Strengthening Design Research Practice for a Social Impact Consultancy
Building practical design research capability and shared language across disciplines.
Background: Ambitions for Furthering Community-Minded Innovation
In 2024, Outwitly was engaged by an established Canadian consultancy focused on delivering innovative solutions for public, social, and not-for-profit organizations.
The organization was driven to apply human-centred design strategy effectively, in service of better experiences for complex social missions. To support this ambition, they recognized a need for stronger, more consistent design research practices across their teams.
The principal researcher at this organization had worked with Outwitly’s CEO Sara Fortier before, and remembered her sound and actionable frameworks for applying the design research process to business goals. They reached out and asked Outwitly to design and deliver a multi-month training program to grow design research and service design capability, and enhance cross-functional collaboration.
I really enjoyed the training, and have already started implementing various elements of it into three of my current projects.
Training attendee
Challenge: A Lack of Shared Norms Creating Resistance
The organization’s consultants regularly incorporated aspects of human-centred design, behavioural science, and change management into their work. But their experience levels, roles, and approaches to design research varied widely. They also worked across several locations, and needed to be proactive in breaking down silos.
Key stakeholders were determined to address these issues head-on:
Inconsistent understandings of design research. Some had deep academic expertise in specific areas, while missing practical frameworks for execution at certain stages of a project. Others with more cross-functional, hands-on experience were less certain of research theory and how to gather or extract from the data.
Different expectations and processes across roles. Analysts, PMs and their teams often approached design with disparate perspectives and priorities, with different understandings of what research activities should be involved, how to approach them, or how long they should reasonably take.
A lack of shared frameworks and language. Without a standardized way of approaching, applying or talking about design research, teams would struggle to align on research goals, methods and proposed solutions that would move the organization toward enhanced design maturity.
Without this shared foundation, it would be difficult to scale methods across associates and analysts without over-reliance on more specialized staff.
They recognized this issue as an opportunity, and asked Outwitly to facilitate training that would allow cross-team collaboration and more consistent, in-depth understandings of impactful design research in practice.
Approach: A Collaborative Learning Program for Unifying Practice
Over a five-month period, a cohort of 15 participants — including principals, associates, and analysts — took part in a blended learning experience combining online learning, coaching, and custom live workshops.
Outwitly designed a multi-layered program tailored to the client’s mix of experience levels, roles, and real project needs. Our approach included.
A probing discovery call rooted in listening first. Outwitly worked closely with the client to understand existing processes, delivery pressures, and collaboration challenges, ensuring the program addressed real project realities rather than abstract theory.
Comprehensive training in the end-to-end research process. Participants completed an eight-module course, Design Research Mastery, which covered the span of the design research process. Instructors emphasized research planning, including risk mitigation, timeline guidance for project activities, and carving out opportunities for collaborative ideation and validation.
Specialized coaching to embed practices. Eight weekly small-group sessions with two senior instructors with extensive backgrounds in research, service design and design strategy — helping participants apply course content to live work, reinforce shared language, and set aligned expectations across roles.
A neutral, trusted, experienced-backed voice. Outwitly brought an external, expert perspective on design research best practices, frameworks, and delivery, helping normalize organizational change and secure wider-spread buy-in for new practices and shared ways of working.
Targeted service design and co-design workshops. Six instructor-led workshops focused on strengthening service design capability and establishing co-design as a shared way of working. Delivered virtually using MS Teams and Miro, and starting off with light creative icebreakers, these sessions combined short instruction with hands-on group work using a shared case study.
The workshops covered:
- Rigorous, collaborative synthesis of data using theory-based techniques
- Creating journey maps from research that are highly useful for client stakeholders
- Using service blueprinting to understand key service areas and map processes from research
- Building clear differentiated personas from the data, creating them live as a group
- Applying design storytelling to turn findings into actionable insights reports
Exploring ideation and solutioning within the 5-stage design process, including How Might We questions and digital prototyping
Results: Enhanced Capacity for Human-Centred Design and Collaboration
The training resulted in a clearer and more standardized understanding of how design research could fit into the organization’s day-to-day work most effectively, and more open views of co-creation and collaboration across roles and projects.
Attendee participation and post-workshop feedback highlighted:
Greater confidence in research skills that were immediately applicable. Feedback highlighted a stronger sense of how to plan and participate in research activities that would result in actionable insights. Attendees were enabled to start using the frameworks introduced through the program right away in live projects.
Stronger cross-team alignment and co-creation practice. Participants emphasized the value of working through research and service design activities together, building shared understanding of these practices across roles, and the value of co-creation and co-validation in delivering experiences that help clients and their users.
Clearer expectations for research planning and effort. Teams developed a more realistic understanding of research timelines, levels of effort, and where collaboration could reduce risk and uncertainty.
Shared language and frameworks. The program introduced common terminology, artifacts, and approaches that supported more consistent ways of working across projects.
Outwitly, thank you for your ever-patient and curious mindset. Really appreciated your collaborative efforts to make the coaching sessions work. You created a positive, kind environment where it felt safe to ask questions and try new techniques.
Training attendee
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