PD Newsletter #103: Shaping Technology for Transformation 📖

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

This month we’re focusing on the release of our book, Shaping Technology for Transformation. Order your free copy.

Also in this edition: how to use AI effectively in user research, the answer to 'enshittification', and the state of US government design since Joe Gebbia.

Dai and Rosemary

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✨ Shaping Technology for Transformation ✨

The capability of technology is moving at an incredible pace - and so are people’s expectations. This creates relentless pressure to adopt new technology, whether that's the move to cloud computing 20 years ago, or the recent hype around AI.

But the reality is that if we only focus on the latest tool, we’ll always be playing catch up. Instead we need to change how we change.

When it comes to technology, success requires building the right underlying strengths - a “muscle” that makes change easy, and determines an organisation's fitness to compete and survive. This muscle has two critical functions: the adaptability to navigate constant change, and the resilience to withstand inevitable shocks.

Our latest book, featuring articles from Public Digital colleagues, offers a guide to building that muscle.

Its editor is Dai Vaughan, Public Digital’s Consulting Chief Technology Officer and a non-executive director in the NHS in Wales. Dai was one of the founders of the Government Digital Service, where, as Head of Technology, he led the technology teams responsible for delivering the GOV.UK website.

Order your free copy

“This book, while ostensibly about technology, is not really about the technology itself. It’s about the culture, mindset and leadership conditions that allow technology to be effective.”

Dai Vaughan, Shaping Technology for Transformation

“The greatest barrier to building true resilience is a leadership mindset that treats failure as a possibility to be prevented, rather than a certainty to be prepared for. “

Rob Miller, The resilience muscle: how to endure shocks and emerge stronger

“Real transformation happens when leaders seize moments of disruption as opportunities to implement lasting change.”

Linda Essen-Möller, Using chaos testing to build like it’s already broken

Latest from Public Digital

🇨🇦 Last week we hosted FWD50 Public Digital Day, featuring leading practitioners from Canada and the UK including Mike Bracken, Natasha Clarke and David Eaves. We were thrilled to have over 900 people join us. Thank you to our speakers and attendees!

🙌 We’re excited to announce Lesley Cowley OBE as Public Digital’s new Chair.

🖋️ Read the report from our recent PD Sessions event on Finding Opportunities for Transformation in Local Public Services - sharing ways to meet the challenges of local government in 2026.

Internet era ways of working

💡Five interventions (that aren’t service mapping) for bringing clarity to complex services. As Ayesha Moarif writes, there are various reasons that maps might not be the answer: from the risk that a map won’t be used effectively, to a service that is too fragmented or fluid.

🔍 How to use AI safely and effectively in user research by Jake McCann. "AI doesn’t change what good user research looks like... What AI changes is how easily things can go wrong."

🕹️ Six levers for making transformation happen in the face of resistance, from Katherine Wastell and Alex Blandford - and how to make sure you use them in the right order. When it comes to the mechanics of transformation, Vaughn Tan argues boring tiny tools are the way forward: “Don’t waste your digital transformation budget on grand AI plans that are intended to disrupt your organisation; instead, build lots of tiny, unsexy pieces of software that fit seamlessly into existing workflows.”

🌱 A directory of the work of Data for Action as their work on social purpose data-led projects comes to a close: including, mapping Sheffield’s neighbourhoods as a starting point for achieving shared city outcomes, as well as their Questions for Action tool.

🏃‍♀️“Product development is an exercise in human relationships.” Kent Beck on why the answer to enshittification (e.g. in the form of your fitbit pointlessly telling you that you’re exercising) is putting principles (e.g. don’t interrupt users unless they’ve asked you to) before metrics.

Technology in focus

✂️ Another route to ‘disenshittification’, according to Cory Doctorow himself, is seeing opportunity in the USA’s hostile approach to its former allies, and repealing the ‘anti-circumvention’ law that restricts modification of our tech products. Doctorow also writes entertainingly about how to be a good AI critic. TL;DR: attack the forces that created the bubble.

🌑 As part of one of the most extreme internet shutdowns in history, Iran is testing the expansion of its two-tiered internet access system which allows full internet access only to a select group of the population with ‘white SIM cards’. Digital activists are fighting back.

💳 In Public Digital’s new book on technology we emphasise the need for resilience by design - for which Monzo provided a case study this month in their handling of an issue with its mobile app. It involved activating Monzo’s backup bank ‘Monzo Stand-in’, which enables customers to continue making payments.

🦀 The future of personal AI assistants might look something like Moltbot (formerly Clawdbot:) "the ultimate expression of a new generation of malleable software that is personalized and adaptive."

🎧 Humorous and interesting listening in series 2 of immersive podcast Shell Game, in which journalist Evan Ratliff documents his experience setting up a ‘real start-up run by fake people’: human-impersonating AI agents.

Digital government news

🫠 "Should the Americans who’ve lost food security be excited about the new food pyramid telling them how to eat?” Excellent piece from Fast Company on government design in the US since the appointment of Joe Gebbia - which is mostly glossy promotion, rather than actual services. As Ashleigh Axios observes: “design is stewardship, not spectacle.” Plus a personal weeknote from US-born designer Mike Gallagher (of NHS Digital) on why design is politics.

🔥 In the face of disintegrating public services under Trump, it’s heartening to see the leaders of USDS attempting to fix what DOGE broke.

🌎 What happens when the company responsible for the Dutch national digital identity system is acquired by a US-owned company? Georgina Sturge writes about the implications. In other European sovereignty efforts, France has announced a homegrown video conferencing application to replace Microsoft Teams.

🏭 Why the service factory is broken from Dennis Vergne, and how the principles of good public service design fail to deliver the same results for relational services. “The concept of "delivering" a service implies a unidirectional transfer of value. This works for a passport. It does not work for "health" or "safety" or "wellbeing."”

👏 Great work from the Canadian Digital Service in trialling AI Answers: a good example of a team experimenting, working in the open, and identifying where the underlying foundations need fixing (in this case, where there were content gaps and errors on the Canada.ca website causing incorrect answers).

📚 Finally, a progress update on the National Data Library - which we believe could be a quiet revolution.

Top posts from newsletter #102

1️⃣ Why your operating model is your biggest risk, Tom Loosemore

2️⃣ Public Digital’s 2025 year note

3️⃣ The Kayfabe model for writing AI prompts, Jack Sheppard

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