Workshopping MOBI
If you’ve been following along here on Medium or on Twitter, you’ll know that the qualitative data collection for #myMOBI has been in full swing. Since we last touched base, the team has done over 80 interviews with experts across the Government of Canada ecosystem, our #myMOBI tweets have been seen over 15,000 times, and we’ve had #myMOBI info booths at two major conferences.
So what have we been doing with all the qualitative data we’re collecting? Rudimentary analysis. Reading, classifying, and documenting all the information we‘ve collected has helped us group challenges related to MOBI into three main categories. We could write a whole separate blog about these challenges, but for now, we’ll summarize them in this way:
1. Most people in the government have a general lack of understanding surrounding MOBI mechanisms (e.g. Interchange), which creates misperceptions and fears.
2. There’s poor strategic alignment in using MOBI, meaning that we don’t use MOBI well in both realizing organization-wide objectives and furthering personal learning.
3. Employees who do MOBI report difficulties in the MOBI experience from searching for MOBI opportunities all the way through to reintegrating in the GOC with new skills.
We began sharing these challenges informally with our networks about a month ago and we’ve found general agreement in their broad contours. But as we’ve continued to collect more and more data to confirm or challenge our ideas, we’ve also turned some of our thinking towards how to address these challenges in a practical way. And in doing that, we recently let others in on the brainstorming.
About two weeks ago, in the cold, dark, final week of January, we held the first #myMOBI design workshop. In essence, we turned back to the very people who shared their views with us over the last number of months in interviews and asked them to help us address the challenges that they themselves helped us identify. (At this juncture, it really must be said that the “we” you’ll read throughout the below is more royal than reality; in actuality, our team member from CED-Q, Julien Aubin-Beaulieu, was our lead for all things workshop and did the bulk of the heavy lifting. Julien is a hero, but “we” is just easier to write.)
In deciding we wanted to hold a design workshop on MOBI, our basic aim was to let participants design solutions to the challenges we’d already identified. In doing our early planning, we were able to draw on our Nesta training and the GC Entrepreneur network to get ideas, and we also caught a big, early break: we found a rather perfect co-host in the form of the ESDC HR Business Innovation (HRBI) team. The HRBI team — and in particular the amazing Julie Ann Viveiros — had experience running the kind of workshop we were envisioning, and their focus on HR was too good to pass up. So we worked closely with that team to find an appropriate room, prepare invitations, refine the agenda and write a script for the day, have materials printed on large format paper in both official languages (props to the PCO print shop), find last minute replacement attendees, send advance documentation and simplified agenda to participants, draft a snow-day plan B (#Ottawalife), and make sure we’d have snacks for all the participants. It was a lot of work for us. And by us, we mostly mean Julien.
The day of the workshop was roughly divided in two halves, with lunch in the middle. The morning was all about having participants understand the various challenges we’d identified and then asking them to choose one to focus on for the rest of the day in teams of 4–5. By lunchtime, each team had whittled down their ideas to a single solution that they would prototype throughout the afternoon. The workshop culminated in timed, 5-minute presentations to all the participants on the solutions they were proposing. (This is the lightning quick summary of the day. You’ll find at the bottom of this post a longer explanation of each step and the tools we used to help make them happen.)
So what did we learn from our participants? A thousand and one things. And while we don’t have the room to write about everything in depth, there are some common themes worth highlighting in the solutions that the teams proposed.
· Defining the value proposition: A number of teams suggested MOBI solutions should be grounded in a solid articulation of the value proposition of MOBI. From understanding the incentives and drivers behind MOBI to identifying its customer segments, the solutions proposed by the teams took a more strategic view of the MOBI experience than we could have gotten from any one interviewee. In particular, we were challenged to think more seriously about how solutions could leverage the strategic HR interests of both the enterprise and the employee. That’s how one team came up with the Business Model Canvas for MOBI, a tool to help us better articulate why we need MOBI and why it makes sense to focus on it. It’s also how another team came to the proposition that employees and employers alike needed a better platform to connect and exchange potential MOBI assignments in a user-friendly way.
· User experience: A lot of our participants either had had their own MOBI experience, had some intimate knowledge of the process by virtue of their positions, or were recognized change-makers and strategic thinkers, which meant a lot of the solutions that were proposed came from an intimate understanding of how it feels to go through MOBI. As an example, one group proposed “Mission: Re-entry,” a targeted reintegration program for public servants that go out on MOBI and come back with defined, concrete expectations of what new skills they’ll bring back, how they’ll disseminate those skills, and what obligations are on managers and employees alike to ensure follow through.
· Communication matters: Every team in some way articulated that any solution to their chosen challenge needed to be coupled with clear, consistent, attractive messaging about MOBI. One team’s entire focus was on communication, and they proposed an ambitious branding campaign for MOBI that would include targeted communications within specific functional communities, actively marketing MOBI assignments to particular private and public sector groups outside government, and incorporating ethnographic research in to the MOBI branding and marketing strategy. The basic premise behind this focus on communication was that no matter the positives or the negatives of the available MOBI tools, they’re no use if no one knows about them or if they have a bad reputation.
So what’s next? Well, a few things. As we were drafting this blog post, we had the opportunity to present our work — which included the results of the workshop — to members of the Deputy Ministers’ Task Force on Public Sector Innovation. We’ll update this post when the video of our presentation is live, and while we can’t reveal too much about the discussion afterwards, it’s safe to say that Deputies were supportive and interested. Several have offered to participate in being a champion or support running a MOBI experiment in her/his department. Presenting to the Task Force has now given us, along with our partners at OCHRO, the PSC and others, the room to advance our work. We’re also interested in doing another design workshop, maybe in a different city and with some non-public servants. With the ideas we got from the workshop and all the support we have from Deputies, not to mention some other pressures building on the horizon, it looks like we could have our work cut out for us.
In the meantime, you can always keep up to date on #myMOBI and the other GC Entrepreneur projects on Twitter or on Medium. And if you’re a real process nerd, keep reading for some juicy tick-tock details.
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Post-script: In the interest of being completely open and in paying forward all the kindness we received in planning our workshop, we’re sharing nearly all of the major documents we wrote, used, or otherwise needed for our workshop prep. Special thanks to Daniel Villate and Mathieu Audet of the ESDC Innovation Lab for their help and guidance in designing our design workshop. You’ll find links to documents you can use, download, manipulate, and re-use as needed. Together, they’re almost a workshop in a box for your own use.
· Icebreaker: The icebreaker was a simple speed dating exercise. Participants paired up and had two minutes to answer three questions, one of which was about government. Nothing radical, but it worked like a charm. Metaphorically, at least: the ice outside was still slippery.
· Gallery walk: in the morning as people arrived, we asked them to walk around the room and spend a few minutes reading about each challenge on posters we’d made up for that purpose. This was a way to get everyone quickly on the same page, and also allow them to choose which table they’d be sitting at for the day and for which challenge they’d be working on finding a solution.
· How might we…?: Groups turned their challenges in to positive “How might we…?” questions, where that pesky ellipsis is filled in with a solution-oriented phrase related to the chosen challenge. As an example, the team that chose ‘general lack of understanding of MOBI’ reframed it as “How might we communicate the benefits and values of mobility to the public service?” We provided examples to help them out.
· Ideating solutions: Teams spent an hour together brainstorming answers to their How might we…? statements in the form of actionable solutions. Every single idea got a sticky note, and these eventually got grouped thematically to find similarities or outliers in ideas.
· Complexity/impact matrix: Teams plotted their grouped-together sticky notes within one of four quadrants on a complexity/impact matrix. This allows you to separate and prioritize ideas, with each quadrant having something to say; we named the quadrants “not worth the effort,” “investigate,” “maybe later?,” and “low-hanging fruit.” Interestingly, our teams didn’t enjoy this particular tool: some found the quadrants poorly named, while other teams had a hard time deciding on one spot on the matrix for groups of multiple ideas.
· Prototyping: In this stage, teams took the idea they found most promising and spent an hour fleshing it out in as much detail as possible. The solution got a name, the team defined risks associated with it, what failure or success would constitute, and a roadmap for prototyping the solution fully.
· Ritual dissent: This is an activity we borrowed from our ESDC friends. In our version of ritual dissent, teams nominated one member to present their ideas to other groups in rotating session. The catch was that they had 5 minutes to present and then had to turn around to face away from the people they presented to so they could receive positive, negative and constructive feedback. It worked better with some groups than others, but over the 45 minutes or so that we did it, each solution was put to a rigorous-but-polite test so they could be as strong as possible.
· Final presentations: After each solution had undergone ritual dissent from all the other teams, participants had about 15 minutes to regroup and then be ready to give a timed, 5-minute presentation on their final ideas to the whole group. We filmed each presentation, but we promised we wouldn’t share so everyone would feel comfortable. But we’ve used the presentations to do a pretty extensive round-up and post-workshop analysis, which has helped inform this very blog!
Fin! Like a whale fin… like MOBI… get it?
