Weeknotes 4: Solutions?
This week we moved to generating our potential solutions, and it certainly felt a relief to be moving to the next phase having completed such rich user research. The ideas were flowing.
We also upped the pace on progress. In our weekly operational meeting on Tuesday we passed a proposal to get the prototype ideas of what we want to test ready to test with real Community Businesses before Christmas, so the testing can start in the New Year. This means we needed to get to work!
Here is what has happened:
Solutions sketching workshop on Thursday 25th November we (Danny Hearn from DOT Project, Debby Mulling & Ellie Hale from Catalyst, Ed Howarth, Fergus Arkley and Simon Borkin from Power to Change and Abi Handley from Outlandish) identified the group of How Might We’s we wanted to focus on for testing solutions further:
HMWs we focussed on for the pilot
It seemed clear that if we couldn’t support CB’s (Community Businesses) to find the space and time needed to work out their needs, then we wouldn’t be able to support them to change in anyway. How can Power to Change support CB’s to create the foundations they need to bring change to their businesses that really sticks and makes a difference?
We moved on to spit-balling ideas that we had and came up with many, all very much aligned which was really exciting (and a little relieving) as we all come from different directions.
And then… we ran out of time and space to think and had to get on with other things in our calendar. So we definitely get the challenge organisations have in creating the space needed to do real development work!
We set ourselves some homework to do some sketching of the ideas and to review these in our regular Tuesday session (30th November).
The solutions had strong themes across them all — collaboration and teams rather than single people joining from different CBs, flexibility on timeframe, bringing the Community Businesses along with us through the entire journey or programme (not fitting them into boxes but working with us to codesign what those boxes are for them), building trust and establishing peers, support networks, not only for the Community Businesses but also the Connector role that we’ve talked about before, and also a digital facilitator role that we’re beginning to scope out.
Next steps are for Debby And Fergus to spend some time as a pair to define a first version of our ‘North Star’ vision for the programme, and for us then to work out the best bits to test in January. Exciting times.
This Week Notes was written by Abi Handley, a member of Outlandish Co-operative and member of the Digital Capabilities Pilot circle, supporting in modelling and establishing collaborative behaviours and bringing in digital delivery insight to the design process.
