Design Facilitation as an Emerging Design Skill: A Practical Approach

John Body ThinkPlace, Canberra, Australia Nina Terrey ThinkPlace, Canberra, Australia Leslie Tergas ThinkPlace, Washington, United States

Abstract
Design facilitation marks a distinct and emerging role for designers. This paper describes and identifies key skills and attributes for the design facilitator. The paper argues that the role of the designer is being extended from the sole expert designer to a participatory inclusive designer (Saunders 2008). This changing role is being driven by the organisational contexts in which designers work. Increasingly, designers are working in public sector organisations, which are under pressure to respond to both community and stakeholder needs as well as to deliver on government policy. Growing evidence shows that public organisations have adopted design thinking to help design and deliver better public services. This paper explores the new role for designers to supply design services to meet the increased demand for public organisations to bring multiple voices together to address organisational design challenges and delivery of public services. The designer skills required are in the area of design facilitation, which is the ability to bring diverse groups of people together, address the power imbalances and provide the environment for constructive communication between stakeholders. Design facilitation also acts to ensure breadth of perspectives are present and heard, including the citizens perspective. This paper draws on over 15 years of practical experience by the authors who have worked with government on challenges relating to the design of organisations and the design of public services. The design thinking approach referred to in this paper was initially developed in the Australian Taxation Office from 2001. It drew heavily on design mentors including Professor Richard Buchanan (at the time Head of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University), Darrel Rhea (CEO of Cheskin Added Value), Jim Farris and Lauralee Alben (at the time principals of Alben Faris Design) and Tony Golsby-Smith (Founder of Second Road). In addition, Richard Hames and Marvin Oka provided thought leadership in the area of working with complex systems.

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1. Increasing complexity of design applications

1.1 Application of design to more diverse fields
The field of design thinking is being applied to increasingly more diverse and complex areas, for example, the design of social and economic systems. These systems are generally the domain of government. One of the early applications of design to a large social and economic system is the Australian taxation system. (Junginger 2006; Body 2007; Terrey 2008; Terrey 2009). The interest from this work is now spreading across Australian Government agencies as they seek to improve ways in which the community is engaged in the design of services that affect them. There are many other examples internationally of the increased involvement of people in the design of systems and services, including those listed by the UK Design Council (2010) and Service Canada (2010).

1.2 Complex adaptive systems

Designers of social and economic systems are involved in the design of what are termed complex adaptive systems (Waldrop 1992). A key characteristic of complex adaptive systems is that they comprise many individual agents who act independently, and this makes these systems inherently hard to predict and hard to reverse. The study of complex adaptive systems suggests ways to work with complexity, rather than against it. A reductionist approach to complex adaptive systems does not work. Breaking systems down into smaller and smaller parts is not an answer for dealing with complexity because it does not allow the interdependencies between the parts to be observed. Complex adaptive systems are more sustainable when they can demonstrate more variety than other systems because this means they have more capacity to adapt and change. Complex adaptive systems, because they cannot be accurately predicted, can give rise to unintended consequences from planned interventions. Unintended consequences are often negative consequences. They can never be eliminated but through a strategic approach, involving multiple perspectives and extrapolation of time, they can be reduced.

2. Increasing requirement to consult and engage

Governments are increasingly expressing a requirement to consult and engage. Many policy implementation issues faced by governments can be traced back to a failure to engage early enough with those affected. Recently, in Australia, the Government faced significant backlash from those affected by the proposed Resource Super Profits Tax. In a letter to shareholders, Rio Tintos Chairman, the head of one of Australias largest mining companies, stated, Rio Tinto, like the rest of the mining industry, has grave concerns about the fundamentals of the new tax. It has been developed in a vacuum and is divorced from the day-to-day realities of business (Du Plessis 2010, p.1). This is but one example of a policy implementation issue arising from a design process divorced from all the necessary considerations. Governments around the world are learning from these policy implementation issues, and they are becoming increasingly interested in engaging with those affected by change during the design process. Charles Leadbeater (2004, p.53) describes five possible scenarios of increased public engagement with government around the design and delivery of service: 1. Providing people with a more customer-friendly interface with existing services; 2. Giving users more say in navigating their way through services once they have got access to them; 3. Giving users more power to make their own decisions about how to spend money allocated to their education or operation; 4. Involving people as co-designers and co-producers of a service so that they actively participate in its design and provision; and

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5. Providing people with platforms, environments, and peer-to-peer support networks to allow them to devise their own solutions collaboratively amongst themselves.

Figure 1. The extent of community involvement

Leadbeater (2004) describes an increasingly ambitious stance towards community engagement that is not without risk. He describes a significant shift in the power of decision making from government towards the community. The risks to embrace in such a stance come from providing greater relevance and greater innovation in designs that affect the community. The risks to mitigate result from a loss of controlloss of control over decision making, loss of control of the design process and loss of control of governance. To embrace the positive risk and mitigate the negative risk requires considered techniques. Codesigning with the community is not about asking people who dont know how to design about subjects in which they have no expertise. Equally, co-design should not be about asking people what they want. Co-designing with the community is about bringing a breadth of perspectives to the design challenge to develop a design that is, as Larry Keeley (2010, p.5) of Doblin Group describes, a balance across what is desirable from a customer perspective, what is possible from a technology perspective and what is viable from an organisation perspective.

Figure 2. Desirable, Possible, ViableAdapted from Keeley (2010).

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3. Design facilitation: a new role for designers

Design facilitation is an emerging role brought on by the necessity to facilitate conversations across broad groups to grapple with the questions of desirability, possibility and viability. The answers to these questions do not exist in one mind. The institutions policy intent, the customers needs, the possibilities offered by technology and other fields, and the requirement for an organisation to remain viable over the long term are often competing. The design facilitator has the daunting task to navigate through these perspectives while serving as a catalyst for the identification of new solutions and opportunities to align seemingly disparate interests. The design facilitator drives the engagement of people through the design process; which is fundamentally a constructive and optimistic process of searching for possibilities. The engagement of people becomes increasingly necessary as the complexity of the design challenge increases. The design facilitator must be able to navigate through complexity. This is not about over simplifying issues in a reductionist sense. As Oliver Wendell Holmes [1] is quoted to have said: I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. To strive for a solution on the other side of complexity, the design facilitator engages with all those people who can shed light on the complexity and how that might extrapolate over time and place. The design facilitator is the broker of an extended conversation that seeks a design respecting complexity while being as simple as it can be.

4. The role of the design facilitator

4.1 The design facilitators role is to:
Obtain a clear, shared understanding of the intent of the change with those who will take a part in designing the change. This seemingly straightforward activity is a critical determinant of the success of the design project; Assemble the right people to address the design challenge, and align them towards a common and constructive vision. This includes: people who hold the intent of the change; users and others affected by the change; specialist disciplines such as policy makers, legislative drafters, HR specialists, IT specialists and operational specialists who will deliver the outcome; and design specialists such as user researchers and information designers who bring design expertise to the challenge; Determine the best process to engage these people. A mix of techniques is available, and the design facilitator must work through a series of considerations to choose the right mix of techniques for the situation; Manage specific design events, for example, a large workshop, an interview, a focus group or a small design team; Maintain focus on design thinking as a means to construct new futures, as opposed to merely analytical, problem-identification thinking. This includes the ability to deploy generative techniques to get stakeholders to create innovative options and concepts of what could be, and this often needs to be achieved quickly and iteratively; Ensure that the output of a design event is sufficiently robust to progress the design, and that it has the ability to combine with other design outputs to get closer to addressing the design challenge.

4.2 Contrasting design facilitation with generalist facilitation

A design facilitator is different from a generalist facilitator. Although a design facilitator has some of the skills of the generalist facilitator, there is a different focus directed at designing and making. A design facilitator takes a group through a collaborative process of design thinking to

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create a picture of a future state that doesnt yet exist and one which is better from the perspective of multiple stakeholders and points of view. A general facilitated session is described by Michael Wilkinson (2004, p.23) as A highly structured meeting in which the meeting leader (the facilitator) guides the participants through a series of predefined steps to arrive at a result that is created, understood and accepted by all participants. Whilst a facilitated design event may contain some of these features, it may contrast quite significantly. It might not be highly structured and it might not follow a series of predefined steps. The objective is not a result that is created, understood and accepted by all participants, although that may be a by-product of the process. The objective of a design event is to create and develop a design that works for the sponsor, the user and those who have to deliver it. Design facilitators guide groups through a design thinking approach that is heavily influenced by observation. As Peter Senge et al. (2005, p.84) describes You observe and observe and let this experience well up into something appropriate. In a sense there is no decision making. What to do just becomes obvious. You cant rush it. This becomes the basis of Theory U described further by Senge et al. (2005, p.88) as Observing, Presencing and Realizing. Design facilitators have a driving force to produce a design. They have a heavy focus on making something in the design process. They are very interested in how one event connects with other activities in the design process. They are interested in the people dynamics but only in as far as they can be used to progress the design.

4.3 Selecting design facilitators

Recruiting design facilitators is challenging. It is not an established profession with which people identify. The skill sets can be hard to uncover in a standard selection process. The attributes that make a successful design facilitator include: A strategic perspective: The design facilitator can work beyond todays current operations and imagine what could be two years or five years into the future. The design facilitator can project beyond the immediate teams involved, work with very diverse groups of people, work with complexity and embrace the ambiguity of these diverse views; A human perspective: The design facilitator must have credibility with a range of groups of people. Strong emotional intelligence is needed to understand the nuances within the groups of people involved in the design. The ability to work with the most senior people in an organisation and at the same time work with the most disadvantaged client groups requires a combination of confidence and humility in the design facilitator; and A design perspective: The design facilitator must be able to design. Design facilitators must be able to explore, to observe, to conceive an idea with a group and then have a strong disposition to develop the idea to make and enhance the design. They must be prepared to prototype, fail and then improve, and they must not be complacent. Prototyping is a way of sharing mental models. If you are prepared to prototype then it means you are prepared to fail [2].

4.4 Personal qualities of the design facilitator

The right attitude will be valued as much as the right skills. The design facilitator must be inherently curious with a strong sense of inquiry. Their perspective must be broad with lateral or peripheral vision to look for opportunities that may not suggest themselves. At the same time, the design facilitator must recognise what cant be changed and work within constraints, although they will often test these constraints to ensure they are genuine. To encourage divergent thinking, the design facilitator will suspend judgement. Design facilitators will have

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a strong desire to help others and get satisfaction from seeing a group reach a breakthrough. Although the design facilitator encourages lateral thinking and diverse opinions, they have a strong sense of purpose and can bring conversations back to addressing the design issue at hand. At the right time the design facilitator will drive for convergence. The design facilitator has a well developed ability to visualise and represent ideas back to the group. The above qualities suggest paradox. The design facilitator is very comfortable with complexity and ambiguity.

5. Key considerations for a design facilitator

5.1 Divergence and convergence
A key attribute of a design facilitator is to understand when a group needs to diverge and when a group needs to converge. Different people have different appetites to diverge and converge, and the design facilitator needs to be able to read the group and the design challenge to determine what is required. Divergence for an indefinite period is not good design because nothing gets produced from the process. Convergence too early will result in a poorly formed design that does not accommodate the complexity of the situation, and it is therefore likely to be too simplistic. A design that is the result of rapid convergence is unlikely to stand the test of going into production and is likely to result in implementation failure. Thus, the design facilitator must have the skills to balance group divergence and convergence. Design changes in complex systems are much less expensive to make early in the project lifecycle rather than later when significant rework needs to be done.

5.2 Exploration, innovation and evaluation

Another way to think about divergence and convergence is in the three stages shown below. Many design companies have some derivative of these three stages: Explore: to understand insights into the community; Innovate: to generate possible solutions to meet user needs while achieving the policy intent efficiently; Evaluate: to select which services will proceed to implementation. Exploring is characterised by techniques to understand the user context. Exploring involves a mix of qualitative methods such as ethnographic research and quantitative methods such as surveys and operational information. Customer insight is A deep truth about the customer based on their behaviour, experiences, beliefs, needs or desires, which is relevant to the task or issue, and rings bells with the target group. The important element about this truth is that it is powerful enough to bring about behavioural change and can be used to inform decisionmaking by policy officials or those involved in designing or delivering services (Customer Insight 2006, p.9). Innovating is characterised by generating design options and better design questions to be addressed in subsequent iterations. This phase depends on ideation and creative thinking to be effective. Customers are still involved by participating in prototyping. Prototyping is important for this stage because it allows designers to make mental models visible. Evaluation is characterised by techniques to select the ideas to take forward. This includes evaluation before the service is launched, as well as after. Critical to this stage are tools and techniques to measure the effectiveness of the service in terms of desirability, possibility and viability. Evaluation criteria are progressively refined as each iteration moves closer towards a refined implementation ready prototype. The following diagram shows the iterative process that the design facilitator navigates to diverge and converge.

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Figure 3. Divergence and convergence

5.3 Specific techniques for different stages

The design facilitator has at their disposal a range of techniques that can be used at different stages of the design process. Some techniques are appropriate for all stages, while others are best suited for a particular stage. Exploratory techniques can include surveys and simulations to observe the interactions and relationships between the service and the user. Qualitative data can be part of the exploration phase. Focus groups can also shed light on user needs. Observing users by employing ethnographic techniques is a very effective approach. Social media is increasingly being used to connect with the user constituency. Innovation techniques will often involve some form of workshop. This may be a formal workshop or a less formal design team that forms around a design challenge. The techniques most commonly found in practice are evaluative techniques. Perhaps the most overused and least effective evaluative technique is a consultation process conducted via email that seeks comments on a near final product. Whilst easy to conduct, its value is mainly in ticking the box that a consultation process has been undertaken. Other evaluative techniques of more value are the use of simulations in the users context or a simulation laboratory to observe the interaction between a service and the user. Focus groups are a way of obtaining evaluation information about a product or service. Surveys and other data sources can also provide evaluative information. The design facilitator determines the appropriate technique to gather user insights. Several of these techniques involve getting people together with a view to either exploring with them, innovating with them or evaluating with them. For the application of each technique, the design facilitator becomes the coordinator of that particular design event.

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5.4 Choosing the type of design event

There are a number of different design events, each with its own form: Strategy design workshops seek to uncover the direction an organisation should take; Design planning workshops aim to develop the agenda of design projects that will deliver on the strategic direction; Product or service design workshops uncover the experience of specific groups of users and design improvements to that experience; and Process design workshops design aspects of organisational capability to deliver the new product or service. They aim to design the staff experience associated with the change.

5.5 Choosing the participants

There are four perspectives that need to come together during the design process. On occasions these four perspectives will be present in the one event. On other occasions the four perspectives may be involved separately. The four perspectives are: The holder of the intent. This perspective is the champion of the change. Without this perspective being strongly emphasised, the chances of success are significantly reduced; User. The user perspective, whilst a central consideration, is often not brought into the conversation. In some design exercises, there is a reluctance to involve the very people that are most affected by the change. An assumption is often made that the user perspective is known by the other people involved. Successful design exercises have authentic involvement from the user community; Specialist. There are specialist disciplines involved in developing design solutions. These include people with expertise in the law, in information technology, in learning and development of staff, and in the operational systems and processes of the organisation. These specialist disciplines are most effective when they can be brought together in multidisciplinary teams to solve design challenges together; and Designer. The design facilitator role is a required discipline because this function balances and coordinates all perspectives. Others in the design discipline include those with specialisations in conducting user research or in visualisation of the progressive design.

5.6 Choosing the space

The logistics of an event can appear to be too trivial to spend time on. However, the logistics can make or break an event. A good space will have good natural light, space to move around and plenty of horizontal or vertical surfaces on which to develop or display emerging thinking.

5.7 Expect the unpredictable

The world is a messy place and things rarely go according to plan. Sun Tzu in The Art of War (2009) says that a strategy is correct until the first arrow is fired. Therefore, all the best laid plans of facilitation are good until reality strikes. The best designed workshop or series of workshops must accommodate changes that will inevitably occur when designing within the dynamics of a complex adaptive system, which by definition has many interdependent parts making independent decisions. Therefore, the system can change unpredictably. The role of the design facilitator is not suited to someone who wants high levels of predictability and order. The design facilitator needs skills not only in facilitation but also in leadership, strategy and change management that will allow the design facilitator to navigate when reality strikes.

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Conclusion
With the increasing application of design to complex adaptive systems, such as social and economic systems, an important design role is emergingthat of design facilitator. Complex adaptive systems are made of the collective actions of many actors or agents who make individual decisions that have an interdependent and collective impact. The design facilitator works with the different groups that make up the system with a view to developing designs that are desirable for the user, possible technologically, viable for the organisation and in the case of large community systems, meet the policy intent. A complex web of perspectives must be navigated by the design facilitator who must have some rare qualitiesa strategic / temporal perspective, a human / empathetic perspective and a design / making perspective. Design facilitators bring these skills to bear and must address confusingly conceptual and mundanely practical considerations as they carry out the role that is being increasingly demanded by those who manage social and economic systems.

Acknowledgements
The authors have developed the ideas in this paper by working on some of the largest social and economic systems in Australia and New Zealand, and they acknowledge the efforts by these organisations to improve service delivery for people in the community by adopting design approaches.

Notes
1. This quotation is attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) an American physician, professor, lecturer and author. It is cited in a number of blogs and wikis, but cannot be verified in scholarly dictionaries of quotations. 2. This quotation came from Larry Leifer of Stanfords dSchool in a conversation with John Body in January 2010.

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