TOOLS: INVESTIGATIVE REHEARSAL AS A SERVICE DESIGN TOOL

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The ‘investigative rehearsal’ method is based on a technique developed by the clever folks at Work Play Experience. We’ve made some changes for it to work best for the people we partner with and developed our own principles for success.

Principles for success
 

• Creating a safe space - this activity requires participants to be vulnerable and ‘act’. Find a space where nosy onlookers won’t bother participants and say no to all cameras and social media
   
• Taking the problem seriously, not yourself - play and humility are important parts of the process
   
• Create a container for imagination - have participants set the scene with props, furniture, wigs or costumes
   
• Use personas - as established characters, stakeholders are more easily able to enact their 'character'
   
• Don’t talk, do - learn by doing, not talking about doing
   
• Challenge the ‘subtext’ - it’s important to go beyond the superficial and challenge what’s really going on. How do the characters feel?
   
• Ask observers to take a particular character's perspective - you’ll get much more targeted feedback on what they thought the experience of that person was like (what worked well, what didn’t, what needs to change)
   
• Respect the people who designed the initial service proposition you're testing - be delicate with crushing their hopes and dreams
   

Vancouver Film School, Some rights reserved 

How do we do it?

The technique is broken down into 3 'scenes'. To set this activity up you'll need:
 

• A service proposition to test i.e. a new process map, call centre script, face-to-face interaction, etc. 
   
• A director - a skilled facilitator who can run the activity and help to uncover the 'subtext'
   
• Actors - people who 'play' service users and service providers
   
• Observers - expert listeners, watchers and note takers
   
• Props - wigs, costumes - whatever assists in setting the scene
   
• A space

Act 1:

Based on the service proposition you're testing, the actors act it out.  

The director helps the observers understand what the characters are thinking and feeling by pausing the act and asking the characters questions. For example:

"How do you feel right now?" or "what is working well for you?", "what isn't work well?", "what do you think about this?"

These things don't naturally come out unless they are challenged to the surface.

Observers write down their observations.

Design for Social Innovation Conference, Auckland 2015

Act 2:

This is the opportunity for the observers and actors to re-design the service.

As the actors run through the activity again, the observers and actors can yell 'stop' and demonstrate how they'd re-design the experiences. It's important everyone shows not just talks. 

The director facilitates the feedback process and helps the group reach consensus on changes.

You need someone/several people capturing the changes to the original service proposition.

Act 3:

After changes have been made, the actors to re-do the service experience - helping the room understand how the original service proposition has changed.

Why use it?

• Theatre provides a way to model human interaction

• Engages hearts and minds - creating empathy for customer and staff experiences

• Brings personas to life - helping stakeholders get to know and use personas

• Quick and cheap - to test, iterate and prototype services

• Breaks assumptions down quickly

• Facilitates honest conversations - providing a safe space for critique.

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SKILL UP: SOCIAL INNOVATION RESOURCES

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We're in an exciting time, with social innovation being practiced, explored and expanded around the globe. Amazing people and organisations are employing social innovation approaches and gaining powerful insights into the essence of what works best.

Here's a list we've compiled of some of the knowledge resources we love most:
 

DIY Toolkit
UK's Nesta developed this toolkit on how to invent, adopt or adapt ideas that can deliver better results. There are loads of practical tools with clear explanations on how to use them.

Develop Your Skills
This vast section of Nesta's website  has a wealth of great innovation training and upskilling resources.

Design Kit
Mindsets, methods, case studies and more — Design Kit is IDEO.org’s platform to learn human-centered design, a creative approach to solving the world’s most difficult problems.

Virtual Crash Course
The Stanford d.school created this online 90-minute video-led cruise through one of their most frequently sought after learning tools.

Using video, handouts, and facilitation tips, you’ll be taken through a step-by-step process of hosting or participating in a 90-minute design challenge.

Bootleg Bootcamp
Another great resource from the d.school: an active toolkit to support your design thinking practice. It's often used as an introductory experience to design thinking.

The Bootcamp Bootleg is “more of a cook book than a text book, and more of a constant work-in-progress than a polished and permanent piece.”

Design methods for developing services.
A brief introduction to why design methods can be useful when developing services, from UK Design Council.

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TOOLS: PROTOTYPING

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Social innovation and design evolve through iterative cycles of doing and reflecting. Prototyping can help us to quickly evaluate and discard potential solutions and keep building on the ideas that work.

Prototyping helps us to communicate or test aspects of a desired experience, a service or a programme.  It is important to focus our prototyping on the bits of the service that are most important to learn about.  innovate change associate Penny Hagen has come up with these questions which can help us prioritise what to prototype first:

• What do you want to learn through the prototyping process?
• What are the questions that need to be answered?
• What are the embedded assumptions with your idea that need to be tested?
• What aspects need further thinking and exploration?
• What aspects need to be communicated in order to enable feedback?

There are a lot of ways to prototype and we’ve included some links to a few awesome resources at the bottom of this post.  Let us tell you a bit about exploratory and developmental prototyping – two of the main forms of prototyping we use.

Exploratory prototyping is helpful to try out an early idea and to test the demand for a potential new service in a quick and “lo-fi” way (think about hi-fi audio – it’s the best and most refined audio; this is the opposite – simple and low tech).

You can use a range of creative techniques to do this kind of prototyping.  Some ideas are in the boxes to the right.  Different methods can help you explore and communicate different things.  For example, visual methods can help communicate ideas, stories and outcomes, whilst tangible and role play based methods can help to convey experiences and interactions.  It’s better to start and then iterate your prototype than spend too much time in planning though.

We often do some exploratory prototyping following idea generation and selection (from the designing and refining stages of our innovative action model).

Say we were working on a new service idea to incorporate primary care services into an Emergency Department.  The group working on the idea might develop a physical model out of simple materials.  The model showed how the physical service environment at the ED might work and how patients might navigate between the primary care service and the ED service.  The group could then use the models (prototypes) to test and get feedback on the idea.   The prototypes help people feel and see the idea.

Developmental prototyping should still be easy and low cost to do but it allows us to test and evolve components of a service in more detail.  This can be done by identifying simple ways you can try part of a service.

For example, when working with our friends at Curative on Steer Clear, we often test out a new experience, campaign product or information resource with a small group of the target audience.  We make low cost versions of the products and get people in to try them and give us feedback on the experience.  This helps us make changes and sort out issues that the rest of the audience may well have experienced – but we do it before that part of Steer Clear goes public.

Prototyping is different to piloting.  By the time we get to piloting a service or programme, we should be pretty sure about it – and hopefully we’ve gone through a range of cycles of prototyping to get there.

Whatever way you’re prototyping, there are some common learnings here.  Prototyping should be quick and easy – try not to get bogged down in detail.  It’s better to try something, make it physical, visual or tangible in some way and get some feedback.  You can keep making new prototypes as you get more feedback and insight, so making it quick and easy also means you don’t get too attached to those LEGO models or storyboards!  It’s important to get clear on what you want to prototype, and Penny’s questions at the top of this post should help with that.  And it is super important that the sorts of people who are going to use this service or programme are involved in testing and feeding back on the prototype.

There are heaps of awesome resources available on prototyping – like these:

• Steps to developing your prototype (one page concise resource developed by our associate Penny Hagen)
• IDEO Design Kit Rapid Prototyping Guide
• NESTA and thinkpublic prototyping framework
• Roberta Tassi’s research work on service design (specific pages on prototyping)
• Stanford D-School Prototype to Test Worksheet

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TOOLS: BACKCASTING FROM SCENARIOS

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Imagining a desired future can inspire strategy and action, but the path to success is not always obvious.  At innovate change, we use future focused scenarios to provide a picture of the future, then we ‘backcast’ to work out how to get there.  Developing policy, services or programmes from this perspective helps us to imagine the impact of our plans on real people.

Future focused scenarios

Future visions are commonly used as a tool for planning, especially in relation to strategy, disasters or sustainability.

They are useful for getting a diverse range of stakeholders to articulate their shared vision of a desirable future. Future focused scenarios can also be used as part of a design process to encourage people to imagine specific outcomes or ideas in concrete ways.

Future focused scenarios work best when developed collectively through a participatory process. Not only does a participatory process allow for a rich range of inputs to shape scenarios, but it enables stakeholder learning and buy-in.

One of the ways we have developed scenarios is by facilitating the co-creation of the scenarios in a workshop environment. We provide ‘ingredients’, such as the name and age of a persona, indicators of success, and key trends. Workshop participants blend these ingredients with a dash of imagination to create a scenario that describes a desirable future situation. When we worked on the National Drug Policy, this participatory approach enabled a range of government officials to realise how drug and alcohol issues had an impact on their work, regardless of their actual work area.

Backcasting

Once we have created future focused scenarios, we can work backwards to determine how to reach the desired vision or state. Through ‘backcasting’, people identify the key events, conditions and triggers that would be needed to reach this future. The key question at this stage is “what would need to exist for this state or vision to be arrived at?” Or, in other words, “What actions and assumptions lead us to this future?”

Backcasting from future focused scenarios is an alternative to forecasting. Forecasting is unlikely to generate solutions that break trends or challenge the status quo, because its point of departure is the present situation and dominant trends. Backcasting, on the other hand, takes us on a journey to the desired future from the present, by starting with the destination we want to reach then working backwards. When we aim to achieve sustainable systems-level change and innovation, backcasting is a useful tool.

We have also found backcasting to be a helpful method for generating and sharpening ideas. It can be easy to come up with new ideas that sound great but are not that feasible in practice. Backcasting can be a good reality check.

In our workshops and innovation injection sessions, we sometimes provide participants with a half-formed idea and ask them to work backwards, identifying what must exist or change for this idea to work. Participants then identify various activities, conditions, resources, roles and behaviours that underlie the idea. This activity can complement prototyping as a useful way to quickly break open and tease out an idea.

If you’re interested in finding out more about future focused scenarios and backcasting, here are a couple of useful sources you might like to check out:

• This short article on backcasting from a UX perspective
• OECD guide to scenarios.

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OUR THINKING: INSIGHTS ON BEHAVIOUR CHANGE

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innovate change in partnership with the New Zealand Drug Foundation and our mates at Curative brought social marketing maestro Jeff Jordan, founder of Rescue SCG, to NZ to share his unique approach – social branding.

As well as sharing his experience of being a young social entrepreneur at innovate change takeaways, Jeff facilitated workshops on behaviour change for good in Auckland and Wellington.

Here’s a look at eight insights he shared in April 2015:

ONE:  Awareness is not enough.

For a long time public health has strived to raise public awareness of various pieces of information that say people shouldn’t do x behaviour and should definitely do y. We assume that if people just knew how bad something was for them, they’d stop doing it almost automatically.

Jeff points out that people aren’t really that logical, and that a lot of what determines the choices we make and the behaviours we engage in is our environment and peer group.

TWO:  Engagement does not mean success.

Although measuring the number of Facebook shares we get for a clever health meme might feel really nice, it’s not an impact metric. Just because a lot of people have seen or ‘liked’ a post doesn’t mean they have been influenced by its message.

THREE: Too often public health tries to reach everyone with one campaign.

The public health sector is way behind the commercial marketing world when it comes to monopolising on lifestyle adherence. Many cigarette brands, for instance, are actually “rebrands” of the same product, packaged differently to match the audience they’re targeting.

This is in contrast to most social marketing that treats everyone within a demographic subset as a single audience, with a single message delivered in a single way.

FOUR:  To reach young people, we must understand peer groups.

The social groups and scenes that young people identify with is a powerful indicator and determinant of their behaviours. Rescue SCG is known for its targeted social branding strategies based on research into socio-cultural peer crowds, and this means they have a powerful ability to create marketing that matches what young people value.

FIVE:  Social marketing brands do not need to point to the behaviour change.

Many social marketing programmes don brands centred around the behaviours they seek to discourage or promote. These brands are consequently interesting only to those who already support the message being offered up. To everyone else they inevitably feel incongruous with their lifestyle and values.

Jeff talked about the need to form brands based on the lifestyles and identities (peer crowds) of the people you are trying to reach because, quite simply, these are the only brands that a programme’s target audience will care about.

SIX:  Find those in a community who already agree with you and amplify them.

People inside of a subculture already know the scene and have a place in it.

By finding respected people within a scene who want the outcome you’re trying to achieve, and supporting them to be leaders of that change, your message gets way more impactful.

SEVEN:  Understand the behaviour before you choose your strategy.

We need to assume that for an individual engaging in a behaviour we want to change, there’s some positive benefit they’re getting from it. There’s a reason they’re doing it, even if we don’t agree with that reason.

It’s important that we understand and respect the behaviour that we want to change. We need to find out why the “bad behaviour” is a good idea. Then we are better equipped to offer an alternative, better strategy for getting the same benefit.

EIGHT:  (Re)frame the desired outcome as a better way to be who they already want to be.

People act in alignment with what they value and how they see themselves. Encouraging them to change their behaviour in ways that don’t fit their values and identity simply doesn’t work.

However, showing how a preferred behaviour (like not smoking) allows individuals to express what’s important to them (like not testing on animals) more effectively than what they’re already doing is way more likely to succeed.

Edward from Curative has written a blog about his takeaways from Jeff’s workshop too – read it here and handouts from the workshops are available for view and download here.

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