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Summary
This will be an informal conversation between Alison Rand and Sarah Brooks. We discuss Sarah's experience applying service design and design research in both the public and private sector to create organizational change that delivers positive outcomes to people. We touch on questions of working at different scales, within different types of organizational structures and business models.
Key Insights
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Service design and design operations are deeply connected when scaling design impact across teams and organizations.
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Sarah Brooks’ career spans startups, nonprofit social impact, government innovation, and large enterprise, showing diverse contexts for design leadership.
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The Presidential Innovation Fellowship program uniquely integrates private sector innovation into federal agencies via entrepreneurial residencies.
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Ethnographic research at the VA revealed complex barriers veterans face navigating vast healthcare and benefits systems.
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Large organizations require both top-down support and grassroots momentum to effect meaningful cultural and systemic change.
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Changing a deeply rules-based government culture involves fostering common-sense empathy and trust among civil servants.
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Storytelling with human-centered design evidence can influence leadership more effectively than abstract data alone.
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Human-centered design is evolving toward life-centered design, recognizing interdependence beyond just humans within ecosystems.
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Convening people across silos benefits from respect, deep listening, psychological safety, and structured yet informal facilitation.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed work vulnerabilities and accelerated empathy and vulnerability in professional environments.
Notable Quotes
"Design operations is really about how we’re scaling the work, thinking our practices, and serving cross-functional teams."
"At the VA we explored how veterans understood or didn’t understand the services they were eligible for and uncovered many blockers."
"You need support from the top down and from grassroots; those two have to meet in the middle to make change happen."
"Changing people’s relationship with change is key, especially where rules-based culture can stifle innovation and risk-taking."
"There’s no other theory of change I’ve seen more true in large organizations than requiring dual-level support."
"We live in a biosphere that’s collapsing, so maybe we should try life-centered design rather than just human-centered design."
"People often go along with the outcome if they feel they were part of the process."
"If people just got in the room and I did nothing except take a seat, everything would be fine."
"COVID forced all of us into vulnerability, letting us see each other as humans beyond our work roles."
"Qualitative data is data. It’s okay to be informal and human when designing complex systems."
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