What We're Learning From Discovery Labs

Three Discovery Labs in, several lessons are becoming clearer about what it takes to design a more integrated approach to socio-economic mobility.

This year, CityCollective launched Discovery Labs to help organizations clarify who they’re designing for and build a more integrated approach to socio-economic mobility. Through these Discovery Labs, we’ve worked alongside organizations at very different stages—and we’re learning a lot.

A Discovery Lab is a facilitated design process that helps a community move from a broad aspiration for integrated services to a clearly defined operating model. Together, teams examine who they’re designing for, the participant journey, organizational roles, the partner ecosystem, and how progress will be measured.

And we’re learning alongside them.

Experience creates the confidence to rethink what’s possible.

Some of the organizations participating in our Labs have been serving their communities for decades. Experience hasn’t eliminated the need to ask hard questions. In many cases, it creates an even stronger foundation for asking: What have we learned, and what should we do differently now?

Teams bring years of relationships, program experience, successes, and hard-earned lessons into the room. Discovery creates space to step outside the urgency of day-to-day service delivery and examine those experiences as a whole, not to discard what already exists, but to use what has been learned to make more intentional choices about what comes next.

Collaboration gets stronger when roles get clearer.

Nearly every organization we work with values collaboration. But collaboration becomes much more powerful when it moves from a general commitment to a clearly designed way of working together.

That requires teams to get specific: What does our organization need to own? What should a partner own? Where does responsibility transfer? Who remains accountable for the participant experience when several organizations are involved?

These conversations move partnership from a list of organizations around a table to an intentionally designed ecosystem. The goal isn’t simply more partners. It is greater clarity about how each partner contributes to a coherent experience for the people being served.

Better design starts with knowing who you’re designing for.

Most organizations have a good sense of whom they serve. But there is an important difference between who you are willing to serve and who you are intentionally designing around.

The more specific teams become about the people at the center of the model, their circumstances, barriers, strengths, readiness, existing support systems, and aspirations, the more productive the design conversation becomes.

That specificity affects everything downstream: the participant journey, staffing, partnerships, physical space, measurement, and even which services should or shouldn’t be part of the model. A model designed broadly for everyone can easily become a collection of services. A model designed around a clearly understood participant can become an intentional pathway.

The operating model matters as much as the vision.

Whole-person support is a compelling vision. Turning it into an operating model is harder.

Participants do not experience their lives as a collection of programs, yet organizations and systems are often structured that way. Mapping the participant journey helps teams look across programs and organizations from the participant’s point of view. Where might someone have to tell their story again? Where could they lose momentum? Who owns the relationship at each stage? How does information move? What happens when a partner cannot deliver what the model requires?

Those questions begin to translate aspiration into operations. Integration is not simply about locating more services together. It is about intentionally designing how people, organizations, partners, information, and accountability work together around a shared participant journey.

You don’t need every answer to know the next right questions.

One of the most useful practices in the Discovery Lab is distinguishing between what a team knows, what it assumes, and what remains unknown.

Organizations accumulate enormous institutional knowledge. Over time, though, assumptions can begin to feel like facts. Asking “How do we know?” helps teams identify which parts of the model are grounded in evidence and which still need to be tested. Naming the unknowns isn’t a weakness in the design process. It is an important output. It tells a team what needs to be learned or validated before making a significant investment or building an operating model around an assumption.

Discovery isn’t about leaving the room with every answer. It is about leaving with better questions, clearer decisions, and a much stronger understanding of what comes next.

“The roadmap that we ended up with through the Discovery Lab is fantastic, and that process clarified so many pieces for me and my team. I truly feel set up to take the next steps with clarity and intention.”

— George Nixon, Executive Director, Catholic Charities of West Tennessee

What could this look like in your community?

Every community starts from a different place. The purpose of a Discovery Lab isn’t to replicate another organization’s model. It is to help a team use the principles behind an integrated, whole-person approach to make clearer decisions in its own context.

That means clarifying who you are designing for, defining the experience you want to create, deciding what your organization must own, identifying the capabilities partners need to provide, and determining what you need to learn or test next.

Our next Discovery Lab begins in January 2027. If your organization is exploring how to move from a collection of programs and partnerships toward a more intentional, integrated operating model, we’d welcome the conversation.

Explore the January 2027 Discovery Lab → Start a Conversation