Blog

Perrie, Sophia Looney (Director of Customer Services at Essex County Council) and I had the privilege of giving a paper at last week’s Service Design in Government Conference.

We are still buzzing after what were 3 days of extremely high quality and powerful papers, given by a vibrant range of practitioners who are leading change and innovation right across the globe. This is a seriously cool conference that has really grown in its third year. I hope we’ll get a moment to blog a bit more about what we heard and learnt, but a quick hat tip here to a few particular favourites:

• Our old friend Tom Losemore and his insights into digital design in government (not complicated, just hard)
• Jo Blundell and team at FuturePublic, and their work to rethink community transport with commissioners from Milton Keynes
• Snook, who are up to all sorts of magic
• Gerry Gaffney and Julian Hexham‘s work in criminal justice agencies in Australia
• Katherine Garzonis from UCL’s pioneering ‘accidental design’ work with mental health service users

We delivered a 90 minute paper which skipped across the breadth of our engagement with Essex, mining the depths of learning to understand why creating sustained change is so hard, how attention to the system conditions matters, and sharing some of the tools and approaches we have used to move blockages and create breakthrough.

Slidedeck is here if you’re interested