Here’s the RedQuadrant cheat sheet for more relational customer-first services: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_redquadrant-customer-first-public-services-activity-7424377183965442048-qzep Where in your service is the exact moment a person stops being a human being with a story, and becomes ‘a case’ that nobody truly owns?
Public services keep using the word ‘relational’ like it is a moral upgrade.
Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is just better customer service.
There is an important gradient here. Transactional services are not bad. They are just limited. They assume the world is tidy, needs are legible, and the job is to process a request cleanly.
Relational services start where that fantasy ends. People arrive with messy lives, mixed needs, half-truths, fear, shame, anger, low trust, and a problem that does not fit your drop-down list. The job is not to complete the transaction. The job is to help someone move forward.
Most public services, most of the time, are not doing full ‘citizen relationality’ – and most of the think-pieces and work out there isn’t aiming for this. They are trying to run transactionally-based services in a world that has become too complex and too human for that to work.
So the practical first move is not to declare a revolution. It is to make transactional services more relational, without kidding ourselves that we have rebuilt society.
That means drawing the boundary honestly. If you say ‘system’, but you still fund and govern through silos, you are performing sincerity.
It means listening to demand in people’s own words, at first contact, not your categories. If the citizen has to learn how to lie to your form to get help, you have already lost.
It means putting decision-making responsibilty at the front door. Most services do the opposite. They put the least authorised person there and call it triage, then act shocked by repeat contact and escalation.
It means case ownership. Someone must hold the thread. If ‘everyone is accountable upward’ but no one is accountable outward, the citizen becomes the coordinator of their own mess.
It means giving frontline staff the capability to actually solve the common asks, not just forward them.
It means stopping ourselves from measuring the wrong thing. If the metric can be gamed, it will be gamed, and the people who tell you the truth will be punished.
It means designing for survival, not heroics. If it only works when the charismatic lead is in post, it does not work.
I will write more soon about what ‘fully relational’ really demands, and why it scares systems that are addicted to control. For now, a simpler test.
Where in your service is the exact moment a person stops being a human being with a story, and becomes ‘a case’ that nobody truly owns?
chosen path 