I recently attended a talk by Theresa Amberger about what her organization, Next, does for the German civil service. Amongst many interesting points, one of the things that they recently focused on is the benefits of networking for civil servants. Specifically, many of the civil servants they talk to are looking for “inspiration”. That, for me, raised the question: what is inspiration for civil servants and, more broadly, for people desk jobs working in large organizations?

This question is important, because it’s been disregarded. The presumption is that if you’re not in a creative industry, or if you’re not an artisan, inspiration is not part of your need.

But that’s not true.

At both the Lab at OPM and the Service Design and Enterprise Digital Experience teams in GSA, we took inspiration seriously. That’s because, in the same way that humans cannot survive on bread alone, great work cannot come from doing, seeing, and experiencing the same processes and context over and over again.

Inspiration doesn’t have to be some transcendent experience like breathing glacial air while looking over the sweep of the Canadian Rockies, nor does it have to be small and poetic, like watching the light change in your living room. Inspiration, especially for customer experience professionals and public servants, can and maybe should be quotidian, normal, and accessible. We can find inspiration in getting something done easily and well. We can gain inspiration by a simple system functioning no matter what the chaos around it. We can even see inspiration in the process of point out the flaws in a product or service, because knowing the flaws is the first step to fixing them.

But the trick is that we have to be tuned in to see them. Finding inspiration is a self-fulfilling cycle: the more you do it, the more inspiration you perceive. Conversely, feeling bereft of inspiration is also a self-fulfilling cycle; the less inspired you are, the less inspired you are. All this raises the question: how do you start the virtuous cycle of being open to inspiration and keep it going? How do you get out of the negative cycle when you’re caught in it?

At Ishmael Interactive, starting that positive inspiration cycle can come from many places: reading a great newsletter, going for a walk, or examining the workflows on sam.gov (we’re nerds, okay?!)

But we’re interested: where do you find inspiration for your work? What was the last thing you heard, saw, or experienced that made a CX idea pop into your head? Let me know in the substack comments or by emailing anamonroe@gmail.com. And if you haven’t felt inspired lately, let’s talk about that, too. Better experiences are all around us; we just have to make them happen.

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What we’re reading this week

Apple just released an eye-opening new paper on how LLMs don’t “think” at all. That’s exactly what we’ve been saying for years, but thanks to Apple for bringing the evidence. Read the paper via the link: The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity.

Speaking of AI, Harvard Business Review is asking What’s the Future of Middle Management? TL/DR: the nature of middle management jobs will change, but they won’t go away. We agree; ask us why in the comments.

Not a read, but we’re super into Season 2 of the Economist magazine’s BossClass. Especially love the season opener on innovation. Spoiler alert: to be innovative, you have to give folks permission and space to try new things.

If you like these reads, let us know, and be sure to send us a link with what’s got you thinking; we would love to discuss!

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Painting credit: Gustave Caillebotte, Raboteurs de parquet, 1875