My Summer in Social Impact Design as a Gobee Group Fellow
By Caroline Gezon, Haas MBA/MPH 2020
As a MBA/MPH “dualie,” I came to Haas with a mission to scale the use of behavioral design to improve global health delivery. Unlike private enterprise where a user-centered approach is widely accepted as critical to commercial success, in the social sector world, strategies are more policy-oriented. Unfortunately, design and user experience is often an afterthought, which then often leads to program failure. A small group of organizations including Gobee Group are shifting the tide by bringing users to the forefront of solution design and global health delivery.
Gobee Group is a small, Oakland-based social impact design consultancy, founded ten years ago by Jaspal Sandhu and Mahad Ibrahim, two PhD graduates from the UC Berkeley School of Information. The business model is a for-profit business with smaller margins than traditional design consulting firms due to the social impact nature of their work and clients. Jaspal and Mahad have built an impressive portfolio of work over the last decade, but they have also intentionally kept the team very small over the last ten years, at around 5–10 people, to maintain space for other work and projects outside of Gobee. As a Gobee Fellow, I learned about all of the current projects in the Gobee portfolio, as well as several former projects and upcoming projects in the pipeline. My work focused on two of these projects; one working with the Blue Shield of California Foundation (BSCF), and the other working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). Gobee showed me what it’s like to work for a small team where most projects at some point require all hands on deck. My role ranged from design strategy consulting and workshop design to in-depth design field research, giving me a taste of the diversity of Gobee’s portfolio.
The first project I worked on, ReImagine Lab 2.0, is the second phase of work from a previous incubator design sprint run by Gobee in partnership with BSCF. The project brought together a diverse cohort of experts and activists in the domestic violence space to ideate new programs for domestic violence prevention. Several ideas were selected from the design sprint to run through a team-based accelerator program for the second phase of work. The ideas are currently being tested as prototypes. I supported prototyping workshop design and wrote a brief that encapsulated our point of view and expert interview analysis on how BSCF should approach the question of intellectual property ownership of ideas from the accelerator. The opportunity to explore different funding and ownership models in open innovation and accelerator platforms also built off previous work I had done with IDEO’s Open Innovation team during my spring semester.
Immunize HCD, a project sponsored by BMGF analyzing how to improve decision making by global immunization managers, absorbed the remainder of my time with Gobee. Vaccine delivery is an area within global health that I’m passionate about, after working on several vaccine related projects in Sub-Saharan Africa at Deloitte, and then again last semester with OpenIDEO. My design process this summer started by studying decision science through secondary research and expert interviews, including our own Haas expert Don Moore. I ran a week-long remote focus group using WhatsApp with Immunization managers across the globe to build conversation and compare experiences of immunization managers in different regions. Finally, I went to Guinea, West Africa, for several weeks of in-depth ethnographic field research. After working extensively in West Africa before coming to Haas, falling back into French conversation, food, and culture, felt a bit like coming home. My research supported the team’s work which included a broader landscape mapping and other field visits to Columbia and Ethiopia. The project continued into the fall with a final presentation to BMGF in October.
One of the most interesting insights we gained from our work in Guinea came from a prototyping focus group we held at the end of our trip. After building six different prototype solutions to the challenges we heard in our research, the focus group unanimously voted for a leadership development program as the greatest area of need. While I study leadership and management at Haas, it’s fascinating to reflect on how any small portion of my immersive educational experience would be deeply appreciated by global immunization managers. In the healthcare sector, emphasis so often falls on technical skills training, but the soft skills of leadership and management are necessary for any global organization and team to succeed. The immunization managers in Guinea clearly voiced this gap. Poor leadership demotivates workers, which leads to program delays and failure. Without effective human resources and teamwork, vaccines sit in warehouses expiring or are not ordered in time to stop an epidemic.
By interviewing leaders about what motivates them and the challenges they face at work, I also paused to reflect on what motivates me and what types of professional environments help me thrive. Strong leadership and a shared culture and vision is vital for team success, and that applies to both the EPI immunization program in Guinea, as well as for Gobee Group itself. On a small team, that leadership and team culture matters even more than it did in larger organizations that I’ve worked with in the past. In summary, I feel honored and grateful for having the opportunity to pursue my career interests with Gobee Group this summer. As a dual degree student graduating in December 2020, I look forward to building off my Gobee learnings with another unique summer internship next summer.
