficiency measures with key managers who make resource decisions. Wade suggests engaging in regular conversations and staying within their line of sight. “Ask for their vision about how the work can be sustained and grow.”
Human-centred design processes are powerful and effective tools to solve complex challenges but it can take time to see tangible results through new ways of working. Through integrating design, measuring impact, storytelling, teaching others and planning ahead we can build patience for outcomes and long-term capacity and support to sustain user-centric practices in government.
At Local Peoples, we help the government solve complex problems through human-centred design and business analysis. We believe design should be a step towards the future we want to inhabit. Get in touch with our team today.
