Bromford Lab: Thinking differently about failure
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A workshop from our Learning from Failure Roadshow
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Bromford Lab: Thinking differently about failure
- 1. THINKING DIFFERENTLY ABOUT FAILURE @BromfordLab Simon Penny @simon_penny Michelle Butler @chellekbutler Katie Fletcher @katie_f182
- 2. Hello & Welcome We are part of the Innovation Team from Bromford Lab
- 4. Innovation is all about getting things wrong over and over again, but a bit less wrong at each iteration Philippa Jones CEO Bromford
- 5. Globally we are all working on the same problems Technology has speeded up but productivity has slowed Lots of money for reports but little for practical action No coordination to scale existing innovations Organisations have little time to experiment The innovation problems we all need to fix
- 6. What Bromford set out to fix Replacing Poor problem definition Fear of failure Initiative-itis Zombie Projects with Evidence based fast fail experimentation
- 7. CHANGE IS OFTEN IMPEDED BY OUR RELUCTANCE TO TALK ABOUT FAILURE OR SHARE WHAT’S NOT WORKED
- 11. Avoiding Silver Bullet Solutions
- 12. “Hey John, wouldn’t it be great if we had a portal that would allow us to login and access all of our transactions with the council, in one place, at anytime?!” SAID NOBODY EVER! @BromfordLab
- 14. Testing & Evaluation Pathway INSIGHTS PROTOTYPE EVIDENCE PILOT EVALUATE Plan and undertake activities to investigate your hypothesis and understand more about the problem you are trying to solve. Be flexible in your approach. Gather evidence to prove or disprove the hypothesis. If applicable / appropriate redefine the design brief and undertake a new round of prototyping. Take learning from the prototyping activity and design a time based pilot. Move from a position of understanding outputs to understanding outcomes. Evaluate the impact of the pilot, taking into account the cause and effect of your interventions. If applicable / appropriate build a service blueprint. Identify business and user needs through data driven intelligence and human centred insight. Develop a hypothesis to test. 1 2 3 4 5 Iterate Refine Redefine
- 16. 1. Openness 2. Diversity 3. Serendipity 4. Fairness 5. Experimentation 6. Play 7. Giving 1. Excellence 2. Loyalty 3. Dependability 4. Success 5. Quality 6. Precision 7. Reciprocity Values of Innovation Values of Production
- 18. Journey to Localities Starting Well Starting Well offered intensive face to face coaching to customers who need the most support to get off to the best possible start in their new home. Money Advice Service Offered to all new customers in the pilot, the service provided a range of money advice services from simple budgeting to complex debt management. Assertive Housing Management A proactive coaching approach to our relationship with new customers based on individual need and aspirations as well as more assertive and prompt action where the relationship with the customer is not working. Employment and Skills This covered a range of interventions across all of our areas of operation; the Connect Hub, 121 skills coaching, work clubs and an Employability Skills Programme that supported customers to develop their work related skills and where appropriate, enter employment. Leaving Well To help Lichfield customers who are leaving us to end their tenancies in the best way possible. Each service was delivered by a different colleague. In 2014/15 Bromford trialled a new model of housing management. We gave it the catchy title of “Service offer Pilots”.
- 19. Think big but start small Avoid solutions in search of a problem Every problem is an opportunity Don’t keep talking about it - try it! A quick fail beats a slow steady death Innovation is about impact not ideas Creativity is intelligence having fun Go to the centre of the network Fast failure is good risk management Be ruthless pulling the plug Lab Lessons
- 20. tEsT PilOt outCOMes “Right, that’s sort of OK” “Needs more work” Usually Crap iDEA Kill It, sHelVE It, Release It. ‘Cursory Design’ Actual Design Evidencing Completing A strategy based on small losses takes most of the risk out of innovation
- 21. Chindogu!
- 23. Chindogu Ten Commandments A Chindogu cannot be for real use A Chindogu must exist There must be the spirit of anarchy Chindogu are tools for everyday life Chindogu are not for sale Humour must be the sole reason for creating Chindogu Chindogu is not propaganda Chindogu are never taboo Chindogu cannot be patented Chindogu are without prejudice 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
- 25. Any Questions
Editor's Notes
- Risk is life. We accept this. We teach our children to ride a bike on grass so that when they fall off they don't hurt themselves. Slowly, but surely they keep getting back up and trying again. Through this ‘iteration’ they learn how to ride, and all of a sudden they balance themselves. In our personal lives we learn how to manage risk. Innovation is all about managing risk. If we refuse to embrace failure as part of an iterative process, we can’t innovate. The risk isn't that we will fail, it is that we will not learn from our failures. At Bromford we embrace failure and recognise that it is an integral part of innovation. “75% of what we work on will fail. You’re funding failure. But 25% will be cool stuff we’ve never done or realised we could do” - Paul Taylor & Vicky Green pitch for Bromford Lab Source: Bromford Lab Blog - http://www.bromfordlab.com/labblogcontent/2015/4/2/target-practice-how-to-measure-an-innovation-lab --- A quick fail beats a slow steady death Nobody wants things to fail, but the reality is that many projects fail to meet their intended objectives. Bromford want to avoid this by failing things as soon as possible, building early evidence that what we are trying out stands a good chance of success. Fast failure is good risk management The biggest barrier in most organisations is risk aversion – so anticipate this in advance. Show that you acknowledge risk and have put as much cotton wool around your idea as possible. Governance teams can be your greatest enemies or biggest friends. Be ruthless pulling the plug Not every idea or project is destined for success. Stopping a project is a difficult decision but in certain cases, it’s inevitable. Making things work artificially is not always in the interests of the customer or the company. You need to know when to pull the plug early to avoid spending more money on well-intentioned vanity projects. Surce: Bromford Lab Blog - http://www.bromfordlab.com/labblogcontent/2016/6/6/10-innovation-lessons-from-two-years-in-bromford-lab
- We realised that these main areas are the main reasons why true innovation fails. We’re not suggesting we’ve cracked it but we have definitely found that by following these ideals, we have delivered some great service design changes and avoided implementing ones that just didn’t fit with the Bromford model. A lot of people embark on grand ideas, trying to be innovative, but at the end of it, have actually achieved nothing because whilst the idea may have been good, there was no clear indication of the problem such idea was trying to solve. In the Lab, we find that effective problem definition helps us in our innovation journey and provides us with a reference point to go back to in order to measure how effective the proposed change would actually be in a ‘business as usual’ situation. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work, we kill it dead and move on to the next one, taking all the learning outcomes we possibly can to help inform our next steps!
- People will talk themselves out of something. Sometimes you just have to build it in a controlled environment and see how it goes. Learning as you go.
- We are a big believer in the deployment of tests before moving to pilots. Why would you want to commit money and resources to something, which you have no idea will actually work in the real world! Testing out beforehand means you see quick outcomes that will further inform whether you would even move to a pilot, and if you do, how you might deploy it to get well informed outcomes. While at surface level they both seem similar, a test and a pilot are nearly polar opposites in the way they go about things… Testing Tests tend to focus explicitly on the building blocks of a new service. They are time-limited, closed off experiments that help us evaluate the component in isolation, without any of the noise that ‘real life’ might generate. Not that this real noise isn’t relevant – it just muddles things early on. Light, fast and ‘dirty’ tests come with relatively low risk so we can afford to do lots of them – indeed we can even fail lots of them without worrying too much. Much better to fail quick, fail cheap, right? More often than not it’s not the idea that fails, just the way we’ve chosen to implement it. Tests are also a great way of identifying weaknesses in your method, or the data you’re trying to collect. They might eve highlight a new problem – e.g. engagement problems – that you were otherwise unaware of and could present significant delays on a pilot. It’s important to document a test so we prep all concepts with a test framework that outlines all the aims/objectives, the methodology and all the data we’re trying to collect. Data requirements are small and focus solely on what effects you're trying to observe. Try not to build in measures that cross over into another idea you might have. Tests can be iterative and exploratory – encouraging colleagues or customers to find a way past a particular problem, or even identify the problems in the first place. When you’ve finished testing you should be able to pull together all the information and produce a service offer document or something similar that outlines your idea in depth, with any changes as a result of your testing included. Piloting Pilots evaluate the whole, assembled service and usually take place over a protracted time-frame so you can spot the interactions you might’ve missed in testing stages. This is ‘adding the noise’ back in to see if your idea holds up. Because of the resourcing, duration, risks, costs and difficulty in mobilizing – you don’t really want to fail pilots. Better to fail a pilot than have a rubbish service implemented, granted. Then again, much better to drop an idea as a result of a couple of failed tests too… A whole swathe of measures will likely be drawn up for data-hungry pilots, which drastically limits your ability to adapt and change the way the pilot is ran… or if you do, you can’t trust your before/after measures anymore. Pilots are the only way you can test your idea out in real life situations, so are probably important or whatever... but don’t get caught in the trap of fetishizing about how many pilots you have on the go at any one time. Calving more unwieldy pilots into existence is not a badge of honour, it’s a badge of not valuing your own time. Finally, Pilots should never be implemented or scaled into the business without being evaluated. If you're not going to let the idea fail, there's no point piloting it in the first place. Source: Bromford Lab Blog - http://www.bromfordlab.com/labblogcontent/2015/7/22/tests-vs-pilots
- Internal based innovation fails when the large company decides to use the same processes it uses to manage it core products to manage its innovation projects. Internal based innovation fails when the large company decides to use the same processes it uses to manage it core products to manage its innovation projects. Guerrilla Movement: Sometimes it is very clear that you will never get full executive endorsement for innovation. The executive are focused on cash cow products and the best you can hope for is support from a handful of visionary leaders within your business. In this case, innovators might consider leaving the company for greener pastures.
- There were some downsides: 1. With a large number of customers, the workload for the housing managers doing “Assertive housing management” could fluctuate wildly. 2. Some of the admin – and extra appointments we created for customers – was causing frustration. A housing manager would meet the customer, then perhaps refer to the starting well service. Or if a housing manager received notice from a tenant, they’d have to book a separate appointment for the customer to see a leaving well advisor. 3. Some services clearly had impact, whereas customer and data both suggested that others were “Nice to have, but not changing anything”. So we looked at how we could take the best bits of the service, with none of the downsides.