FGX Goals — What does ‘confidently incomplete’ mean to us?
What are the FGX goals?
We’re intent on making change happen. We know it’s more than what we do and what we build and create that has an impact. It’s the way we do it and the experience of working with us that can really make lasting change.
We put a lot of energy and effort into the experience of working with us and we’ve given it a name … FGX (FutureGov Experience). To help our team, our partners and our clients aim for the most impactful experience we have a set of five FGX goals to describe what the FutureGov experience should be. This post is the fourth in our series outlining what we mean by each of the goals. Check out our previous posts on energising, positively different and bold.
Introducing FGX Goal: Confidently incomplete
Change is on-going. It’s never done or finished. And we embrace that. We’re learning and growing together all the time as a team, as a business, as a group, with our clients and with our peers.
So often, our clients begin work with us expecting something to be ‘finished’ or ‘done’ by the end of the engagement. It’s an expectation and unachievable ambition, built from years of being sold ‘solutions’ rather than an approach to change and improvement.
There are very few instances when something is ever ‘finished’ or ‘done’. And in fact, the only examples I can think of is when something needs to stop, close down or end (Joe Macleod does a lot of great work on endings).
The reality is, the challenges we seek to address, the organisations we work within and the conditions within which we deliver, all change. And so must the things we do to make meaningful improvements.
Culture of learning
As a business, we’re openly and explicitly learning. We do this together as a team, constantly reflecting on what’s working and what’s not through things like retrospectives (regular times to come together as a project team to reflect on how to become more effective) and our Communities of Practice (groups or people working in a particular practice such as service design or product design who come together to reflect on and develop their collective skills and approaches).
We explicitly learn with our clients too as we face unprecedented challenges together Building strong and trusting relationships with our clients allows us to try, learn, fail and succeed together.
FamilyStory is an excellent example of a shared ambition to do things differently in children’s social care and a shared understanding that we’ll learn together. Its new territory and we’re openly learning alongside Kensington & Chelsea, Hammersmith & Fulham and Westminster Children’s Services to radically rethink how technology can support children’s social care. This is no simple task and requires significant change across high-risk areas. We’ve travelled great lengths over the past two years working on FamilyStory, even winning awards, but importantly, we’re all confident in its incompleteness. There’s a lot more work that can be done to better support the people working hard to improve the lives of families and young people.
We’re experienced professionals who’ve worked on hundreds of projects but one project is never the same as the next. We’re constantly learning and building new knowledge to continually improve and deliver better. This FGX Goal means being confident in what we don’t know, or in how we’ll be able to respond to future challenges. An approach to not knowing, when change is happening all around us, is an essential part of helping organisations and teams solve 21st-century problems in the right way.
When responding to change, design is never done. We recognise that our work will always be incomplete. But we’re confident in the ability to make progress when we work together with our clients in this way.
So if you work with us — as an employee, partner or client — be prepared to end a project not with a finished ‘thing’ but with a roadmap of what needs to be done next. Be prepared to be resilient and adaptable to the ongoing change that is inevitable. And be prepared to learn together.
As Einstein said: “If you stop learning, you start dying.”
