Summer Design School - Observatory of Public Sector Innovation

Summer Design School is a new approach to teaching and learning human-centred innovation for government employees. It accelerates the development of critical thinking, creative collaboration, and human-centred design capabilities in civil servants with little to no previous exposure to design methods by means of an immersive, cross-sector, experience based curriculum.

Innovation Summary

Innovation Overview

Building design capabilities at scale in the U.S. government requires new approaches that are faster to yield results, more reliant, and focused on maximizing the potential of each civil servant, much too often minimized by training models based on top-down, one-size-fits-all approaches to learning. Summer Design School was developed as an novel approach to capacity building in human-centred innovation, and a new paradigm in public sector design learning, one that separates from a culture of skill-building and toolkits, into one of relational learning and co-created methodologies that are adaptable to different contexts (different agencies, different policy challenges, etc.). It was designed as a cross-sector platform that expands the notion of government innovation and learns from key non-government sources (academia, private sector, social innovation sector, etc.). By participating and learning together in a weeklong event, government (federal, state, and local), private, academic, and non-profit partners strengthened each other’s design confidence and found new patterns of operation.

This led to multiple ways to address complex challenges in new ways, all under the umbrella of human-centred design, and the critical questioning of what should human-centred design be in the 21st century. This new curricular experience underlines the proactive aspect of learning and challenges the assumption that building design and innovation capabilities is about discrete skills, tools, and toolkits. It also challenges the unfounded assumption that civil servants are, by default, unwilling to take risks, not interested in experimentation, and incapable of responding to challenges creatively.

By requesting that each individual participant bring his/her own challenge, Summer Design School became a temporary living lab for today’s government problems and gave participants the opportunity to negotiate their way into larger clusters of problems or, simply, problems that someone else brought, and seemed more interesting than their own. SDS deconstructs conventional training models that are still pervasive in the U.S. public sector, based on sequential/linear, dogmatic content delivery.

In this model, instruction is offered by subject matter experts teaching what the participants don't know about a given subject (in this case, design). In contrast, the main goal of SDS is to blur stage and audience and help participants discover what they don’t know they don’t know (the “unknown unknowns”) by combining content delivery with opportunities for peer-to-peer and group-to-group interaction and learning. SDS fosters inter-agency collaboration and knowledge-sharing in an open, safe, creative environment in which participants are learners and designers before they are government officials belonging to a specific agency. In SDS 2017, there were 48 participants from 18 federal agencies. This broad representation provided the necessary critical mass for breakthrough P2P and G2G learning.

Innovation Description

What Makes Your Project Innovative?

Summer Design School pioneers a number of new approaches to design learning in the public sector. It is designed to strengthen cross-sector opportunities for government employees. By participating and learning together, government, private, academic, and non-profit partners benefit from hybrid approaches to innovation and human-centred design. It provides a stage for the development of new knowledge in design, and gives government innovators the opportunity to deliver content related to their area of expertise. It underlines the pro-active aspect of learning and challenges the assumption that building design and innovation capabilities is about discrete skills and tools. By requesting that participants brought their own problem (BYOP), SDS is not about working from an ecosystem of problems that allow participants to find patterns of change more easily. It teaches flexibility and adaptability, and pushes participants to pursue courses of action conditioned by uncertainty.

What is the current status of your innovation?

By engaging with The Lab’s alumni network (2000+), collaborators, and the larger community of practice of federal innovators, a need for a new experimental format that deviated from the sequential teaching of design methods was quickly identified. The U.S. government is at the right moment in understanding the benefits of incorporating human-centred design as a lingua franca that will deliver public value to all citizens in a sustainable way.

The project was implemented as a pilot in July 2017 in Washington. Currently, The Lab is evaluating the experience with the goal of offering quarterly workshops in 2018, before they may be offered with greater frequency and in multiple locations nation wide (more than 80% of all U.S. federal employees are outside of Washington). The evaluation system that was designed to assess this project was based on redundancy, and included pre-workshop data, daily data, and long-term data that will be collected from a sample of participants at 1, 3, and 9 months after SDS took place.

Innovation Development

Collaborations & Partnerships

This innovation benefited from the broad cross-sector network that The Lab at OPM has developed over the years. Private companies, consultancies, and design studios sent their experts to interact with participants.

From academia, several design schools collaborated with us in this project. Being in government and understanding the context of the U.S. government well, allowed us to establish direct communication with agencies and departments that helped us made this experience a reality.

Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

When the workshop was announced, we received an overwhelming response from civil servants all over the country. The course’s 48 seats filled in days after it was announced, and the many civil servants who could not be part of it this time helped solidify our commitment to make SDS a regular educational offering. This circumstance gave us the momentum to engage with our partners in the private sector, the non-profit world, and academia.

Innovation Reflections

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

Our efforts as curators and facilitators were directed to helping participants overcome their initial hesitation and confront uncertainty face on. As the week advanced and they kept gaining confidence and seeing how their work evolved, our role was to underline that their progress was earned, rather than given, and that clicked towards the end of the week when different groups realized that they could do what they were set to do, that it was in their hands to act rather than to ask for help. Toward the end of the week, excitement had built up as everyone was proud of their accomplishments and finally understood the approach that we had announced the first day.

Another key impact that we observed was a true interagency collaborative spirit. Many people brought problems that were dear to them and ended up dropping them and joining a team of a different agency. This operational generosity contributed to building strong groups that carried on with the work through the week.

Challenges and Failures

One of the main challenges has been that operating from inside government has its own rules and procedures, that are usually inflexible. One example is that we were not allowed to offer stipends to guest speakers, due to current regulations. There were no speakers who turned down our invitation, even under those circumstances, because they believed in the value of participating in this event. But we would have liked to compensate them for their time and expertise. In government, one learns to be resourceful and go around problems rather than trying to go through them. A second challenge what that we did not have full authority to curate our cohort, because there are barriers for non-government people to participate in a government event. This meant that this initial pilot was not as cross-sector as we had expected, but we now know how to make next one more so, and in the end the challenges were extraordinary learning opportunities.

Conditions for Success

There must be minimum infrastructure and maximum knowledge transfer as to how to assemble an experience like this. Coaching a different team to replicate Summer Design School would be time consuming, more so than trying to find the right infrastructural conditions. This innovation is disruptive in nature, and its greatest impact will show only after it has been tested in different contexts, with different actors, etc. One potential hurdle is its duration (1 week), which may be a deal breaker for leaders who are not willing to let their employees be away for that long. In this pilot, we had a good amount of senior executives, who will go back to their agencies and encourage their employees to experience what they experienced. That may be a tactical decision that we did not make this time, but we have learned from for future iterations.

Replication

The Bring Your Own Problem approach is the conduit to successfully replicate this experience in other governments. The session we had for the first day was called The Wall of Problems, and it was an exercise in which each individual brought her/his problem and mapped it in a wall, clustering by affinity with other problems, etc. This created an ecosystem of problems that are real, and that bring a real context to everything else that was offered in the workshop. The Wall of Problems is the element that will make this experience both truly replicable, and truly contextual.

Lessons Learned

Experimentation is a key driver for human-centred innovation in the public sector.

Challenge the assumption that civil servants are bureaucrats without any creative potential.

Challenge the notion that learning in government should be step-by-step and unambiguous: ambiguity is the threshold to innovation if one knows how to administer it.

Foster visual communication and encourage people to express themselves visually, through sketches, diagrams, symbols, notations, maps, etc. They will always say “sorry, I can't draw very well” but that is fundamentally an understatement on their part.

Don’t be afraid to ask civil servants to dwell on uncertainty for a while; they will strongly oppose to it, because they are told there is no space for uncertainty in their jobs. It is essential to realize uncertainty is the key ingredient in complex challenges.

🇺🇸