2. Anticipating Barriers to Impact
Anticipation
Can you predict what will happen?
Can you predict the responses of participants to your design?
Can you predict what their misconceptions or challenges will be with this topic?
Anticipation is a design skill. It allows you to create better learning supports, frameworks, and learning experiences. For example, let’s say you notice a problem of schools having challenges that the youth leader cannot handle. So, you want to design a system for connecting officers with such problem schools. You can anticipate that you will need some way of tracking those problems. You can also anticipate that field staff will not be happy to do a lot of paperwork and will see it as additional work. The more advanced designers have very specific predictions. An advanced designer might predict that field staff would be able to request officer assistance by answering three questions only and be able to list the common problems schools face in a simple drop down menu to take only 5 minutes per school to complete. For impact, it is important to anticipate internal and contextual behaviors such as required time or data to complete the new report.
Anticipation does not equal idealism.
Ideally, if the local government officer is informed about the program, s/he should support its implementation. Teachers should prioritize student learning. Ideally students do their homework. But ideals often do not happen in reality! Proximity and awareness does not always lead to engagement. Engagement does not always lead to impact. Try to avoid idealism in your designs. This doesn’t mean having low expectations. It means you should be realistic to ensure your designs have a good chance for success. Low expectations would be: "Oh, students cannot speak English well in this area so they should not present." No! Realistic would be: "Oh, students cannot speak English well so we should allocate more time for presenting."
Anticipate by visualizing the path to impact!
Designer Dreams
Sometimes the optimism of a designer can get in the way of them being realistic.
Will a person change their whole way of working after just a one day training?
No. Not maybe. Not if the training is really really good. No. No way. Never.
So, if your training anticipates a 100% revolution, your training is destined to disappoint you and others. Why? Because that is not how people change.
So, if you know for example that this government employee we are training to implement our teacher support has a documented history of not supporting teachers due to their administrative demands, what do you do?? Well the training you design won't fix that barrier to impact. You might be tempted to make a training anyway with the theme: "just do it", even though the last three similar trainings all failed... you set yourself up to fail as well!
Unstoppable Problem-Solvers
Unfortunately, you are a professional designer and not a professional critic. This means it is not enough for you to just acknowledge problems, reasons why people will never do what we want them to do...no no...you have to also propose solutions. Proposing solutions is your number one job as a designer.
Proposing solutions is your number one job as a designer.
New solutions preferable.
"Training them" is not a solution. "Raising awareness" is not a solution. Solutions pinpoint specific problems and provide specific ways of either removing those problems or working around them.
The key to making a good solution is in uncovering a good problem to solve. Yes, there are good problems and bad problems.
Bad Problem:
1. After 2 years of training, the field team tells you that the teachers do not understand the importance of portfolios so you must "train them on it".
Good Problem:
1. After 2 years of training, the field team tells you that the teachers do not "understand the importance of portfolios". You inquire as to whether the teachers were previously trained in portfolios. They were! So, you inquire further, why, if teachers have been trained on portfolios, does the field team thinks the problem is that teachers do not "understand the importance of portfolios". The field team responds "because teachers do not make time to grade portfolios". You ask "Why not?". "Because they have 40 students and 5 classes to grade so it is a lot of work".
Voila!! Now you have the real "good" problem: "Teachers do not have a way to grade 40 student portfolios every day given they teach 5 classes." Now, create a design solution to solve that! For example, you might give them a way to grade portfolios quickly. That is very different, and deeper, and more effective of a solution than you would have had if you only focused on "awareness of portfolio's importance".
Assume a technical barrier to impact, not an attitude problem!
Assessment #2
Complete the following Barriers to Impact Framework. Use your current design project to complete the barriers to impact template (tab #2). If you have any questions, ask an experienced Educate! designer to help you! Send your completed Barriers to Impact Worksheet to: designacademy@experienceeducate.org
Barriers to Impact Worksheet (Design Academy).xlsx