Service design and resilience when transforming government
Reflections from Service Design in Government 2023
Image from Service Design in Government.
The challenges of government service transformation
Building new digital transactions can be fast and straightforward. Changing the underlying service is a challenging, slow, and often frustrating endeavour. It's not a quick fix; it's a complex journey that involves countless people from diverse teams with many interdependencies, conflicting timelines and unknowns.
Yet in a world where services are tied to policy, funding cycles, and legislative terms, navigating these complexities is essential for improving outcomes for citizens.
In this blog post, I’ll share ideas on maintaining momentum and achieving real results. Whether it's changing terminology, modernising legacy tech, or pushing for policy and legislative changes, these transformations often take months or years.
To succeed in reshaping services from end to end, front to back and across channels requires unwavering resilience, stamina, and persistence.
This was the resounding message I took away from the Service Design in Government conference I had the privilege to attend in September 2023.
First, let’s take solace that we are not alone in these struggles! Prompted by the 10th anniversary of the conference, Rochelle Gold, a seasoned practitioner, shared her reflections on the pace of change in the NHS since 2014.
She observed that most of the NHS's 2014 five-year vision still needs to be fulfilled even a decade on.
Achieving this monumental shift has its challenges. So, how can we make progress in a world where change is slow and complex without losing heart and giving up?
I returned from the conference with a list of useful tips to retain your individual resilience and make change happen in government.
These are not my ideas - they are collated from sessions by Rochelle Gold, NHS Digital; Steven Garrett, Sport England; Henrietta Curzon, Newham Council; Katie Brunger, Newham Council; Nicholas Ward, Essex County Council; Martin Jordan, German government’s Digital Service; and Kara Kane, GDS - full references at the end.
Agitating for change
1. The Power of Senior Leadership
Change works best when it comes from the top down, bottom up and middle out. Securing buy-in from senior leadership accelerates the rate of change, especially in the slower layers of transformation, such as organisational culture, governance and infrastructure.
Adapted from Steven Garrett’s slide
How might we use some of our design tools and methods to understand what keeps senior leaders up at night and tap into that narrative to influence change?
2. Assess design maturity
Use design maturity assessment tools tailored to your specific sector to gauge where your organisation is now and to plan the next steps. These tools are valuable for their outputs but, more importantly, for the conversations they stimulate and the resulting actions. For example at Sport England, they developed key phrases that described where they were going from and going to.
Here are a few examples of design maturity models:
Design Maturity Approach for Government (TPX Impact / HM Land Registry)
Local Government Service Design Maturity Model (Newham Council and others)
User Centred Design Maturity Model (NHS Digital: England)
There are non-sector-specific maturity models - for example, the Nielsen Norman Group UX Maturity Model, which could be adapted to other design fields.
Which other design maturity models have you come across or used?
3. Follow the energy
You can’t take on the whole organisation at once. Ask yourself, where are the people that want to help? Identify allies who share your passion for change. These cheerleaders may not have the "right" job title, yet they possess the enthusiasm to help drive transformation. They are the ones who can speak up when you’re not in the room.
4. Learn from others
Reading relevant books is a shortcut to finding clues to avoid common mistakes. Share these books with colleagues to encourage alignment. But realise context trumps theory!
A community of practice might be a good place to share reading or even starting a book club.
Learn from others in your organisation too. Our individual views of a system are inherently limited by our position within organisations. Recognising this, we should actively seek input from diverse perspectives, understanding that every viewpoint offers a unique insight.
5. Develop organisational capability
Recruit if you can (though that’s easier said than done!) and grow your own talent by training enthusiastic staff with transferable skills. For example, currently, we’re seeing many Business Analysts join our service design training programmes.
6. Make yourself useful
Start to demonstrate value by delivering something useful to begin to build trust in you and trust in the approach. Even if it isn’t focusing effort on the “right” problem just yet.
7. Work in the open, share challenges and be humble
With a median job tenure of just 3.3 years in some parts of government (figures from DWP), continuity is rare.
Yet changing governance, culture and even the very nature of government is a big, multi generational collaborative project, spanning perhaps 50 years.
To ensure a seamless transition of ideas and progress, we must work openly, maintain clear research and design decision records, and facilitate effective handovers.
Blogs about progress or weeknotes are a great place to start working in the open. It can help future teams avoid going down the wrong route a second time. Here is a great example from Coco Chan. If you’re not brave enough to do this publicly, start by sharing within your organisation via Teams.
Openly and humbly admit that you “think things could be better - perhaps this might help.” and ask “Who else is willing to give this a try?”. This is more effective than telling everyone you have all the answers to all the things!
9. Do one thing well
(👆shamelessly stolen from the brilliant Hiut Denim Co)
Or a handful of things. Many business plans contain far too many items. Focus efforts on what’s important. Start with a gradual culling of the corporate to-do list.
8. Just do it
(👆also stolen 😉)
You won’t know whether your plans are right until you get going. Nothing will work perfectly anyway. Ask yourself, “What’s the smallest thing we could do to test this idea?” and give it a try.
Don’t wait for the “perfect moment” before making a change. Instead, consider the one small thing you could do that would make a difference. Even if it means jumping into a traditional waterfall project - try something that might be scrappy. It might feel like a detour but eventually gets you closer to your goal.
How do we do this difficult work while retaining a sense of perspective and individual resilience?
Individual resilience
10. Join a community of practice
Though peer connection is often framed as knowledge exchange, the essential role is in nourishing and change-making.
Working with a community of like-minded professionals can provide invaluable support, motivation, and insights during challenging times. Resilience comes from social connectedness. Community is everything.
Having a supportive network around you can help people navigate adversity and mitigate the risk of “snap back”.
What is snap back?
Snap back is the thing that happens when you have made a change effort and you find yourself returning to where you started rather than sustaining the change.
The community can also collaborate to develop the things they need at a practical level, such as a new set of job descriptions for new roles and share knowledge, too.
Communities don’t happen by magic. They require time, willingness, support and structure. The best book I’ve seen on this subject is Emily Webber’s Building Successful Communities of Practice.
11. Step back to see the big picture
We must recognise that our services will never reach perfection. As technology evolves and society changes, the goalposts continually shift.
Remember, your job is to leave the organisation a little better than when you arrived. Your job is not to reach utopia tomorrow!
12. Reflect on progress
Regularly assess how far you've come. It's easy to forget past achievements when continually pushing for progress. Celebrate successes by regularly looking back and to see how much progress you’ve made in the last year. You’ll probably be surprised!
13. Recognise layered change
Change is not monolithic; it comes in layers. Some aspects, like transactions, can change relatively quickly, while others, such as governance, organisational culture, and even the nature of government take much, much longer to shift.
It’s rare that these layers will align in your favour.
The example that Martin and Kara shared is useful to demonstrate this. In the German Government, they were working on getting more people to use the gov ID app. While they could make changes to the app in team sprints, the thing that was a real blocker was the signup letter. It was confusing, so people didn’t activate the app. It took them about a year to get the letter redesigned, requiring changes to infrastructure and governance.
Slide from Martin Jordan and Kara Kane’s session
14. Recognise uniqueness
Understand that every organisation's journey toward design maturity is unique. They operate in different contexts, with varying considerations, and will inevitably progress in a different order and at different speeds. And that’s OK.
As I left the conference, I felt invigorated by the collective dedication to making change happen in government. Yes, it's tough. Yes, it's slow. But it's also incredibly rewarding. By embracing user-centered design and applying these valuable insights, we can navigate the intricacies of government transformation, one step at a time.
After all, it's not just about the destination but the journey and the connections we make along the way.
Thank you to those who so generously shared their thinking at Service Design in Government and whose ideas I’ve stolen drawn upon in this post:
Rochelle Gold, NHS Digital: The Journey to Eutopia
Steven Garrett, Sport England: A look inside Sport England’s whole organisation transformation: one service at a time
Henrietta Curzon, Newham Council - Katie Brunger, Newham Council - Nicholas Ward, Essex County Council Assess your organisation’s service design maturity using the new local government service design maturity model
Martin Jordan, German government’s Digital Service - Kara Kane, GDS The Long Slog of Public Service Design
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