I just spent a snowy day in a workshop on Service Excellence at the business school.  It was (apparently) the first time in recent memory that all staff have participated in a cross-departmental training initiative.  Except that it wasn’t training, really.  Nor was it planning, or team-building.  In fact, upon discussion, it became clear that no one was sure what it was.  Yet we were all told to give up a valuable day of our work time to be there – at a significant cost to the organization.

It seemed that the sponsors of the initiative wanted us to to come up with some ideas to improve customer service.  And while we did generate some tactical suggestions, mostly what we did was to ask questions.

• Who are our clients?  Are students clients?  Public taxpayers? Other business units?
• What are our corporate values and goals?  Until we know these, it’s difficult to deliver service that meets them.
• How is service performance measured?  Rewarded?
• Why aren’t faculty participating in this initiative? As the “face” of the School and front-line service providers, they need to lead and own customer service along with staff and the executive.
• Customer service is notably absent from our newly-minted strategic plan.  What is the connection?
• Where does customer service end and corporate culture begin?  Do we just try harder for “clients” and lower our standards for everyone else?
• And finally, what’s the process for all this?  Where will these ideas go?

In response to the last question, we were told that there will be a debrief in which our ideas will be summarized and presented to the executive.  At that point, the sponsors of the session may choose to implement some of our suggestions, making incremental improvements in a few spots.

Rather, I hope that they will pause to reflect on the tremendous opportunity they’ve just created.

They have unintentionally engaged a cross-functional community in exploring a wicked problem space that runs much deeper than customer service.  Instead of coming to an end as a brief service tune-up, this initiative could be transformed into the beginning of a journey into a powerful design process, through which the School’s community members co-create a corporate culture that fosters and celebrates service excellence.

This is a great example of how organizations will rush to invest (significantly) in trying to generate solutions, when really, they don’t yet know what the problem or opportunity is.  I hope the business school’s leaders will have the courage and vision to recognize the value that could be added by supporting this as a design project to tackle one or more of the wicked problems that emerged during the session.  It could become a nice case study in design innovation in public sector management.

Photo credit: UBC

We ran a design session the other day with a senior faculty member to explore options for making his course more active and engaging for students, while improving their higher order learning.  The process and outcomes reminded me that perceived risk (un-managed) can be a massive barrier to innovation and change.

The environment for the session, the design activities and most of the ideas generated were well beyond the faculty member’s comfort zone.  We suspected this would be the case going in, but somehow thought it would be okay.  It wasn’t.

He sat uncomfortably (arms crossed) for two hours in the open, glass and leather studio space.  During brainstorming, he tried his best to avoid having to stand up to put his sticky notes on the wall and share his thoughts out loud with the group.  When we sorted the ideas from the brainstorm, suggestions of doing anything that might resemble “play” in his class (such as building a model of a financial system with lego) fell off the table first.

Design processes, tools and techniques are familiar to many who come from creative industries and the like.  But they can be terrifically intimidating to those from more analytical or traditional backgrounds.  Before we invite “newbies” to deep dive into the design pool, we need to spend time with them to map our their comfort zones.  Knowing what is at stake for them – what their risk tolerance is – will enrich both the design process and potential outcomes.

We wrapped up the second session of the eight-hour Design Advantage workshop with the UDI on Tuesday night.  The workshop was developed at the request of their U40 (under forty) group, to help them expand their toolkit for dealing with complex problems.  The issue of housing affordability is of particular concern to them, so we used it as the working problem for the session.

This was the first workshop I’ve co-developed and facilitated; I had the extreme pleasure and privilege of working with Professors Moura Quayle and Ron Kellett (UBC) and someday-to-be Professor Andreanne Doyon.  (We also had the support of our extraordinary Sauder d.studio student team).  It was an incredibly rich process for me and I believe that the final program was infinitely stronger than anything we would have produced individually.  It was actually a terrific example of design thinking in action, with multiple iterations and versions of questions, workbooks, presentations and strategies.

I learned a great deal – about getting out of our heads and onto our feet – as the participants were less keen on theory and anxious to get busy. This is always a struggle for educators.  We believe that novices need theory first before they could possibly be able to do anything.  Yet, novices repeatedly prove us wrong, as they are always smarter, more experienced and more resourceful than we think.

Many of the participants left feeling that they had developed good ideas for addressing affordability that they could continue to pursue – and that they did take away new skills and strategies for managing complexity.  Others left disappointed, as they expected to solve the affordability problem.  In future, we need to be more specific with our marketing.

In the end, 23 young professionals went from thinking about a massive problem – affordability – to prototyping five viable solutions to specific pieces of the problem.  Not bad for 8 hours work.

Kudos and thanks to all!

Just found this great video clip from David Kelley (IDEO) on the Culture of Prototyping.

He talks about our tendency to try to think our way through to innovation, when really, we need to shift to doing – trying out ideas quickly and learning from them.

I am definitely guilty of this and often catch myself working alone, thinking so hard that my brain seizes up.  We all know that we usually learn best by doing – so why don’t we apply this to design and problem-solving?