For nearly two decades, behavioural insights have shaped default actions in government services. Alongside these, debates on the ethics and potential paternalism of nudge interventions have emerged. But this article is not about that — it is about their role in the necessary leadership in service design.
Service design, with the emergence of digital products, is even more often confused with the crafting of the main touchpoint or similar interaction. However the orchestration of people, props and processes is still very much the key skill of a service designer. People, be it users or service delivery actors, can never be entirely separate of their behaviour.
Broken Public Service Design vs. Enabling Technology
Since the Agile Manifesto’s release in 2001, “agile” became a buzzword across tech departments, including the public sector. Nearly 24 years on, practitioners continue to reflect on how this bold declaration by software developers reshaped work in large organisations. But it also brought broken code — experienced by users as broken digital services — leading to frustration and a desire for human support. The promise of enabling technology often fell short, leaving users hesitant to trust digital services. Yet government services are not optional. Can perception be shifted by the service design? Why is public sector still building broken services?
Role of Culture in Heterogeneous Teams
The autonomy of teams and the much-celebrated Adhocracy model — informal, flexible, and flat — gradually morphed into traditional siloed functions. The human factor organically reshaped the model, and the vision of innovative, client-facing developers faded under the very behaviours it originally sought to resist. Agile’s monocultural teams delivered fragmented tangible outputs at speed, later patched together by a distant institutional power. Meanwhile, users became increasingly diverse in culture, language, professional background, and values. Can value be translated in the effortless service use? So, what do these end-users actually value — and does it matter in compulsory government services?
Behaviour, Needs, Values, Value in Use
Yes, its value and values matter — especially when government services are compulsory, like filing taxes, getting documents, or drafting legislation. In these imposed interactions, the diversity of users must be prioritised. Their needs and values often show through behaviour, particularly in habitual use, one of the clearest signs of value-in-use. Why should software developers care? Because in agile teams, they are client-facing service actors capable of, for instance, effort nudges. And in that moment, many users decide whether to adopt the service or not.
Leadership as a Value in Public Life
One of the seven Nolan principles of public life is leadership, the same self-directed leadership agile encourages. But do users value leadership enough to see value-in-use in leading services, compulsory or not? Perhaps. Companies like Google or Apple might say “of course.” In government, it is subtler, especially for internal users accustomed to having tools, processes, and services imposed on them. Nudges — i.e. the ways in with the architecture of choice can be designed to influence decisions without restringing those making them — are an alternative to leading through influence in the intangible. What is the place of nudges when designing government services of any kind? Sustainable changes in behaviour.
Leading Sustainable Transformational Change
Concepts like democracy or active citizenship can be seen as older systems of choice architecture. They endured, arguably, because they became habits, i.e. sustained change through voluntary adoption. On the MBA thesis behind this article, this idea underpins the transformation of a Law Technology (LawTech) Service team into an in-house consulting service: a shift to a client service mindset enabled by nudge-based experiments. It unfolded within the complex landscape of a supranational governing body, struggling to drive adoption of a flagship initiative among internal users and independent counterparts. More importantly, hierarchies of needs — key to resonating with value-in-use — surfaced as just as relevant for addressing team dysfunction as they are for understanding user behaviour. Memory and intrinsic motivation nudges were widely recommended as drivers of the delivered behavioural change in the service delivery team.
Reflection on the Use of Behavioural Insights
Behavioural insights help to design choice architecture through nudge interventions, guiding people towards options that benefit them. But these mechanisms must be used ethically and in citizens’ best interests — a delicate balance still in its regulatory infancy. A nudge should also never become a tool for questionable actors to push a service, thus values of the service personnel and value-in-use must remain front-and-centre in any implementation plan. Perhaps, a task for a perception nudge.

Bibliography
Valverde, C. (2025). Designing Client-Ready Public Services Through Nudge-Based Experiments – How Behavioural Insights Can Enable Change in In-House LawTech Teams. Master’s Thesis. Turku University of Applied Sciences.

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