Rethinking The Obvious

When I saw in the syllabus that we had to read “Design Thinking for Social Innovation”, an article published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, I was very glad because I had already read it. Then, I remembered that soon after this article was published, Jocelyn Wyatt, one of the authors and social innovation lead at IDEO, went to Stanford University to give a lecture about IDEO’s work and their design thinking approach for promoting social inclusion worldwide. This lecture can be found at http://sic.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4697.html

In sum, Jocelyn Wyatt advises social entrepreneurs to focus on community needs, culture, preferences and expectations, because our intuition and common sense might not always match the community’s actual problem. So, in order to provide a useful solution, it is very important to keep close communication with the final users at all times. Also, inspiring the community and getting them involved in the whole process increase success probabilities, since they would embrace the project as their own.

Throughout the lecture, Jocelyn Wyatt describes a series of cases in which IDEO has been involved. From them, I would like to highlight one in particular: the “Actúa Ya” campaign that took place in Peru to promote citizen involvement in political affairs. I like this case because I worked in a very similar USAID funded project in Mexico: the “Seguridad con Justicia” or “Security and Justice” campaign www.seguridadconjusticia.org.

In this project, we were supposed to make citizens more aware about the need to ask their government officials for accountability on security and justice topics.  To accomplish this general objective, we lobbied with political parties, candidates and elected officials so they would include security and justice topics in their political platforms. Also, we organized several debates, town hall meetings and roundtables to inform the people about the importance of changing the Mexican legal and judicial system. Nevertheless, our project was extremely passive. So, even when people learned about the topics, they were not getting involved. People were not communicating with their candidates nor participating through our website.

As Jocelyn Wyatt did in Peru, in Mexico we decided to “ideate” a new approach for our campaign. We studied where were the people we wanted to reach, which were their preferences and their activities. We did some research and we found that the common citizens don’t trust political leaders when they talk about security topics and they like to watch soccer games. Accordingly, we reached out the main soccer teams and ask some of their players to be the “Seguridad con Justicia” campaign’s spokes people. The results were evident. The hits on the website rocketed and thousands of people began to participate in our campaign.

By applying design thinking principles and human centered innovation, we learned that interpersonal trust and inspiration are key issues for achieving successful enterprises. Having a trusted soccer hero asking the people to get involved in a project gave them the confidence and the inspiration to get involved. If my TV soccer hero is concerned about security and justice topics in my city, why shouldn’t I do the same? To accomplish a successful outcome, we had to stop thinking the obvious and ask the community what their real needs and concerns were.