Organisational change Strategy

Using Design Principles to Describe What Transformation Means

Paul Taylor

“Transformation” is a dangerous word.  It is bold in ambition, but often very uncertain in precision. Instead of attempting yet another definition, as part of yet another attempt to tie the concept down, this post sets out eight powerful design principles which, if applied, would result in something which pretty unarguably would have delivered transformation. Perhaps transformation isn’t what you do, it’s how you tell what you’ve done.

But whatever the level of ambition, there is a lot in these apparently simple principles – well worth keeping close to hand.

Democracy Social and economic change

How do you solve a problem like technology? A systems approach to digital regulation

Rachel Coldicutt – doteveryone

It is increasingly obvious that ways of regulating and controlling digital technologies struggle to keep pace with the technologies themselves. Not only are they ever more pervasive, but their control is ever more consolidated. Regulations – such as the EU cookie consent rules – deal with real problems, but in ways which somehow fail to get to the heart of the issue, and which are circumvented or superseded by fast-moving developments.

This post takes a radical approach to the problem: rather than focusing on specific regulations, might we get to a better place if we take a systems approach, identifying (and nurturing) a number of approaches, rather than relying on a single, brittle, rules based approach? Optimistically, that’s a good way of creating a more flexible and responsive way of integrating technology regulation into wider social and political change. More pessimistically, the coalition of approaches required may be hard to sustain, and is itself very vulnerable to the influence of the technology providers. So this isn’t a panacea – but it is a welcome attempt to ask some of the right questions.

Democracy Government and politics Service design

Designing for democracy

Catherine Howe – Curious?

By happy – one might almost say curious – coincidence, this is another mapping of policy interventions, but this time ranked by democratic power. The result may feel a little painful to user researchers, but is a powerful complement to the Policy Lab perspectives.

But this post is about much more than a neat diagram. The core argument is that policy making is intrinsically political, and that being political should mean being democratic, not – or at least not just – because democracy is intrinsically good, but because there is already clear evidence that bad things happen when design, and particularly digital design, happens in a democratic vacuum. ‘Working in the open’ is one of the mantras of GDS. This post takes that thought to a level I suspect few of its proponents have ever imagined.

One Team Government Service design

Mapping service design and policy design

Andrea Siodmok – Policy Lab

This is an excellent reference post for two dimensions of policy design thinking.

The first part is a typology of government interventions (click on the image for a larger and more legible version), which prompts more rigorous thought about the nature of the design challenge in relation to the nature of the intended impact.

Slightly curiously, the vertical categories are described as being on a scale from ‘Low level intervention’ (stewardship) to ‘Large scale intervention’ (legislation). That’s a little simplistic. Some legislation is intended to have a very narrow effect; some attempts to influence – which look as though they belong in the ‘leader’ line – can have huge effects. But that’s a minor quibble, particularly as it is described as being still work in progress.

The second dimension is about the scale of design, from micro to macro. Thinking about it that way has the rather helpful effect of cutting off what has become a rather sterile debate about the place of service design in government. Service design is, of course, critically important, but it’s a dimension of a wider model of policy and design which doesn’t entail conflict between the layers.

Future of work

The Age of Automation

Benedict Dellot and Fabian Wallace-Stephens – the RSA

This new report from the RSA takes a more balanced view than most on the impact of automation on work, and particularly on low-skill work. This is neither a story of a displaced workforce condemned to penury as the robots take over, nor one of a blithe assumption that everything will muddle through. Much of the underlying analysis is now fairly familiar – certainly to regular readers here – what is distinctive and valuable is the focus on the quality as well as the quantity of work and the ways in which automation can enhance human work rather than displace it

Impressively, the authors have put some of their approach into practice by partly automating the process of reading it. Traditional manual readers can work through the full eighty page report; automation maximalists need only skim the eight key takeaways; and those with intermediate ambitions can focus on extracts from the main report summarising the main arguments or focusing on the impact of automation on the quality of work.

Organisational change Service design

Let’s fund teams, not projects

David Thomas – DEFRA Digital

Being agile in a small agile organisation is one thing. Being a pocket of agility in a large and not necessarily very agile organisation is quite another. One of the points of friction is between conventional approaches to budget setting, typically with a strong focus on detailed advance planning, and agile approaches which make a virtue of early uncertainty and an exploratory approach. It’s clear that that’s not an ideal state of affairs, it’s less clear what the best way is of moving on. This post puts forward the radical approach of not funding projects at all, but funding teams instead.

The thought behind it makes a lot of sense, with the approval process becoming some version of managing a high-level backlog and there being a real efficiency gain from sustained team activity rather than fragmented project team formation. But in focusing on funding as the key tension to be resolved, the post slightly skates over what might be the larger issue of planning, where the gap between the aspiration to be precise and accurate and the reality of underlying uncertainty tends to be large. It may be that following the approach suggested here moves, rather than resolves, the friction. But it may also be that that is a useful and necessary next step.

Data and AI Social and economic change

Reclaiming personal data for the common good

Theo Bass – DECODE

The internet runs on personal data. It is the price we pay for apparently free services and for seamless integration. That’s a bargain most have been willing to make – or at least one which we feel we have no choice but to consent to. But the consequences of personal data powering the internet reverberate ever more widely, and much of the value has been captured by a small number of large companies.

That doesn’t just have the effect of making Google and Facebook very rich, it means that other potential approaches to managing – and getting value from – personal data are made harder, or even impossible. This post explores some of the challenges and opportunities that creates – and perhaps more importantly serves as an introduction to a much longer document – Me, my data and I:The future of the personal data economy –  which does an excellent job both of surveying the current landscape and of telling a story about how the world might be in 2035 if ideas about decentralisation and personal control were to take hold – and what it might take to get there.

 

Data and AI Democracy

Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?

Dirk Helbing, Bruno S. Frey, Gerd Gigerenzer, Ernst Hafen, Michael Hagner, Yvonne Hofstetter, Jeroen van den Hoven, Roberto V. Zicari, Andrej Zwitter – Scientific American

There is plenty of evidence that data-driven political manipulation is on the increase, with issues getting recent coverage ranging from secretively targeted Facebook ads, bulk twitterbots and wholesale data manipulation. As with so much else, what is now possible online is an amplification of political chicanery which long pre-dates the internet – but as with so much else, the extreme difference of degree becomes a difference of kind. This portmanteau article comes at the question of whether that itself puts democracy itself under threat from a number of directions, giving it a pretty thorough examination. But there is a slight sense of technological determinism, which leads both to some sensible suggestions about how to ensure continuing personal, social and democratic control – but also to some slightly hyperbolic ideas about the threat to jobs and the imminence of super-intelligent machines,

Data and AI

Artificial Intelligence for Citizen Services and Government

Hila Mehr – Harvard: ASH Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation [pdf]

The first half of this paper is a slightly breathless and primarily US-focused survey of the application of AI to government – concentrating more on the present and near future, than on more distant and more speculative developments.

The second half sets out six “strategies” for making it happen, starting with the admirably dry observation that, “For many systemic reasons, government has much room for improvement when it comes to technological advancement, and AI will not solve those problems.” It’s not a bad checklist of things to keep in mind and the paper as a whole is a good straightforward introduction to the subject, but is very much an overview, not a detailed exploration.

Innovation Organisational change

The Anti-Problem: Digital Transformation

Neil Tamplin – Technology Meets Culture

How would you organise to impede transformational modernisation? You might set your face against all things digital, you might add as much stultifying process as you could find, you might just do things the way they have always been done.

This post explores how best not to do digital transformation, which turns out to be rather an interesting way of thinking about what it takes to do it successfully. There is a risk though of its becoming a form of confirmation bias: of course all those old ways were bad; of course the new ways are good. The risk is not that that is untrue, it is that it is not the whole truth. So perhaps there is another, harder, exercise to do after this one: assuming that the people who came before were neither malign nor idiots, why are things the way they are? What about the current way things were done has genuinely outlived its usefulness, and what was there for a reason? That’s not an argument for just keeping things as they were, but it may be an argument for making sure that we don’t throw away solutions without being clear what problem they belong to.

Social and economic change

The generation game

It’s tempting to try to understand social change in terms of generations – and it is a temptation widely succumbed to. Millennials are pitted against baby boomers, generation X is succeeded by generation Y, lost generations are found again, and stereotypes abound. This article and an earlier more detailed one are an attempt to challenge that framing. A part of that is recognising that people criticise younger generations for the same faults which their elders once ascribed to them; the more interesting part is challenging the idea that there are shared experiences which are best understood in terms of generations. That’s not to say of course that there are no social and economic changes to which governments and others need to respond. But it is a useful reminder that focusing on differences  between generations tends to obscure differences within them (and differences which aren’t generational at all).

John Quiggin – Inside Story

Data and AI Service design

Hackers Are the Real Obstacle for Self-Driving Vehicles

It’s a surprisingly common mistake to design things on the assumption that they will always operate in a benign environment. But the real world is messier and more hostile than that. This is an article about why self-driving vehicles will be slower to arrive and more vulnerable once they are here than it might seem from focusing just on the enabling technology.

But it’s also an example of a much more general point. ‘What might an ill-intentioned person do to break this?’ is a question which needs to be asked early enough in designing a product or service that the answers can be addressed in the design itself, rather than, for example, ending up with medical devices which lack any kind of authentication at all. Getting the balance right between making things easy for the right people and as close to impossible as can be managed for the wrong people is never straightforward. But there is no chance of getting it right if the problem isn’t acknowledged in the first place.

And as an aside, there is still the question of whether vehicles are anywhere close to be becoming autonomous in the first place.

Simson Garfinkel – MIT Technology Review

Innovation Organisational change

How To Become A Disobedient Organisation

"You can't change the world by doing what you're told" - Joi ItoRules are made to be broken. That’s an idea with considerable support from those on the receiving end of rules, rather less so from those who set them. Rules are the very essence of the Weberian bureaucracy which infuses governments and there are good reasons – fairness, clarity, consistency – why that is so. But that also means that bureaucratic organisations are designed to frustrate evolution and thus innovation – which is perhaps one reason why bureaucracies rarely communicate a sense of being on the cutting edge of innovation.  And while bureaucracy is often used as a pejorative synonym for government, in this sense almost all organisations of any size are bureaucracies. Becoming adaptable and responsive isn’t just about breaking rules, it’s about adopting the expectation that rules are made to be broken.

Paul Taylor

Government and politics Service design

Government doesn’t have needs

A short and powerful polemic on why government doesn’t have needs (and thus why governments are different from users, which do). It’s a powerful argument, but a narrower one than the author seems to recognise. To the extent that government is a provider of services, there is much to be said for a strong focus on meeting user needs, and there is certainly good reason to think that behaving as if that were true has some powerful positive benefits, not least in that using the language of needs gives the best possible chance of not getting prematurely tied up with solutions. There’s a risk, though, that the consumers of a service are seen as the only relevant people, and their needs the only relevant needs. That’s sometimes true (or as nearly true that we don’t need to worry about it), but often there are social and collective interests in how a service operates as well as the individual one – which is one reason they are government services in the first place.

The post is also dismissive of describing the users of government services as ‘customers’. That’s a view which is more rigid than sensible – but that’s a debate for another day.

Charles Reynolds-Talbot – Medium

Data and AI

The Seven Deadly Sins of Predicting the Future of AI

This is a long, but fast moving and very readable, essay on why AI will arrive more slowly and do less than some of its more starry-eyed proponents assert. It’s littered with thought-provoking examples and weaves together a number of themes touched on here before – the inertial power of the installed base, the risk of confusing task completion with intelligence (and still more so general intelligence), the difference between tasks and jobs, and just how long it takes to get from proof of concept to anything close to real world practicality. There are some interesting second order thoughts as well. There is a tendency, for example, to assume that technologies (particularly digital technologies) will keep improving. But though that may well be true over a period, it’s very unlikely to be true indefinitely: in the real world, S-curves are more common than exponential growth.

Rodney Brooks

Government and politics Strategy

Creating Policy Innovation in the context of Government Bureaucracies? Could ‘Parallel Learning Structures’ be an answer?

It’s a rare treat for a site with an audience disproportionately made up of practising bureaucrats to point to a post which begins by describing bureaucracy as one of humanity’s best inventions.  But there is, not surprisingly, a sting in the tail: the very qualities which are the strength of bureaucracy are the downfall of creativity and innovation. The answer suggested here is ‘Parallel Learning Structures’.  From the description in the post, the recent flurry of policy labs, innovation spaces and agility in governments has strong if unwitting resonance, with that approach – but the question, as ever, is how to move these approaches from the margin to the core. 

Colin Talbot – Cambridge Policy Lab

Presentation and communication

Tips for people who don’t like giving presentations

Continuing the down to earth practicality which is its hallmark, this Doing Presentations post offers lots of good advice for people who are far from sure that they ever wanted to be doing a presentation in the first place – all of it equally good advice for the less reluctant. 

Ella Fitzsimmons – Doing Presentations

Government and politics

American Hot Dogs

Government is mostly about making choices, most of the time. Or more precisely, that’s what politics is. The reason politics is hard is because those choices are often hard in their own right, and harder still when put in the context of all the other choices which need to be made.

This post is a cartoon which starts with the question – apparently the final hurdle in White House job interviews – about your readiness to microwave a puppy. It ends with the assertion that the White House – and, by extension, politics generally – is a place where impossible choices are made everyday. The two are more connected than they might first appear.

Sassquach

Future of work

To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider the Janitors at Two Top Companies, Then and Now

How do changing patterns of employment affect not just the nature of people’s work in the short term, but their ability to progress and to have careers? This article attempts an answer to that question by looking at two tech giants of different generations, Kodak and Apple, and their very different employment models. It is unashamedly a powerful story rather than a deep analysis – but interesting read as an illustration of Simon Caulkin’s recent article, which covers closely related ground in a very different way.

Neil Irwin – New York Times

Organisational change Presentation and communication

What I Hear When You Tell Me Your Company Doesn’t Do Meetings

Governments are run by civil servants. Civil servants are bureaucrats. Bureaucrats like meetings. Meetings have very high costs but deliver very little value. So if there were fewer meetings, government would work better, and perhaps more people who are not bureaucrats would find it more congenial to work in government. And if there were no meetings at all, perhaps everything would work perfectly.

Or perhaps meetings survive because they have purpose and value. Perhaps we should focus on having better meetings, perhaps even fewer meetings. But to miss the value of meetings is to miss something really quite important.

Johnathan Nightingale – the co-pour