Transcript
Transcript: Reflections by Kate Tarling
[00:00:00 Montage of a series of images: people walking down busy streets; a Canadian flag waving on the side of a building; an aerial view of Parliament Hill and downtown Ottawa; the interior of a library; a view of Earth from space. Texts on screen: Leadership; Policy; Governance; Innovation; Review and Reflection. Produced by the Canada School of Public Service.]
Narrator: Public servants, thought leaders and experts from across Canada reflect on the ideas shaping public service: leadership, policy, governance, innovation and more. This is the Review and Reflection series, produced by the Canada School of Public Service.
[00:00:23 Kate Tarling appears on screen. Text on screen: Kate Tarling, Author, The Service Organization / Service Design Leader]
Interviewer: So, hello. I'm very pleased today to be joined by Kate Tarling, author of The Service Organization, a book that came out in the last year or so, that is really an excellent, excellent read for all public servants and anyone involved in designing or delivering services. Welcome, we're really pleased to have you here.
Kate Tarling: It's my pleasure to join you here.
Interviewer: Kate, could we start with a few simple questions about yourself? Where were you born?
Kate Tarling: I was born in the UK, in a town called St Albans.
[00:00:53 A photo of St Albans is shown next to the text "© Geographer, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons."]
Kate Tarling: It's a little north of London. Traditionally it was a sort of farming, a rural area, but now it's a town close enough to London, but a little bit out.
Interviewer: And what were your earliest interactions with services that might have drawn you to the concept of service in government?
Kate Tarling: I think the earliest memory is probably going to school, how things happened at school, teachers. Yeah, hanging out, doing exams, that sort of thing, it's probably my earliest memories as a child. But blissfully, mostly unaware of public services and how they worked, which is probably, in some cases, the ideal.
Interviewer: We should not be seeing the services we receive necessarily, yeah.
Kate Tarling: Sometimes, yeah, the best service is one when no one needed to do anything, it was anticipated. Not always, but sometimes.
Interviewer: So what drew you into the world, either through your education or through your early career? What was it that brought you towards this subject that is one maybe still a little bit unusual for most?
Kate Tarling: I found myself in my mid-twenties in a company where I was responsible for quite a lot of how this whole service worked from end to end. It was in the entertainment; it was to do with gaming. And I observed that the company was spending an awful lot of money trying to keep its customers, entice them, reward them, keep them loyal, and at the same time, I was also responsible for the contact center. We were inundated by calls about people who couldn't do this, couldn't do that, were complaining about this, not happy with that. So, on both sides, you had the company spending money to keep customers, you had us then bearing the costs of things not working very well.
And because I happened to be responsible and have oversight of the whole thing from beginning to end, I could see where we might change things and actually invest in making it a really good service for people and then perhaps invest less in trying to keep people to stay or in handling the cost of it not working so well. So, that wasn't intentionally about services or design, it was mainly by chance of being in a leadership position with that amount of oversight and responsibility. And that experience stayed with me for the rest of my career so far.
[00:03:32 The logo for The Service Org Group appears onscreen next to the text "Kate Tarling founded The Service Org Group in 2012 to help others pursue better approaches to product and whole service delivery, through her writing, speaking, coaching and advising."]
Interviewer: And from there you established, if I remember correctly, you established a consulting organization that helped other companies design their services.
Kate Tarling: That's right. And for many years, I was involved in working with organizations to help them make some of their services perform better for the people that needed them, for themselves as an organization, and in government to achieve whatever the policy intent was behind them. And then, after about sort of a decade or so of doing that, I began to observe that in every organization there were some really common barriers, or really common problems that made the work for improving services hard. Things like how the governance worked, things like leadership roles, things like performance and reporting. And so, that really guided me in the last sort of 15 years or so. It's been focusing heavily on the organization itself, how it makes services well, or how it gets in the way of itself and it can't.
Interviewer: Oh, that's a fantastic lead up, and we'll get more into those barriers and hopefully opportunities in a little bit. But before we do, we've mentioned this word service several times. I'm curious if you could give us an on-the-spot definition of what service is.
Kate Tarling: Yeah, great question. And I think a lot of the things that we think of as service are not really services. In the work that I do, and in the UK government, service really means what helps somebody to do what they need to do or to achieve a particular outcome.
[00:05:10 A photo of a woman handing a document to a service worker is shown next to the quote "A service is everything that helps someone achieve a goal."]
Kate Tarling: It means that the organization has a particular outcome to achieve, and it encompasses everything involved in that from start to end. So, if you think of a verb rather than a noun, so, somebody getting a passport, somebody getting financial support, somebody getting access to health care. So we start from the outside-in with what somebody actually needs to do, the government has an interest in, and then frame the service. It's encompassing everything that's involved in delivering that, be it contact centres, be it application forms, PDFs, online elements, caseworkers, frontline staff, absolutely everything that's involved in the final outcome And that definition is really helpful, because you can see actually all the parts that go into impacting how well that service works.
Interviewer: Thank you for that definition.
[00:06:08 A photo of Kate Tarling's book The Service Organization is shown.]
Interviewer: I do recall in your book, in The Service Organization, you spoke to how when you go into organizations to identify and help them map out their services, that they generally start by trying to map out everything. Can you speak to that a little bit and how you might work with organizations to go from the gigantic view down into the real, the core of what their essence would be?
Kate Tarling: Yeah. I think when you start making a list of what an organization does, if it's new to people to see things in those ways, then I think people default to listing the name of their team or their function or the very important work that they're doing as if it's a sort of service or a thing that needs to belong on the list of what the organization does. And I've certainly been in organizations where once the list gets to 100, 150, 200, it starts to kind of lose its clarity. It just becomes a list of things.
Part of the work around understanding what an organization does through its services is being clear what the remit, why does that organization exist, particularly in government? What policy areas is it responsible for? And that starts to give you a clue as to what kinds of services it's likely to have. Are they around permission and control? Are they around regulation? Are they around getting things to people or controlling access or entitlement? And so, understanding kind of what an organization does at its core is one place to start.
But then looking at all, who are the users, the external citizens, businesses that are trying to do something that this organization has an interest in, or that this organization exists to help them achieve something. And so then, looking at what the people do in the organization or why the organization exists, and then doing a mapping of those two, so bringing them together. People are trying to do something, government might want to support it or stop it or control it. So, what are those sort of core policy or organizational remits that you can then begin to shape your services.
And in my experience, it's more common that an organization will have five, ten, 15 important services, and then a bit of a long tail. But if you're looking at a list of hundreds and hundreds of things and bits of technology and the staff cafeteria, that's probably not the most helpful view.
Interviewer: That's fantastic. Thank you for the clarity. You did mention the word policy a few times in that answer, and so that's actually where I wanted to go next. Being so long in the Government of Canada the way I have been, there seems to be a constant pull and push between the concepts of policy and service, where many folks feel like the policy drives service. or service is the implementer of policy almost after the fact. I have a few examples in the Government of Canada where they are actually working well together in one synergist unit. So, the way I heard you explain that is that if you're looking at your policy remit to define your services, then the policy is actually in effect integrated with the service. Am I putting words into your mouth with that?
Kate Tarling: I think you've captured that really well. I think the way I see a service is it's enacting, it's the vehicle that the policy is successful or not. So you can have all these great ideas and good intentions, and like really good thinking about the change you want to see in the world through your policy. For many organizations, the service is the way that that policy happens, the service is the policy. And so, bringing them together isn't just a good idea, it's kind of fundamental to how well that policy works, how well it does what is needed to, and at what cost. So, the time, cost and effort involved in delivering that policy.
And in many organizations, there's a bit of a light bulb moment when people who perhaps were unaware of the reality of how that policy works and actually seeing for themselves firsthand where things aren't working in a surprising way, where people are doing something you really didn't want or expect them to do. Actually, it's really empowering, if as policy people, you're really closely involved in the service and actually how it's working in reality.
Interviewer: Is this what you call a service organization, the title of your book, an organization that is seeing all of that as one cohesive whole?
Kate Tarling: Yeah, at least where it makes sense too. There's lots of things that organizations do that perhaps are more direct or have other effects, so setting pricing or incentives for people, for example. But the majority is the service and actually much of getting teams working together as a whole across those services is really the idea of the book. So, that means policy, strategy, politicians ideally, operations, digital routines, technology, but really working together with a much more shared view about what we're trying to deliver here, what our organization needs to do, and needs to do well.
Interviewer: Thank you. Let's talk about your experience working with the UK Government for a few minutes, and this will be, hopefully for our listening audience, to reinforce this concept of what a government service looks like and how it is that we can continuously improve those services that we offer. So, I wonder if you could share with us a story or two of some work you've done with the UK Government to look at how they design and deliver their services?
Kate Tarling: There's a really nice example at sort of the level of direct design and delivery and improvement of a service, it's in the licencing space. So, government does a lot of licensing of all kinds, and in this case, it's about making sure that research is carried out by academics or large organizations safely. So, government has an interest in that. One of the ways in which they do that is issuing a license and that involves various checks and data and making sure precautions are in place and so on.
Now, this service was previously run by a very large chunk of technology that was run by a third party, and it was coming up to the end of its contract. The sort of default assumption was that the contract would be renewed, and so it would be a procurement project, a procurement piece of work. Now, leadership actually stepped in at this point and challenged this assumption because there were a lot of problems with this service, the restrictions, how people experienced it. If you were going through the experience of applying for one of these licenses, you would potentially need to hire entire teams to be able to deal with the complexity and the time it took to get your license and get the conditions in place.
So, there was already a lot of scope for improvement. The feedback from users and the organizations involved was quite terrible. So, the call was made rather than just reprocure the same bit of technology that we know causes problems, to bring a team in-house and actually build this out as a whole service from start to end. So, everything to do with what the organizations would see at the start, to how they applied, to the tools staff were using to help make those decisions, and then the form of the license, as well.
They spent time really understanding that organization and different uses and simple licenses, complex licenses and everything in between. They began to prototype, they began to learn kind of what it actually takes to do this work well. And all along, they were really clear about what they were measuring. So they were looking at the time it took to make a decision about a license, both in terms of the organization as well as the end users, and the resources involved as well, so the ease of effort for them in doing so.
And because they were using those measures right the way along, they could use it as a measurement approach to guide how they delivered the service. And after some time, they were able to reduce the time this took by half for users, they were able to reduce the time it took for staff to process applications by a third, but satisfaction from users rose by 30% at the same time. And this team now remains in place to do continuous improvement because it's utterly justified based on the metrics alone. So, that's one example of just how one service has taken that approach.
Interviewer: Can I ask you some follow ups on that example? You seem to describe a team that had, if I could be facetious for a moment, but the luxury to take the time to work on that particular service. I feel like that is a struggle that I hear of a lot in government, that we can't stop the machine while we rebuild the machine. So, could you help us understand a little bit? Was this the team that also normally delivered that service, or a separate team set up beside it? How did that structurally work?
Kate Tarling: It was not the same team, it was three or four of the current leaders working alongside a service designer, a user researcher and people who could build and prototype the service as well. So, it included people from the operational side, it included people who were responsible for that policy area, and it included the people with the sort of skills and abilities to deliver, to try to test, to learn.
One of the things that really helped was the support of leadership. So you're right, when particularly when a piece of technology is coming to the end of its life cycle, the pressure can be on. In this situation, there was really good support by the spending control team who, because of the existing problems, knew that this wouldn't be good value for money in simply doing the same thing again, and the cost was significant. And so, they managed to negotiate some extra time. So, an agreement to, on a short-term basis, we knew what was there existing to buy this team some time. And that wouldn't have helped, or that wouldn't have been possible without the support, and like a clear vision of leadership that we weren't just going to make the same mistakes again.
So partly, this team coming together was new. Some of them stayed in place, so the team morphed and evolved over time, but it was really important that it was both the people who would be running the service on an ongoing basis that would be involved as well as the people you need in-house building some of the things around you, and that they worked really closely together.
Interviewer: And the external users.
Kate Tarling: They worked closely with external users, so I think they did research and interviews with several hundred different types sizes of organization to learn, test. And the feedback was incredible, they were saying, please keep this team in place, because it has such an impact on the time and effort that it takes us, so that we can focus on what we do best, which is good for the economy rather than just dealing with government.
Interviewer: If I think about how that would scale across a government or multiple government organizations, if responsible for a larger organization, how would we set up that organization to have all of these different units looking at the different services?
Kate Tarling: Yeah, great question. So, the work I do a lot with government, lots of the UK Government and also others, it's really about applying this at an organizational level now. And I think the good place to start is being clear what services are being provided, how well are they performing at the moment in general, and choosing sort of what's likely to change, where are the areas of biggest opportunity? So, this doesn't mean that you need to upend your entire organization, do everything differently just because you're aware of its services. But some are likely to be undergoing sort of big investment and change anyway, some are likely to be impacting or costing more because of they're not working so well at the moment. So there's this sort of sense of being clear about sort of where the biggest, most important areas of opportunity are.
And then looking at that approach that we just described, is one that can be taken on any service, but if you want to do it in a more systemic way, looking at where might you look at evolving leadership activity across some of those services. So, typically organizations are organized by functions with some separation across them, and the work I do a lot of now is shifting that so that the organization is very focused on its services and puts in place leadership that works across end-to-end. It looks at putting in place governance that's designed for services.
So, rather than many, many different forums all focused on all separate parts, that actually there are forums that are really supportive of how does this piece of work relate to the performance of the service as a whole when you're making investments or steering decisions? And actually, the organization comes to look at its performance as a whole, 80% of it is in terms of the services it provides, so it becomes putting services at the heart of the organization. It becomes a central part of its operating model. And then the roles of some of the corporate services around that, so finance, HR, all could be a bit clearer about their role in helping brings about, or their role in improving the flow of money, the flow of finance across. Once you've got a view of the services and where your opportunities are, it sort of brings everybody a more helpful perspective on that organization.
Interviewer: Fascinating. It feels like shifting the axes, almost, of how our organizations are built, which is often around… well, hierarchically, they're around functions. And it seems like the functions are almost becoming the horizontal, because they need to blend across all of the new verticals which are the services, if you're putting services at the heart of the organization. Is my visual making sense at all? And maybe it's still a bit too linear.
Kate Tarling: I think that's a good way to look at it. I tend to think of the end-to-end services as the horizontals, implicit in that is the functions need to come together to figure out how they work together better to deliver them well. And of course, not every service is unique, it's really important that we look at common infrastructure, common design, common rules that run across our services so that you have a space for cross-cutting teams to think, actually, we've got a lot of gathering data going on through various forms, how do we improve that for on behalf of all services?
So ideally, you have a healthy tension between the people that know performance end to end, working really well with their colleagues who are like on behalf of the whole, we are deciding to do payments in this particular way. So we're not necessarily going to prioritize the thing you need, but we really understand what you're trying to do. So, it brings sort of helpful end-to-end and sort of vertical perspectives to all the pieces of work that are happening.
Interviewer: Fantastic. So we've talked a bit about the opportunities in organizations relating to being service-oriented and putting services at the heart, what are some of the challenges? You mentioned barriers at the outset, I'd love to hear about those barriers or maybe some of the lessons you've learned from working with different government organizations.
Kate Tarling: I would say that there are some very common challenges and barriers, which is partly because of the scale the organizations work. But it's also good news, in that where we have good examples of working through, then they can be easily applied elsewhere. So, I think one is when you start to shift accountability and responsibility, and the role of leadership from a functional area to sort of working across. For some people, this is instinctive and good, and it's just opening up an opportunity that they were already wanting to do. For others, it can be a concern that what they are used to and really good at having sort of control over or oversight over starts to shift, they might become more reliant on how their colleagues work with them or their peers, which means that it's sort of less directly in control, and that can feel uncomfortable for some people.
And I would say it takes time for, for example, a leadership team or group to shift from just coming into a room together and reporting on your one area, to actually working as a genuine team, really caring about what the other cares about, and confronting the trade-offs together rather than just sort of standing up for your own part, and then having a much more objective view across the whole of what good looks like rather than what's just good for your area. So, it takes time, but that's sort of one of the barriers and opportunities, I think, for leadership to come together to work much more across the whole.
I think governance in decision-making is another challenge and opportunity. Where you have that organizational structure that's very much around functions, you probably have an incredibly complicated governance diagram as well. Loads of differences, forums, committees, boards that are often layered on to each other. Whenever there's a change, more governance is added, and it's quite rare for an organization to take a look at actually, where are we now? Is this how we would design things today if we were starting from scratch? Probably not.
A lot of the work that I do with organizations in government is actually reviewing how their governance is working, and making it much more integral to good service decision-making. And that means putting emphasis on levels of responsibility, delegating, where it's possible, to push decision-making to those with the evidence of what's working, and then having really supportive boards and committees that are vested in bringing this focus on services. So, the investment committee, I think, has a huge role to play in challenging some of the requests that come their way and asking what problem are we trying to solve? What part of which service does this relate to? What else could we do if we didn't do this? And forcing some sort of good discussion and scrutiny.
Interviewer: Excellent. Could you give us some advice? These were a list of barriers that seem insurmountable, perhaps, to some. Where do we start, if we're thinking either at the individual level or at the organizational level?
Kate Tarling: I think one good place to start can be in visualizing the messy reality of how things work today. There's often a tendency to, when confronted with change, look at all the costs of change, the risks of change. I think a really sensible place to start is looking at the costs and risks of the status quo. And one way to bring that to life is, you know what? How long and how many teams are involved in a decision that we recently made to do something quite sensible, or how many loops and wrong ends, dead ends and confusing points did somebody have to go through in order to do something, whether that's a citizen or a staff member inside.
And I think for busy leadership, it can be really tempting to see a neat slide or a few rectangles and think, okay, that looks like a sensible process. When you see the reality, you follow actually what happened from start to end with something, it can be quite stark and shocking to people. And that opens up a really good conversation of, okay, we know as an organization there are always things we want to work better, what are those things? How can we then use these approaches to tackle some of what makes our organization slow or problematic to deliver things? So, that's one example.
I think another way is looking at maybe similarities in different countries, examples of how leadership works differently, and using that to reflect on what of that works well for us now, what parts could we do differently? So, a sort of a way of lifting out of the day to day, or the inertia or the feeling of risk involved in this, and looking at parallel examples across government. Because we have lots now, we have really good service leadership happening as a whole in parts of the UK now. So, that would be another way.
Interviewer: Do you think that imperative needs to come from the top-down, or is it possible, depending on who our listeners are today, is it possible to motivate that change from the bottom up?
Kate Tarling: I think it's necessary to do both. I have observed both approaches. So you could say that the work of the UK Government digital service was setting an imperative, it had really good support. It had control over spend, it had good support from ministers, and set a set of service standards that it was required for all departments and agencies to meet, and that was really powerful. It's really hard to imagine how that could have happened in any other way.
That said, while that was happening, I was working very closely with a very large government department for which there wasn't automatic buy-in for what was coming from the center, and from as an imperative. They felt that because of their size and scale, they knew quite well what was needed for them. We took a much more sort of bottom, ground-up approach. So, we found all of the people who experienced the pain of things not happening well and established a kind of informal community.
So, they were people who were coming from, of course, every profession. So, our operational colleagues who were just given rubbish old tools to do their jobs with, some of the original policy writers who were like, the intent we came with, I can't see where and how that's being carried out. Some of the people working centrally to try and improve some of the standards or look at commonality across the organization, they felt the pain too.
So there were already lots of people in the organization, and we, as a community, it was much more powerful if we came together to meet with leadership, to say these are really common problems. We all see them, we all face them across every area. Here are some suggestions that we commonly agree to of what we'd like to do. It was coming from within and it made it much more powerful than if, as individuals, everybody had come and said their own idea, their own recommendation, their own thing that they'd like to see in the organization.
So, ideally you have both. You can do it either way around, and I've certainly experienced both a top-down imperative way of doing things as well as that more ground-up. Ground-up takes longer, you probably get more buy-in from as you go.
Interviewer: Fantastic. We've mentioned users a few times, I do want to circle back before we close up today, to the users who, in the case of government services, are anybody accessing our services, whether they be at home or abroad. What's the value in putting the user at the middle?
Kate Tarling: Value is a really, really important word. Almost everything that we think of, that we do work with around helping people orient around their services is to increase value. And I think defining what value means for a government service is incredibly important. I think to start with, what are people trying to do? What outcome are they trying to get? Why do they need government? What is the job of government in that circumstance? And so, I think a lot of that effectiveness. Why does government even have a service? Is it doing the job that we ideally want it to do, or not? Is it doing the thing for our citizens, for our users, for our democracies that we need it to do? And what proportion of the time is the right outcome happening? That, in and of itself, is an enormously important measure, indicator of value.
We're also constrained by resources and the part of the importance about putting the emphasis on the user and coming at this from outside-in, is because people do things that you don't know about, that you couldn't anticipate. So, centering users encapsulates all of the messiness, and then you yourself can see what's happening internally. So, the other important ways of thinking about value of time, cost and effort, and that includes the burden that we might place on citizens, on businesses – which isn't so good for the economy or for the other things people need to do with their lives, but also for how we run public services.
So, I think the value of putting users at the heart is because that is the way that you can measure the genuine cost-effectiveness of your services. Government exists to serve people, but also support democratic outcomes, and that's the way to do that, is to look at it. And finally, I think defining value is very, very good thing for an organization and service to do. So yeah, rate of outcomes, what are the outcomes, and with what time, cost and effort for all involved, I think is a really solid definition of value for all public services.
Interviewer: Thank you. Nearing the end, here, I have two last questions for you. So we've spoken a lot about how we can think about services in our organizations, identify them, prioritize them, design ourselves around them, become much more service-focused as organizations. How do we organize ourselves also to make meaningful investments, to build the capacity and the culture of our workforce around those pieces?
Kate Tarling: Yeah, really great question. I know in many parts of government, there is an investment in terms of bringing in people with kind of digital skills, products skills, design skills into government. And I think that's incredibly important, people who are familiar with today's approaches to what it takes to work through technology challenges, risks and opportunities of tools, and to do things in a sort of more user-centered way.
I work a lot at the moment with operational teams, because often these are the people who are the service, know the service, know the challenges, what works well and what doesn't work well, and yet are often given not super helpful tools to work with. And in some cases, can then be blamed for bottlenecks for when things are slow. That's the sort of culture of separation.
So, I think one of the investments there is actually in really walking the talk of making things better for the people who serve on our services, and looking at kind of roles and even career paths. And there's been really interesting work around bringing operations much closer to change, so having roles that are on behalf of operational teams, triaging what doesn't work so well, what's actually just a training need? What features do we need and expect, that where are we not being served well to deliver the service? Or in terms of self-serve training and so on. So, I think there's huge opportunity in our operational teams to actually be involved, much more integral to change and improvement.
And one area of investment is around sort of attention and time. I think moving people around from different roles, so having policy people prioritizing within a digital context, what features are we going to take forward this month. I think putting digital people in front of a minister and confronting trade-offs and priorities, is really effective. I think putting operational people inside those change teams as well is really important. So, it's not so much an investment of bringing skills in, it's more about sharing, seconding, pollinating across functions, the real challenges and opportunities that each area has.
And finally, but not least importantly, in leadership, I think. There are different behaviours, so caring just as much about what the other leader, another leader you're working with, cares about compared to your particular area that you're looking at. What it means to have co-responsibility and accountability with another. So I think there's also areas of investment for leadership, too.
Interviewer: Fantastic. So my last question, and we're leading very nicely up to it – you've been in Canada now for a few weeks, maybe a few Government of Canada meetings here and there. What is your advice for the Government of Canada, or for its public servants?
Kate Tarling: It's been a real honour to spend time with many different civil servants across the Canadian government. There's one phrase I've noticed in particular that has come up in many different forums, and that's about being risk-averse, and I would encourage you to really challenge what people mean by that. It's sometimes used, I think, as a reason why not to change the status quo, or how things are working currently. But actually, it doesn't mean actually being averse to risk. I think, in the status quo and how things are currently done, there is an awful lot of risk, and risk that can be hidden if you're not clear about how the service works or the costs that it entails because you haven't looked at things end to end.
So, whenever you hear a colleague or you hear yourself talking about being risk-averse, I would translate that into thinking about where are we actually being sort of subject to inertia and being too protective of the status quo. And actually, that's a very different thing to risk management, which is what can we be more certain and confident about? What can't we? And instead of not doing anything, what a sensible approach is to start small, to test and learn before we scale to appropriately handle that risk. So, that would be one encouragement that I could make.
Interviewer: Thank you so much. Kate Tarling, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us today.
Kate Tarling: My pleasure. Thank you.
[00:38:39 The CSPS logo appears onscreen.]
[00:38:42 Text appears on screen: canada.ca/school.]
[00:38:45 The Government of Canada logo appears onscreen.]
