Short-term thinking does not fix long-term problems

Some of the most important problems for us to solve (such as housing, climate and health) are the most complex. 

Whether we call them ‘wicked’ or ‘sticky’ problems, they’re the ones that take years to make an impact on and involve multiple organisations collaborating to overcome. As such, because they’re not perceived as urgent, we’re often extremely under motivated to look at now (especially if we’re experiencing austerity service design). 

Without focusing on them now though, those long-term problems quickly become short-term emergencies that we lack the knowledge and capacity to deal with, and we create another pressured environment to respond under, which usually leads to poor design decisions, or ‘sticky plaster’ fixes. Not because the talent isn’t good, but because the environment for designing in isn’t conducive for good, deep work.

These short term challenges can be anything from “We need to keep pace, our users aren’t visiting our service anymore. Make our services AI ready” which really is the deeper data project we put off for a long time to “We need to move our services online now because there’s flooding” which really is the lack of engaging with a changing world.

Reactivity does not create space to think long term

This is a feature, not a bug of austerity service design. Organisations’ funds go down, but they try to do more with less. Corners are cut. There is no time to think. No time for research. No time for design. Staff churn is high, since these are stressful and unfulfilling circumstances to work under and so the cycle repeats. 

Organizations in this situation often cannot afford multiple multidisciplinary teams working permanently on the number of services they want to change, at the pace they feel like they should, or for the important big picture thinking that’s needed to identify, let alone solve the right problem. 

Is there a simple solution to this?

No. Ironically the fact that we find big problems hard to solve is itself one of the hardest problems to solve…but there are things we can do to get better at it.

Start to shift the narrative from problem solving to problem guardianship

This doesn't mean we don't solve problems. But it does mean acknowledging that completely solving an issue, or even making incremental improvements, is often a long term activity that takes sustained effort. Big problems often need lots of small solutions all working together within a bigger system, so thinking about ourselves as guardians or custodians of a problem, rather than individual ‘solvers’ changes our bias away from thinking that it is us as individuals who need to solve these problems alone, but that this is a collective effort. It’s a small but important shift.

Reduce our negativity bias

It’s natural that we prioritise avoiding problems over seeking improvements. One feels vital to keeping what you already have. The other is a luxury. While our negativity bias keeps us safe, it also stops us from trying new things.

When all you see is that everything is broken, it’s hard to try to fix the bigger issue that links all of these small problems. Try to move conversations to focus on opportunities rather than problems.

Celebrate your successes and try to create space – however brief – for positivity.

Scrap the plans and tickets and start again
This is a more extreme approach, but sometimes short-termism and emergency mode manifests itself as fear, which we’ve observed can lead to micro management. This can look like detailed plans, tickets in a system to deliver on, bloated project management systems.

This management model becomes the distraction.

The extreme option is delete all the plans, all the tickets, and start again with teams. What if we asked “If we didn’t have this plan or tickets, what would we work on that helps us deliver on our outcomes”

Of course there are organisational constraints that would shape what we’re working on, but with that in mind, try to find a balance of ensuring we still deliver on what sustains the organisation whilst looking at the larger opportunities to keep pace with change, or transform some parts of your organisation and underlying systems that will have a wider impact across more of your delivery.

Sarah worked with an organisation that was constantly in emergency mode. It was a common scenario. Scarcity in the sector blended with critical service delivery and diminishing funds - an organisation cracking at the seams as it had grown, held together by the care of the staff, but each burning out leaving deeper cracks and unsustainability of delivery. A push to keep winning more of the same service delivery contracts that they were starting to lose.

A bold leader stepped in and said, let’s take a step back and look at our future. Investing in a small in-house design team, and given the space to do a strategic discovery looking at the organisations’ services, they recognised that if they solved a service pattern like booking appointments in one service, and onboarding in another, it could be used across all of their services. It was a bigger project than quick surface level fixes, requiring more deep work on how they manage data, and interoperability of their systems but ultimately it would have impact more broadly across every service.

Until this leadership, the team had been working service to service, dealing with cracks. Whilst they still retained time for some sticky plaster work, they struck a balance in their road map enabling them to work on the bigger, chunkier service patterns and data retrieval.

This isn’t easy

We’re not saying it is, and often it does take bold leadership to create the space to do this.

But it’s important. Short-termism will damage your services, and often harm the sustainability of your services, the thing that keeps you in business whether that’s revenue or reputation to deliver.

Change doesn’t happen overnight (caveats to events like Covid) but suddenly technology will change and you’ve not prepared, users may go somewhere else, an extreme event happens or the market shifts and you’re redundant.

So where can you create space for the long-term in your role and work, and what are you willing to say no to in the now and drop to do so?

Our new book Bad Services is out now, and helps people look inside their organisation and why services are failing beyond the user experience.

This post was written by Lou Downe and Sarah Drummond