Exactly, or research/testing is happening, but not functioning beyond confirming what people think is true (where pre-existing assumptions prevail)

A test site in the months leading up to the relaunch found customer satisfaction rates were consistently above 70%, they told the BBC:

“The tsunami of complaints suggests that consultation was either perfunctory or they listened to the wrong people"

And here’s a perfect example of false positives from my news feed this morning…

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I didn’t get to that much this year… But did manage to grab a last minute ticket to go to Robert Mcfarlane’s Is a River Alive? session on Friday (I really enjoyed the audiobook a few months back)

This post looks at how to understand policy intent – including developing a future service ecosystem and working with a statutory instrument. It also covers how to use proto-personas and hypotheses to guide research when a policy is still evolving

If people in your team or organisation are using AI notetakers as a way of coping with too many meetings and a culture of presenteeism, there's not a technological fix for this. The answer is to have fewer, better organised meetings www.careful.industries/blog/2025-11...

I’ve been scribbling notes while I’m listening. This truth has stuck with me all day today: “We all need technology that at least supports us to take care of ourselves"

Thanks Martin!

That's really great to hear, thanks John!

And here's a big thing I'd call out. Product Mindset is different to Service Mindset - they're not interchangeable… product is the foundation and means of delivery. Service thinking is how you build on that in terms of elevating user-centred approaches

/end

Even in organisations with a strong product focus, user centricity is often still limited to product teams, but that doesn't go far beyond its immediate remit. It comes back to how we describe things, organise and align work in more joined-up ways, and what you measure

The thing I observe most around government, is growing product delivery maturity, but still relatively low design and service maturity. And that means the complexity of user journeys still being pushed to the end user. Often at the expense of improved service, business, and policy outcomes