This week, we returned to workshopping the Service Standard. It’s been a quarter since we wrapped up the DIN specification. Since then, the team has been busy supporting the release, calculating the value of doing things the Service Standard way and translating the strictly codified spec language into plain language.
We wanted to pick things up where we left them – with the people who were part of the consortium since autumn. Many returned, and some sent colleagues as replacements with a different professional angle.
Workshopping Service Standard content
We invited people to our office for 2 half days of content work because taking a community-led approach works best. Linn did most of the writing work on the plain language description for each of the new 13 criteria.
We are calling them criteria instead of standard points; somehow, that resonates better with most people.
As we have seen often enough, starting with a non-empty page works best. So, we offered for each point:
- a newly formulated title including verbs
- a description of why it matters
- a list of what there is to do
- some references to what’s done by others
And we are about to workshop more #ServiceStandard content with colleagues from all parts of German government — from federal to state to municipal level, plus public and private sector IT suppliers and digital outcome providers. This is day 2. The output will shape the new standard’s guidance.
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) April 30, 2025 at 10:53 AM
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The 25 or so attending participants were asked to read and review each criterion on a poster. We chose a world-café format style. They left comprehension-judging stickers on the posters and added sticky notes with questions, suggestions and corrections.
After previous feedback from male participants with colour vision deficiency, we invested in more accessible workshop material. The team ordered stickers that one can distinguish by both colour and shape. A green dot, yellow square, and red triangle no longer confuses anyone. This must become standard workshop equipment now.
For more inclusive workshops and improved #accessibility: After receiving feedback from participants with colour vision deficiency, we started using stickers that don’t just rely on colour for identification. Before, some (male) participants could not distinguish the green and red stickers.
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) April 30, 2025 at 11:57 AM
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We also showed and shared our live prototype of the new Service Standard website. It’s incomplete, of course, but it gives a good impression of what’s to come. Tito built it in Webflow so everyone could take a look on their device and share it with interested colleagues, too.
Going forward, we will use the prototype to work with the external developers who are starting to get involved. The prototype already utilises all elements of the umbrella brand: the official header, cross-government logo and the latest KERN Design System styles.
During the 2 workshop days, we received plenty of comments again, which we will unpick in the coming days. People left the space with a productive spirit and a ROTI score of around 4.75 out of 5.
Working on myself – taking leadership training
It’s been a proper while since I took a leadership training course. I’ve been using my annual learning and development stash almost exclusively for attending conferences.
On Monday and Tuesday, I joined an intensive integral leadership training. I did that together with just over a dozen other people from very different organisations: from feminist tech startups to corporations and NGOs to sales organisations. We looked at different types of personalities and related communication preferences. We reflected on our organisational culture models according to Frédéric Laloux’s book ‘Reinventing Organizations’. The model helped me make sense of some of our day-to-day communication challenges as we are split between 2 vastly different models: Digital Service is a green-to-teal organisation with empowered employees, shared values, self-managed teams, a degree of distributed decision making, and a focus on user satisfaction. The government ministries we are working with, on the other hand, have formal roles, value hierarchy, control and processes over everything else.
The 2 days were highly interactive and followed an active learning model. We touched on mindfulness, did nonviolent communication self-coaching and developed a guide for difficult employee performance reviews. Throughout the afternoon of day 2, we ran simulations of difficult conversations and role-played things.
I took plenty of notes, left the training refreshed, and hope to revisit the collected material in the coming weeks and months.
Learning about the new minister
The surprise announcement of the week has been the appointment of the first-ever Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernisation, Karsten Wildberger. Before Monday, I had never heard of his name. He was not mentioned in any public discussions in the past few weeks. Various women were on the lists of likely ministers. So, I didn’t think it would be a man. Everyone else was just as surprised. There was talk of a private sector wildcard.
To understand what he might care about, I listened to a podcast conversation recorded in November 2024. In the conversation, Wildberger describes his approach to leading the holding company of MediaMarkt/Saturn, a multinational chain of over 1000 consumer electronics shops across Europe. He mentions various concepts and areas that can be equally relevant and transferable to digital public service context:
- Service platform
- Personalised services
- Omni-channel experience
- Customer experience
- Online-offline tandem
I hope he will bring some fresh ideas to the table and make civil servants think differently about public service experience. I’m curious to meet him when the opportunity arises.
Getting policy designers to meet
Last week, David, Kara and I got together to plan a workshop for early June. Now, we have a sign-up form and a short description. It says the following:
What’s the role of design in shaping policy? What’s the role of trained designers in informing laws, regulations, and procedures? More and more designers are working further ‘upstream’ than before.
Declining trust in government and low levels of satisfaction with public services shows us that we need a system-wide transformation in public service delivery. How can we embed agile, iterative and user-centred ways of working into policymaking? What does bottom-up policymaking look like?
While most designers work on services and design interactions between users and governments, the role of dedicated policy designers is now firmly established. But what they do on a day-to-day basis differs a lot. In this international morning gathering, we will bring policy designers of different kinds together – to share work, approaches and questions.”
We are planning to have an interactive session. We’d like to hear about different policy design approaches from across the world and collect collective challenges and successful tactics.
Let’s talk #Design for #policy! Adjacent to the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, we are running an international #govDesign gathering on contemporary #policyDesign practice: Join us on 6 June from 9 am in Berlin at @digitalservice.bund.de. 🎟️ Sign up here: www.tickettailor.com/events/inter…
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) May 2, 2025 at 6:34 PM
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In any case, we will have short input presentations from David from the EU Policy Lab and someone from Digital Service to share some of our Digitalcheck work.
Planning next workshops and meetups
With a bit more lead time than recently, we opened up seats for the Berlin May meetup on accessibility. It will be our 10th meetup already and the third one this year. The topic is ‘accessible for everyone’. We will host it in our office.
We will hear from Deutsche Bahn folks, and Digital Service colleagues will share some work on justice services.
Join us on Global #Accessibility Awareness Day on 15 May in Berlin – if you’re around! www.meetup.com/offentliches…
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) April 30, 2025 at 4:20 PM
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The description I wrote says the following:
Public sector services need to work for everyone. Unlike private sector businesses, public organisations cannot exclude anyone or focus on a narrow user group. German accessibility law, the Basic Law – also known as Grundgesetz – and EU legislation demand this.
Various public sector organisations have been building significant capacity and capability in-house. In our May meetup, we want to hear from representatives of several public sector organisations about their efforts to design and develop the most inclusive products and services.”
After submitting my proposal at the last minute, I received feedback from the Service Design in Government conference organisers. They accepted my proposal. So, Kara and I will run a September workshop on how to exit our service design Groundhog Day experience.
Proposal accepted! LinkedIn post turned into a workshop format for @sdingov.bsky.social: “How to exit our #serviceDesign Groundhog Day experience?” @karakane-kk.bsky.social & I will run a workshop on making end-to-end service design finally happen. We hope to see you there: Edinburgh, 17-19 Sep
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) May 1, 2025 at 11:50 AM
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This started with a LinkedIn post 2 months ago, in which I wondered why some service transformation things move so slowly. I wrote it after Sabrina and Marco ran the ‘Introduction to service design’ training again – see notes from week #146.
The workshop proposal I submitted pitched the following:
Where is the ‘end-to-end service design’ we’ve been talking about for almost a decade? While design systems have helped us create straightforward transactions and navigational content patterns like ‘step by step’ have helped stitch disjointed offerings together, unified services that truly “solve a whole problem for users” are almost impossible to find. “From when the user starts trying to achieve a goal to when they finish” has been the ambition since 2016. How do we finally get there? In a workshop, we will collect all the small and big things we have seen work to get us to those ends. From running service communities to creating service owners and far beyond.”
We will have 60 minutes for this workshop. I reckon we will shape it over summer.
With new public sector design roles popping up, I also wondered if we should properly review the government and the public sector’s capabilities and capacities in user-centred design. As user-centricity is referenced in the coalition agreement once again, we can ask for some action. It would require a few more actors to back a more robust study. I think it would be worth it.
New design jobs in the German #publicSector! German pension provider DRV Bund is looking for another #serviceDesigner in Berlin. The City of Munich’s unit digital@M seeks a working student focusing on #design and visual communication. 👇🏻 verwaltungsgestaltung.de#positionen
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) May 2, 2025 at 11:56 AM
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Since starting my little job list about 6 months ago, there has been no time without an open design role somewhere in the public sector in Germany. Most often, it was more than 1 opening.
What’s next
Next week, I will start interviewing designers. I haven’t done that in quite a while, so I probably got a bit rusty.