Millie Devereux

Millie leads complex multi-stakeholder partnerships at Public Digital. She joined PD from Social Finance, where she was Head of Design and Research, and before that worked at the Government Digital Service and the Behavioural Insights Team, where she spent several years applying behavioural science to public policy design.

Millie's starting point is that digital transformation is as much a behavioural challenge as a technical one. She is interested in the way AI shapes how we see ourselves, relate to others, and behave in the world. She works with teams to close the gap between intention and reality: understanding how people actually behave, and changing how organisations design, govern and learn as a result. Having worked across three continents, she has found that human behaviour is remarkably consistent - and so are the mistakes leaders make.

Much of her work has been on protecting people from harm. At Social Finance, her research into information sharing between child safeguarding agencies produced recommendations laid in parliament and adopted into the DfE's national data strategy, and she went on to advise Ofcom on measuring children's exposure to harmful content online. She also led the systems evaluation of the Drive perpetrator programme in London, generating the evidence to inform its national roll-out. At the Behavioural Insights Team, she led the behavioural design of SafeSigns, a chatbot shown by a published randomised trial to significantly reduce young South African women's exposure to intimate partner violence. She built a behavioural framework for identifying the precursors to murder, commissioned by the Mayor of London's Violence Reduction Unit and the Metropolitan Police, and designed community dialogue tools for use in fragile states, testing approaches to reducing violent conflict in Nigeria over WhatsApp and radio.

Millie builds the capability for organisations to keep doing this work themselves, having established Social Finance's user-centred design practice from the ground up and led cross-government user research on secure data sharing at GDS. She currently leads the evaluation of the £100 million Test, Learn and Grow programme, in partnership with the Government Outcomes Lab at the University of Oxford