What have I done?

and why have I done it? On starting a business.

In my first service design team, we had a mentor, Eric. He taught us how to analyse qualitative research, to trust ourselves to follow the worthwhile threads even before we could say why we were following them; to differentiate between insight and straightforward summary; to always involve someone else, so we didn't fall into rabbit holes of our own devising; to do design work well, in other words.

He also taught us how to be a designer. This is different from the competent execution of design work. It requires you to read the room, to be aware of the politics of the situation, to focus on the people. Eric's motto was something along the lines of, "first, you have to create the environment for good design". Or, as my colleague Sara put it more succinctly: "there's no point doing good work if nobody cares".

Your work can be as good as you like – perfect, elegant, evidence-based solutions to the needs of both the organisation and the user – but if the people you've got to convince about that don't trust you, don't believe you've listened, it won't get implemented. If the team who have to build the IT aren't talking to the team who have to use the IT because of something that happened in 2015, it might get implemented, but somewhere along the way something will fall over, or get crossed off a list, or interpreted without context, and the end result won't work in the way it needs to.

I've found, in the ten years since I joined that first design team, that the bulk of my work isn't what we think of as 'design work'. I still do research. I occasionally draw boxes with arrows between them, sure. I talk about the double diamond, and Arnstein's ladder of participation, and run workshops. But the majority of my time is talking to people, getting them to talk to each other, listening, facilitating, smoothing-over. Pointing out the gaps and the quiet people. Drawing attention to emotional contexts. Making sure the environment we're designing in is conducive to the elegant, evidence-based solutions we're all working towards.

And that shit is hard. In organisations where people have been, up until now, rewarded for having the right answers, and for being effective at getting things done (that is to say, most organisations), it's a huge risk for someone to say "I don't know." It's a risk to speak up, to disagree, to suggest an idea that might be terrible just to see what conversations it prompts. It requires bravery, and trust. And so a huge amount of my job has been creating a space where decision-makers feel comfortable admitting when they're not sure about something, and where everybody else feels comfortable telling the decision-makers the things they need to hear to become sure.

It can – and it does – take months to create that space, but when it works, it's glorious. Being part of a team that's working towards something exciting or important, whose members trust and support and challenge and champion each other: those are the teams that deliver. Those are the teams that make a difference.

Our civil service, NHS, public sector organisations, they aren't slow or inefficient because the people in them want to be slow and inefficient. They're full of smart, hard-working, dedicated people who do those jobs – who bang their heads against the brick wall of shitty organisational culture every day – because they want to make a difference. I know, because I've seen it. It's the environments they're in that stop them from being effective.

That's why I've started People Equals Purpose: I'm fed up seeing these smart, hard-working, dedicated people burn out or lose hope. I'm fed up seeing the organisations that are trying to solve the most important problems we have, not doing that as well or as fast as they could because they've got a culture which – inadvertently – doesn't allow for it. And I'm fed up doing that work as a side-of-desk activity, without the visibility and focus and support it needs.

I want us to live in a world where the groups of people who are helping to ensure it doesn't remain on fire have the environment they need to actually do that work.