Design Thinking and Church Community: Step Five - Test!

This post is the sixth and final post in a series on building Digital Church Community with Design Thinking, a series responding to the challenges of building Christian community in a pandemic. Be sure to check out the intro, as well as our guide to Empathizing, Defining, Ideating, and Prototyping!

As we continue through our process of re-inventing church community through design thinking, we make a decisive pivot from the theoretical to the concrete. In the "Testing" phase of design thinking, we test and measure the effectiveness of our prototypes.

According to interaction-design.org, step five of design thinking puts our prototype into a pilot test:

Evaluators rigorously test the prototypes. Although this is the final phase, design thinking is iterative: Teams often use the results to redefine one or more further problems. So, you can return to previous stages to make further iterations, alterations and refinements...

Once we start our test, it's all downhill from here.

With enough intentionality, our prototypes should lend themselves to an easy testing format. If we created visual storyboards, we should have a clear idea of who will be involved with the test, what the test might look like, and how success might appear. But to run an effective test, it's helpful to clarify a few parameters:

First, what is the medium of the test? In this time of social distancing, we are likely executing our test virtually. We need to ensure all parties have access to the right tools, at the right level of permissions. What software do we need? How do we ensure everyone involved in running the test has administrative access to these tools? How do we ensure everyone participating in the test has end-user access?

Second, how do we get the word out? We can't run a test if nobody shows up (though nobody showing up might indicate that we need to go back to the Ideate phase!). If we're testing something new with virtual worship, we need to make sure to communicate the change ahead of time, describing any new expectations for involvement. Simplicity is key. If someone needs to click a link to participate in the test, make sure that the link is easy to access, that it is communicated through multiple channels.

Third, what are we going to measure? Testing is not a subjective process. It involves the rigorous collection of data. Before the test starts, we need to understand what we will measure, and how we will find the metrics. Are we testing page views or web interactions? Participation or attendance? With YouTube views or Google Analytics? Be specific about the numbers you will collect, how you will collect them, and over what duration.

Finally, how long do we allow the test to run? This is typically the most ambiguous question related to design thinking and church community. Do we run a test for one Sunday, or do we run it for a month? Do we run it for one worship service, or for our entire church community? To determine these answers, it's helpful to consider what constitutes a valid test - not a rejection/acceptance of our design, but enough data to reevaluate our problem statement and begin the design thinking process anew.

To that extent, we should run our test for as long as it takes to initiate a new round of design thinking, to truly make our process iterative. In most situations, this means allowing a test to run for a month or more, so that it runs through a full communications cycle in the life of the congregation, so that it engages all regular worship attendees. With four weeks or more of data, we can gather enough perspectives so as to begin a new phase of empathizing and defining.

Iteration is always the key to testing, testing is never about reaching a finish line. Design thinking, particularly in the context of building Christian community, is never about delivering a finished product or a silver-bullet solution.

A wise pastor recently shared with me how the use of the word "solution" can be problematic in the church. We're not in the business of solutions. We're seeking to live more fully into our new normal, harnessing the gifts that God has given to us and to our community so that we can bring God's healing and redeeming word to a hurting world. In the context of building Christian community, a test can never "fail" if it leads us to further conversation and discovery, if it helps us to move more decisively into this new normal.

So when is your test done? It's done when you're ready to start over, taking all that you have learned, and committing once again to the work of empathy and listening. It's done when you acknowledge that our designs our never complete, that our community is always changing, that our call as the church is ever-evolving. As church leaders, we design. The spirit dances. And on we go.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of Grace and Gigabytes, now available wherever books are sold.

Design Thinking and Church Community: Step Four - Prototype!

This post is the fifth in a six-part series on building Digital Church Community with Design Thinking, a series responding to the challenges of building Christian community in a pandemic. Be sure to check out the intro, as well as our guide to Empathizing, Defining, and Ideating!

As we continue through our process of re-inventing church community through design thinking, we turn the corner from thinking to doing. In the "Prototyping" phase of design thinking, we seek to create usable versions of our top ideas to put into a pilot test.

According to interaction-design.org, step four of design thinking is the step we start to create solutions:

This [prototyping] is an experimental phase. The aim is to identify the best possible solution for each problem found. Your team should produce some inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product (or specific features found within the product) to investigate the ideas you’ve generated. This could involve simply paper prototyping.

With prototyping, the way forward becomes immediately clear

But how do we know which of our brainstormed ideas deserve an "inexpensive, scaled-down" prototype?

Start by consolidating ideas. See which topics from the ideation phase are duplicates, or which ideas could be logically combined. If we merge the ideas where there is overlap, we will find that most of the heavy-lifting of prioritization happens automatically. Once your group has "de-duplicated" the list, you'll have to make some tough calls on which thoughts to advance.

Some groups simply vote on the ideas they would most like to prototype (see the Nominal Group Technique for more on effective voting processes). If everyone on the team is given one vote, several ideas usually emerge as consensus favorites. The challenge with voting is that it is subject to diluted results. If one idea gets 2 votes and 30 others get 1 vote, is it really the front-runner? To avoid complicating design thinking with the complexities of an electoral college-like system, you might prioritize with two questions:

• Which idea is the easiest to implement?

• Which idea will have the greatest impact?

If we prototype based on simplicity, while also prototyping based on impact, we are likely to balance the critical factors of feasibility and effectiveness. We may even find that the ideas with the greatest impact are also the ideas that are easiest to implement! These two questions should lead us into the development of no more than two prototypes for our design thinking test.

But what does prototyping actually look like, in the context of building Christian community? It's a valid question since we're likely designing a process or set of communal actions, rather than a tangible product.

The key to our prototype is that we should be able to use it in our pilot testing. So what we're seeking with our prototype are the parameters that will guide our test. While we can document these ideas in a word doc, outlining the who, what, when, where, and how of our prototype, many innovators will find it more enlightening to create a prototype in the format of a storyboard.

By actually drawing visual representations of our prototype, we can imagine creative ideas that the written word may not facilitate. We can imagine how our ideas will pull our community together, as we remember that this process focuses on real human beings, not textual abstractions! And we can imagine the best-case scenario for our ideas, appreciating how our community will benefit once our vision is realized.

Shelve any concerns about a lack of artistic aptitude. Ignore any preconceived notions of what a storyboard must look like. We're church leaders, not animators for Pixar or The Simpsons. Stick-figures are just fine. Clip art and stock images from Google search are completely adequate. And we don't need expensive software. There are countless free storyboarding apps on the web. I simply use Canva or Google Slides. The tools are unimportant. This is not a high-tech, visually appealing process. It is a collaborative, imaginative process, one that requires creativity, not artistic skill.

The final output of the prototyping phase is a storyboard that guides us through the implementation of our ideas, illustrating a successful outcome of the pilot test.

Having created our prototypes in response to our ideation lists, we now must seek to put our ideas into a pilot test. We look towards testing, the final phase of design thinking, and the subject of our next post.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of Grace and Gigabytes, now available for pre-order wherever books are sold.

Design Thinking and Church Community: Step Three - Ideate!

This post is the fourth in a six-part series on building Digital Church Community with Design Thinking, a series responding to the challenges of building Christian community in a pandemic. Be sure to check out the intro, as well as our guides to Step One and Step Two!

As we continue through our process of re-inventing church community through design thinking, we transition from listening to and defining problems to identifying bold new solutions. In the "Ideate" phase of design thinking, we seek to generate many ideas by throwing out the constraints and limitations that might inhibit our creativity.

According to interaction-design.org, step three of design thinking involves with "challenging assumptions and creating ideas":

Now, you’re ready to generate ideas. The solid background of knowledge from the first two phases means you can start to “think outside the box”, look for alternative ways to view the problem and identify innovative solutions to the problem statement you’ve created. Brainstorming is particularly useful here.

There are many ways to brainstorm. In the context of church leadership, there are three considerations that are especially important to consider.

First, every church leader can likely attest to how quickly some are at pointing out limitations! "We can't do this, we don't have the resource, we can't do that, we don't have the budget, we can't try it, it's in conflict with our mission" - sound familiar?

I've never understood how an institution supposedly anchored in God's abundance can be so adept at pointing out resource constraints! Don't let the limitations get in the way of your brainstorm. During the "Ideate" phase of design thinking, resource constraints are officially off the table. Remind your group of this. Out of the box solutions require out of the box thinking. But we can't think outside the box if a pile of limitations is weighing down the metaphorical lid. The goal of ideation is to generate as many ideas as possible. Quantity here matters far more than feasibility. Rest assured, we'll have plenty of time to revisit constraints during the next phase of the process.

Second, many church leaders have seen conversations de-railed by ideas flying in from "left-field." Talking about the mission? Let's go on a budget tangent. Discussing the Bible? Let's digress into church politics. Running through the council agenda? Let's throw out a few "bonus" topics for discussion. The key to an effective brainstorm is not just to generate many ideas, but to generate ideas that align to our problem statement and research question.

For this reason, I recommend using mind-mapping techniques and mind-mapping tools to keep your ideation structured! My favorite mind-mapping software is Coggle. It's cloud-based, it's interactive, it's free (up to a certain number of mind-maps). Put your problem statement in the middle of the mind-map, and let the ideas branch out quickly and abundantly!

Basic mind-map created on Coggle, a free Ideation tool

Finally, to keep your group brainstorm positive, remember to keep your own thoughts and opinions positive as well. As a Christian education mentor once encouraged me to do, affirm every thoughtful idea! Affirming thoughtful ideas is about more than positivity and exuberance. It is about refereeing the conversation, defending thoughtful ideas from put-downs and fending off "analysis paralysis." As the convener of the brainstorm, your role is to celebrate ideas - and to convince others on the team to do the same.

Having created an extensive list of new ideas in response to our problem statements, we now must seek to prioritize, and ultimately, to protoype. We pick up our proverbial pruning sheers to trim our list of ideas into a workable action plan. We look towards prototyping, the subject of our next post.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of Grace and Gigabytes.