Space Around the Thing: The invisible work that transforms public services

Since late 2024, we’ve been working within NHS England’s Digital Prevention Service Portfolio, supporting business change across digital screening programmes like breast and lung cancer.

This has given us a unique perspective between product development and real-world implementation in the particularly complex healthcare landscape.

In this interactive workshop hosted with our NHS colleagues, we’ll explore the “space around the thing” — the wider environment digital products enter — and why even well-designed solutions can fail without considering it.

Aimed at those working in service transformation, delivery, or digital roles, this session combines reflection with practical activities, helping participants reimagine how public services could look if we focused more on this invisible work.

Participants will leave with practical insights, clearer roles in enabling change, and actionable recommendations.

In digital teams, especially in agile environments, there’s a strong focus on the thing – the product, the feature, the user needs. And rightly so.

But we’ve watched brilliant products go nowhere, not because they were badly built, but because nobody designed for the environment they were entering.

In this workshop, jointly hosted with an NHS colleague, we’ll share our thoughts on the mindset, skills, and resilience it takes to transform public services in practice using real examples from NHS screening programmes. We’ll then open up the discussion for participants to apply this to their own context.

Key takeaways:

• A sharper working definition of “the space around the thing” — and why it’s not optional extra work, but core to whether digital products succeed
• Concrete examples of how this plays out
• A clearer sense of participants’ own role in making this invisible work visible and legitimate
• Practical recommendations participants can act on immediately in their day-to-day work
• A shared roadmap, built collaboratively in the session and circulated afterwards