Project Overview
Engaging and consulting stakeholders is a well-established best practice in design, innovation, organizational change, and beyond. And while stakeholder involvement in a change or innovation process can bring valuable context, nuance, and perspective, it is no easy feat. It requires thoughtful planning, increased facilitation, and it requires an organizational culture that is open to considering stakeholder input.
Challenge: CAS, an innovation group within NASA Aeronautics, understood the value of stakeholder involvement in research and design, but – being a highly regulated government agency – there were significant barriers to doing so. The first constraints were regulatory considerations because of NASA’s position as a federal agency. Engaging members of the public is highly regulated and, thus, slow. And, designing alongside members of the public is not always common practice, so bringing in stakeholders would require a shift in some team members’ accepted ways of working. And finally, as there was little precedent for this methodology, no processes existed for recruiting, selecting, and facilitating stakeholders.
Even so, this team was intent on navigating these challenges to improve their innovation process. The Human Factor’s objective was to facilitate a bespoke approach for NASA to bring stakeholders into its innovation process within its current constraints.
Approach: We approach challenges like this by first gathering as much data as possible about our client’s goals, capabilities, ways of working, constraints, and concerns. In discussions with our NASA partners, we learned that they did not have trouble bringing in expert stakeholders but needed help bringing in members of the general public.
They wanted to engage a diverse range of people who represented members of society that would be impacted by NASA innovations (in climate change, healthcare, technology, etc.). We also worked with them to identify the level of stakeholder engagement they were seeking. They wanted to get feedback from stakeholders and co-design alongside them but needed to do so within the realms of possibility for the federal government. This data-gathering phase helped us to clarify the type of stakeholders and the level of engagement NASA was aiming for, but to build out a strategy and process, we used our field testing methodology.
Before rolling out massive and untested changes, we believe in field-testing solutions to see how they work in context. In this case, we decided to run a series of experiments, testing which approaches to stakeholder engagement were most effective for this NASA team. These experiments coincided with research sprints the team already had planned so that they could make progress on critical research while testing stakeholder involvement processes. It also helped introduce wary team members to stakeholder engagement in manageable chunks while collecting data to demonstrate its value.
Results: Over the course of six experiments, we collected enough data to craft a custom stakeholder involvement strategy for NASA that fit within the organization’s unique context, culture, and constraints. Enabling this previously challenging innovation tool allowed NASA researchers to uncover deeper and more nuanced insights into problem spaces. The impact was clear to the team because they worked alongside us in developing and evaluating the experiments. At the close of the project, NASA had gained repeatable processes that they could apply to future research, a precedent for involving stakeholders in the design process, and the tools to test and iterate on new ways of working as needed.
Project Timeline
Establish criteria for selecting stakeholders. By working with various stakeholders over the course of our experiments, we analyzed the factors that made for the most helpful, collaborative, and informative stakeholders.
Identify the best location to engage stakeholders. To understand how in-person, virtual, or hybrid dynamics impact working with stakeholders, we ran our six experiments in a variety of settings. We collected data on the impact of location on factors like psychological safety, creativity, collaboration, and more.
Determine the point in the process that stakeholder engagement has the greatest impact. We tested bringing in stakeholders at different phases of the team’s work: preliminary research, problem validation and framing, concept generation, and concept feedback.
Choose the best approach to engagement depending on the need. Our field testing relied on numerous types of stakeholder engagement – online surveys, co-design workshops, interviews, panels, and more. We were able to determine which approach worked best for different situations and needs.
Collect data on what works, what doesn’t, and why. Through observational data, post-sprint feedback from participants, and analyses of sprint outcomes, we assessed which methods worked best within NASA’s organizational culture, which processes led to the highest quality research, and which processes were most cost and time-effective. This data was used to iterate and adapt our experimentation along the way.
Capture and communicate stakeholder data. We tested various methods of collecting data from stakeholders and conveying that data to diverse audiences. Our testing included audio recordings, concept drawings, transcripts of conversations, key quotes, written responses, and more.
Complications lead to meaningful lessons learned. For a co-design workshop, we learned that stakeholders were prohibited from video-conferencing into the NASA room because of security protocol. We pivoted and created a virtual board on which NASA researchers posted questions and stakeholders responded live – the protocol was upheld, and the stakeholders' voices were heard. In another instance, we found that the desired stakeholders were tough to find, so we used “proxy stakeholders” and found that, in this case, it was possible to center the stakeholder experience even when direct stakeholders could not be consulted.
Project Summary
Any organization can strengthen its design, innovation, and problem-solving process by involving stakeholders, but every organization has constraints that make this challenging. In our work with NASA, we started by defining their constraints and then coming to a consensus on their goals for stakeholder engagement, as well as why and how they hope to involve stakeholders in their processes. Field testing, experimentation, and iteration helped us to learn what processes worked best for NASA and build a strategy for future stakeholder engagement. Using field testing and experimentation to drive organizational change is one of The Human Factor’s critical capabilities. We were delighted to use that methodology to help NASA unlock the potential of stakeholder engagement in their innovation process.
