Behind the scenes, with the team

The second week of October brought an in-person visit from our coaches, Dr. Sarah Schulman and Muryani Kasdani of InWithForward. It was an intense few days of learning and practicing IWF’s approach, Grounded Change, at the stage of idea generation. IWF is focused on innovation at the level of implementation and their training focuses on everyday operations: how we get information, where we keep it, what we do with it, how we use it to generate ideas, improve the quality of ideas in a team context…it’s super practical stuff. But it sure does look different (note the frequent use of large posters, the flurry of stickies, and the combination of academic social science articles and stories from the ground).

On the ReMaking a Living Project, we collect stories from folks who are feeling stuck in unemployment, or trapped in a cycle of precarious employment/unemployment – and people who look a lot like the people in these first two groups, but are somehow flourishing. These stories form our data. It’s not meant to be a representative sample – in fact, it’s a super small sample, ten to twenty people. Instead, we use this data to generate ideas for better social solutions, that we think would benefit people like those in our data sample. At a later stage, we’ll rigourously test those ideas by prototyping them (mocking them up on a small scale, so people can interact with, and experience them, and measure the results.) At this stage, our focus is on coming up with as many ideas as possible, be they crazy, lousy, fantastical, or marvelous. With the help of our project participants – the people actually experiencing long term unemployment – we’ll winnow them down to five or ten ideas worth further development.

We’re coached to start with the assumption that the more we practice generating ideas and understanding how the good ideas around us work, the better our ideas will be. Every day, we have a quick idea generation exercise, with a timer on. Yesterday we took three minutes to each choose and breakdown an idea that already exists, is innovative, and/or has successfully spread: libraries, carshare, Pushbullet, Uber, Saddleback Church, B!ke, Employment Centres. Using a system called Prism that IWF has adapted for this use, we identify the people whose pain the idea addresses, the currently underutilized resources it maximizes, the interactions (setting, props, actors, and scripts) that make it different, its mode of spread, and the mechanisms it utilizes. Over the past ten years, InWithForward has come to focus on using 7 mechanisms* that are often missing from our social services, that enable people to live great lives (not just lower risk ones). Those mechanisms include stuff like modeling and rehearsing in context, bridging social capital (where you meet people who are like you, but closer to where you want to be), taster experiences that allow people to shape their preferences and goals as they are exposed to new things, and feedback to increase validation and motivation.

*Read more about InWithForward’s 7 mechanisms here, pp7-22.

“What if…” statements, while sometimes pretty out-there, are informed by a research process that helps us stay true to our data, the stories of people who aren’t making it in our economy. To get to our “what ifs” we start with the cast of characters we’ve met, and identify questions or themes that have arisen, like:

• How do people make long term decisions for a great life, while living with the daily struggles of a crappy life?
• How do hang-out groups of unemployed friends affect each member’s ideas about the desirability and chances of achieving change?
• How do changes in employment status, or long term unemployment, affect people’s sense of identity? And their feelings about the future?
• Which factors affect how likely people are to flounder, cope, or flourish in unemployment?

Then we look for social science articles that present research and theories on these topics. We explore psychology, economics, sociology, anthropology, and business journals, for example. We find articles that present relevant theories and identify the constructs within. For example, the the construct of “alternate roles”, in which people’s identification with a greater number of alternate roles (parent, dancer, baker, gardener, friend) is a great indicator of ability to cope well and maintain higher self-esteem during unemployment (Ruth G. McFadyen, “Coping with Threatened Identities”). Then we segment our participants along an axis based on that construct, sometimes combined with another Eg. ‘Few alternate roles’ to ‘lots of alternate roles’, maybe crossed with ‘unhappy with life’ to ‘very happy with life’. Usually in social services we segment people based on demographics (age, gender, risk level, etc.) By using a whole bunch of lenses through which to understand out participants, we might find surprising groupings: it may be that a sixty year old single man and a twenty-five year old woman have more in common with each other than their peers, because neither has a sense of alternate roles outside of a paid work environment.

With our participants plotted on a series of different axes, we can see where groups form. We might circle one group (“high desire/low confidence to change”) and start to generate “what if…” statements for them. What if statements can lead to policy ideas or programmatic intervention ideas. Our Debriefers (the group that gathers to help us reflect on our practice and challenge us with questions) joined us last Friday as Sarah led us through the idea generation process. And they were dynamite! The strength of our debriefer team was definitely their ability to look at structural enablers that could benefit people like our participants.

At this point in the process we want as many divergent ideas as possible. We try not to get too high tech. We are reminded by Sarah and Muryani that not everything has to be an app! Our ideas include solutions targeted at employers, municipal, provincial, and potentially federal policymakers, people on social assistance (both as individuals and group units), and often incorporate other parts of the community, such as recent immigrants with underutilized skills. By the end of our session we had a lot of ideas, some of which may have some potential. Using prism helps us articulate all the working elements of a solution.

Then we can turn it into something that our participants can give us feedback on. Perhaps we will create a brochure for a potential service or a news article about the government’s plans to radically reorganize social assistance. We are asking for feedback on early ideas, but we try to make it seem real so that participants can take it seriously. We give more than one option so that people can rank and criticize freely. Next week we’ll be doing just this! Check back to find out how it goes.