How To Make Complex Things Simple
I’ve just had to apply for a new passport.
It’s one of those things that you generally only do every ten years or so. It prompts you to ruminate on a few things.
Ageing: That old passport photo you were embarrassed about now looks like the ideal version of you. You shudder at the thought of what the 2026 edition will look like.
Life: Where have I been in the past decade, what experiences have I had, what have I learned?
And technology and design: Wow – the sheer hell of passport renewal has been replaced by….something quite simple.
Back in 2006 only 3% of us owned a smartphone. Today that figure is 71%. The phone is now the hub of our daily lives – transforming the way we interact with services.
It’s driven us to crave ever greater simplicity. Things we can do on the go. Complex tasks we can perform in minutes rather than hours.
Yet most of our organisations have not adapted to this.
Most of the problems we were set up to solve were relatively simple, but as organisations get larger, there’s more technology, more people, and more regulation. We put together processes, controls, reviews, and structures to deal with all these things. All of these factors together create a great amount of complexity.
For most organisations it’s easier to make a simple thing more complex than it is to make a complex thing more simple.
But our customers’ needs are not so complicated.
Making things simple for them is now a competitive advantage.
Back to the passport.
Mine came back in 8 days – 10 years ago it took about a month.
There are 6.7 million passport transactions in the UK each year – numbers most of our organisations couldn’t dream of handling. To understand how that’s happened it’s useful to look at one of the Government Digital Service (GDS) design principles:
GDS have achieved this transformation by doing less not more. They’ve not added new options – or any bells and whistles – they have ruthlessly focused on user need.
The only apparent ‘innovation’ in passport services is that there is now a beta test where you can take your own photo using a smartphone – making the process fully digital. If you’re in the business of manufacturing those little photo booths you get in supermarkets you need to move on. You’re going the way of VHS.
However this simplicity comes at a price – there’s only one way to get a passport. If you want one – you’re going to have learn how. That means acquiring basic digital skills for a start.
This is a world away from how most of our organisations , particularly in the social sector, operate.
- We bend over backwards to do more things.
- We create bespoke ways for customers to do business with us – trying to do the right thing but adding layers of complexity and cost into the process.
- Our websites – often providing an illusion of digital transformation -offer so many services it’s often unclear what organisations actually do.
Doing less not more requires a cultural rather than a digital shift. The lesson from GDS is to find your ‘irreducible core’ – and then constantly refine and innovate against it. Accept we are not always the right people to solve the problem. Do what only you can do.
How do you make your company’s services simpler? You can start by simplifying your company.
Why You Need To Selectively Forget Your Own Past
Reset All Assumptions
We must selectively forget the past. That means not accepting current practices but challenging underlying assumptions, our solutions and mindsets, and the way we tackle the problem.
We need services designed as people need them – not as we have learned to do them.
Bromford Design Principle 1 (Draft)
I’m doing some work at the moment on organisational design principles – which is as good an opportunity as any to stand back and assess our capability for radical thinking.
A lot of the conversations I’ve been party to recently have centered around the need for a strong organisational culture to promote innovation. Indeed – I took part in an innovation assessment that seemed to hold teamwork, co-operation and shared purpose up as a kind of holy grail.
My experience of working with teams is almost exactly the opposite. Innovation often thrives because of diversity and discord. “The idea that will get you fired” is often the best one to explore.
Strong cultures are a positive – but there’s a tipping point. A point where conflicting opinions can get stifled rather than being actively cultivated.
Phrases such as “That’s the way things get done around here” or “That person isn’t really a (insert your company name) sort of person” are early warning signs you’re reaching that point.
I’ve been reading the latest book from VG Govindarajan – a great thinker on innovation and leader of a global initiative to design a $300 House.
In the book VG proposes a simple test to assess the size of the challenge in forgetting the past.
Here are some of the questions:
- We primarily promote from within
- Our culture is homogeneous
- We have a strong culture
- Employees have a long tenure
- We rarely recruit from outside apart from entry level positions
- When people are recruited from outside, we have strong socialisation methods
- We have a track record of success
- We don’t mess with success
- The senior management team has a long tenure and has also worked primarily in our sector
VG asks us to answer the questions scoring 1-5, with 1 representing ‘strongly disagree’, and 5 representing ‘strongly agree’. The higher the score the bigger the challenge.
I ran my own organisation through this – I’ll be asking other leaders to do the same – and found we score pretty highly.
As VG teaches us – this is not cause to throw our heads into our hands and despair. Rather it’s about surfacing awareness of the weight of our history – and the chains we may need to break to move forward.
A crucial part of this is about resetting our assumptions about why we do what we do, how we do them, and who does them.
It means embracing misfits – not rejecting them from “your” culture.
Contained in our own personal and organisational histories are thousands of assumptions. Assumptions that we live by everyday.
To truly transform we need to question every one of them.
Bending The Rules To Drive Frugal Innovation
The frugal innovation revolution, by making the means to innovate more widely available, has the potential to speed up the innovation process – Jaideep Prabhu
Jugaad is a Hindi word that roughly means ‘solution born from cleverness.’ It’s usually applied to a low cost fix or work-around. In a culture where people often have to make do with what they have it’s an improvised or makeshift solution using scarce resources.
Anyone who has been to India or other parts of Asia will have seen examples of jugaad on a daily basis.
In case you’re new to the word I’ll give you four pictures:
Building a house with discarded cola bottles
Making tea using an iron
Attaching an extra seat onto mopeds (or attaching literally ANYTHING onto mopeds)
Bike + Tuk Tuk + Wifi
I’ve seen washing machines used to whip up yoghurt drinks, an indian toilet converted to western style just by sticking a chair over it. The spirit of frugal innovation is everywhere.
Although the book Jugaad Revolution was published four years ago – it’s only now entering mainstream thinking in many western organisations.
Partly this is a result of austerity. In an era of abundance there isn’t much desire for the simple fix. Scarcity drives creativity in ways abundance cannot.
We’ve also seen a generational shift. Many of us have moved towards a post-materialistic mindset. We are more interested in the environment. More interested in experience rather than acquisition. Digital platforms have opened up new marketplaces and information exchanges so we are all buyers and sellers – of products, services or even knowledge.
A new report from Nesta asks whether Europe needs frugal innovation. It’s well worth a read – particularly the points around how little real innovation is around for low income consumers.
The question is whether organisations – often risk averse rather than risk seeking – can bring the principles of jugaad on board without killing the spirit.
Most organisational approaches to change or transformation are carefully structured. Agile or lean are process frameworks, whereas jugaad is void of process altogether.
Innovation in the social sector is often focused on introducing shiny new things rather than bending the rules to make existing things work. Even creating new things with meagre resources requires a complete shift in thinking.
I’ve been out with quite a few customers recently and it has reminded me of two things:
- I need to get out more. You don’t solve the problems that matter from a lab or office.
- Innovations ARE passing a lot of people by. The relentless focus on digital and technology as an end in itself is blinding us to the real needs of communities.
Our own Lab is currently running a test that very much harnesses the spirit of jugaad. We are developing resident skills to open up ways they can do their own home repairs – literally hacking the home.
My personal belief is this is the best way western organisations can adopt jugaad: by directly channelling it into communities themselves. The frugal revolution needs to be driven by people – not from your boardroom.
That means learning to forget the past, and challenging our current solutions and mindsets.
Bromford alone has over 80,000 customers. Imagine if everyone of them became a jugaad innovator – hacking solutions for themselves and the wider community.
The time for westernised jugaad has very much arrived.
Resisting the Rush to Technology for Solutions
Is anyone else getting tired of the talk – and it is mainly talk – of digital transformation?
The endless rounds of conferences, clubs and lists of so-called digital leaders – all promising a tech utopia.
At a recent event I observed an audience listlessly staring at their iPhones as a speaker described how digital was changing the world. It certainly has – no-one was paying him the slightest bit of attention.
The problem I have with digital cheerleading is two fold:
A) The implication that all our problems are ‘solvable’
B) The subsequent rush towards technology – as if digital is the only solution.
Organisations are too often focussing on form rather than function , digitising the prosaic and easily achievable (customer portals anyone?) rather than having a fundamental rethink of why they exist.
As I’ve argued before, transformation is not about the illusion of radical change – but a reshaping of purpose.
All the work we have been doing at Bromford over the past five years has convinced us of three things:
- There are problems in communities but there are even more opportunities. We have learned that our customers and communities have many skills. That even if they do need ‘help’ they are just as likely to find what they need from a friend or a neighbour as they are from a ‘professional’.
- That many of our most challenging issues fall into the category of Wicked Problems like social isolation, health and income inequality. These aren’t amenable to a single organisation, top down instinct to define, analyse, dissect and process.
- The challenge is connecting the various players and closing the gaps. Who is connecting the connectors?
Over the next few months we will be launching a completely re-engineered way of providing our service – an evolution of the Bromford Deal.
It’s less about Bromford as a single purpose organisation and more of organisation as a platform. Organisation as a super connector.
It’s the result of all the testing , piloting and exploring we’ve been doing over the past few years. The learning from all these pilots has brought us to an overriding conclusion: we can have the most impact with our communities when we truly get to know them and are freed from the shackles of how we used to do things.
Those shackles include silo working, restrictive policies, a reliance on contact centres and customer relationship ‘management’ software. As if customers are there to be ‘managed’ anyway.
Are we just Luddites? I’d argue not – the principles will be supported by mobile working, collaborative tools and digital networks. However we are resisting putting burdensome technology in the way of relationships.
Digital evangelists too often presume that it will solve all our problems. By doing this we embark on the worst kind of technological solutionism – that risks ignoring the skills, assets and sheer talent that exists in our communities.
Who is connecting the connectors?
Starting now:
We are.
Note: We are recruiting to support this!
You can see a video of the new approach (perfectly narrated by Lab Manager – Vicky Green).
Here’s a link to example job profiles of the Head of Locality and Neighbourhood Coach (these are available in different geographical areas – go to main Bromford recruitment site)
If you’d like any more information or a quick chat, just message me here or via Twitter DM and I’ll connect you to the right people!
To Boost Innovation We Need To Make Ourselves Obsolete
If you’re of a certain age you’ll sometimes find yourself reminiscing about an age where things were built to last.
My own mother swears her first washing machine lasted for over 20 years. Today, Apple expects the lifecycle for an average iPhone to be just three.
Firstly – this is almost certainly a rose tinted view of the past. I remember several breakdowns and days of hand washing in our house. Statistics back me up – In 1971 Which? found that 50% of washing machines broke down in their first year. Today the chances of a breakdown in six years is just 12%.
Secondly – the relative cost of technology has fallen dramatically. In 1970, the cost of a washing machine was extortionate – equal to about 8% of average annual earnings. Today it’s barely 1.5%.
In truth – today’s goods are far cheaper and far more reliable than they ever were before.
The price we pay for this innovation is a much shortened lifecycle. And it’s known as planned obsolescence.
This is a strategy in which the process of becoming obsolete— unfashionable or no longer usable – is planned and built into it from conception.
Many see planned obsolescence as a driver for innovation. Philip Kotler has described it as
the working of the competitive and technological forces in a free society—forces that lead to ever-improving goods and services.
Others regard is an exploitation of customers – driving them through a never ending cycle of wasteful upgrade or repurchase.
However – I propose that it has a place. And that includes a role in how we design our organisations and how we design our public services.
One of the questions I often hear asked is why aren’t our organisations embracing change, new technology, social innovation, more quickly.
The answer is pretty simple I think:
Getting rid of the old is harder than embracing the new.
All the talk and excitement of sexy new tech and ways of working runs out of steam when faced with legacy systems, established practices and policies. All formed in a very different age and stuck in place like a limpet on a rock.
Whilst organisations are generally very good at coming up with new ideas and practices they are generally not so skilled at decommissioning older ones.
- So what if we designed all new services and products with the life cycle of an iPhone?
- What if our customers and colleagues knew at the launch of a service that the infrastructure was in place for just four years , after which a newer , more powerful upgrade was to be launched?
- What if rather than plan on our services being around forever , we designed for the very conditions in which they would cease to exist?
Wouldn’t that be a better future than yet more failed attempts by services to fix society?
Over the next few months Bromford will be launching a completely re-engineered way of providing our core service. In fact it’s less a service and more a relationship. A relationship less about housing and more about people.
It’s the result of all the testing , piloting and exploring we’ve been doing over the past few years. The learning from all these pilots has brought us to an overriding conclusion: we can have the most impact with our customers when we truly get to know them and are freed from the shackles of how we used to do things.
This redesign will be accompanied by a process of decommissioning. And we’ll have dates by which we will know whether objectives have been achieved. Dates when we can begin again or decide we are no longer needed in the same way. Or even at all.
If we all planned for obsolescence we’d perhaps see a very different social sector. A sector where innovation wasn’t endlessly lauded so much as endlessly practiced.
A sector where things maybe didn’t last so long , but where services had more impact, were cheaper, and rarely broke down like they used to.
Stepping Behind The Rhetoric of Digital Transformation
Fundamentally the challenge for current leaders and public sector organisations is the legacy thinking and a business model which is rooted in serving a de facto purpose which is disconnected from the people and places the organisation or leaders serve – Carl Haggerty
Yesterday I chaired an event where the CEO of HACT , Matt Leach, gave us a wicked provocation.
Talk of a digital transformation in housing (he could also have been talking about care, health etc) is rubbish.
It hasn’t happened.
All the talk , all the conferences , all the clubs , the tweets, all the lists of digital leaders – it’s all rhetoric.
Nothing has changed.
We are delivering the same services as we did in 1965. Just with shiny websites and customer portals.
It’s a point that Carl Haggerty also refers to in his must read post. Too many people are claiming that there is digital transformation happening – when really it is just automating legacy processes.
It’s improvement for sure. Less time for customers , less money for providers – but it’s not ‘transformation’, a word possibly even more abused than innovation.
Here’s what transformation could be:
- Rebuilding your organisation as platform – enabling people to select the suppliers and services they themselves want – rather than the ones that made it through your procurement framework.
- Rewiring your organisation for the network era – stripping out hierarchy and management and making the, often painful, transition to decentralised decision making.
- Automating everything that can be automated. But not before stripping out legacy protocols and systems. Decommissioning old world services as you launch new ones, reserving your people for worthwhile jobs that add value to their lives and those of others.
Transformation is not about the illusion of radical change (better, faster services , less crap than they used to be) but rather a fundamental rethink of why you exist – and a reshaping of the ways you deliver upon it.
That said, a few events I’ve been to over the past week have reminded me that many of us are a long way from this.
For a lot of people closer to the frontline some minor changes could be truly transformative.
Over the past days I’ve heard the , sometimes sad, reality of people trying to change things whilst their organisation seems to fight against it.
- Of organisations where social media is still banned, or at least actively discouraged
- Of organisations where IT departments tell people resources like Yammer and Slack cost £35,000
- Of people stuck using digital tools that were last updated when Gordon Brown was in Number 10.
(As an aside I was told great stories of young people entering the workplace not knowing what Outlook is. Not even realising that Microsoft made anything other than Xbox!)
For all the talk of transformation we are in an era of digital haves and have nots. And Matt rightly questioned how seriously this agenda is taken strategically.
- How many social sector organisations have true digital leaders on their boards?
- How many Chief Information Officers (or their equivalent) are part of the executive function?
At the end of the conference I collected up some of the evaluation sheets.
The first one had scored my slot , presented in the slides above, 5 out of 10.
My talk of robots, 3D printing and self management was a world away from what they needed. They just wanted tips on how they could convince their organisation that social media had a business benefit.
Transformation, like innovation, is all relative. We need to support whatever makes a difference to people.
How Organisations May Stifle Community Creativity
One of the many challenges for the public sector is that it must start believing in people and communities again.
We know that many organisations are out of sync with technology , but there’s an argument that they are increasingly distant from an economy where sharing and collaboration trump paternalism and top down protocols.
One of the most interesting comments on my post How To Kill Creativity was from John Wade. In it he wondered whether the organisations that limit the creativity of their employees also inadvertently stifle citizen and community strengths.
I think the answer is almost certainly yes.
It’s well established that meetings, emails and design by committee suck the creativity out of a business , so surely this would trickle down to the end user?
If you have a risk averse culture surely you also contribute to risk aversion in communities?
One of the more damaging ways we can stifle creativity is just by not listening. Of leaving the thinking to the ‘experts’. If it was an idea worth having, the experts would already have thought about it. They have all kinds of qualifications and can write reports and they tend to use very long words. When there’s a problem they really can’t solve they will often bring in a consultant or make an appointment to their board.
We can also – without meaning to – make communities defer to authority. Everyone is a manager or an officer. This indicates that someone is in charge and is important. The people in charge must know what they are doing, or they wouldn’t hold the positions that they do. They don’t need any ideas on how the service could be run differently.
These behaviours are out of kilter with networked communities and the way we share information and resources.
If we approach public service purely as a one to one consumer transaction we’ll view the world through the lens of efficiency, reduced contact, metrics and performance indicators.
In an economy moving towards sharing rather than just transacting we need to build a new set of behaviours based on trust, fondness, habit and traditions.
Huge parts of the public sector have designed services around what people can’t do for themselves rather than nurturing what they can.
At Bromford we are in the process of reshaping our organisation around the latter. A move away from managing to coaching and connecting.
Every individual and community has assets, talents, skills and abilities. Better to focus on helping to develop and release these, rather than treating people as a series of ‘problems’ that need to be solved.
If we think of our organisations as platforms to enable people – rather than just as service providers – it fundamentally changes how we seek out ideas.
Yesterday we hosted a discussion in Bromford Lab kicking off a 12 week period looking at the problem , or opportunity, of loneliness.
What struck me more than anything was how the conversations we have are completely changed. Very quickly the contributors stopped talking about loneliness and starting talking about community connection. About amazing examples they had seen of people doing things together. Of Bromford leading by stepping back. Of the organisation no longer feeling it has to be omnipresent.
Believing in what people can do means being brave enough to admit that we won’t always be needed.
Many of our public services are actually products of failure. They only exist because things don’t work.
Planning for obsolescence may sound suicidal, but it’s actually the most enlightened creative state your organisation can be in.
People Don’t Believe Our Organisations – Here’s Why
There’s not a week goes by – and I mean that quite literally – in which we don’t see a sector bemoan its image problem. The launch of some campaign or other to raise awareness of a ‘message’ and get people to see the valuable contribution it makes to society.
This week it’s housing, but I could have selected almost anyone. Charities, the NHS, Financial Services – everyone, everywhere is obsessed with image.
One thing I’m certain of is that all these marketing campaigns and re-branding efforts will fail.
Here’s why: trust in institutions is eroding. And trust can only be rebuilt by actions, not words.
Imagine you’re in a relationship that starts to break down. You don’t seem to understand each other anymore. Here’s what you might do:
- Go back to the start. Revisit the experiences that attracted you to each other in the first place.
- Recalibrate the relationship – trying new things together.
- Wipe the slate clean. Start afresh and reinvent yourself. A new era and new challenge.
Here’s what you absolutely would not do:
- Start a Twitter campaign to raise awareness of your contribution to the relationship.
- Get all your mates to agree you’re a brilliant person and tell your loved one that he/she’s mistaken.
- Launch a new strategy to tell them what you’ll achieve over the next five years.
But time and again we see organisations adopting exactly that approach – just with the public and politicians in mind.
The issue that we face is that trust is in question. Distrust in business and government is the new normal. And you can’t rebuild trust through marketing.
The latest Edelman Trust Barometer shows that we face a truly global challenge.
In the digital age we are getting ever more astute in spotting spin, marketing and doublespeak.
The most credible sources are not your comms team, but an academic, a technical expert, a regular employee and “a person like myself”. All of these are more trusted than the people we here from the most – CEOs.
A ‘person like yourself’ builds trust – so we need to promote the voices of those engaged in frontline services, not the hierarchy.
Government is ,unsurprisingly, the least trusted institution. However non-profit organisations are also losing trust as they are perceived as ineffectual.
In the world after Kids Company , and amid a huge decline of trust in charities, it’s no longer good enough to do good. You need to BE good.
If trust is at a tipping-point it’s a time for action not words.
To rebuild trust in our organisations we need to be more like people. Relationships in the digital age require acknowledging and accepting our human flaws. Ironically digital gives us the opportunity to be more human, to interact with people in more nuanced, intimate ways.
For organisations that means adopting behaviours of extreme transparency , honesty and sharing failure.
There are four things we need to do:
- Default to transparency – publish everything. Even our biggest mistakes.
- Reinvent services – not rebrand them.
- Humanise the organisation – push our customers and colleagues to the forefront, not the bosses.
- Forget trying to change the image of sectors – if we align ourselves with a sector we just become an average of everyone else.
Ultimately – if you really want to transform perceptions of your organisation or sector there’s only one option:
transform.
Anything else is just an expensive waste of time.
What if Uber did health, housing and social care?
If you’ve been to a conference in the past 12 months – you’ll almost certainly have seen the slide above, or a version of it.
Mentioning “disruptive innovation” adds a sprinkle of sophistication to otherwise ordinary presentations. It’s a sit up and take notice slide that says: ‘Better listen, or you could be history.”
However – it doesn’t always hit its intended target. A significant portion of the audience at a couple of events I’ve been to recently have looked at each other as if to say ‘that couldn’t happen to us’.
The reason for this seems to be the comfort blanket that can come with extended working in the public and social sectors.
The thinking can go like this.
- We are different.
- We deal with people who are highly complex with multiple needs and vulnerabilities.
- No tech outfit could hope to understand the extent of the personalisation involved in our services.
It’s optimistic thinking – probably the same that was held by some taxi firms pre-Uber and hotels before Airbnb.
It’s going to take radical change a lot closer to home before many managers recognise how profoundly the rules of business have changed in the digital age.
Arguably though , it’s already happening. I’ve made a slide of my own that might be more relevant to the public sector.
Far from fantasy – we are at the beginning of the end of one size fits all health, housing and social care monopolies.
Some examples:
Mercy is a hospital with no beds, no waiting rooms and no patients.There are nurses but they work virtually, providing care across 33 hospitals. The strategy is quickly expanding beyond hospitals and into the home. By keeping tabs on patients at home, Mercy can help keep people with chronic conditions out of the hospital.
Buurtzorg is a care system without managers, even though it has 9000 employees. To kill bureaucracy and overheads there are no call centres. Nurses take the calls. In self-managing teams of ten they plan patient visits and decide how long they spend there, depending on their judgement of the need.
Honor is home care without direct employees. Like Uber , the care professionals here are self employed and use an app that helps them find and keep track of job offers. Applicants undergo background checks and in-person interviews to screen them, with only 5% allowed onto the platform so far. More flexible than traditional care – it allows people to book packages in just one hour increments, and aims to foster long-lasting relationships between caregiver and the customer.
What these systems and technologies do is to enable existing infrastructure to be used more efficiently. They are harnessing the power of the connected citizen rather than the analogue organisation. As Alastair Parvin has written – we are no longer stuck with the choice between the public sector and the private sector. The citizen sector now needs to be recognised as a viable, industrial force.
Is it impossible to imagine a local authority as just a digital platform with its services all outsourced?
Paul Blantern, Chief Exec of Northamptonshire County Council is almost there. The Council employed 12,000 people when he took over. Today they employ 6,000 and his vision is to reduce that to just 150. He was asked in this programme “Is there anything you wouldn’t outsource?”. His response – “No – it’s all about the outcome to the end user.” Essentially the ‘Council’ could reduce to zero as long as people feel the services are still good.
Is it impossible to imagine other organisations , housing associations for example, being managed entirely differently? Rather than multiple companies we may see a singular platform where users themselves directly procure the services they need from the cloud. The next generation of housing manager could be an algorithm rather than a person.
It’s not just housing. Any sector that has multiple players performing similar services is ripe for disruption.
There’s no question about whether the Uber , AirBnb, Facebook and Alibaba of the public sector will emerge.
It’s simply a matter of when.
[Credit to Mike Clark and Shirley Ayres for inspiration on the slide! Thanks both]
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