Organisational self-sabotage: name it to tame it
In 1944 the CIA's predecessor taught ordinary citizens how to quietly wreck their own workplaces. Eighty years on, every one of those tactics is alive and well in a meeting near you.
Services and content that are useful, usable and used: who wouldn’t want that?
The World Bank published its guidance for years, then checked the analytics and found nearly a third of the PDF reports had never once been opened. Putting something online is not the same as it being used.
A gardening metaphor
A gardener never starts from nothing. There's soil, climate, shade, pollinators, seeds blown in on the wind. You can plan the garden on paper, and you still have to work with what's already in the ground.
The death of design
Lately I've read a lot of articles mourning the death of design and research, apparently eaten alive by product. I'm not buying it.
Yeah but…how can we invest in continuous improvement when there’s no more money?
The opportunity of government service transformation is immense - but how do we fund it when the pot is empty?
Yeah but…this place doesn’t want to work in the open
Some places really are that political, and I get the fear. But "we can't work in the open here" is rarely that cut and dry - so don’t let it stop you seeing just how much you can get away with.
Services - how to even start?
Before anything clever, the basics: what services do you have, who are they for, what are they meant to achieve, and what do they cost? Surprisingly few organisations can answer all four.
67% of accessibility issues originate in design
This gets quoted all over accessibility circles, and it comes from a single Deque case study that measured something quite different. Worth knowing before you put it in a slide.
80 percent of failures can be avoided in the design phase
This figure is peppered all over design literature. I've pulled at its threads before; this time I take it at face value and ask whether it even holds up.
Seductive statistics and design
80% of a product's impact is set at the design phase. Design errors cause 80–90% of construction failures. Our field is full of these confident numbers, and most fall apart the moment you look for the source.
BAU doesn’t have to be BAU
Inflexible models of BAU set out a false binary: “business as usual” vs “transformation”, asking leaders to choose between forever-beta and what is essentially disinvestment. It doesn’t have to be this way.
If your senior accessibility consultant sits below middle management, your org doesn’t (yet) care about accessibility
Every organisation has to start somewhere. But if your whole accessibility effort rests on one junior person, your org doesn't really care about accessibility yet, whatever it says.
If you’ve made DEI HR’s job, you’re doing it wrong
Equality and inclusion consists of thousands of tiny decisions made all over your organisation, every day. It’s not an impact assessment document, checklist, or HR’s job.
Seeing apples and oranges, not just “fruit” - on build vs buy
We treat all our services as if they're the same thing, and waste a fortune doing it. Some solve tidy, well-defined problems; some really don't. Best not lump them together.
Design backgrounds are overrated
For strategic, systems and service design, a design background is overrated. Insist on it and you shrink your talent pool and your odds of finding people who can actually deliver change.
Digital sucks
Digital sucks, as a word. In one week I heard it used for scanning documents, automating processes, redesigning a business, and buying software. When a word means everything, it means nothing.