Integrative Design: A Practice to Tackle Complex Challenges

How social sector organizations can integrate human-centered, systems-minded, strategy-aligned, and equity-driven approaches for greater impact

by Nadia Roumani, Thomas Both, and Susie Chang

Social sector organizations worldwide are tackling some of society’s most challenging problems — such as rampant homelessness, overwhelming climate change, sexual violence, addressing community needs, and rising inequality, to name but a few. With limited resources, they must understand these complex challenges, continue to improve their approaches and interventions, all the while running their existing day-to-day programs. We at Stanford d.school’s Designing for Social Systems program, believe that these leaders and their organizations can bring about meaningful and creative change in the world by applying an Integrative Design Practice. We find that an Integrative Design Practice that combines the four methodologies of human-centered design, systems thinking, and strategic planning, and that grounds their practice in a commitment to equity and anti-racism, will provide teams with a more comprehensive and impactful approach to tackling complex problems.

We have found that Human-Centered Design empowers practitioners to be more curious, explorative, empathetic, and collaborative, improving the effectiveness of their work. Systems Thinking is a helpful addition to one’s practice, helping practitioners take a step back, identify relationships between stakeholders, and determine where there is greater leverage. Strategic Planning allows an organization to orient itself within the broader context, and identify the best intervention given the organization’s resources. Additionally, we know social sector challenges are shaped by inequity — active and structural oppression, exclusion, and discrimination. Therefore we must ground any design practice in a commitment to address Equity.

Each of these methods provides a unique contribution, but when applied alone are insufficient to make lasting change. We believe that social sector leaders can, and should, use a combination of these methods, to see the bigger picture and the myriad of connections while staying grounded in the lives and behaviors of real people.

Below we outline each method’s unique contribution to improving one’s practice and impact:

Human-Centered Design is action-oriented, deeply human, and experimental.

Human-centered design (HCD) is a process, mindset, and approach to identify meaningful challenges and creatively solve complex problems. It guides practitioners to understand and respond to the needs of specific people, question assumptions, reframe problems, and experiment to advance their solutions.

HCD’s unique contribution to tackling social sector challenges is that it helps teams:

• Put real people, the beneficiaries and stakeholders, back into the line of sight. As organizations focus on impact and scale, real individuals can quickly become faceless, monolithic categories (children, teachers, government agencies, underrepresented communities…). Design brings texture to understanding who practitioners are specifically designing for and with, and helps teams prioritize who they are trying to reach, especially given that most organizations do not have the resources to reach multiple groups of people.
• Uncover deep insights that can lead to novel solution spaces. HCD pushes past the explicit needs, and uncovers deeper, implicit needs below the surface. By articulating emotional needs, leaders can design programs targeting meaning — which are more successful.
• Generate a wide range of possible solutions and activities, before settling on the one in which they will invest. HCD provides teams with a reliable process that helps them push past obvious ideas, and come up with novel concepts that can meet needs in new and exciting ways.
• Build low resolution prototypes of concepts they want to advance, thus helping teams build to think. The method helps teams bring an idea to life by building early and inexpensive versions of the concept, moving from words on paper to more tangible concepts.
• Test their assumptions and questions by putting prototypes in real people’s hands for feedback. Rather than launching costly city-wide or nation-wide programs, this approach ensures that teams have incorporated a critical feedback loop, identifying assumptions long before it is too late to change course.

Systems Thinking is analytical, relationship-oriented and holistic.

A systems thinking approach helps social sector leaders take a step back and visualize the system in which they are working, understand the relationships and implications of those relationships, and help clarify in which part of the system to act. The approach can help an organization determine where they have the greatest leverage to make an impact.

A systems thinking approach to tackling social sector challenges helps teams:

• Identify relevant stakeholders and note the relationships between them. By mapping out the various stakeholders within a system, and the relationships between them, teams have a chance to step back and see the broader system in which they are working.
• Map causes and effects in the system to gain insights on what is enabling or inhibiting progress in the system. By mapping the forces in the systems, teams not only identify the force or forces on which they want to exert pressure, but they are also able to see potential unintended consequences.
• Identify points of leverage in the system as opportunities where interventions may have outsized effects. With limited resources, most teams cannot deploy their resources at multiple points in the system. Therefore, a systems approach helps teams narrow their focus on areas where they might be able to have the greatest impact.

For more about how human-centered design and systems thinking can be used together and benefit social sector work, see our article, Human-Centered Systems-Minded Design.

Strategy is logical and helps an organization align its activities with its existing resources and intended outcome

A team applies a strategic planning approach to its programs to ensure that the team is aligned around a clear direction that is grounded in the reality of their resources and capabilities. In this approach, teams articulate their programmatic assumptions, and identify leaps in their logic. By aligning their resources, activities, and desired outcomes, they can avoid a common social sector organization pitfall of staying busy with reactive programming without achieving their desired impact.

The strategic planning approach helps teams:

• Ground themselves in the reality of their existing resources. Although a team can imagine what it would be like to acquire more resources, the strategic planning process roots a team in the reality of what it currently has, and gives a team the opportunity to explore what it might do with those existing resources.
• Helps teams and their leadership tell a coherent story rooted in clear goals and articulated assumptions.
• The process helps teams identify where they may have causal leaps due to faulty assumptions, or leaps in logic.
• The approach helps teams ensure that they are aligned around a clear direction, returning to their articulated goals when they begin to experience mission creep or other demands or distractions.
• Assists teams with making difficult decisions in the face of competing needs. A team’s ability to step back and apply a strategic lens to their work is often the difference between a busy team and an impactful team.

An Equity practice grounds a team’s work in the intention and commitment to reduce inequity, and confront and dismantle discrimination and oppression

An equity practice centers a team to see, acknowledge, and disrupt active and systemic inequity and oppression. The practice is both an intentionality and set of actions that strive for justice. How a team works (the process) must be equitable in order to create the possibility to create more equitable outcomes. Active reflection and relational work –wrestling with issues of racism, identity, and equity– are vital prerequisites to bring about positive social change.

An equity practice helps teams to:

• Examine the historical and systemic causes of challenges they aim to address. Nearly all social challenges are rooted in current and historical, active and passive inequity, racism and discrimination. Practitioners are more ethical, equitable, and effective by gaining understanding of the historical and systemic causes at play in their work.
• Be mindful of our own identities and biases, and build self-awareness. It takes active reflection and discourse to see beyond one’s own experiences and lenses. With more awareness, individuals and teams can better interrupt their biases and question assumptions.
• Center those most marginalized in the process and in the interventions created.
• Question who’s included and who makes decisions. A more equitable and effective practice centers those with lived experiences as experts, not subjects. Those most affected are uniquely suited to be designers and decision makers.
• Create space for dialogue and healing, rather than avoiding difficult conversations and dilemmas about race and identity. It is necessary to work with the assumption that there is messiness to the practice. Create honest human relationships and attend to healing that is needed in facing oppression and racism.

For more, read our article on Equity Practice in Design: A 2021 Update from the Designing for Social Systems Program.

The methods and findings from each approach — human-centered design, systems thinking, strategic planning, and grounding work in an equity practice — inform one another. They each contribute a unique piece to a complex puzzle, and integrating these approaches is a fluid process. While each of these methods is a field and mindset in its own right, in the DSS program, we have invested in helping practitioners better understand how to apply these approaches and integrate them more seamlessly. Integrating these practices allows teams to uncover and integrate insights to determine actions, understand history and context, examine and make strategic choices, test assumptions and new ideas, and question which potential interventions and intermediate outcomes best lead a team to their desired impact in the world.