I’ve recently learned about Journey mapping and its exciting. I want to know specifically what barriers stand between my homeless clients and the services available to them. Journey mapping has been telling me.

I’ve sat with 4–5 clients for about 4–5hrs in total. I’ve learnt that what they don’t like is asking a question and not getting a straight answer. They don’t like feeling fobbed off or being given bad advice by people who don’t know them. They like honesty, and being given realistic expectations. They like it when people listen, really listen.

What it boils down to is the flow of information between them and the person trying to help. Are they told what they need to know? Are they listened to when they speak?

In this case I’m looking at them and the council. It’s a complicated relationship and there are understandable reasons that my clients are sometimes disappointed when they seek help there. My clients are often desperate and in search of not just a housing solution but also hope. The council staff are generally hardworking and compassionate people trying to do the best they can, but with the limited power and resources. The relationship is naturally imbalanced. The clients need time, housing officers have very little. Clients need a friend on the journey, housing officers need to impartially follow the law. Clients need immediate answers, housing officers need time to investigate.

That said, it is in both parties interest that key pieces of information get through the wall of stress and tight resources that keep the two apart.

Two clients I spoke with found a hack - sometimes third party organisations can have conversations clients often only hope for, and when they do, they can have them in a way that housing officers can only hope for.

The thing is this is a part of what we think we do as an organisation, but neither of these clients used that part of our service. So why did a couple of our clients end up taking such a circuitous route to access help from the council? They both started on our books then seemed to disappear before they came back much later, by which point they had either involved a different organisation or the situation had worsened. So this is first question I want to answer: How can we best improve engagement with our own service and get better information from them?

The two parts of this question are inextricably linked by a sense of being accepted and valued: you come back, and you can be honest.

To get some depth on how we can improve engagement we took to journey mapping to a wider group of people — our Support Centre volunteers.

SC is our hub of operations. It’s a drop in where we provide instant access to support, advocacy, advice, and practical help to homeless people or those facing eviction. We get the volunteers together every few months for some training and fine tuning so it seemed a perfect opportunity to get under the skin of our processes and look at how it might feel to someone experiencing it.

Running a journey mapping workshop

Me and the volunteering coordinator threw some ideas together and with some extremely helpful input from the System Changers team we put together a format. Some bits of it worked better than others and there were some learning points for me. The first and most obvious thing was that our training tends to be focussed on things like how to navigate a benefit form, or how mental health issues might affect the people we work with, or what even are legal highs? Spending just under 2 hours journey mapping was going to be a bit different for the volunteers.

So here’s what we did:

1. To get them on board I opened with ten minutes scene setting, what has lead to us all being here now, all the above really. I showed them the journey maps I’d done with clients. I explained what it had taught me, and the question I now wanted to put to them. To be honest I didn’t feel like the vols ‘got’ this bit. They sat down expecting shift leader training, what they got was an intro to a research project and how they were going to be a part of it. What I said wasn’t bad, but maybe more of an emphasis on how journey mapping will help them shift lead would’ve helped, might have made it seem like more of a win-win situation. The journey maps that I showed them were really helpful though, it gave them an idea of what they can look like.
2. To provide a baseline of understanding and get them talking I got them to quickly fill out these Use Case Cards about what they turned up on shift to do and why. 2 minutes to tell each other. This only took 5 minutes and it didn’t add much to the workshop. The ice was already pretty broken as they’d had lunch together before. That said, using it at this point helped with step 6 when they got to it.
3. Nothing left to do but equip them with markers, multi-coloured post-its and unleash them onto some unsuspecting flip chart paper! It was a little more stunted than that but I asked them to break down a shift in SC into steps and observe each step as fully as possible, noting down what went on, and what tensions or issues there were so we could look at them together later. They were in groups of about 4. We had designed the groups knowing who would be attending, which I think was a good move. We had people with different approaches in the same group, and a mix of talkative and not so talkative people. I also gave them some questions to help. I had two challenges here: group sway toward immediate problem solving and time. Firstly, when they found problems the volunteers immediately tried to fix it within their group. It’s a wonderful demonstration of their desire to fix broken things, but it meant they got stuck on bits of the shifts and a number of groups only got part way through the map. I wandered round and encouraged people to note down the problems, give them a big red circle and we’d come back to them later. This dislodged a couple of stuck discussions. Time was also an issue. It took a lot longer than 20 minutes for people to get into the task, next time I’d leave 30+mins for this. To be fair it was a big job and a completely new tool [Picture of the questions slide]
4. Then we came back together for a big group discussion to look at the journey maps and identify the highs and lows of the shift, the clunky bits. My colleague scribed, and we tried to draw out themes, suggestions, stuff they could do different immediately, and things we’d need to chew on as a staff team. This was the bit that scared me the most. I like delivering content. I really enjoy presentations. I get the chance to think of witticisms ahead of time and feel very clever. With this, I was needing to simply trust this tool that I had found so useful myself would reveal enough insight to our veteran volunteers to justify their having given up yet another afternoon to our organisation. I had a list of questions which helped, lots of open questions, which I just worked my way through until we run out of time. I focussed on trying to get as full a picture of the issues without jumping ahead to committing to a particular solution. I asked them clarifying questions, invited alternate points of view ... but it was hard. I really wanted to send them away with a “and this is what we’ll do differently…” or “this is what you’ve learnt” but in a lot of ways it was more “this is what you know already but have taught us, the staff team”. Doesn’t this tension just scream the ‘knowing professional’ trying to teach the ‘unknowing volunteer’? But to be fair it is a lot easier to stand in front of a group of people when you do feel you know the answers, regardless of the labels people are carrying. However, I also think that the volunteers had an expectation of answers and solutions. The relationship between volunteers and professionals, and what it is to be ‘staff’ are interesting issues.
5. At this point we all needed a coffee. The journey mapping and the discussion had run well over time and we had yet more we wanted to do. We had planned for a colleague to come in and deliver some more typical training to round things off but having started the journey mapping process we had to finish is. He kindly agreed to save his content for another time, buying us an extra 30 minutes. I took some minutes to regroup.
6. Next I gave them some handcrafted fake client personas. They were really typical cases that fitted snugly into four roles; new angry client, known angry client, new depressed client, known depressed client. Between them these personas cover the biggest challenges the volunteers face, very depressed people, aggressive people, and how knowing or not knowing them affects what you can do with them. I asked the volunteers to do the use test cards again but from the client’s perspective this time, again to ground them a little and try to get in the heads of the clients in these positions. I think the use case card were a good idea at this point, but could probably be cut out if necessary in the future.
7. Then I got them journey mapping again, but from the client’s perspective this time. The volunteers started with when the client first walks in the door and moved forward from there. The journey maps then focussed on subtly different issues and with a keener eye for the detail of the client’s experience, rather than an over view of making the whole shift run. The volunteers got on with this one much quicker having got one journey map under their belts already.
8. Feedback, my colleague with a pen and a flip chart, me with my open questions.

We unearthed a motherlode of stuff. I can’t recommend the process highly enough.