Lab Planning #12: The Week That Was

Week 12 of our new approach to working out loud - and we've let ourselves down on the production of update posts. Tell us off if we don't improve next week...

So this week has been mainly about:

REVISING OUR APPROACH TO CHANGE

As part of creating a 2.0 version of Bromford requests for change now need to go through a Lab based approach. So how do we ensure people bring us problems not solutions? We've been redesigning our approach before doing some live testing over the next couple of weeks.

MOCKING UP SERVICE DESIGNS

If there's one thing we've learned about presenting ideas and plans to colleagues over the past three years - it's been to make concept designs as super-simple as possible. So we've been busy designing up some visuals on #PropTech and #FinTech tests (watch this space) that need to be understandable to non-geeks.

Additionally we are beginning an ambitious plan to present a visual of all 30+ service areas across Bromford and what they will look like post-transformation. 

A FRESH APPROACH TO DIVERSITY

On Monday we held a session to review our approach to equality and diversity - and considered how we could all move more towards thinking of inclusion in a much wider context. As John Wade writes here we've been conditioned to believe that the people with the most knowledge, the best ideas and the right answers, will probably be middle aged white men.

In a really open and challenging session we learned that Laboratory experiments have found that humans, upon meeting someone new, will automatically encode just three points of information about them: age, gender, and race. The tribal nature of our chimpanzee cousins runs deep in our DNA. 

Additionally we talked about biases we don't even know we have (it’s been found that babies universally prefer faces of their own race), and how they may inform our decisions and work styles.

We'll post the outcomes of the session soon. For now - why don't you try out this fab tool shared by Michelle Beardshaw. How implicitly biased are you? The results might surprise you.

Have a great weekend