Using Human-Centered Design to Operationalize Strategic Plans

How Olio uses Human-Centered Design to jump start and sustain strategic priorities

If your strategic priorities involve improving your organization’s sector position, stakeholders’ experiences with your services, or your community engagement initiatives, taking a Human-Centered approach will unlock endless opportunities for greater organizational impact. This is why Olio uses Human-Centered Design to help organizations transition from a static vision to momentum-building implementation. 

We engage external stakeholders throughout the process to identify and inform the greatest opportunities for impact.

Certain strategic plan priorities require organizations to think and take action beyond their internal operations. Topics that intersect with systemic issues, or changes that involve external collaboration with different communities and ecosystems, can be daunting to dig into. What’s more, when organizations are not equipped with tools to thoughtfully explore these spaces, it can leave a void for less effective approaches to take hold—instead of working from evidence, decision makers place big bets based on assumptions, teams and leaders revert back to what’s been done in the past, or worst of all, the priority falls by the wayside entirely. 

Human-Centered Design offers an alternative path. Olio approaches complex, nuanced situations as opportunities to get curious, play and experiment. Taking on the role of empathetic investigator and tinkerer, we chip away at both the knowns and unknowns in methodical, incremental doses to understand where (and how) your organization has the greatest potential to grow its influence. 

We start by grounding in the lived experiences of the people who are most impacted, and look at the challenges and opportunities from all angles. Elevating stakeholder voices is how we begin to see situations from new perspectives and generate confidence that we’re going in the right direction.

Ethnographic research, journey mapping, and role playing are just some of the Human-Centered Design techniques that not only immerse us in stakeholders’ points of view, but actually get stakeholders involved in the problem solving. A deep degree of connection is necessary for priorities like these to create meaningful change, and carving out space for people to actively play a role in the process is critical.

We collect data in ways that lead to actionable insights and encourage continuous learning.

Because Olio works almost exclusively with nonprofits, we understand the importance of demonstrating credibility and accountability to donors, funders, and other stakeholders. We also know that some strategic priorities are more conducive to collecting anecdotal feedback, which can be a challenge to measure and quantify. 

Fortunately, Human-Centered Design is loaded with frameworks and methods for collecting  structured qualitative, quantitative, and observational data. By triangulating anecdotal feedback with other types of information, we are able to validate and contextual these findings, increasing their credibility and reliability. 

And, because Human-Centered Design encourages systematic data collection throughout all steps of the process, we can pass on knowledge and tools for your organization to practice continuous learning beyond our direct engagement.

We use ideation and iteration to balance desirability, feasibility and viability.

Nonprofits are all too familiar with the reality of being tasked with increasing impact with finite resources (e.g., time, budget, technology capabilities). When innovation is at the heart of a strategic priority, these constraints often force leaders to make tough decisions about which solutions to develop and how deeply to invest in them. That’s a lot of pressure to “get it right.”

These are the situations where ideation and iteration become a nonprofit leader’s best friends. Human-Centered Designers love constraints, because we see them as one of many lenses through which to view a design challenge—and uncover a more creative solution.

At Olio, we believe that project limitations in no way limit your organization’s potential to do something impactful, and we maintain this perspective through expansive ideation. By stretching our thinking to the far corners of our imaginations, we strive to put every possible idea on the table.

This allows us to get predictable ideas out of the way and generate fresh concepts that are truly inspired by your stakeholders. With a broad range of ideas to consider, we assess the benefits of implementation against the resources each will require, ensuring we only pursue options that have the right impact to investment ratio for your organization. 

Whatever makes the cut is developed into a testable model, and we engage stakeholders to provide vital feedback. Then we continue to shape solutions that align with internal and external needs. If something falls short of expectations, we scrap it and apply the insights we captured to the next potential solution. If we discern that a solution is desirable to stakeholders, sustainable for your organization, and a viable source of impact, our final step is to work with internal stakeholders to develop a launch and implementation plan. By working creatively, quickly, and iteratively, we overcome analysis paralysis and mitigate the risk of overinvesting in an unbalanced solution.