4‑day week after spending last week at Het Meerdal Center Parks.
Even on holiday it’s hard to switch my brain off from service design. There were lots of ways friction could be removed from the experience. Like, the park makes it hard to rent or buy things once you’re there that you could have preordered. If we were organised enough to know we needed to preorder towels, we’d have brought our own. A simple way of requesting a few things you need on arrival would be a massive benefit to families and easy money for the park. I assume there are some organisational seams behind it, or maybe it’s about managing capacity. I wonder if Center Parks have any service designers, it would be a fun job.
5 services, 5 models
When I joined NHSE 9 months ago our portfolio had 1 service in alpha and 1 in discovery. We now have 5 projects. I’m proud of the work we’ve done to grow so fast and grateful for the trust people have put in us.
The services are all aligned to our vision of ‘making it easy for people to understand their health risks and find the right services to stay well’.
The interesting thing that occurred to me this week is how the first version that each service is building towards has a different set of parts it’s testing. Different entry points (GP invites versus data cohorting), different ways of linking users to next actions (simple referrals versus risk‑based options). I’d like to say this was by design, but it’s largely a product of what exists already.
It’s still early days, but it’s exciting to see how the services will develop. In the long term we will need to manage this complexity. Spending more time thinking about the more important stages between our siloed services and something more coherent has been on my agenda for too long. I’ve been better this week with protecting my time, but I consistently underestimate how long work will take.
I am human and I need to be loved
The Digital Prevention Services team has regular sessions where external speakers talk about their work.
This week we had Paul Willmott from Lego, talking about how they have adopted AI into their working practices. It was a fascinating talk and incredible to see how they have changed their entire organisation to benefit from AI. For example, they have AI agents in board meetings, all their developers co‑write with agents and they’ve transformed their HR department.
It was a clear articulation of how we will all be working sooner or later. I was left feeling that I need to do more to take advantage of these tools or be replaced. Which is honestly terrifying.
I use AI a little, generally to challenge anything I’ve done to see what is missing or could be improved. But I’ve noticed even that is having a detrimental effect on my mental health. It feels like I’m trying to pass off someone else’s work as my own. I wonder if there is a change in my mindset that would allow me to be more comfortable with using AI. I regret not asking Paul if people saw AI as a threat to their identity and if part of the training was about adjusting to a new way of working.