I’ll be sharing a two hour session with public servants in both Toronto and Ottawa this week. As part of the mission to increase public sector design competency, there is no charge for the sessions. Here’s the session description…love to hear your thoughts and feedback. I’ll be posting slides later.
Putting the Citizen Back Into Citizen-Centric: How Service Design Can Save You Headaches & Delight the Public
All too often, the term citizen-centric is just another usual suspect describing public sector projects. While it’s easy to pay lip service to putting citizens at the centre, it can be much harder in practice.
We face the reality of competing demands, limited resources, partisan maneuvering, public apathy, ambiguous mandates and unknown futures. It’s easy for the citizen to get lost in all that, no matter how much we proclaim a project should be citizen-centric. Even when initiatives are able to engage with citizens, they often settle for quick surveys or focus groups rather than looking for deeper, transformative insight.
This session will introduce public servants to service design – a set of methods and tools for understanding citizens and designing great policy and service delivery grounded in evidence, insights and empathy. The public sector can become more efficient, more innovative, and more effective by increasing our understanding of citizens and their experiences, and using simple tools to translate those insights into designs and then reality. That reality is one where citizens are satisfied, our mandate is accomplished, and our programs truly are citizen-centric.