Person:

Leary, Kimberlyn

Social innovations are at risk at a time when surprise is employed as a unilateral government strategy in order to shrink and refocus government operations. Social innovations involve collective efforts, frequently spanning public and private stakeholders. The needed trust and reciprocal understandings are undercut when government employs the logic of reengineering combined with surprise as a strategy— what we term “Surprise by Design.” This contrasts with past federal restructuring initiatives that employed a mix of administrative expertise (top down) and frontline continuous improvement (bottom up) as strategies for negotiated changes. Surprise is a particular type of top- down imposed change, which disrupts patterned roles and routines in order to impose a reconceptualization of how government will function in society. This article documents surprise as a change strategy and identifies needed adjustments to two relevant lateral models for negotiated change. By taking this into account, social innovation initiatives can be more resilient in the face of Surprise by Design.

Now more than ever, governments around the world, ranging from hyper-local to national levels, seek to deliver for their people — demonstrating through action that government is responsive to the needs of the public. We live in a world in which many people can interact with digital services on their phones, watches, and tablets, experiencing efficient and immediate services. People have come to expect this ease from providers across industries. So, when poor public service delivery occurs, not only does the government fail to meet expectations, but it can also break trust. In this environment, governments seeking to build trust amongst the public must demonstrate responsiveness by improving their delivery of public services.

Customer experience (CX) is the discipline of designing services, and improving them, from the perspective of the people who use them. It embodies a holistic understanding of how a human builds a relationship with a provider of goods and services, the context in which they act, the journeys and collective touchpoints they navigate to meet their needs, not just once, but across their lifetime.

Although CX began as a private-sector practice, over the course of three decades, it has also become an approach to delivering innovative solutions in the public sector, institutionalized through executive orders and mandates across the world and levels of government. In this paper, we mainly focus on the U.S. context, where CX was more formally structured and institutionalized by the federal government, producing a suite of tools that can be (and have been) adapted for other state and local governments. These adapted practices include the designation of “high-impact services,” standardized measurement, ongoing mixed-method feedback mechanisms, and frameworks organized around life experiences rather than government bureaucracy.

The CX approach has proven itself in both the market where it started and the United States federal government where it was applied in a new context. Yet the government people encounter most often is local — which makes the municipal level the most natural context for implementing CX to deliver immediate and meaningful gains for residents. This paper provides an overview of the evolution of the federal customer experience portfolio, sets out an approach for translating these tools into a “CX for Cities” Bloomberg Center alumni program, and describes one application by the Good Services Lab: service enhancements that shape family and child well-being.