Transformation and Personalisation: the future of services, not the past

The concepts of “transformation” and “personalisation”, used by the last UK Labour government to describe their vision for public services, are no longer in vogue. But not only are these concepts still important when designing public services such as education and health, they are at the forefront of the new business frontier for both companies offering services, and companies developing services around products. Here is why.

Transformation

We have moved a long way since the beginnings of the industrial revolution, when the concept of mass production changed first the way we created products, and very shortly the way we created public services, as Fredrik Taylor’s ideas of efficiency and economies of scale were picked up in education, health, and even the way restaurants cooked food. This was a huge innovation, and it allowed us to deliver products and services at a scale never imagined before, to all sections of society. It changed the world.

In the past decade, however, we have looked to move beyond mass produced products and services, recognising that one sized fits all solutions do not always provide the best solutions.

Part of the new approach is to look at the experience a customer (or learner, or patient) needs, and design the services, systems and structures of an organisation to orchestrate that experience.  This leads us to the concept of transformation:

“When you customize an experience,” say Joseph Pine and James Gilmour in their seminal 1999 work, The Experience Economy, “to make it right for an individual – providing exactly what he or she needs right now – you cannot help changing that individual. When you customize an experience, you automatically turn it into a transformation.”

Pine and Gilmour predicted that “transformation offerings” would emerge across the service sector, focussed on helping individuals better themselves, and affecting everyone from phone companies to healthcare providers.

The term quickly pervaded into design language and public policy. When the UK Labour government launched it’s Building Schools for the Future programme in 2003, it was quick to show it had learned from the lessons of the past years of building schools, and instead of this being a “building programme”, the aims were loftier, more ambitious. They were about transformation.

“We want to achieve a step-change in the quality of school buildings for every secondary pupil. We want to move from ‘patch and mend’ to ‘rebuild and renew’. However, above all, we want to create an environment in which to achieve education transformation and innovation.” – BSF launch document, February 2003

This caused enormous perturbation within the building sector at the time. Part of the problem was that transformation almost immediately became a meta-word, used as a shortcut to imply a meaning, but without either the user or the recipient in the conversation necessarily understanding what it meant. Local Authorities would ask consortia bidding to build new schools, “how will you achieve transformation through building our new schools?”

Bidders did not know. I remember very clearly being invited, some time around 2005, to a meeting with a very large building contractor, with over twenty of their bid directors sat around a board table, to talk to them about school buildings. Their first question was, “can you explain to us what transformation is, because we really don’t get it.”

Even bigger questions were being asked about how we should achieve it, questions we have only begun to answer within the school sector even as the “Transformation agenda” has come to an end. Yet there were people out there who were grappling with these issues – they just weren’t communicating the answers to those who needed the answers. A Design Council RED paper in 2006 proposed a new design discipline to deal with problems as complex as these: Transformation Design. It showcased successful methodologies around user centred service design that all public services and commercial offerings could benefit from. In a sense, it was a holistic approach to creating better experiences.

Personalisation

If transformation is the end, personalisation is the means, and it is a key global trend for all services.  

Sir Ken Robinson was on Radio 4 recently, talking about how if he had the role of the UK Education Minister for a year, he would stop trying to standardise education and recognise that people have different paths, and that the curriculum needs customising to them, not the other way around:

Everyone has very different talents, and we need an education system that recognises that and promotes it. And there’s a very important difference here between standardising and raising standards, and very often what happens with national policies is there is an attempt to standardise education as if it is a manufacturing process, and what we need to do is customise it to each individual. And that’s about giving schools the freedom to customise the curriculum to their children… – Sir Ken Robinson, Radio 4 Saturday Live

What Sir Ken was proposing was a more politically correct terminology for personalisation, a concept he has spoken extensively on, for example in his most recent TED talk.

“Personalised Learning” was a major education policy, and Blair and Brown alike talked about their visions for more personalised public services. Again, personalisation existed as a concept before the policies did, and as a force it will exist even as the terminology and policy fades away.

Yet again, however, we had a concept many were struggling to define and understand. David Hargreaves, the man who pioneered usage of the term, Personalised Learning, created one of the most useful definitions:

“Customisation in business is where goods or services are tailor-made, in contrast to mass production… “Mass customisation means providing goods or services at the prices of mass production. Personalised learning is an educational version of this.” - David Hargreaves

The concept of mass customisation had also been well explored in the past decades. “Whenever a company starts using words like whatever, wherever and whenever, or anything, anywhere and anytime, it is a sure sign that it has begun the shift to Mass Customization“, said Pine in an earlier book, Mass Customization, The New Frontier in Business Competition.

Mass customisation, or personalisation, is saying, ”as an organisation we will give you, the customer, the choice and flexibility to take our services and fit it around your own needs“. Or, as Charles Leadbeater says, it is as simple as ”putting users at the heart of services… enabling them to become participants in the design and delivery… Services will be more effective by mobilising millions of people as coproducers of the public goods they value.”.

It is worth noting the word ”mass“, in mass customisation. Many confuse personalisation with complete customisation or individualisation. Imagine this in the context of buying a suit. At one end of the spectrum, you can buy something that has been mass produced. These are available in the most common sizes and body shapes, and roughly fit. You have to try it on in order to check it does fit your particular size and shape. This is cheap, as it is produced at scale.

At the other end of the scale, there is a completely customised offering, available from a tailor. A tailor measures your size and body shape, and produces a one off suit that fits you perfectly. This is expensive, as it is very difficult to scale.

In the middle would be a mass customised offering. This would feel customised, but be as scalable as the mass produced option, and around the same price.

Sticking with the suit analogy, one attempt to do this within the clothes market is called Fits Me. Fits Me allows you to enter your own body measurements online, and has robotic technology that measures and ”wears“ a range of retailers mass produced options to see what would work with your body shape. You have access to everything, but can see what fits you, specifically.

Pulling together the collective thoughts of Pine, Gilmour, Hargreaves and Leadbeater, we could say that personalisation is therefore about mass customisng a service, creating something that is user centred, and thereby helping individuals transform themselves.

This is an exciting vision that paints great possibilities for all types of services and products. Indeed, some exciting concepts recently imagined:

Last.fm

Last.fm is a personalised radio station that customizes the music it plays depending on your own individual listening tastes, which are detected by keeping track of what music you actually play on your computer and iPhone. This is mass customization at its best: it delivers a service that feels completely individual, but at unlimited scale.

Biosauce

Many gym goers use post workout drinks to optimise their recovery. Biosauce has recognised that protein shakes, for example, are generic – you have the same dose recommended for every person. Their concept is to install vending machines that require you to input your workout type, weight and body fat percentage. In return you are served up a drink that ”matches your personal requirements“, giving you a tailored mix of carbohydrates and proteins in a quantity that is optimised to your own situation.

This is also a great example of mass customization: a product/service hybrid that can be produced at scale, but feels customized for every user.

Personalised Medicine

Personalised Medicine was the vision of the Human Genome Project, a vision of a technology that offers the opportunity to tailor drugs to your specific genetic requirements, meaning doctors will have the ability to diagnose and treat with much greater precision than today. Everyone will have access to treatment that might now only be affordable by billionaires – a treatment that feels individual, but is at scale.

Researchers hoped that once the genetic blueprint was revealed they could create DNA tests to gauge individuals’ risk for conditions like diabetes and cancer, allowing for targeted screening or preëmptive intervention. Genetic information would help doctors select the right drugs to treat disease in a given patient. Such advances would dramatically improve medicine and simultaneously lower costs by eliminating pointless treatments and reducing adverse drug reactions. – Technology Review, Personalized Medicine Briefing

This is a vision that is actively being worked on by a number of experts today, such as genetics pioneer Leroy Hood, who contends that “Individual genomes will become a standard of medical records in 10 years or so, and we will have the power to make inferences [about an individual's health] when combined with phenotypic information. Then we can begin to plan strategies for individual health care in ways we have never done before.”

The Potential of Personalised Services that lead to Transformation

Despite the best efforts of public service innovators up and down the country, our public services continue to be defined by a mass production model [as opposed to a mass customisation or personalised model]… But all the evidence suggests that our commercial service experiences are, in general, not much better. – DEMOS, The Journey to the Interface

Policy wise, transformation and personalisation are not part of the new agenda. Yet, we must be careful in not confusing terminology with meaning. For the public sector, in times of cuts, it is easy to regress and provide a lesser service and experience. That is not, I believe, what this government is aiming for. Within the rhetoric of the Big Society lies many similarities: by involving the society in the provision of services, we can provide services that are more appropriate and fit for purpose. This is not a vision about mass production: that would be centralising all services again. This is still about personalisation, but just in a different route. This is being recognised and discussed by a number of public organisations, such as the Social Care Institute for Excellence, a charity funded by the Department of Public Health, who note that “there is a strong link between the Big Society agenda and the drive for personalisation in adult social care… Both involve empowering people to be active citizens who control their care and support and can contribute to their communities.”

The private sector, too, needs transformation too. Consumers are becoming more discerning and demanding. Personalisation – and therefore transformation – are key differentiators in a service model. The iPhone generation is used to having more customised information and services at their fingertips, but we have barely scratched the service on the potential.

If this whetted your appetite, check out the final report on our recent project, Space for Personalised Learning, where we looked at how to design schools and learning spaces around this principle.