My keynote will outline the state of the citizen experience today and where it is heading in the coming years. Here’s the official description:

Customer experience has gained much recognition and focus in the private sector, and it is gradually raising the bar of service and experience expected for government services as well. Benchmark against the current state of citizen experience and anticipate future developments in this area. Hear the latest updates on:

• The current top three challenges in citizen/ customer experience programs
• New opportunities for the public sector, and what main lessons can be learned from the private sector
• Where citizen experience will be in the next three to five years

Gain a comprehensive overview of the current state of citizen experience to guide your strategy and planning.

You can find all the session details and conference registration at cxpublicsector.com – hope to see you in April!

ANZSOG Institute for Governance’s (ANZSIG) Parliamentary Seminar at The Lobby on February 1, 2012. ANZSIG brought together a group of leading international and national design thinkers on citizen-centric governance in an interactive interview format to help address questions such as: What do we mean then by citizen-centric governance? Where is best practice to be found? What happens when citizens decide? Are there emerging policy agendas that are best suited to a citizen-centric approach? And, what are the implications of such an approach for public sector leadership and governance?

Interesting things happening in Australia for public sector design.

The chapter underscores the fundamental reality that to improve services, we have to work at a policy level in order to design for better experiences for citizens and other stakeholders. I’ll be sharing more ideas on design for policymaking here in the coming weeks. Thanks especially to Elizabeth for inviting me to contribute!

The book is scheduled to be released by Morgan Kaufmann in May. You can preorder it from Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.co.uk.

Business origami is a paper prototyping method for complex systems invented by the Hitachi Design Center, but reverse engineered by myself after a dinner conversation with a visiting Japanese researcher. Any flaws in how I present or use the method are entirely my own.

That comes to the forefront as I teach and share this method. Teaching demands clarity, and this is the most documented that business origami has been in my own practice, too.

Below is the slide deck from the workshop. If you’re interested in learning more, please get in touch.

I’d like to tell you why I think paying attention to the citizen experience is so important, and why citizen experience design can help reinvent government by adopting tools from customer experience, design and innovation.

Government is in distress. From City Hall to Capitol Hill, the public sector faces an uneven economy, partisan polarization, jarring shifts in global power, and our own struggles at home to keep up with the demands of an aging population, the offshore migration of manufacturing and increasingly innovation, and a growing gap between rich and poor that shows the American dream coming true for fewer people in every new generation since the 1970s.

In the face of these challenges, the machinery of government often seems stalled. Leaders and citizens alike seem unable to agree on a common course of action. Finger pointing, fear and blind ideology from all corners fuel empty rhetoric that replaces action with blame when action is what’s needed most.

In a culture of blame, no one wants to make the wrong decision. Fortunately, making the right decisions shifts our politicians, public servants, and communities from debating to doing, from posturing to practical solutions, and from doubt to confidence even in the face of uncertainty. We have amazing power that transcends partisan paralysis and unites our neighborhoods and nation when people align around a common cause.

History repeatedly demonstrates this unity: from the War of Independence to the Depression to the civil rights movement, the Apollo missions and the aftermath of 9/11, we have pulled together.

But how can we find such unity short of genuine crisis?

Of course I don’t have a silver bullet. But I do have lessons from the past century of product design and innovation. In that world, things took a dramatic leap forward when the customer experience became a key consideration. Customer experience has become a bridge between different parts of the enterprise, creating more effective, efficient and innovative opportunities.

I believe that focusing on the citizen experience can serve as a similar catalyst for action in government.

Conscious citizen experience design can help us make the right decisions, faster. And in fact, the tools that a citizen experience focus brings together can help just about anyone make better, faster decisions.

By citizen experience, I don’t just mean the civic experience of elections and voting, or participatory democracy. I mean the entire daily sum of interactions and benefits that a citizen experiences through both the direct and indirect actions of the public sector. That includes programs and services, policy and planning, funding, taxation, subsidies and economic development. It means dealing with specific needs, and with the broad attitudes and expectations that develop in a community. It spans all levels of government and extends into education, healthcare, and government funded non-profits. And it makes a profound difference in the kind of people, the kind of communities and the kind of nation that we are today and that we aspire to become tomorrow.

Citizen experience design is a practice devoted to improving that daily citizen experience. It draws on the best of what we know from customer experience, design and innovation. Citizen experience design doesn’t replace how we practice government. Instead it adds to the toolkit, giving civil servants and citizens more tools to improve our communities and make better, more confident decisions.

Citizen experience design can improve two significant areas of government: service delivery and policymaking.

Service delivery is often what we think of first when we think of government. Governments deliver programs and services, from national defense to education to community programs to the people. That’s its biggest job. And when you have a problem where you need government yourself, you typically draw on a program or service.

Policy making might seem like government nerd talk (and it can be). But to really improve the citizen experience, you have to make the right decisions. And policy making is all about engineering the decision DNA of government. Policy determines the official why, what and how of government decisions.

When government seems stalled, poor service delivery or policy is often the culprit.

Understanding a program or service from the citizen’s point of view is the path to eradicating inefficient bureaucracy. By taking on this “outside-in” perspective, service delivery can be optimized and focused on what matters most to citizens. Services and programs can be rapidly prototyped, the best alternatives evaluated, and pilots and rollouts managed with lower risk.

That improves outcomes across the board, from cost-savings to employee engagement, citizen satisfaction and public trust and confidence in public institutions. Optimizing this public sector service value chain of engagement, satisfaction and trust creates an upward spiral that continually improves service delivery, all while improving efficiencies and budget savings.

Policy making can be harder to change, since so much is driven by political ideology, bureaucratic inertia, or the influence of lobby groups in one form or another.

However, there are opportunities to shape policy for the better, especially at the local level. When a department or branch of government wants to truly be citizen-centric in its decisions, citizen experience design can help with two major challenges.

The first challenge is understanding all the different stakeholders and their values and viewpoints. Too often policy becomes a battleground, rather than an opportunity for change. That adversarial attitude often comes from misunderstandings and assumptions about what matters to everyone around the table. Using research tools from design, citizen experience can help identify and clarify the agendas at play. This includes field research about actual behavior, codesign with stakeholders, and exploratory concept design that all go beyond typical consultations.

Secondly, citizen experience design can help bridge those viewpoints by creating concrete artifacts to create common ground. By visualizing the challenges and opportunities in more concrete ways, from models to diagrams to prototypes, different stakeholders are better able to express their views and find common values that move decision making forward.

By giving us more tools for service delivery and policy making, citizen experience design can help reinvent government. But the biggest contribution may just be in the idea of “citizen experience” itself.

When citizen experience becomes the playing field for politicians and civil servants then everyone benefits. Having a clear, deliberate conversation about the citizen experience and how to improve it creates common ground for contributions from all participants. Focusing on the citizen experience clarifies our shared values and helps reduce the influence of special interests, since the citizen is at the center of the conversation.

The end result can be an agreement on what matters most: improving the daily lives of people. And that can help sow the seeds of a culture of opportunity and unity instead of a culture of blame and division.

Like I said, there’s no silver bullets. But citizen experience can be a valuable and important contribution to reinventing government for the better for you and your community today, and help accelerate the recovery of the nation tomorrow.

I’m hoping to see more sketching and making for participants as they work to discover and frame the right problems and opportunities for open government at the local level.

More details soon!

Both of those sessions will have plenty of lessons for current and aspiring citizen experience designers.

And it turned out that Samantha and I got drafted to co-chair the Summit this year and next when Livia Labate had to step down as chair, so I’ve also got a session talking about the business model & future of the event itself.

Putting the Citizen Back Into Citizen-Centric: How Service Design Can Save You Headaches & Delight the Public

All too often, the term citizen-centric is just another usual suspect describing public sector projects. While it’s easy to pay lip service to putting citizens at the centre, it can be much harder in practice.

We face the reality of competing demands, limited resources, partisan maneuvering, public apathy, ambiguous mandates and unknown futures. It’s easy for the citizen to get lost in all that, no matter how much we proclaim a project should be citizen-centric. Even when initiatives are able to engage with citizens, they often settle for quick surveys or focus groups rather than looking for deeper, transformative insight.

This session will introduce public servants to service design – a set of methods and tools for understanding citizens and designing great policy and service delivery grounded in evidence, insights and empathy. The public sector can become more efficient, more innovative, and more effective by increasing our understanding of citizens and their experiences, and using simple tools to translate those insights into designs and then reality. That reality is one where citizens are satisfied, our mandate is accomplished, and our programs truly are citizen-centric.

While the full website is a few days away from launching, you can sign up to be notified when it goes live and get all the details if you visit ottawa.uxcamp.ca. You can also follow UXCampOttawa on Twitter if you need more updates. Hope to see you there if you’re in Ottawa or Montreal!