Who Gets to Design?
When you learn that it’s the spreadsheet folks who decide what gets designed
Thanks for following along with this fortnightly series and for those who continue to answer the call to Contribution Design. This series is for people who work in complexity: social innovators, policy architects, ecosystem leaders, scientific inventors, community-centered organizers, and impact funders who make efforts to move beyond futility and result in positive systems change.
“Thank goodness we can just decide this in spreadsheets,” the Senior Vice President said. I once worked on a complex public-private partnership—a corporate, government, or non-governmental organization. I can’t tell you which corporate, government, or non-governmental organization. It was a while ago. But I have heard this sentiment, which you might never hear if you work in social impact, design, or policy-making. I thought you would want to know.
Everyone’s intentions were good.
The design team had engaged in deeply human-centered work; months had been carved out for research, partnering with community-based organizations, co-designing the research agenda with local interests in mind, and creating engagement avenues to ensure that full participation was accessible and minimally harmful across a diverse representation of community participants.
We had systems maps showing the complex dynamics that led to the intractable and structural dynamics that seemed to lock the perpetual problems in place. Service design blueprints were generated showing the points of interface between the public, private, and third-sector partners.
My job was “business models”—novel combinations that would make sense for each partner involved while still preserving the mission's intent. We prototyped a lovely portfolio of concepts to see if these problems could begin to be unlocked.
Now, it was time for the decision. Which concepts would get the green light and proceed with funding? Which concepts would get the red light and never be seen again? Which would get the yellow light and seek more evidence to prove this was on the correct vector of change?
[I’m surprised to have found, after searching in a plain vanilla image library, an accurate depiction of how critical decisions are made in the real world. Can you guess which one is the truest? But I’m also noticing that in the most accurate depiction, the person in a suit has their fist in the air. Is this a coded message from the photographer to the users of this photo service?]
It was a Webex call, an artifact of pre-pandemic times. We opened the spreadsheet to share. The Corporate Senior Vice President wanted to meet with me, the model designer, and her Chief Comptroller, who knew his spreadsheets well. They asked me to change an assumption here, a variable there, to play with the trajectories of outcomes. Without the Regional Director of the Government. Without the Executive Director’s Chief of Staff of the Non-Governmental Organization. Without the Lead Systems Designer. Without the Participatory Action Researchers. Without the Community Benefit Organization Governance Counsel.
You think this story will turn dark.
That I’m telling the story of the failed vaccine1 or flouridation2 or rail service3 public-private partnerships. Or that I’ve removed the names of the stories to protect myself and prevent legal action from breaking my non-disclosure agreement. That the Corporate Senior Vice President and her Chief Comptroller made cruel, calculated bets and used their knowledge of spreadsheets and finer points of assumptions about weighted cost of capital and international transfer costs to get an edge, favor the investor shareholder interest, diminish the pro-human, pro-earth public-private partnership we were creating. Or that the more insidious and unconscious type of blindspot decision resulted from unawareness of the consequences.4
But these things didn’t happen. The Corporate Senior Vice President and her Chief Comptroller played with the variables, turning them into the interests of various stakeholders. One even joked that we could take advantage of those with social science and design degrees and tweak everything toward different outcomes. This gave us a secret power to change the fate of this public-private partnership, and no one would know the wiser. We could completely stack the deck towards the interests of the corporate shareholders, and the press release would read the same.
Instead, we changed all of the variables back to the original intention. A good plan. For a better world. To address the sticky wicket. To experiment with a portfolio of solutions to change the wicked problem. To unwind the complex structural morass. In favor of community wishes.
I tell you this story of a non-event because these are the decision rooms that are rarely included when discussing how we change the process of change to redesign for a better world.
I love design methods – I teach in a design school. Representing multiple perspectives.5 Appreciatively inquiring.6 Facilitating everyone’s capability to design.7 Designing when everyone can design.8
We have come to believe that strategic design methods and artifacts inform our decisions about change. These efforts excite government policy innovators, foundation program directors, and non-profit leaders.
But we are leaving out the rooms where the allocation decisions happen.
Allocation of materials.
Allocation of money.
Allocation of leadership support.
Allocation so that we make sure everyone gets some pie, and enough pie to live.
Allocation to the part of a pie we want to grow, so we get a bigger pie, but of course, a sustainable and regenerative pie to please the degrowthers.
Allocation of scalable pie-making tools to people historically excluded for access to these tools.
Allocation to the part of the pie that we want to shrink because if we continue to make pies that way, we might ruin our future changes of pie making, or even living, on this planet.9
Allocation of time and attention to make good decisions about the allocation of it all.
The current crisis on university campuses underscores that we have failed to manage a social decision-making process when the critical decisions align purpose, intent, and principle with long-term financial sustainability and legacy.
Before you attempt to change the world through any means, you might want to answer the question: Who designs? Who gets to contribute? Then, include a stakeholder map that locates the people with spreadsheet skills and identifies when and how they meet and make decisions- with little arrows pointing to those rooms you have found.
Key questions before initiating a contribution design process:
How do we determine which principles and objectives align allocation decisions to the world we want and do not want? What is the current tacit or explicit process for making sense of the world? Who is being tasked with understanding global and local dynamics? Who is responsible for the ongoing research, mainly if the intent is focused on an extraordinarily long-term horizon, like a university endowment? Who negotiates to make trade-off decisions when they need to be made? Or go back to the original principles and make amendments when the social, cultural, geopolitical, and technical conditions change?
Next up in contribution design is to explore: Who does what to whom?
Elder, K and Malter, J (2022) COVAX: A Broken Promise to Vaccine Equity. Doctors Without Borders. https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/covax-broken-promise-vaccine-equity
Freeze, R. A., & Lehr, J. H. (2009). The Fluoride Wars: How a Modest Public Health Measure Became America's Longest-Running Political Melodrama. John Wiley & Sons.
Bowman, A. (2015). An Illusion of Success: The Consequences of British Rail Privatisation. In Accounting forum (Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 51-63). No longer published by Elsevier.
Marcelle, G (2021) “Mobilizing and Deploying Capital for Good: The Triple B© Framework” Resilience Capital Ventures, Washington DC.
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press.
Whitney, D., & Cooperrider, D. (2011). Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change. ReadHowYouWant. com.
Papanek, V., & Fuller, R. B. (1972). Design for the Real World.
Manzini, E. (2015). Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation. MIT Press.
Kelly, M. (2001). The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.