Writings

The Expectation of Impact: How Design Becomes Indispensable in a Public Organisation

Design gets into the room where decisions are made only when it brings measured impact on subjects those deciding already care about. A case study, and what sets apart the countries where design is attached to a budget or a mandatory gate.

Solutions Are Becoming a Commodity: Design in the Age of AI

When generating a solution takes minutes, value migrates to choosing the right problems and proving impact. The text-simplification project, reread as a design project that uses AI.

Making Things That Work: the Market Substitute for the Public Sector

Without a market, improvement becomes optional. The only external pressure available to a public institution is binding measurement of user impact — and design is the discipline that produces and measures it.

You Don't Choose Innovation: It Happens to You. The O.R.C.A. Model

Hostility, resistance, complexity and anxiety are the four forces anyone trying to innovate will meet. Recognising them in advance changes how you run a project.

Compass, Team, Fuel: the Three Tools of Public-Sector Innovators

A vision that holds the course, the ability to dose collaboration, and real sponsorship to protect the journey: three operational skills without which an innovation project stalls halfway.

Speaking to Young People Without Dressing Up as One

The INPS per i Giovani case: how you build trust with a generation that doesn't understand you, starting from listening and bringing young people into the process before the message.

The Experience Authority: Who Guards the Rules When Projects End

A design system without stewardship quickly becomes a forgotten manual. The story of a function built to support teams rather than block them — and of how 450 different ways of measuring satisfaction became two.

Meaning First, Structure Later: the UX@INPS Manifesto

Before a single component was designed, the Sirio project started from a manifesto written together with people from different silos — and published when there was still nothing to show.

The Trojan Horse: Building Iteration into Identity

Nobody objects to "continuous improvement". Coding it among the brand values was the way to bring a far more demanding idea inside the institution's identity: quality has to be proven with evidence.

From Bureaucratese to Clarity: AI-Driven Text Simplification in Government

More than 2,100 texts rewritten, roughly ten million more people able to understand them, and a generative-AI experiment blind-validated by 1,620 users: 71.4% preferred the machine-written version.

The Simpleton, the Nitpicker and the Ninja: the Archetypes of Resistance to Change

Three recurring figures met while introducing guidelines in an institution where everyone had always done things their own way. And why a governance is judged above all by how it handles exceptions.

The Rebranding Nobody Asked For

The INPS rebranding started from a problem the organisation didn't know it had. When the difficulty lies in the diagnosis rather than the solution, the innovator's first job is making visible what nobody sees.

Leadership Doesn't Buy Tasks, It Buys Visions

How you win the support of the leadership of a large public organisation: always bring a solution alongside the problem, connect to the priorities of the moment, narrate the risks instead of hiding them.

The Pincer: Why Middle Management Blocks Innovation (and How to Unblock It)

The middle layer resists for rational reasons: incentives that reward something else, and a culture that discourages exposure. The lever is converging pressure from the top and the front line, making yes easier than no.

The Five Traits of the Leader Who Has No Formal Authority

In the public sector, whoever leads an innovation project has neither hierarchical nor economic levers. What remains is influence, clarity of direction, and the ability to make change desirable.

Collaborate as Little as Necessary

When alignment is low and competition high, wide tables turn into protest arenas. The counter-intuitive strategy that carried the rebranding through, and the price it took to pay.

Objectives Are Not Tools

Building a shared vision takes a decision first: a few clear objectives, set by whoever leads, becoming the boundaries within which the group can move freely. Plus the distinction that saves projects: adopting a tool is not an objective.

The Public Sector's Secret Advantage: a Vision That Can Tell the Truth

Private companies chase a purpose almost nobody believes. A public institution can afford a statement of purpose that is true all the way down — a competitive advantage almost nobody uses.

A Vision Is a Compass: Five Characteristics

What separates a vision that actually steers the work from a sentence on a noticeboard: clarity, measured ambition, roots in a real need, the power to engage, and resistance over time.

The Anxiety of the Public-Sector Innovator

Working in full public view, being the only one who sees the whole project, fearing that a change at the top will erase years of work. The three forms of an innovator's apprehension, and how to live with them.

The Mechanical Watch: Three Ways to Fail at Innovation in a Complex System

In a complex system the hard part isn't finding the solution, it's making it work alongside everything else. Three recurring risks, told through the cases that taught them to me.

Resistance Doesn't Push Back: It Absorbs

Endless requests for further opinions, purely formal agreement, projects allowed to advance onto a siding while a more cautious twin quietly appears elsewhere. How to recognise faceless resistance, and how to defuse it.

Latent Hostility: the Invisible Enemy of Innovation Projects

Declared opposition can be faced. Far more insidious is the kind that agrees in the meeting and then leaves everything as it was, because it comes from change experienced as a loss of control over one's own work.

Why Innovating in the Public Sector Is Harder: the Six Structural Conditions

Recruitment, the absence of a market, procurement constraints, self-reference, fear of error and short political cycles. Six conditions no public innovator can ignore, explaining far more than individual good or bad will.

Design Ops from Scratch: Building a UX Function Inside Government

Manifesto, design system, design framework, rebranding and governance: five phases in a precise order, each made possible by the one before it.

Function Is a Commodity: the Value of Experience When Users Can't Choose

People expect services to work: the difference is made by the experience. And that matters even more where nobody can switch provider.

Sirio: Building a Design System from Scratch in a Complex Public Administration

Silos that don't talk to each other, failed previous attempts, vendors competing among themselves: the organisational story of how collaboration made INPS's design system possible.

Is Collaboration a Silver Bullet?

A two-axis model — alignment and competition — for understanding when collaboration genuinely pays off: the Relay Race, the Picnic, the Cross-Country Race and the Tug of War.

Designers, Not Artists

The artist-designer syndrome, constraints as the engine of creativity, and why institutional identities should be born classic instead of chasing trends.

Brand Is a Promise, Experience Is the Proof: Three Scenarios for Designers

Sovereign brand in luxury, frustrated brand in telco, absent brand in government: three configurations that radically change the job of designing experiences.