Public services don’t fail primarily because of money, digital, or process but because they are numb to themselves

Public services don’t fail primarily because of money, digital, or process but because they are numb to themselves. Systems practice is a humanism; a responsibility. We draw a line: service / citizen. Systems practice helps us see the implications of that and work relationally. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_public-services-dont-fail-primarily-because-activity-7429442843301175296-arYW

Public services don’t fail primarily because of money, digital, or process.
They fail because they are numb to themselves.

At the Systems Thinking Systems Practice conference in March, I’ll make a simple – and challenging – claim: systems practice is a humanism. Not models, toolkit, methods. Not a facilitation style. It’s a stance.

I start from the observation that most failure in public service is epistemic before it is operational. The system cannot sense at the critical boundary where citizens’ lives meet organisational response. It measures what is legible internally, not what is real externally. So it cannot learn. And a system that cannot learn will hurt people.

I’ll draw a deliberate parallel with Sartre’s ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’. His famous focus was ‘existence precedes essence’. We are what we do. There is no blueprint to hide behind.

The systems version is this: practice precedes the model.
The purpose of a system is revealed in its behaviour, not in its strategy. You do not discover your values in a vision statement. You infer them from how you treat people at the boundary.

So systems practice, at heart, is about responsibility.
Responsibility for the boundaries we draw – because boundaries decide what counts, who counts, and what the ‘system’ even is.
Responsibility for building learning loops – so the system can ‘know itself’ rather than repeating harm more efficiently.
Responsibility for refusing the comforting fiction that ‘citizen’ and ‘service’ are naturally separate worlds, instead of a single recursive human system we all inhabit.
And responsibility to call out that what I’ve glibly called ‘the system’ even in this post – a useful abstraction – does not exist independently of us.

I’ll argue that relational public service is not about being nicer. It is about shifting value definition into the citizen’s context-of-use, and designing recursive feedback across worlds – citizen, service, management, leadership – so insight is continuous rather than episodic.

And I’ll offer a practical agenda, concrete moves to strengthen sensors, cross boundaries, and embed learning into the rhythm of the work.

If systems practice is a humanism, then it has power, for good or bad. Humans are agents, not units of need. Relationships are infrastructure. Learning is how we keep our promises in a changing world.

At its heart, there’s a question I’ll ask the room to consider – and ask you, here:

When you bring a ‘service’ into existence, what is the divide you are drawng between people – what image of the citizen are you quietly legislating into existence? And would you be content to live inside that system yourself?