What are these competencies for?
When services or policies are poorly designed and implemented they can make people feel disrespected, unappreciated or even discriminated against. Anyone who has queued for hours in a government building only to be told to come back another day has experienced this, as has anyone who has wanted to tear their hair out when filling in a confusing form. In addition to undermining the dignity of citizens, such experiences can impose real economic and social costs on individuals and society.
Some administrative burdens are created intentionally. Sadly, many burdens are also created unintentionally by well-meaning public leaders: the product of cultures, systems and policies that are highly constrained and that often prevent public servants from doing what's right.
For example, a government pursuing a mandate of organisational efficiency (i.e., 'Collect X amount of tax for less than cost Y') may impose both huge inconvenience and large costs on citizens by, for example, forcing them pay for professional accountants to fill in incomprehensible paperwork.
This competency focuses on the all too common phenomenon of well-intentioned policies and services actually making the governments users or clients feel miserable, degraded or even discriminated against, all whilst the official performance data shows 'Green - all is well'.
The heart of this competency - the 'Users competency' - is the idea that public service leaders must value the experiences of people who are the subjects of public policies, not just the ultimate outcomes of a policy.
This contrasts with the budgets and targets focus that much public service teaching centres around. A traditional public service education teaches people to deliver and measure success by hitting outcome-based targets like '80% of people placed into jobs' or '90% of people receiving vaccines'. It attaches little value to the experience of the people who are the subject of such policies, or to the lives of the public servants administering them.
By asserting this competency matters we are arguing that a government that hits all its targets but simultaneously makes its citizens miserable and exhausted is not a successful government.
However, this competency is about more than taking a stance in favour of treating people well. It contains a summary of the skills and capabilities that are required to back that stance. It names two skills of particular importance.
The key skill required is an understanding of service design. More specifically it means being familiar with how services can be successfully designed to meet user needs in a government context. This means learning about the various stages in service design: starting with taking the time to research and understand users and their needs, and moving on through design, prototyping and iterative delivery phase