LG/WWW

Next week I'm attending an unconference for learning and development (L&D), and organisational development (OD) practitioners. I'm familiar with the unconference format as I've been part of the team who organise LocalGovCamp for the past few years, but both L&D and OD are well out of my comfort zone. So why am I going? I've been involved with digital and service transformation for a while now and I've come to realise it's about more than tech. Sure it is you're probably thinking, real digital transformation is about the re-design of function and process around the capabilities the internet and technology provide, and that's true, but it's also about people. The main driver for digital transformation is often cost reduction, and one way to cut cost is to reduce headcount. Some service re-designs remove the human element completely and create a fully end-to-end digital service, but lots of services councils provide or commission still n...

You're planning your wedding and it's time to send out the invites. You decide you'll email everyone asking them to save the date, and send the invites in the post later. Within seconds of sending your emails you receive a polite and carefully worded reply from one of your invitees explaining they can't attend. It's like they didn't even think about it, they just flat out rejected you there and then. How would that make you feel? We've been thinking about this. Thinking about the psychology of rejection and how this relates to services we're redesigning. Digital is efficient, it's fast and cheap, but it can also be cold and uncompromising. Sometimes the steely hard edges of "computer says no" need padding. With this in mind we're redesigning one of our services so that applications that don't meet the lowest threshold of the acceptance criteria are automatically rejected. Not only does this reduce staff workload, it means th...