Having recently been involved in a lot of innovation workshops with different service areas, I’m reaching the conclusion that most public sector challenges boil down to one statement:

“We have more demand than we can meet with our current service model and budget”.

The magnitude of that statement is leaving many directors of services feeling completely overwhelmed. The problem simply feels too huge to know where to start.

So how might we make it feel more manageable?

One obvious answer is that we need to chunk it up into more digestible pieces. To do that, we might usefully observe that not all demand is of the same type or created equal. 

I’ve had a go at breaking down the demand that typically lands at the doors of local authorities into eight different types: Real, Symptomatic, Optional, Misdirected, Informational, Failure, Artificial and Hidden. 

My hypothesis is that each type of demand might be considered as a discrete (albeit interconnected) problem that we can tackle one at a time in a more manageable way.

Types of Demand

Let me start by laying out what I mean by each type of demand, and what fundamental question each poses for public sector organisations. (I’ve phrased this as “How Might We…” HMW questions.) The demand for our services might be:

1 – Real Demand

• This is exactly what our service is here for. HMW… Deliver a great service that meets the user need first time?

2 – Symptomatic Demand

• The fundamental issue is upstream of our service. HMW… Provide a great service while also identifying and tackling the underlying cause?

3 – Optional (i.e. Non-statutory) Demand

• We’re not legally obliged to provide this service (to all users). HMW… Make an informed decision on who – and how best – to help?

4 – Misdirected Demand

• People misunderstand what and who the service is for. HMW… Communicate more clearly and effectively? Or connect users to other providers of the support they need?
• Other organisations are incorrectly signposting to us. HMW… Identify sources of those false referrals and inform them better?

5 – Informational Demand

• People want information about the service, not the service itself. HMW… Make it easy to get answers about the service? OR make the service so simple everyone can understand it?
• We haven’t updated users on the status of their issue and they want to find out where it’s got to. HMW… Ensure users have full visibility of the progress of their case?

6 – Failure Demand

• We didn’t solve the original issue. HMW… Deliver a great service that meets the user needs, first time?
• Our process is so hard to navigate that users had to contact us. HMW… Make the service so simple that the target users can use it?
• A user wants to make a complaint. HWW… Respond to the complaint fast and resolve the underlying issue so it doesn’t happen again?

7 – Artificial Demand

• An unnecessary requirement of our own making. HMW… Identify and remove all unnecessary steps, requests and processes from our service?

8 – Hidden Demand

• There are people who should be using our service who aren’t or can’t. HMW… Reach people who most need our help and enable them to access our service?

How do we respond to each type of demand?

Breaking it down like this, we notice something: there are types of demand that are mainly demands on our time, not demands for the actual service we provide. 

What I observe speaking to colleagues working in public services is that the time they have to spend dealing with types 4-7 takes time and resources away from providing the service. 

Moreover, when all the different types of demand reach the council through the same mechanism, service leads end up spending huge amounts of time having to sift through to find the cases they most need to address. We saw this as part of LOTI’s work in Adult Social Care, where council teams often have a single inbox with emails ranging from desperate cries for help (i.e. ‘Real’ demand) to messages from a care agency saying one of their carers is running five minutes late for an appointment (which we might regard as ‘Artificial’ demand).

We might then form a theory of change that if we can automate, reduce or eliminate demand that is Misdirected, Informational, Failure or Artificial, we can dedicate more time and resources to the demand for our core service. 

In blog form, I won’t go into each type individually, but let’s pick a couple of examples. 

With Informational demand, how much time and effort could be saved if we simply updated users on the status of their request? Providing such information is well established to have a powerful psychological effect. Imagine you’re in an airport and over the tannoy it’s announced that your flight is delayed. What do you do? A natural reaction is to panic, feel stressed, and catastrophise about the impact on your trip. Now imagine it’s announced that your flight is delayed “by 20 minutes”. This time, you shrug your shoulders and go grab another coffee. It’s the same thinking that informs why Uber shows you where you cab is right now. It doesn’t make the wait any shorter, but you feel better knowing where you stand. Yet we are generally terrible at doing this in public services. 

On Artificial demand, a council Chief Executive once told me a story about when she was a more junior official. She was tasked with completing a form about each individual case her team worked on and submitting it to another department. She wondered how the information she was having to note down could possible be useful to anyone else, and never saw any evidence of it being used. So she tried an experiment. She continued to fill in the forms, but instead of sending them on, she kept them in a drawer. Six months later, literally no one had asked about it. In complex organisations like councils, where processes evolve and get added to by colleagues who come and go, there are no doubt hundreds of redundant steps in some of our services. We should be hunting them out.

A final point is that if we can automate, reduce or eliminate demand that is Misdirected, Informational, Failure or Artificial we might also then get time to address Hidden demand.

There are many people who could benefit from our help who we never even hear about. LOTI is working on a project with 20 boroughs to test the use of Internet of Things sensors to detected damp and mould conditions in social housing. The idea is to reveal a problem that risks going unreported and leading to terrible cases like that of Awaab Ishak. That is surely worth our while.

Your views

I’ve written this blog in the spirit of sharing early ideas and thinking out loud. I know many readers will have done substantial work on service demand, and I’d welcome your feedback. In particular, I’d love to hear from you about: What types of demand have I missed? And for each type, what’s the single best example you’ve seen about how to address it well?

For all of us working on public sector reform, we have a joint mission to help our colleagues overcome the sense of overwhelm that stems from having far too much work to do for the resources and funding available.

We have to make innovation feel doable. 

Chunking up the demand challenge into smaller questions with more specific solutions might be one good place to start.