Building trust fast
Initial phases of service design for improvement
At Malmö Civic Lab, a service and digital design experiment by the city of Malmö, we are spending 3 months exploring ways to improve processes with our coworkers at the department of adult education in Malmö city.
In this initial phase of the project, we are looking at the different educational admissions processes to see how we can collaborate and find room for improvement. Improvement can mean better service for the end user or citizen, finding ways to save money for the department, or helping fellow civil servants to find better ways of working. In bigger organisations, the departments often consist of rigid structures that can easily hinder people to be flexible and move even the smallest things forward.
Agency and overview
As people over time start to work in silos, no one ends up having a full picture of what is going on. This makes organizational change and improvement really difficult. Sometimes, just providing an overview can help foster empathy for other units within the department, lower the threshold to collaborate, and help all involved in the process focus on shared goals. Meeting as many people involved in the processes as possible early on gives them a clear idea of the project, how they can help, and in turn opens up for the possibility for us to reach out.
Coming from the outside gives you a different perspective and the agency to act on improvements. But it also means you need to build trust if you want people to collaborate with you. They are the experts, and we need to gain their trust to uncover the bigger problems and get them to spend time with us to make real improvements. These are people who may have stumbled upon blocker after blocker, heard that something they are eager to improve is not their responsibility, or in other ways been discouraged to take initiative. They are also often all too familiar with the experience of having people come in from the outside, promising to help, yet not delivering.
One small tweak can move people to tears
If you help out and fix smaller things early, you can prove that you’re not just preaching but actually making things happen. Still early on in this project, we are trying to work with low hanging fruit, to keep momentum, and show that things can happen really fast once you stop over thinking and start doing. The other day we helped an economist at our department to get the information about students and courses to help forecast the budget. She struggled with hundreds of pages long printed reports and pdf’s that didn’t have the structure she needed, and cost her lots of time copying and pasting from one place to another. In a couple of days we worked with her and a person from another department to find a middle way. In the end our economist herself could generate the data she needed, so that she could just copy it once and have it in her spreadsheet software. The task she normally spent half a day on now took 5 minutes to complete.
It seemed like a small tweak for us, but in an organisation where tackling an issue instantly and in flexible ways is rare, a simple fix can make a huge impact. And apart from lifting some of the frustration she faced in her everyday work, we now made an ally to tackle the bigger challenges of the organisation together.
