Gracen Johnson is an urban designer. She introduced me to the concept of the “loose doorknob effect” many moons ago on her Instagram story, and it stuck with me.
She writes:
“Doorknobs are a part of your home that you interact with every day. It’s disturbing in a subtle way when a doorknob doesn’t feel sturdy and functional.
Every time you turn a wiggly doorknob with a loose screw, or feel a dented hollow one, or WORST, try to turn one that doesn’t even turn; it cheapens the feel of the building.”
The doorknob is our handshake with a house, and jiggly doorknobs subconsciously impact our confidence in the building. It’s unsettling in ways that we don’t necessarily register. It’s difficult to articulate, but these interactions are felt in our bodies and imprinted in our psyche nonetheless.
This same effect can be observed in government services too.
Every public service touchpoint is a handshake with the government. Every phone call, letter, e-mail, trip to the service centre, or form to be completed cumulatively and subconsciously defines our relationship with the government.
We might not be able to articulate the effect of all those ‘wiggly door handle’ interactions with the government, but the felt effect is woven into our sentiments and impacts our trust and confidence in the government.
Meanwhile, governments continue to rely on transaction measures. How many customers came through? How long did the transaction take? How many projects did we complete this quarter? How long did they take?
It is rare for a government to prioritize the wiggly doorknobs and their effects on citizens, customers, and the public. But a movement is gaining momentum. In December 2021, the US Federal Government published the Executive Order on Transforming Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government. What is particularly compelling about this Executive Order is the explicit connection it makes between service delivery and trust.
Other notable examples of this rising momentum include the Canadian Government’s Policy on Service and Digital, the Government of Abu Dhabi’s Program for Effortless Customer Experience supported by Gov. Design Academy and International Model for Customer Experience in Government.
If governments want to achieve fundamentally different results through fundamentally different customer experiences, they need to go beyond cosmetic changes to services and begin organizing the design, development and delivery of those services in fundamentally different ways.
This requires at least two big changes: 1. To incentives, performance metrics and success
measures and 2. To the practices of the public service.
Measures
Governments need to capture insights into the lived experience of the people it serves. This needs to go beyond quantitative data and asking survey questions — because people often cannot articulate the latent effects of wiggly doorknobs!
Weak links in the service delivery chain need to be accounted for, and governments need to measure what matters to their end users. We need to make the case for measuring citizen experience and using qualitative research in our design decisions. For starters, I highly recommend The Good Service Scale by Lou Downe, author of Good Services.
Practices
All transformation results in change, but not all change is transformative. Transformative change involves paradigm shifts (new ways of thinking and seeing the world) and the introduction of novel practices (new ways of doing and relating to the world). The kind of change needed today is transformational. Innovation labs (or any other space to prototype culture change and novel ways of working) are the most promising ways of breaking free
from the dependent path of bureaucratic organizations.
Changing what we measure is one key to unlocking a more human-centred government. Making space to experiment with new ways of working is one promising way of discovering human-centred government. Sliding these metrics and design practices into your projects will plant the seeds for bonafide service transformation.