Design Systems for the People They Serve (August 15th, 2026)

I am writing this piece during a 16 hour flight. Sometimes I take for granted the fact that a normal part of our world is flying through the sky. It is an absolute marvel of engineering and ingenuity that this is possible; and a testament to the ability to scale what is at one time perceived as impossible to something our society cannot fathom living without. I recognize that not all people fly, but our global society, as well as many societies with massive tourism industry, rely on the assumption that flight is available to us. While it has been over 100 years since man first took flight in Kitty Hawk, it did not take nearly as long for flight to become ubiquitous.

I just got done an audiobook called Mastery which looked at how some incredible people developed the skills over the course of their lives to achieve incredible things. The Wright brothers were one such example in the book. There was an effort by many to become the first to achieve flight, many of whom were better funded than the Wright brothers. What separated the Orville and Wilbur Wright was their history and knowledge they brought to the project. The book describes the fundamental assumption that made them first to flight.

Others had thought of an airplane flying like a boat floating and focused on the vessel. The Wright brothers’ modest beginnings working in their bicycle shop and using the proceeds to work toward flight made them focus on the pilot. To them, the question was not how to make the plane float through the sky, but rather how to help a pilot balance during flight like a cyclist must do on a bike. I am missing a tremendous amount of information and steps, but this was the fundamental difference, as I understood the story, in their ultimately achieving flight. A striking factoid that sticks with me is that they built the plane for less than $1,000.

Innovation is critical if we are to achieve new things. In the modern world we often see innovation as something that moves a technology forward, and it often feels like innovation is seen as a marginal improvement on top of an existing product or technology. This is innovation and takes hard work, no doubt, but we often ignore the innovation of paradigm shifts, and the innovations that can stem from such an innovation. And, doing so can be more efficient.

Our public system has been designed in ways that serve itself as the priority rather than the people it is organized to serve. The fragmentation into uncoordinated pieces allows itself to function more easily, but comes at the cost of reducing the burden on end service users relying on multiple systems, which we all do to some extent. The bureaucracy that maintains homeostasis for systems has reduced its capacity to adapt to changing circumstances well. The politics of those influencing systems has further protected entrenched interests on both sides rather than focusing on the public interests we all share. Now, each of these elements, within reason, serves its purpose. Different agencies can bring expertise to different elements of public need, but if these parts of the broader system don’t communicate well (if at all) then we fail to comprehensively address true public need. Process is critical to serve such a large calling, but when the process becomes more important than what the process is supposed to be working toward, we have lost our way. Politics can help us organize ourselves and create alliances to move policies in ways that serve large numbers of people, but when we become more beholden to our parties than our principles of serving the greater good, politics becomes burdensome.

As I listened to the story of the Wright brothers and the paradigm shift that fed their innovation, I was picturing the flaw in how our systems have been constructed. What if, rather than putting the system at the center of its design, we put the people it was meant to serve? I must recognize in saying this that this is not a particularly novel concept. Human centered design has vast literature and action that proves this. However, we must continue to ask this question. A lot of human centered design that I have seen starts from the place of how systems are currently organized and then moves to how that organization can better serve people, rather than starting from the place of asking how a system can better serve people, and rarely do I see the question of how the public system at large can better be designed to serve we the people.

When I think about systems design, I think of those I have worked alongside and tried my best to serve, especially early in my career when I did direct service work. The student who lost friends to gun violence and simultaneously had to navigate academics and grief; the teacher who got into the profession to help kids thrive but found themselves in an overwhelmed system that made reaching kids at the necessary depth challenging, exacerbated by the need to have a second job because of the poor pay; the single mother of a child with special needs who worked multiple jobs to give her child the best she could; the veteran with severe PTSD, compounded by homelessness, who seemed unable to help the reenactment of violence he experienced, and continued to due to the reenactment; the isolated workaholic who despite having the financial means to support a good life did not have the other forms of capital that made it possible to do so. These are not just pretend stories, these are short descriptions of people I have come to know so far, and their stories are not isolated incidents. As my work has become more macro, I have learned just how typical such stories are, and I know because of the work I have done how hard it can be to navigate current systems and structures to get help in these circumstances.

That is why The Full Press centers community. The coalitions we are trying to promote cannot do everything that needs to be done on their own, but they provide agency and voice to individuals and families to shape decisions that impact them. Though it will take time, the goal is to have community members help shape the systems that inform the way that life plays out at a local level. I am fortunate to be in the midst of a months long project with a regional coalition in south-central Pennsylvania going through a systems practice together. The discussions we have had thus far together have already helped me see the system levers we must navigate and can manipulate to promote upstream wellbeing in new ways.

It feels like I am getting a bit abstract, so let me take a step back to make this system change a bit more concrete. In work done by Washington State that has become known as Self Healing Communities to support such coalitions and action as described above, communities worked to address the root cause drivers of multiple negative outcomes they were experiencing. One community was experiencing high levels of crime. Community members recognized that the conditions were perfect for criminality because it was so dark at night, so they organized to fix the street lights and had an event together celebrating turning the lights on. Crime in the community dropped and multiple benefits stemmed from such improved conditions. Another community that was more rural did not have widespread access to transportation. They organized to put in a bus stop near their community on an existing route. This created access to better jobs and other benefits, that transformed family trajectories and the community as a whole. This is the sort of systems thinking that manipulates conditions to promote wellbeing.

Perhaps because our systems have become organized to serve themselves rather than people, we do not work upstream near enough. This winds up hurting systems in addition to hurting people despite the short-term convenience of waiting for people to show up in systems to help them. The burdens our systems are navigating, the bottlenecks and debts, which wind up creating even more harm for all of us, are self-inflicted wounds stemming from a flawed underlying paradigm in how they are designed. We have seen what different looks like, and while it is not easy it is undoubtedly better than the status quo. Not only were outcomes improving in the Washington State example, but as a result of that they saved the state over $1 billion, which was a 35x return on investment. If the work had continued longer, and children born into healthier systems had children of their own, the reduction in transmission of intergenerational trauma would have resulted in exponentially higher ROI. We know more than they did at the time now and I believe can implement with even greater success and at scale.

Centering people in systems design is why community-led coalitions are foundational to The Full Press. From there, we can start to reimagine how our levels of government and the broader public system at large are organized in support of the people they are meant to serve, which is all of us. Local governments - county, municipality, and township - become responsive in new ways to the communities they serve. We have seen the importance of this with recent pushes around things like community policing, with law enforcement being a massive responsibility of local governments. There is recognition that services must be integrated with and responsive to the needs of the community they are organized to serve. This is just one example of a public system that local governments organize, but local government is where social services most frequently get delivered. This integration between communities and local governments is a core partnership for the success of The Full Press, but it is not the only one. Counties receive supports from and must be responsive to the state in which they reside, and coordination and alignment between county and state is a critical component of success as well. The state must be responsive to what counties need to best serve their communities, and counties must work with the state to adapt systems to understand new work and reorganize to best serve it. The connection between state governments and the federal government is similar, just at a larger scale. An example of the systems transformation that becomes possible in this organization is braiding and blending of current funding streams to address shared root cause drivers across outcomes that funding streams currently work to support, but the investment is not coordinated.

This is pretty high level and does not fully answer the question of what this change actually looks like. Part of that is because I try to keep these blog posts to a manageable length so that people actually read them, so I am unable to share all of my thoughts in a single post, and also there is more to learn as I try to make these changes at the local, state, and federal levels. But as my work moves forward it is with the spirit of innovation that underlies so many of the stories America tells itself. Human flight was hoped for but unexpected until it happened. It was built upon deep study of both successes and failures of efforts around flight for a long time before the successful experiment in Kitty Hawk. It occurred when someone thought more about the person flying the machine than the machine itself. It happened for far less money than was initially expected. And it quickly transformed the way our world worked.

I finish this piece halfway into my flight, five miles above the ground at hundreds of miles per hour, as though that’s normal. As we think about social innovation, we are not starting from scratch. The United States is built on an intentionally adaptable system of government that our forefathers called upon us to redesign as we work to create a more perfect union. The Full Press aims to do that. I look forward to the continued learning as time moves forward. And more importantly, I look forward seeing both individual lives and systems thrive.