From the Cabinet Table to the Kitchen Table

A few weeks ago I sat on a panel at Better by Design in Dublin; a conference full of people across government who take the design of public services seriously. It was held on the same day Ireland launched Design for Public Value, its new guidelines for designing better public services.

Launches like this follow a pattern. A minister speaks, a document lands, everyone applauds and goes back to work. But something in the backstory of this one struck a real chord with me, and I've been ruminating over it since.

In October 2022, the Irish government published its first set of design principles for the public service. In the official documents, they labelled them a prototype.

A government… shipping a prototype.

Not a framework. Not a standard. A prototype; something explicitly expected to be imperfect, published so it could be tested against reality and improved.

Then they did the harder thing. For four years the principles were used, challenged and iterated across the Irish public service. What launched in June is the next version. In their own words: this is not a starting gun.

Institutions don't usually behave like this. Strategy documents arrive laminated. Frameworks are defended, not revised. The prototype label changes the relationship between the people who wrote the thing and the people who use it; it invites challenge, expects correction, and builds learning into the plan rather than treating it as failure.

For anyone who knows me, this is the argument I've been making for most of my working life. Design is not a department, or a discipline reserved for people with the word in their job title. It's a way of working; a method for changing, improving or inventing almost anything.

It starts with understanding people. Real human needs, researched properly, turned into insight. That insight can reshape a product, a service, a whole organisation. And, as Ireland has just demonstrated at national scale, it can reshape policy.

Because policy is a hypothesis. The service built on top of it is the experiment. Most policy failure isn't bad intent or bad ideas; it's that nobody designed the journey between the document and the citizen, between what was decided and what someone actually experiences.

Policy doesn't fail at the cabinet table. It fails at the kitchen table; at the moment someone sits down to apply for the thing, claim the thing, understand the thing… and can't.

The patterns that work against change

The guidelines are unusually candid about why this keeps happening. They name six patterns that work against change inside large organisations, and three of them deserve a place on every leadership team's whiteboard.

1. Solving before understanding. We reward the person with the answer, not the person with the better question; so work begins before the problem is properly defined.

2. Adding, rarely subtracting. Every fix is a new form, a new step, a new system on top of the old ones. Almost nobody's job is to take things away; complexity compounds.

3. Delegating the understanding. Commissioning a report, receiving the findings, skipping to the recommendations. The guidelines put it better than I ever have: you cannot fully learn from work you did not do.

That last one is the line I'd put in front of every chief executive, public or private. You can delegate research. You cannot delegate understanding. If you've never watched someone struggle with your service, you don't know your service; you know the version of it that survives the journey up through your organisation.

Did it matter?

There's a second idea in the guidelines that deserves to travel well beyond government. Most organisations measure delivery: on time, on budget, as specced. Fine questions; none of them asks whether the thing made a difference.

The guidelines run every decision through four lenses instead: desirability, viability, feasibility and responsibility. And desirability comes first. Not "what can we build with what we've got?" but "does anyone actually need this?"

I'm close to one small example of what that looks like in practice. Earlier this year, Big Motive worked on MyWaste.ie's national textile map. Where to recycle or donate clothes was scattered across local authorities, charity shops and civic amenity sites; nobody could see the whole network. The project pulled that existing information into one simple, public map. No new infrastructure. In the words of the guidelines themselves: existing data, made useful for the first time.

That project now sits inside the published guidelines as a worked case study. Not because it was expensive or complicated; because it made a difference people could feel.

That's the bar the guidelines set. Not "was it delivered?" but "did it matter?"

The label on the document

Which brings me back to that 2022 document.

Remember what the prototype actually was: a set of design principles on paper. The hope was that departments across government would adopt the thinking, enact the principles, hold new services against them.

The authors knew what publishing it meant. It would be pulled apart. Criticised. In places, ignored. Implementation would come in fits and starts. And they were comfortable with all of it; they had formalised a set of principles and put it into the world as something deliberately unfinished. Its sole purpose was to learn: about context, about adoption, about whether it could inspire the change its authors hoped for.

Inspiring stuff and perhaps worth pausing to reflect on the last time you put something into the world unfinished… for the sole purpose of learning? If a government can do that, why can't you?