Learning from others – User Needs First Across Borders

Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen
I think it’s powerful to have this from head of state, head of government. So I think that’s quite powerful because then people below can pick this up and make references, right? So even if you have, I don’t know, state secretary or kind of like a senior director, if they haven’t heard that, you can reference that. So I think this is what we have been doing in the UK government where I was working before. If there was any kind of strategic statement or so on, we’ve been picking it up and we’ve been using this as an argument for interesting pieces of work that we found very useful to implement like the wish of the king in that case.

Randy Semeleer
Yeah, I guess that’s true. Morten, anything to add? You’re also from the Marduk, right?

Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen
Yeah, as a Dane we also have a king and we also just swapped the king for a queen, previously it was a queen. But yeah, similar approach in the Nordic countries, but the Danish head of state has traditionally had a little bit of raised pointing finger on things and pointing out things that were not working culturally or socially economically, being the sort of moral ethical voice of the country and trying to get us to behave a little bit better in our daily lives, including the public sector. But again as Martin was saying, clear that when you have these high level decision makers, you can use those statements as a hook for other activities and of course it sets the direction for the coming year. Definitely.

Randy Semeleer
That’s a bit of a I guess a cultural and political difference between Denmark and the Netherlands. Although by some people from some parts of the world are often confused but they’re still quite different. In the Netherlands the king doesn’t really interfere much with these types of things but for him to make a statement like that is, well it’s noticeable. Cara, anything to add on?

Kara Kane
I just think I would add that it’s so important for designers, kind of practitioners working at the service level to be reading these speeches to see what’s going on at that level and then as the other guests were saying to point to those in their work.

Randy Semeleer
It’s really powerful. Cool. Well enough about royalty for now. So you’ve all have experience in different countries, some in multiple countries. I’m just curious, could you point out a few countries who you think, if we think about the quality of public service that actually perform quite well. Do you have some examples for our listeners? I see Martin you’re nodding. What are you thinking about?

Martin Jordan
I’m always nodding but I think we’ve been recently in a room where we had different countries involved and I think Germany usually looks down a bit ashamed because certain things are not working perfectly well for a number of reasons but whenever we look at something that Denmark is doing, Estonia is doing, I mean smaller countries, different levels of government and so on but like certain things they have been able to achieve and equally as well the UK has been able to like tie certain services together in a more holistic way so So make it easy or easier at least for citizens to navigate government in the relation of or in the circumstances of certain life events. So I think there are quite a few European other countries that are ahead of Germany where I am now.

Randy Semeleer
And life events, what are you referencing to if you talk about those?

Martin Jordan
So yesterday we did have an interesting conversation about what happens if a salesman dies and that is a service area where the Netherlands is looking into and I remember there was work that was done as well in some way as well in the UK. So there’s a dedicated step-by-step guide what to do when someone dies in the UK. So just helping people in very specific circumstances when they’re under stress and have to navigate certain things like fairly quickly to deal with that and to reduce the cognitive effort that is there. So there are some remarkable things. And I think the remarkable thing is also that these things are not specific to countries, right? We might have different policies, different rules, but like the experience of people is quite universal. they have very similar needs so we can share insights, we can share what we have learned and then distribute that knowledge as well across borders.

Randy Semeleer
Cool. Morten, any countries come to mind when you think about countries that perform well?

Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen
Yeah, so in my former life as a Danish civil servant, we actually looked at the UK experience around the first design standard, Gov.UK, when it was relaunched in an alpha, beta, And that was around 2010 that that really happened and it set a whole new standard for how the public sector globally I would dare to say think about usability and service design. So that’s obviously a few years ago and one of the things I personally think holds the UK or Anglo-Saxon countries back is a bit, is the lack of identity management online, which means that it’s more information-based government services. So questions to answers, guidelines on where to call, where to go, maybe some PDF forms you can fill out to some extent and send in by email, whereas in a lot of European countries, Nordics in particular, identities are validated online, which means that you can jump straight to transactional government as in a pre-fail form after you’re locked in, you don’t have to deal with anything, if you don’t react to your tax return within two weeks, it’s automatically assumed that everything is correct by the tax agency. So there’s almost a no touch approach. And that’s what I’m really seeing that a lot of governments are quite good at. But in terms of the complete innovative approach to the way we deliver services or develop services in the public sector, there’s still very few pockets on that. One item I really like, and this is from the Middle East, it’s Dubai, and you can say a lot about the gloss and the Disney-esque approach to some things in Dubai, but they have a very strong government innovation model working behind the scene that is on an annual cycle. So we’re talking about annual cycles of public sector innovation that are actually now for the last year and a half challenged government to design themselves out of service delivery, to make things proactive, predictive, personalized, not make you and I the carrier pigeons of information between local authority and national government or from the employer to the public sector, but really try and look at where do entrepreneurs spend their best time and money? Well, running their businesses, not filling out forms for the government. How do we ease that? And for people, how do we ensure that the electricity is switched on from the minute they move? They don’t have to do that in Dubai. real estate agent will automatically register your change of address for you. The utility companies will be notified that from this stage you’re moving from A to B and they will ask you do you want to change your account, do you want payout, is this the right account number, but it’s done proactively for you. So again there are some examples of how you rethink the way we do things that are very inspirational. You can’t copy paste it but you can be inspired by it.

Randy Semeleer
Yeah, that’s a very interesting example. I’ll get back to you about it in a bit. Kara, any examples come to mind for you?

Kara Kane
Not specific examples, but I think in the UK government where I’ve worked for many years, we are always talking to other teams, service teams in other countries to learn from them to understand, yeah, what can we take and then consider it back in our context. And I think maybe something to add to the conversation is referencing a talk that Martin and I did yesterday at the conference that we’re at, which is about kind of things being undone. So as much as we can learn from each other and kind of look at the progression and the maturity and the innovation in other countries for digital services, it’s interesting to see when things get shut down or get closed or services that are no longer running. And I think the interesting thing that we do in our work, Martin and I have an international design and government community that we manage and we are always learning from each other and sharing those stories and trying to document that. So the narratives I think are really important to understand. like understanding what are the contextual differences of these services, but then what’s the wider kind of macro context of things and how are they getting by and how are they getting funding to do this innovative work, but then also how are they getting dismantled. And I think that’s important also to know.

Randy Semeleer
That’s an interesting idea. I didn’t really think much about that to be honest.

Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen
If I may pick up on the point is that there’s two things I think is quite key and we can probably have a long discussion on this as well. If something is closed down because it’s not working, that’s fine, that’s eliminated the negative impact. The ideal closing down of an initiative is when it’s no longer needed because it’s now entrenched in the organizational culture and I think there is some really good examples of that out there. Think Lab is a Danish example, the first, I think, global government innovation lab. It got closed down after a few years because the partners realized in part that this created so much value that we wanted to have it in-house, not as a shared component. So the volume increase, the maturity level of the public sector that was involved in that increased. So whether or not you can justify having it in-house or you know when you need to insource that expertise is a really interesting learning experience from that in Denmark. So in this specific case, there was negative elements about closing it down, but there’s also some positive in terms of the maturity level that Kara was referring to having actually had a real impact and this lab was no longer needed because it was now entrenched in the organizations behind it. So I think that’s a positive story as well that should be done and highlighted, but then things as Clara is hinting at that is closed down because political leadership is changing or there’s a financial recession and it creates value but it’s down prioritized.

Martin Jordan
And just to add if I may, just to add what you both Morten and Clara just said, I think it is vital that we are documenting because in the moment things are like ending, they shut down, we document the work thoroughly and that this stuff like stays available, And I think this is what we have seen as well with the national community wide because we have been running semi-regular calls where we often have been discussing things around certain topics. So, I remember vividly a talk that a little session that we initiated about the work at the ministries of work, work and pension and so on, however it’s sliced in different countries. And we did invite Finland, Sweden, and as well Norway to share their work. And we had these three countries, like these teams presenting. So designers talking about this work in the context of their ministries. And they were all puzzled afterwards. They were like, wow, we had no idea that you in Finland or Sweden, that you are doing work that is so similar to ours. So we have to create these forums for people to find out about the work that they’re doing in the first place and how similar that work is. So it’s so vital that we create these international forums to document work, to share experiences and then to learn in a structured way from each other.

Randy Semeleer
Yeah, so despite being neighboring countries, they weren’t aware that they could learn from each other until they were invited by another country

Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen
really. Exactly. Yeah. I think it’s a very valid and important point and to complement that as a civil servant I’ve hosted lots of foreign delegations talking about the Danish Citizen Portal, how we were doing digitization, the collaboration between the local, regional, and central government around that. But it was usually high-level decision makers and not the people that really benefited, which comes down in the hierarchy, which are the civil servants that do the operationalization of decisions, get their hands dirty and the fingers into the nitty gritties. And I think that’s important and where you will have these aha moments because a lot of people that we talk to, particularly in Northwestern Europe or North America or parts of Asia, they don’t see themselves as innovators, even though that’s actually ingrained into what they do as continuous improvement, failure demand, innovation. But then you have someone from the outside coming in and saying, “Wow, that’s really impressive how is your leadership allowing you to do that, but it’s because of the organizational culture and I think that’s the best way to actually improve and innovate is when you don’t realize that you’re doing it on the day to day basis, but you need that encouragement from these conversations you have in terms of, oh so how did you solve that problem, we did it like this, how can we do that, how can we learn from others in terms of improving our own operationalization or our own initiatives through these conversations, whether or not they’re with partners from across the road in another agency or if it is across borders.

Randy Semeleer
Very good point, yeah. I guess it’s something if it’s normal for you then you don’t realize how much of a big difference it can be for other people that haven’t come up with the same idea yet. Just to move back a little bit to an early question I was asking about some example of countries that perform quite well in this area. I would ask each of you to think of one country in specific and think about why does this country perform well at these type of things and Martin you were talking about Dubai earlier I thought that was an interesting example you don’t hear a lot so maybe take that one. you want to kick it off?

Martin Jordan
Well, I could try. So I’ve been working in UK government for slightly over six years and now I’ve been working close to three years in Germany and then there are still a lot of things where I’m like, oh, I wish we could have done or we could do this and that as well. So I think having kind of like a central body with certain remit with authority to like steer things. I think in Germany it feels very much like herding cats. So in Germany we have 16 federal states. They’re doing their thing because they can. They are close to 10,000 municipalities and they’re doing their stuff and like certain things at a federal level we can’t govern and we’re not allowed to by constitution even. So and I think the UK has certain advantages. One of the key things is as well kind of like central spend controls. Like from a design perspective often this is really ignored and not really considered interesting but if you have, well you can control the money and how money is spent, how it is tied then to certain quality standards that basically make usability testing and like all of these accessibility work, whatever it is, like user-centered design can make work, you mandate that, you tie it to the money, then the things happen in the right way and I think this is such an important lever that Germany currently is missing and is at least now discussing how we could go there at least at a state level. We’ve been tying some quality standards in the area of justice services in Germany and like keeping as well like an eye on what the UK is doing. We’ve been having regular exchanges in the sector in this specific area of like justice services, we have had calls with people from the UK Ministry of Justice to hear how they are set up, how they manage and that’s really inspiring. So sometimes you have to have a call with someone who’s been basically stepping out of the time machine at least five to ten years and then tells you, “Ah, we’ve been doing this in that way,” and then it inspires your leaders to pick these things up. So that’s one example.

Randy Semeleer
Interesting. More than anything… hear that, see that, but

Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen
it resonates. I had a bit of an aha moment in the Netherlands. I used to live here for a few years and then not having been here because of COVID and this, that and the other and then suddenly going back to talking digital and technology use in the public sector in the Netherlands after being away for 10 years was sort of a ha moment about how stagnant this agenda has been in the Dutch context of late. So if you go 10 years back, the Netherlands were amongst the European leaders in this area and now they’re sort of down around the middle because of a lack of political prioritization. It’s not that the government doesn’t function, but it seems to have stagnated. So some of the things that I like to keep an eye out with is a little bit of what Martin was hinting at is like the bad excuses for not transforming or changing. And we’re federal in the German context. We can’t, we’re large and you’re small, Denmark is small compared to Germany, but Germany is small compared to China and they can do this. For social security, there’s one ministry, 30 plus regions and autonomous regions, two levels of local government. So for social security there’s more than 4,000 government agencies involved. So you know size is sometimes used an excuse. So what I like to look at is some of my favorite examples is when small organizations or small countries, we’re talking micro states with populations smaller than you know Amsterdam suburbs. Think about the Dutch and tills like Aruba. If you’re looking at some of those, they are managing to do electronic signatures and PKI exchange, using no code, no code, spitting out things. They’re countries that already comply with the EU ID regulation on having a digital wallet in the Danish kingdom, so the Faroe Islands, they already have one, it’s compliant, their driver’s license is an app, so is their security cards, is that and the other, and they did it for a fraction of the cost of what we do it in Denmark. So five years, did it all, four million euros for all of that, including a national portal. Their medical patient journal, they did it in three years, including integration with pharmacies, hospitals, integration with Denmark because a lot of operations also in Denmark. And it took two and a half years because they couldn’t get a project manager for the first six months. But they did it for 1.3 million euros. In Denmark it’s taking us 20 years and cost us close to half a billion euros. The concept costs the same. Rollout is scalable depending to the amount of actors and amount of citizens and businesses you have in the country. But it also means you have more resources based to that scale unless you’re an emerging economy with low income levels. So there are some really interesting approaches there that if you’re forced to look critically of getting as much out of your resources, human or financial, you start thinking about where can I get 80% of the way for 20% of the resources and those are the things that I like to keep an eye out for. That’s very interesting. Because that can inspire others that are also larger and more resource strong.

Randy Semeleer
So if you keep an eye on it, do you have an idea about why a place like Faroe Islands or Aruba can do that?

Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen
So Aruba hasn’t done it, but the Faroese came from a very political perspective and there’s multiple things. A, they’re looking at potential independence from Denmark and just being part of the Commonwealth. Secondly, between 10 and 20 percent of the national population is outside of the country at every given point in time. Either they work, study abroad, and they need the same services even if they’re not there. So remote digital was a way to facilitate that and then you can link it to business continuity and resilience and we see that for instance in a place like Ukraine. They managed to do this out of need but it also works in the middle of a war zone. You try and take the Danish, the Dutch, the German, the UK systems into a war zone and I’m sure half of them would break down, you know, because they’re just not geared to that type of stress. So there are some really interesting models out there and I think they’re worth keeping an eye out for. Just look at the penetration of mobile money in East Africa. In Pisa is mobile money, now we’re doing tap and mobile pay in Europe, but it’s 10 years after they did it in East Africa. So innovation can come from everywhere and we sometimes need to be more open for that and avoid the context, although it’s important, but sometimes it’s also used as an excuse for not doing something and that’s my key point.

Randy Semeleer
Well the other example of Ukraine that we’ll be talking about that in another episode some more so the listeners can look in the feed for that episode later on. Kara anything you want to add to this we’ve spoken quite a bit about UK already maybe you are or maybe you want to move on.

Kara Kane
I can share I think three short examples.

Randy Semeleer
Sure go ahead.

Kara Kane
I think mentioning Ukraine I think shouting out the DIA app is just an incredible app that has been iterated and developed.

Randy Semeleer
Can you tell the listeners a little bit about it that they’ll know?

Kara Kane
The DIA app is the app for Ukrainians to access all services on their phone. And it has been hugely beneficial during this period of war to be able to have this app where you can do things really quickly and interact with the government. And there’s a really great team behind it that are iterating it, building it out, adding new features, adding new services. And yeah, it’s just incredible work and really difficult work that’s happening really quickly. I think a lot of the work, the work that I do in government has always been around maturing the practice of user-centered design, building awareness, building culture and capability around that. So I’m always looking for examples around that and I think part of that is looking at like what’s the level of design leadership in government, like where’s the ceiling.

Randy Semeleer
So that’s a key factor, the design leadership?

Kara Kane
It’s one factor. I think it’s an interesting factor of kind of where should design sit in an organization. I think if we look at the French government, correct me if I’m wrong, Martin, but I think in the past couple of years, they’ve been putting heads of design roles into all of the government departments. And I think that’s really incredible to have design at a senior level represented across all of the kind of federal level departments to bring user centricity, to bring this kind of agile, iterative way of working across the state. And I think, yeah, there’s some interesting work that has, again, happened quite quickly in the French government through interesting ways of working, such as partnerships and bringing in people from the private sector onto convents to do really innovative, kind of like incubated work in short sprints to kind of test things, see if they work, document sit in the open, pause things if they’re not right and then continue and build things and scale them.

Randy Semeleer
Yeah, so I hear talk about iterating in short sprints and Morten you were earlier talking about a country that can execute policy within a year which for governments is extremely fast.

Kara Kane
I would give my third example, which is the Scottish government. So they have a Scottish approach to service design, which is all about participation. So including people, including citizens in co-production of services. There you have really amazing work of involving people in analyzing research that is on an area that a citizen might be affected by. Being able to join a research session, join an analysis session, help analyze information that is about them and affects them, and that is quite different from the way that I’ve worked in the UK government. And I think there’s a lot to learn around kind of going to the front line of services, going to the people that are using these services, affected by these services and the policies and finding meaningful ways to involve them in co-production and co-design.

Randy Semeleer
And could you point out what the Scottish government then is doing differently than other governments in the UK?

Kara Kane
So just that, so working in local, working with local authorities and kind of co-designing, developing services. So from the kind of national level, a design team that then is working with local places across the system. So working with the healthcare system, working with local services to help bring design capacity and capability and build capability in the system and then to bring the learning back to the center. And that is something that we are now starting to do and to test ways of working in the UK government.

Randy Semeleer
How’s it going?

Kara Kane
It is brand new. We are just getting started. Okay.

Randy Semeleer
So good stories to be told later on I suppose. Yes. Very good. Very good. Oh, very interesting to hear about that even within government of course there are governments within one country but still that things can be still quite different and you can still even like internal borders, you can cross them to learn from each other. Is there anything you’d like to like talk about? We have about nine minutes. I have one more thing that I can wrap it up with, but if anything you want to mention, I can talk to towards that a little bit.

Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen
Just raise a question. We can, we can spin it, I think.

Martin Jordan
Okay. Yeah. I think that’s, that’s one thing a little bit about like, um, starting someone as this is something somewhere and then kind of like scaling it, I think like Scalability. And like testing in one place. And I think capacity

Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen
requirements and like being allowed to fail but with a responsibility for that.

Martin Jordan
You can say something about that for sure. And yeah, I think we all could say something about that.

Randy Semeleer
So we were just talking about scalability. There are big countries, there are smaller countries, there are countries that consider themselves large but compared to other countries not so much. If something performs well in either a big or a small country, could you talk a little bit about the scalability and what comes with adapting that scale to a specific situation with another country?

Martin Jordan
I could have an example that is on a different level and it’s much smaller but then maybe you can both enrich it with other kind of like larger things. So one stream of work in German government we’re doing right now is around justice services and so we are working on court claims, we’re working on legal aid services and justice is an area that is also like devolved so that means that the 16 federal states they are in charge of justice. So they can do that. And there’s also kind of like the freedom of the courts, the courts’ independence. So for us as federal government unit, it’s kind of like difficult to work in this space. The same time we have money, we have capability. So we’ve been proposing like certain pieces of work and one of the works was, well, let’s work on specifically a legal aid service, for example. So we’ve been going out talking to the federal states and say like, “Hey, we’d love to do this work. it in participating. And then there were kind of like 12 out of 16 federal states coming back and say like we are actually interested and they’re like that’s great. If you want to join this piece of work, please bring some courts. So now we have 31 pilot courts across all of Germany and we’re working with them in a very active way. So and we have a memorandum of understanding with all of these 31 courts that we get four hours of their time every month. That’s a certain amount of time that we can use in a very flexible way. So we could go there and do pop-up research. We could go there to have, I don’t know, to shadow a little bit the caseworkers about their processes. We could use that to consult their judges on a certain thing we’ve been like thinking of. And that is terrific. So we can try certain things. But then at the federal level of government, we’ve been also creating, co-creating a new piece of legislation that includes an experimentation clause. And that has a timeframe for 10 years. So for 10 years, we have a certain freedom of like trying things, of like experimenting. So it’s with all these like pilot courts where we would try things and test things, and then we can roll that out for the total like 600 courts across the country. So but really like starting something distributed kind of like locally but also distributed all across the country and then if certain things work we can scale them and roll them out entirely and that’s kind of like quite powerful because it’s very close to operational practice but it’s also changing policy and changing even the law to allow certain things to happen and to try and test.

Randy Semeleer
I’m also interested in the time frame that you mentioned that you can do over a decade really. So the thing that you hear often from civil servants is that after elections things can be quite different. So how do you plan something over a decade when an upcoming election can have like maybe exciting but maybe a different result than you were expecting? I can say

Martin Jordan
a short thing about that but maybe Karan can talk a little bit about some developments in the UK around their missions. I think one important thing is and so in Germany for example we now always have collision governments so there are always certain partners that keep changing potentially but some partners, some political parties also stay. So it’s very important that our work is also like very agnostic that we are reporting as well to all members of parliament that we’re working very much in the open that everybody understands the value whatever their party alignment is. So we demonstrate the importance of the work, we make the work visible, the outcomes visible, so there’s a lot of transparency around that. So and then we make sure that this work really can continue. And if certain things are like ingrained in law around this experimentation for example, then it’s likely to keep going and they don’t want to change that law necessarily, especially if this thing like is very politically agnostic and it’s working. But I think like Cara, if you want to talk a little bit about the UK missions and all of the work that they’re doing there.

Kara Kane
Yeah, I think as you’ve been speaking, I’ve been thinking about like the convening function as being this like important thing that has to be in the system in order for the scaling to work. Maybe not in every situation, but in the UK government, we have a labor government that came into power over the summer last year and the labor government has missions. So it’s six missions for the whole nation to kind of get behind. So they’re kind of led from the government, but the way that we talk about them is that it’s for businesses, charities, it’s for everyone to kind of get behind to deliver these missions. So for example, one of them is safer streets. And yeah, I think having that in a way, they’re kind of convening missions for departments as well as local government, as well as these other parts of the system that I mentioned to kind of work towards. So it’s setting a direction and it’s setting a priority that then we can align our work toward, or align our work to, and that can enable different ways of collaborating, different ways of funding, and then also looking at opportunities for scale. So in the work that I am doing now, which is brand new, as I mentioned, it’s called Test and Learn, and it’s from the center of government in the Cabinet Office. And what we’re doing is working with local partners in local places across the UK and looking at how can we do more bottom-up development of policy and how can we make an impact at frontline services and involve frontline staff and citizens into the improvement and the development of services. then where can we find opportunities for scale? So I don’t have anything concrete to share yet because it’s work to come. But I think something that I’m thinking about from this conversation and from the work that we’ve done so far is around the kind of the capacity in the system. So if you’re trying to scale things across different types of organizations that have different capacities, different capabilities, different funding and funding models, Where do you find the opportunities to test and experiment and to implement? So yeah, I’m interested to see how this works and I would love to see examples from other countries of how you successfully scale things from local places. How do you widen them out from a local authority to then a region to then, you know, perhaps all local authorities across the UK?

Randy Semeleer
Wow, yeah, I can imagine you’ll be very interested in that. Yeah, maybe we can do a follow up on that because…

Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen
Just to pick up on two points. So A, I think the point that Coro’s mentioning about these six missions is related to a little bit of the discussion we had in the beginning with the Majesty’s speech, where how do we We hook up our work on that, both on a strategic level, but also on a daily operational level. So I think there’s a nice little comeback to our initial conversation. But there’s also this scalability, and I think one of the things that the public sector is particularly prone to is risk adversity. Key decision makers, whether or not senior civil servants or elected officials like mayors and ministers, they’re allergic to bad headlines. And we know that things happen, preconditions, expectations, technology, we might be over optimistic or over pessimistic. But I think what good organizations and good leadership does is they leave room for experimentation. Also a point Martin was saying with the judiciary for 10 years, judiciary is classically very conservative organizations even for the public sector globally. So getting them to innovate is an uphill battle traditionally. But allowing for a little bit of risk, manage it, allowing for failure, but capturing that failure and capturing that learning experience is key. So with that failure comes also a responsibility to learn from it. And that’s usually what’s not documented in the public sector. We’re good at publishing and documenting best practices, the awards we win, the pads on the shoulder, but we actually learn more from our failures. And that’s often kept in the background. And that’s again where I see some countries, some organizations are better geared at that. So the Singaporeans have this ingrained, you’re allowed to fail, but you must analyze why and show that you’re not going to repeat those type of failures again. So it captures that experience into the institutional memory. And that you don’t always have if you’re too outsourcing in your mode. The other thing around long-term strategy I think, particularly the northwestern European countries have this consensus-seeking approach. So you reach across the aisle, not just in your coalition government, but for key strategies that education, health, economic transitions, you want to ensure the stability even when the minister or the party in responsible change and reach over to get that consensus to ensure that even if the minister changed tomorrow, the strategic vision is still being followed up because other parties was engaged in that. And we do actually see that also in African countries where you have a national vision that is maybe 10 years horizon, but then you do a five-year strategy under that. you do annual action plans because you know that it’s changing. And a lot of those African countries are linking that to traditional decision making processes around the community and consensus seeking, but also to what the South Koreans are doing where we have a 20 year national vision. We have a five year strategy for AI or service design or cloud, but we know that every year we do an assessment of where are we in our action plan? What do we change? How do we align while keeping that five and 20 year goal in mind but on an annual basis we know we need to adjust. Things change.

Randy Semeleer
Yes.

Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen
Things happen and that’s something that we can also be better at in the public sector. In the private sector the good companies tend to do it organically because you know it makes them money. Yeah. In the public sector it’s other dynamics that are in place but I think those elements are really key.

Randy Semeleer
It’s interesting that you mentioned that. It’s kind of a common wisdom that you learn a lot from your mistakes, but still in certain cultures tend to not talk about it. Also to protect high-ranking officials sometimes or the damage of the public image, all those kinds of things are also a part of it, of course.

Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen
But definitely very good to watch. Correct me if I’m wrong, Kara, but didn’t one of the early design principles in the UK actually say the minister must successfully have tested the solution and that does two things in my opinion. I don’t know what if it’s true or not but it means that the top level elected official cannot say they didn’t know. They cannot not take responsibility and they must have ownership to this because it is the organization in the end and of course they should know. So really, really interesting approach, maybe a little bit gimmicky in some countries, but it seemed to have worked in the UK for a period of time. So I’d love to see now the king of the Netherlands to test out some services and really linking it back to what you said at the beginning. I think he might be more digital savvy than average Danish minister or similar because they’re usually not the most tech savvy people, even the ones responsible for technology and innovation. Occasionally, you get some really good people in from the private sector.

Randy Semeleer
That would make for an interesting usability test I think.

Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen
Maybe we should get on that. We’re joking now obviously.

Randy Semeleer
Well that’s a good point to wrap a bow around it I think. I just want to mention a few things that were said during this conversation. So well it’s also the subtitle of this podcast but reaching across borders obviously very important to learn and you can think that you already know a lot but your colleagues in another country might know even more or just know different things about the same challenges. What I thought was also very interesting is the innovation that when you don’t realize it so it might be normal for you but could be very innovative for another place so that’s also important to think about and what we spoke about in the end about leaving a room to fill, taking a little bit of risk and then also taking ownership to make sure that that becomes shared and also ownership of the higher ranking officials, we also spoke about that. So that’s where I want to leave it. This was my conversation with Morten Meijer of Newson of the UNU, Cara Kane of the UK’s Cabinet Office and Martin Jordan of Digital Services of the German Government. For the activities of Martin and Cara, all their activities for international design minus civil servants can be found at international.gov-design.com. That’s international.gov-design.com and we also put that in show notes. Martin, Cara, Martin, a sincere thank you from my end, from all of us here at User Needs First for your time, your knowledge and all your insights. We really appreciate it. Thank you.

Martin Jordan
Thank you so much.

Randy Semeleer
Pleasure. That is it for this episode. Thank you for listening. Are you interested in more interesting conversations like this one? Subscribe to the podcast through Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your podcast app of choice. If you subscribe, it’ll be easy to listen to a new episode. It’s also very helpful if you leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. Does this episode contain something important for your organization? Share the episode with your colleague, manager or executive official. Do you want to learn more about these topics? Visit international.gebruikercentraal.nl or for Dutch speakers gebruikercentraal.nl. You can also find these links in the show notes. Dear listeners, in this podcast we explore perspectives across borders. Still, keep in mind that while borders may seem to divide us in many ways, we are all connected. Until the next one. This episode was produced by Elke Helmers, Victor Zuidweg, Jessica Stratemans, Jeroen Schalk and myself, Randy Stengelier. Editing and audio engineering by André Dortmund. Social media by Elke Helmers. A special thanks to the Mervaar Theater where this episode was recorded.