When someone suggested I write a blog to mark ten years of Capacity, my first thought was the wins, the achievements. But that’s never really been our style. We’ve spent ten years working in the gaps. The spaces where systems don’t quite connect, where new ways of working struggle to find a home and where people’s lives don’t work out like the pilot project.
I remember the early days of Capacity when explaining what we did took nearly as long as doing the work. Ten years later, I’m still doing it. But at least now we’ve got some real stories to back it up. The last ten years haven’t always gone to plan. But sometimes the best things don’t work out exactly as you expect.
Here are ten things that shaped Capacity, not the greatest hits, just some honest reflections that made us who we are.
1. The problem was never a lack of ideas
When we started out, there was an assumption that public services were struggling because nobody had thought of anything better than the status quo. Turns out that was wrong. The ideas were everywhere – in frontline teams, in our communities and in the lived experience of the people using services. The gap was always between the idea and the doing. That insight shaped everything about how Capacity works. Today, we work at the intersection of designing and doing.
2. Place matters
The Liverpool City Region has its own culture, history and way of getting things done. You earn trust with people and communities by showing up and sticking around. We learnt early on that being rooted in the region has given us a real advantage in the work we’ve done in places like Birkenhead, Bootle, Kensington or Widnes. You can’t parachute in a way of working and expect it to work.
3. Strategies don’t change things. People do.
Here’s what they don’t tell you when you start something new. The idea is the easy bit. What’s hard is finding people who care as much as you do. We’ve been lucky to build a team that cares deeply about the communities we work in.
The work we do can be hard. You can’t do it on autopilot. And we found brilliant people who believe that too. That, more than any plan or strategy, is why we’re still here.
4. Co-production isn’t a slogan
Early on, we’d talk about ‘involving’ people in service design. We got better at the language and, more importantly, at the practice behind it. Real co-production means doing something with people’s stories, experiences and trust. The work isn’t done when the workshop ends. It’s just starting.
5. The best public sector teams are brilliant people doing difficult work
We’ve spent ten years working alongside children’s teams, social workers, neighbourhood managers and community health teams. The dedication, creativity and emotional labour that goes into public services is intense and sometimes completely invisible.
6. Our ventures changed us
In the last few years, we’ve moved beyond consultancy into building social enterprises. There’s a limit to how much you can change from the outside looking in. Our ventures mean we’ve got skin in the game. When you’re responsible for making something work, you think about it differently. We’ve experienced the highs and lows, but we still believe the best way to show something’s possible is to do it.
7. What went wrong is as important as what went right
We’ve worked on projects that didn’t work as well as we hoped. Approaches that seemed right but could’ve worked better. But the culture we’ve tried to build at Capacity is one where we talk openly about what didn’t work and why. It’s not easy for the public sector to do this – admitting failure can be hard. We’ve tried to model something different and share what didn’t work just as openly as what did.
8. Austerity and COVID (sadly) revealed what was possible
We were born into austerity – a time of brutal cuts that stripped back public services to the bone. It created tough decisions. But it also created urgency. We’ve seen some of the most radical thinking about public services come from teams with no slack left in the system and no choice but to think differently.
Then COVID hit. And public services teams did things in weeks that would previously have taken years. Life-saving community support and digital transformation happened overnight. It was a tragedy that none of us wanted, but it also showed that radical change was possible when the status quo stops being an option.
9. Collaboration is harder than it looks and more important than ever
Big challenges facing public services can’t be solved by any single organisation. They need collaboration across sectors, teams and geographical boundaries. We’ve committed to convening and creating the conditions for collaboration. It’s slow work. It can be frustrating. But when it works, it’s transformative.
10. People are always the starting point
‘Making public services people services’ didn’t come from a branding exercise. It came from our experience of what happens when services are designed around people’s lives, not what’s available. When you start with people, their lives, unique circumstances and strengths, the design of services looks completely different.
We haven’t got all the answers. But over the last ten years, we’ve brought together public sector know-how, service design expertise and community insight to turn good ideas into real change in Liverpool City Region.
Get in touch if you’d like to know more about the work we do.
