It pays to pay someone to make sense of stuff

Instructions made to be followed

Why external service design expertise is critical for public sector success.

Government agencies face dual challenges: improving service quality while simultaneously reducing costs. The go-to method for achieving those contradictory goals is service design, which promises root-cause analysis and focus on citizen needs rather than institutional process. To this end the title service designer has become more and more common in the public sector. Yet despite growing investment in design initiatives, many public sector organisations struggle to implement even well researched solutions.

There’s a pattern that emerges, familiar to many who work in this space: enthusiastic discovery phase yields brilliant insights, which is then followed by almost nothing. Why?

Good insights vs bureaucracy

The public sector operates under unique constraints. Regulations, legacy systems, departmental silos and political considerations create a complex web that can entangle even the most promising service innovations. Internal teams often lack the authority to force cross-departmental cooperation to drive change, as service design is considered a tactical task rather than a foundation of strategy. Improving service quality for citizens involves actual organisational change, which requires a much higher level investment in terms of authority and political will, than can be achieved at the mid-level where internal service designers operate. They become stuck in the quagmire of “the way things have always been done,” unable to envision and enforce alternatives that work within these constraints.

Not a prophet in your own land

External service designers bring with them two critical skills:

1. They have experience from multiple organisations and sectors. They’ve seen similar challenges solved in different contexts and can adapt these solutions to public sector realities.

2. They are not limited by status or authority within the structure of the organisation, which is a polite way of saying that they can tell truth to power without fear or favour.

To be quite honest, sometimes it feels that skill number 2 is more important than skill number 1. In Brand Manual we have often noted, that we’re hired as the mouthpiece to say again what has already been said by internal voices, but then no-one listened because the voices lacked authority.

From Discovery to Delivery

One reason that service design processes fail to deliver results in the public sector is also the misunderstanding of the timescale: discovery is a sprint. Delivery is an ultra-marathon. The most valuable external partner will help to prepare the organisation for change. However, this can only happen if there is administrative and political capital invested into the process, allowing external partners and internal teams to co-create solutions with all relevant stakeholders across the organisation, as necessary, without undue constraints on time-availability and pre-defined deliverables. Managing change is not managing a process but rather about managing people, building consensus and motivating a team. This requires leadership and external partners can only support the process, not drive it.

The other main reason that service design fails to live up to the hype, when it includes external partners is the procurement process. By definition, the discovery process seeks to uncover root-causes of problems and thereafter address these in a logical order. The procurement of services often defines concrete issues need to be addressed, even though the discovery process proves that these are symptomatic, and that addressing the root-causes will also solve them by default. A lot of effort is often wasted to answer questions that have become irrelevant.

Organisations that already have service designers employed are therefore often better buyers of external service design help. They are themselves aware of how addressing symptoms never cures the problems that need to be solved.

Value created vs cost incurred

Some public sector leaders balk at the cost of consultants. They’re expensive and the track record is mixed, at best. But when measured against the cost of failed internal initiatives or the opportunity cost of continued inefficiency, external partnerships often represent excellent value. The problem, however, is often that the problem consultants are hired to solve is not the problem that needs to be solved and solving the real problem costs more than the budget allows which results in the mixed track record and image of consultants.

Presuming, however, that you hired the right people for the right budget to do the right job then effective external service designers don’t just solve today’s problem. They help transfer skills and build internal capacity for ongoing improvement. They support internal service designers and embed a new way of thinking and doing throughout the organisation, that makes the idea of “human centred design” sticky. The best consultants make themselves redundant over time.

Citius, Altius, Fortius

As public sector organisations face growing pressure to do more with less, service design offers a proven method to meeting this challenge. But unlocking its full potential requires bridging the implementation gap. External service design expertise, properly deployed in partnership with committed internal teams that have authority, can help navigate the complex terrain between promising ideas and practical reality. The public sector doesn’t need more well researched reports taking up storage space on government servers. It needs service design that delivers for citizens. This is where the right external partner makes all the difference.