In the UK public sector we have been working with Digital design for some time. The success of digital services has been spearheaded by the transformation of highly transactional services, like passport renewal.

However, transferring this to other public service has often simply been to copy the same principles and methods, without recognising that most public services are actually non-transitional, they often involve complexity. And designing for complexity requires very different methods and approaches.

Local government became hooked on “digital first”. The drive for this was to cut costs. The outcomes are that citizens in need had far greater barriers to getting support than before, which drove an increase in failure demands into the council, and an deepening of citizen problems. We are now working back from that, but we can see other countries getting seduced by this paradigm.

The greatest problems occur with citizens who are in difficulty; whether it is paying overdue bills, homelessness, or just trying to cope with living. Dealing with this is complex and requires dynamic local people based support. As a percentage of total budgets, this work uses up greater resources than for transitional services. At a national level a good example of this mismatch in design is a service called Universal Credit; a country wide system to deliver benefit payments. Whilst it works for some people, this new design has been a disaster for citizens in need, it has increased waste work and led to many suicides and increase in problems within families. The causes lie in the design that used methods and concepts from transactional services.

Other countries can learn from this understanding complexity and systems thinking, and design with intelligence rather than a standard approach. Service Design should not mean Digital design, it means designing appropriate services end to end where Digital is enabled where appropriate.