Building trust in digital innovation
Perception of digital teams
Digital teams can sometimes be seen as sitting in ivory towers, doing abstract things that have no real meaning for the people doing the work on the ground.
As with all biases, there can be some truth to that. Without the everyday visibility of the issues and the impacts that frontline teams have to deal with on a daily basis, digital teams can be a bit removed.
This isn’t a bad thing. By being distanced from the problems frontline teams face, it gives digital teams the opportunity to explore ideas that can help to solve big problems.
There are two caveats to this though:
- Without access to the experiences and knowledge of the experts in the room, our ability to think about the systems, the tools and the products are useless
- What we do can feel inaccessible and fluffy to people who aren’t familiar with it and that can be off-putting to the people we need to involve
Clarity about what we actually do
Innovation isn’t about a shiny product, or rooms full of colourful post-it notes. It’s about taking a step back from the situation you’re trying to help so you can:
- take the time to explore the problem and the root cause of it
- understand who’s impacted by the situation
- be clear about the value this work will add for these people
- try out different ideas to see what works best
- constantly improve what we do so it has the greatest possible impact
Value to the organisation and the user
The only way to demonstrate real value to the people we work with is to be open and transparent about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and how we’re doing it. To show them that what we’re doing has them at the heart of every stage of the process, and bring them into research, design and testing sessions wherever possible. This makes sure that we’re designing things that really have value to the people who are going to be using them.
Much like the challenges our front line teams, whose challenges never end and are always evolving, so are ours. And while they continue to give it everything they’ve got to make life better for service users, we’ll continue to give it everything we’ve got to design the tools, products and services that will make it easier for them to do their job.
