Program design and assessment
This is the fun part: designing and delivering programs that fulfill your mission.
Design
When we work together on program design, we will start with intended ends – What situation do you want to change? – and reverse engineer:
· Who will benefit?
· In what ways, specifically?
· Produced through what activities?
· Using what resources?
· How will you know you have succeeded?
· How will you sustain the activity if it is successful?
This series of questions -- essential steps in strategic planning as well as initiative development -- is sometimes called a “logic model.” Using design thinking to approach these questions can yield fresh, unexpected results. Here’s how design thinking steps line up with logic model questions:
This is the fun part: designing and delivering programs that fulfill your mission.
Design
When we work together on program design, we will start with intended ends – What situation do you want to change? – and reverse engineer:
· Who will benefit?
· In what ways, specifically?
· Produced through what activities?
· Using what resources?
· How will you know you have succeeded?
· How will you sustain the activity if it is successful?
This series of questions -- essential steps in strategic planning as well as initiative development -- is sometimes called a “logic model.” Using design thinking to approach these questions can yield fresh, unexpected results. Here’s how design thinking steps line up with logic model questions:
Logic model questionsWhat situation do you want to change?
Who will benefit? In what ways, specifically? Produced through what activities? Using what resources? How will you know you have succeeded? Assess How will you know you have succeeded? |
Design thinking stepEmpathize, then define the problem.
Correctly defining the problem is a critical first step. It’s easy to think that we already know what we want to fix; but stopping to make sure we have correctly defined the problem will save a lot of time and money down the road. Research at this phase involves engaging a selected, diverse set of stakeholders to get out “on the street,” to experience the situation from a variety of different perspectives, engaging a wide range of people affected. Listen, learn, empathize, and bring your findings back to the planning group. We will use an array of strategies – they might include mind-mapping, guided brainstorming (or “brainsteering”), visualization, improv, role-play, and others – to use our research, empathy, and intuition to find the answer to the first all-important question: What’s the problem? Your chances for success are exponentially improved if you engage, in every step of this process, people directly affected by the situation you want to address. Create and consider many options. How many possible activities could help solve this problem? To avoid the trap of thinking the answer is obvious, we’ll use some of the creative-thinking strategies at our disposal to generate a varied set of realistic possible solutions. Just generating this set of possibilities will take your thinking in fresh directions. Additional research can help in this step – Who is doing related work? How well is it working? How does their situation or analysis differ from yours? What are relevant best practices? – as long as it serves to open up rather than shut down the possibility for disruptive innovation. Refine selected directions. We will flesh out, combine, refine, and nurture your set of ideas. We will think them through, test them against values, mission, and philosophy, clarify and question the theory of effectiveness implicit in each suggestion, determine the costs and resources required for each – from materials to staff to community support. Part of this refinement process is articulating fundamental steps in preparing for assessment of the effectiveness of your work: · What do we think will happen as a result of this activity, in terms of specific, measurable outcomes? · How will we measure those desired outcomes? Through this process, we will narrow down a set of possible activities to test. Prototype, assess, refine, launch, assess. Assessment is an ongoing process. You have been assessing -- formally or informally -- every step of the way: assessing process, team effectiveness, idea fit, and more. You have been thinking about assessment from your first exploration of the questions, "Who will benefit?" and "In what ways, specifically?" Answering those questions has provided you with the specific desired outcomes you need to find a way to measure. Determining the best way to do that is the task at this stage of formal assessment planning. The assessment strategy you devise is almost certain to be multifaceted, involving both direct and indirect measures, and a range of tools (surveys, interviews, observation, counting, and others). One of the best short introductions to program evaluation is published by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Kellogg’s single-page list of evaluation activities at different stages of planning and implementation is an invaluable place to start thinking about what to include in your formal assessment plan. As Kellogg's excellent handbook makes clear, outcomes assessment is a vast and complex field. If we determine that you need an expert evaluator, we can engage one appropriate for your needs. Assessment can seem daunting at first, but doesn't have to be -- which is fortunate, since good assessment is key to your sustainability. |
Sustain and build
The final logic model question -- How will you sustain the activity if it is successful? -- does not have an explicit counterpart in the design thinking process; but considerations of sustainability are integral to every step.
Sustainability is not just a matter of money -- although that's essential. Throughout the program design process, we will have been thinking – implicitly and explicitly – about sustainability and most of its eight components:
The final logic model question -- How will you sustain the activity if it is successful? -- does not have an explicit counterpart in the design thinking process; but considerations of sustainability are integral to every step.
Sustainability is not just a matter of money -- although that's essential. Throughout the program design process, we will have been thinking – implicitly and explicitly – about sustainability and most of its eight components:
|
· strategic planning
· funding · organizational capacity · strategic partnerships |
· political support
· evaluation · flexibility and adaptation · strategic communications |
As we move down the road to securing your initiative's future, we will carefully consider each of these elements in turn, and make plans for putting in place the supports you need to thrive.