A Wasted Story.....      The Challenge    I want to start by reflecting that many of the choices I have made on my projects in the past have unwittingly  involved the use of design thinking tools. This one example below outlines a project I worked on a few years  ago and serves as a wonderful reflection on what more could have been achieved with the design thinking  knowledge I now have.    So the story starts here...    I was contracted to assist in the development of a community based program to reduce the production of  waste by local residents. The program was intended to target behaviours with the aim being to result in a  reduction of the communities overall reliance on non renewable resources. My role was to interact with the  community and client to design some parameters around what the program could incorporate and how it  might operate. Without any knowledge of design thinking, I commenced tackling this wicked problem by  reframing the question as to how might we encourage residents to reduce their consumption of non  renewable resources through a community based program.     The certainties I had around this project from the outset were (amongst others):

1. I had at hand a group of experts in the waste, water management, and climate change fields that

were prepared to offer their time to the project.

2. I had great knowledge about the community (including through surveys, existing forums and

established community groups).

3. There was virtually no budget for engaging any other stakeholders

With this knowledge and known constraints a critical challenge was how best to engage with the community.  For this, I employed the use of storytelling to garner interest in the project, develop design criteria and  generate ideas.    Tool Selection & Application    According to Daniel Pink "Story is just as integral to the human experience as design... Stories amuse; facts  illuminate.  Stories divert; facts reveal.  Stories are for cover; facts are for real..."1.    Storytelling can be used as a design research tool and for different purposes throughout a project. I chose to  use the power of storytelling for this project in essence because I had access to some amazing experts who  wanted to share their industry experiences with the customers. I also knew that I had to find a way to get  people interested in the project at the offset. Without customer input, the program would never get traction.  I was cognisant of the fact that storytelling has a role to play in creating empathy for the new future. I had to  bring the customers along that journey and...I knew that storytelling could be done with minimal cost.      So we kick started the process by staging a sequence of events that occurred looked something like this:

  For a period of 2 weeks, the various experts were situated in public locations around the community  at busy times to interact with the community. They were encouraged to talk non-technically about  their real life experiences in the field, the things they had witnessed both positive and negative. They  were provided with project cards that directed people to the project website and invited them to the  “meet the expert” evening.

  A “meet the expert” evening was organised where the community were invited to hear about the  topics that interested them and were given the opportunity to provide feedback on; what criteria

1 Pink, Daniel H. A Whole New Mind: Why Right-brainers Will Rule the Future. New York, N.Y.: Riverhead, 2006.

were important to them for developing a community waste program, and what it needed to  incorporate.

  We then created a platform on the client’s website that provided a lot of baseline data about  consumptive behaviours and the impact on the environment and society, but also provided  graphically depictions of what life with less consumption might look like.

  We hosted community stories on the site looking at local individuals and groups who had already  started tackling this wicked problem in their own way.

  We established a community forum and advisory group for talking about the complexities and  barriers of doing things differently and held a conversation about what the possibilities might be

There were elements of the use of storytelling throughout this phase of the project that were successful. The  use of experts and community members who were able to tell their real life stories helped to inspire  involvement of other community members. Visual representations to help support the raw data and facts on  the client’s website were creative tools that supported engagement. However the website did not attract the  volume of traffic anticipated.    Insight & Approach    I think what surprised me more than anything was the communities desire to be involved. I had expected  turnout for the events and forums, but not to the extent we saw. The major insight for me was this: that we  got to know the audience (our community) better through the storytelling approach. I had intended the  storytelling to engage but in fact it did so much more. As the community got more comfortable along the  journey they we were more prepared to offer up their personal experiences, involve themselves in  conversations and importantly invest in the outcome.      In essence what the story telling did was inspire people to act.    Although storytelling was invaluable in this process, in hindsight I can see that the application of storytelling  could have been used more broadly throughout the entire design process. Certainly using some of the  community member’s stories in a more proactive way, rather only on the website, would have been useful.  The use of storyboards on the web based platform could also have provided another visual cue for the  community to engage. I also think the storytelling could have be better utilised at the beginning of the  process to inform the definition of the problem. The community were not involved in this process; the client  had already determined from the outset what the problem was. Had the community been involved in the  formulation of the problem perhaps a common understanding would have been established upfront and  paved the way for a more constructive outcome.    One lost opportunity and a major learning for me was in relation to the expert evening.  Whilst it was useful  in terms of garnering support for the project, the evening could have been extended to incorporate  visualisation and mind mapping exercises. This would have further refined the design criteria and perhaps led  to some more innovative ideas for program development. I think we got part of the first stage of the project  right, we did a great job on the storytelling, we knew the audience, we had a clear sequence of events and  people wanted to get involved. I just feel that if we had employed some of those additional tools in the  design thinking toolkit, then who knows what magic we may have arrived at.    For those who may be curious this is how this story finishes......    The community forum and advisory group lead the development of the final design criteria for the waste  program. They selected a safe “tried and tested” program that other local communities had already  implemented. The selected program was trialled it for 8 weeks, it ran for a further two years and has since  been shelved.

