Beatrice Lucy from Citizen Advice Bureau

Beatrice is the chief digital officer for the Citizen Advice Bureau and had plenty to say on digital design. The presentation opened with a live webpage which was the first thing that they built for staff.

The dashboard is live and displays the amount of people on the website currently, what people are searching for on the website, searches coming from google and what’s trending on the website.

They found this particularly helpful to have up in reception to remind staff why they do what they do.  It led to some really interesting thoughts on content design as many times we have people from services using technical or policy speak which doesn’t always reflect the language the public use. Having this tool would go some way to helping us convince service’s to release their grip on ‘council speak’ and engage with the public in the language they use and on their terms.

With almost 800 pages a year being added there was a big temptation to just keep adding pages as it’s harder to comprehend the size of a website as it’s not a book! In the same light it’s not difficult to end up with a page that runs close to 5,000 words, no one is going to scroll down to read it all!

The most interesting part was recognising that there were a number of user groups for the website:

• The public
• Their own employees
• External organisations such as DWP

Although these users will complete different actions on the website they may come with a very different state of mind i.e. a debt collector is knocking on their door while they are on the phone to citizen advice or on their website.

They ensured everything was tested with users before going live and got staff involved by offering incentives to do tasks and be interviewed.

Ok so what now? Thought from Sophie Payne (Head of Customer Experience and Communications)

Let’s not fall in to the trap of producing content solely for our website, we need to recognise that users are on other platforms be they money saving websites or on whatsapp discussing pot holes, is there a way we can prompt them to interact with the council where they are?

We really need to develop a deeper understanding of our users so we can truly help them by understanding their needs i.e. is a digital solution the right solution? Perhaps if we can make the website easier to use, we can free up advisors to do more face to face or telephone calls if it’s required.

The key to developing understanding for the website is the research. The digital team used guerrilla marketing where they sat in CAB waiting rooms to talk to customers and got their own staff to test drive the website with incentives in exchange for 4 hrs of time a month. This was complemented by a number of online tools such as Crazy Egg, eye tracking and recording behaviours from the website itself.

Matthew Taylor Chief Executive of RSA

Matthew was a rather different speaker from the others that attended our Innovation Month of talks. Rather than coming from a business background accompanied by practical examples, here was sociologist steeped in governmental policy and theory. Needless to say it was a thought provoking and challenging talk that will take many of us some time to digest.

Matthew talked about some of the societal changes and world views that are surfacing all over England.

As a nation we have been happy to be governed but things are changing, there is a desire to be governed less and to take more control for ourselves but still not yet wanting to govern ourselves.

In addition there is a shift from the old world to the new world and the diversity of people and culture that’s brought as part of the global village.

Lastly there was an interesting application of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs where as a nation we have come to expect our basic needs to have been met but as an individualistic society we want to be creators of our own solutions.

This set the scene for a slightly different take on innovation, rather than smaller changes that can be quickly tested and implemented the challenge was for larger systemic change. He challenged us to look at change as a system and try to understand the equilibrium that keeps things together currently and develop reasonable theories of how things could be done better, always understanding that small changes will have cause and effects.

No mean task then! So where do we find these people that come up with ‘reasonable theories’? Are these people further up the evolution scale than us, with a mutant ability to see in the round? No because it’s not a top down approach we need, but a bottom up approach, we need people that have lived and breathed in a broken system to connect the dots. This means social workers, contact centre staff, carers, those working on the front line who understands the broken systems they work in and what holds them together.

The next step is to act like an entrepreneur so be dynamic, move quickly and embrace failure as part of the process. We need to test the theory quickly and measure the cause and effect it has when the equilibrium moves, we need to react to it so the system changes but doesn’t fail completely.

How do we build the right team to deliver this? Matthew cited the London Challenge team which has documented success in changing the quality of schooling in London and then laid out his own Coordination theory that ensures that the team has the right characteristics

1. Hierarchal – believes in systems, leadership and strategy
2. Solidarity – believes we should galvanise around a cause, having a common driver for change
3. Individualism – wants to maximise the scope for people to do their own thing and come up with solutions that fit them best
4. Fatalism –nothing we can do that will have a significant impact, ultimately we are governed by factors outside of our control

 

To develop innovation and change we need a leadership team of people that are strong on the characteristics above, particularly the first three with tan acceptance of the last. This type of leadership team combined with a team of people who have experience of working in the broken system should be able to develop insights and solutions along with a team to deliver that change!

Sounds simple doesn’t it! I like the theory but I suspect that human desire to find people just like themselves would ensure this isn’t a long term situation but a possible project team that can be created. In all it lends itself very well to AGILE working and how we select the right teams to deliver these projects, there probably are more thoughts I have but this blog post is long already and I will link you back to Matthew’s blog which outlines his theory

Managing Director of Commerce at o2 comes to visit

Robert Franks Managing Director o2 Commerce

The fast talking director of o2 Commerce came to our offices this week to discuss how his team innovate.

He discussed key waves of innovation with the development of multiple tariffs and mobile phone packages to being the first UK provider to ‘gamble’ on the iPhone, something other providers did not think the public would pay for.

As a telecoms provider they have access to a wealth of customer data but as with all Big Data the challenge is how to develop insight and actual innovation from it.

It was pleasing to hear that they still use classic ethnography as well as Time and Motion studies to augment their data collection. Add this to the Social Media Intelligence they collect, then they are in a position to start to make assumptions and begin the innovation process.

On a side note the recruitment of ‘innovators’ seemed to be an under developed area, they had recruited an innovation team made up of sales people and business developers but there was no ‘silver bullet’ to find that elusive innovation gene! This has always interested me, how do we recognise those people that can look at data and draw workable/testable solutions to problems or unperceived needs? Perhaps for another blog!

The next step is to test those assumptions and Robert emphasised the importance of establishing a control group to validate experiments. What they also do is run a lot of tests/experiments at the same time, why? Because if you run 30 experiments a number will fail but with this amount of experiments one might be successful! By having so many experiments that will ultimately fail it sets the right tone across the organisation, failure is part of the innovation process.

I also like the language of experiment over test. Test implies pass or fail, win or loss but experiment is just that, ‘we’re trying something out’ it’s a process that will give us findings we can learn from.

Ultimately this process gives permission to fail but he does admit it’s a struggle to do!

I will leave you with the questions they ask all would be innovators

Real: Is there a genuine customer need for this?

Win: If we bring this to market will we be the best at this?

Worth it: Overall is this going to be profitable to the company

Seeing the world in a different way

In one year 3,283 patients died through preventable error, in England alone

1 in 10 patients suffer some form of unintended harm

1 in 300 hospital admissions will die as a direct result of error

(Data from Parliamentary enquiry into Patient Safety 2009 and DH/NAO publications 2005-2009)

Yes I know this is difficult to believe but these facts set the tone for Martin Bromileys presentation on seeing the world in a different way.

This was part of a series of talks for the Innovation Month the council has been running throughout May.

Martin explained how the death of his wife at the hands of caring, highly qualified and experienced medical professionals led him to eventually found the Clinical Human Factors Group.

Their raison d’etre is the investigation of accidents in healthcare, how they happen and why, but most importantly not the ‘who’

Challenges within the NHS

You are 33,000 times more likely to die from clinical error than an airplane crash

This is because the aviation industry has been able to embrace error and create a feedback loop that improves safety. This has inevitably led to a culture shift of accepting human error as a factor in accidents and learning from those errors to provide better and safer systems.

Embracing error is difficult in the NHS as it has a very hierarchal setup due to the high levels of technical skills to be senior within the organisation. This presents difficulty for those less senior to challenge and those who are senior, to accept error on their part.

Learnings for the Council

We need to be more open about failure, not the who but the how and why.

If there is a failing i.e. in social care or children services, don’t wait till we receive a complaint, an FOI or are being sued, investigate because we want to understand and learn from the failing

Help people with the language to challenge colleagues and those more senior. This act alone gives permission to do so.

In turn help those more senior to develop the skills to listen to challenge