Phase 1
Guiding questions resources
Is your team able to completely and decisively answer these guiding questions specific to the Understanding and Identifying Phase? If not, select one of the questions below to focus on with your group and try out some of the suggested activities as your team works through finding the answers together. The questions are presented in a logical and suggested sequence for approaching this phase. Please choose only those activities most relevant to your team’s needs, or use them as building blocks to modify and create your own.Consider some of the following PI Card Deck questions to generate discussion amongst community members and move forward collectively:
- How might I contribute to providing a safe environment to share ideas, thoughts, concepts, and viewpoints?
- What are the consistent opportunities and practices in place that encourage the development of authentic relationships?
- How am I taking time to build relationships?
- What kinds of partnerships do we need to establish to ensure our work respects the social context?
- How can we support others in finding their identity and interests through every interaction?
Tools:
Collaboration characteristics
Teaming with others opens the door to pooling collective expertise and experiences, enabling us to more effectively prototype and iterate on innovative practices. Created by the PI team, use these helpful team member characteristics to reflect on what makes a good team and how to improve collaboration.
Listening for understanding
Intentional listening brings more clarity to communication and supports authentic relationships by creating conditions for people to feel valued and understood. Created by the PI team, this technique can improve our understanding of one another and our unique perspectives.
Getting to know you
This activity created by the PI team is an icebreaker to facilitate connections between people in a group, encouraging more meaningful discussions among participants.
Team identity
This is the mutual connection amongst community members to work together in realizing common goals. If the team is new to each other and does not have a mission/vision that was collectively built, a team mission/vision could be created if deemed appropriate. Otherwise, the group could engage in discussion about their passion and commitment to the shared work and their perspective of their individual contributions. How will the team collaborate and prioritize these common goals?
Virtual team building ideas
Remote working and collaboration is a part of our daily lives now and even though we aren’t sitting in a room together, we can still engage in activities that allow us to get to know one another on a deeper, human level. Try out one of these activities with your team to connect and build relationships.
Ask a question
A generative tool to invest deeply in a topic with others, this Liz Lerman activity is often used to get to know others. It harnesses the power of gestures and movement to learn more about your colleagues in a fun, relaxing way.
Development of professional working relationships
Each community member takes a personality test. The results can be shared by the individuals themselves, or they can be mixed and used as a guessing game to encourage more lively discussion. Members are encouraged to make connections to their work. This is meant to be a fun activity to share and get to know one another, not a deep analysis.
Consider some of the following PI Card Deck questions to generate discussion amongst community members and move forward collectively:
- How can we support others in finding their identity and interests through every interaction?
- What steps can I take to understand cultures that are different from my own?
- How does my role affect how and what people share with me?
- How will we learn more about the socio-cultural and historical context where we plan to implement this initiative?
Tools:
Notice, think, feel, do
When we train our minds to be aware of others and of their contributions they bring to our community, we are better prepared to hear their values and stories. Created by the PI team, use this simple activity to develop an others-focused “appreciative humility” to boost empathy and perspective-taking.
Education journey
Specific to an educational innovation, this interview activity created by the PI team will help us understand lived experiences, preconceptions, and cultural influences related to attitudes about education. It is important to better understand multiple perspectives and mindsets about education to create deeper connections and a sense of community.
Classroom contexts survey
Providing a safe context in which others can share their passions, anxieties, or identities can help innovators better understand how to support them more effectively. Use this activity by the PI team to facilitate your own understanding of your community and/or stakeholders in a safe online context.
Values sort
Exploring our individual and collective values - what they are, what they mean to us, and how they might guide our decisionmaking, can also help us to recognize the spectrum of values that individuals hold and why each of us believe and respond to situations as we do. Here is a simple activity created by the PI team to begin to identify those values that are important to you and to your community.
Identifying values through storytelling
One way to understand the why behind our values is through storytelling that represents the meaningful experiences that have shaped who we are and what’s important to us. Created by the PI team, use this activity with either a group or on your own to explore, interact and reflect on the lived experiences that have shaped your values and the values of others.
Empathy interview
Created by the PI team, this resource will guide you through a protocol that should result in a deep understanding of your interviewee.
Define your audience
IDEO Design Kit has developed a beneficial resource to identify all stakeholders affected by a particular project.
What’s a value or principle you live by?
A short 1-minute video by Australia’s Ethics Centre illustrates the types of values that guide our moral and ethical decision-making.
Values
This brief animation, produced by the University of Texas at Austin, provides a quick introduction to the role of values in decision-making.
Tools:
Principled Innovation® Field Guide
This is a guide to getting started with Principled Innovation including links to signature tools, resources and more.
Is this the secret of smart leadership?
An idea for further reflection on humility, this BBC article reinforces the importance and application of intellectual humility.
Scent of Character videos
Consider encouraging the CoP members to share their own PI-related stories during meetings like the examples of these human stories. These are not only great community-building activities, but invaluable opportunities to intentionally learn and apply PI to your CoP work.
Principled Innovation® Continuum
The practice of Principled Innovation provides opportunities for individual and organizational development within the moral, civic, intellectual and performance assets. The continuum can be used as a reflective tool to identify the degree to which they are currently engaging the practice of Principled Innovation.
Principled Innovation® Foundations Course
An open access, self-paced course that provides an introduction to the concept of Principled Innovation with a focus on the character assets. The course includes six modules that are all rooted in the context of decision making.
Principled Innovation® Card Decks
Explore these reflective and generative questions at various stages in your innovation process to stimulate discussion and reflection and move forward collectively.
Principled Innovation® Framework
Explore the Principled Innovation® Framework to see how the four domains of character are expressed through assets and practices.
Principled Innovation® Overview
Consider some of the following PI Card Deck questions to generate discussion amongst community members and move forward collectively:
- What opportunities do we have to learn from others in our organization who may have different views?
- How might I better understand the experiences and responses of others or members of the community?
- What opportunities have we provided to view the problem through different lenses?
- What kinds of partnerships do we need to establish to ensure our work respects the social context?
- How might we effectively use feedback from the community to ensure their needs are being met?
Tools:
Using data in schools
When practicing truth-seeking, we look for multiple sources that can give us a rich picture of a challenge or situation. Specific to the school-student context, use this activity by the PI team to explore ideas from a number of education experts on how to create a richer portrait of student learning using multiple data sources.
Responding to crisis with character
This 11-minute video by the PI team shows a prime example of how ASU recently responded to a critical social need, using important character assets.
Defining the problem
Unpack empathy findings and other data insights, define the problem statement, and reframe How-Might-We questions.
Data collection
Is there particular data relevant to our work that could be analyzed for specific insights into the social need? What further questions do we have? What other data may be missing and can it be collected?
Empathy interview
Created by the PI team, this resource will guide you through a protocol that should result in a deep understanding of your interviewee.
Liberatory Design
d.school provides this short-but-sweet daily approach, along with mindsets and modes, that supports self-awareness and guides the team towards a design that best impacts the stakeholders.
Consider some of the following PI Card Deck questions to generate discussion amongst community members and move forward collectively:
- How might I contribute to providing a safe environment to share ideas, thoughts, concepts, and viewpoints?
- What are the consistent opportunities and practices in place that encourage the development of authentic relationships?
- What opportunities do we have to learn from others in our organization who may have different views?
- How might I better understand the experiences and responses of others or members of the community?
- What opportunities have we provided to view the problem through different lenses?
- What kinds of partnerships do we need to establish to ensure our work respects the social context?
- How might we effectively use feedback from the community to ensure their needs are being met?
- What other perspectives were considered to interrupt implicit bias?
Tools:
Perspective taking for inclusion
Taking the perspective of others can be challenging, and this can be more challenging the further away we are from the lived experiences of others. Created by the PI team, use this activity to begin developing both an awareness of the difficulties others face and also an awareness of our own shortcomings in understanding others’ experiences.
Rules of engagement
Civility is treating others with sincere respect and as members of a shared community, including those who may challenge our beliefs or opinions. Knowing what our own practices should be in the midst of discourse can help invite diversity and innovation. Created by the PI team, use this activity to reflect on how civil discourse has important implications for how we interact around common problems, both in our larger community and in our professional lives.
Think, Feel, Care
These guidelines, provided by Agency by Design at Harvard, can be used during or after interviews to support perspective taking and the analysis of stakeholders’ points of view.
The Five Whys
Also in IDEO’s Design Kit, this 15-minute activity is suggested for use in interviews, to determine the roots of one’s motivations or assumptions, yet can also be utilized for a team to uncover their motivations and assumptions behind their goals.
Ethnography Fieldguide
Similar to the empathy interview developed by the PI team, this d.school resource also helps illuminate the motivations and beliefs of others for deeper understanding.
Listening Palettes
A tool included in Liz Lerman’s Atlas of Creative Tools, it encourages active listening that involves your whole self. This is a critical skill for empathy interviews and the engagement of multiple perspectives.
Empathy Interview
Created by the PI team, this resource will guide you through a protocol that should result in deep understanding of your interviewee. Once interviews are completed, unpack the empathy findings and insights, define the problem statement, and reframe with “How might we…?” questions.
Stakeholder’s Analysis
Invite outside perspectives to see and explore possibilities. First, determine whose perspectives are critical for each objective, then develop relevant questions for stakeholders and invite them to specific CoP meetings for interviews, and finally, engage in the Stakeholder’s Analysis to frame all aspects of their needs and contributions.
Two Canadas: My story of generosity and systemic racism
In this video (13 minutes), a Canadian MP—once a Somalian refugee—describes the conflicting reality of discrimination persisting in a nation that is highly generous. The speaker argues that altruism must be seated in the moral asset of humility and willing to hear others’ perspectives to build a society that better works for everyone.
Consider some of the following PI Card Deck questions to generate discussion amongst community members and move forward collectively:
- What opportunities have we provided to view the problem through different lenses?
- How might we effectively use feedback from the community to ensure their needs are being met?
- What other perspectives were considered to interrupt implicit bias?
- What kinds of partnerships do we need to establish to ensure our work respects the social context?, How might we effectively use feedback from the community to ensure their needs are being met?
Tools:
Nuclear flowers
In Principled Innovation, finding creative solutions requires fighting against confirmation bias and seeing our social settings from new perspectives. Use this brief activity by the PI team to highlight the brain’s propensity toward confirmation bias.
A Simple Way to Reduce Unintended Consequences When Solving Big Problems
This is a thoughtful article in Forbes that encourages and explains how to ask the right questions in the early stages of problem analysis.
Map the Problem Space
Developed by Stanford d.school, this poster-size workshop tool is used by teams to expand the scope of their work by identifying all opportunities for design interventions (d.school, 2022). Their suggested time is 5-5000 minutes.
Root Cause Analysis
It is critical within an effective innovation process that solutions and ideas are directed towards the actual root cause of an issue. If the community has not already determined the root cause of the problem specific to the social need, this 5-step guide created by Mind Tools explains the process.
The Five Whys
Also in IDEO’s Design Kit, this 15-minute activity is suggested for use in interviews, to determine the roots of one’s motivations or assumptions, yet can also be utilized for a team to uncover their motivations and assumptions behind their goals.
Empathy Interview
Created by the PI team, this resource will guide you through a protocol that should result in deep understanding of your interviewee. Once interviews are completed, unpack the empathy findings and insights, define the problem statement, and reframe with “How might we…?” questions.
Consider some of the following PI Card Deck questions to generate discussion amongst community members and move forward collectively:
- How are we aligning our objectives with the mission or vision?
- Why do we believe these are the right objectives?
- How are the proposed solutions a fit for the context of the community?
Tools:
Make It Visual
Because the social need, objectives, context and culture, common values, and PI practices and assets are essential aspects of the entire Principled Innovation approach, especially as the community begins the next phase, they must always be top of mind as the team engages in the ongoing work of social change. It will help to make these aspects visual rather than read and reread as part of each CoP meeting agenda. Depending upon the number of members, assign each person some of the items to “make visual.” Whether you meet virtually or in-person, the visuals can be made accordingly. Post and reference these visuals during each meeting as the team is reminded of the focus items of that particular time together.
Align on Your Impact Goals
In IDEO’s Design Kit, this activity provides a step-by-step process for team’s to clarify and organize their long-term goals and short-term objectives. Suggested time is 1 hour.