How to Co-create Experiences of Efficiency and Equity
For when a service gets faster for the people who already found it easy, and nobody asks who got left behind.
A local authority replaces its housing benefit phone line with an online portal. Average processing time drops by half, and the team that built it is proud of the number — most people now finish the form in eleven minutes. Nobody measured how long it takes the resident with no broadband at home, or the one who doesn’t read English as a first language, or the one who doesn’t trust a form with no person behind it. They stopped showing up, so there was nothing left to time.
That’s the trap efficiency and equity keep setting for each other, as if a service can only get faster by getting narrower. It doesn’t have to. The fix isn’t slowing everything back down — it’s building the service with the people who struggle with it, not just measuring how fast it moves for the people who don’t.
The card holds six practice areas across two groups: what individuals and citizens can do to document, feed back and demand better from the services they use, and what institutional leaders and service providers can build so the whole journey — not just the transaction — works for the range of people it actually serves. Written for anyone who designs a public service, and for anyone who has been the person a fast service wasn’t built for.
It comes from The Next Evolution, where the fuller argument for co-creating services lives. The card stands on its own — you don’t need the book to use it.
Print it, or send it to whoever is measuring a service’s success by average completion time alone.
The question I’d leave you with: when your organisation cuts a service’s average time in half, do you know who stopped using it — and why?
You’re reading The Next Evolution by Neil Catton, articles that explore the human world and the intersection of technology, they try and ask difficult questions - not to scare - but to inform. If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe free at neilcatton.substack.com.
Neil Catton is the author of The Next Evolution, The Cognitive Crucible and The Shadow System - available on Amazon, and writes at the intersection of technology, ethics, and human purpose.