Say "rebranding" and everyone pictures the same scene: a redesigned logo, a refreshed palette, a catchy slogan, some nicely packaged storytelling. The INPS rebranding started from a far less photogenic premise: nobody had asked for it. Not the leadership, not the departments, not the citizens. The organization — 125 years of history, the largest welfare agency in Europe — had no idea whatsoever that it had an identity problem.
And that is precisely what made it an innovative project. In the classification I use for innovation there are three configurations: a known problem tackled with a new tool, an unknown problem tackled with a known tool, and an unknown problem with an unknown tool. The Sirio design system belonged to the first family: everyone knew that 450 digital services, all different, were a problem — what was missing was the tool. The rebranding belonged to the second, which is trickier than it looks:
The main obstacle lies not in the solution, but in the diagnosis.
Rebranding as a practice is well known, codified, tested for decades in the private sector. INPS even already had a logo, a few templates and a rudimentary brand manual. What was missing was the awareness that any of this constituted a problem. Before designing anything, we had to build the urgency for change where none was perceived. Convincing an organization that what it has always done is no longer enough, while everything apparently "works", is diagnostic work before it is design work.
A disorderly sum of contradictory signals
As I told in Brand, promise, experience: the brand is the promise, the experience is its execution. We had already put our hands on the execution — design system, usability standards, service simplification. The promise, however, had stayed frozen in a past era. Or rather: there were hundreds of them in circulation, one for each office, department or project that communicated on its own, in the name of creativity, autonomy or — more simply — habit. An unattended identity, after all, "is not an identity: it is a disorderly sum of contradictory signals", one that confuses those who look at it from outside and disorients those who live inside it.
At the start of the project we tried to run a census of the logos in circulation. There was everything: logos for individual digital services, logos for the teams in charge of waste recycling, the institutional mark reinterpreted on the signs of local offices with creative colors and shapes. Each one told a small identity story, disconnected from the rest. We soon got tired of cataloguing them — and the point, by then, was clear well before the list was finished.
"A public agency just needs to work"
The deepest friction was cultural. According to a widespread view, brands belong to the world of companies and exist to sell things; a public administration "wouldn't need to tell its own story, but merely to function": what matters is efficiency, the rest is a marketing indulgence. Except that institutions also communicate, constantly — through forms, letters, websites, services — and all of this builds or erodes trust, whether anyone is minding it or not.
On top of the objection of principle came one of feasibility, usually phrased like this: "there will always be someone in a position of power who will do as they please anyway". A well-founded objection, by the way. The honest answer is that absolute consistency does not exist, and that the value of governance lies in making exceptions what they should be: recognizable, isolated, manageable. The surprisingly creative repertoire of those exceptions is worth a short gallery of archetypes.
The platform as a decision-making device
The heart of the project was the brand platform: purpose, vision, mission and values. I know this sounds like the paragraph everyone skips in presentations. In our case, though, the platform had a precise job: to act as a decision-making device — making criteria and priorities explicit, shrinking the space for personal taste and arbitrary exceptions, defining what is non-negotiable.
The purpose: "We believe growth is worth more when it is collective: that is why we at INPS give each person the strength to grow". The vision: "We want to build a country in which every person can grow and contribute to growth". The mission: "We add value to every person's life, offering millions of Italians the best possible service every day".
That last sentence, apparently harmless, is the most subversive of the three, because it forces the organization to answer a question it had dodged for decades: what is our core business? The organization had always described itself as an executor of policies, an applier of rules, a manager of obligations. Declaring that the heart of the mission is offering "the best possible service" puts the user back at the center, and moves the measure of value from the volume of files processed to the perceived quality of the service.
Then the six values, each with an operational reading — because a value without practical consequences is just a motivational poster:
Accountability. Rejecting the "not my job" logic: if an online service is incomprehensible, the problem belongs to the organization, not to "someone else".
Inclusivity. INPS serves all citizens, without exception: if someone is left out, the system has failed. Hence the ban on acronyms in the names of citizen-facing benefits, the simplification of texts and — for the first time — the systematic measurement of readability scores.
Continuous improvement. A Trojan horse with good intentions: inside an apparently obvious idea, we installed the iterative approach of digital service design — prototype, test with real people, measure outcomes as well as outputs.
Respect. For centuries it was the citizen who adapted to the timing and logic of the public administration; this value flips the burden: it is the organization that must answer to people's right to understand, to access, to never repeat data already provided.
Concreteness. Service names that say what the service does, without circumlocutions: an antidote both to formalisms and to the marketing frills that mimic famous tech products.
Listening. We cannot design for citizens if we do not listen to them. A permanent practice, the opposite of self-referentiality.
An imposed compass
Those who read the Sirio story will remember the UX@INPS manifesto, built collaboratively through workshops and co-design. For the brand platform we did the opposite: the framework was formulated by a small working group — after a listening phase made of external perception surveys and individual interviews with the leadership — and then presented to the organization as a non-negotiable frame.
Losing months in discussions about "who we are" would have produced more conflict than cohesion.
In that context — a textbook Tug of War, with opposing interests and little alignment — the identity would have come out of any extended negotiation in pieces: what was needed was a single, clear, stable platform. That choice, which deserves a defense of its own, is the subject of Collaborate as Little as Necessary.
Of course, an imposed platform risks remaining a dead letter: formally applied, owned by no one. There were three countermeasures. The first, constant narration: every release told and retold, inside and outside the organization, until the rebranding became a public story that was hard to ignore. The second, the brand manual, grown through three successive forms: first digital documents on the intranet, accompanied by official communications signed by the top leadership — to make clear these were binding rules, and not suggestions; then a printed volume, because in the public sector a printed book "officializes" more than any file, and — with apologies to the strictest environmentalist — is also easier to consult; finally a public brand portal, incrementally updatable and open to citizens. The third countermeasure, the templates: event posters, name plates, letterheads, document folders, even Teams backgrounds. Ready-to-use semi-finished products that worked as the brand's transmission belt: while the logo and the manual stay in the background, templates are what people use, fill in and send out every single day. It's the kind of invisible infrastructure I also wrote about in Design ops from scratch.
The hard level
The rebranding took years, went through a change of leadership, and survived by becoming institutionalized in a dedicated function — the Experience Authority — which turned a personal sponsorship into a permanent safeguard. Looking back, I draw two lessons. First: innovation does not always start from a visible fire; sometimes it starts from a silent fragility, and the hardest work is building the awareness that the fragility exists. Second: an apparently "aesthetic" operation can be a deeply political and organizational act, because redefining an identity means redefining who may speak on behalf of the institution, in what voice, and by what rules.
If Sirio was the easy level, the rebranding was the hard level: the terrain where you learn that innovating also means teaching an organization to overcome its own "we've always done it this way".