Project: In Australia, like much of the western world, two-thirds of adults and one-quarter of children are overweight or obese. As the national broadcaster, the ABC wanted help facilitating the design of a pan-ABC event focused on improving Australia’s obesity problem.
Background: The ABC had created many “tent pole” events before, like Stargazing Live, War on Waste, and Mental Health Week. However, content production for these events had typically focused on a single show in a single medium (eg. 3-part series on TV) with other shows only being invited to create supporting content.
The obesity project was born out of an internal innovation competition. With a long lead time and a desire to be truly collaborative, this project represented a chance to bring a multidisciplinary team together, who would work in a more agile manner, and be centred on developing content around the audience’s needs.
Design Team: Complementing an in-house Project Manager, Concept Lead, Digital Content Lead, Development Producer, Service Designer, Quantitative Researcher, and SME Coordinator, I worked with Phil Banks (another Design Researcher contracted through Pragmateam) to lead the project approach.
Ways of working: Using a whiteboard we developed a Team Wall, centred the workflow around a Kanban, and workshopped a project backlog. We established a weekly rhythm of Scrum ceremonies to ensure the team was communicating efficiently: Planning, Standups, Showcase, and Retro.
The team was predominantly co-located in Sydney, with one member based in Bunbury, and all in-house members having other project commitments to juggle.
Timeframe: 6 weeks
Objective
Most of the ABC is siloed into functional teams which leads to people having multiple concurrent project commitments. In this context, projects end up following waterfall approach around team availabilities where the research is done up-front and documented in a research report, before the ideas are developed and approved, and then finally produced into content for TV and other media. However, this makes it difficult to collaborate, encourages political battles, and restricts the ability to adapt to change as the content evolves.
By mobilising a multidisciplinary team to use user-centred methods and work in agile ways, the project’s goal was to find ways that the ABC could make an impact on Australia’s obesity epidemic.
Work
Discoveries are messy and full of ambiguities. With a fundamental rhythm to our ways of working established, we structured the 6-week discovery into the following phases:
This model provided us with a clearer idea of what we needed to end up with.
Context: Outline the background
Desk Research
There’s a lot of information already available around obesity. Additionally, the ABC has contributed a lot of content to the area through its various publishing mechanisms: News, Health, Science, etc. Our first step was to pour through it and begin to make sense of some of the key themes.
Subject Matter Expert Interviews
In order to deep-dive into the key themes and learn from the experts, we recruited academics, policy experts and doctors to participate in a series of interviews and panel discussions. Learnings from the SMEs were captured and analysed in a dedicated Trello board.
SME Interviews Trello
Workshops, analysis & synthesis
Facilitated several workshops to unpack what our vision for this project is, and why that’s important for the organisation.
Problem: Define our focus
Consensus was established across the team around the following Vision Statement:
“We want to change the national conversation about weight, shifting the blame from individuals to the market environment we inhabit.”
Investigations: Show what we learned; separately
A Trello was setup to capture key references and findings from the discovery process.
Discovery Research Trello
Findings: Bring it all together
To summarise, we learned that as a nation we’re fat, but it’s not all our fault as individuals. This is a complex systems issue. We are empowered tp do something about this, but we have to stop blaming ourselves. The mission for this project at the ABC is to shift the conversation toward something more productive.
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From Individual action, to Food industry regulation
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From Choice & free will, to Reveal persuasion tactics used to drive food industry profits
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From Poor food choices, to Poor food options
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From Judgement of others, to Empathy for all
Alphas (or Ideas): Start showing the way forward
A research plan was developed to explore topics and engagement tactics with the Australian viewing public. Part of this plan was to leverage the YourSpace ABC panel for a survey. A planned extension of this research was to create an Australia-wide survey and use this as one of the content pieces for the TV event itself.
A prototype for a digital content service was developed. Named “Healthy Habits” this service would act as a hub for obesity related content at the ABC, and would exist before, during and after the main tentpole event.
‘Healthy Habits’ digital prototype – https://bit.ly/2Jg9pik
We knew that the TV development process would follow a parallel workflow and that content strategy and delivery would continue from mid-2018 until late 2019. The only recommendation towards an ongoing time commitment was to convene the stakeholder group monthly to check-in on relevant updates around the obesity subject matter.
End result
We covered a lot of ground with limited dedicated resources and in only 6 weeks. The project had developed significant momentum and a broad range of stakeholders across ABC were engaged (not just TV folks). Additionally important voices outside the ABC (SMEs) were engaged too and ready to provide ongoing support.
Given this was just the first 6 weeks in an 18 month project it’s hard to measure the end result with any kind of certainty. We will continue to watch the project evolve, provide advice where required and seek learnings throughout.
Reflection
From the outset, we were pragmatic, using the opportunity we had to build momentum around the subject of obesity. However, given the complexity of the subject matter and the scale of the involvement across the ABC, it may have been better to delay the mobilisation of the project until additional dedicated in-house team members could’ve been secured. This project runs the risk of stalling as the team juggles multiple competing priorities.
Another challenge relating to the TV commissioning process requiring the largest investment, is that the project becomes just another TV-led activity. While there’s good examples of content production following this model (eg. War on Waste), this doesn’t represent a truly pan-ABC collaboration, and may make it more problematic to engage non-TV audiences through digital media.
A final reflection was that more consideration could’ve been given for deepening the involvement with ABC’s new ABC Life team.
Sam Court 