The design thinking values change makers already know
(originally published Jan 2019)
In 2017 with Puerto Rico knocked out by Hurricane Maria Direct Relief did what they do best — start bringing the needed supplies and talent need to get a badly damaged health care system back up. This is something they do in disaster sites all over the world. But this time things were a little different.
Direct Relief, with its’ years of on the ground experience realized that bringing supplies — though needed and helpful — wasn’t addressing the other need people had: money. In 2017 they made a shift from relief supplies to now bringing funding as well. In Puerto Rico they did everything from funding clinics staffing needs to funding solar panel electric grids to get providers up and running.
No look at this effort from a Design Thinking perspective and you see them applying many principles that others making change around the world — in social, public and private sectors that make design driven organizations catalyzers of real world impact.
You can imagine those human centric insights they arrive at though listening to end users and observing disaster area challenges that helped them realize that money, not just things, was the real input for the ‘job to be done.’ This is empathy and observation at work in a power way. And in this understanding that co-creating the change needed with their end users rather than for them (which is the typical well meaning but often ineffective trap of non-profits to assume their users are helpless). And though we don’t know how the decision to start funding change we can only imagine that it took some form of early prototyping and iteration to find a way to do this that met the needs of internal audiences looking for accountability and external audiences seeking quick access to money with little bureaucratic hold up.
We don’t know if Direct Relief has ever been exposed to Design Thinking or Service Design but like many other social change organizations who are focused on real world impact they tend to focus on people and what makes a difference to them. And with a lot of focused effort and determination they end up designing what works rather than what just seems to work. These are the values of designers from public, social and private sectors. And it’s the values (and mindsets) that make a difference. Congratulations to Direct Relief for everything they are doing. (and should you ever want to know more about design thinking we would be happy to talk to you about it.)
