In this keynote at the Gurteen Knowledge Café, Benjamin P. Taylor introduces the Public Service Transformation Academy (PSTA) – a not‑for‑profit partnership of charities, social enterprises and businesses whose stated purpose is to build the capacity for public services to transform themselves, ultimately making the consultancy that supports them redundant. He explains his day‑job at Red Quadrant, a network consultancy that aims to “do itself out of a job” by empowering clients rather than delivering traditional consulting outputs. Taylor then shares a frontline anecdote from his early career running the Shepherd’s Bush Advice Centre, describing chaotic, multilingual demand, ad‑hoc triage, and a modest improvement when opening regular 9‑to‑5 hours. He uses this story to illustrate why superficial process tweaks are not true transformation – they still rely on a broken service model that exists because citizens are forced to seek help. The core of his talk is a “four‑world” (later expanded to five) model of public‑service systems: 1. Citizen world – everyday life of people needing help. 2. Service world – the pragmatic, front‑line delivery side. 3. Management world – abstract, data‑driven performance information. 4. Politician world – ideological, electoral concerns. 5. Learning/leadership world – the rarely‑visited space for improvement. He argues that information degrades as it crosses the invisible “front‑line” divide between worlds, becoming abstract performance metrics that hide the lived reality of citizens. This translation failure makes genuine transformation difficult. Taylor proposes a shift from service‑centric commissioning to co‑creation and outcome‑focused design: services should be built together with the people they serve, aiming directly for the desired outcomes rather than delivering a bundle of tasks. He suggests “cheating” the system by empowering citizens to meet their own needs and by focusing on interventions (resources, technology, community assets) instead of buying more services. Finally, he poses two reflective questions for the audience: (1) How can individuals take ownership of systemic problems without being blamed or overwhelmed? (2) How can the dynamics of the separate worlds be managed so that transformation becomes possible? The talk ends with an invitation to continue the conversation.
Chapters
Go on, go on. So, quick word from our sponsors. Well, this is me. I very much welcome social media connections. Ant the Boy is just an anagram of the short version of my name. I do tend to go by Benjamin these days, but I will answer to anything. We founded about a year and a half ago with all of these other partner organisations a thing called the Public Service Transformation Academy, which is dedicated to doing itself out of a job. By which I mean building the capacity and capability for public services to transform themselves, whatever that means. And all these partners are here because they all have something good to offer in terms of the learning and the teaching and the whatever. If you want to learn a lot in a short space of time, try and set up a not-for-profit body with 13 partners, an equal mix of charities, social enterprises, businesses, representative bodies, and entities which turn out to have no contractual form whatsoever, which was a surprise in one case. It's a good learning experience. It costs you a lot in lawyers' fees though. And my day job is running Red Quadrant. Red Quadrant is a network consultancy, so we don't employ any of our consultants, but we do mostly public service work. And I like this as an illustration of what Red Quadrant is all about because we have our banners on the left, building your capacity to transform, and we run a tongue-in-cheek campaign against consultancy. These are contrasted with on the right Some nice shiny images from some very nice shiny consultancies of a different type. This was at a big event in the City of London at the Haberdashers Hall, and the master of the Worshipful Company of Management Consultants took me aside for a little bit of a serious quiet word at the end of the session, and the banners have never been seen since. Mm-hmm. But why do I say all that? It's because we believe in Red Quadrant that our job is to do ourselves out of a job and create the capacity to make change in our clients, not in us. So we have 2 goals, and these again, just to reiterate the theme, we want to change consulting in such a way that it's respected, maybe even given a bit of serious respect, and that it tries to do itself out of a job. And we want to change public services in such a way that they are the Harvard Business Review case studies, for whatever that's worth, that they are the services that are sought out around the world, respected, and that they seek to do themselves out of a job. As well, and I don't expect you to read all of this. If anybody wants a PDF, I can send it round or invite David to do so. But these are the kind of work we do. Enough of the advertising, but there's a theme developing which will kind of be relevant. Oh, more advertising. This is this is what we offer. Don't don't worry about all of that. So I'm going to talk very very quickly about why service transformation is absolutely definitely impossible. Already had a couple of conversations about that in the room, and then of course. Contradictorily or, you know, what's the thing that's called a thing that can't be paradoxically, why it might be possible. And then I'll hand over to you. So, and I should say my first job in public services very early in my career was being the administrator of Shepherd's Bush Advice Centre. If anybody's been along the Uxbridge Road, It's at 338 Uxbridge Road, and it was chaotic, it was smelly. We had a client base when we did a survey which spoke 138 different first languages. We were open really random opening hours: 10 till 2 Monday, Tuesday, and Friday; 4 till 7 late shift on Tuesday; and 3 till 5 on whatever. And every time we opened the door, 40 people came in, quite smelly, the unwashed, the poor, the miserable, the sick people of Shepherd's Bush and the surrounding area, and they waited up to 4 hours to see an advisor who couldn't really help them very much, usually because they had a housing problem and they were seeing the welfare rights advisor, or they'd been in the queue and they were seeing— we couldn't help them at all, etc. They had about 11 minutes, you know, the doctor experience, to scribble a note. stick it in an overflowing filing tray where I would try and file it and make an appointment for them with the right sort of advisor, and on and on it went. And I won't tell you the whole story. In fact, if you want to hear me telling the whole story, which would be a bit weird, you can actually listen to Rob Worth's podcast, The Prime Domino, where he interviewed me and somehow we got into this. But basically, I made a lot of incremental service improvements that, you know, told people how long they'd wait. I got used to triaging and telling people, go to the other advice centre, you're in the wrong one, we can't help you, those sort of things. And we made a huge breakthrough when we just started opening 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. And people would— believe it or not, it was really hard because the advisers were like, it's hell when we're just open 3 hours a day. What the hell is it going to be like when we're open 8 hours? And guess what? People smoothed themselves out during the course of the day. They would pop by, and if there was a couple of people in the waiting room, they'd go and do their shopping, then come back on the way back. Go upstairs to the mezzanine, find the right advisor. You get the idea. And most people could spend 2 hours with the advisor, more or less sort the case, and stop that rotation of the appointments and losing the files down the back of the manager's desk and all of those kind of things. So transformation, right? Well, no. I don't think that was transformational really at all, because we were still giving people bloody advice, which is clearly something that shouldn't ever be needed or happen in the first place. And everybody was coming to us because something had gone horribly wrong. I didn't intend to tell that story, so I'll try and speed up, but that's why transformation is impossible. It was hard work to do the change management manipulation to run an away day, and somehow magically me and the manager got the team to come out with that 9-to-5 idea, and it kind of worked. We use this model now, 4 worlds, that we've been playing with for a while, and we talk about these worlds being different experiences, different ways of relating, different ways of Thinking, and we all spend time in all these worlds, but as soon as we're in the world, we're really in it. We're not in the other world. So citizen world is obviously where we live, where we do our shopping, where we live, love, laugh, etc. And then the service world, where we provide services, we do process improvement, all that kind of gubbins. Citizen world and service world are divided by an invisible line. Somebody who's not seen this before, do you want to volunteer what you would name the divide between service world and citizen world? The line. Give you a clue. It's a military analogy. The Maginot Line. Very close. The DMZ. Yes, you're on the right lines. The Green Line. Very close. Line in the sand. Very close. This is good. No man's land. All very close. Now we call it the front line, don't we? I'm going to go and see some front line stuff. It's the same thing though. The DMZ. The Maginot. It's Defending against the oncoming onslaught of need and problems and poor, sick, miserable, quite smelly people. Yeah, there you go, frontline. But the frontline is the point of power. It's where people actually come and say what they need. Most organizations are absolutely systemically deaf. And apologies if you have a hearing impairment. I've got to find a synonym. Metaphors of deafness and blindness abound. And I don't know what to do about them. But there we are. We're stuck with them. We're systematically deaf to listen to what people actually say they want. Instead, we have to fit them into our service buckets. So, you know, you're a Type A need, we don't do that, go away. You're a Type B need, well, we can squeeze you into the Type C bucket, etc., etc. You get the idea, yeah? And one important point, and if you're a systems thinker you'll recognise this, is no information or knowledge crosses this boundary Unscathed. It gets translated, usually very badly, like through a very early machine translator, into a different language. So I come in as a person with a problem, something comes into service world as a case fitting a service profile, maybe part of a cohort of cases, you get the idea. And by the time that information goes into management world— It's been How is that information being translated? Yes, it is certainly corporate. Yeah, you've gone the right track. That kind of language. Anybody else? Sorry, data. Yes, but what kind of data? Summarized, abstracted. So that all that, that for sure. Anything else? Huh? Averaged. Yes. Unemotional, cold, cut off from people's lives.
Redacted.
Redacted sometimes. Yeah, all right. You're on the right— well, I call it performance information. So the worst form of information is performance information because it just comes through as a successful case or a cost amount, cost to serve or something like that. You get the idea. So the management world. And so by the way, citizen world is the world of life. Service world is unnecessarily— What do you call the thing where you're not absolutist about something but you adapt to the circumstances a bit? There's a form of philosophy that has the same name. Situation. That's along the right lines. Where you're adapting, you're a bit flex, a bit— Pragmatic. Thank you, yes. Service world is pragmatic world, right? Management world is the world of kind of hard data, so it has to be abstract. So it's a world of science. And what's the final world in public service systems in which I operate?
Government world?
Yeah, something like that. We're gonna call it politician world, right? And politician world is a world of what? Ideology. So you can see why these translations don't actually work, okay? And I've yet to know what the right title for the divide, but it is a divide between management world and politician world is. Maybe you can discuss that if you want. I mean, the good news is politicians have to pop into citizen world at least once every 4 years on average. To buy a carton of milk. To buy a carton of milk, yeah. To get that price right. Yeah, that's right. So we all live in citizen world, but it doesn't reflect in our dynamics. And I've seen people who go from one world in organisations to the other, and overnight they're blaming the bloody team, where they were in the team blaming the bloody manager, etc. You get the idea. So we are locked into those perspectives because they're what we experience, and it's irrational. only rational way to survive in those worlds and actually to make sense and thrive in them. But the power of those different perspectives locks us in to stay in those worlds and makes communication, boundary crossing, anything that might change things across those worlds much, much more difficult. We in Red Quadrant and a couple of people in the room were involved in the development of this model. use this much more consultancy— woo, diagrams and arrows and things— kind of model, which I won't go into. But we've added— we go from system world to service world to management world, trying to integrate and organize, and to leadership world, which may or may not be political. So this applies to all organizations. We've added a gratuitous extra world because there was space on the diagram. But that's kind of improvement, change, learning world, which seldom gets much traffic. But again, it's a different world from all of those other 3, actually, because in each of the worlds we get on with our So these are not the final questions, I'm afraid. I will try and finish quickly. But maybe just a moment of silent reflection, because I've experienced and I deeply believe that there are dynamics in each of these worlds that spend a lot of energy and a lot of learning and a lot of effort keeping this whole system in stasis. Keeping the balance, keeping things as they are. So maybe just have a think about that for a second. So I think you can see for yourselves how each of those worlds has a kind of magnetic repellents or there's a system dynamic going on there that affects the whole thing as well. What else might be possible? So my organization is branded as a transformation consultancy or the Public Service Transformation Academy, so I must believe that transformation is at least conceptually possible. I have very seldom achieved it or seen it happen, but I still believe. We start with a definition That every service is always co-designed, co-created. Every public service that I've ever experienced that I can think of is co-created with the poor, sick, miserable person or the citizen or the scrote as the police call them. Whether it's an enforcement process where the co-creation is not necessarily willing, nothing much real happens without the involvement of the person themselves. Do you get the idea? Or whether it's a poor, sick, miserable person being made sicker or better by a medical establishment or medical professional. So what we're trying to do is just get from the customer need to the positive outcome as quickly as we possibly can with as few steps, as little time, as little crap, bullshit in between. But if it pings around between all 5 of those worlds, we've got precious little chance of that. So can we cheat? Yes, I think we can cheat. From this definition, there's an inherent way to cheat, which is if you can give the customer, the citizen, the person, the ability to meet their own needs, then you've really reduced the steps and the time and the effort from the need to the positive outcome quite significantly, possibly in the biggest way possible. I'll give you another way of thinking about this. If we can move— oh, the quote's at the bottom. Typically in organizations, we think about using money To meet needs with services. So there's a thing called commissioning in the NHS, but we teach a different thing called commissioning, just to confuse everybody. So, you know, you look at how many people you have with a certain health problem, you look at your reducing budget and your increasing thing, and you think, how can I get somebody to do a service cheap enough to stretch my budget to meet as much of these needs as possible? That is an example of the system burying itself deeper and deeper and deeper in whatever it is. Learning to be more the same. If instead you start to think about the outcomes you're trying to achieve and accept that those outcomes belong to the people, you can't actually be the ultimate arbiter of them. So the outcome is different for an individual, to a family, to a street, to a neighborhood, to a cohort, to a community, to a country. People want different things. Just to be morbid for a minute, at the end of life We don't typically all want what the NHS is set up to do, which is to extend life. Some people want as many dinners with their family at their dining room table as they can, or they want to do a bucket list thing, or whatever else they want. Does that make sense? Mm-hm. So any system that tries to aggregate up and try to achieve the outcomes for the whole thing is going to fail almost everybody. Averages, again, in a sense. So think about outcomes very clearly. Think about resources, not just your budget, but the people, the market, what technology can provide, what innovation can provide, what the community sector can provide, what people can do for themselves, what library books can provide for outcomes— quite a lot, believe it or not. And then think about interventions instead of services. Instead of buying the service, what interventions can we encourage to happen that will take us from the resources to the outcomes? And then you move from where I was in Shepherd's Bush Advice Centre dealing with all of this overwhelming demand, and the instinct is to control the demand, ration, put up as many barriers, as much of a demilitarized zone as you can, and reduce the hours and deal with it and all the rest. It's very demoralizing, by the way. It's very unpleasant work to control demand. It's not really thrilling work processing demand, but it's infinitely better. But behind every demand is a human need. If we can actually think about the needs that people have that have driven them to have recourse to public services— I don't know if any of you plan to make extensive use of public services in your dream life plan. To a certain extent you might, the bus for example, but probably not the type of services that I work with. Most people want their needs to be met otherwise, or can we help people to achieve the purpose in their life Which is behind the need which has arisen. And my theory is that if you get behind the need which drives codependence— very risky— to the purpose, you'll find the real valuable work and you'll find the joy in the work. I think I've gone on. I planned to be very quick, but I got into it. I'm sorry. Here are the questions. So here are my questions, then we'll just flip over to the main question of the café. How can we take ownership of this problem without taking the blame? Because as soon as somebody steps up and takes some responsibility, some leadership, some ownership, there's a very high likelihood that all of the negative outcomes get pinned on them, or they get completely overwhelmed and become disabled by the challenge of trying to solve everybody's problems and fix this whole system. And how can we deal with this dynamic of the separate worlds that interact in these very active learning ways that keep things the same as they are. So our question this evening, how is service transformation possible and what would it mean? You've got all of my contact details probably. I'm on the web if anybody wants to get in touch and follow up or anything else beyond this evening. You'll be very welcome to do so. Back to you, David.
