Case study: City of San Jose Innovation Learning Lab
Providing organization-wide tools for creative problem solving at the City of San José
CivicMakers facilitated our signature Learning Lab program, an eight week, hands-on learning and engagement experience for cross-departmental teams in public institutions, with the City of San José in 2020. This was our first Learning Lab conducted entirely virtually.
“I came out [of Learning Lab] with skills to be a better manager, adding a more human approach to each day, adding emotion and not just the business.”
Learning Lab Participant Cohort 1, City of San Jose Cohort
The pilot was a unique collaboration between HR and IT, blending staff capacity-building (Human Resources) and San José’s OneCity Workplace intranet initiative (IT). The inaugural cohort was brought together into three cross-departmental teams to learn about and apply human-centered design tools and techniques to a key City challenge. Teams were each assigned a unique challenge, including: How Might We (1) create an engaged and informed workforce, (2) optimize virtual productivity, (3) improve collaboration in a distributed workspace?
As of December 2023, we have run seven cohorts with cross-departmental teams tackling citywide challenges.
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