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!

It’s one of the 5 minute lightning talks, so I’m working to pare things down to the core elements.

Looking forward to a great day of speakers, catching up with some Victoria friends, and sharing some thoughts on citizen experience with the Gov 2.0 crowd.

I talked about the opportunity for local government web teams to start thinking about the citizen experience holistically – not just online. In about an hour I covered some basic principles from service design and we had a conversation about how public sector web teams can start to think beyond digital.

Here’s the deck from the day:

It’s been five months in the making, but it’s finally time to start raising the public profile of the Centre for Citizen Experience. As the founder, I’m thrilled to finally be sharing more about the vision and mission for the Centre, start conversations about how we can help organizations, and most of all to invite participation in designing the Centre itself.

As a startup “do tank”, the Centre for Citizen Experience will succeed based on the contributions of interested people: staff, clients, and the broader community. In the coming weeks I’ll be sharing more about the vision for the Centre and inviting comments and perspectives on how best to realize that vision.

Many thanks to all who’ve offered feedback so far. I hope to continue our conversations and enjoy new ones!

Understanding these principles is the beginning of great citizen experiences. Of course, this version is just the start. We’d love to hear your thoughts and input as we iterate over the coming weeks.

1. Citizen experience is about people.
2. It’s about the relationship between citizens and government. The citizen experience is the foundation of that relationship.
3. It’s about the entire range of that relationship, from active political participation to community civic engagement to policy creation to daily service delivery.
4. It’s about what’s in hearts and minds, about what people say on the campaign trail or over the fence to their neighbor or standing in city hall.
5. It’s not just about hearts and minds, though. It’s about results too. What is a given experience like? Is it good? Bad? Indifferent? The answers echo every day, in every community across the country. All together, those results are the reflection of a nation.
6. It’s about rights and responsibilities that transcend simple transactions. The citizen is not a consumer or customer. Using language and concepts from the world of business can help us be more efficient, but we cannot let that efficiency eclipse the relationship, rights and responsibilities between citizen and government.
7. As part of those responsibilities, government should sometimes be a partner and engage in conversation, collaboration and co-creation. Government needs to be open to the expertise of its citizens collectively and individually.
8. Other times, government should be a provider: a vending machine for public services. It should just work, simply and on demand.
9. In turn, citizens have a responsibility and right to be participants in shaping the public sphere. Participants make opportunities to offer their insights, perspectives, and expertise to help their communities and countries become the best they can be.
10. These roles of partner, provider and participant extend to every interaction, every touchpoint between citizen and the public service–whether face to face, online, in print, in the media, or over the phone. What matters isn’t the medium, it’s the relationship supported by that specific experience.
11. These touchpoints exist at every level of government and reach beyond government to embrace every publicly funded institution–the citizen experience fails or succeeds on the contributions of all public sector organizations.
12. There are many people who aren’t citizens, but have the same need for a caring, empathic, efficient and effective public sector. Pursuing excellence in citizen experience benefits residents, immigrants, business, and more as the public sector seizes opportunities to improve for all constituents.
13. We recognize the reality of competing demands, limited resources, partisan maneuvering, public apathy, ambiguous mandates and unknown futures. However: Embracing constraints and uncertainty prepares organizations for opportunity.
14. Thriving despite today’s public sector constraints requires a different way of thinking, a third way, an alternative to either/or. It isn’t about raising taxes or cutting programs–it’s about finding a way to improve service delivery while managing limited funding, about winning the game and making ends meet. It’s about innovation.
15. This innovation shares much the same spirit and aims as Open Government and Gov 2.0, but at its core, innovation for citizen experience is focused on people more than platforms.
16. This innovation extends along a continuum: from how we deliver and design services to how we design policy and organize ourselves to how we understand and solve problems in general in the public sector.
17. That kind of innovation for the citizen experience demands new tools, new thinking, new ways of doing and being. It demands creativity and insight into discovering, defining, and solving problems and realizing opportunities. It demands more than a tired buzzword, it demands and deserves a practice with real methods that are tangible, applicable and practical for public servants to adopt alongside the tools they already use.
18. We believe that methods and proven practice for transforming the citizen experience can be drawn from dozens of disciplines, and most of all in design and customer experience. These sources don’t have all the answers, but they do have the beginnings of a path forward.
19. New methods aren’t enough to improve the citizen experience on their own. Instead, new methods can lead to a new mindset, and new mindsets lead to new culture – a culture of opportunity.
20. [Your principle here?]