public digitalThe public digital logo

PD Newsletter #101: Opportunities for transformation in local public services

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

 

On Thursday we’re hosting a session on finding opportunities for radical transformation in local public services, featuring a brilliant panel of thinkers and doers from across the sector.

 

As well as our monthly round-up of internet era ways of working and technology news, in this newsletter we explore examples of change and innovation in local government.

 

Rob Miller, Philippa Newis, and Rosemary Evans

 

🌟 View this newsletter on LinkedIn

🚀 Forwarded this email? Sign-up.

 

🌱 Opportunities for transformation in local government

 

As our colleague Gavin Beckett writes in his thought piece on the opportunities ahead for local government:

 

“Solving complex social problems in our local communities only succeeds when we step back from the paternalistic top-down approaches of the past. Progress comes from harnessing the capacity and creativity of the whole place.”

 

At Public Digital, we’re excited by the possibility of purposeful collaboration and user-centred innovation in local government, and the opportunity to go beyond ‘best practice’ to meet the huge challenges that the sector faces.

We’re already seeing beacons of progress:

  • Local Gov Drupal - a collaborative approach to developing an open source web publishing platform, building on work funded by the Local Digital Fund.
  • The Cabinet Office’s Test, Learn and Grow programme - looking at how central and local government can work together in new ways towards delivering outcomes.
  • Transforming the front door of social care - a great example of the potential for bold innovation in local government, using relational ways of working to improve outcomes and reduce cost.
  • LGA’s cyber grab bag - a practical, user-centred and collaboratively produced toolkit to support councils with their cyber resilience.

This week, we’re involved in two events exploring how these changes can become part of a wider transformation:

 

There is lots of exciting work happening elsewhere in local government. Here are some of the developments we're watching:

 

🇨🇦 Latest from Public Digital

Earlier this month we were in Canada for the FWD50 2025 conference - one of the world’s leading gatherings on digital government - where we were also a producing partner. Watch our video below to hear our takeaways.

 

We’ll be joining forces again with FWD50 on 20 January 2026 for a virtual one-day event of feature presentations on subjects including digital sovereignty, test and learn, digital public infrastructure, and AI. Register to attend.

 

Back in London, we were thrilled to receive a High Commendation for Growth Business of the Year in the Lloyds British Business Excellence Awards this month.

 

Looking ahead to next year, we’re proud to be sponsoring UK GovCamp on 17 January 2026.

 

Internet era ways of working

📸 Applying Martin Eriksson’s model of the Decision Stack - a framework for aligning decisions from vision through execution - to the story of Kodak vs Fujifilm, and what it can teach us in the AI era. It’s comprehensive and full of smart observations, most importantly: success in the face of technological disruption relies on embracing - not fighting - change. In other words: everything you love will change, and that’s the point.

 

🤦 More hard-won learnings in everything I got wrong about product so you don’t have to, by Paul Brown. Covers everything from the dangers of being wrong at scale, to why ‘behaviour is the truth’, to the need to make decisions reversible: “Make cheap decisions, learn quickly, and reserve the expensive ones for when you actually have evidence.”

 

🧭 How service mapping can improve operational efficiency, by Alistair Ruff. TL;DR: The map itself doesn’t solve inefficiencies, but forcing a cross-functional team to collaborate to look at the whole picture does. On a similar thread, shared understanding of the service is the first of Ayesha Moarif’s five conditions for service ownership.

 

👏 A story of AI use done well in how Lloyds Banking Group used AI to transform schedule processing: Guided by design principles - with a particular emphasis on user-centricity - and carried out by a cross-functional team. On the subject, the Careful Consequences Check from Careful Industries is a helpful guide to assessing the outcomes of proposed AI adoption.

 

🧰 Introducing the data and measurement toolkit from Charity Change Collective: A resource designed to help charity leaders create the culture, investment, questions and skills “that allow data to move from overhead to strategic asset, from compliance headache to mission driver.”

 

Technology in focus

🫧 Will the AI bubble pop? Economist William H Janeway writes a succinct and excellent explainer. As he points out, there is often a big gap between the surge in investment in a new technology, and the emergence of truly profitable applications for it: “Most likely, a truly productive bubble will emerge only years after today’s speculative frenzy has cooled.”

 

🔥 Unsurprising but important reading on what happens when you go all in on AI: As many companies have discovered, you end up in a place where nobody can defend, modify or interrogate the work. This draws attention to the key distinction between augmentation and abdication using AI, and suggests a simple formula for ensuring you’re doing the former: “AI + HI, where HI (Human Intelligence) is larger than AI.”

 

🤖 Striking footage of firefighting robot ‘dogs’ being trialled in China - designed to be able to drag high-pressure hoses, crawl into hard to reach areas, and collect data. In other robot news, you’ll soon be able to buy your own autonomous household robot capable of (very slowly) loading the dishwasher, making an espresso, and folding socks.

 

🔄 Agentic AI’s OODA loop problem and its implications for security from Bruce Schneier. The OODA loop - a decision-making model applied to AI agents - “assumes trusted inputs and outputs, in the same way that classical AI assumed trusted sensors, controlled environments, and physical boundaries. This no longer holds true.”

 

🏷️ Finally, read about how the BBC are designing user-centred AI labels.

 

Digital government news

💪 Jen Pahlka on California State’s work piloting Outcomes Reviews to ‘test and learn how to build the muscle of test and learn’ in government delivery. These reviews provide “a second legislative rhythm—one focused not on passing new laws, but on making existing ones work”.

 

🧩 How to know when you need a pattern versus when you need a standard according to Honey Dacanay - building on a presentation delivered at FWD50. Honey's team in the Government of Canada are also developing a OneTeamGov Canada Pattern Library.

 

📢 Digital identity and the UK Gov announceability problem by Richard Pope. A more product-led approach - and less focus on making a headline - might have altered the reception of the digital ID plans announced earlier this year (not to mention its recent rebrand). As Richard writes: “Policy professionals are not product specialists…. ministers need to get much closer to product delivery teams.”

 

🇺🇦 Ukraine has announced plans to partner with Nvidia to construct a ‘sovereign AI state’. It’s part of the country’s wider mission to build sovereign digital infrastructure, and comes at the same time as reports that the International Criminal Court is ditching Microsoft, and calls from OpenForum for funding to protect Europe’s open-source ecosystem.

 

🙌 Some excellent lessons on building (and sunsetting) a government AI chatbot from the Incubator for AI in the UK’s DSIT. Starting with: “Continuously validate that the problem you're solving is the most critical one for your users.”

 

✨ One last thing

Design Week interviewed our Senior Design Director Katherine Wastell on her work at Public Digital, and our new book Competitive Advantage by Design. Request your free copy.
 

 

“Strategy only works when it’s built from a real opportunity, not an empty ambition.”

 

Read Katherine’s razor-sharp reflections from her work supporting clients through transformation.