#SDinGov 2023
Hurried train thoughts on a few days of conferencing
I am sat on an LNER hurtling through the British countryside. The train has now deemed it appropriate to grant me a teaspoon of wifi, a mostly insufficient dribble which I hope will facilitate the publishment of this blog post.
This post also acts as a tiptoe back into #weeknotes after a hefty hiatus.
This week I have been up in Edinburgh at SDinGov conference, my 4th in-person, I think I came first in 2019 (when I also first spoke). It feels like a very long time ago now. I went with my Social Finance colleague Chloe and it was nice to take someone new along and get the brain cells sparking.
While still ‘fresh’* in my mind I thought I would write out some themes, the things I have been thinking about or that I’m keen to think more about.
1. Service designers are obsessed with time (but do we make this obvious?)
We know that in order to develop services we need to understand what happens and when, when people expect what kinds of behavior. We outline these in maps and call them journeys, which speaks to the tangibility of services (the places they move through) but I wonder how much we truly recognise and talk about time as being part of this or how often we call it out. Maybe it’s my limited experience with larger services, that I hear this less often, and maybe it’s the product part of my brain which is obsessed with time, as Areeba Siddiqui mentioned in her lightning talk, The Product Mum, “Product managers are obsessed with roadmaps”.
Time: maybe being really explicit about this might be a useful way of helping others to understand the practice better?
What needs to happen when? How many notifications are pinging? What information is needed from people and when? How do timeframes prevent participation? How long do people have to wait?
Kate Tarling’s keynote, Building Successful Service Organisations, used a DEFRA service as a case study and spoke about how some farmers are disadvantaged by 12 week timeframes for seeking support, a service where timeframes are based on the processes that central government need to undertake over and above the need for flexible timeframes (needed by farmers who might be experiencing late or early harvests and who might need support from government when things don’t quite go as expected).
Yemina Safra also talked about ensuring users have enough time to bring together evidence to enable access to justice services in UK Immigration.
Other talks were more expansive in their concept of time, Rochelle Gold’s honest and personal keynote, The Journey to Eutopia, was a call to action to act, do, keep moving, and not to wait until the perfect time. Eutopia can exist, Utopia fundamentally doesn’t. It was useful for me to hear people talking optimistically about pragmatism, and to remind us to balance our work and ‘life’.
Finally, Julian Thompson described intergenerational connection in co-design and imagining ‘futures’ being able to visualise futures being the key way of understyanding steps to move forward. Ways to have conversations about what needs to change.
2. Service Designers don’t really talk about money (maybe we should?)
It seems unfair, perhaps, to single out a talk by representatives from a Local Authority which this week announced that they had ‘gone bankrupt’ (issued a 114 notice), but here I am. Kalvinder Kohli (Birmingham CC) and Shagun Seth (EY Seren) began their talk Partners in Communities with a grounding in the council’s current situation. The case study that they presented, around delivering Early Intervention and Prevention services using Asset Based Community Development was great, but obviously there was a very big elephant in the room. How will this work be funded moving forward?
We talk about resource constraints, we talk about limited capacity, we talk about efficiency, all of this means something but maybe doesn’t make clear the key thing here — these things cost money, and how that money is allocated can have major impacts on how the work is delivered.
Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to ask Julian Thompson a similar question about his work. His keynote Transcending Black Realities: The Possibilities of Joy and Imagination was inspiring, upbeat, wonderful. He spoke about taking participants out of their environment to help them get into the frame of mind needed to imagine new futures, and building trust with communities to enable them to imagine futures (this takes time!), I kept asking myself how does someone get funded for that work? How do we have honest conversations about how much it costs to do this well, and convince others?
Our team work a lot on projects that are already defined by the client, how do you have the conversations needed about what’s appropriate in terms of funding to get the work done in the best possible, most inclusive, most appropriate ways? Do we talk about this enough as Service Designers? I’m not sure.
3. Service design is a wedge into Policy design (is it?)
I really enjoyed Polly Bass from Camden Council’s talk, A Model for Policy Design in Local Government, where she described Service Design as being a wedge to get into policy design.
It makes sense, given Polly’s mention of Dark Matter and Trojan Horses that we see Service Design as a way of influencing policy. This is something I’ve grappled with previously, to what extent does service really influence policy? While Service Design provides a space for experimentation and development of evidence and learning, I remain slightly unconvinced (or at least I haven’t seen) real world examples of Service Design actually being translated into Policy, or at least I haven’t heard about substantial or wholesale change arising from Service Design.
Are these examples out there? How do we surface them?
I kept thinking back to something Audree said to me a while back:
“Service Design is the rendering of Policy Intent”
I think in a lot of cases this is right, particularly in central government. But this phrase also incorporates a directionality, policy moving in one direction (downwards). I don’t know, maybe this is a comfort for Service Designers as it removes some of the frustrations that build up in thinking about influencing the big stuff, but might also mean that we give ourselves an excuse not to try? I hope I havent misquoted or misunderstood Audree here. I think she meant it as a call to action for Service Designers to understand how policy works, as Polly would say the ‘Dark Matter’ — which speaks to:
Polly, Kate Tarling and Yemina Safra all talked in various ways about the need to understand the context / bureaucracy (governance, leadership)/ regulation and policy of places to both enable Service Design and to support organisations to change over time. I’d describe it as like fixing one floorboard when you don’t know how to fix the wooden frame holding the house up, or even that the frame needs work.
Nugget time:
- Kate Tarling said that we should do things and show them to people “This is wrong but…” I have a post-it on my desk which reads “Make things up, show them to people, move closer to reality”
- Kate’s definition of sustainable: “Ways of working that become the default” this is useful.
- Emily George from Surrey SEND services used the term “preferred terminology” to describe the language people with disabilities want to use, this might change over time, but the terminology allows that
- @jukesie shared a tweet by John that said “Prioritisation frameworks are negotiation frameworks” and this makes a huge amount of sense to me.
- Alongside Julian Thompson’s talk, Jay Hackett’s lightning talk included the nugget “Depression prevents mental time travel” — the concept that depressed and anxious people can’t imagine. While the language is blunt this has a lot of implications. Julian quoted Adrienne Marie Brown “Losing our imagination is a symptom of our trauma.”
Other stuff I enjoyed:
- Finally working up the courage to talk to Emma, Sophie Dennis, Linjing, and others even though I felt quite jangly and caffinated and awkward and impostor-y (particularly on Day 2).
- Meeting up with Jukesie, Imran, Martha, Alice, Caylee, Natalie, Jess and others and filling my peopling cup
- Getting to know Chloe better and eating delicious Thomyum soup together
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- Three nights away from home eating conference food. Reader, I do not feel ‘fresh’.
