I’ve spent most of my career helping teams move from talking about user-centred design (UCD) to actually doing it, often as part of digital transformation programmes.
And one thing I’ve learned is this: transformation doesn’t stall because people don’t care. It stalls because we treat “digital” as technology, rather than a way of working and thinking.
Over the past decade, we’ve come a long way in Wales. Many public sector leaders now talk about agile, user-centred design, and digital transformation. These words have entered our leadership vocabulary, and that’s a real sign of progress.
Yet I often find myself puzzled by posts from digital leaders in Wales. Not because the work isn’t important, but because the focus is on tech: infrastructure upgrades or backend metrics that only insiders can understand. It’s hard to see the public in that picture.
By contrast, when I read posts from leaders in England and elsewhere, I understand them immediately. They talk about outcomes. About people. About making public services work better. The difference isn’t just communication style, it’s what gets centred: systems or citizens.
Learning the language of digital is only the first step. Now we need to learn the practice of it: how to lead, organise, and make decisions in genuinely digital ways, centred around user needs. Unless our teams, culture, structures, and leadership habits evolve too, they remain just words.
When the talk doesn’t meet the practice
Many organisations have the right intentions. Leaders genuinely want to improve services, support teams and make a difference. Yet our systems and structures often pull us back toward old patterns: control, certainty, and hierarchy.
You can see it in our org charts and our governance.
We say we’re user-centred, but we still decide solutions before we understand the problems.
We say we’re agile, but our teams spend more time reporting progress than making it.
We say we’re data-driven, but we mostly measure what looks good in an annual report.
We say we work in the open, but stop teams from openly discussing challenges or blockers because of “PR risk”.
None of this comes from bad intent. It comes from habit, from years of equating leadership with certainty and expertise rather than curiosity and learning.
What digital leadership really looks like
True digital leadership is about creating the conditions for user-centred work to thrive. And protecting it when the system pushes back.
In too many organisations, solutions are still predetermined before anyone has spoken to a user. Discovery is treated as optional, or at best, research is treated as a “once and done” activity. Designers and researchers are scattered thinly across projects, with little power to influence. Delivery and development teams outnumber UCD teams ten to one, and when pressure hits, user research is the first thing to be cut.
The cost of this is already visible. In the short term, teams burn out and services falter quietly. In the medium term, we lose the talent we most need — the researchers, designers and digital leaders who want to build things properly. And in the long term, we’re left with a brittle system that cannot adapt when it matters most.
The alternative is harder, but better: create an environment where it’s safe to test, learn and adapt, prioritise research, and treat user evidence as real evidence. That’s how transformation becomes something we do, not just something we say.
When user-centred design disappears, harm becomes invisible. We stop seeing how policies and services fail real people. We miss the chance to design with care, and to fix things before they fail.
That’s not a delivery problem. It’s a leadership problem.
From language to practice
We’ve learned to speak the language of digital in Wales. That’s a huge achievement. But now comes the harder, more exciting part: putting those words into practice.
Digital leadership means using power differently: to protect UCD practitioners and their expertise when everything around them is pushing for speed; to prioritise problem exploration and research over solutionising even when budgets tighten; and to treat evidence from users as the most valuable data a team can hold.
When leaders do that, transformation stops being a communications exercise. It becomes a lived practice, one that keeps products and services human and keeps our most skilled practitioners motivated to stay and build here, in Wales.
That means shifting from control to trust. From certainty to learning. From “digital as delivery” to “digital as culture.”
If we can make that shift together, as leaders, practitioners, and communities, then “digital transformation” will finally mean what we’ve always hoped it would: better public services, shaped by and for the people who use and deliver them.