Public Servants

Bring employees along in the creative process, and you’ll find innovation everywhere.

When Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, talked before the Royal Television Society in November 2008, he pointed to the “intangibles” that mark a successful modern economy: innovation, imagination and creativity. There’s little doubt that leaders throughout the world look to these elements in hopes of differentiation and competitive advantage. Yet, the path to implementing them – and then quickening their pace and effectiveness – is rarely clear. In fact, it can be downright bumpy. Through my work as CEO at IDEO, I’ve come to find that “design thinking”, a discipline which melds the sensibility and methods of a designer to people’s real-world needs, leads the way to customer value and market opportunity. Of course, there’s a catch. For this approach to work, an organisation’s leaders must expand out the traditional definition of “designer” to include all of their employees, from the backroom accountant to the clerk behind the counter. Both business and public sector managers need to encourage every worker to become a design thinker who reaches out to customers for inspiration. In other words, innovation in an organisation needs to be everywhere – yes, everywhere – not sequestered away in some lofty R&D turret.

Become a design thinker
Fortunately, many of the world’s organisations provide us with glimpses of the ever-present design thinker: the eternal observer looking for ways to help others. At the BBC, for instance, this role has been expanding for the past 10 years. The BBC first came to IDEO’s London office in 1998, when managers there wanted to explore the future of digital radio. Nine prototypes led to a portable device made by a European telecommunications company. Since then, I’ve watched the BBC move on its own to the fore of getting out into the world and using real customers in real situations as the inspiration for new ideas. Through its Innovation Labs, the BBC leads a series of creative workshops for interdisciplinary teams of professional technologists, application designers, software developers and interactive media designers wanting to submit projects for possible commission.

They also run BBC Backstage, a pilot for open innovation that encourages “people both inside and outside the BBC to share knowledge, ideas and prototypes with each other”. The BBC is laying the breadcrumbs for creating community-led innovation that will better both the organisation and their viewers’ experience. None of this is part of an effort to generate the next great marketing meme. Rather, thought leaders at the BBC are looking to make all employees and customers design thinkers. In other words, they’re after people who share in creating, adapting and growing the organisation’s continual wave of great ideas through innovation activities at every stage of the product building process.

Certainly, this isn’t easy, and as managers in the public sector well know, our work includes special challenges, such as issues of scale and legacy. Still, it’s helpful to channel companies with leaders who embed themselves in the daily lives of both their staffs and customers while using design thinking – whether or not they’d call it that – to generate meaningful change. Consider Virgin’s Richard Branson jetting around the world with a notebook in hand, taking comments from employees and fellow passengers. Each trip leads to 20 to 50 “little suggestions” for changes at the company. There’s also Tesco’s David Potts, director of retail operations, who tells staff and management “to do what they believe is right so long as it’s responding to customers”. David also promotes Tesco’s “Customer Plan”, a short list of prioritised actions designed for major change. As David pointed out in Smith and Milligan’s 2002 book Uncommon Practice, Tesco’s “business strategy more or less lives or dies by the Customer Plan”.

Ask questions
Of course, there’s plenty to learn from the customers of the public sector, and let’s be honest, services from this sector typically touch people’s lives in far more important ways than a cell phone or a television does. Design thinking can remind public servants to ask the obvious: What’s it like to check in to a hospital, call the police or collect the dole? These questions are a great start for unlocking innovation by using design tools, such as observation and storytelling. Over the years and through IDEO’s product design heritage, I’ve come to distill design thinking down into three key steps, a daily mantra of sorts:
_ Inspire.
_ Prototype.
_ Execute.

When it comes to looking for inspiration, there’s no better place to start than with customers in real situations, struggling with real problems and questions. Public servants need to get out of the confines of their workspace and learn to recognise customers’ needs. They need to engage with local authorities, customers and staff to harness design thinking for innovation. As Richard Branson and his notebook show us, a few hours in the trenches will lead to a lot of ideas, and here’s where smart prototyping comes in.

Prototype early and often
First, lose the notion that prototyping is an art form, that it’s some precious process. It’s not. Give prototypes only as much time, effort and investment as needed to produce useful feedback and to evolve an idea. Never expect prototypes to be pretty, and never assume they’re something to be held in one’s hands or tossed across a room. Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts teaches all of its employees improvisational skills. While even I have a tough time imagining the British bobby as an improv actor, I think the point is obvious. The product of the public sector is often services, and even those need to be prototyped (and videotaped) in order to solve for customer needs. How does a customer journey look from start to finish? How should one map out, or prototype, that experience? What surprises emerge? As Ossie Hopkins pointed out in SFI’s July 2008 pamphlet Innovation Through People: “innovation – if inspired and encouraged – can emerge from anywhere in an organisation”.

Inspire from the inside out
Execution is where things can fall apart or simply limp along. That’s because organisations often consider it the end game, when it’s really only half-time. Managers need to look for supporting roles, or ways to help organisational change break through to the customer. Technology is an obvious example. When rethinking its nurse-shift experience, the large US healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente introduced a new electronic medical records system to streamline the process. By the end of the experience, one nurse found herself “an hour ahead”, after having been at work for only 45 minutes. Execution doesn’t stop there; rather, it adapts and evolves. For Kaiser, the next step was creating the Garfield Innovation Center, which acts as a design-thinking consultancy to the entire organisation. By doing this, Kaiser plans to avoid the trap of incrementalism, where everyone at an organisation spots all the easy, obvious elements but misses the truly big ideas, and the lesson is clear. Engage everyone at your organisation in design thinking, and you’ll inspire from the inside out. You’ll own those big ideas, and the public – your customers – will join the process. They might even thank you one day.

Tim Brown is the CEO and president of IDEO, a global innovation and design firm with offices in eight locations: London, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Chicago, Boston, New York City, Munich, and Shanghai. His designs have won numerous awards and been exhibited at the Design Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Axis Gallery in Tokyo. He regularly writes about design thinking at designthinking.ideo.com