 Ah, right, yes. Hi, everyone, I'm Amy Woodcroft. It's, well, how is everyone feeling today? Sorry, the lights are bright. Are we good? Yeah? Yeah? Glad to hear that, full of tasty foods and learnings, hopefully. So we've all heard that better data leads to better decision-making, or I'm sure we all have heard this, but I'm sure that we've all often seen attempts to get good data and good information, which we use to inform what our products, services, our policies, well, they go awry, despite our best intentions, and sometimes really horribly so. So today I'm gonna share just some simple thoughts and simple suggestions on how to help improve matters. So I invite you to imagine Gizman on the east coast of Northern Ireland. Who's been there? Sweet. So as we all know, it's a really gorgeous spot, but it's in an interesting position because it's not on the way to or from anywhere in particular. It means that people are there to visit specifically, which is great, because it means that people are there to experience it, but it also means that Gizman has to work a little bit harder to actually attract visitors to it, right? Because it's not getting that through fair traffic. Events, as one can imagine, like the annual Rhythm and Vines Music Festival and smaller community events as well, are a really good way to do this. So now imagine you're part of the Gizman District Council. You want to support events in your region. You know they're a big deal. And you want to better support the people who plan them as well as the people who attend them. You know you could be doing better based on some feedback that you'd had and also just generally wanting to, but you're not quite sure where to start. My business partner Nick and I were thrilled to be asked to help by running a Learn by Doing workshop with the Council, well, with a number of the Council staff to teach some of the basics of service design and agile service development to help develop some problem definitions, I eat what is actually the problem, not what you think the problem is, and to prototype some potential solutions. So I'm gonna run through the five things or five of the main things that people learned over the course of the day that we had with them. So one, this seems really obvious, but talk with people, talk with absolutely everybody that you can internally and externally. For example, much to the terror of a lot of people there, we bought in one of the most senior event planners in the region to chat with the staff about what was working and what wasn't working and well in terms of the Council's sort of processes and interactions and have a really open and honest and respectful conversation about what people might be able to improve. This was a lot more powerful than her writing complaints emails, which had happened in the past. And on the other side, it taught the Council stuff that interacting with your users, like your event planners, doesn't have to be terrifying. They were absolutely terrified of her up until this workshop. And it's a brilliant way to figure out what's not working and how to improve stuff. So the second one is don't assume and be a respectful and safe listener and responder. Organizations and those who interact with them tend to make assumptions about each other as we know. And this can well lead to major problems. Of course, sharing information can lead to things getting a lot better in terms of saving time and saving costs. So by talking with a whole range of people, the Council staff were able to see that they didn't actually really understand what events planners needed to do and when and the timelines and figure out what they needed to do to address that. Also remember that the loudest voices in the room may not, well, definitely aren't the only ones and they may not be the best ones. So it's a good thing to remember to make a safe space so that everyone can say something and put their feedback in. And it's also, of course, really important to engage with minority groups and minority voices. Learning by doing is, of course, extremely important. Over the course of the workshop, people got to learn and use a whole bunch of new skills around human-centered design, which was really cool. And we got to talk through a real issue and then figure out how to define the problem properly, think about solutions, go out and talk to real people about whether they might work and sort of iteratively prototype and improve our thoughts on the matter. And we got to prioritize what to focus on. So one fantastic thing that happened was out of that piece of work, the council was able to justify making a whole new position. So a whole new FTE just devoted to event coordination in the region and helping event planners get what they needed and when they needed it, which we thought was fantastic. So that's great for economic development. It's also kind of awesome for human development. And we think it's just generally great for awesomeness, per se. We like awesome. So remember to start small and iterate. Building a giant thing never works, right? Out of the box. Pick something small that addresses our problem and then start working on it. And always remember to keep going back to people, which I'll come to you shortly. So in this case, the simple thing was a shared calendar that people internally and externally could put their events and timelines and processes into so that everyone was on the same page and could see what was coming down the line. And remember that it's okay to fail. Experiments do that and you can sometimes learn more from your failures than your successes. So just try not to fail the same way each time. I find, it sometimes takes me a while. I have to triangulate my fails. And of course, keep, I'm gonna try not to swear here. So keep, swear word, talking with people. Something as we know that turns everyone off is you put in your time and your thoughts and your love and your effort into a decision-making process and you hear nothing back. It disappears into a horrible black box of decision-making. So if you've made a decision, tell people why. Be honest about it. Ask for more feedback. As you keep working on improving things, keep going back and talking to people. It seems obvious, but the so seldom happens. We know that the Gisborne District Council has kept doing this and it's a way in some cases to turn some of your biggest detractors into your biggest allies as well, which is quite exciting. And it's okay to show vulnerability. I think people tend to respond to it. And they tend to stay more engaged that way. Of course, why does it all matter? Because this is how we build better products and services and policies and why that matters is this is how we build a kinder New Zealand that's more fit for the future. Cool, thanks.