In my recent piece, I explored why strategy and human-centered design belong together: strategy provides direction; design enables learning. Many leaders grasp this conceptually, but struggle to apply these approaches in practice. Why?

The barrier is not a lack of commitment, intelligence, or even tools — though integrated frameworks are still limited. The real hurdle is emotional. More specifically, in the social sector, we collectively fail to name the emotions these processes surface and to help practitioners navigate them.

Emotions in strategy? Yes. Strategy is often framed as rational and analytical. But in the social sector, strategy is deeply emotional. Every decision carries moral weight: Who do we prioritize? Where do we start? What happens to those we cannot reach?

Emotions are also in human-centered design (HCD). HCD is a problem-solving process, but one that investigates deeply human issues by clarifying who we are designing for and by uncovering underlying needs. Here too, decisions become emotionally complex: Who are we truly designing for? How do we honor their stories with limited resources? How can we sit with insights we’re not ready to address as an organization?

Both approaches are rooted in ambiguity. Both require moving forward without certainty. And both surface emotions that often go unnamed in organizational life — especially in mission-driven work.

As human-centered educators, we spend significant time helping practitioners clarify what they are trying to change and attend to the emotional needs of the people they serve. Yet we often overlook the emotional journey of the practitioners themselves. In our focus on uncovering insights and driving impact, we fail to name and support the emotions leaders experience as they navigate this work. Social sector leaders are not merely vehicles for change; they are key stakeholders in the process. If we teach frameworks and tools without supporting the emotional labor of social change, the cost is high — not only in reduced effectiveness, but in burnout and growing dissatisfaction with the work itself.

Strategy as an Emotional Act

Social sector leaders operate in a near-constant state of urgency — responding to crises; managing scarcity; and meeting expectations from funders, boards, staff, and communities. Strategy forces choices under uncertainty, and those choices rarely feel neutral. They are infused with care, responsibility, and often guilt.

I see this most clearly when teams are asked to narrow focus or clarify outcomes. For leaders deeply committed to equity and service, prioritization of one group can feel like abandonment of another.

In one coaching session with nonprofit leaders working on mental health access, the simple question, “Who are you specifically trying to reach?” led to tears:

• “How can we choose?”
• “If we don’t serve them, who will?”
• “Who are we to prioritize one group over another?”

This reaction isn’t about strategy in the abstract. It’s about scarcity, moral responsibility, and the painful reality that needs far outstrip resources. Many leaders hold a quiet hope that if they don’t limit their vision, serving everyone might somehow become possible.

Strategy often becomes a series of emotional decisions disguised as analytical ones.

But prioritization is not about reducing impact. It’s about increasing it — moving from aspirational intent to tangible, real-world change. Over time, I’ve moved away from the language of narrowing altogether. Instead, I ask: Who might you start with? Starting somewhere is not the same as stopping elsewhere. It’s a commitment to focusing and learning, not abandonment.

The Emotions that Surface in Human-Centered Design

Human-centered design introduces a related, but distinct, set of emotional challenges.

Many social sector leaders already work closely with communities. What draws them to design is the rigor in the process: slowing down, uncovering deeper needs, and breaking free from habitual solutions. For many, this work reignites why they entered the field. And yet, emotions quickly surface.

Leaders ask:

• “How do we address all the needs we’ve uncovered when we lack the capacity to meet them?”
• “Is it ethical to prototype with under-resourced communities if it raises expectations?”
• “How do we honor the voices we’ve heard when we must still make tradeoffs?”

There is also the emotional challenge of practicing design inside institutions that lack an innovation culture:

• “Will leadership see this as learning — or as distraction?”
• “Is it safe to share unfinished work?”
• “How do we make time for iteration when delivery pressures are relentless?”

Design invites behaviors — prototyping before certainty, sharing work-in-progress — that often feel risky in systems that reward polish, predictability, and control.

For many practitioners, this creates a sense of exposure without institutional cover. Design can surface uncomfortable truths about gaps between intention and impact — truths social sector practitioners may not yet feel supported to confront.

The False Safety of Extremes

When emotions go unacknowledged, teams often retreat to what feels safe. One response is over-specification: projecting certainty through detailed plans and concrete activities, even when the situation remains unclear. Saying “we don’t know yet” can feel like a failure of leadership rather than an honest assessment.

The opposite response is over-breadth: keeping strategy intentionally vague to avoid conflict. Big umbrella language can create surface harmony while masking deep confusion about what an organization is actually trying to do.

Both extremes serve emotional needs — protection from vulnerability on one end, protection from conflict on the other. However, neither produces clarity.

Aligning a team towards focus and clarity is not tidy. It requires discomfort, negotiation, and what one leader once described during a coaching session as “very useful agitation.” Avoiding that agitation may feel easier, but it comes at the cost of focus, learning, shared direction and ultimately, real human-centered impact.

Leadership as Emotional Stewardship

When strategy and human-centered design are practiced together, leadership fundamentally shifts.

Leadership is no longer about providing certainty; it is about helping teams move through uncertainty — channeling overwhelm into focus, conflict into productive disagreement, and guilt into clarity about where contribution can begin.

In strategy, leaders must help teams understand why prioritization matters, make sense of competing insights, and align resources with where the organization can contribute the greatest value. Strategy is not an exercise in semantics; it is about making, and standing behind, hard choices

In human-centered design, leaders must name and normalize the emotions that arise. They must support developing self-awareness, confronting bias, listening ethically, and caring without carrying the full emotional burden of others’ experiences.

When these approaches are integrated, leadership becomes an act of attunement — knowing where teams are in the work, how design insights inform strategic decisions, and when emotional discomfort is a necessary precursor to clarity. Simply naming and tracking these emotional dynamics is a powerful start.

Strategy and human-centered design ask leaders to care deeply and choose deliberately.

Integrating these approaches requires intellectual and analytical rigor — but what ultimately distinguishes effective leadership here is emotional capability.

When leaders acknowledge and support the intellectual AND emotional demands of this work, they strengthen their organizations. Meaningful, human-centered impact does not come from certainty — it comes from building the capacity to navigate uncertainty together with integrity, honesty, and care.

My reflections as a Design Educator at the Stanford d.school, working to help social sector leaders make more impactful change.

At the d.school, design has always taken a human-centered approach. I have built my career at the intersection of strategy and human-centered design, helping social sector leaders navigate complexity while staying grounded in the real needs of the people they serve. In my work with nonprofits, governments and philanthropic organizations, I have seen how these two disciplines — often treated as separate or even in tension, form a surprisingly powerful partnership when combined thoughtfully. Alongside my long-time d.school collaborator, Thomas Both, we are advancing this integrated approach, including through an upcoming workshop with Stanford Social Innovation Review, designed to help leaders strengthen their strategy without losing sight of the humans at the center of their work.

Why Strategy Needs Design–and Design Needs Strategy

For much of my career, I have worked at the intersection of strategy and human-centered design — two disciplines that are often treated as separate, sequential, or even in tension with one another. Strategy is sometimes seen as rigid and abstract; design as open-ended and exploratory. Together, they form a surprisingly effective partnership. What’s consistently true in practice is that, when combined thoughtfully, the two are far more powerful together than either can be alone.

This integration has been the through-line of my work for nearly two decades — as a strategist, facilitator, and now as a senior designer at the Stanford d.school, where my focus is helping social-sector leaders build skills to navigate ambiguity while still creating meaningful, measurable change for people.

This integration is especially important today because social-sector leaders are increasingly being asked to do more with less. Government funding is shrinking, trust with institutions is fragile, and teams are under constant pressure to scale — often at the expense of reflection and learning.

Traditional, static strategic plans are no longer sufficient. Three-year plans can become obsolete within months as political and funding contexts shift. What leaders need instead is the capacity to become learning organizations — grounded in purpose, responsive to change, and able to adapt without losing direction.

Human-centered design reconnects teams to the people they serve and reminds them why they entered this work in the first place. Strategy ensures that this energy is channeled toward outcomes that matter.

The Challenge I See Again and Again

When social-sector leaders arrive to do strategy work, they often don’t lack commitment or activity — they lack clarity, specifically, clarity at the human level. Teams can easily describe what they’ve done or plan to do, but struggle to articulate:

• who they are specifically trying to reach;
• what behavior or outcome they are actually striving to change or support; and
• where their efforts can have the greatest leverage.

Goals are framed as activities (“launch a program,” “host a training session”) rather than outcomes, and audiences are described in broad terms like “children” or “the public.” Without alignment on the who and the desired outcome, teams end up with a narrow solution space focused on familiar activities, and little guidance on where there might be room for exploration and creativity.

The Cost of Strategy Without Design

At the same time, strategy developed without human-centered design often becomes a theory built in a vacuum. Without engaging the people you aim to serve, or with whom you want to co-design, teams risk pursuing well-intentioned activities that don’t lead to meaningful outcomes.

The costs are real:

• resources drained on efforts that don’t change behavior;
• erosion of trust with communities; and
• teams that lose confidence when they don’t see results.

Over time, this disconnect contributes to burnout. I’ve come to believe that a clear, testable strategy is actually an antidote to burnout, especially when paired with design, which allows teams to learn whether their assumptions are grounded in reality. This is where strategy matters. A clear strategy acts as a guide: it helps teams make choices, align internally, and decide what not to do. It creates focus in a sector where needs are endless and resources are limited.

Teams often look to human-centered design as a way to innovate or improve services and programs — but as its core, if done robustly, it keeps your team and organization grounded, accountable and relevant to the communities you serve. It helps teams test whether perceived needs are real needs, and whether proposed solutions are actually desirable. Just as importantly, it builds trust by shifting teams from imposing answers to listening, learning, and adapting.

The Limits of Design Without Strategy

Of course, the reverse is also true. Human-centered design without strategy can leave teams overwhelmed. In the social sector, it doesn’t take much ethnographic work to uncover dozens — if not hundreds — of legitimate needs. Without strategic guardrails, teams struggle to decide:

• where to go deeper;
• which needs to prioritize; and
• what success actually looks like.

Human-centered,community-engaged design takes time, energy, and resources — all of which are scarce. Strategy provides the focus that allows teams to utilize design selectively, where it can have the greatest impact.

Strategy Sets the Direction; Design Drives the Learning

I often describe the relationship this way: strategy clarifies what we are trying to accomplish, while human-centered design clarifies what we need to learn — and provides a disciplined way to uncover the insights required to achieve meaningful impact.

Strategy articulates a starting hypothesis: Which communities or stakeholders are we prioritizing? What outcome are we trying to change? Why this approach? Design then stress-tests that hypothesis through real engagement with people — uncovering nuance, surfacing deeper emotional and behavioral needs, and revealing whether a solution is actually likely to work.

Importantly, this isn’t a linear handoff. Strategy informs where design is most useful, and design, in turn, refines and strengthens strategy. The relationship is dynamic and iterative, especially critical in complex systems where certainty is impossible.

My Professional Passion

I’ve noticed a familiar divide: people who love strategy are often hesitant about human-centered design, and those who love design can feel intimidated by strategy. My professional passion is helping leaders see that these are not competing approaches — they are deeply complementary tools for creating real impact in people’s lives.

This integration is at the heart of my work as an educator and practitioner, and it’s why I’m excited to continue exploring this intersection. Because when strategy and human-centered design come together, teams don’t just plan better, they learn better, adapt faster, and create change that actually sticks.

Related links:

Connecting the Dots Between Strategy and Design

https://dschool.stanford.edu/stories/designing-human-centered-ai-for-social-impact-using-ai-to-serve-the-public-good-part-one

https://dschool.stanford.edu/stories/city-services-human-centered-design

Why Strategy and Human-Centered Design Belong Together was originally published in Stanford d.school on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From Overwhelm to Impact: How Project Scoping Unlocks Better Social Change–and How Our AI Tool Scopey Makes It Easier

For more than a decade, the d.school’s social impact team has been on a mission: help social sector leaders — from nonprofit innovators to government changemakers — design solutions that truly improve people’s lives. After years of working with nonprofits and social sector leaders, Nadia Roumani, senior designer, and Thomas Both, director of social impact programs, identified a universal need: tools for better project scoping.

The first step in design work

In our workshops and coaching sessions, the team noticed that while many leaders already know how to use design tools like interviews and prototyping, they often struggle to apply them in real-world settings, where complexity, limited resources, and competing needs can easily overwhelm even the best intentions. Over years of working with hundreds of practitioners, one truth became crystal clear: how you start matters as much as what you do.

A critical first step? Scoping — designing your design work.

Why scoping is so powerful

In most fields, a “scope of work” describes the outputs you’ll deliver. But in human-centered design for social impact, scoping is something different — and counterintuitive. It’s not about naming the thing you’ll make; it’s about clarifying what you need to learn to get to the right solution.

“Instead of saying, ‘We’re going to build a website,’ you’re defining, ‘Here’s what we’re trying to understand, here are the assumptions we want to test, and here’s who we need to learn from to understand what we should build,’” says Thomas.

Good scoping does three essential things:

• It focuses the work on the most important questions and opportunities;
• It aligns team members on goals before jumping into research or prototyping;
• And it ensures limited resources are spent on efforts with the greatest potential for real change.

Scoping is especially crucial in the social sector, where practitioners face tight timelines, tight budgets, and a dizzying number of possible directions. Without a clear scope, design efforts can become “wayward” — collecting lots of insights without a clear plan for using them. In fact, practicing human-centered design without intentional scoping can be frustrating and even harmful in needs-rich environments where trust and resources are on the line.

Scoping at the intersection of strategy and design

Scoping sits in a sweet spot between strategy (where you set the vision and intended impact) and design (where you explore and iterate your way to the solution).

“Strategy is knowing where you want to go; design is having the humility to know you still need to discover the path to get there,” explains Thomas. “Scoping connects the two, it helps you set up your design work so it’s as impactful as possible.”

It’s a skill we’ve honed over years of coaching. In workshops, we often spent more time helping participants figure out what to apply design to than on the design activities themselves.

The birth of Scopey

That pattern sparked an idea: what if there were a tool to help anyone, anywhere, scope their design work similar to a live coach ? Enter Scopey, an AI-powered scoping assistant.

“We designed Scopey to replicate the coaching conversation we’d have with a practitioner — asking clarifying questions, challenging assumptions, and narrowing focus,” says Nadia . “The magic isn’t in giving you an answer. It’s in guiding you through a dialogue that brings clarity out of the chaos.”

The team imagined a tool that could act not as an answer machine, but as a thoughtful guide, one that pauses with you to reflect, challenge assumptions, and find focus before diving into solutions. Built in partnership with Enchatted, Scopey began as a set of prototypes tested with d.school alumni. The team refined it based on feedback, added dynamic AI capabilities, and launched it to the broader public.

How Scopey works

Scopey starts by asking a deceptively simple question: What change are you trying to create? From there, it helps you:

• Identify who you’re designing for, not just broadly (“all high school students”), but specifically (“students transitioning from middle to high school in rural districts”).
• Surface and articulate your assumptions about those people and their context.
• Define the questions you need to explore through design.
• Align your team on goals and learning priorities before starting.

In other words, instead of jumping into What will you make?, Scopey starts with What do you know now? and What do you still need to understand? The result is a clear, intentional design scope — one you can use solo, with a partner, or across a team to compare perspectives and build alignment.

AI that crafts a conversation rather than provides answers

While many AI tools deliver quick answers, Scopey’s value lies in the conversation. It behaves more like a thoughtful coach than an all-knowing oracle.

“People are used to AI as a shortcut, or to speed things up,” says Nadia. “But Scopey is about slowing down just enough to get the clarity you need. That clarity lets you go faster and be more effective once you start the design work.”

In doing so, Scopey acts as scaffolding for your design work.

From workshop tool to global resource

Scopey is now a popular feature in the d.school’s Design for Social Impact workshops, where participants bring their own real projects to advance (over the five weeks). They use Scopey in the first week to set themselves up to apply design, equity, systems, and strategy practices.

But it’s also free for anyone to try. And we’re eager to see where it travels.

Already, users have applied Scopey to:

• Redesign community services.
• Align new teams around shared goals.
• Orient newcomers to a project’s design approach.
• Train other organizations in scoping as part of broader capacity-building efforts.

Why it matters

In the social sector, every hour and every dollar counts. A poorly scoped project can waste both — or worse, miss the mark for the people it’s meant to serve. By helping practitioners start with focus and alignment, Scopey turns overwhelm into clarity and ambition into direction, boosting the odds that design efforts lead to meaningful, lasting change. Just as importantly, it re-energizes practitioners by reconnecting them with the purpose that drew them to social impact work in the first place.

“If people start with clarity, they’re more likely to stick with design and see its power,” says Nadia. “That’s how we spread human-centered design through the social sector — and that’s why we’re so excited about Scopey.”

Scopey is available now for social sector leaders, teams, and anyone working to make a positive impact. We invite feedback to continue improving it — and to help more people move from overwhelm to clarity, and from clarity to impact.

Credits: Special thanks to Cece Malone for help writing this article.

From Overwhelm to Impact: How Project Scoping Unlocks Better Social Change–and How Our AI Tool… was originally published in Stanford d.school on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Stanford d.school instructors Ariam Mogos and Nadia Roumani discuss the process of integrating AI-based solutions into social sector work in this three-part series.

A practical approach to AI for the social sector

The familiar phrase “at the speed of light” might now be “at the speed of AI.” AI is moving fast, both in how it is built and how it’s being adopted. Every few weeks, a new chatbot, smart assistant, or a more advanced LLM (large language model) emerges, promising to solve big problems in fields like education, healthcare, or government services. Many of these AI tools are built by private sector companies who are optimizing for scale, efficiency, and profit — and not necessarily real impact in these social sector fields, even when heavily subsidized by taxpayer dollars.

Leaders of nonprofits, schools, public health institutions, and state and local governments are on the frontlines, working to solve complex human problems. Many are curious about how AI might help them serve more people, or support their work to be more impactful. But the path forward feels chaotic, even overwhelming.

In partnership with the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), we’ve been working to help social sector leaders move from feeling overwhelmed by AI to actively and confidently shaping its future. We’ve identified a process specific to social sector leaders, and have developed a program to guide them through this work.

Our program is informed by our work with social sector leaders. We have consistently heard questions like: I don’t have the resources to hire new staff; how do I train existing staff to apply and develop AI tools? What technology should I be using? I don’t have AI talent on staff, who do I hire? How do I test and scale something with limited resources? What kind of legal structures, policies, or data practices do I need?

To address these questions, we’ve designed a set of activities that helps participants explore what to prioritize when designing AI solutions and how to deconstruct AI concepts. This informational arc includes a process for addressing the emotional needs that arise throughout. By demystifying the complexity of AI, and supporting participants to tinker and experiment with its various components, our goal is to guide social sector leaders into meaningful uses of AI.

Make sure you are building something people want — and need

The first need that we found was a way for social sector leaders who are navigating AI to slow down and ask the right questions before surfacing solutions and building interventions. The core belief behind our efforts: you need both a solid foundation in understanding, framing, and testing clear community needs and a strong grasp of the fundamentals for designing AI-supported resources to ensure positive social impact. Otherwise, leaders will fall into the inevitable trap of building resources and applications nobody wants and contributing to the growing and costly wasteland of unused AI-supported efforts.

In our program, we start with the basics to ensure we’re creating something useful. We’ve seen it again and again: expensive AI tools built with good intentions end up unused, untrusted, or entirely unusable — and at a great environmental cost. Too often, teams get swept up in the excitement of the tech and skip over the basics: understanding real human needs and testing early and often. Without a solid foundation rooted in clarity about the end user and repeated testing of assumptions and solutions, failure (and potential harm) is inevitable. Ironically, though, that is exactly what these leaders are positioned to excel at through their proximity to community needs — defining problems first.

And so we begin with the fundamentals, re-centering humans and their needs in the process. Before talking about tools and vendors, we support participants with going back to the basics: Who are you designing for? What does your community actually need? How have you tested that this need exists with your users? And why AI?

After going through this project scoping phase, several participants realized they may not have a clearly defined need, they may have made some fundamental assumptions that need to be examined, or they may still have many questions about their users behavior they need to explore before landing on an intervention — let alone an AI-supported intervention. As one participant said, “We jumped to the solution, we don’t even know if this is what people want.” Other participants shared, “I really appreciated the time spent scoping our work, it grounded the entire process.” “The program boosted my confidence as a user.”

The high costs of missteps for social sector leaders when building with emerging technology

When you’re leading an under-resourced, overextended organization without the technical capacity or budget in-house to build AI-supported solutions, the cost of a misstep while building isn’t just wasted time or money. Such missteps erode an organization’s confidence in building with emerging technology tools and, above all, can cost an organization the trust they have spent years, sometimes decades, forging with the communities they serve. And in the social sector, trust is everything.

Our goal is to help leaders build impactful and meaningful interventions, which means grounding in human-centered design practices into the entire scoping and building journey. The fundamentals do not change with AI-supported interventions, except maybe with the process of building and testing prototypes.

Our approach isn’t to turn social sector leaders into AI engineers. It’s about making them better leaders who are more confident decision-makers on what technology will meet user’s needs. When you’re clear on the problem, centered in your community’s needs, and equipped with the right questions, you’re already ahead of the game — even in the face of fast-moving tech.

AI is not a magic fix. AI may be innovative, but it is useful only when it helps you focus on, and solve, a real need.

In our next post, we’ll share how we simplify the complexity of AI for adult learners who have little technical background. We’ll walk through how we break AI down into discrete parts, so that social sector leaders have the language to engage, the confidence to build, and the agency to lead.

Stay tuned for parts two and three of this piece!

Credits: Special thanks to Cece Malone for help writing this article and to Patrick Beaudouin for the photo.

Designing Human-Centered AI for Social Impact: Using AI to Serve the Public Good was originally published in Stanford d.school on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Nadia Roumani, Natasha Bach, Thomas Both and Susie Chang

“To me, co-designing basically means partnership — working together,” said Havana Barksdale, a Columbus, OH high school senior. She had just participated as a co-designer with lived experience in a Stanford d.school Designing for Social Systems (DSS) workshop and design sprint, hosted in conjunction with the Columbus Foundation.

The d.school’s DSS Program strives to empower social sector leaders to be more human, effective, and creative in their work. In order to practice human-centered design practices and mindsets during our d.school DSS workshops, we invite participants to tackle a real challenge in teams. A critical characteristic of our workshops is bringing the voices of community members into the human-centered design process, so that social sector leaders are not designing in a vacuum but instead, grounding their work in the lived experiences of community members.

A human-centered design approach to tackling a challenge can take many forms. The following visual, adapted from Tania Anaissie (Beytna Design) and equityXdesign, provides three different practices along a spectrum.

As illustrated above, toward one end of the spectrum, community-consulted design is when designers working on a challenge consult those in the community who are most impacted by the problem at hand. In the middle, co-design, is when community members with lived experience are fully integrated into the design team — framing the challenge, conducting the design work, selecting the ideas to advance, and testing the ideas with stakeholders including those impacted by the problem. On the right, community-led design is when community members with lived experience are the design team, and design experts might provide support to community members who are leading the process. Co-design and community-led design are variations of practices often described as participatory design.

Previously the DSS program has engaged a community-consulted design approach in our educational workshops. In the past, we have done one of the following: invited community members with lived experience relevant to the topic to the Stanford campus, or brought workshop participants to community-based organizations to interview community members, and ground participants’ understanding in the human experience. In August 2020 we took a different approach.

In partnership with The Columbus Foundation, we led a workshop followed by four design sprints, in which we invited community members with relevant lived experience to join the design teams. We saw the opportunity and importance of incorporating community members with lived experience into design teams and thus, moved into a co-design approach.

We had individually participated in and facilitated participatory design work, but hadn’t integrated the practices into DSS workshops. However, with Tania Anaissie advising us on best practices of equitable design and co-design, and The Columbus Foundation’s commitment to co-designing with community members, we were well positioned to implement.

“We began co-design projects in Columbus in 2019 to support our work to improve community well-being,” explained Heather Tsavaris, Principal Consultant for community well-being at The Columbus Foundation, who encouraged introducing the approach in the workshop and sprints, and was instrumental in making it possible.

Heather’s team has worked with equity designers Tania Anaissie, Susie Wise and Chris Rudd over the previous year to design and deepen the practice of co-design by The Columbus Foundation.

“As we thought about how to influence the way our community solves problems, we were clear that the d.school’s excellence in teaching designing for social systems was the kind of design learning we wanted our social sector leaders to experience. We were thrilled when the d.school committed to embrace co-design for this workshop.”

How this new approach took shape

The workshop spanned 5 days and included 38 social sector leaders from across Columbus. For the workshop challenge, we partnered with the Columbus Metropolitan Library (CML) to explore how they could better support Columbus residents, ages 18–30 living in Central Columbus, in order to improve their access and preparedness for work, and address their life and learning needs. Participants were divided into 8 teams that each interviewed Columbus community residents in this demographic. Some of the individuals interviewed then joined the design teams for the remainder of the design challenge.

Following the workshop, in partnership with The Columbus Foundation, we hosted four week-long concurrent design sprints. The sprints were carried out in partnership with four Columbus-based organizations: The Women’s Fund of Central Ohio, The Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority, Columbus City Schools (CCS), and the Columbus Metropolitan Library (CML).

Each sprint tackled a unique challenge that the organizational partner was facing or might be positioned to address. Each sprint included a design process facilitator, three to four workshop participants, a Columbus Foundation staffer, and approximately two community members with relevant lived experience.

How this structure came to life

For one of the four sprints that we ran after the workshop, the Columbus Metropolitan Library wanted to test the concept of the CREW — an idea that emerged from a co-design sprint led in the previous few months by The Columbus Foundation — that sought to understand why young people were not engaging with online learning. The concept of the program was as follows: a small cohort of students would meet (virtually) for a period each weekday with an adult mentor, to talk, listen and be heard. CREW aimed to engage and support high school students in their remote learning experience because so many students were not attending, and did not feel supported in remote schooling.

For this sprint, The Columbus Foundation invited back several high school students who had already been co-designers with the Foundation prior. Led by a d.school design process facilitator, co-designers — including students Havana and KB Abdullahi — joined four social sector practitioners and Foundation staff to tackle this challenge as a design team.

Having Havana and KB on the design team throughout the work meant that they were integral in reframing the challenge and ensured constant grounding in the students’ experience. They not only provided invaluable perspectives to the team’s understanding of the challenge, but they had equal power to determine what ideas were selected, how they were designed, and how they were tested. Students who participated as co-designers in both this and the CCS sprint were also able to reach more disengaged students who would be difficult to reach otherwise. Ultimately, the concept was launched as a pilot program in the fall of 2020.

We believe engaging the co-designers with lived experience in the workshop and sprints significantly impacted the proposed ideas and the team’s overall understanding and experience. Engaging community members in the entire process, rather than during one-time interviews, builds a solid foundation to collaboratively tackle complex challenges as a community.

Establishing practices to include co-designers with lived experience

In order to engage co-designers with lived experience into the workshop and sprints, we made some intentional changes to the workshop and sprint format design, and incorporated specific lessons and practices to support the practice of co-design. These changes built upon work and advice from Tania Anaissie, input and collaboration of DSS coaches and d.school colleagues, and learnings from The Columbus Foundation’s co-design experience.

Virtual format allows for remote collaboration and broader reach:

We did not choose to run the workshop virtually; the COVID-19 pandemic required us to do so. However, the virtual format greatly helped us incorporate a much wider group of community members and co-designers compared to when we held the workshop in person. The virtual format removed some of the physical and time constraints we often face when trying to engage end beneficiaries and stakeholders. The remote format also allowed us to reach a more diverse set of students. By going virtual we were able to expand our reach and engage people who lived anywhere in Columbus, Ohio — making it logistically easier to engage harder-to-reach community members. We were also able to engage community members in multiple sessions so they could be a more integral part of the design process, and in some cases participate as full team members. In the future, the virtual approach would allow us to also reach a more diverse set of participants in terms of race and socio-economic status as well, as we are able to invite a broader group of people when not dealing with physical convening constraints.

This experience showed us co-design was very possible and practical even with tighter time frames. While we believe an in-person engagement (for ideation, interviewing, or synthesis, say) may be ideal, the importance of including those with the most relevant lived experience (and potentially most affected by what’s created) outweighs the in-person advantages. Remote learning helps make that possible and at times, potentially more accessible.

Lay the groundwork well in advance:

We learned that it is important to start the planning process well in advance of the workshop and sprints because it requires time and effort to identify and invite well-suited co-designers to join the design work. Much of this groundwork was done through The Columbus Foundation’s existing relationships both with co-designers and with social sector leaders. In the past, co-designing wasn’t at the forefront of our mind when planning workshops and sprints, so it never felt possible as the dates approached. Once we made the mental shift, we were able to find the time required.

Be flexible with your process, tools, and timing:

In order to accommodate all co-designers, be ready to convene at times that work with everyone’s schedules. This can be difficult; however, flexibility is key to maximize inclusion of people with different life and time constraints. Also consider whether the way you are working is accessible to some community members. For example, some may not have access to the internet or digital devices. In Columbus, project teams adapted to different technology needs like connecting via phone calls if video calls were not possible.

Work with partners with deep ties in communities to engage potential co-designers with lived experience:

Since The Columbus Foundation had been doing co-design work in the community from 2019, including ramping up that work in advance of the DSS workshop in 2020, there was a sizeable cohort of individuals or lived experts who had experienced co-design and were glad to promote that experience within their networks. In addition, several nonprofit partners put out a call for community members to participate in the workshop. The existing person-to-person relationships and trust that The Columbus Foundation, The Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority, and the Columbus Metropolitan Library had with some residents proved critical to identifying community members who were open to engaging with us in this process.

Provide an honorarium for co-designers’ time and expertise:

In the past we have provided an honorarium for all of our workshop and design sprint interviewees, often in the form of a gift card. But in order to acknowledge the larger contribution that co-designers were making to the workshop and sprints and their time commitment, we provided larger cash honorariums.

Ensure other design team members are aware of power dynamics and biases:

We needed to go beyond simply including relevant community members with lived experience, and also prepare the mindsets for all the teammates in the workshop and sprints. It was important for social sector leaders, who could be perceived to have more power when engaging other community members with lived experience, to recognize their power and privilege. By centering equity within our curriculum, we worked with participants to bring awareness to their personal lenses and the ways they influence others in the challenge with their beliefs and approach. As one example, we had participants complete a Paseo exercise (based on work of the School Reform Initiative) to help identify possible biases, and increase their awareness of current and potential power dynamics.

Put the challenge into historical context:

When launching the workshop challenge, we also placed the challenge into a broader historical context to help participants better understand any underlying systemic issues. This context was created through conversations with partners in advance and our own literature research. The presentation of this historical context was followed by a robust conversation among the workshop cohort and in the design sprint teams, to expand the breadth and nuance of the context. Providing historical context ensures that the team does not place blame on the end beneficiary, but helps participants understand the systemic issues and root causes that have led to the current situation.

Reflections from Co-designing Community Members on Their Experience

We asked some of the participants of the sprints to share their experience of the process. We’ve shared this in the following sections to emphasize, particularly, the personal impact of the approach.

Co-designers felt the impact of collaboratively designing in this way. For high school senior KB, who participated alongside Havana in both the workshop challenge and the Columbus City School sprint, being brought into the design process was transformational. He explained that he and many of his peers have often thought that his school district treated students like they’re “just a number for four years.” When he participated in the design sprint, he felt like the participants actually wanted to hear his views — even if it meant throwing their own ideas and preconceived notions out the window:

“If what you say or think tears apart what [the designers have] been working on, they’re fine with that,” he said. “They don’t know the experiences of the students and they acknowledge that.”

Havana also felt like her perspective as a student was heard:

“It was the first time my opinion and feelings were considered when it comes to school,” she said. “Even though we’re students our opinions weren’t less valued. They were actually more valued because we’re in the online learning environment so we know firsthand what we’re talking about.”

At the end of the workshop, Havana said that she “used to think that students had no voice in terms of school and how it operates.” With her experience participating as a co-designer, she felt that she was given a real opportunity to share her views and that “people actually want to know what [students] have to say about things.”

KB also felt like the other participants were really open to hearing new ideas, creating a supportive environment in the process:

“You’re not just getting a participation trophy for being there. Your opinions are valued — you’re not seen as an unequal but an equal. Your ideas matter just as much.”

Yet the students also felt the pressure of their role. Havana said that as “an advocate for my peers,” she felt responsible for doing well and providing good feedback to improve the situation for all students.

KB felt similarly, noting that he is only one person, so while he can speak to his own experiences and perhaps that of some of his peers, he knows that different people have different struggles.

Despite the overall excitement and pride KB and Havana felt, there was still some skepticism. He now has a better understanding of the “inner workings” of the school district operations, but he’s still not convinced of the district’s “openness to new ideas.”

Havana was also worried about the work translating into action from the schools and superintendents. But since the workshop concluded, she has been part of a team developing and testing the prototype with the Columbus School District.

Social Sector Leaders Reflect on Collaborating with co-designers

The DSS workshop and sprint participants also commented on the impact of working and building alongside co-designers with lived experience. Although they are all social sector leaders who are not new to engaging community members, for the majority of them, this approach of working with community members on their project teams to tackle the challenges together, was a new way of engaging community members with lived experience.

“The notion that we would involve the end user in the entire experience was life-changing for me,” said Donna Zuiderweg of the Columbus Metropolitan Library. “From a nonprofit perspective, my experience has been that we try to intuitively figure out what customers want or need, but I hadn’t really experienced it where we so fully engaged the end user in the development and testing of the program or solution to the challenge.”

“Bringing people in can be time-consuming and a more costly way to do our work, and that’s one of the biggest things that has held us back from doing so in the past,” said Kelley Griesmer, of the Women’s Fund. But her experience participating in the workshop demonstrated the importance of making that happen:

“[As a trained lawyer,] I had been conditioned to look for certain comments or things I needed to prove a case. So often we have an idea and we look for proof that we’re right. Co-designing is the complete opposite,” she said. “I realized that no matter how hard I’ve attempted to learn, if you haven’t experienced what [your end user] is experiencing, then you’re not an expert.”

Sonja Nelson, Vice President of Resident Initiatives at the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority, spoke about engaging co-designers going through their own self-sufficiency journeys after having gone through that herself earlier in life:

“The one thing I thought was missing in my own journey was my voice. Seeing that there’s a whole movement in activating that voice was great. I was in such awe the entire time.”

But she also felt a burden after gaining these insights from community members. “Once you ask a group of people how they feel and get their insight, you now have the responsibility of following through on that,” Sonja said. “When you’re part of a system, that makes it even harder. We know that we won’t always be able to immediately deliver on their expectations — so how do we address these diverse opinions and insights while not letting anyone down?”

In a post-workshop survey, another participant said:

“I’m feeling empowered to advocate for the importance of regularly engaging our constituencies for feedback and brainstorming; to value the peculiar and listen to outliers; and to consistently hold myself and my team accountable to an equity lens.”

The process of inviting in co-designers with lived experience and truly listening to and incorporating their voices and views enabled the participants to reframe the challenge. Rather than devise solutions based on their own biases and assumptions, the participants had the benefit of receiving input from the precise individuals they hope and seek to serve.

Following the workshop, The Columbus Foundation is continuing both financial and technical support for those who want to build co-design processes into their work and is continuing to build out its own internal co-design practice and capability. We also heard from workshop participants, such as Sonja, who is integrating a practice of co-designing with community members with lived experience into her organization. She realized that one of their existing engagement plans that was intended to build better relations with residents “didn’t even scratch the surface for true engagement and interaction.” She is now going back to the drawing board to make the process truly engaging for the community members it will impact the most.

On-going DSS work to integrate co-design

We at the d.school’s DSS program hope that co-design will help practitioners re-engage their communities in a different way, and encourage them to explore new ways of addressing the issues and challenges they face in their jobs. Or, put another way, the work is best done with members of the community as part of the team. Crucially, we think co-design can help push back against the tendency to leap to solutions. For community engagement in design to really work though, we need to not just interview community members, but also ensure we include them in the problem framing and problem solving piece as well. In our view, this is the best way to ensure that we are solving for the right problem, not just the problem we think exists.

We believe this experience demonstrated how powerful this approach can be — provided that you are able to set the context and deliver both with and for communities. But as we saw from KB and Havana’s feedback, this kind of work also raises expectations. So while it may help build buy-in, trust, and better-founded results, we urge organizations to be mindful: beware of using this approach without the ability to follow through. In our view, if you don’t have the capacity, intent, or political will to act upon the information and insights, applying this approach may actually do more harm than good. Furthermore, organizations may be well-served to gain a handle on a design process before moving fully to a co-design or community-led approach. As shown in the spectrum of human-centered design practices, you can continue to build toward more community ownership, and be at different places on the spectrum.

Designing for Social Systems continues to prioritize co-design and integrate those with lived experience in our current and future engagements.

Integrating Co-designers with Lived Experience: was originally published in Stanford d.school on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Nadia Roumani, Thomas Both, and Susie Chang

Social sector organizations worldwide are tackling some of society’s most challenging problems — such as rampant homelessness, overwhelming climate change, sexual violence, addressing community needs, and rising inequality, to name but a few. With limited resources, they must understand these complex challenges, continue to improve their approaches and interventions, all the while running their existing day-to-day programs. We at Stanford d.school’s Designing for Social Systems program, believe that these leaders and their organizations can bring about meaningful and creative change in the world by applying an Integrative Design Practice. We find that an Integrative Design Practice that combines the four methodologies of human-centered design, systems thinking, and strategic planning, and that grounds their practice in a commitment to equity and anti-racism, will provide teams with a more comprehensive and impactful approach to tackling complex problems.

We have found that Human-Centered Design empowers practitioners to be more curious, explorative, empathetic, and collaborative, improving the effectiveness of their work. Systems Thinking is a helpful addition to one’s practice, helping practitioners take a step back, identify relationships between stakeholders, and determine where there is greater leverage. Strategic Planning allows an organization to orient itself within the broader context, and identify the best intervention given the organization’s resources. Additionally, we know social sector challenges are shaped by inequity — active and structural oppression, exclusion, and discrimination. Therefore we must ground any design practice in a commitment to address Equity.

Each of these methods provides a unique contribution, but when applied alone are insufficient to make lasting change. We believe that social sector leaders can, and should, use a combination of these methods, to see the bigger picture and the myriad of connections while staying grounded in the lives and behaviors of real people.

Below we outline each method’s unique contribution to improving one’s practice and impact:

Human-Centered Design is action-oriented, deeply human, and experimental.

Human-centered design (HCD) is a process, mindset, and approach to identify meaningful challenges and creatively solve complex problems. It guides practitioners to understand and respond to the needs of specific people, question assumptions, reframe problems, and experiment to advance their solutions.

HCD’s unique contribution to tackling social sector challenges is that it helps teams:

• Put real people, the beneficiaries and stakeholders, back into the line of sight. As organizations focus on impact and scale, real individuals can quickly become faceless, monolithic categories (children, teachers, government agencies, underrepresented communities…). Design brings texture to understanding who practitioners are specifically designing for and with, and helps teams prioritize who they are trying to reach, especially given that most organizations do not have the resources to reach multiple groups of people.
• Uncover deep insights that can lead to novel solution spaces. HCD pushes past the explicit needs, and uncovers deeper, implicit needs below the surface. By articulating emotional needs, leaders can design programs targeting meaning — which are more successful.
• Generate a wide range of possible solutions and activities, before settling on the one in which they will invest. HCD provides teams with a reliable process that helps them push past obvious ideas, and come up with novel concepts that can meet needs in new and exciting ways.
• Build low resolution prototypes of concepts they want to advance, thus helping teams build to think. The method helps teams bring an idea to life by building early and inexpensive versions of the concept, moving from words on paper to more tangible concepts.
• Test their assumptions and questions by putting prototypes in real people’s hands for feedback. Rather than launching costly city-wide or nation-wide programs, this approach ensures that teams have incorporated a critical feedback loop, identifying assumptions long before it is too late to change course.

Systems Thinking is analytical, relationship-oriented and holistic.

A systems thinking approach helps social sector leaders take a step back and visualize the system in which they are working, understand the relationships and implications of those relationships, and help clarify in which part of the system to act. The approach can help an organization determine where they have the greatest leverage to make an impact.

A systems thinking approach to tackling social sector challenges helps teams:

• Identify relevant stakeholders and note the relationships between them. By mapping out the various stakeholders within a system, and the relationships between them, teams have a chance to step back and see the broader system in which they are working.
• Map causes and effects in the system to gain insights on what is enabling or inhibiting progress in the system. By mapping the forces in the systems, teams not only identify the force or forces on which they want to exert pressure, but they are also able to see potential unintended consequences.
• Identify points of leverage in the system as opportunities where interventions may have outsized effects. With limited resources, most teams cannot deploy their resources at multiple points in the system. Therefore, a systems approach helps teams narrow their focus on areas where they might be able to have the greatest impact.

For more about how human-centered design and systems thinking can be used together and benefit social sector work, see our article, Human-Centered Systems-Minded Design.

Strategy is logical and helps an organization align its activities with its existing resources and intended outcome

A team applies a strategic planning approach to its programs to ensure that the team is aligned around a clear direction that is grounded in the reality of their resources and capabilities. In this approach, teams articulate their programmatic assumptions, and identify leaps in their logic. By aligning their resources, activities, and desired outcomes, they can avoid a common social sector organization pitfall of staying busy with reactive programming without achieving their desired impact.

The strategic planning approach helps teams:

• Ground themselves in the reality of their existing resources. Although a team can imagine what it would be like to acquire more resources, the strategic planning process roots a team in the reality of what it currently has, and gives a team the opportunity to explore what it might do with those existing resources.
• Helps teams and their leadership tell a coherent story rooted in clear goals and articulated assumptions.
• The process helps teams identify where they may have causal leaps due to faulty assumptions, or leaps in logic.
• The approach helps teams ensure that they are aligned around a clear direction, returning to their articulated goals when they begin to experience mission creep or other demands or distractions.
• Assists teams with making difficult decisions in the face of competing needs. A team’s ability to step back and apply a strategic lens to their work is often the difference between a busy team and an impactful team.

An Equity practice grounds a team’s work in the intention and commitment to reduce inequity, and confront and dismantle discrimination and oppression

An equity practice centers a team to see, acknowledge, and disrupt active and systemic inequity and oppression. The practice is both an intentionality and set of actions that strive for justice. How a team works (the process) must be equitable in order to create the possibility to create more equitable outcomes. Active reflection and relational work –wrestling with issues of racism, identity, and equity– are vital prerequisites to bring about positive social change.

An equity practice helps teams to:

• Examine the historical and systemic causes of challenges they aim to address. Nearly all social challenges are rooted in current and historical, active and passive inequity, racism and discrimination. Practitioners are more ethical, equitable, and effective by gaining understanding of the historical and systemic causes at play in their work.
• Be mindful of our own identities and biases, and build self-awareness. It takes active reflection and discourse to see beyond one’s own experiences and lenses. With more awareness, individuals and teams can better interrupt their biases and question assumptions.
• Center those most marginalized in the process and in the interventions created.
• Question who’s included and who makes decisions. A more equitable and effective practice centers those with lived experiences as experts, not subjects. Those most affected are uniquely suited to be designers and decision makers.
• Create space for dialogue and healing, rather than avoiding difficult conversations and dilemmas about race and identity. It is necessary to work with the assumption that there is messiness to the practice. Create honest human relationships and attend to healing that is needed in facing oppression and racism.

For more, read our article on Equity Practice in Design: A 2021 Update from the Designing for Social Systems Program.

The methods and findings from each approach — human-centered design, systems thinking, strategic planning, and grounding work in an equity practice — inform one another. They each contribute a unique piece to a complex puzzle, and integrating these approaches is a fluid process. While each of these methods is a field and mindset in its own right, in the DSS program, we have invested in helping practitioners better understand how to apply these approaches and integrate them more seamlessly. Integrating these practices allows teams to uncover and integrate insights to determine actions, understand history and context, examine and make strategic choices, test assumptions and new ideas, and question which potential interventions and intermediate outcomes best lead a team to their desired impact in the world.

Integrative Design: A Practice to Tackle Complex Challenges was originally published in Stanford d.school on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We have heard many of our alumni of the Stanford d.school’s Designing for Social Systems Program* found it extremely helpful to apply design principles they learned during our workshops to redesigning their internal meetings. Therefore, we wanted to share this article and worksheet in the hopes that it can help others create more dynamic and engaging meetings.

DESIGNING ENGAGING MEETINGS HAS ALWAYS BEEN IMPORTANT, AND WITH “WORKING FROM HOME,” IT IS MORE IMPERATIVE

For many of us, we have often felt that we have way too many meetings on our calendar. And somehow, when we transitioned to “working from home,” we seem to have even more — and although we are staying in one place and not expending energy by commuting or moving about, these meetings can feel even more draining. This is because in many cases, some of the unengaging meetings that we had to attend in person before have simply been transferred online — making the experience more torturous.

PUT PEOPLE, NOT TECHNOLOGY, BACK AT THE CENTER OF YOUR MEETING DESIGN

If the original meeting design and experience were not great, transferring that meeting online is definitely not going to make them better. Technology is not going to fix an un-engaging meeting, and will likely make it even harder to connect.

Instead, we need to focus on fundamental principles — we need to put people back at the center. The irony is that although people seem to be more in focus now that you can see them all in one place on your computer, that does not mean we are putting people at the center. We need to put their emotions, their experience, their needs at the center of the meeting — not just their faces.

Here we explore the question: How might we create more engaging, inspiring and productive in-person and remote meetings?

PROCESS FOR DESIGNING AN ENGAGING MEETING (IN-PERSON OR REMOTE)

The principles and process for designing a meeting are the same for both in-person and remote meetings, although the tools at your disposal and some tactics may differ.

Even if meetings have followed the same format and structure for decades, if you are leading the meeting, you have the agency to make it a better experience. Even the most mundane meeting, such as a recurring staff meeting, quarterly board meeting, or team project session can be redesigned to be more dynamic and effective.

The following are five steps you can take to design a more engaging and effective meeting, along with an accompanying worksheet.

We invite you to think of an upcoming meeting you want to (re)design. For some of you, it might feel a little scary to think about trying to design a new experience with your colleagues — but trust us, your colleagues will thank you for creating a better experience.

1. Design for the experience and not just the information

A human being’s critical elements include the mind, body and spirit. Why then, when we design a meeting — a convening of human beings over a specific period of time — do we design only for the mind?

We often start with these considerations: What do people need to know? What information do I have that I need to share, or that others have that I need to hear? This approach usually translates into long presentations, often accompanied by a powerpoint that is not engaging or memorable. Nobody wants to be talked to for the duration of a meeting — in person or online. People want to be engaged.

Information is one component in an effective meeting, but there are other desired outcomes that can be designed for as well. In addition to engaging participants’ intellect, we must also engage their emotions, senses, and body. We must try to engage them as a whole person.

When you think of a good meeting you attended recently, what comes up for you? For me, I think of a meeting I participated in last week. It was a 90-minute zoom meeting for 60 people. It could have been a nightmare — but the meeting was very well designed and facilitated. The organizers were able to excite the group by having the meeting leaders share brief, timed comments about why they are inspired to co-lead this effort. The meeting included the critical information about the initiative’s purpose, goals, desired outcomes, and visuals of the timeline and process. The meeting allowed for personal connections, despite the meeting’s size, by organizing breakout sessions in which participants were able to connect personally to 8 members of the group. Finally, the organizers solicited participants’ input via pointed questions peppered throughout the convening, for which participants shared their comments in the chat box.

The organizers, designer, and facilitator designed for the information they wanted to convey, as well as the participants’ experience. Integrating the informational, emotional and experiential elements of a meeting converts it from an informational download to an event that participants remember, experience and possibly even transform from.

2. Create a POP — Clarify and articulate every meeting’s purpose and desired outcomes

POP = Purpose + Outcome + Process*

A meeting’s purpose and its outcomes are sometimes implicit, especially for recurring meetings. It is critical to make each meeting’s purpose and desired outcome explicit to ensure that you, and everyone coming to the meetings, have the same expectations. Although this might sound obvious, meetings take place every day with a detailed agenda, but lack a clear articulation of purpose and desired outcomes. For those meetings, their designers found a way to occupy the meeting’s allotted time, but it is not clear towards what end.

i. Clarify your purpose. Nobody wants to come to a meeting when they don’t know the point of the meeting. Why are you pulling people together? To build trust? To gain alignment on a proposal? To assess someone’s performance? To clarify a work plan? To reassure your team? To strategize around a partnership? You’ll notice that some goals might be tactical and others are emotional, and sometimes both. We often forget to articulate the emotional and value-based purpose for our meeting, which are as important, if not more important, than the tactical one.

ii. Articulate your desired outcomes: what are the specific outcomes you want to accomplish as a result of this action? Not the meeting’s activities, but the desired outcomes. You should be able to complete this sentence: “We will successfully achieve the meeting’s purpose of… if …”

For example, if the purpose of the meeting is to build trust, then the outcome might be “that each person leaves the meeting with a stronger sense of connection and trust with one another.” Or if the purpose is “gaining alignment around a proposal,” then the outcome might be “each team member understands the project’s timeframe, the goals, the group’s expected deliverables, and each team member can articulate what they are personally responsible for completing within the proposal’s scope of work.”

If you have a goal of co-creating the meeting’s outcome with your participants, then include that as a desired outcome and explore engaging ways to design for that goal. This scenario goes beyond the scope of this article, but invites an interesting discussion around participatory design.

iii. Articulate your process — read below for details on how to go about developing a process.

3: Focus on who is participating in the meeting and what information you need to share, emotions you need to address and behaviors you need to shift.

Good facilitation requires meeting your participants where they are, and then moving them to where you want them to be and where they want to go. Intentional meeting design can shift individual and collective behaviors. The art is balancing the right amount of information sharing with emotional engagement, to achieve the desired shift.

Information sharing: Figure out what information asymmetries need to be addressed. Who has information they need to share? What information needs to be shared so everyone is working from the same baseline? How can you share this information in the most engaging way possible? If information is spread throughout the group, is there a way to have people show-and-not-tell in a creative way to share that information? Can you design it so that the information is shared quickly and people are heard?

Emotional shifts: In order to care for your participants, you need to also assess their emotional state and needs. What is the current context, and is that affecting their state of mind and heart? This step clearly assumes that you have your finger on the pulse of your participants’ emotional state. If you do not have a good sense, or are unsure about where some people are — simply ask them! Reach out and ask how they feel about the project, the meeting, and what they are hoping to learn. Possibly gather their input on where they feel the group is and where they want to go.

For instance, if an organization is going through a round of lay-offs and staff are uncertain of their status, they are unlikely to move quickly into a dynamic brainstorming session. You will need to find a way to air and address these concerns before you move the group into a place that feels generative, or ask whether that outcome is even possible given the state of the group.

If you are leading a project launch meeting, assess the participants’ emotional state related to the new project — are they curious? Excited? Agitated? Or annoyed? Does everyone feel the same way or are there widely differing emotions around the project at hand? Even if the group has divergent emotions, you can design for these different starting points. You might find a way to surface the annoyances and try and address them, and then you design the meeting so that those who are excited can help energize the rest of the group.

Desired behaviors: You also want to articulate any behaviors you are trying to facilitate in pursuit of your meeting’s desired purpose and outcome. How are you going to move the group from a passive state to engaging and voluntarily sharing? If the goal of the meeting is to generate ideas and the group you are convening tends to be more critical, how can you move them into a more dynamic, collaborative and generative state?

If your group is less forthcoming, you might need to start with some activities to loosen them up. These behavior shifts do not simply emerge because a facilitator asks the group to do something, but new behaviors are invited, coaxed, supported, encouraged etc. For example, we have all experienced the sound of crickets when the facilitator states that the presentation is now over and it is time for comments. If you have spent the first 50 minutes talking at people, don’t expect them to perk up in the last 10 minutes when you want them to engage. If a facilitator wants participants to engage in the middle or towards the end of the meeting, then allow them to contribute to the meeting as early as possible. A round of introductions does not count as contributions. Contributions involve more active participation — such as planned or sporadic breakout groups to discuss a well-scoped question or discussions in the chat box on a specific question. To foster discussions, invite participants to reflect for 2 minutes in silence on a question, and then ask a few people to share while others put their comments in the chat box.

4. For each need above (information, emotions, and behaviors), explore a range of engaging activities

Now that you have prioritized what you want to cover and the emotions and behaviors you want to facilitate among the group, you can move to brainstorming different activities to address each of your meeting’s goals. This is your opportunity to imagine new ways of facilitating a collective experience.

For each goal identified in step 3, create brainstorming questions. For instance,

• if you need a group to share the information they learned from a set of interviews — you might ask “how might the team share their insights efficiently and visually?”
• if the desired emotion at the beginning of the meeting is “supported” — you might ask “how might we make participants feel heard and valued?”
• if the desired behavior during part of the meeting is around “generating ideas” — then you might ask “how might we set up the space to create a rich brainstorm? How might we encourage everyone to share ideas during the 20 minutes allotted? How might we shift the group’s energy so they are likely to build on each other’s ideas?”

For each question, you can come up with a wide range of activities — some that include everyone sharing using a timer so that everyone is heard, others that include everyone sketching a concept, some that use audio tools, others that place people into pair shares or small group discussions. Activities can use white boards (in person or virtual), paper and pen, audio messages, physical movements, verbal statements etc. The options are endless.

You don’t have to do this step alone — consider inviting a colleague or even a meeting participant into your brainstorming process. You won’t be able, nor need to, integrate all the ideas you generate from the brainstorm into your meeting design. Select from the ideas generated, and pick the one that best fits the meeting experience you are designing.

5. Create an outline for the meeting and then layer a detailed timeline.

Now you can create an outline for your meeting and see if and how all the pieces fit together. Sketch it out on paper: break your meeting into discrete phases — maybe into three or four parts. Layer on the information, emotions, behaviors and activities you selected and see how the meeting flows.

You might even think about it like acts in a participatory theater production. What are you going to cover, feel and experience in each act (info, emotions, behaviors), and how are you going to transition between each act? Does the final act land you where you want to be as a group?

The final step is to address the logistics. Does it all work? We often are trying to cover too much in one meeting. Create a timeline that follows the arc you have outlined above by setting an estimated time for each activity. How long do you need to cover the content and provide the instructions? Or how long for a pair-share? How long for the question and answer portion of the meeting? Try to include some buffer time — maybe 10 minutes for an hour-long meeting — just in case some elements go over the time allotted. And some activities always run over.

Make sure to communicate all the logistical information to your participants in the meeting’s invitation, and at the beginning and end of the meeting. But don’t launch or close a meeting with logistics. Instead, offer an opportunity for the group to connect personally at the opening and close of the meeting (even if very briefly).

CONCLUSION

To recap, apply the following steps to design more human-centered, engaging and effective meetings:

• Clarify the purpose and desired outcome of the meeting
• Articulate and prioritize the information you need to share with the participants
• Address the participants’ emotions
• Design for the behaviors you want to shift
• Explore a range of activities that address your goals, and select the ones to include in your meeting
• Outline your meeting plan and check whether it will all work in the given time

Although at the outset this might feel like more work, if practiced, you will find that this process becomes more intuitive. This practice is like exercising any muscle — the more you do it, the stronger the muscle becomes and the more fluid the process.

Some meetings are definitely more complicated than others. More complex meetings can result from participants coming into the room with conflicting emotions; participants having competing priorities; or you are looking for specific collective behaviors (such as personal reflection or dynamic collaboration) which are absent in the organization or team’s culture. But regardless of the meeting’s complexity, we have found that taking the time to be intentional, explicit, and creative about designing your meetings is transformative to a group’s culture and effectiveness. Plus, it’s more joyful, and we can all use more fun in our lives!

Notes & References:

*We hope you are encouraged to apply these principles immediately to your next meeting. This accompanying worksheet can help.

*The author Nadia Roumani is the Senior Designer with Stanford d.school’s Designing for Social Systems (DSS) Program. Thank you to Stanford DSS colleagues Thomas Both and Susie Chang for their extensive feedback and comments.

*Stanford d.school’s Designing for Social Systems (DSS) program helps social sector leaders in nonprofit organizations, government and foundations increase their capacity to design creative and impactful programs, rooted in human insights, and tackle critical forces within complex systems.

*The POP Model was created by Leslie Sholl Jaffe & Randy Alford. The author adapted the POP from Rockwood Leadership Institute materials.