Bowl of Fish Hooks
Why I'm starting to write
The bowl of fish hooks is a metaphor I use when I try to describe how complex and connected much of the world is to me. You try to take out one fish hook, and they all come out in a big, jagged ball. In this substack I want to try and peel some fish hooks apart and help myself think.
I’m looking back at 17 years working as a researcher and designer in newfangled fields like user experience, human-centered design, service design, co-creation, you name it. I’ve become very frustrated with my field of work and as it stands I don’t believe that I’ll keep working in it. I’ve seen the cycles spinning enough, and I’ve heard the same stories from my peers, that I’m no longer blaming myself for running into the same brick over and over again. I believe there are some common through lines in what me and other human-centered people experience in the workplace, and I’m hoping to describe them here as I go.
I will particularly write about the public service, simply because it often feels like being the piss-poor cousin when you’re a designer in a government office and that’s not right. There are so many issues facing the public service and its leaders have learned to sport the language and narratives of big tech and continously iterate on versions of ‘customer-centric’ strategies. All the while very little has changed in the ecosystem of public management in my time to allow for new ways of working to institutionalise or to support the people who are hired to get the public service there.
An early inspiration for me was this post by Thea Snow and Abe Greenspoon, in which they coin the phrase ‘change washing’ to describe the fact that public servants are not resistent to change (as is so often assumed), but tired of “reforms that purport to bring about change but fail to result in any substantive shifts in systems, services or culture.” This bold reframing of something that I felt myself but couldn’t grap yet was one of the stepping stones to where I am today.
I’m now half way through writing a PhD on restructuring in the public sector. The restructures that I experienced in my time where like nothing else in the workplace - it felt like the rules, values and behaviours that our leaders (and an endless number of motivational posters in our hallways) never tired of reciting to us where null and void. I will describe this feeling in a future post, for now just know that this feeling is what peaked my interest in what happens in internal restructuring. I suspect that much of what is pushing me away from human-centered design and working in the public sector has a shared root somewhere with restructuring and that sense that instead of slowly moving in the right directions, the public sector and its relationship to people is treading water at a frantic pace.
These fish hooks won’t come apart neatly or in a sensible sequence, as they will accompany my path through the second half of my doctoral study also. Let’s see what happens.
