Thursday evening, we discussed ‘creating better policies’ at the 6th edition of the ‘Öffentliches Gestalten – Shaping public sector’s future’ meet-up series.
Running an event during the high holiday season is risky because you might not have anyone show up. That didn’t turn out to be a problem. We had about 75 signups, with many dropouts, but it was still worth it. Around 40 people joined us. Attendees, once again, asked plenty of questions and were curious about the topic.
Talking about their work supporting digital-ready policy, my colleagues Mike and Sabrina presented the evolution of their growing toolbox for policymakers.
One of the best quotes of the evening came from Mike:
“Just like a product, a law is never finished. They are in a constant state of change and evolution. The time scales are fundamentally different: For products, we think in iterations of weeks or months, whereas for laws, the leaps are measured in years or even decades.” —Mike Pierce, DigitalService
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) Aug 23, 2024 at 8:38
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Rojda, who is running PublicLegalDesign, gave the second input his evening. She zoomed further out, offered her view as a trained lawyer and design thinker, and presented case studies from Germany and Guinea-Bissau.
It was such a good talk! On Thursday, legal designer Rojda Tosun introduced her approach to #publicLegalDesign. She explained how she works with lawmakers and #policy drafters, created a legal design toolkit, and worked on a justice service in Guinea-Bissau. Here’s the talk: youtu.be/RYaZYjDMC4o
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) Aug 24, 2024 at 10:13
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Miraculously, I edited and uploaded both talks, so they are available on YouTube sooner than ever.
With a 4.9 rating for the event, we feel validated that it’s worth our time. We have the opportunity to learn about things that are otherwise not discussed or at least captured.
There are plenty of topics we like to discuss. ‘Filling the gaps’ is probably the one I am most interested in doing next. Civic tech activists keep doing what—one can argue—government is supposed to be doing.
Aiming at 4 events per year, we still have 2 to run this year. We better get started with
Supporting international work
On Thursday, over lunchtime, we had a leadership Ask Me Anything session tentatively focused on international. Magdalena and Christina started by sharing some of their ongoing international engagement work. I added my few cents, spoke about some of the International Design in Government work, and tried to articulate the value it has created in the past few years.
A couple of hours later, Kara, Viktoria, and I ran our 35th international call. With a focus on ‘designing justice service’, we heard from 2 speakers – from Germany and the United Kingdom. A Spanish colleague we had invited didn’t manage to join. We again had a curious exchange, quickly filling the 80 scheduled minutes.
We have 37 people from Canada 🇨🇦 Finland 🇫🇮 Germany 🇩🇪 Sierra Leone 🇸🇱 the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 the United States 🇺🇸 in our international call on ‘designing justice services’. – including a district judge from the North of Finland.
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) Aug 22, 2024 at 17:08
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Earlier in the week, I also caught up with Laurence. We discussed his contribution to the Service Gazette, his upcoming workshop in September and how both could be related.
Right before a long holiday in the UK, we published our latest international blog post on the ‘Design in government’ blog. It recaps the global design pattern workshop we hosted in June and gives an outlook on the Helsinki conference.
The International Design in Government community is getting together in person this year for workshops and a conference in #Helsinki 🇫🇮 in October. Here’s our latest post about all community activities on the UK #GovDesign blog: designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2024/08/23/c…
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) Aug 23, 2024 at 10:39
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While slowly extending the event website further, I added a section listing all partnering organisations joining us in Helsinki. So far, it’s 90 public sector entities.
Describing the value of community work
As I was doing local and international community work this week, I tried articulating its value.
It deserves more time and space, a few more conversations, a blog post, and, eventually, a few book chapters. Here is a first attempt:
- Community work is knowledge management
- Community work is capability-building
- Community work is silo bursting
- Community work is strategy implementation
- Community work is defining end-to-end
Building and nurturing design communities has been a side-track of my professional work for 13 years now. It started with running Global Service Jams in 2011 and continued with the Berlin Service Design Drinks, a local Jobs-to-be-Done meetup, and the Service Experience Camp. Much public sector community work followed in the years since.
I feel privileged to do substantial community work. All too often, that’s outside of my work hours. My life circumstances allow that at the moment.
The perceived value of community work keeps shifting. By far, not every leader has a clear or even any understanding of its value. It needs more explaining and enriching with evidence:
Community work is knowledge management
I have used community work for knowledge management. People come and go. Organisational memory is often poor. So, if we don’t capture good work happening, no one will remember, be able to reference it and build on top of it. Hence, I have created YouTube channels with well over 100 recordings of presentations and talks, listed and unlisted. They serve as a patch for what should be done by organisational structures.
On one occasion during Services Week 2019, I recorded a case study of the Blue Badge service. The service team mainly consisted of contractors. Only the product manager and service owner were in the Department of Transport. A few months later, they were gone. None of the people who had built an excellent service were there anymore. Later, product managers were grateful to receive the recording of the talk.
Community work is capability-building
We have witnessed organisational capability-building through formats like the internal UK #GovDesign and service design meetups, the regular NExT user-centred design gatherings and monthly user research exchange. Whether it’s presenting work to each other, sharing tools and templates or offering support, we see small and more significant jumps in capability. By talking to each other, we define what good looks like. We raise our common bars for the work we will do in the future.
For some years, we ran monthly cross-government service design clinics. People from any UK public sector organisation could stop by and get support. Hours, days, or weeks later, they often expressed their gratitude. The same happens when I do Mega Mentor calls with public sector colleagues from around the world.
Community work is silo bursting
People are all too often stuck in their organisational bubbles. They don’t know what’s going on elsewhere or how closely other people’s work is related to theirs. Sometimes, it’s directly overlapping and even duplicative. Community work can be silo-bursting. It makes individuals see what they otherwise would not be able to see.
We have seen that on local and international levels. In early 2020, we ran a call on employment services. Rather randomly than intentionally, we invited designers from Finland, Norway, and Sweden to talk about their work in the space. After the 3 presentations, they were – more than us – puzzled by how much overlap there is between their work. They are from neighbouring countries. Some speak the same native language. Their welfare state systems are similar. Before, they had not been aware of each other’s work. After, they decided to sync.
Community work is strategy implementation
Party manifestos, coalition agreements, and digital strategies prioritise government work. All those things appear every 4 to 5 years. Senior leaders set the overall direction of travel for the coming cycle. Then, a strategic paper needs interpretation at the lower levels for implementation. Eventually, the strategy needs delivery. Community exchange is vital to strategy sense-making.
In UK government, we unpicked the 2017 Government Transformation Strategy and described things that members of the user-centred design community can do to contribute to it and to action it. We derived cross-government design community objectives from it. We also linked our international work to that strategy.
Germany’s current coalition agreement from December 2020 mentions user-centricity, interdisciplinarity, agility, and open source. But beyond high-level lip service, no ministerial responsibility became tangible. So, various NExT communities of practice have been tagging along and started to make these ambitions tangible for others in the public sector to see. Digital Service is co-running the formally organised communities on open source and user-centred design.
Community work is defining end-to-end
For years, we have talked about and worked on the end-to-end experience. But what is that anyway? The UK’s Government Transformation Strategy referenced a whole service approach. Germany’s recently updated Online Access Act covers end-to-end digital transformation. What is the whole? What are those ends?
Community formats are forums to discover and discuss that. In a recent monthly exchange session of user researchers working across the German public sector, attendees started sharing their findings on the implementation of shared service components across service areas. Together, community members can collect use cases, collate research, and inform roadmaps for services and components. In the UK, dedicated ‘service communities’ and related structures and tools supported the work towards whole services for years. They helped construct the best step by step guides for various service areas.
Community work is doing even more
This is a hasty write-up of loose thoughts.
Over the past decade, I have seen communities carry a lot – often without getting recognition for it. While the progress on our book ‘Strong Design’ is slow, strands and narratives are solidifying. There is much more on the functions and value of community work to research, discuss and write out in full.
Doing the day-to-day work
Occasionally, these weeknotes misrepresent my week. I report on the things that are more easily describable. I leave out the tenacious managerial and administrative work I do every day.
This week included 3 sessions on progressing with our approach to systemise design components and patterns across our service areas. Some services we have developed share design and code. Others use branches that have developed in their own way. We want to, and need to, bring things together. We might do this overarchingly with other public sector partners, or we don’t. Until the end of the year, we want clarity. So, we developed a plan for evaluating the options – with designers and engineers closely collaborating on this evaluation.
I had a checkout session with my Service Standard partner-in-crime, Caro, who is going on parental leave. Without her application of the standard in the context of justice services, our joint public talks and the theory of change we sketched, Germany’s Service Standard would not be maturing as it is now. In the last 10 minutes, I opened an Asana board to write down her 5 wishes for May 2025. I tagged them with my name and set a due date for the end of April. I am curious how far we will get until then. Nothing Caro wishes for is outlandish, but some things are ambitious.
Robert and Stefan shared an update on the Service Standard work in the Thursday morning Show-the-Thing session. It was crisp as always and received plenty of cheers. So far, they have interviewed 18 people. This week, I was again the notetaker in one of the interviews.
Currently, I’m thoroughly enjoying doing note-taking in interviews with public sector colleagues about the application and non-application of the #ServiceStandard. So many insights! So many strong soundbites! So much important work ahead of us!
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) Aug 21, 2024 at 20:41
For our open user research roles, I interviewed further candidates. I hope we can fill at least one by October. For content design, we were fortunate. A recently interviewed candidate stopped by on Wednesday to sign the contract – to already start in September.
I am still figuring out how to best deal with the demand-supply challenges in content design. I started thinking out loud about a trainee programme.
The difference in salary expectations of #userResearch and #contentDesign applicants is significant. I continue to be puzzled by this. Cause, at the same time, supply and demand are inverted. We have about 3 times as many user research applicants as we have applications for content design.
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) Aug 20, 2024 at 19:35
With possibly too many blog posts in the making, I checked in with blog editor Lutz. He aims for one blog post per week and has developed a tight schedule. I need to finish my content design blog post in the coming days. I can finish the other drafts by mid-September.
What’s next
This week, I have made good progress with the objectives for the user-centred design discipline. I have a draft, which I shared with the design leads and CPO Stephanie. I will refine it in the coming days and share it with all designers and user researchers.
I will interview further candidates for user research roles. And I will talk to our legal designer Franziska about her future work focus, which I am very excited about as it fits her unique skillset well.