This summer I worked with MakeSense on their 're_action for climate' project as part of my Leadership-in-Action placement. MakeSense is a global social enterprise, aiming to be a catalyst that allows everyone in society to play a role in solving the social and environmental issues of our time. Their overarching strategy is the ‘Power of 10’, where each individual mobilises ten others to multiply the collective impact.
Throughout the six weeks the MakeSense team in Mexico gave us in-depth training in Design Thinking, from identifying an initial project area to the final implementation (or ‘re_action’) period. We worked in pairs, forming eleven groups between the on-site and remote scholars. A digital mural mapped out each group’s progress and enabled us to share ideas between projects.
One interesting part of the Design Thinking process came early on during the ‘empathise’ segment. Each group was tasked with pinning down a profile for the individuals we hope to focus on such as their profession, interests, motivations or simply their daily routine. This was especially insightful as it allowed us to turn a fairly broad objective into a more personal, purposeful goal. I found it’s very easy to consider policies from a strategic level, but much harder to contemplate how the policy will develop in reality and more importantly how particular groups will respond.
After some time researching our project area further, which for my group revolved around waste and littering in the community, we begun the ‘ideate’ phase to identify potential solutions to our unwanted situation. This was undoubtedly the most creative element of the project, with great scope for ingenuity and originality. The MakeSense team gave us a huge amount of independence by this point, allowing us to carve out our own direction for the campaign.
The second phase of the ‘ideate’ segment concentrated on scrutinising and improving the concepts we had chosen. This analysis was certainly tricky, but vital in recognising any flaws in the policy. I tend to have a blinkered attitude to ideas I am especially fond of, so the scrutiny involved in this stage helped me step back and tweak elements before moving on.
We prototyped some of our concepts, in particular the use of social media to gauge how much exposure our project gained from certain platforms. For me the use of social media was a big learning curve, specifically using online tools for more commercial purposes. Generating engaging content (which in terms of waste and litter was somewhat challenging!) ensured our campaign reached the greatest number of people online. This was something entirely new to me, yet skills in digital content production will increasingly be needed in the future so I was grateful for the chance to develop this.
My team quickly realised however that mobilising people to act was not as easy as first imagined. We struggled to recruit volunteers using our social media accounts, in part due to the time of year with lots of people being away but also the difficulty of making the issues of waste and litter an attractive prospect! After a final ‘KDI’ evaluation of ‘Keep, Drop, Improve’ we switched our strategy to encompass both physical media in the form of posters in addition to social media. The KDI method is a structure I shall certainly take forward beyond the programme, as it proved invaluable in recognising (and more importantly changing) elements of our policy to achieve maximum success. Forcing yourself to keep one thing, drop another and improve some element was the most effective form of scrutiny rather than adopting a vague approach where very little changes.
Following the two week implementation period, I reflect back upon the project as a whole. The whole process of Design Thinking and the associated training has given me a set of skills I will most certainly carry forward into the world of work, and more generally in life as I’m able to step back and consider ideas from both a strategic and operational position. Looking back at our digital mural too, I envisioned the Design Thinking process as a machine in some respects. I spoke with Davizz, one of the MakeSense coordinators who guided my team and I through the project, discussing how the step-by-step process takes an input (in this case an ‘unwanted situation’ we seek to tackle) and produces an output (a well-rounded package of measures to solve it). The structured nature of Design Thinking makes it transferable across all sectors and I fully intend on utilising the skills MakeSense have enabled me to develop in the near future.