Bill Burnett is a Consulting Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and currently the Executive Director of the Design Program. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Product Design at Stanford and has worked professionally on a wide variety of projects ranging from award-winning Apple portable computers to the original Hasbro Star Wars action figures.

Human-centered design begins with need-finding, as a clear understanding of the user’s needs is central to the design process. As our first design project focused on foreign concessions in Sierra Leone,  I accompanied eight students from Rebooting Government on a week-long trip to Sierra Leone over spring break. Hosted by Simeon Koroma, the executive director of Timap for Justice and our partner in the process, the trip was an intense and immersive exploration of the politics and economics of mining and agricultural concessions.  Students in the class completed a comprehensive set of readings on Sierra Leonean politics, structures of governmental and traditional authority, the challenges faced in mining communities, and a range of other issues before departure. But for the kind of work we hope to do in the course, there is no substitute for direct and sustained need-finding work in the communities most affected by foreign concessions.

Over the course of a week, we engaged senior officials in all of the major ministries, including mining and agriculture; leading legislators with responsibility for oversight of the concessions process; and civil society leaders working on issues of transparency, accountability, and the effective management of Sierra Leone’s natural resources. These interviews in the capital, Freetown, were intended to help us map the dynamics of the concessions process: the key actors involved, the legal framework and obligations/responsibilities of the parties, and the backstory on how things play out in practice.

After our work in Freetown, we headed to the rural areas to interview local leaders, landowners, and ordinary citizens in communities affected by agricultural and mining concessions. Timap’s local ties – through their community-based paralegals – were essential interlocutors in facilitating these visits. We moved around Bo and Moyamba districts, visiting a variety of chiefdoms affected by gold and bauxite mining as well as large-scale agricultural concessions. In each community, tens and tens of residents came out to speak with us, anxious to share their stories and perspectives on how communities have fared in the negotiations between government and foreign companies.

In the blog posts here, here, here, and here, students offer some first-hand reflections on their time in Sierra Leone.

As outlined in a previous post, this quarter we are focused on Stanford based prototypes, including a spring course at the d.school.  The course is split between two design projects (henceforth referred to as DP1 and DP2), the first working with a civil society leader in Sierra Leone and the second working with the city manager of East Palo Alto.

We kicked off the quarter with the following design challenge in Sierra Leone:

Redesign how rural communities engage with the government and foreign companies as mining concessions agreements are negotiated and implemented, in an environment in which processes have been opaque and generated resistance, and communities feel that they have not benefited from the extraction of Sierra Leone’s mineral resources.

Sierra Leone experienced one of Africa’s most destructive civil wars between 1992 and 2002. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF), led by Foday Sankoh, was known for its brutality: mass amputations, systematic rape, and violence against civilians characterized a conflict that turned Sierra Leone into the poorest country in the world. A decade after the conflict came to an end, Sierra Leone has successfully navigated the departure of United Nations peacekeepers, two democratic elections, and the implementation of a series of reforms that have offered hope for a better future to many people who continue to live in extreme poverty.

However, Sierra Leone confronts a persistent challenge: how to effectively manage its natural resources.  For example, despite having one of the world’s richest diamond deposits, Sierra Leone ranks at the bottom of most indicators of human development, with more than 70% of the population living below the poverty line.  The country is emblematic of the idea promoted by political economists of a “resource curse” in which the presence of natural resources undermines the prospects for security, development, democracy, and quality governance.  Natural resources, the mineral sector in particular, have figured centrally in the political economy of Sierra Leone’s one-party rule since independence, its decade-long civil war, and the process of post-conflict reconstruction.

The minerals sector is second only to agriculture as a source of employment and income in Sierra Leone. The country’s resources are mined by approximately 20 small-scale mining operations, and anywhere from 200,000 to 300,000 artisanal miners. The World Bank estimates that the growth of large-scale mining could generate an annual production of over $370 million over the next ten years, and deliver improvements in infrastructure, social services, and livelihoods for an estimated 300,000 people (Rogers 2009).

But realizing these benefits requires substantial improvements in the governance of the minerals sector.  Significant progress has been made with reforms to the mineral sector’s fiscal and regulatory framework, and donors have played a substantial role in this process alongside reformers inside the Government of Sierra Leone. However, as Katherine Rogers of Justice for the Poor reported, “few, if any, of the donor and Government–led efforts have focused systematically on the legal and institutional mechanisms needed to empower communities to hold small and large-scale mining companies and Government accountable for the decisions that affect the social and economic well-being of local communities.”

Resistance from communities to foreign concessionaires has continued to grow with local leaders holding companies responsible for forced dislocation, social upheaval, and the destruction of local environments. Many communities feel that they have not benefited from the extraction of the country’s natural resources. Violence has been the result in a number of mining communities. In addition to the loss of life and the threat of renewed conflict, these tensions undermine the appeal of Sierra Leone to foreign investors and threaten the prospects for much-needed development.

Our partner is Simeon Koroma, a leading civil society activist in Sierra Leone. He is the Executive Director of Timap for Justice, a grassroots NGO developing innovative ways to bridge the formal and customary systems of justice. He’ll be spending the spring quarter at Stanford as a Social Entrepreneur in Residence at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Simeon views the issue of governance around foreign concessions, mining in particular, as one of the most important issues facing Sierra Leone.  He will work closely with us throughout the design project as we help him think through innovative approaches to empower local communities.

We spent our fall quarter out in the field testing prototypes for the Governance Collaboratory in Kenya, South Africa, and Jamaica.  These prototypes allowed us to test the value of design thinking for a range of governance challenges with a diverse set of local actors — technologists, civil society leaders, designers, and government officials.  We learned a tremendous amount and received a very positive feedback from our local partners.  Most encouraging, almost all of our workshop participants have begun to use the tools of human centered design in their work.

Since we are conceiving the Governance Collaboratory as a Stanford-based program, prototypes at home are essential for exploring the models we are likely to employ.  This spring quarter is dedicated to two, more in depth prototypes on campus.  The first is a d.school class which we’ve called Rebooting Government with Design Thinking.  The course will help us understand how we can leverage Stanford’s diverse and talented graduate students to contribute to our work at the Collaboratory.  As with our other prototypes, the course will help us continue to understand how to integrate design thinking with existing tools for governance innovation for different types of problems.

Like all d.school courses, Rebooting Government with Design Thinking is experiential and project based.  Students will focus their efforts on concrete design challenges with two unique partners: Simeon Koroma, a ground breaking civil society activist from Sierra Leone, and the City Manager of East Palo Alto.  By working with government reformers on the inside and a civil society activist on the outside, the course explores the challenges of fostering innovations in governance from both sides of the formal institutional divide.  Students are also examining governance from a theoretical and empirical perspective, enabling them to see how design thinking complements the analytical and policy approaches already being employed.  Also like all d.school courses, ours is taught by a multi-disciplinary teaching team.  Jeremy and I are joined by Liz Ogbu, an architect-trained designer, social innovator, and expert on sustainability and spatial innovation in challenged urban environments globally.

The course is small with just sixteen students and four design teams.  We were thrilled at the response we received from the student body, with over 70 applicants for our 16 spots.  With such an exceptional pool of Stanford graduate students to draw from, we’ve assembled a phenomenal group of students.  Disciplines represented include political science, applied physics, business, human computer interaction, journalism, international policy studies, law, and management science and engineering.  Beyond their disciplinary expertise, our students bring a wealth of professional experience from organizations such as IDEO, the White House, Peace Corps, the mayor’s offices of Los Angeles and New York, USAID, Teach for America, the Israeli Central Intelligence Agency, Apple, and of course, their own startups.

Included in the quarter’s assignments are blog posts which the teams will write at key points in each project lifecycle.  These posts will both help our students crystallize their learnings as well as enable us to share our experience with those following our work from the students’ perspective.  We’ve set up a separate blog for these posts here.

Design thinking has always been keen on observing and interviewing extreme users to learn how their needs and workarounds are amplified; this tends to expose meaningful insights that aren’t easily visible in the middle of the bell curve. But how does a superfan relate to an extreme user and what exactly are they ‘using’? If we think of the hero as a consumable, the superfan is its most ardent extreme user.

Early design principles are already starting to bubble up to the surface from the interviewing we’ve been doing in and out of Stanford. Two weeks ago we went for our first immersive experience at Petulama Speedway. The speedway is a 3/8-mile dirt oval that hosts races every Saturday night; it is the atomic unit of racing heritage in America and its fans are there not so much to see superstars but to congregate with their family and friends, watch new racers rise up through the ranks and just have a plain old good time on a Saturday night. New heroes are made and the environment is fertile for a good story to take hold.

Our experience at the track focused on doing intercept interviews (‘intercepting’ someone in public to do a short interview with them) with fans in the parking lot and the stands. From those interviews a great story emerged; a couple of friends were at the track to support a guy who had never turned a wheel in a race car before, but there he was with a gleaming #3 on the side of his black car. A local pig farmer, Pete Langley was nevertheless on the starting line, his car an homage to Dale Earnhardt himself. There was no way a newcomer like Pete had a chance to win his first race, right?

Start the video from 10:00 for the final lap and watch for the black #3:

It’s hard not to root for pig farmer Pete Langley. The raw emotion of being there produced its own set of atmospherics, but even watching it on video and hearing the narrator you can get the sense of transformation taking place. The spectators at Petaluma were clued in to Pete’s remarkable story by the public address announcer, a Cinderella story that was almost too good to be true. The applause was greater for his win (a support race for the bigger events) than all the others put together. Pete earned his fans that night.

For our class, two design principles emerge from the experience and they are closely related if not co-dependent. The first is that the fan must be able to view the hero experiencing a transformation (from rags to riches / from failure to success / from pig farmer to race winner) and becoming new in that transformation. And because we are focusing on the fan here and not the hero himself/herself, the act of viewing the transformation is actually as important (if not more important) than the transformation itself.

Secondly, our interviewing over the last few weeks revealed a common word: family. It’s not the first word that comes to mind when you think of racing, but it is almost always one of the words that a racing fan will describe when telling you their stories and emotions. Family is important here because the fans in the crowd experienced Pete’s transformation with him and ownership is shared. Frequently you will hear a fan use first person pronouns to talk about their heroes: “We lost that race!” “We won!” “When we lost Dale…” etc. As I walked out of the track on Saturday night, I passed the beer line when one fan said to another: “Pete Langley is one of us!” Farmer Pete Langley better plan on a big pig roast; his family just grew by about 500.

To see more photos from our trip to the track, view this gallery.

Reilly Brennan is co-teaching Understanding Superfans and Their Heroes with Michael Sturtz this quarter at the d.school. He is also the Executive Director of the Revs Program at Stanford University, an appointed lecturer at Stanford University School of Engineering, an advisor to numerous startups and co-conspirator on various rogue projects. His personal land speed record is 168 mph, behind the wheel of a Chaparral 2E.

One of the big questions we have been asking since starting our work is, “Which questions are amenable to design thinking and which are not, and why?”  We wondered if certain types of governance problems are best addressed with alternative methods of problem solving, or how we should use the tools of design thinking differently depending on the types of problems we want to solve.  In order to help us test the limits of using design thinking to address governance challenges, we aimed high with our workshop last month in Jamaica and crafted a design challenge around a complicated, systemic problem: praedial larceny.

The Jamaican government estimates praedial larceny accounts for $5B ($50M USD) in losses for the country’s agriculture sector and is one of the biggest issues facing farmers across Jamaica.  Addressing the problem requires engaging many actors within the Jamaican government; key stakeholders included the Ministry of Agriculture, the Jamaican Agricultural Society (JAS), the Rural Agriculture Development Agency (RADA), the police, the judiciary, and the Cabinet office.   Each of these stakeholders engages with other agencies regularly, as well as critical actors across the agriculture industry: farmers, buyers, vendors, exporters, local community leaders, and the criminals themselves.

The current approach to praedial larceny has not been very effective.  Farmers in Jamaica must be registered, and the registration process collects and stores key information in a central database (managed by RADA).  In addition, farmers must now provide official receipts when selling their produce (managed by JAS).  This allows police to stop agricultural products in transport, ask for an official receipt, and verify that the produce come from a registered farmer with RADA officials.   Farmers find this process onerous and question its efficacy, as receipts are not required to follow products all the way through the distribution chain.  Illiteracy in some cases may also hinder the uptake of the system.  Many farmers also feel that enforcement is the real problem and point to the police for better solutions.  For all these reasons and more, it is estimated that only about 5,000 of Jamaica’s 200,000 farmers are using the receipt book system.

As we worked with RADA (our key partner) to help craft a design challenge, we resisted their instinct to focus narrowly on improvements to the current database and receipt system.  In general, we’ve found it much more impactful to step back from a particular solution to the broader problem, revealing insights and opportunities that would have otherwise been missed.

Given the complexity of praedial larceny, it was challenging to craft a design challenge for a three-day workshop.  Because design thinking focuses on a clearly defined user, we had to focus our design challenge around specific touch points within the broader system.   Now that we have done three separate workshops, we realize that moving from a general problem area to a specific design challenge involves at least two key steps: first, developing an understanding of the overall system and identifying key areas to hone in on; and second, taking into account who the innovator is and what capabilities he/she has to address the issue.

After several conversations with the RADA team, we decided to focus our design challenge around several key constituencies within the system, with the central government as the key implementer: Redesign how one of the following key stakeholders — farmers, communities, police, or vendors — engage (with RADA) in combatting praedial larceny, in an environment where resources are limited, enforcement is perceived as insufficient, and farmers feel overburdened by the current approach.

This exercise helped to clarify some of the bigger questions on using design thinking for governance that we’d been grappling with.  When using human centered design in the private sector, or even in service delivery, the human interaction point is often clear: an organization and its customer.  For issues like praedial larceny, however, a multitude of human interactions are at play.  There are interactions within government, across government agencies and between political leaders and bureaucrats.  There are interactions between government and the citizens it serves, though different government agencies engage different end-users.  One must first analyze this complex system to identify which interactions are bottlenecks or important points of leverage to change dynamics in the system.  Design thinking doesn’t focus on these systemic issues, but it seems essential to have some awareness of how other parts of the system work before designing for a single end user.  The tools of design thinking can then be harnessed to generate innovative ways of approach any one of these interactions.

The value of design thinking for these sorts of systemic problems is something we will continue to explore as we turn to our spring prototypes.

What’s a d.fellowship? Our program is a creative leadership accelerator for professionals with the potential to scale their expertise and incorporate new ways of working. As an education-focused d.fellow, you’ll receive a full-time salary and benefits to commit to a 10-month experience during the academic year. During this time, you’ll develop and launch an initiative using the resources of our d.K12 Lab Network, the d.school, Stanford and the Silicon Valley community.

How does it work? This fully funded, full-time intensive includes both residency periods at the d.school to learn and strengthen design thinking leadership skills, here in sunny Palo Alto, CA, and periods in the field to gain insights and test out prototypes of your ideas. We imagine you’ll split your time about 50/50, but of course that will vary depending on your project.

Can I keep my current job during my d.fellowship? In some cases, depending on the partner organization, the fellow may stay on their employer’s payroll and work closely on prototypes and program development, but be relieved of regular duties. (For example, a classroom teacher could stay employed by their school or district during the fellowship, but would not perform regular classroom duties.)

Here’s a timeline of what to expect:

Fall Quarter: Sept. 3 – Dec. 7
Focus on Learning & Leading
Fellows dive deep into the practice of design thinking by participating in and leading experiential learning. They also take part in weekly seminars that feature Stanford faculty and outside experts in leadership, entrepreneurship, creativity, ethnography, scenario planning and more.

Winter Quarter: Jan. 7 – March 15, 2014
Focus on Leading & Doing
Fellows rev through the design thinking cycle (Empathy, Define, Iterate, Prototype & Test) to sharpen their prototypes. Fellowship events continue when the fellows are not in the field.

Spring Quarter: April 1 – June 30, 2014
Focus on Doing
Using what they’ve learned during the winter and fall, fellows refine their projects and launch them into the world.

What type of people are you looking for? The d.fellows are restless experts, high-performers with an instinct for the edge, self-starters with an impulse for change and the savvy to make it real. Read about our current class and our program leadership here. Read about our d.K12 Lab Network here. We are not seeking applicants outside of the education space at this time.

Possible Areas of Focus (some things we’d love for d.fellows in education to work on)
Future of High School: How might we build a high school model that deeply engages students in real-world projects that build the design thinking, entrepreneurship, and character skills and competencies they need for life + work in the 21st Century?
Future of Blended: How might we leverage technology to build on and develop approaches to personalized learning in, out and in-between school structures?
Challenge-Based Learning: How might we use design thinking to lead the wave of challenge-based learning platforms?
Common Core + X: How might we lead the way to deeply engaging the common core and to building performance-based assessments and other tools and curricula that support those standards?
Redesigning the Role of the Teacher: Blended, personalized, ecosystem-orientated and challenge-based learning all fundamentally shift the traditional role of the teacher. How might we reinvent teacher roles, teacher training and development, and school structures to meet and shape this future?

Why should I apply? Do you have a big idea for how to change teaching + learning? The d.fellowship program gives you the space and resources to rigorously pursue your leadership potential. Rather than come in for a year, study something new, then go back and practice it, you will learn by doing all along.

So it’s an accelerator? Yes, and it’s focused on you, not just your current big idea. At the d.school, we aim to unlock the potential of innovators, knowing that often the innovations will follow. You might be at the transition point in your career between talented practitioner and transformative leader. You might be learning to evolve and scale your expertise into a contribution that is potentially much greater than your individual output to date. If we catch you at the cusp of this transition, if we support you, challenge you and accelerate your leadership, what might that mean for your future? Let’s find out.

Here’s what we need:

• A current CV
• A 1000-word story about who you are and what’s led you to our doorstep
• A 500-word statement explaining your vision for the impact you want to have in the Education sector and the initiative you’d like to incubate at the d.K12 Lab
• A one-minute video on what you need to realize your potential

DEADLINE TO APPLY IS 11:59 pm PST on Monday, May 13. You must send all application materials to fellowships@dschool.stanford.edu by that deadline to be considered for the next round in the selection process. PLEASE PUT YOUR NAME ON EACH PIECE OF YOUR APPLICATION. We’ll accept file formats including .docx, .pdf, .mp4 and .mov.

Open application finalists, focused on the Education sector for 2013-14, will be chosen the week of May 27. All applicants will be notified at that time. Finalist interviews will take place in early June, and d.fellows will be chosen shortly after. The fellowship begins Sept. 3.

Throughout our time thinking through the Governance Collaboratory, there is one question that has loomed perhaps above all others: how should we think about supporting innovation from inside government as compared to working with activists advocating change from the outside?  We have scoped governance (i.e. our “problem space”) to include challenges that both sets of actors address, but our instincts have always led us to believe that working as an innovator inside government is entirely different than as an activist/entrepreneur on the outside.

We ran a workshop this past week in Jamaica with the Rural Agriculture Development Authority (RADA) to help us begin to answer this important question.  We tackled a complex systemic issue involving a host of actors both inside and outside government: praedial larceny. The theft of agricultural produce and livestock is a major issue for the Jamaican economy, and one that the agricultural agencies are committed to addressing along with a host of partners from across the Jamaican government. (Blog post coming soon on what we learned through the process of framing the challenge).

We oriented the workshop around the following design challenge:

Redesign how one of the following key stakeholders — farmers, communities, police, or vendors — engage (with RADA) in combatting praedial larceny, in an environment where resources are limited, enforcement is perceived as insufficient, and farmers feel unfairly burdened by the current approach.

Though we learned a lot about the challenges of addressing such an ambitious problem, our primary objective for the workshop was to understand the process of innovating within the public sector by working with a multitude of stakeholders across government.   It was a large workshop with over 20 participants, representing each of the major government organizations, involved in Agriculture: RADA, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Jamaica Agricultural Society (JAS), the police, and the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI).  We also had representatives from Code for the Caribbean, Slashroots (a Caribbean civic tech NGO), the Mona School of Business & Management, and the Caribbean Open Institute, an IDRC funded initiative, which has been collaborating with the government to support the agricultural sector.

It didn’t take long for the dynamics particular to working inside government to become apparent; it happened as soon as we launched the design challenge and led a discussion around the problem.  The room was full of passion and tension as participants expressed their (very strong) opinions about what the problem is or what the solution should be. We reminded everyone that the objective of the discussion was to give everyone a shared background and understanding of the context, and we asked participants to keep an open mind going into the challenge.  This quickly demonstrated how critical it is to create a collaborative space for stakeholders accustomed to advocating for their agencies and defending their existing efforts.

We divided the participants into four teams, distributing expertise and organizational affiliation across them.  Each team focused on a particular user group as identified in the design challenge.  For need finding, we sent half the teams into the mountains to interview farmers and community leaders, one to the local police station, and one to a nearby market.

When we returned to unpack our interviews and define POVs, we were surprised to see each team reframe the challenge around a farmer.  In part this was because the police and higglers (what Jamaicans call produce vendors in the markets) we interviewed hadn’t themselves experienced issues with praedial larceny.  Almost universally, the teams discovered that farmers faced theft of their crops from within their communities.  Many farmers had a strong sense of who had stolen from them, but for various reasons never took action.  Some felt the formal punishment was too severe; they wanted someone to be thrown in jail for a day, not years.  Others felt the formal system was too costly for them and had little confidence in a positive outcome.  For some, a strong sense of community outweighed a concern for their personal loss: if their poor neighbors needed to steal their food to eat, they were happy to feed them.  For many, strong community norms against being an informant or not upsetting neighbors kept them silent and resentful.   All cases pointed to clear opportunities to design solutions at the community level to address praedial larceny.  It is important to keep in mind these insights reflect what we uncovered in farming communities proximate to Kingston, due to the inherent constraints of a 3 day design workshop.  We would expect to needs to vary in other rural areas throughout Jamaica.

 The teams came up with many compelling ideas from this framing of the problem.  One devised a program to employ the idle youth who appeared to be responsible for much of the theft — by utilizing them to help keep RADA’s farmer databases up to date.  Another developed an innovative mechanism to shift the losses from a single instance of theft from the farmer to the community as a whole, thereby creating incentives for community members to work together to police against larceny.  A third team focused on the possibilities for developing a dispute resolution and compensation mechanism outside the formal system.

When the teams presented their final ideas to the group, some of the predictable intergovernmental dynamics returned.  Despite going through the design process themselves over three days, some people immediately dismissed ideas as infeasible (e.g. that’s not allowed under the existing law) or inappropriate (e.g. that should be done by the government not the community).

In general, everyone enjoyed the workshop immensely.  We heard familiar sentiments of enthusiasm during our debrief:  “I wish the workshop were longer than three days,” “I wish I had learned this years ago,” “This is such a better way of approaching problems than the one we use.”  But we probed them to think about the challenges they might face in taking their learnings back to their organizations.  People expressed concern that their bosses would really need to participate in the workshop themselves to appreciate the ideas coming out of it, but that it wasn’t in the culture of the government for high level officials to engage in such activities.  Others anticipated the pressures to get things done quickly would be at odds with the experimental, iterative nature of design thinking (which was consistent with what we heard in our own empathy interviews in the fall).

Of the three workshops we have done thus far, we’ve probably learned the most from this one simply because complexity was ratcheted up on every dimension: the issue we chose to address, the stakeholders involved, even the size of the workshop.  In our next couple posts, we’ll share what we learned and the key insights that will inform the design of the Collaboratory next year.