Transcript
Tom Hulme
Thank you so much. I’m humbled to be here. In between adjusting my slides to 16x9 this morning and calculating that I have less than 1% of the patents of Jonathan Ive, I was inspired by absolutely every session. I’m excited just to share some learnings about work with government.
IDEO, as many of you know, is a global innovation company with 600 people. We help small start-ups, corporations and also government innovate and we think actually, the interplay between those learnings is important and more and more we’ve found clients, governments asking us a big question. Firstly, can government actually design, and can countries? We hope we’re taking a small step to figure out – and I’m going to use an Obama phrase here – yes, we can, together. But it’s not easy.
To date we’ve worked with six different governments. We’re on our fifth project with the US Government and I thought what might be fun is to share with you just three learnings that apply across all of these projects. It’s certainly consistent across them all.
So the first one, and I think we heard this theme, I think it actually, well, Jony Ive’s conversation around the goal being critical; I think it touches on this. The question is half the battle. It’s absolutely the first opportunity to fail but it’s also a wonderful, wonderful design opportunity and that’s particularly true when working with government because the world is so complex. Its unbelievably complicated and so are the silos in government.
This is a map of the US Government. To structure questions around organisations or government like this becomes impossible. To reflect these silos in questions; it doesn’t matter to the people that are important. So I thought it was interesting; when the Obama administration, John Berry specifically, first came to us – he’s the director of office and personnel management – and I thought it was interesting because his role cuts across government, it cuts across it all.
And instead of just thinking, how am I going to fix something that’s really broken, they came to us initially asking the question, how can we recruit and retain better talent? I really admired that. We started the project like we always do. In fact, what we initially… As you can see, they went to look at Facebook, Google and IDEO and we showed them around and showed them how we work over in Palo Alto.
And the next thing we did them, keeping, making sure that we kept it small, the engagement was manageable, we just had a workshop and we had a workshop with his team and what we learnt from that workshop – and it’s actually a quote I have on the next stage – that you can see, the real value that this sort of process, this collaborative process involving all of the stakeholders, involving all of the people tasked with recruiting – the real value is it gives a shift in thinking and it gave them belief.
But broadly, the right questions for governments to ask, we find, have to universally be centred on the citizen. And it sounds really simple. We’re not naïve. We know it’s tough in government because although we’re all, everyone in this room; the one thing that unites us is we’re all citizens, we’re all humans. People forget, we move further away from the bulk of citizens.
And so that brings me to the second big learning, which again sounds really obvious. You can see, you know, I definitely am not smart. IDEO is a bit smarter than me but being citizen-centred is critical. Now, to us that means a number of things. It means really deep insight so we did a project with the social security administration and our task was to significantly increase the number of people filing online by 2015.
The obvious answer to deliver that is design a better website but we started with the citizen at the centre so we shadowed them. We shadowed them across the office experience, we watched them online, we watched the way that they behaved day to day and we started to unlock some insights. And we also started to realise, actually, there were some distinct archetypes and so we took the US population that was moving to this need and we actually built just four simple archetypes.
And I think the thing that we learnt from this, it sounds so obvious but it was unbelievably powerful because this organisation in the past was trying to design for the average American. Can you imagine how hard that is? When we then broke it up into four archetypes, suddenly, in those meetings, people in the room said, I’m a passenger. Sheepishly they said that, when actually, a passenger is someone that never does their own finances. It’s often done by their spouse.
So we had very senior people in the US Government acknowledge that they were passengers. Suddenly they could design for people they related to. That was important and that enabled us then to design a better experience, including things like visualising the most important bit, what your benefits are likely to be based on when you retire. So we helped them manage their life.
The next thing that we often do is we remind our clients to remember that their citizens are part of a big journey. Their interaction with the government is part of their citizens’ big journey and so when working with the Ministry of Manpower in Singapore that basically handles the application and registration of overseas workers – which is a huge proportion of the Singapore workforce, as you can imagine – we started by shadowing them, workers, overseas workers through that process.
And we actually delivered a film. This is a brief summary of that. I’ll just play probably ten seconds just to show you the sort of experience.
So you can see, it was overwhelming confusion. This is what it was like. To a Singaporean Government worker, they didn’t see this because it was all routine. They didn’t go back and reset and ask themselves the questions again. When you went through this first, it was absolutely terrifying but if you look at the navigation boards here, which hopefully you can see better on some of the side screens, it was terrifying.
So we actually showed that to them and that acted as a leaping-off point to actually design a much better, bigger experience. The next thing you do, if you have the citizen at the centre, you can start to think how to engage them. Now, Obama’s clearly done a phenomenal job of this, particularly when he was actually running for office; unbelievable.
I think actually, still today, he has something like 4% of the world’s Facebook users have liked his page, which is extraordinary engagement, amazingly powerful. Interestingly, the… it hasn’t actually been as successful translating that into involving citizens in day-to-day decisions. This is one of the efforts. This is actually from a couple of nights ago. You can see, up on their web page, they put the question, what would you like us, to see us post and tweet about?
And we find ourselves actually working with governments to involve the citizens more and more and move to this era of sort of co-creation and we often use our platform, open IDEO, which was mentioned. So this is our open innovation platform that works through a process that’s completely modular and it’s designed around two core things. Number one is collaboration because we believe diverse input gives better output.
And secondly, it’s designed around impact. That’s what we care about. We don’t care about vanity metrics like number of users. We care about impact and we look for that and in this case, we experimented whether these platforms can be used to actually ask big, important questions. So we, with the I20, which is a group of the innovation leaders of 35 countries, we actually asked the crowd – I hate that term because it almost sounds derogatory – but we asked everyone what they thought the agenda for that event hosted by Hillary Clinton should be.
And the engagement was great, even on a tough question. You can see here some of the winning agenda ideas and specifically this one by a guy in New York called Damian Rappuci [?] where he really wanted actually to see disaster relief rise to the forefront. And the typical sort of contribution to the site you see, we never have winning people, we have winning concepts because winning people doesn’t drive collaboration.
And in this case, you can see that the evaluation criteria were clear. You can’t ask people just to applaud stuff to figure out if it’s good. You’ve got to ask more specific questions than that and the level of contributions you see in the commenting was huge.
Even if you can’t get people to engage online, you can offline so we worked with the Government of Peru to figure out actually, in a society where voting is absolutely mandatory but civil engagement is non-existent – everybody was incredibly cynical of the system – we wondered, how can we get people to have a voice, how can we give them a voice?
And we created stickers and gave them out locally and asked people to stick them on things they thought were broken. So this literally translates to Fix This. I think a great quote we always enjoy is, we were asked by one of the contributors, can you make one that I can stick on a person? Which is an interesting lesson.
But we also, in that context, realised that transparency was critical to the communities and one of the ideas in that, which I’m still inspired by, and local councils were specifically to put up their pledges and tick them off as they achieved them, use buildings as a manifesto and solicit feedback, give feedback through buildings.
And my final three slides are on the, my final point which is probably an over-used term but we believe passionately in the idea of government in beta. Historically, government was constrained by an electoral cycle of four years, let’s say. It was difficult to do stuff that took longer than that.
That remains the same but we think what’s changed is our ability to do stuff at speed so whereas previously something, a new service would take six years to develop, because of the tech it can take weeks, literally weeks. And we always start our projects by prototyping. Beta is beyond that so, for example, when we worked with the Transport Service Authority to come up with a better security clearance process, we actually mocked up the whole experience in a warehouse. If we can prototype this stuff, we can prototype anything.
And then finally, final example is we worked with Dubai, with their Government and Dubai has a pretty fast-paced belief, as many of you will know. And we redesigned their equivalent of the chamber of commerce. And as we did that, we realised that actually, what we were delivering was a fast-paced process but we were also delivering insights to help them learn and adapt it over time.
So this is the scissors that inaugurated the building after only six months of the project, an incredible pace. It was inspiring to see and I’m inspired by the US Government for this as well. It’s interesting to me that Anish Chopra is the first CTO of any government that I’m aware of. It’s an interesting role. They understand that technology will be at the heart of more services in the future and the importance, therefore, to understand those.
And I think we have some success stories here so I’d love to close out with a sort of optimistic note. I think alpha.gov is actually referenced in the US as a wonderful example of exactly this. It’s inspiring to people.
So my points are simply, the question is half the battle; be citizen-centred; and government should remain in beta, more than ever. Thank you.