What Soap has to do with Design
Need to suppress your bias, think differently, take a new perspective. There are tools for that. Just ask my mother.
What do you do when you really need to think about — better yet, rethink — something? Like ‘why are patients not following their medical plan?’, ‘how do we reduce errors in how orders are handled?’, ‘what is contributing to teen depression?’ or ‘how do we support a better employee experience in a virtual workforce?’ Organizations are filled with these types of questions — things that need some new, deeper, exploratory thinking. But forced to do so business leaders tend to do the same kind of thinking they have always done — bring all they know to the problem space, think hard — but always with the same frameworks in their head and constrained by the built-in biases we all carry. Maybe that’s a financial bias, execution bias, something that makes us look at it from one perspective but blind to others.
Design (Human-Centered, Design Thinking, Service Design, UX — choose from the array of design practices) has multiple ways of dealing with this from crafting more diverse silo-breaking teams, to being outside-in by engaging users where they are to the back and forth of the think-to-make cycle where the cognitive application is balanced by doing things that teach you things. Farther down in the more tactical box of methods, design has other ways as well — call them frameworks, exercises, paradigms. Let’s just say tools. Many of these tools are there to help people suspend their thinking bias and push them to take on other perspectives, consider a problem from multiple viewpoints, to break down the analysis of an issue into component parts. Essentially, they are bias busters and thinking stretches. They can be as simple as the very common Like-Wish-Worry that seeks input and critique, RoleStorming which forces people to develop ideas from the perspective of other roles like ‘a general’ or how would a ‘community organizer’ approach this challenge. Very common is the Empathy Map — how does your user think, see, hear, feel. One of my favorites from doing immersive user research is POEMS which helps you break a situation down into components along People or actors involved, Objects or things they are using, Environment or place they are in when they do this, Messages they are getting as they do and Services that are being (or not being) offered. (happy to share our worksheet on this)
But yesterday I learned about another one from another industry with a different purpose, from my mother. My mother likes to hear about what I do and, like parents of most service and strategy designers, struggles to explain to her friends what her child does for a living (we should create a designer support group for this issue alone). My mother is a nurse and she likes when I talk to her about patient experience and healthcare design issues. As someone who has worked from the frontline patient care to administration to public health project management, she has a wealth of knowledge — and she likes to share it (along with a ton of other unsolicited advice). We were talking about how doctors have too little time to talk to patients and how there is a need for more nurses to fill the gap (I know, assumed solution — but go with it.)
She started to tell me about how nurses onboarding patients in support of a more seamless patient experience and better coordination of care use a framework (tool) to assess and capture notes. The acronym is SOAPS. As a nurse assesses a patient they break down input into four areas. Subjective date — the things a patient says about symptoms, behaviors, feeling like ‘complaints about stomach pain. Objective data that the nurse can observe like ‘a rash on the arm’ or ‘blood pressure 140/90.’ Then they pivot towards more action orientation. Assessment is where they diagnosis with their medical knowledge what the problem is like ‘patient likely has an adverse reaction to food, possible allergies.’ Finally, they create a Plan of action and next steps on how to address the problem which could be ‘patient education, medications, etc.’
I found this interviewing and assessment tool interesting (yes, it overlaps with other tools in the design toolbox like when we interview and break it down to what did people say, do, themes….). But I like how to goes from taking in data both human and numerical — from the patient, from themselves and then pivots to forming a hypothesis and quicking moves to take action (for designers, maybe like prototype planning). It seems to avoid jumping to conclusions, structures a routine process, collects data in a sharable easy to review way, and most likely helps make efficient and possibly faster a common action that, in an overstressed healthcare setting, needs to use every minute wisely.
It reminded me of the importance of using the tools we have to both structure and stretch our thinking as a way to tame our biases, the natural instinct to decide and surge forward. For whatever this SOAP tool is, maybe it is something you take from, use directly, or inspire us all to use our tools better. And, at the least, it let my mom feel like she understands my world a little better.
Hi, I’m Dana. I’m a service and strategy designer. I lead design at Wovenware, a software and emerging technology firm that is doing some amazing work humanizing AI.
