Supplejack wins two awards!

Posted Sunday 5th September

OK, so we submitted our co-design work with Waitemata District Health Board (Waitemata DHB) to NZ's Market Research Society (MRSNZ) Effectiveness Awards.

Co-design means working with management, staff and customers to design a better service. We took this literally and brought these stakeholders together in ongoing workshops. We identified issues and workable solutions, decided which would deliver best value, and then worked on these solutions together too. Here's a fabulous YouTube video on co-design by UK service design company thinkpublic. 

In our submission we compared a conventional project (one we'd done the year before) to our co-design work. For a given dollar in budget, we spent three times as long working directly with stakeholders, and achieved four times the number of improvements/ innovations. There's no truth in the view that ordinary people can't be creative: it's just a matter of having the motivation and the tools to get on with it. 

There's a lot more we could say about co-design here, including its use in more commercial settings, but we'll leave that for later. 

Frankly, the submission was a lot of work. The crux was demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach and its results for staff and patients. Fortunately my colleague Hilary Boyd at Waitemata DHB had more than enough determination and good humour to keep us on track.

Yes, Hilary and I did joke about winning, and even about an acceptance speech 'in the unlikely event of an emergency', as they say during flight safety briefings.

Neither of us are strong in the award-winning speech department, but we did resolve to thank all the patients who have been involved.  We could also have thanked Dr Bernie Mullin for starting the whole business all those years ago, the dedicated staff of the Colorectal, Breast, Melanoma and Breastscreen Aotearoa services who worked closely with us, and Unitec senior lecturer Cris de Groot with his amazing product design students. I think we assumed co-design was a bit too far left field? Our mistake. 

So we won a Gold in the Social and Community category. Much to our surprise, we also won Platinum for Effective Partnerships. (To clarify, a Gold is a second prize, if you like, and Platinum is a first.)

And yes, our speech was the shortest on the night.

While receiving the two Awards we nearly wandered off the stage before our photos were taken, and managed to get some of them upside down (thankfully spotted and corrected by the photographer). But we managed not to ramble on (no names mentioned) as well as not falling off the stage (the two jolly dignitaries are undamaged).

A special thanks from me to Hilary for being there right to the... well, the Award-winning end!

Previous Blogs

These blogs are also available for response at Supplejack's wordpress page.

My new vision for service sustainability - posted Wednesday 14th July 2010

Measuring the good stuff in sustainability - posted  Wednesday 31st March 2010

Social sustainability and service design - posted Wednesday 17th August 2009

What's a sustainable service business? - posted Friday 19th June 2009