Hey Reader,

Before I jump in, I wanted to mention that I will be speaking in Barcelona in October 2026 at the brand new and incredibly awesome Service Design Disrupted Conference. This event was created BY the community FOR the community. Wouldn't it be so cool if many of my readers could attend and we could all hang out in person?

I have 20 tickets at the early-bird price. Use 'SDD-X-GERRY' to get that deal :-)

Ok, let's get into this week's newsletter.

I have heard this story a hundred times from a hundred different practitioners. Same script, different organisations.

They walk in with genuine intent to do amazing work, only to slowly realise that the beautiful picture painted in the interview was, in fact, painted with crayons.

But miraculously, they still manage to do good work. They show what is possible. And then something happens. The budget gets cut. The sponsor moves on. A new executive arrives with a different agenda. The project that was changing lives gets quietly shelved in favour of something shinier.

That is the storm. And if you do this work long enough, you will see and hear of it regularly.

The storm is not always dramatic

Sometimes it is slow. A gradual forgetting.

One day, the mission is on every wall. Then next, nobody can tell you who the service is actually for.

The purpose gets buried under layers of process. Governance frameworks multiply. Reporting structures get reorganised. Committees form to oversee other committees. And somewhere in the middle of all that activity, the organisation stops asking the only question that matters - is this making things better for the people we serve?

The symptoms are always the same and often unintentionally designed in a specific way. Processes designed to keep people busy rather than being effective. Decisions made to protect the structure rather than improve the service. Teams are so deep in delivery that nobody can remember what they are delivering or why. Everyone is happy, they are busy working, or working busy as I sometimes say on the podcast.

Poor prioritisation becomes gut-based decision-making. Gut-based decisions stretch teams thin. Stretched teams trigger projects in isolation. Isolated projects push problems back onto the people being served. Support channels overflow. And the drift accelerates.

The politics are not a distraction. They are the work.

The road to implementation runs directly through politics. You are asking people to change their behaviour, to challenge what they have always done, to look at their part of the system and admit it might not be working for the people it is meant to serve. That is threatening. That triggers the organisational immune system.

The trick - and it is a trick, because it requires real craft - is to understand the executive's currency. Risk reduction. Cost savings. Regulatory compliance. Whatever language they respond to. Frame the work in those terms. Not because you are selling out. Because you are being strategic. You are navigating the force field that maintains the current problem.

You are asking people to step out of their comfort zone.

Finding the seams

When I walk into an organisation, I do not ask where the silos are. I map the service experience and let the fractures reveal themselves.

I map the core experiences.

From those journey maps, I build outward to explore who does what and when within the back office. The service becomes the narrative backbone.

• Why is the citizen left waiting four weeks here?
• What caused that?
• How can we reduce that?

That question exposes the silo(es) without naming them. It centres the conversation on the person being served, not on departmental territory.

I print these maps. I carry them into meetings. I spread them across tables. And nearly always, the same thing happens.

People who have never considered their role in a broader service suddenly see it laid out before them. The map becomes a boundary object - something that sits between different groups and creates shared understanding without requiring anyone to abandon their expertise.

The crown prosecutor who had never seen what came before

I was once asked by a Director of Public Prosecutions to conduct a human-centred evaluation of the prosecution model. An organisation that has operated in essentially the same way for over two hundred years.

I started mapping a thirty-foot journey on the office walls, then ran one-to-one sessions with people from across the organisation. For many of them, it was the first time they had been able to piece together their role in the delivery of justice.

One afternoon, a crown prosecutor was reading the map. He found it "fascinating". And then he said something that stopped me. He had not realised what came before his role. A career professional - an expert in the justice system - who had four decades prosecuting cases without ever seeing the full journey that brought a case to his desk.

• What the victim went through.
• What the police went through.
• What the administrative staff processed.

All of it was invisible to him.

His response was not defensive. It was fascinating.

That taught me something important. Silos are not always the disease. They are only a problem when they prevent effective collaboration and delivery. The crown prosecutor was excellent at his job. His expertise mattered.

The problem was not the silo.

The problem was that nobody had ever shown him the system.

This is where design earns its place

Here is what I want to say clearly.

The antidote to an organisation that has forgotten its purpose is not another restructure.

It is not a new strategy deck. It is not a transformation programme with a three-year roadmap that nobody believes in.

It is the emergent practices of design.

The ability to step back, see the system, and bring the conversation back to the people the organisation was built to serve. To make the invisible visible. To carry the map into the room and say, "This is what it actually looks like for the person on the other end of your service."

That is not a nice-to-have. That is what wakes the organisation up.

The people I admire most in this community are not waiting for permission to do this work. They are not waiting for a transformation budget or a mandate from the top. They are doing it anyway. Quietly. Persistently. One conversation, one map, one question at a time.

That is the strength of what we do. Not the workshops. The ability to remind an organisation why it exists - when it has stopped asking, why.

Gerry Scullion​ Founder & Designer ​ We are building a global network of people doing human-centred work. Come add your name, learn, listen, connect and network - it's free!→ thisishcd.com/directory​

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