If you want better products from your teams, define what better means and what needs to be better. Here’s a ritual that will help your team do this more effectively.

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The Nuance of Better

What we’ve created isn’t good enough.The people on your team never really want to hear this. Yet it happens all the time when working on products of all shapes and sizes.
Over here, product management has some opinions about what problems your product should be solving, and how to best monetize what you’re shipping. Over there, engineering wants your products to work flawlessly on a functional level, no matter how they’ll be stressed by users. In that corner, the design team wants every flow and detail to be clean and simple, while also navigating the organization’s design systems. Oh, and since you’ve already shipped an early version as an experiment, some customers are sending fiery messages directly to your CEO about reallyneeds to happen.
After spending the past two years coaching and training in-house product teams with my partner Mary, what I’ve realized is this: If you want better design work from your team, it requires a regular examination of what better means and what needs to be better. There are thousands of team decisions that contribute to a good product, thousands more for a great one. Most teams struggle with the nuanced decisions around what makes a quality product, because they lack the vocabulary.
Every function of your organization has their own point of view about what quality looks like. But it’s rare that everyone gets a chance to share these perspectives, and align on a shared definition. As a result, we hear things like this: What we shipped isn’t good enough… We’ll know it’s right when we see it… This doesn’t hold a candle to the competitio Talk like this may be meant to drive a team, but the lack of specificity isn’t a motivator; it just allows more space for excuses. Determining and maintaining shared quality standards as a team is the best way to prevent ambiguity from swallowing everyone’s best efforts.
The standards that work are those that design holds jointly with their product partners, and that can evolve over time. We’ve found that the best way to help teams create these types of standards is through shared rituals. When we say ‘ritual’, we’re talking about a team moving through a series of behaviors in a specific order. Teams create rituals for two reasons: to support the behaviors they want to see from each other, and to respond to the needs of their organization. Over time, rituals can become routine, and core to how teams behave and respond as part of workplace culture.
The following ritual will help your team define what quality looks like for your products. We recommend using this activity with teams that will be working together for longer periods of time, and it’s helpful to to revisit it when new people join your team.

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<h2>Ritual: What Does Quality Look Like for Our Team?</h2>
To prepare for this ritual, have a stack of index cards or sticky notes, as well as a whiteboard or a large sheet of paper on hand. Although this ritual works best with physical notes or paper, a remote team can use a shared document to achieve similar results. Set aside at least an hour and a half for this ritual, so your team isn’t rushed.

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Hand out sticky notes or index cards to your team members. Have them individually write down three words that describe what they think quality should look like for their products. Some of the words that we see most frequently are:
If team members ask for formal definitions of the words, let them know that this activity is about how these words are defined by them individually, not by others on the team. Each of us has a different picture in our heads of what these words mean, and what our products look like when those qualities are present.

 Identify the words your team uses to describe quality

Ask each person on your team to share their quality words and explain why they chose them.

 Share your quality words

As a team, each person votes for three words that represent what quality looks like for your product. The entire team has to agree on those three words. If you’re facilitating this conversation, pay attention to the trade-offs the team makes as they narrow in on their chosen words. We don’t always agree on what these words mean, especially when the industry leans so heavily on certain companies and products as object examples. Talk about that, and write down what you discover.

Decide on three quality words for your product

Ask each person to take at least ten minutes to write down specific attributes they would want to see in their products, directly associated with the three words they agreed on. Product attributes are tangible examples that the team can reference as they make decisions about their product.
Make sure each of these attributes is written on an individual sticky note. Each attribute must be associated with a quality word. Use the following questions as prompts:
<blockquote>We say that our products are &lt;quality word&gt;. What specifically makes them that way?</blockquote>
This question helps team members identify what tangible attributes exist in their current product that meet the quality bar. Don’t overlook the basics here, as they are things that the team will need to preserve moving forward. Simple onboarding? Lightning-fast on mobile? Capture these details.
<blockquote>If we want our products to be more &lt;quality word&gt;, what do we need to see?</blockquote>
This is about what attributes team members could add or change to improve quality. They should be specific enough that team members can say definitively whether they did or didn’t put them into practice. For example: “Product users will be able to do their work faster in our app” sounds good, but it isn’t specific enough, because “faster” is relative. Instead, try: “Product users complete critical tasks 10% faster than our current baseline.”
At first, this specificity may feel overly prescriptive or limiting. Stick with it. Think of these attributes like building codes in construction. A building can have a thousand different features and functions, but the structure underneath needs clear and defined parameters to ensure that its systems work together and that its occupants are safe.

Describe what specific attributes you want in your products

Set up the following diagram in a location that all of your team members can see. One at a time, each person shares one of the attributes they’ve identified. Place that attribute under the appropriate quality word in the diagram, considering whether the attribute is something that is yes/no or dynamic.
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If an attribute is yes/no, then your team can prove that it’s present in your product. Some of these attributes are obvious, such as loading content from your API at a minimum latency, or making sure that your interfaces have no typos. Others will be contextual to the type of product that you run and what’s important to your team.
If an attribute is dynamic, then it’s an aspect of your product that’s relative. These attributes are where teams make the majority of their quality tradeoffs. The designer might be frustrated that the text in the search feature isn’t exactly adhering to their visual design system, while the rest of the team is concerned that the search results aren’t perceived as relevant by users. Your team would need to define what adherence to design system and relevance to user means, and which they want to prioritize in their work.
After everyone’s attributes are placed on the diagram, prioritize as a group which attributes the entire team can support, and then which ones require the attention of specific team members. This is the time to associate metrics to these attributes—it’s likely your team already has some in mind. That said, take care not to add in dozens of new attributes for your team. It can take a substantial amount of effort to maintain what’s working well in your product, let alone make simple improvements. At this point, we’ve seen that six to eight key attributes end up being 80% of the effort for teams.
When you’re done with this ritual, make sure to place the output of the ritual where everyone can reference it.

Decide what attributes the team will support

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<h2>Quality Isn’t Achieved, It’s Proven Over Time</h2>
Within an hour or two of dialogue, most product teams can find common ground and create basic working definitions to explain which quality words matter to them and why. But from there, it can be hard for team members to be specific about what tangible attributes their products should actually demonstrate. And the difficulty increases when considering how quality evolves over time. Use this ritual to create a shared perspective as a team on what quality looks like for your product, and how you’ll prove it over time for your customers and your organization.
Get more team rituals like these in <a href="http://bit.ly/intoteams">Turning People into Teams: Rituals and Routines That Redesign How We Work</a>, available from Berrett-Koehler Press.

David Sherwin

David Sherwin is a Fellow at frog, co-founder of Ask The Sherwins, LLC and co-author with Mary Sherwin of Turning People into Teams: Rituals and Routines That Redesign How We Work (Berrett Koehler, 2018). <a href="http://twitter.com/changeorder" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@changeorder</a>

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This is an edited excerpt from the book LEAP Dialogues: Career Pathways for Design in Social Innovation, which was published by Designmatters at ArtCenter College of Design and available from DAP/Distributed Arts Publishers.

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Making Models: R&D in the Social Sector

Renuka Kher and David Sherwin have collaborated on multiple initiatives between <a href="https://tippingpoint.org/">Tipping Point Community</a> and global design and strategy firm <a href="https://www.frog.co">frog</a>, including T Lab. T Lab is a six-month long program that brings together nine Problem Solvers to design and test new solutions to help with pressing social issues in the Bay Area, such as access to child care, availability of early education, and support for people recently released from prison.

David Sherwin: You’ve had an unwavering vision around creating a model for research and development in the social sector that would serve as an equivalent to what we see in other industries such as technology, defense or medicine. Based on the experimentation that we’ve done with this approach over the past year, what would you say R&amp;D should look like for nonprofits or nongovernmental organizations seeking to create new social services?
Renuka Kher: We are still very new at testing this approach, so it’s too early to answer that question with rigorous evidence. However, there are some observations worth noting.
First, and this may seem obvious, you have to give yourself and your entire organization permission to develop new products or services through building and testing rather than writing and planning. The current norms and practices in the social sector are to put together elaborate plans that include many assumptions and that will only be tested once the effort is fully funded or in some cases incrementally tested as some portion of it might be funded and efforts continue to raise money for the rest. Or to put it differently, an idea for a social service represents nothing more than a set of assumptions.
We place a premium on defining the problem or challenge first, and then incrementally building a potential solution while simultaneously learning about and mitigating key risks. What we’ve seen in applying this approach is that conducting small-scale experiments proves to be invaluable in helping shape the larger solution, making that upfront investment worthwhile.
DS: Let’s talk about what you’re looking to accomplish with design as part of Tipping Point Community. Why did you choose to create T Lab over other potential experiments you could conduct in the social sector, seeing that some of the Problem Solvers that have participated in the program have used it as a bridge from school or other career paths into working in social impact?
RK: T Lab serves as our initial pilot experiment, and we have several learning objectives that we hope will inform our overall approach. By talking with others who are also in this space, such as IDEO.org, we learned that finding and employing designers with the necessary backgrounds and skill-sets, as well as the right orientation to do this work is expensive, nascent and emerging.
We designed the T Lab structure to help us test a few things:
<ol>
<li>How much “making and testing” can we do in six months as part of an R&amp;D approach to social services for our grantees?</li>
<li>Can we train, support and coach mid-career professionals to work in multidisciplinary teams and to apply the human-centered design process as its central framework?</li>
<li>Can we build new knowledge in each challenge area from cohort to cohort that will help accelerate new insights and potential solutions?</li>
</ol>
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DS: In looking at T Lab, there are multiple levels of experimentation. There is experimentation that is happening within T Lab regarding how to identify and validate potential new social service opportunities, which is within the community and in collaboration with your grantees. There is experimentation regarding how to develop a strong team of people that can collaborate with nonprofits or NGOs, in terms of building capability and capacity to do R&amp;D across multiple domains. And there is also experimentation in influencing your grantees so they can, in the long term, utilize this approach to design and test experiments on their own. I think there’s major upside in taking this layered approach, where you are trying to create both meaningful solutions that help a community thrive and also organizations that can sustain their services. But if you want major return on investment, you need to find major risks, knowing that experimentation in the context of social services requires immense attention to the people you’re serving and how they participate throughout the human-centered design process.
RK: Tipping Point is committed to taking risks and helping our grantees do so as well. Our board seeded our first year of T Lab. The Problem Solvers also took a risk and devoted six months of their professional careers in testing something new and being comfortable with an approach that has emergent outcomes rather than those that are known or predefined. We need more funders to follow suit, and collectively we will be able to establish a new set of norms for how to take on risk in this way. It will require us to shift our mindsets from “funding known outcomes” to “investing to learn” so that we can create some space for solutions to emerge.
For example, during year one of T Lab, one of the teams tested whether converting a bus into a preschool classroom might facilitate access to early childhood education. They designed a prototype of a “preschool on a bus,” and tested the concept for six days to find out if children, parents, teachers and school leadership would consider this concept. The team was addressing a significant facilities challenge, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Tipping Point provided a $250,000 R&amp;D investment to conduct a pilot program.
Until we see funding flow in this way, we won’t see an increase in demand for designers, engineers and other talent to come on board and play the role that they have played in the tech startup community.
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DS: If we’re going to encourage funders to support these types of initiatives, we’ll have to demonstrate how the design process for social services can differ from other forms of R&amp;D. Many projects we’ve participated in require working within the community to identify existing people, assets, and capacities rather than trying to bring in new assets or inventions. Designers aren’t always trained to work with motivated people from a local community to utilize what they already have in unique ways. Solutions emerging from the design process may not feel “new” to the designer, but they can be immensely needed by the community. One such outcome I saw this in last year’s T Lab came from a team working in West Oakland. They co-designed a second- and third-shift child-care service called GMA Village provided by grandmothers within the neighborhood. The designers used a people-first approach to identify what was needed for people living in that community, and then they formulated a systematic solution. The service was prototyped with the community, although it took substantial time for this concept to take form.
RK: Moving “fast” in this context/terrain is hard. The notion of rapid prototyping and experimentation is measured in weeks in a startup environment, but in a social service it can and does take several months to move from low-fidelity prototypes to an example that people are truly using. Rigorous participatory and co-design efforts require continuous collaboration with different groups of stakeholders, a lot of lead time and relationship-building, and educating everyone on the design process—all before the cycle of build-test-learn can happen.
DS: Not all nonprofits and NGOs are familiar with how to set up formal relationships to do this. And designers have to be prepared to spend multiple years of their life focused on a community issue or need, partnering with the right organizations that have made a similar commitment.
What is the role that a designer should have in this new type of construct, especially as they are figuring things out in their first few years out of school? What kind of commitment do you think a designer should make to working with a client or a community group?
RK: Designers will be tasked with using their skill set to build something new or to improve the efficacy of what might already be working. Designers play an essential role in leading this work and in helping organizations develop the muscle to deploy this approach across the entire organization. They will lead user research, build prototypes, and solicit feedback from several key stakeholders in the community. They will be responsible for sharing how the process is unfolding and serving as a translator.
DS: Human-centered design speaks to spending time with people and understanding their needs. Along with these skills, this R&amp;D work requires in-depth collaboration and co-creation of solutions that you can test alongside different frameworks and/or business models they could live within. I see many designers come out of school realizing they have to become well versed in partnering with those who can take a prototype or concept created with community members and make them real. There may be skills that we want today’s students to borrow from the startup community and apply in the context of social services, such as the ability to prototype and build technology-based solutions that they can get into people’s hands for rapid feedback all the way through to a formally engineered and shipped product. But those skills shouldn’t be confused with or privileged over the empathy, compassion, humility, tenacity, critical thinking, communication and facilitation skills required to partner with other people and empower them to make concepts real. Along with these skills, are there others outside the realm of design that designers must conquer to successfully participate in social impact work?
RK: Yes. Project management, stakeholder management, change management, and so forth. I would argue that it’s not just about mastering these skills as a discrete set of things that you know how to perform but rather as a holistic set of skills that then you are able to toggle effectively between in any given context—which will rarely repeat itself.
Visit the <a href="http://www.designmattersatartcenter.org/leap-dialogues">book’s website</a> for full information.

David Sherwin is a Fellow at frog, co-founder of Ask The Sherwins, LLC and co-author with Mary Sherwin of Turning People into Teams: Rituals and Routines That Redesign How We Work (Berrett Koehler, 2018).

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The Collective Action Toolkit Quick Start Guide

Groups of people around the world get asked to try and solve all sorts of problems, both big and small. How do people from unique backgrounds come together with their different skills and perspectives to make change happen? We’ve heard stories from all over the world, and while there is no perfect way to make change happen, we know that having a shared process can help groups move in the right direction. The <a href="https://www.frog.co/work/frog-collective-action-toolkit">Collective Action Toolkit</a> (CAT), which was launched in 2012 and re-released in a revised edition today, provides a set of activities that enables groups of people to organize, build trust, and collaboratively create solutions for challenges impacting a company or a community. Groups can use and adapt these tools to solve problems, build new skills, and gain important knowledge to better support their needs. The toolkit is part of <a href="https://www.frog.co/work/frogthink">frogCamp</a>, our approach to sharing the processes that we use with our clients at frog, so that more people can have access to the tools we use to solve challenges every day in multidisciplinary teams. Thousands of problem solvers have downloaded the CAT in the last four years, and sent us valuable feedback about how it can be best used and potentially improved. For example: <a href="http://www.pointb.is/#top" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Point B</a>, an organization in Myanmar, used the exercises in the toolkit to develop a curriculum for training the next generation of change makers in an emerging democracy:
<blockquote>“We started using the CAT because it was the first toolkit that was really made for local people who want to create change in their communities. We used the CAT to build our team and create strategies for how we were going to work together, what kinds of programs/projects we wanted to work on and where we wanted to focus our work.” —Rochelle, educator in Myanmar</blockquote>
Based on the input of people like Rochelle, we set out to do a revision of the CAT. We spoke to and surveyed people to find out how we could further improve it, and potentially extend it into new languages. As a result of what we learned, we refreshed the visual style to improve the overall usability of the toolkit, and added a French-language translation to our English, Chinese, and Spanish editions. Along with these updates, we heard from some toolkit users that they wished there was a simple quick-start guide to get them going with the toolkit. What follows are 5 quick steps you can do with a group to get started with using the CAT. All you need is a group of people, a space to meet, some pencils and paper, and a few hours of time. (We also recommend that you have some snacks on hand.)

Step One: <a href="https://www.frog.co/work/frog-collective-action-toolkit" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Download the toolkit</a>

Step Two: Share your skills and talents
Start with the “Skill Share” activity from Build Your Group section. After about 30 minutes, your group should ready to take things further with a set of known skills. First, get into groups of 5 to 6 people. Each of you gets two sheets of blank paper and a pencil or a pen. For five minutes, individually write on one sheet of paper:
<ul>
<li>The name you’d like the other group members to call you</li>
<li>Your skills and talents</li>
<li>One recent accomplishment</li>
</ul>
On the second sheet of paper, take five minutes to create a drawing that expresses who you are and what you like. Over the next 15 minutes, each person in the group takes two minutes to share who they are and what they created. One member of your group should take notes about the group’s overall skills.

Step Three: Identify the challenge you’re trying to solve
We recommend trying the “Find True North” activity from the Clarify Your Goal section. After about 45 minutes, your group will have a shared sense of what you want to accomplish working together. Stand in a circle with your group. One person should have a piece of paper and a pencil to write down what people say during this activity. One at a time, each person should share what he or she wants the group to achieve collectively. The person who has the piece of paper writes all those goals down. Once everyone has shared their goals, each person can place a star next to the top three goals they heard from everyone present. As a group, each person should share why they chose the goals that they did. The goals that received the top votes should then be rewritten on a sheet of fresh sheet of paper that everyone can use as reference.
Step Four: Make a plan for action
Work as a group to develop a timeline for how and when you will achieve these goals. You might also want to decide on the next time you’ll meet together. Your group should now have an area to focus on and a timeline that can guide your group forward. Consider using the “Set the Timeline” activity from the Plan for Action section if you get stuck.
Step Five: Evaluate what you have learned
Now that you’ve done two activities from the toolkit you’re ready to familiarize yourself with the rest of the toolkit and choose your own activity. But first, it’s important that your team reflects on what you have learned. Take about 30 minutes to have your team members fill out a Learning Card. All you need to do is answer three simple questions:
<ul>
<li>What did we do?</li>
<li>What did we learn?</li>
<li>What do we want to do next?</li>
</ul>
In answering the first and second questions, you and your group members will be able to discuss how the previous activities went. If anyone in your group feels like the activities weren’t successful, you can ask them what you might want to change in the future to make the group more successful. For the last question, invite your group to look through the toolkit to decide what activity would be most appropriate to try next. In the coming months, we will be sharing more stories from CAT users around the world, so we can continue to grow a strong network of people who are working together to make change in their communities. Stay tuned for a future post to find out how to keep your group and your goals moving forward.

Kara Pecknold

Kara Pecknold is a Creative Director at frog. She has a background in visual design and design research and is the current lead for frog’s Collective Action Toolkit, a collaboration and creativity tool for group problem solving that is being used worldwide.

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After more than 50 years under military rule, Myanmar (formerly Burma) is just beginning to open up to be a free and democratic nation.

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Launching Point B’s Design-Thinking Center for Community Engagement in Myanmar

The people of Myanmar currently face challenges and complexity that vastly exceed the creative resources available to address them. Point B Design + Training (pointB), a partner of frog, is leveraging this unique time and context to change the story of Myanmar from seeing problems to creating new possibilities.
“Most higher education programs focus on critical thinking skills. This is good but it only gets you halfway to your goal,” says Tun Bobo, a graduate from one of the nine higher education (post-10) schools on the border of Thailand and Myanmar. At 27, Tun Bobo is an unassumingly mature and intuitive community trainer, whose education was from a school co-created by pointB founders. “Critical thinking means you can see the problem, but then what? What are you going to do about it? That’s why we need design thinking.”
The founders of pointB — Greg Antos, Rochelle Ardesher, and Sandy Shum — came together a few years ago to start a new organization that is focused on empowering change agents, like Tun Bobo, through design-thinking. And pointB has teamed up with frog, to co-create a Design-Thinking Center for Community Engagement in Myanmar’s 3rd largest university: Mawlamyine University in Mon state.
The Design-Thinking Center for Community Engagement is specifically tailored for makers, doers and activators. These are people who want to lead change, tackle social issues like education and poverty, and engage local communities in Myanmar’s emerging democracy. pointB recruits multi-ethnic young adults from diverse communities and ethnic groups throughout Myanmar. These trainees live, learn and work together in an environment that promotes empathy, cross-cultural understanding and peace-building.
Starting this June, the center will offer a six-month, project-based course in design thinking — a proven approach to solving social issues and challenges that focuses on empathy, collaboration, action and optimism to create new solutions for local communities. Projects at the center will happen within the community, and encourage co-creation of local solutions as a primary vehicle to create impact with existing assets, knowledge, and capacities. The students will also learn mindfulness techniques to increase their self-awareness and reflect on what they discover throughout the program.
Tools and techniques from design thinking will include frog’s Collective Action Toolkit (CAT), which is helping thousands of people around the world to organize, collaborate, and co-create solutions for problems impacting their community. After the first year of the program, the curricula will be shared in an open-source fashion for other schools and programs to utilize in their communities.

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Along with the six-month course, the Center is intended to serve as a bridge to rebuild the local university system and connect students to community development, social innovation, and entrepreneurship in underserved areas. By the end of the program, graduates will have co-created solutions to an identified community issue, and may receive support from local organizations to carry their solutions forward.
“Design thinking is the other half that nobody teaches you,” says Tun Bobo. “Once you can see the problem, you need mindsets and tools so that you can work with communities and groups to find new solutions. Design thinking puts those tools in the hands of the community.” It’s our hope that we can create a new model for teaching this “other half,” and based on what we discover, empower more communities worldwide.

David Sherwin

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Launching Point B’s Design-Thinking Center for Community Engagement in Myanmar

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