Kaiser Permanente's nurses were losing the start of every shift to a handover that still missed what patients needed. Tim Brown's account in Harvard Business Review, of work done with IDEO, is a concrete test for a manager who has to decide whether a service team needs a human-centred workshop.
Brown describes workshops over several months with nurses, doctors and administrators. One project reworked shift changes at four hospitals. The core group included a strategist who had been a nurse, an organisational-development specialist, a technology expert, a process designer, a union representative and designers from IDEO, working with frontline teams in each hospital. Nurses were spending the first 45 minutes of a shift at the station, briefing the next shift. The method differed in every hospital, from recorded dictation to a face-to-face conversation. Notes went onto scraps of paper or onto scrubs. Nurses still often missed how a patient had fared, which family members were present, and whether tests or therapies had been given. Patients experienced the change of shift as a gap in their care.
What they did before they changed the handover
The teams watched the handover, then tried ideas in a form other people could react to. Brown writes that a service prototype has to be tangible, and that the trials were videotaped so the group could see what the trial had taught them. Within a week they had a working version. Nurses passed the information on in front of the patient, and a simple program let them record notes through the shift, so the scramble at the end was smaller. Kaiser measured the mean time between a nurse arriving and first speaking with a patient. Across the four hospitals that interval was more than halved. One nurse said, "I'm an hour ahead, and I've only been here 45 minutes."
When to book, and what to have ready
That sequence is a booking test a manager can apply without a design department. The service moment is already happening, on a real shift, call, visit or queue. Customers feel it, and the people who deliver it can describe the last time it went badly. The method is inconsistent from team to team. You can get those people into the room, including someone with the authority to change the procedure, which is why the Kaiser group included a union representative and nurses who do the handover. You have a measure you already care about, or could start counting, such as time to the first real contact. You can also leave the following week open enough to try a rough version with the team that owns the moment. Kaiser did not wait for a finished system. They had something the nurses could use within a week, and they kept the measure.
If the solution is already chosen and the budget is already spent, the hours will go into decorating that choice. Send that work to the people who have to deliver it. Book the workshop when the method is still open and the people in the service can still change it. A manager's preparation is then ordinary and specific. Write the moment in a few sentences, as a situation with a person and a constraint. Name two people who do the work and one person who can change the procedure. Bring any record you have of the last few times the moment failed. Agree the measure before the day, so the room judges the trial against a number you already trusted.
Collective Campus builds high-performance teams for the AI world. The design thinking workshop runs this sequence on a live service your team owns. How to keep the users in the work while the service is still being shaped is in how to design a service with its users. What the day itself should contain, once you have decided to book it, is in what a corporate design thinking workshop should cover.
Talk to the people who use it
Send the moment, the two names, and the measure you will watch. We will shape the workshop around that handover, queue or visit, and around a version the team can try while the quarter is still open.
