PD Newsletter #88: Stand up to Racism

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

The last few weeks have been difficult ones for the UK, and we have all been deeply saddened and appalled by the outbreaks of hate crime against minority communities across the country.

Words are important, but actions matter. We have been reading about how and why we need to show up against racialised hatred and exchanging suggestions for ways we can act, including supporting organisations like Stand up to Racism.

Kindness means a great deal to PD. Look out for each other.

Rosemary and Oli

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Introducing our guest editor

Oli Lovell joined PD this year as a Principal Consultant, coming from a background in the intelligence and cyber defence sector. His professional obsessions include:

🏁 Outcomes, and the use of outcome-centric language, particularly as a small change that can create disproportionate results. I believe outcomes are the closest you can get to magic in transforming the relationship between leaders and their teams, creating one of the key conditions for truly adaptive organisations.

🧠 The art of deciding how to use what delivery methodology or approach to achieve results. The Einstellung effect - a learned, burned-in inertia to keep trying the same approaches despite obvious and repeated failure to deliver - is strong in all of us. But it seems particularly strong in the kinds of organisations PD are here to help.

🌟PD news

We’re delighted that our former Partner, Emily Middleton, will be leading the design of the UK government’s new digital centre in her new role at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

Since joining us in 2019, Emily has been instrumental to so much of PD’s work, and especially in establishing our international practice. We will miss her a lot. But we couldn’t be more proud to see her take on this incredible challenge.

Last month we hosted our first panel event (pictured above) as part of Town Hall 2030, a research project co-led by the Future Governance Forum exploring the role of digital in local public service reform. Watch the session.

🚀A new UK government

The chancellor’s statement on public spending reveals big plans in relation to digital public services, including harnessing the opportunities of AI.

We think the assumption that AI will fix everything is erroneous at best. At worst it distracts from the areas requiring urgent action.
➡️ Specialists at the Ada Lovelace Institute agree AI will be no ‘quick win’ for government.
➡️ Jeni Tennison gives 10 challenges that need to be tackled before AI can be rolled out to the public sector.

At the same time, we're excited by signs of fresh approaches from the new government:
➡️ A welcome change of tone on the civil service.
➡️ The expression of mission-driven outcomes in the chancellor’s statement, acknowledging the complexity of change and the need for multidisciplinary approaches, particularly when this government will have to do more with less.

Finally, in the face of the new government's fiscal challenges, Lou Downe asks if we can end austerity-era service design and look to ‘scarcity-era service design’ instead.

Ways of working

❤️ In light of recent events in the UK, we’re big fans of Catalyst’s why you need anti-oppressive content, and how to create it. These pieces tap into an important distinction between an inclusive approach and an anti-oppression approach, and why the latter is so fundamental for achieving real change.

🔍 Learnings from conducting user research for an AI service by Truly Capell, as part of creating a public-facing LLM model for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Some excellent work in user research underpinning a real LLM implementation, with interesting observations about how users respond to AI.

🦉 Wise words from Andrew Duckworth on when and how to move from an assumption to a hypothesis. Assumptions can be helpful if time is short, but asking “what’s the cost if what we believe isn’t true?” demonstrates the power of a hypothesis in reducing risk.

🪐 Listen to these lessons from NASA astronaut Cady Coleman on high-stakes collaboration. As well as NASA astronauts’ uncompromising policy around admitting mistakes, she talks about why a successful plan relies on restraint from its architects: any plan, whether it’s a space mission or a service rollout, is made vulnerable by last-minute changes.

State of technology

🇳🇬 Nigeria’s #EndBadGovernance protests over the last few weeks have prompted the government to disrupt internet connectivity in an alarming violation of citizens’ digital rights, affecting some of our PD colleagues. The global rise in instances of digital authoritarianism is flagged in these reflections on fighting for digital rights by the departing Exec Director of Access Now.

🧐 CrowdStrike have published a root cause analysis of the outage last month, and have pledged to make changes to ensure it doesn’t recur. Readers may be left wondering why they didn’t implement those safeguards in the first place… not to mention why they thought handing out $10 apology gift cards after the outage was a good idea. Plus, some have recognised that crash reports like this are an untapped hacker goldmine.

🔓 With tech monopolies at the heart of the CrowdStrike problem, it’s amazing to see the Swiss federal government requiring all public bodies to release software as open source. We are remaining cautiously optimistic about the impact, given some of the harm 'enterprise' IT can cause.

💭 A cognitive scientist’s take from Gary Marcus on the one important fact about current AI that makes it so unreliable: the ‘outlier problem’. Outliers essentially describe tasks requiring “generalizing beyond a space of training examples”: something human cognition is capable of, where AI isn’t. To mitigate against that unreliability, the UK government has launched a project to prevent AI catastrophes involving building AI models which can safety-check the work of existing AI deployed in critical areas.

😞 Speaking of safety checks, Meta’s decision to discontinue social media monitoring platform CrowdTangle has not been well received, not least because we’re in a big election year. Plus with Musk being even more appalling than usual, James Plunkett gives some advice on how to leave Twitter.

🌹 Frustrated with traditional dating apps, some singles are creating their own, including one app, ‘Flirt with Emma’, where users can communicate with - you guessed it - just Emma. And if you’re looking for romantic connections via the internet, a bizarre new video-pairing site designed to capture the spirit of Omegle lets you stare into the eyes of strangers.

Digital government

📍Perhaps inspired by a call from our colleague Ross, some governments have been sharing their backlogs and roadmaps, including the Canadian Digital Service who have released their public roadmap for creating GC forms. Ross’ new page listing also provides a growing number of other links to public sector backlogs and roadmaps.

📝 The US government has announced it will tackle the administrational burden of consumers, pledging to introduce regulation that will simplify cancelling subscriptions, filling out insurance forms, or reaching customer service agents. Rachel Coldicutt looks at the parallels with the UK government’s plans to reduce the time citizens spend on government admin. Meanwhile, the US Digital Service is celebrating its 10th birthday: Here is its impact report.

👶 Interesting reading on Kazakhstan’s major strides in digital government. Their model of a ‘life events’ approach to digital public service delivery has created a joined-up service where all the administrational labour relating to one event - such as having a child or buying a house - is integrated. It’s essentially a user-needs approach, applied to a whole civic lifetime.

🧰 Tamara Finklestein, the Permanent Secretary at DEFRA, asks what’s next for the civil service generalist: a nimble fixer in a complex political and policy context, but without the structured learning or the diversity of more specialised civil service professions.

🎨 Finally, our CEO Ben Terrett writes about the radical simplicity of gov.uk’s logo: How GDS doing the hard work to make it simple saved a generation of government administrators time and money, and saved the rest of us a lot of political arguments.

Something fun

🏅 Throwback to when renowned designer Milton Glaser rated every Olympic logo since 1924. His cutting analysis of London 1948: “the typography is sad.”