Daily workout to strengthen Service Design practice in government

Service Design within the public sector is increasingly used by local and central governments to rethink, design, and shape the new generation of public services. As practitioners, we find ourselves in a good position to continue working in this way. We now have a considerable pool of knowledge, methodologies and case studies generated by the vast community of colleagues around the world that provide sufficient leverage for shaping the future of the public sector.

The Service Design for Government conference is one of the main events that brings together the international service design community. This community is involved in designing, improving, and testing new services, policies, or experiences across the whole public sector. Attending the conference is always a fabulous opportunity to be inspired and get insights from the first-hand experience of fellow practitioners working in in-house design teams in government or as consultants in design agencies.

The main inspiration was being aware of the refinement and evolution of service design. And it made me think about the importance of being trained every day with the basics to keep fit and face the challenges that practitioners might have.

The following five steps are common and shared practical tips that you may have seen before if you work in service design in the public sector. Alone, they work a set group of tasks, but together these five exercises become a complete workout for your team. During the next months, and after we finish the launch of the MVP of our service, we will be warming up in our Digital Service Design team at the National Lottery Heritage Fund. So, tell us if you start with the workout and how it goes. Perhaps we can meet in the park and train together!

Step 1: Embrace regular experimentation to gain confidence with new proposals

Experimentation is the essence and difference that design brings to rigid systems, such as the public sector, founded on more evidence-based methods. This experimentation has the benefit of being properly funded and of taking place in design teams that are — or should not be — polluted by daily routines and with the necessary resources. Design teams develop practical experience through trial and error before implementation using innovative, creative and open-ended methods. Through experimentation we can introduce new ways of thinking and generate value in the process of formulating policies, laws, regulations and in the creation of new types of services.

[Case] Home Office Policy & Innovation Lab (CoLab)

The design experiment used by the team of the CoLab in the Home Office clearly showed that running experiments within the public sector can generally solve complex problems. They presented how they are running experiments to test and approve or decline “the riskiest assumptions”. The method is simple, sequential, and iterative. The first step is to carry out extensive research, mapping the system and pain points, and identifying the main themes. By running workshops, they collect a considerable number and diversity of ideas that are later associated with riskiest assumptions. Finally, they run the design experiments to test these assumptions/ideas. A good example is an experimental process about the refugee integration loans, focused on making the service easier to understand and to apply for users. As a result, and after running experiments across 17 ideas, the service went from a paper-based manual process to an online service with simplified lending criteria, the removal of wet signatures and reducing the time to access the money from 25 to 7 working days. This is a real design digital transformation.

Based on their shared reflection, an important part in CoLab experiment’s success has been considering minimal viable experiments produced quickly on paper, sticking to the experiment and not trying to scale as a pilot or remembering that you are not in a delivery team.

Step 2: Be bold and precise in exploring design methods for every specific task or process

When the challenge is about introducing change, it is important to be careful and take the time to decide how we are going to provoke this. “Change the instruments and you will change the entire social theory that goes with them.” Bruno Latour´s statement defines well the importance of finding and exploring the methods to achieve new and unexpected outcomes.

At the same time that the practice of Service Design is expanding in the public sector, there is a risk of constraining the diversity of methods that the practice of design can bring to generate new ideas and create innovative value propositions. Beyond brainstorming, focus groups, empathy map, or stakeholder map, there are hundreds of methods such as cultural probes, bodystorming, behavioral mapping, film ethnography, participatory action research, experience prototyping, scenarios, and stakeholder walkthrough, to name a few. The important thing is to know why and for whom we are going to apply the method, having the possibility of customising the method itself. Design Thinking is a practice and a technique that, like any other, requires specific abilities and experienced practitioners. Therefore, either through an in-house design team or an external design team, exploring the selection of the convenient methods upfront of a project might be a powerful warm up.

[Case] Municipality of Apeldoorn (Netherlands) and Koos Service Design team

Local governments represent that public layer where the connection with citizens and stakeholders is stronger than in higher governmental layers. The municipality of Apeldoorn, a region in the centre of the Netherlands, launched a transformative initiative to move towards a circular economy model. And the way they addressed this challenge was acting as a catalyst of change involving a considerable group of stakeholders. The project was initiated by the city council and facilitated by Koos Service Design team. They explored with one of the methods, transforming the linear planning into a circular one, co-creating the circular process. By creating a process journey with all the interactions between all the stakeholders involved they defined the role that everyone played in the process. They also experienced that taking the time to set clear definitions of concepts and “avoiding killing assumptions” from the beginning is key to work collaboratively. Another shared success factor was about creating a sense of ownership over the problem and the solutions which made it possible to move easily to prototype and test co-created ideas.

Step 3: Dig into the valuable design of connections and gaps

While one of the challenges facing the sector is the digitalisation of transactions and services, the question is whether this transformation is being planned as an end in itself, or its purpose is to benefit citizens generally and to add public value. Some expert voices of pioneering countries in the digital transformation highlight the importance of not only redesigning services but changing the way in which the government that provides them operates. This would involve a redesign of the structures and a change of attitude that stop working in non-connected silos, because “users do not care about the structure of government” (Downe, as cited in Service Design Network, 2016).

Rethinking the structure encompasses the three operational levels of government: governance, policy making and services. Hence the potential of service design catalysts of change from a holistic and systemic view that contemplates the three levels. It means designing end-to-end services and the connection between the policies and the service delivery. It’s not about mapping and diagramming as an outcome itself. It’s actually about designing the gaps that those maps and diagrams represent such as the silos between areas or departments or the gaps in a service where there is more than one service provider.

[Case] Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).

The work realised by the design team in the policy department at the MHCLG it’s exactly a perfect example of the value of mapping to visualise connections that are, in real life, disconnected or not visible to people involved in them. They basically mapped the “top-down” policies with the services delivered to users. This encouraged people to see the whole system and the services that bring policies to life and understand the impact of the policies in the service delivery and, directly, in the citizens. The outcome of this brilliant prototype has been an indexed service list delivered by MHCLG and a structured description of every service containing four parts: Overview of the service, Purpose identifying users’ needs and the connection with the policy objective), Delivery with steps and the public service provider/s, and Management of the service showing the area and policy team.

Part of the meaningful learnings and reflections that the team shared have to do with the potential value of mapping, showing the different users and their needs, the connections across departments and other organisations involved or how services are “nested” within each other. This helped them to introduce in a practical way the need of moving from a Traditional to a Service Thinking.

Step 4: Challenge yourself to co-design “with” people and not only “for”

Service design focuses on the needs, wishes, concerns and interests of users to offer them worthy experiences. We do research on their needs, ideate, prototype, and test solutions with them. But how can we challenge ourselves, as designers, involving them in the design process to co-create these solutions or to define the problem? And what does it mean “involving” them?

Some critical voices point to a reduction of co-creation to invite people in workshops that are already designed or that will summarise the ideas based on the principles, criteria, and objectives of the design team. But the potential and value of co-creation to design better services and experiences in the public sector is not being fully explored already. First, we might need to question the practice and some principles related to equality, transparency, accessibility, power and ownership when we involve people in our process. Second, co-creation should be understood as an integrated mechanism that provides value in the design and implementation of policies and public services and not as an optional extra.

[Case] Kelly Ann (KA) McKercher. Designer and Author of Beyond Sticky Notes, NSW Government (Australia)

This was an inspirational Master Class in genuine co-design practice full of tips and case studies. The expertise and the passion that Kelly Ann has for that made the difference. It was very insightful to know the differences she has identified between human-centered design and co-design. In a very summarized way, a solid and substantial co-design means talk about “partners” instead of “participants”; it requires a change to the role, to be a “supporter” rather than a “leader” and de-centering the designer in design; it’s about “co-deciding” and sharing power instead of installing pre-determined agendas; it’s not about telling stories “On behalf of’ but also building “own stories”.

I found it quite stimulating how Kelly Ann pointed out the importance of more organic and less designerly practices, such as looking at the relations that are being created around by actively listening instead of following a detailed workshop agenda, transcribing literal conversations or doing a lot of activities. Because let’s be honest, “Human relationships take time” and we might challenge our narrowed problem-solving ways of doing, particularly when we are dealing with health services or complex social questions. That’s the case of one of the projects Kelly mentioned, Our Town ran in different towns in Australia, a ten-year community driven initiative to prevent and respond to mental health challenges.

If you want to test where you are in the scale of transformative co-design and start with this honest practice, I highly recommend having a look at the Model of Care for Co-design that she has developed (below in references).

Step 5: Keep fit and be an expert at opening conversations and building trusted relationships

If co-creation requires the ability to involve people in our process, it is crucial to build strength in being successful when we want to engage them. We might find a few challenges related to the lack of trust in your process, difficulties to engage those that are not familiar with collaborative processes, or just a tight schedule that makes it complicated to participate.

When faced with internal users’ engagement and cross-sectorial challenges, it is vital to build relationships of trust and empathy with all the parts involved. Having strategies and actions such as informal networking, training, and co-design workshops can help to strengthen a collaborative approach. There is probably not a unique formula to create this trusted environment, so keeping fit and being proactive to open and facilitate conversations and dealing with the complexity of human behaviour are the basics of your daily workout.

[Case] Open Change / Convivial conversations

The engaging team of Open Change brought a participative talk about “Convivial conversations”, a suggestive term and methodology developed and applied in their work. The session could be described in the same way convivial is defined: friendly, lively and cheerful. We had the opportunity to exchange with other practitioners our experiences running workshops and facilitating conversations. How the pandemic has transformed the facilitation with the digital sphere as the main playground, the value of a good workshop preparation or the benefits of setting clear expectations were the most relevant topics shared by most of the colleagues.

The facilitation method shared by Open Change, emphasises how important it is to pay attention to create the spaces where people can feel safe to collaborate and open trusted conversations. It is about composing the enablers for those convivial conversations to happen. Have a look at this inspiring approach and think about the warming ups needed before you open conversations and facilitate a design process.

References

Service Design for Government conference https://govservicedesign.net/event

Our Town project (Australia) https://www.ourtownsa.com.au/

Who cares? A model of co-design by Kelly Ann (KA) McKercher https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/who-cares-model-care-co-design-kelly-ann-mckercher-them-they-/

What is Colab? (Home Office Digital, Data and Technology) https://hodigital.blog.gov.uk/2020/08/13/what-is-colab-at-ddat-home-office/

There’s growing interest in digital mortgages (HM Land Registry) https://hmlandregistry.blog.gov.uk/2019/05/16/theres-growing-interest-in-digital-mortgages

A guide to convivial conversations (Open Change) https://openchange.notion.site/A-guide-to-convivial-conversations-595cd2f04f014be3ac619e9d6a456f23