Good Things Foundation — Users at the heart

Last night I went for a coffee with my oldest friend and we got onto the subject of my new job — Delivery Manager at Good Things Foundation (I’m 3 weeks in). We started to discuss the scope of the NHS Widening Digital Participation Project and the 20 pathfinders that the team will help deliver. My friend happens to be doing a PhD in health related interventions for school children and was curious as to the methods that we will use.

“I’d love to come down and see how you guys work”

Here is what I told him…..

We put the User at the heart of everything. Those of you who work on digital teams or in service design will be familiar with this mantra — perhaps it even sounds cliche to you now. But, do you remember the first time that this made sense to you? I remember that powerful moment when it all fell into place for me — I felt like one sentence articulated the frustrations that I had with all projects before. The Social Design Team, here at Good Things Foundation, are helping our pathfinders by providing expert Service Design workshops and I get a buzz out of watching the stakeholders flourish because we give them the freedom to put the Users first.

We test and we iterate. It took me a long time to be comfortable failing fast. I completely understood the reasons for it but it was flying in the face of the get-it-right-first-time culture that I had worked in for most of my career. It takes a confident group to honestly fail fast because failing is failing right? Wrong! By being open about failure we learn, we improve, we are cost effective and we are willing to work even harder to improve- maybe changing the name to learn quickly might help (snappy one liners clearly aren’t my thing). I really enjoy it when a project team gets the confidence to shout about this. It shows a healthy team dynamic based on;

That is why we will embed Retrospectives into our projects, allowing us to challenge each other and improve our ways of working.

We will show the thing on a regular basis to inform partners, stakeholders, colleagues and users of what is working, what isn’t working and, therefore, what have we changed. Google docs is great, however, there is no substitute to getting as much stuff as you can on the wall. You can talk through it easier as that squiggle between two points on a wall will often mean more than a full document.

We will test through qualitative and quantitative means, whilst also plonking ourselves right in the communities we are working to help — our Users are our partners in this and they will inform throughout the project. In fact, during our first team meeting at a hipster coffee house in Sheffield we immediately decided that our full team meetings should be in one of our online centre. The coffee house was awesome…. But we want to immerse ourselves in the stories of the people that we are serving. We have all seen countless stats about every issue facing Britain (and beyond). Only when you are sat with Hayley from Learn for Life and you try to stop yourself from crying when she discusses the clients who have been ‘organ trafficked’ or in the community centre in Manchester that I visited running the most amazing job club in a tiny room packed with people whilst rats scratched the windows next to us, can you appreciate stats fully. These aren’t necessarily things that would form part of a report but they are certainly things that will inform our thinking as we roll out the pilots.

I’m really proud to be part of something so important and I’m so excited about the lives we can change over the next 3 years.

So my friend is welcome here anytime to see how we do things… as are you. We would love to learn from you and what your experiences are.