Entering the synthesis stage of their human-centered design project, IDEO.org's Molly Norris explains how a key part of the team's research thus far has been about activating the client's latent organizational wisdom.

We’re just emerging from the research phase of our IDEO.org Peer Health Exchange (PHE) project and our minds are abuzz. Our hearts are awash with admiration for the volunteers, teens and staff we’ve interviewed. Our hands and hard drives are full of notes, photos and other artifacts from our design research. As we enter the synthesis stage of the human-centered design process, we’re starting to identify patterns and themes in what we’ve learned. Our starting point in this process is the knowledge we’ve captured so far from listening to PHE stakeholders and activating their latent organizational wisdom.

Coming in as an outside design firm, we have a perspective that allows us to stumble upon novel insights for the future direction of PHE. However, it’s also obvious that many of our insights have occurred to employees at PHE in the past, even if they have not been articulated out loud amongst themselves. In fact, many of our insights so far are synthesized forms of long standing challenges PHE is keenly aware of on a day-to-day basis.

Our job at IDEO.org is to pair the stories we’re learning during our design research with the ideas that have been lurking around the organization for years. For example, one insight well-known to PHE, is that some students can’t afford to volunteer because the tradeoffs are too steep for a college student with a lot going on like jobs and family commitments. The problem is that these might be the very volunteers whose powerful life experiences will connect with that of at-risk teens in challenging circumstances.

Consider the PHE volunteer who we interviewed who is her family’s breakthrough kid, the first to go to college, while also still working a job to help support her family financially. Over time, the indirect costs of volunteering required her to downgrade her PHE commitment from leading a group of volunteers to the point of nearly dropping out of the PHE program. An excited call to mom upon acceptance into the program had turned into stress and tears. In this case, PHE stayed flexible and worked with the volunteer to keep her as a PHE volunteer in a less demanding role. Our challenge as IDEO.org designers is to determine how PHE’s mix of programmatic intensity for teaching quality and flexibility for college students’ changing needs can be intentionally developed and scaled as the organization grows.

Another volunteer we spoke with had a background in hardcore ventures of the military variety. This volunteer felt that PHE’s programs needed to work with and for volunteers instead of the other way around. Although, for him, PHE’s volunteer requirements were not a problem, explaining to us: “I’m a driven guy who fully commits to what I’m doing. I’m either foot in, or foot out.” But, how can we make sure other volunteers aren’t swallowed up to the knee by volunteer demands?

Next up, we’ll be speaking with teens that have gone through the PHE program. Our purpose for helping to design an improved volunteer experience connects directly back to making the classroom experience better for high schoolers learning about healthier decision-making.

Our extended team – PHE staff and IDEO.org designers – is coalescing around various insights before move into the concepting phase of the human-centered design process. We’re reflecting back on what we’ve heard from staff, volunteers and teens and adding our own spin and analysis as we take long-harbored hunches from inside PHE forward – forward into a terrain paved with Post-its.