How can we make toolkits better?
There is a good demand out there for better-designed organization toolkits. On some of the projects I encounter, clients request for support on making the toolkits more user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing. In other words, improving the graphic design of the toolkits.
Note that the content itself is usually untouchable because its been authored by technical experts. (For better or for worse? There’s an interesting debate there.)
These toolkits are often created for purposes, such as:
To share knowledge and evidence around what works with the industry (for example, how to design youth refugee programs that develop their social and emotional skills)
To standardize internal processes for teams around the globe (for example, monitoring and evaluation standards)
To guide new implementers on how to deliver a tried, true, and tested program (for example, a women’s support group program for survivors of gender-based violence)
If I’m being truly honest, I often wonder, “Will anyone use this?”
I’ve noticed that the biggest challenge that organizations face is knowledge transfer. People change jobs, people retire, or people want to scale (and scale efficiently).
There’s a plethora of toolkits (probably in the hundreds of thousands) that organizations make — and are still making, to transfer knowledge. It’s very similar to research publications created by academia.
There is just so much knowledge in the world, and so much of it gathering dust on the physical or digital bookshelves.
This takes me back to the project I gave in the example above. I was assigned to help program staff design youth refugee programs infused with more social emotional learning (SEL).
Through using human-centered design, we learned that program staff wanted and needed:
A professional development program
A program design tool that would “scan” and “fix” programs to integrate more SEL
A system of champions, mentors, and conferences to enable sharing, learning and consultation
What happened?
The leadership were only interested and able to fund a publishable, shareable “toolkit”, so we could only build the parts that didn’t involve connecting people with people.
But listen to what we heard:
“I always heard about SEL and there wasn’t anyone to give any direction.”
“There isn’t a person for me to go to… I feel like I’m guessing and just trying it out.”
Notice that people weren’t asking for a document. They were asking for a person.
There’s only so much knowledge transfer that a toolkit can accomplish, because people value guidance from other people.
Why is guidance from people valuable? Because:
the advice comes from personal experience and;
the advice is immediate and catered to exactly what the advisee is looking for based on their own situation (without having to comb through a whole manual first).
Unfortunately, toolkits often miss the mark on substituting for people. Toolkits tend to:
generalize experiences to create vague-ish guidance; and/or
have so much information about all potential scenarios that an information seeker has to go through 50 pages to find what they need.
Even if I’m brought in to use graphic design to make the toolkits as user-friendly and beautiful as possible, it won’t be helpful (read: it won’t be used) if the content itself is not user-friendly.
Let me share a more recent project. The assignment was to revamp the implementer’s toolkit of a 10+-year-old, globally-used program.
There was an abundance of knowledge that included all the past implementations, the evidence shared by researchers, the input of team members across the organization, and the knowledge kept by the program predecessors.
There was a lot of information being thrown in.
Of course, nothing should get lost.
It was 178 pages long.
What was being called a toolkit was, in fact, a storage room.
In an ideal world, the implementers read every manual carefully from top to bottom and know where all the information is for future access.
In the real world, organizations are messy, people are skimmers of documents, and resources (especially time) are never enough. People often come to a document when they need guidance for a specific decision or solution for a specific problem - and they need it fast.
So we give them a storage closet. But alas, there's no time to go through a storage closet. People improvise. They either go with their best guess or find someone to advise them.
Suddenly, we find that initiatives don't go as planned or that the change we want to see just doesn't happen.
'“Sure,” you tell me, “it would be great to have an all-knowing, always available human providing advice and guidance to others. But it would be impossible to ask someone to hold all this information, nevermind asking someone to be the advisor of every current and future program implementation.”
What can we do?
We need a shopkeeper; a curator-on-demand.
There’s a film costume shop in Cape Town. When you walk in, your eyes go dizzy looking at racks full of pirate clothes, disco pants, Egyptian jewelry, medieval armour, and cosplay outfits. Everything is everywhere and you don't even know where to start.
The customers for this shop are usually working on a film or commercial and they come with a wardrobe concept. Rather than inviting the customer to browse, the shopkeeper asks the customer what they are looking for. The shopkeeper then pulls the relevant pieces on to a clothing rack, which is then presented to the customer to browse through and further finesse into the perfect wardrobe collection.
We need such a shopkeeper for knowledge.
I would LOVE to see AI and powerful search engines play a role in this.
Imagine a staff member submitting a question to the knowledge shopkeeper, and what is churned out are best practices, case studies, research papers, YouTube videos of people speaking from personal experiences, and maybe the contacts of available advisors.
Am I just dreaming? Someone please build it!
In the meantime, I will be working away, designing toolkits to become as close as possible to this type of functionality, but in an analog way.