Design, Missions and Experiencing Systems: Using Service Design to Co-ordinate and Align Activities and Resources to Deliver Missions
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Executive Summary
Democratic governments are increasingly turning to ‘missions’ to address the significant challenges they face, which cut across traditional departmental structures, levels of governance and ways of developing and delivering policy responses. This shift is taking place in the context of citizen distrust in experts, institutions and politics and fiscal limits on investment.
A ‘mission-oriented’ approach to government combines setting a vision for change, a focus on outcomes, iterating and learning and working across silos. However the operational delivery of missions is still a work in progress. Barriers include a lack of capability and capacity to work in new ways. To improve the ‘how’ of achieving mission-oriented government, this paper argues that Service Design has as yet untapped potential for two reasons.
Firstly, Service Design enables essential co-ordination and alignment of activities and resources by: weaving together fragmented perspectives, challenging assumptions to unlock transformation; aligning stakeholders across organisations and systems; and enabling real-time learning and iterative development. In particular we focus on three methods widely used in Service Design to show their potential for enabling co-ordination and alignment: Service Mapping, Service Blueprinting, and Service Architecture. Using examples from Livework’s work in government and the public sector, we demonstrate the organisational benefits of using Service Design to achieve missions in public sector and government contexts.
Secondly, Service Design has untapped potential because it is already built into digital delivery in government and sometimes policy development. For example, people, expertise, methods and tools associated with Service Design are already embedded in the UK Government Digital Service and the Government Digital and Data Profession, alongside teams in government departments associated with policy design and innovation, as well as in local government, agencies and consultancies, NGOs, universities and networks such as the Policy Design Community. Connecting across these pockets of expertise and supporting mutual learning will help address the capacity gap to deliver missions.
By deploying and amplifying Service Design methods and teams, governments can amplify their capability and capacity to deliver on their mission-oriented goals. This shift will not only enhance the effectiveness of achieving operational delivery of policy and public services but also help rebuild trust in public institutions.
Setting the scene: Challenges in Delivering Missions
Democratic governments are increasingly turning to ‘missions’ to address the significant challenges they face, which cut across traditional departmental structures, levels of governance and ways of developing and delivering policy responses. This shift is taking place in the context of citizen distrust in experts, institutions and politics and fiscal limits on investment.
A ‘mission-oriented’ approach to government combines setting a vision for change, a focus on outcomes, iterating and learning and working across silos. The methodology associated with missions is one of co-production, combining resources and shared accountability. Delivering missions requires a shift in how the Civil Service, local government and public sector bodies operate and how they shape ecosystems and, in some cases, markets beyond the traditional spheres of government. The emerging missions agenda co-exists with long-standing discussions about public sector innovation and commitments to civil service reform. Alongside calls for ‘positive’ public policy, the mission ethos sees a need for change in how government and public administrations go about their work.
In the UK, the Labour Party included a mission approach government in its manifesto published ahead of the general election in July 2024. This built on an existing body of work; including a report published in May 2024 by Marianna Mazzucato, co-published by the independent Future Governance Forum and UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, which set out principles for mission-driven government in the UK. The government’s Plan for Change announced in December 2024 provided a set of indicators for government and its partners to work to, alongside new investment in building capabilities to pilot how to ‘test and learn’. Local and devolved government bodies (eg. London Borough of Camden) have already adopted the language of and tools associated with missions. In Europe, too, there is extensive investment in missions, although currently tied to research and innovation. However, analysis suggests that adapting ways of organising and scaling missions approaches are a challenge and some confusion around the term ‘missions’ remains.
As a result, the operational delivery of missions is still a work in progress. Barriers include a lack of capability and capacity to work in new ways. To improve the ‘how’ of achieving mission-oriented government, this paper argues that Service Design has as yet untapped potential for two reasons.
The first challenge is capability – building up expertise, frameworks, activities, resources and legitimacy to use them, enabling iterative cycles of experimentation, learning, and adaptation across multiple organisations within changing ecosystems. This is a fundamentally different way of working that acknowledges uncertainty as productive rather than trying to simplistically quantify and reduce risk. For example, a framework articulating the differences between conventional plans and priorities, and ‘game plans’ and missions developed by Nesta and the Institute for Government highlighted the need for iterative cycles of understanding the ‘system’, developing a theory of change, challenging assumptions and hedging for uncertainty and evaluation. Analysis of international cases of ‘missions in action’ distinguished between designing new institutions in government and working across government departments, both of which require collaboration and cross-disciplinary working.
However as several commentators have pointed out, including the Institute for Government, there is no readily available capability, governance or investment model in the UK for delivering missions. For example, a study by Anna Goulden and Rainer Kattel reviewed toolkits for designing and implementing mission-oriented policies; they found that best practice, methods and tools for implementing such policies are at an emergent stage. This highlights the challenge of carrying out essential co-ordination and alignment work across teams, organisations and levels of governance to do the iterative learning and adaptation required to deliver missions.
The second challenge is identifying and scaling capacity to deliver missions at a time when economic and fiscal priorities limit public investment. Alongside the missions agenda, there are many other transformation or innovation agendas in government and public services. For example, government and public services are already heavily invested in digital transformation and there is potential to learn from, and align with, some of that existing activity.
The argument made in this paper is that approaches and methods from Service Design have as yet untapped potential to achieve the ‘how’ of delivering missions.
Firstly, Service Design methods enable essential co-ordination and alignment of activities and resources, by weaving together fragmented perspectives; challenging assumptions to unlock transformation; aligning stakeholders across organisations and systems; and practically enabling real-time learning and iterative development. We explain below how approaches from service design offer powerful and practical ways to achieve co-ordination and alignment across teams, organisations and levels of governance which play different roles in delivering or providing infrastructures, processes and systems. Using examples from Livework’s work in central and local government, we show the organisational benefits of using three methods to achieve missions:
Service Mapping
Service Blueprinting, and
Service Architecture.
Secondly, Service Design is already found in many pockets and organisations across and beyond government, allowing the scaling up and out of capabilities to achieve mission-oriented approaches and ultimately achieving government’s priorities. For example, current ‘assets’ in the UK system include the Government Digital Service (an organisation within government) and the Government Digital and Data Capability (a cross-government framework for roles and skills), alongside teams in government departments associated with policy design and innovation, as well as in local government, agencies and consultancies, NGOs, universities and networks such as the Policy Design Community, as the annual Service Design in Government conference demonstrates. Connecting across these pockets of expertise and supporting mutual learning will help address the capacity and capability gap to deliver missions.
Service Design teams, expertise, methods and tools, on their own, are not going to address the complex challenges in organising to deliver missions. However, through their focus on articulating people’s experiences of and journeys through complex systems and how they are delivered through resources and activities across multiple organisations, using them will help achieve essential co-ordination and alignment work in achieving the visions, collaboration and outcomes associated with missions.
Transforming Mission-Oriented Policies into Operational Success through Service Design
Service Design has four well-established approaches enabling governments to build organisational capabilities to deliver mission aspirations and achieve practical outcomes.
Figure 1: Service mapping often starts with collaborative work to align different teams to a common experience and outcomes for service users. Often this results in insight into the issues across and between delivery teams.
Service Design Methods enabling Co-ordination and Alignment
Journey Mapping and Service Blueprinting are two methods required for translating mission-oriented visions into coherent operational delivery. These methods enable policy-makers and public and private service providers and NGOs to map out the interactions between service users and providers, as well as the behind-the-scenes processes and policies that support these interactions and shape lived experience.
Figure 2: Diagrammatic service map outlining how service design uses the customer, or service user, and their experience as the anchor for alignment and coordination of operational capabilities and business goals.
Journey Mapping creates a visual representation of the end-to-end user journey, identifying the ‘touchpoints’ where users interact with the service provider over time, such as waiting rooms, leaflets, websites, call centres or apps (see Figure 2). Service Blueprinting maps out the behind-the-scenes processes, policies and systems that make these interactions possible. By breaking down operational service delivery into components and visually mapping out the roles and resources of different organisations involved, blueprinting highlights potential friction points and opportunities for improvement (see Figure 3). The blueprinting process reveals uncertainties and risks, which can then be tested through field research and prototypes, thereby helping to mitigate these risks early in the process.
Figure 3: Examples of Service Blueprints being employed to structure performance dashboard and inform deliver roadmaps.
Key benefits of using these two methods are:
Service maps focus on single service propositions and offerings and partially capture aspects of the service ecosystem. As a result, they don’t reveal in detail how various parts of the service system interconnect or how people interact and experience multiple services offered by one or multiple providers.
To address this limitation, over the past decade, Livework has developed and refined what it calls ‘Service Architecture’. Unlike individual service maps, which focus on one journey at a time, Service Architecture captures all significant service journeys relating to clusters of users, providing a comprehensive framework for designing, delivering, and managing services that meet user needs at every stage of their interaction with the system – across several organisations. Creating and using Service Architecture visualisations (see Figure 4) ensures that people’s journeys are interlinked and consistent, aiming to enable a coordinated approach to mission delivery and underpinning continuous improvement.
Figure 4: Diagrammatic Service Architecture representing the ability of service design to zoom between big picture policy level concerns (level 0) and connect them to specific aspects of service delivery as journeys that define how services are experienced and delivered.
Effective mission-oriented government requires strong governance structures that can manage cross-sector initiatives and ensure continuous alignment of stakeholders across organizational boundaries. Service Design not only maps and aligns service delivery but also provides the foundation for governance structures that can manage complex, multi-sector missions. These structures ensure that stakeholders across different sectors, governance levels, and organizational boundaries are continuously aligned and held accountable (see Figure 5).
Demonstrating the Benefits of Using Service Design
We now show the opportunities of using Service Design by presenting three case studies from Livework’s portfolio. Each illustrates a different facet of how Service Mapping and Blueprinting can support alignment between policy intent and service outcomes.
Case 1: Using Blueprinting to achieve Integrated Care Systems in the NHS
Integrated services have been a goal for the NHS for some time but became a larger focus in 2021 with the creation of Integrated Care Systems (ICS) as statutory bodies. An ICS is tasked with improving care delivery across the health and care landscape. Working with the ICS and key NHS Trusts in Sussex, Livework co-developed and delivered a design for one of the priority areas for integration – hospital discharge.
The challenge
The challenge the NHS faced was that patients were being held in hospitals unable to return to home and community-based care due to a lack of integration of operational processes and lack of shared data to enable a clinician to confidently discharge someone.
The approach
An initial discovery (or research) project for one hospital took on the challenge of reducing hospital stays by one day per patient, on average. This one day would represent a significant reduction in cost and an improvement in patient experience. Through running workshops and carrying out interviews, Livework uncovered the specific barriers to people being discharged in that hospital setting. The team mapped out the service to demonstrate people’s experiences, needs across different phases, and to identify opportunities to improve service delivery (see Figure 6). The team then co-created a Service Blueprint that suggested how the different NHS organisations (hospital, community & GPs) could each play their part in creating the right conditions for the patient to be discharged earlier, and the data requirements to enable this.
The result
When the new Service Blueprint was presented to the ICS board, the team was greeted with the response: “This is what integrated care looks like”. The visual mapping of patient flow alongside procedures and data made the idea of integration more tangible, allowing the various organisations to understand interdependencies and better co-ordinate. Following this initial discovery work, the discharge initiative was further designed. It was then scaled up to cover over 20 organisations across Sussex with an expanded blueprint covering how discharge would be integrated and enabled as an integrated care journey.
Figure 5: A service map using the steps or stages of a service as the structure to understand experiences, needs and identify opportunities to improve service delivery.
Case 2: Enabling cross-agency collaboration to improve employment outcomes in Sunderland
The challenge
A Livework team funded by One NorthEastRegional Development Agency and the City of Sunderland reimagined support services for long-term unemployed citizens who were considered ‘hard to reach.’
The approach
By working closely with individual residents, frontline providers, and local agencies, the team revealed the initial insight that people needed comprehensive support through the whole ‘back to work’ journey, across multiple organisations, from healthcare and social services to skill development and job placement. Instead, existing services were fragmented.
To address this gap, Livework created a Service Blueprint showing how a more connected experience should work for a Sunderland resident on their journey towards employment. The team created a simple service map to show how service users moved through stages towards an outcome (in this case, into sustained work) cutting across silos in public service delivery (see Figure 7). The team then produced a Service Blueprint, suggesting how organisations in the city could work together and combine resources more effectively through the lens of people’s experience (see Figure 8). Funding was allocated with the requirement that the city, the NHS, Job Centre, and 20 third-sector organizations would collaborate in a more cohesive way. This resulted in new initiatives, increased collaboration and better use of existing resources to support people in Sunderland in their back to work journeys.
The result
Over the course of an 18-month pilot, this initiative delivered a 200% social return on investment and supported 180 individuals. Its success secured an additional three years of funding totaling £5 million.
Figure 6: Simple service map showing how service users move between stages, and multiple organisations addressing aspects of their life, on their journey towards an outcome (in this case into sustained work) cutting across the structural silos of public service delivery.
Figure 7: Service Blueprint defining how specific organisations would integrate into the overall model of a future service.
Case 3: Reducing complexity in the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Service
The Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND) is a critical gateway for individuals navigating immigration, asylum, and naturalization processes. However, the complexity of regulations, unpredictable application volumes, and outdated digital infrastructure have resulted in inefficiencies, fragmented service delivery, and frustration and confusion for applicants. The IND has set an ambitious goal to become one of the most effective and user-friendly public service organizations in the Netherlands. Achieving this requires a shift from incremental fixes to mission-driven, systemic transformation.
The challenge
One of the major barriers in the IND’s current service model is fragmentation. Applicants interact with multiple chain partners—including municipalities, tax authorities, and judicial agencies—each with their own systems, procedures, and regulations. This lack of integration leads to inefficiencies such as repeated data submissions, inconsistent information, and long processing times. For applicants, whether first-time asylum seekers unfamiliar with Dutch bureaucracy or seasoned immigration lawyers, the process often feels uncertain, and overly complex. To address this, the IND partnered with Livework to develop a holistic, human-centered vision for its future service model—one that prioritizes seamless digital and physical interactions while ensuring that every applicant receives clear and reliable guidance throughout their journey.
The approach
At the heart of this transformation is the shift to an omni-channel service approach, ensuring that applicants can navigate the system seamlessly – whether online, by phone, or in person – and receive accurate, timely information regardless of the channel they choose (see Figure 9). Having a vision is only the first step. The real challenge lies in operationalizing it. Livework and the IND focused on three key service design tools to turn this vision into a concrete, implementable strategy based on a clear view of user needs and pain points. By aligning data standards, information-sharing protocols, and procedural coordination with organisations (such as municipalities and embassies) which underpin the digital infrastructure, applicants now encounter a coherent, unified process instead of being passed between institutions.
The result
This mission-driven redesign of the IND’s service ecosystem lays the foundation for an immigration system that balances efficiency, fairness, and user-centricity. By focusing on holistic service design, the IND is not just optimizing processes but actively reducing harm – ensuring that immigration procedures are clearer, faster, and more humane for all users.
Figure 8: A Service Design visual overview for the Dutch immigration service defining a number of connected opportunities to intervene in the overall system aligned to user experience.
Using Service Design to Achieve Missions
In this paper, we identified some of the operational challenges associated with building capability and capacity to deliver missions, and argued that Service Design has potential to address them.
We showed that Service Design has powerful methods for enabling better alignment and coordination in public sector innovation. We argued that these methods allow holistic co-ordination and alignment across multiple organisations, with a relentless focus on thinking through outcomes from the point of view of people’s lived experience across organisations and systems, rooted in data, co-creation and iterative development of solutions.
We also pointed to the expertise in the UK, which can be mobilised to scale up and across to deliver missions. The UK government is already a leader in building up service design expertise, in particular in digital services as well as policy design.
By deploying and amplifying Service Design methods and teams within a capability of continuous learning, governments can develop the capacity to successfully deliver on their mission-oriented goals. This shift will not only enhance the effectiveness of operational delivery of policy and public service delivery but also help rebuild public trust in the institutions.
About the authors
Lucy Kimbell (PhD) is Professor of Contemporary Design Practices at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. She is a researcher specialising in the use of design approaches to address social and public policy issues. She supported the UK Civil Service’s Public Design Evidence Review between 2023-25 and led the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Design|Policy Research Network (2022-23). She co-leads the international Sustainable Transitions through Democratic Design Doctoral Network (2024-28) funded by the EU Marie Curie programme.
Ben Reason is a founder of service design company Livework. Since founding the company as the first service design consultancy Ben has pioneered the development and maturing of a new design discipline focussed on what accounts for the majority of our economy. Ben has introduced service design to multinational corporations to start-ups and to public bodies including the NHS, Public Health England, The Danish Government. Ben is passionate about improving the quality of service to deliver outcomes for both people and society.
Cristina Tamburello is a senior service designer and customer centricity specialist at Livework, with a focus on service innovation and organisational design. Over the past five years, she has worked in partnership with a wide range of organisations across the private, public and third sectors, including the European Commission, the NHS and Challenge Works. Cristina applies a structured, evidence-informed approach to design, ensuring that solutions are grounded in people’s needs, organisational priorities, and operational context.
Noortje Küppers is a senior service designer at Livework, with extensive experience working in complex delivery-focused government organisations, including the Dutch prison service and the Immigration and Naturalisation Service. She specialises in bridging the gap between policy and execution, particularly in politically sensitive and complex environments. Her work focuses on designing for real-world impact, aligning operational realities with policy ambitions, and enabling public sector organisations to work more human- and future-centered.
About livework
We guide people and organisations through the complex challenges of our times.
Why? Because we believe that the true worth of services lies in their benefits. How people perceive these benefits shapes their satisfaction.
By constantly striving to evolve and improve services, we create value for everyone involved – organisations, individuals, and society.
Every day, we help our clients achieve their goals through services that make lives better, taking full responsibility for how our work affects both people and the planet.
How to cite this paper
Kimbell, L., Küppers, N., Reason, B. and Tamburello, C. (2025). Design, Missions and Experiencing Systems: Using Service Design to Co-ordinate and Align Resources to Deliver Missions. London: livework.
