ROEB Design Thinking Workshop June 2021
INTRODUCTION
The ROEB Transformation Office of Health Canada held a series of virtual Transformation by Design workshops in June 2021 focused on Design Thinking. The workshops were intended to introduce Health Canada employees to the methodology of design thinking and empower them to use it to help discover solutions to workplace problems. In doing so, they were able to support initiatives developed for the Build Back Better (BBB) and Multi-Year Compliance and Enforcement Transformation (MYCET) missions and the ROEB's general agenda of transformation. The goal of Transformation by Design is to develop and configure our transformation plans by the following tenets:
- Creating systems that can continuously learn and evolve
- Avoiding standalone services
- Experimenting to produce results
- Alignment of plans with organizational governance
The objective of the workshops was to provided Health Canada programs with the knowledge and toolkits to enact their own transformation incrementally through experimentation and innovation. ROEB nurtures many experimentation projects to contribute to the BBB and transformation agendas, and hopes to propagate this capability Branch wide. The workshops had the following specific objectives:
- Share experience and lessons learned gained from POD-TO lead projects such as Kelpie, Cyclops, Hummingbird, and Cipher.
- Share techniques to frame problems and design proposed solutions for testing through experimentation via workshop.
- Provide coaching opportunities to co-develop BBB plans to be executed within 2021.
What is Design Thinking?
As per Jumping Elephants, design thinking may be defined as "an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding. At the same time, Design Thinking provides a solution-based approach to solving problems." It takes a human-centered approach to designing products and services, as opposed to a system-centered approach, meaning the focus is on understanding the users and their context, and not on what is easy and efficient to build on current infrastructure.
Design thinking approaches to development can include 3-7 phases, but the one we were recommended and utilized included the following 4 "D's":
- Discover - Backed by research or working with users, we use divergent thinking to explore why something is a problem.
- Define - Convergent thinking focuses on finding a shared vision of what the problem is.
- Design - Divergent thinking is used to explore ways to solve the problem.
- Deliver - Convergent thinking refines and then delivers the solution.
These two pairs of divergent and convergent thinking can be visualized as a "double diamond" of creating and refining ideas.
Implementation
Jumping Elephants was contracted to design, facilitate and moderate the workshops. They were held in 3 hour virtual synchronous sessions, during which participants were led through the following exercises:
- Individual brainstorming to develop a list of problems to examine during the session
- Reframing of problems as 'How might We?' questions (e.g. "Approval Processes are slow and inefficient" vs. "How might we make approval processes faster and more efficient?")
- Brainstorming of solutions and clustering of similar ideas
- Group voting to prioritize problem/solution pairs for future work
Individuals worked through exercises individually and then within increasingly larger groups up to the complete assembly of employees. The workshop was hosted via Eventbrite, where users could access reference material and a live video conference on Microsoft Teams. As a medium for group collaboration and sharing of ideas, Mural was used with a predetermined template, allowing users to create ideas on digital "Post-it notes" and move them across the template as the session progressed, with voting added in the form of virtual check marks participants could add to their favorite ideas. A full summary of the workshop implementation is available here.
WORKSHOP SUMMARY AND FINDINGS
In total, 8 sessions were ran with over 100 participants generating 441 problems and 303 solutions. The most frequent problems across the sessions were tied to the following categories:
- Remote Work Environment and Staffing
- Documentation
- Excessive Number of Priorities
- Issues with Top-down Communication
In response, the most common themes across the proposed solutions were:
- Communication across Health Canada
- Flattening Communications and Decisions
- IT Tools/Databases/Technical Knowledge
The findings from the 8 sessions were consolidated and are available in PowerPoint format here including a description of the top 25 problems and solutions and an executive summary.
DESIGN THINKING PLAYBOOK
After the completion of the sessions, Jumping Elephants created a detailed Playbook entailing the steps to recreating the workshops as a resource for Health Canada employees, which is available in PowerPoint format here. The goal of these instructions are to provide a comprehensive guide to hosting one's own workshop so that other boards and branches of Health Canada, as well as separate organizations within the GoC can reproduce them to aid with their own transformation. The instructions provide generic information on the tools and methods used for both in person and virtual workshops, instructions to moderators, and workshop tips, but also provided specific instructions on how to progress through the the four "D's" phases of the session. Goals as well as the specific prompts for attendees are included for each phase of the workshop, and rationale is provided for each activity.
CONTACT US
The ROEB-TO encourages questions and comments and can be reached at our generic inbox address at hc.roeb.transformation.dgoral.sc@hc-sc.gc.ca
