The Mi:Lab Toolkit: Forces of Progress

The Maynooth University Innovation Lab (Mi:Lab) takes a Human-Centred design approach to explore and tackle challenges within the Higher Education system. In a series of Mi:Lab blogposts, we will explore some of the key tools we employ in our projects at Mi:Lab. This week we look at Forces of Progress, a key tool at the initial audit stage of the design project.

Forces of Progress is a design tool used at the audit stage of a project to define potential strategic opportunities that exist for change.

We know that 70% of executives cite failure to align and coordinate as the biggest challenge to executing strategy (Sull et al., 2015). Therefore, it is important to audit the challenges and opportunities ahead. Any successful project must start with an acknowledgement and understanding of your starting point, the context of inquiry and how innovation can develop and grow. As Devitt et al. highlight, “every innovation project has a context of origin, an environment where it is rooted and is expected to develop and grow.” (2017:6).

Forces of Progress is a reflective tool that aims at understanding the forces that might motivate change and auditing the forces that might make change difficult.

Forces of Progress looks at four forces affecting change (Klement, 2018):

1. The Push of a Current Situation: The Push considers both internal and external pushes away from the current situation that prompt the active search of a new and preferred solution. It may be the things that aren’t currently working or are no longer fit for purpose.
2. Magnetism of a New Solution: The pull is a promise of the new and desirable state of the new idea. These factors allure us into accepting the new idea or solution. They might be new approaches or ideas you’ve seen that you want to adopt further.
3. Habits of the Present: Strong, well-established habits and practices often pose a resistance to change. Such common practices restrain us and entice us to stay with a solution that is already known. These might be areas where you expect to face resistance from others.
4. Anxiety of the New Solution: A fear may exist when considering the unknown outcomes of the new solution. This ambiguity makes it uncomfortable and we therefore seek comfort in what is already known to us. This may include things that you have heard mooted, but you are nervous about.

To conduct an audit of your context using the Forces of Progress, an individual or group should spend about 30 minutes reflecting on and brainstorming the potential pulls, pushes, habits and anxieties in your project on a board visible to everyone in the team. What might stop you from making changes? What intrinsic motivations pull you to make change?

Instructions:

Step 1: Set up a group brainstorming board divided into four sections: Push, Pull, Habits and Anxieties. You can download our template here or if you are conducting this exercise on a whiteboard, you can divide it into the four sections.

Step 2: Individually brainstorm ideas onto the board using post-it notes, spending approximately five minutes on each question. You can refer to the Force descriptions as a guide.

Step 3: Set a timer for 10 minutes to vote on the top Push, Pull, Habits and Anxieties for the project. Allow individuals to vote by adding a dot to their top two factors of each.

Step 4: Come together as a team to discuss the top-voted factors. This discussion will be a time for you to discuss the project opportunities, pre-empt barriers and analyse where the project may need to focus.