create change Blog

There’s a quote often (wrongly) attributed to Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Government, it appears, hasn’t got the memo. We’re repeatedly guilty of attempting ‘decisive action’ based on little evidence and with strong incentives not to change strategy if we get it wrong. And getting it wrong is Read the full article…

I’ve been doing a bit of thinking recently about the introduction of agile methods into organisations using non-agile methods such as PRINCE2. In this context, I, like many other coaches, often see friction between agile delivery teams and the organisation around them. There can be many reasons for this friction, but I want to focus here Read the full article…

Alex wrote recently in How to make friends and winfluence people about some common ways to screw-up an organisational transformation. These include: Treating your service delivery teams as somehow more special than others in your organisation Making transformation a thing that is done to people rather than with them Failing to devote time to transformation — especially hard in Read the full article…

We work with policy teams to design new public services, mostly in wicked problem spaces. Policy officials are often very interested in the “secret sauce” of service design, so here’s my take on the 5 essential things a service designer needs to do when designing or transforming a public service. It’s based on watching and Read the full article…

Occasionally my work makes me look in the mirror. It’s not always comfortable viewing. Designers of public services are used to using Pareto logic: you seek the 80% of benefit by actively letting the edge cases slide, even if the edge cases are actually pretty big. On many services it’s probably acceptable to treat 20% Read the full article…

Go to a show&tell where a team is presenting user research insights. Read this Government Digital Service (GDS) blog post explaining what Accessibility means. Read this GDS Service Manual page about Assisted Digital. Visit delivery teams and see what user research they are putting up on their team walls; talk to them about their user research findings Read the full article…

The show and tell (also known as sprint review, sprint demo, team review or iteration review) is an important agile practice. It’s a regular meeting that allows teams to celebrate their work and talk about what they’ve learned. It’s also a chance to: bring the team together, helping stakeholders and others bond with the team Read the full article…

In an earlier post I noted that I’ve been doing a bit of thinking recently about the introduction of agile methods into organisations that use non-agile methods such as PRINCE2. In particular I noted that: Agile ways of working are radically different to the non-agile ways of working that preceded them. That is, agile methods aren’t just a bit different to what’s Read the full article…

In recent years I’ve been doing a lot of work as part of large Governmental Transformation programmes. Alex Osborne commented on my recent post “Some thoughts on how to not screw-up organisational transformation” that in his experience the people funding transformation programmes are often the last ones to get on board with the adaptations (changes) needed to Read the full article…

NESTA has given us seed funding for a joint venture with National Theatre Wales and NoFit State to create a product that arts and cultural organisations can use to find out more about live audiences. Audience development with limited resources is one of the big challenges if you are an arts or cultural organisations. At Read the full article…