We began by helping to assemble an Advisory Committee made up of a diverse cross-section of staff across the organization asking them a simple question: “What do you want to learn?”

We worked with the Advisory Committee to identify baseline success metrics and methods to encourage employee engagement in the co-creation process.

Once we had the co-created curriculum for the Learning Lab, we continuously iterated on it based on participant input through real-time feedback gathering after each Lab and longer-term evaluation.

We learned from potential participants that in addition to learning human-centered design, employees wanted to practice giving presentations, storytelling, and some basic project management skills.

Past Learning Lab participants were willing to share their knowledge and skills with incoming participants, so we found places in the curriculum they could facilitate.

Through the discovery process and listening to employees, we learned that the training program was not just about developing human-centered design skills, but played a role in shifting the culture of the organization.

The pre- and post- evaluation surveys of the Learning Lab mapped to the Guiding Principles and allowed us to quantitatively measure culture change.

Over three years, we moved three cohorts of nearly 100 employees, from directors to public facing staff, through the Learning Lab and its co-designed curriculum.

To support socializing the Learning Lab opportunity across the organization, we created a communications plan, project messaging framework, and baseline success metrics.

This co-creation process allowed us to bring Learning Labs to two other cities and one state agency.

The work of the Learning Lab helped create a new department three years later. The department of Digital Service & Open Government actively uses human-centered design in its projects to continue bringing the Guiding Principles to life.