Embracing Ambiguity
Launching the Public Radio Incubation Lab with design thinking training helps kickstart a generative mindset.
The Public Radio Incubation Lab launched with the goal of “bringing transformative ideas to life in public media,” with equal emphasis on how we set about that work as well as what that work eventually produces. The first Lab team is tackling the question of how to leverage digital scale to drive value to NPR Member stations. We kicked off with a session on design thinking, led by Justin Ferrell of Stanford’s d.school, which helped reign in our impulse to leap to solutions and open up the team to bigger possibilities.
Ambiguity
One of the key principles we discussed on the first day was the importance of maintaining open minds in the early weeks of the Lab and resisting our impulse to jump to solutions.
By design, the Lab team includes product managers, designers, subject matter experts, makers and innovators who bring ideas for how to tackle the challenges facing public media. Jumping from a problem directly to a solution is what many of us do all the time, and it often serves us well. The Lab affords us an opportunity to slow the process, change how we work a bit and see what happens in that time and space.
It took mindfulness and occasional reminders to be comfortable with ambiguity and to respond to fog by adding yet more fog, but it’s helping us change and open our approach.
Flare vs Focus
As we also discussed in our design thinking workshop, there is a time for the process to flare out and time to focus in.
Welcoming uncertainty is key to flaring out: meeting questions with more questions; generating ideas about without filtering for what’s viable or feasible; seeking out users and perspectives that will challenge initial ideas and reactions; and pulling on threads that risk unraveling what we’ve done.
As we research, create and generate ideas we want the scope and possibilities to grow so we approach our users with an expansive sense of what’s possible. This is an iterative process, and there will be a time to prototype, test, make choices and focus the work later. But in the first two weeks, it was all flaring all the time.
Problem-Finding
As part of that process of opening our thinking, in the second week, we spent time expanding on the theme of the Lab to try to frame (and reframe) the problem we’re addressing. One of the variations on the problem to solve is, given the current constraints within the system, how can we engage the audience on NPR’s digital properties to drive value to stations in the near term? We agreed that if we can seize some of that opportunity, we can benefit the whole system in short order.
But the value of incorporating the principles of design thinking into our practices goes beyond helping us solve the problem at hand. Taking more time to freely generate ideas, reframe the challenge, and work closely with more users will better solve the problems in front of us, and maybe help us find the problem we really want to solve.
Want to contact the team directly? You can find them at incubationlab@npr.org.
