I'm a service designer, creative technologist, coach, thinker, tinkerer, observer of people, maker of things.
Joined November 2007
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22 Jul 2016
"When faced with a challenge, get smarter."—Ed Catmull
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Purpose and target are not the same thing.
Targets are proxies for purposes. The danger comes when people start optimising the proxy, and the purpose gets left behind.
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What's the purpose of your system, and what are you actually measuring?
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If you liked this thread, I have a free 7-day email-delivered course on systems thinking called 'See the system'.
Learn to spot patterns, anticipate consequences, and find better places to intervene in the systems around you.
Sign up here: humanedesign.co/courses/syst…
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Jun 12
The regressive service that looked efficient on paper.
A digital-only service reduced processing costs significantly. On a CBA, it passed.
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Jun 12
In your organisation, who typically bears the hidden cost of decisions made for efficiency reasons?
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Jun 12
I have a free 10-day email-delivered course on business thinking called Know the business.
Learn the concepts that show up in strategic conversations, from value propositions and unit economics to switching costs and incentive alignment.
Sign up here: humanedesign.co/courses/busi…
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Jun 12
Why CBA isn't enough.
A positive cost-benefit ratio says: in aggregate, the benefits outweigh the costs.
It doesn't say where those benefits land. Or who absorbs the costs. Or whether those populations are the same.
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Jun 12
A service can look efficient in aggregate and still transfer costs from one group to another.
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Jun 12
"Who pays and who benefits?"
It's the question behind every spending review, every commissioning decision, every cut.
Cost-benefit analysis gives you part of the answer. Distributional thinking gives you the rest.
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Every service has unintended consequences. The ones that matter most are the ones that harm the users you didn't design for. A thread. 🧵
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Ethics as ongoing design work.
Ethics review at the start or end of a project isn't enough. Ethical questions arise at every design decision: who to include in research, what data to collect, which constraints to accept, whose needs to prioritise when they conflict.
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If you liked this thread, I have a free 14-day email-delivered course on service design called Design the service.
Learn to see how services work, identify where they fail, and design solutions that address root causes rather than symptoms.
Sign up here: humanedesign.co/courses/serv…
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