The 5 Operating Principles of Barnardo’s Service Design Team
How we approach service design at Barnardo’s
As our team has grown and matured, and the depth and breadth of work we carry out with and for Barnardo’s continues to expand, we felt a need to articulate our core values and principles as a team.
We’ve created a living document that will evolve alongside our team culture, that sets out our approach and understanding of what works to help us design for change. It’s a document that helps keep us brave, aligned and moving forward together in the same direction.
This blog post summarises these core principles. Our full principles document, which gives more detail about how we live these principles in practice, is available here to view and download. Feedback welcomed!
We were inspired by this great principles document from the User Research team at the Co-op, who have our thanks.
(Caption: Our five operating principles visualised )
1. We gather evidence that helps us look at old problems in new ways
From service improvement to system transformation, we believe the first step to unravelling hard problems is to see them from fresh perspectives.
We work creatively with many different kinds of evidence to do that, always including the evidence of lived experience.
That means we challenge ourselves to find the best (not easiest) solutions, explore problems from multiple viewpoints and use broad range (but only enough) evidence.
It also means we don’t look for evidence to simply validate opinions, or chicken out of difficult paths the research shows us we need to take.
2. We honour children’s needs and voices at every stage of our design process
Including young people in our design process is a non-negotiable must-have.
We are constantly reflecting on and evolving our approach to ensure we do this in a genuinely child-centred, trauma-informed, empowering way.
This means we work hard to ensure positive and safe experiences in sessions, strive for fully-informed consent and power-balance, and try to represent the diversity of our service users.
We don’t reach out to young people without a plan, and we never filter our findings relating to them.
Note: we are beginning to make many of our child-centred resources public domain. Get in touch with matthew.coulson@barnardos.org.uk if you’d like to get notified about new materials going live.
3. We work creatively and try things out — within the real-world constraints and risks of our sector
We are creative and ruthlessly pragmatic in seeking change — which means staying flexible, trying things out to see what works, and adjusting to real-world context as we go.
This means we break problems down into small steps (using prototypes, pilots, feedback cycles), work flexibly and adaptably to achieve better outcomes.
We don’t let challenges discourage us (for too long!) or slow our progress.
4. We work collaboratively, transparently and with humility
Designing for change in children’s social care works best when we collaborate widely, partner openly, value diversity in thinking, and keep trying to do what we do better.
We build design teams and approaches that honour the expertise of our Barnardo’s colleagues. We don’t hesitate to share work that’s still in progress so that we can learn from many voices and iterate as we go.
5. We treat data with the utmost respect
We are committed to ensuring positive, respectful, safe, and ethical treatment of all participants’ data — children, professionals, and otherwise.
We base our decisions and process in participant’s rights and best interests — not (merely) what’s legally required or standard.
We don’t put our participants’ data at risk during our design work or assume that data security is someone else’s job.
This means we plan ahead for effective data management, take personal responsibility for safe data collection, and quickly report any mistakes.
What next?
We will continue to uphold these principles in our day-to-day work.
They may change and develop over time, and we may find that sometimes we fall short of them — we are trying our best, but we’re only human. Keeping them in our line of vision means our team, and the work that we do for Barnardo’s, can continue to maintain focus and a shared sense of what’s right.
We’ll be publishing more thoughts on what it takes to live these principles in practice on the Barnardo’s blog.
Caitlin is a User researcher in the Barnardo’s Digital & Technology team. To get the latest updates from the Barnardo’s Digital & Technology team, subscribe to blog.barnar.do on Medium, and follow #FutureBarnardos on Twitter.
We’re hiring! Read more about the team we’re building and our current roles available.
