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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

End of Q3. Thirteen weeks of content, built around the launch of Service design in practice. Here is what I noticed across the content: what seemed to resonate, what generated the most useful discussion.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Goodhart's Law. Sounds abstract. Shows up everywhere in public services.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Most design principles are decorative. "User-centred." "Accessible." "Simple." "Joined-up." These are not principles. They are aspirations. They do not help anyone make a decision. Here are four tests that distinguish useful principles from decorative ones.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

One of the most expensive design decisions is making the big call too soon. The concept is option value: the value of keeping your options open. A thread. 🧵

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

A causal loop diagram is one of the most useful tools for understanding why complex problems persist. It shows the structure that produces the behaviour, not just the symptoms.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

After the research sessions, the synthesis work begins. You have observations, quotes, recordings, notes. Your job now is to turn them into insights that change what you design. Three synthesis approaches that work in practice.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The question isn't build vs buy. It's capital budget vs operating budget. A thread on CapEx and OpEx, and why designers need to understand the difference.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Adaptive management is not a euphemism for not having a plan. It is a structured approach to working in systems where you cannot fully predict outcomes. 🧵

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

A stakeholder map is not an org chart. An org chart shows hierarchy. A stakeholder map shows something more interesting: who has authority, who has knowledge, who has influence, and who will be affected by the service. These are often very different people.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

The gap between good design and funded design is usually economic, not creative. Most teams I've worked with are excellent at the craft. Few have the vocabulary for the budget conversation. Here's what that gap looks like, and what closes it.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Eight weeks of service design practice. Not eight weeks of theory. Eight weeks of applying a structured approach to your own service. Here is what participants have at the end of it.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

A system can only respond to what it can detect. This is called requisite variety, and it explains why some problems keep getting worse despite serious effort.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Four days until the launch price for Service design in practice ends. £149 (50% off) closes on 31 August 2026. If you have been meaning to sign up, this is the week.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Plotting how a key variable changes over time reveals things that static analysis misses entirely. A thread on why behaviour-over-time graphs are worth the effort.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

“A lightness in the way we hold thoughts gives us room to learn, to shift perspective, and to keep a rigorous humility of confusion.”—Nora Bateson, Small arcs of larger circles

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

"Legal said no." "Compliance won't allow it." "The risk team blocked it." These sentences end a lot of design conversations. They do not have to. Risk and compliance are constraints. Like all constraints, they can be worked with.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Every system with a goal has at least one balancing loop. Understanding it is the key to understanding why change is so hard.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The user sees the form, letter, and call handler. They don't see the 3 systems that have to agree before a decision can be made. Or the team that processes the exceptions. Or the approval chain that adds two weeks to the timeline. The backstage of your service is a service too with different users

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Every system has a boundary. Where you draw it changes what you can see, and what interventions become available to you.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Pain points are not the same as opportunities. Every pain point implies that something could be better. But not all of them are worth fixing, or fixable. Here are four questions to separate the pain points worth solving from the ones that are symptoms of something deeper.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

I've opened a paid course on applying systems thinking in practice. 8 weeks. Real work, not just theory. Here's what it is. #SystemsThinking #DesignThinking

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

When policy says one thing and the service does another, users pay the price. This gap is one of the most common and least discussed failure modes in service design. Here is how it opens up, and what to do about it.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Your service has users. It also has actors. Users are the people trying to get something done. Actors are the people who make the service work, often without users ever seeing them. Understanding both is one of the most underrated skills in service design.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

"If we build this, that will happen." That is not a theory of change. That is a guess. A theory of change is a testable model of how your service creates the outcome it promises. Here is what the difference looks like.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Service design in practice is now open. An eight-week, email-delivered course for practitioners who design complex services and want a structured, end-to-end approach. Here is what it is and who it is for.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Something to read under the shade of a tree... Bad Services by @loudowne.bsky.social 💚 #BadServices #ServiceDesign

A vibrant green book titled "Bad Services" by Lou Downe rests atop a Muji notepad, accompanied by a Uni-ball Eye pen, under tree shade.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Most services don't meaningfully improve after launch. Here's what separates the ones that do. 🧵

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Seven things systems thinking changes about how you work. Not tools. Habits.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Know the business. Ten concepts. Ten days. Five minutes a day. A thread on what we covered, and why each one was chosen.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Experimentation in public services is genuinely complicated. You can't A/B test a benefits application the same way you'd test an e-commerce checkout. A thread on what responsible experimentation looks like. 🧵

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Worldviews are invisible until they conflict. When two teams reach completely different conclusions from the same situation, they're not failing to communicate. They're operating from different mental models.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Vendor lock-in: when the cost of switching exceeds the benefit of a better option. You're not trapped by a contract. You're trapped by the decisions made before the contract was signed.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Measuring whether a service is working is harder than measuring whether it's running. A thread on what performance measurement looks like when it's actually useful. 🧵

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety: a system needs as many possible responses as the variety of situations it faces. In plain English: if your service has one standard response, it will fail every situation that doesn't fit the standard.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Make, buy, or partner. Every technology or capability decision comes down to one of these three. Most organisations have a default. It's usually wrong.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Risk assessment is usually treated as a governance activity. A form to fill in. A sign-off to get. It could be so much more useful as a design practice. A thread. 🧵

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Tipping points are obvious in hindsight. In the data, beforehand, they're almost invisible. But they're not completely invisible. Here's what to look for:

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Cost-benefit analysis tells you whether the total benefits exceed the total costs. It doesn't tell you who bears the cost and who gets the benefit. That second question is often where the real decision lies.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Data sharing between public services can dramatically improve user experience, or seriously harm it. A thread on what service designers need to understand about data. 🧵

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

A vicious cycle is a reinforcing loop running in the wrong direction. The harder you push against it, the faster it spins. Here's how to spot one before it accelerates:

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

What makes a public service valuable? Not revenue. Not user satisfaction scores alone. Whether it makes people better off in a way the market wouldn't provide. That's welfare economics in one sentence. A thread on how to use it.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Interaction patterns reduce cognitive load, but only if they match what users already expect. A thread on how patterns work and where they fail. 🧵

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Optimising the part can harm the whole. This is one of the most reliable ways to create problems in organisations. And it's baked into how most performance management works.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

"The data shows it works." Sometimes it does. Often it shows something changed at the same time as what we did. That's different. A thread on thinking more carefully about cause and effect, without a statistics degree.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Policy as architecture: how eligibility criteria shape interactions, and what happens when they can't be delivered as written. 🧵

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Mapping a system alone is useful. Mapping it with others reveals more than you could find on your own. Here's how to run a 30-minute group mapping session:

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Outputs: what you produce. Outcomes: what changes as a result. These are not the same. But most teams measure outputs and call them outcomes. A thread on why that matters, and how to fix it.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Service blueprinting in practice: not a diagram for its own sake, but a tool for finding where the service breaks. Here's how to use it. 🧵

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Not all parts of a system are equally changeable. Some changes make little difference no matter how hard you push. Others are small moves with large effects. Those are leverage points.

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Simon Whatley @simonwhatley.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

The cobra effect. British colonial administrators in India wanted to reduce the cobra population. They offered a bounty for every dead cobra. People started farming cobras. When the programme ended, the farmers released their stock. The cobra population grew.

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