Future Sessions: Q&A with Diana Griffin from Nava

Diana Griffin is a product leader and designer committed to scaling social impact through human-centered digital tools, services, and experiences built with collaborative, equitable practices. As a Product Manager with Nava Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), she is applying this approach to modernizing large, complex programs and infrastructure in partnership with government agencies.

On September 29, 2020 Diana is joining six leaders in design and tech for a discussion on design, sustainability, and culture hosted by Modernist Studio. Reserve you ticket to this free event, part of World Interaction Design Day (IxDD).

Diana previously led Product & Design at Aunt Bertha PBC, connecting people to social services via the largest social care network in the country, established the design practice at SchoolAdmin, and co-founded GirlsGuild, a platform connecting girls and women in creative fields through apprenticeship and skill-building sessions.

Nava is a public benefit corporation working to radically improve how government serves people. Formed as a team of designers and engineers in the effort to fix HealthCare.gov in 2013, Nava now works with Medicare and the Department of Veterans Affairs. With a strong research practice and a depth of experience scaling digital services, Nava helps more than sixty million people access critical government services. As thinkers and designers of civic technology, they work holistically across engineering, research, design, and operations to proactively envision the services of a better future.

Diana shared her approach to designing for the unexpected and how to work together for civic change in an interview with the Modernist team.

DIANA GRIFFIN: How I approach the knowns and unknowns in my project work is very similar to how Nava thinks about our body of work as whole — by establishing a clear vision for what we’re trying to achieve, and using it as a guiding north star to navigate an evolving landscape.

Nava has a very clear vision and mission for partnering with government to make social services simple, effective, and accessible to all, and it sets a foundation for thoughtful, careful decision making about​ ​the work we pursue​. We’re picky about what we do because we know what we want to achieve, and we recognize that realizing our vision demands a structural and holistic approach and a commitment to long-term thinking.

Taking a long-term perspective doesn’t mean we’re never surprised. But when faced with urgent, unprecedented challenges, the clarity of our vision sets us up to​ ​mobilize quickly in response​.

DG: A state of uncertainty is not inherently positive or negative; how we respond to it, individually and collectively, determines its impact. Experiencing uncertainty is destabilizing, and that can trigger fear and resistance to change at the same time that it galvanizes action and creativity. Both reactions are legitimate when faced with a situation that carries both risk and possibility, but having a framework to manage risk and explore possibility sets us up to embrace creative action and drive positive change.

As a designer I was taught a skill set for navigating ambiguity, and as a product manager I play a role in translating and aligning across disciplines to bring others along on that journey. With the privilege of this education and experience, I can take a perspective from which the current upheaval of the status quo looks like an enormous opportunity for positive change. That said, the challenge of collectively navigating this climate of deep uncertainty is daunting, to say the least.​ ​Nava’s values​ ring especially true to me in this context: progress takes work, and inclusion is essential to the work of navigating and building on these opportunities together.

DG: I think what makes this question challenging to answer (and exponentially more challenging to embody in an organization) is that it requires recognizing and appropriately balancing all the intersecting factors that allow an organization to both be sustained and to be upheld as worth sustaining.

When we talk about ‘sustainability’ we often focus on the latter — the more virtuous factors like how an organization impacts and cares for the environment, its community, and its own members. We emphasize these factors because they have historically been treated as non-essential to sustaining an organization and as distractions from the former — the “bottom line” factors like how an organization pays for itself (financially or through other forms of value creation), and how it establishes operations and infrastructure to maintain cohesion and support expansion.

All too often the standard approach to building an organization has been to first focus on what it will take to be sustained, and then, only once existence no longer feels tenuous, to try to shoehorn in the things that make it worth sustaining. It’s equally problematic to grow an organization based entirely on what makes it worth sustaining without establishing a foundation for how it will be sustained. The rise in public benefit corporations in the last decade (Nava is one of them​) is one example of how organizations are starting to be more intentional about establishing balance across all these factors from their inception. There certainly isn’t a formula for organizational sustainability yet, but it’s exciting to see more and more organizations thinking deeply about what it means and how to achieve it.

DG: “Center of gravity” is an apt metaphor in this case, since it describes the point where we find balance between the two approaches. Designing for end users is not mutually exclusive from designing for system solutions; we shouldn’t frame it as an “either/or” but as a “both/and.”

The question is really, how do we integrate both approaches to find the center of gravity where the methods of each practice enhance each other? The answer will be different in different contexts and at different levels of complexity, as well as at different points in the design process. Our goal should be to follow the shifting center of gravity, maintaining equilibrium by dynamically shifting the emphasis between human-centered and systems-centered thinking in response to the ebbs and flows of process and context.

DG: I entered the civic tech space and my role at Nava in mid-March of this year; I came in as “normal” abruptly exited. My first view of civic tech from the inside came at a moment when an unprecedented surge in need for social services exposed brittle legacy systems and operational models struggling and too-often failing to serve the public. 2020 has been undeniably grim, but not without moments of hopefulness.

Many of the moments that have inspired me this year have shown a pattern of humility and a recognition of interdependence that defies the relentlessly divisive narratives in the public discourse. In these moments I’m seeing individuals, communities, and organizations amplifying the call to collective, collaborative action, acknowledging that the work that needs to be done can’t and won’t be done alone.

In civic tech, I’m seeing this pattern show up in moments when organizations respond to crisis not only by rolling up their sleeves, but also by​ ​sharing resources​ to support others getting to work, and more broadly when they seek to​ ​share​ lessons​ ​learned​ and​ ​learn from one another​.

Diana Griffin is the Co-Founder of GirlsGuild, an Educator at Austin Center for Design (AC4D), and a Product Manager at Nava.

Reserve your ticket for Future Sessions on September 29th at 5:30pm CT

Follow Perspectives on Design as we share interviews with Joah Spearman (next week), Elizabeth Gore, Meetesh Karia, Callie Thompson, and Angela Wong.

This free event is part of World Interaction Design Day (IxDD), presented by Adobe and IxDA.