Better Public Services - Part 1
No carrot and no stick
My very first public sector job was in 2012 on ‘Better Public Services’ – one of the massive, ambitious transformation programmes that were en vogue at the time. My time on the programme has been quite formative so I expect I’ll write more about it in future. Today, let’s talk about the sense and senselessness of such programmes and what seems to be unique in New Zealand. I’ll only speak to my personal perspective and interpretation – I certainly don’t represent the programme and anyone else involved in it.
Better Public Services was an initiative by John Key’s government in 2012 and was made-up of 10 Results, like reducing long term welfare dependence, reducing crime, and improving interaction with government. Yours truly joined:
“Result 10: People have easy access to Public Services, which are designed around them, when they need them.”
as a Senior Designer and set to work on two of its 10 “Actions”, by which the programme organised its the work at the time.
One was to improve the metrics by which digital access and usability were being measured, but I must say not much happened there from what I remember. There was – and is – a pretty great survey called “Kiwis Count” that measures usage and satisfaction of public services – worth a look.
The “action” that became a real head-scratcher though was to “improve the usability of digital public services”. It was an odd one, a lot of the actions were concrete but this one was a broad swing - improve all usability, of all digital services? How the heck would we do that? Back then I decided to take the unclear brief as a “card blanche” and see how far we can run with it.
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about “Better Public Services” is that it was supposed to span across multiple public service organisations to really make a systemic difference (I still agree with that idea in principle). If memory serves, 11 public service organisations “signed on” to be part of the programme, each sent ELT members to be part of the steering committee.
It was supposed to be “owned” by all, but in my view, that meant that no one really felt responsible.
Early on much of our work was just trying to get a foot in the door, trying to find people in each organisation willing to talk to us about what the “actions” meant for them, and to tell us what they wanted from use.
It felt like being an agent in a cold-calling call centre. My job seemed to evolve into sales. Everyone was busy, everything took ages.
It was often just pressure from the tiers above that our programme leaders had to instigate that led to people finally taking a meeting with us. My team and I interpreted this situation with a lot of “can do” design gusto, we spend a lot of time honing our pitch. It wasn't hard to believe that our contacts we're genuinely busy and didn't need another thing on their plate - which we were - and what was “better public services” anyway? So we try to figure out a way in which the resources and access we had would present some kind of benefit to them.
After much wheeling and dealing we got ourselves a monthly working group (gosh, some of that business talk makes me feel ill these days) that at least a few regulars showed up for. And after a while we managed something pretty cool:
We became something of a usability “support group”, a place to rant and a shoulder to sob on.
The thing with “usability” and “customer experience” was that leaders high up in the organisations LOVED talking about it, it was ALL OVER the strategies and organisational values, and it meant NOTHING in practice – as I have described before (I’m not certain at all that this has changed more than a decade on, by the way). So the people who were charged with it in each organisation went through the same frustrating cycles, and banged their heads bloody on the same brick walls as their peers. Coming together to talk about it and two try and figure out a way to do better was relieving and bonding for a fair few.
We had come a long way when the group produced a white paper, a snappy document that described - in the view of the specialists - what it would take to make the digital public services usable and accessible. In short:
Usability and accessibility has to become a requirement, not a nice-to-have-if-we-have-time-and-money-left. We proposed metrics, projects gates and independent assessments to check that public money spent on websites and such was worth its while, and had usable results.
Outrageous, audacious, huh?
Well, that’s what one senior member of the steering committee thought when we presented the white paper to them. Their words will forever ring in my head:
“I can't believe professionals wrote this! This is unacceptable, your action is closed!”
Much after this moment was a blur, I think my manager had to escort me out of the room as I was disassociating. I left the programme soon after that – no surprise there. But as I recall it, many of my colleagues went through the same torment with their actions and we had something of a post mortem in my last weeks there.
We concluded that the righteous, necessary ambition of “Better Public Services” was never going to work while there was no good reason for organisations to genuinely put work into it - because while their leaders had “signed up”, there was no consequence to ghosting us, as they did, and no actual value from contributing.
We had received visitors from a similar programme in the UK that year, and they could point to very clear requirements, metrics and consequences that they said “forced” organisations there to change - even if that still meant being dragged screaming and kicking.
But they had both carrots and sticks to work with, as they described it. We felt we had nothing.
We could only hope for few rare slithers of action where our peers were so motivated, and people, place and time magically aligned, that some movement was possible. Out of 10 actions, one actually survived and did real good - that's the smart start initiative. I expect to write more on that some other time.
My team mates might remember this differently, but I'm still convinced that big transformation programmes like it can be successful, if New Zealand’s public service and its leaders faced up to the necessity for legally binding policy requirements for the things we deem necessary for our public benefit, and real consequences of not meeting the mark. Sigh.