Turning research into opportunities

Knowing who your stakeholders are and how they feel in relation to the challenge is really important to the process. Engaging with, and speaking to, as many of them as possible will unearth information and knowledge that traditional research often misses. Tailor your engagement to your audience and take the time to build a relationship – a relaxed atmosphere of mutual trust will often bring new insight.

Understanding what is currently going on is very important. From finding out how people use a service, watching how transactions take place or detailing the processes at the back end, observation is really powerful. We have highlighted a few of our favourite techniques below:
- Face-to-face interviews
- Journals, diaries and so on
- Fly on the wall observation
- User safari - be the user

Since the beginning of time humans have shared information using story. Words and pictures used to deliver an important message or engage our curious minds. Whether we are encouraging people to engage with us, reporting to project leads or conveying research to the team, the power of storytelling is a constant thread in the work we do.

Capturing your research on a “living wall” helps to build understanding and insight as the project develops. As our knowledge grows we can start to look for common themes and patterns. Clustering these and developing them into problem statements allows you to start to thinking about “how might we…” tackle the challenges in front of us.

As this initial research phase comes to a close, this workshop provides a framework for converting research to insight and helps confirm or re-frame the initial challenge. Often initial assumptions have changed and a number of smaller challenges have surfaced that, if solved, will allow you to improve the overall picture from a number of angles.

Typically, we have “landscaped” when bringing partners and colleagues together. Identifying ongoing work and aspirations allows us to make connections and pool resources. We also use this process before we start to develop ideas or solutions to assess whether someone has already solved our problem.

Following the challenge framing workshop and landscaping process, a final challenge brief documents is completed. This provides a summary of our findings, calls out the challenges and provides suggested next steps for the client. If these involve working further with our team, we would submit this document to the project approval board for agreement on next steps before it goes to the client.

We put people at the heart of everything we do. Collaboration with our clients is very important to our process. At times, our approach can be very different from ‘traditional’ council projects – it is really important to build trust and understanding with your clients. The link between the team and your challenge owner makes your process clear and creates a safe environment to experiment, challenge and innovate together.

• Our guide to Observation
• Our guide to How Might We
• Challenge Brief Example
• Challenge Brief Template
• Creative Matrix Example
• Creative Matrix Template
• Challenge Framer Workshop
• Guide to Clustering