That question came into sharp focus earlier this month at FWD50, a global digital government conference I attended in Ottawa on November 4th. In a compelling keynote, Hillary Hartley, formerly Ontario’s Chief Digital and Data Officer, challenged the audience to reimagine how policy is created and delivered in the digital age.

Her message was clear: policy isn’t something to be handed down to delivery teams after the fact. It’s part of the system that shapes every public service - and it needs to be designed with the same care, iteration, and user focus as the service itself.

This idea aligns deeply with our work at The Moment. Because too often, digital and service transformation efforts focus only on what’s visible: user interfaces, streamlined flows, and faster transactions. But real transformation doesn’t happen at the surface. It happens when we reach into the system itself - and redesign its rules.

Every service lives within a system. That system has boundaries, actors, incentives, constraints - and rules. These rules aren’t just laws or policies. They include eligibility criteria, process protocols, funding formulas, performance metrics, and all the unwritten assumptions about how things “should” work.

Yet, when organizations redesign services, they often treat these rules as fixed. Unchangeable. Outside the scope of design. So instead of questioning them, teams are forced to work around them. They build better flows on top of outdated structures.

But as systems thinker Donella Meadows taught us, the most powerful places to intervene in a system are not the easiest or most obvious ones. In her famous framework, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, changing the rules is among the most transformative - and most neglected - leverage points. It sits near the top of the ladder, just below shifting goals and paradigms. Most redesign work, in contrast, happens at the bottom rungs: improving delays, strengthening feedback loops, tuning performance incentives.

That’s not enough. Optimizing within a broken system still delivers broken outcomes.

Let’s ground this idea in the real world. In 2013, the UK government’s Universal Credit program - intended to simplify and improve the country’s welfare system - was in crisis. Hundreds of millions of pounds had been spent. Years had passed. And no working service had been delivered.

A reset was ordered. But this time, they didn’t just bring in new technologists or tweak the project plan. They co-located policymakers with delivery teams. They started testing not just software, but policy. They piloted the service with small groups of real users. And crucially, when problems emerged, they had the mechanisms and relationships in place to change the rules.

Policy assumptions were revised in real time. Delivery constraints were fed back into regulatory thinking. Together, this cross-functional team didn’t just design a better user experience - they reshaped the system that delivers benefits to millions.

You can read more in the UK’s National Audit Office report from 2014, which documented how this shift to integrated, iterative working led to faster progress, lower risk, and a clearer path to implementation.

Too often, policy is developed upstream and handed down to programs and delivery teams - resulting in what I’ve come to call “translated bureaucracy”. The original intent is diluted or lost in interpretation. Services are implemented, but outcomes don’t change.

Bridging this translation gap is where service design becomes system design. When policy, program, and delivery sit at the same table, the rules themselves become prototypes - ready to evolve with users, not just be enforced upon them.

We’ve seen this advantage firsthand in our work with the International Baccalaureate Organization (IB). Our client Pam Bender is the Head of a department called "Policy and Design" - a name that reflects their commitment to integrating these two disciplines. This team is responsible for both the rules by which schools become authorized to deliver IB’s education programs and the design of the future-state experience for schools undergoing that transformation. Because policy and design are held together, they can shape both the constraints and the experience of change - leading to more coherent and effective service delivery.

The lesson here is clear: when policy, regulation, and service design are treated as separate domains, failure becomes more likely - and costlier. But when we bring the rules of the system into the scope of design, new possibilities open up:

• Policy intent becomes grounded in the messy reality of real people in their diverse contexts before being implemented at scale.
• Complexity is reduced as policy and delivery teams clarify what truly matters - and let go of outdated or unnecessary requirements.
• Adaptability increases as rules are treated as hypotheses, not commandments - ready to evolve as the system learns.
• Cross-functional collaboration deepens, breaking down silos between technologists, policymakers, designers, and delivery teams.