design + bureaucracy = delight

We’re always interested when our alums take design thinking into unexpected places. Meet Phil Ansell, who came to our executive education bootcamp last year. Phil works at the Los Angeles County department of welfare, a 13,000-employee bureaucracy. We’ve been learning from Phil’s team, and what they’ve been able to do. Take a look:

Here’s more from Phil.

Keys to scaling design practices:
“I knew from the beginning that I wasn’t going to be able to be the day-to-day lead on this. So I was looking for people who were the strongest, and developing them as leaders and facilitators. You’re looking for people who have a capacity to function effectively within the process, both in terms of understanding the steps, but also in terms of really being able to collaborate with other people. And just a comfort level with speaking in front of other people, and engaging other people.”

Roll-out strategy:
“I’m a big planner by nature, so there is always an inclination to have a big master plan and stick to it. But as I’ve gotten older, I’m more of an opportunist and less of a modernist. I tend to just go where the opportunities are rather than trying to stick to a big plan. That was definitely our approach with this: Look for an opportunity—a project or a team—in the organization where design thinking might be applicable, and approach it that way.”

Where it works:
“For us, it makes sense to use design thinking when we have a problem where human emotions are at play. If we know we need to translate a form into a bunch of different languages, that’s a prioritization problem, a resource problem or a technology problem. But when we’ve got people walking into an office to apply for food stamps, creating really long lines, when they could be applying by phone or mail or the web, then we’ve got to figure out what’s going on in their hearts. That’s when we employ design thinking.”

Biggest Challenge
“The speed of implementation has not been what we’d like it to be. It’s not that we don’t have the capacity to implement what comes out of these project, it’s that the design thinking work that we’ve done has been in areas where there are a lot of things going on, and we need to track the implementation of our solutions to state law changes that have a lot of downstream effect, or to the rollout of a big technology project that dovetails with our prototype.”

Sustaining Impact
“The fact that design thinking has been carried forward by people who’ve never been to the d.school. Two months after I got back, I was promoted to Deputy Director, and no longer had day-to-day interactions with the team that was working to spread design thinking. It de-personalized my connection to the project, but ultimately that was a very good thing because if it’s self-sustaining, you know it’s working.”