As well as running my own service innovation business, I work as a Design Associate for the Design Council on their Public Services by Design (PSbyD) programme which is sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).
I see my role as helping public sector organisations understand what design thinking is and how best to exploit it for their individual needs. I don’t have a traditional ‘design background’ so I completely empathise with people trying to get their heads around design. It took me a while to really understand it but I think I’ve become pretty good at explaining it in plain English because that’s how I got people to explain it to me. It’s common sense.
I started my career as a project engineer introducing lean manufacturing in to a locker factory in Shropshire. It still remains as one of the toughest jobs I’ve ever done but I came away with some extremely valuable learnings.
To achieve a successful change in the way you do things in your organisation, and for it to stick, you have to actively involve the people the change affects and not to ‘do change to them’. I’m not just talking about consulting people on stuff. I mean working with them side-by-side and making the most of their knowledge and experience. Integrate this with design thinking and you have a smart way to create new services or improve existing ones. I’ve been fortunate to work with organisations of all shapes and sizes using this combined approach, in the private, public and third sector and I’m a huge fan of it.
One of my first clients on PSbyD was the London Borough of Lewisham working with the Housing Option Centre team to improve their homelessness service. Peter Gadsdon, Head of Strategy and Performance for Lewisham, has written a great blog post on the approach we used for the project, so I’ll focus on how I think a design approach can make a huge difference to public service improvement.
Less is more – there are a wealth of design tools and techniques available and to be honest it can be overwhelming. I’m a great believer in using a few tools really well. This is exactly what we did on the Lewisham project, ranging from video interviewing training and coaching by Ivo Gormley from thinkpublic, through to using sketching sheet templates to enable staff to communicate their ideas clearly and confidently.
Start small then get bigger – when doing something new I think it’s critical to get a quick result under your belt to build confidence. The same applied at Lewisham. The four ideas the group decided to prototype were self-contained and relatively easy to do. The impact of them however was much bigger and the team built confidence quickly and were ready to prototype their next idea with vengeance.
Empower people by doing, not telling – too many staff are told they are empowered to be ‘creative and innovative’ but are not given the right tools and support to do it. Many of them don’t even know what being ‘creative and innovative’ means in practice. Personally I think the best way to empower people is through action and that’s exactly what we did on the Lewisham project.
Design has a lot to offer the public sector. Combined with putting people at the centre of change and the rigorous application of common sense, any public sector organisation can fundamentally improve their services.
First published on the BIS Public Sector Innovation Portal, 11 November 2010