Design Meets Democracy 🇺🇸 with Chelsea Mauldin

[00:00:00] Gerry Scullion: Hey folks, and welcome back to another episode of This is HCD. My name is Gerry Scullion and I'm a human-centered service design practitioner based in the beautiful and the somewhat rainy day today in Dublin City, Ireland. And today on the show I'm joined by Chelsea Mauldin, an executive director of the Public Policy Lab in New York.

[00:00:19] Gerry Scullion: Three things that really stood out in this conversation, uh, the early battles. So Chelsea shares what it was like bringing service design into the US government when design was still thought of as throw pillows and dresses. The second thing is the shift how Obama era initiatives and municipal innovation labs helped build momentum for public services and designed to thrive in the US culture.

[00:00:41] Gerry Scullion: The third thing, the reality check, why half the real work in government design happens? After the design phase in the messy world of systems integration and change management. It's a fantastic conversation. Chelsea, I could speak to for hours. In fact, I could probably speak to for days. So if you're interested in design and really how it works within [00:01:00] government, you're gonna absolutely love this one.

[00:01:02] Gerry Scullion: I know I learned an awful lot from Chelsea in the, our conversation that we had. Please, if you're listening, you enjoy what we do. Don't forget to subscribe, like to this podcast. Share it out to all your friends. If you're working in government, it's a great one. I know you're gonna enjoy it. Let's jump straight in.

[00:01:26] Chelsea Mauldin: My background is, uh, I had a first career as a book editor and, um, at a certain point, I, I switched over to editing websites. And then rode the internet bubble up until at a certain point I just thought, I don't think I can build another shopping cart. I'm gonna be, I'm unhappy. Yeah. Doing this, helping people sell stuff.

[00:01:59] Chelsea Mauldin: [00:02:00] Um, and at the time that I was doing that work, there wasn't really much of a codified theory of what we now call UX or ui. Yeah. And so I was thinking a lot about how do people navigate the intangible. Yeah. Um, so I started reading a lot of, um, kind of canonical urban planning stuff because I thought, Hmm, maybe I can understand better how people navigate, navigate the complex sit system of a city.

[00:02:36] Chelsea Mauldin: And that will help me think about how people might navigate a complex digital space. Um, what years

[00:02:43] Gerry Scullion: of this Chelsea,

[00:02:45] Chelsea Mauldin: this is and one, yeah. Something like that. And um, and then I decided to go back to graduate school and study planning.

[00:02:56] Chelsea Mauldin: So I ended up

[00:02:57] Chelsea Mauldin: in a program at the [00:03:00] LSE, which is half an urban design program and half a social theory program.

[00:03:06] Gerry Scullion: Okay.

[00:03:07] Chelsea Mauldin: So it was, uh, think about the city as a social construct and also think about the city as a designed construct. Yeah. Um, and I think, I don't know if you have noticed this amongst people who you've interviewed, but a bunch of us of this, of my age, there are many service designers who trained as planners because the pattern.

[00:03:31] Chelsea Mauldin: It was about systems and patterns, like that was a thing that you could go and study that was about systems and patterns before service design existed as a thing that you could study. Um, so I began, uh, after graduate school, I began working with government agencies on strategic urban design projects.

[00:03:53] Chelsea Mauldin: Nice. And then that led to, um, an opportunity with some colleagues here in New York to begin to try to bring [00:04:00] design, strategic design to the federal government here in the United States. And once we began doing that, it just became clear, oh, there's a, there's literally an endless number of government service design projects to be done in this country, and no one is doing

[00:04:18] Chelsea Mauldin: that.

[00:04:18] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah. So

[00:04:19] Chelsea Mauldin: we began doing the work of the public policy lab in around 2009, and then we officially set up the organization in 2000.

[00:04:29] Gerry Scullion: Okay, so you are right at the, the forefront of design into government. Um, and you would've been faced with, uh, probably bunting and balloons welcoming you in, um, and giving you lots and lots of supplies post-its,

[00:04:47] Chelsea Mauldin: remember?

[00:04:48] Chelsea Mauldin: I do.

[00:04:49] Gerry Scullion: And the cake was beautiful that day. It was, it was so moist. Um, what was it like, um, and I, I'm, I'm looking for war stories here as well. [00:05:00] So what was it like when you went in at the very start

[00:05:03] Chelsea Mauldin: when one could talk oneself into a room with, uh, policymakers or people who were leading government programs in that, in that time period?

[00:05:14] Chelsea Mauldin: Um, there was, generally speaking no awareness of design. Yeah. As a strategic tool. There was an awareness of design as an aesthetic approach to the improvement of tangible things.

[00:05:35] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:05:35] Chelsea Mauldin: Oh, you will, you will create a beautiful dress for me to wear to the o Oscars. You will make decisions about what kinds of throw pillows should go on my, on my sofa.

[00:05:45] Chelsea Mauldin: Um, but there was no

[00:05:47] Gerry Scullion: interior design

[00:05:48] Chelsea Mauldin: sense that what a designer, how a designer could be helpful to someone who was trying to deliver social services. Mm-hmm. Um, so we spent [00:06:00] a good bit of time in those early years just even sort of introducing conceptually what a design approach is to people inside of government.

[00:06:12] Chelsea Mauldin: Um, and luckily found some good partners in those early days. Yeah. Who for various reasons had understood what we were talking about and were prepared to let us. Uh, muck around inside of their systems to try to develop various forms of improvement.

[00:06:30] Gerry Scullion: Can I ask in that time,

[00:06:33] Chelsea Mauldin: yeah.

[00:06:33] Gerry Scullion: And maybe it's still the same, so there's an assumption there, but socially and culturally in America, is it understood that design is more than just throw cushions and making a nice dress for the Oscars?

[00:06:46] Chelsea Mauldin: I mean, now certainly

[00:06:48] Gerry Scullion: Is this, now

[00:06:49] Chelsea Mauldin: yes, it

[00:06:49] Gerry Scullion: has changed. If so, what, what did, what's changed? What's helped

[00:06:54] Chelsea Mauldin: move the narrative along?[00:07:00]

[00:07:00] Chelsea Mauldin: I, I think a, uh,

[00:07:03] Chelsea Mauldin: a combination of a few things. I think, um, you know, good efforts by, uh, socially minded service and policy designers to actually engage in intelligent ways with public sector partners to do better service delivery. So there's like. Real and good, genuine efforts and good work. Um, I think there also it became a marketing positioning offer

[00:07:33] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:07:34] Chelsea Mauldin: For, um, large consultancies serving government clients as well. And I think it could design in those contexts was sold as, um, a smart thing from the private sector that government should also be making use of. Because there's a, a [00:08:00] dominant narrative in US public services that the government is a bad provider.

[00:08:09] Gerry Scullion: Okay.

[00:08:10] Chelsea Mauldin: Because the market is the appropriate provider of value. So the government will always be a second rate provider compared to the market.

[00:08:19] Gerry Scullion: Compared to the,

[00:08:20] Chelsea Mauldin: so in as much as. Uh, government seeks to be a better provider. It better use market approaches.

[00:08:29] Chelsea Mauldin: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:30] Chelsea Mauldin: So design, I think, you know, one way to position design as something attractive and desirable was to say, this is how leading government, uh, corporations do innovation, change design.

[00:08:49] Chelsea Mauldin: Um, and then I think the final piece of it had to do with, um, a dominant narrative in the US that in as much as there is public sector innovation, [00:09:00] it is digital in innovation. It, it's the creation of better digital tools and products. And that, um, often created problems in that there was not a focus on human to human experiences or other mechanisms that human beings might access a policy enabled service.

[00:09:22] Chelsea Mauldin: But it, um, did mean that a, a bunch of, you know, relatively smart technologists got invited in to do transformation efforts, and those smart technologists understood the necessity of doing good research and design to support whatever digital system they were implementing.

[00:09:38] Gerry Scullion: Yeah. So around the time the public Policy Lab, um, started, would've been second term of Obama, is that correct?

[00:09:47] Gerry Scullion: During that period? That's, that's so I know, I know Obama was leaning into design, uh, in quite a big way. So I guess that might have helped as well.

[00:09:57] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah, I mean, the US Digital Service was launching [00:10:00] the White House. Um, yeah. As a design driven team, uh, 18 F was launching inside of the General Services Administration, uh, to do digital transformation work.

[00:10:13] Chelsea Mauldin: Um, the lab at OPM, uh, inside of the Office of Personnel Management was really launching as a. Real true service design practice. Um, so there was that work occurring, um, on the federal level. And then additionally there were innovation teams, um, sprouting up inside of municipal agencies. Okay. Bloomberg Philanthropies was very invested in bringing innovation capability into mayor's offices.

[00:10:46] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:10:47] Gerry Scullion: New York was one, wasn't it?

[00:10:48] Chelsea Mauldin: Uh, not in New York, uh, for a variety of political reasons, but in many other cities across the country, Bloomberg was supporting innovation teams inside of mayoral [00:11:00] offices, and they were, uh, understood design to be one of the capabilities that should be on those innovation teams.

[00:11:08] Chelsea Mauldin: Mm-hmm. Um, and then there were also, you know, other, um, trying to think of those early days like. Boston set up a team called the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics. Yeah. Uh, led by Nigel Jacob. Um, there was a team in San Francisco, a civic innovation team that launched not quite that early, a little bit later, um, run by Kerry Bishop who had started future gov in, uh, uk.

[00:11:38] Chelsea Mauldin: So like, there was a, a, there were simultaneous efforts happening on both the federal and the municipal law

[00:11:45] Gerry Scullion: groundswell. Yeah. So, let's go back to when you were entering into government. I guess, like, you know, you'd set up the public policy lab and you were starting to win work. What was that like, uh, at the coalface [00:12:00] in the early days and what, what did you have to do from a tactical perspective, I guess to build trust

[00:12:08] Chelsea Mauldin: mean?

[00:12:08] Chelsea Mauldin: I think

[00:12:10] Chelsea Mauldin: what we,

[00:12:11] Chelsea Mauldin: uh. What we observed at a certain point, and, and to some large degree this even still remains true, is that the people who are interested in bringing, uh, policy design and service design into government tend to be in strategic or innovation or futures oriented roles inside of executive government agencies.

[00:12:40] Chelsea Mauldin: The folks who are in those roles typically are not sitting on top of operational delivery stacks. They are, they're in an executive's office. They are in the office of strategic planning. They are in some unit of government explicitly charged with [00:13:00] thinking about future, future issues. Um, but meanwhile, 90 or 95% of the effort and focus and money and labor of the agency.

[00:13:13] Chelsea Mauldin: Is is focused on, on the delivery of the current status quo of the service.

[00:13:18] Chelsea Mauldin: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:19] Chelsea Mauldin: So you are always having to do a, a sideways move from the people who have actually brought you in to do the work as an external partner, partner to the people who actually own the policy delivery stack that you are attempting to put interventions into.

[00:13:41] Chelsea Mauldin: Um, so that question of how do you develop, uh, trust and shared intentions across really two different teams that you're interacting with? Yeah. The team that has a set of strategic requirements and [00:14:00] desires of your work and the operations folks who actually have to live with whatever it is that you are designing and then operate it after you have dis.

[00:14:11] Gerry Scullion: So what was the public, uh, policy lab, how was that set up? Was it a set up as a business and how was it position? Not, not for, yes. So not for, but

[00:14:22] Chelsea Mauldin: never be wealthy

[00:14:27] Gerry Scullion: goes

[00:14:30] Chelsea Mauldin: beginning.

[00:14:32] Gerry Scullion: So it was set up. Yeah. And like how did you position it with, uh, government entities at that stage? Um, 'cause I know it was positioned more like a partner versus like a consultancy or shared, shared, shared service. Can you talk to me about that a bit more?

[00:14:52] Chelsea Mauldin: And it, it very much is a, it's a thing that we have always felt was pretty important, which was to say to government partners, [00:15:00] uh, we, you are not our client.

[00:15:04] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:15:04] Chelsea Mauldin: You government entity are not the client of this organization. The client of this organization is, is members of the public. Yeah. Who we're attempting to deliver better services for. You're our partner in that effort. We share a mutual client, so let's work together to try to figure out how a better policy or service can be enabled for the members of the public who we're, I love that.

[00:15:29] Chelsea Mauldin: Who we're mutually attempting to serve. And I feel like that, um, has given us also a positionality where we're not always a hundred percent in agreement with our partners. There are, you know, there are times when what we would like to do or how we would like to alter a service or how we would like to engage with the public Yeah.

[00:15:55] Chelsea Mauldin: Is maybe

[00:15:56] Chelsea Mauldin: not exactly what our government partners would choose or [00:16:00] desire.

[00:16:00] Chelsea Mauldin: Sure.

[00:16:00] Chelsea Mauldin: Um, because we're often. Explicitly engaged in a question around how do we alter the balance of power between the public and, and the state.

[00:16:12] Gerry Scullion: Absolutely. That important to relinquish in power, presumably.

[00:16:15] Chelsea Mauldin: You know, I'd like to think of, um, power as being non finite, so no one, they don't have to give anything up.

[00:16:27] Chelsea Mauldin: Okay.

[00:16:27] Chelsea Mauldin: They just have to allow other people to have more, you know? I like that. There's no, there's no set amount of power that has to be redistributed.

[00:16:38] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:16:39] Chelsea Mauldin: There's just the capacity for expansion.

[00:16:42] Gerry Scullion: Yeah, I, I really respect that. Um, can I, can I talk about the reactions to when you first went in and where it's at today?

[00:16:53] Gerry Scullion: Yeah. And what, what has shifted in that time? Because we're looking at 14, 15 years, right? And how have you seen it [00:17:00] shift and maybe what were the sort of, um, the catalysts for that change?

[00:17:06] Chelsea Mauldin: One thing that we began, you know, and I can only tell you the story from the very narrow spot where we sat, was that somewhere around, I don't know, 20 15, 20 16, we, we had this realization after we had been doing the work for four or five years, that it was possible to, um, get people to, to invest in a human-centered innovation process, both with capital and time and resources.

[00:17:42] Chelsea Mauldin: An innovation process that they then could not, or would not implement. So you could actually get to the point of deployable designs, deployable interventions, and then they would not be deployed. [00:18:00] And so that came a bit of a sort of fascination and obsession of ours. Why is it that people are willing to procure innovation that they then can't use?

[00:18:15] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah, and I, you know, I will swear to you that it wasn't because we were delivering something unworkable. It wasn't that we were delivering, you know, prototypes for flying cars. Like, it was just literally the, the, um, it, it became clear to us. That getting to the point of an implementable intervention in a system was essentially half the project, and that the other half of the project was a, uh, systems integration and change management project that had to be treated with the same care and intentionality as the initial process of research and design.

[00:18:59] Gerry Scullion: [00:19:00] Wow. That's a nice framing when you think about it, that half the work happens after delivery, like, and it's, it speaks to an awful lot of, um, kind of the work that, that I do, particularly in the output. I know a lot of other service designers. I know Sarah Drummond for one, speaks about this. Yeah. You know, when the rubber hits the road.

[00:19:19] Gerry Scullion: Let's, let's talk about bit more about what that looks like.

[00:19:22] Chelsea Mauldin: Sarah and I met when we were both 12.

[00:19:27] Gerry Scullion: Wow. And look at you now. You're 29. That's amazing.

[00:19:31] Chelsea Mauldin: We met at a service design global conference in, I think San Francisco in about 2011 or 2012. Someone will know what year that was. Global was then, but it's been, uh, it was obviously wonderful to watch her build snook up, uh, absolutely into the powerhouse that it was.

[00:19:52] Chelsea Mauldin: And we were able to collaborate one time on one little project that we did around, um, developing a set of [00:20:00] design patterns for. For mental health provision.

[00:20:04] Gerry Scullion: Yeah. Yeah. That's a while ago now though. That's 20, 20 16 or something, was it? Yeah. Yeah. Uhhuh, it's around that time. Um, I'm probably a bit wrong on that.

[00:20:13] Gerry Scullion: Maybe it's a bit later. But yeah, so, so generally speaking it's, it, it's, you think that's where it's at now? So, um, when you're doing projects for, for government, maybe 50% of the time that's budgeted is around the implementation and helping them navigate that change.

[00:20:29] Chelsea Mauldin: What we see is that, you know, it's often difficult, but still we are often doing projects with government agencies that have never done a full cycle service design project.

[00:20:40] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:20:40] Chelsea Mauldin: We, um, observe that it is difficult for people to, sorry, the sounds of weird. That's

[00:20:49] Gerry Scullion: alright. I love external sounds on podcasts.

[00:20:54] Chelsea Mauldin: New York is never quiet. Um, we will, uh, [00:21:00] often. With a, with a, a partner, the first time we partner with them, we have an expectation that they will often not want to commit from the very beginning to going all the way through scaled implementation because they don't, they don't know us or trust us yet, nor nor should they.

[00:21:17] Chelsea Mauldin: Um, so we will often get to the point of having design concepts, or maybe even we will get to the point of having, uh, deployable prototypes and a piloting plan for them. And then sometimes we will wait while they think about the, um, uh, whether they want to go forward with actually deploying the thing into their system.

[00:21:47] Chelsea Mauldin: But what we find is once we have done that once or twice with a partner, then they are often willing to, for future projects, say, yes, we'll commit upfront. To the longer [00:22:00] timeframe that is gonna be necessary to actually take these interventions out to pilot, do an evaluation of them, and then think about scales system wide.

[00:22:10] Gerry Scullion: Okay. I mean. That makes total sense and where we're at now. 'cause I think a lot of people listening to the podcast will probably, uh, nod along with this when it comes to doing work in private sector. You know, it might be a little bit easier to, to go all the way through to implementation, but it's kind of a hurry up and wait scenario in government what I'm seeing.

[00:22:30] Gerry Scullion: So it's a case of like, yeah, we're doing it, we're doing it, we're doing it. This is a great workshop. This is a great workshop. And then ghosting for three or four weeks. And I'm like, where have you gone? Like, you know what happened? Did say something the bad. Um, and then it comes back around again. It just takes a lot longer.

[00:22:48] Gerry Scullion: My follow on question to that chance just, um, I wanna understand how do you as a not-for-profit Yeah. You also have to keep the lights on. Sure. How do you budget for those Slow down [00:23:00] in, in the cadence of projects?

[00:23:02] Chelsea Mauldin: So, uh, five or six years ago. We adopted a kind of agile software development model to doing public sector service delivery.

[00:23:15] Chelsea Mauldin: Um, so when we scope a project, we scope it as, uh, a series of releases. Each release, uh, resulting in some tangible deliverable product

[00:23:30] Chelsea Mauldin: Okay.

[00:23:31] Chelsea Mauldin: Which we'll, uh, share with our partners. And each one of those releases is built out of a set of, of two week sprints of work.

[00:23:40] Chelsea Mauldin: Okay. Um,

[00:23:41] Chelsea Mauldin: and so what, and, and we don't, we don't deviate from schedule, like all of our projects run to schedule.

[00:23:52] Chelsea Mauldin: But what we will do is essentially pause a project. So we will, um, we will say to a partner, [00:24:00] okay, we're gonna get you through release four, which in our framework is design concepts. Uh, scoping, preparing for research. Conducting research, and then design concepting. Yeah, the outputs of synthesis. Um, and at that point we can stop and you can go off and contemplate whether you wanna move forward with us actually developing prototypes out of these concepts.

[00:24:24] Chelsea Mauldin: Um, but while the project is running, it runs to the cadence controlled by our team. Okay.

[00:24:34] Gerry Scullion: So do you sit within the government agency itself when you're doing that work? Or do you sit tends to be probably distributed or do you have your own offices in New York?

[00:24:45] Chelsea Mauldin: We have our own offices in New York. Um, we have, we have a couple of members of team, I think three or four now.

[00:24:51] Chelsea Mauldin: We're not in New York City, but they're all members of our team who previously were in New York City.

[00:24:56] Gerry Scullion: Yeah. And,

[00:24:56] Chelsea Mauldin: uh, we still, we come into the office a couple of days a week. Yeah. [00:25:00] Um, just because like that ability to know one another and collaborate with one another in person is so important I think, for the work.

[00:25:08] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah. Um, it was a pretty miserable period during the pandemic trying to do all of the work remotely. And the moment, the moment that we could stop Yeah. Doing synthesis, doing research and synthesis remotely, we went back to doing it in person because it's just. So much better, much better. I just really, no offense to anyone who is conducting remote research and synthesis, but I would argue that the both the work outputs and also the work experience is much better when you actually get

[00:25:41] Gerry Scullion: Absolutely.

[00:25:43] Gerry Scullion: One of my clients, well a couple of my clients actually, um, they're building the capability internally and their office space isn't fit for purpose from a service design perspective. Sure. And they don't have walls to hang the, the artifacts up that [00:26:00] are created by, not only by myself, but other agencies as well.

[00:26:03] Gerry Scullion: So, you know, to quote Lisa Reel, like, you hang the thing, show the thing. Should I say it's not possible. And even though you speak to executive directors and you know, you go higher than that and say, listen, look, you need to think that this isn't, um, you know, doing work. This, this is knowledge work. This is really, you need thinking space.

[00:26:23] Gerry Scullion: You know, you need to really process an awful lot of stuff. Um, do you have to, uh, not help navigate that kind of quandary with, with clients to say, so if you want to actually inform this transformation, things are gonna have to change a little bit.

[00:26:36] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah, I mean, we'll often, uh, bring partners to our studio, um, and have them spend the day with us or even come for longer periods of time.

[00:26:48] Chelsea Mauldin: And, um, I. I am both embarrassed by and committed to certain environmental fetishes [00:27:00] of the surface design experience. You know, and talk to me,

[00:27:04] Gerry Scullion: Chelsea, tell us

[00:27:06] Chelsea Mauldin: what is like one you need walls and you, ideally walls that you not only can pin things to, you need walls that you can write on.

[00:27:15] Gerry Scullion: Why do you feel embarrassed about that though?

[00:27:16] Gerry Scullion: Like, because I presume that's, that's not the fetish, I'm just gonna say that's the embarrassed one. '

[00:27:22] Chelsea Mauldin: cause because

[00:27:23] Chelsea Mauldin: um, it is, of course everything we do is actually a process of mental manipulation.

[00:27:33] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:27:33] Chelsea Mauldin: When, and, and I, and of course one can do that mental manipulation purely internally, purely cognitively.

[00:27:43] Chelsea Mauldin: Hmm. But it is certainly easier. To do that manipulation with the appropriate props. Yeah. You know, similarly, you know, why do we all use sticky notes? Because sticky notes allow you to put a single [00:28:00] idea on a piece of paper and then be able to tangibly move ideas in space to create relationships between ideas.

[00:28:09] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah. So you can do that in your head. Um, but it is easier to do that if you don't have to do it in your head, and particularly if you're trying to do it with other people. Yeah.

[00:28:20] Gerry Scullion: Like,

[00:28:20] Chelsea Mauldin: um, so there's a, a way in which,

[00:28:24] Gerry Scullion: come on, hit us. We're, we're all bracing ourselves. He said, that's an embarrassment and a fetish.

[00:28:29] Gerry Scullion: So it affect the wall.

[00:28:31] Chelsea Mauldin: Well, the, the,

[00:28:33] Chelsea Mauldin: um, the need for the prop, you know? Yeah. Like, it's the, the, I would like to tell you that we could all be as effective. Purely using our minds. Yeah. But in fact, teams are going to be more effective if they have the appropriate props.

[00:28:54] Gerry Scullion: Hundred percent. It's funny, I've heard the argument said like, oh, well you can do it in mural or [00:29:00] myro.

[00:29:00] Gerry Scullion: I've been to other tech offices and they're doing it. I says, yeah, but they're probably super mature in their design function. This says when you're more lower in your design function, you need to be able to show that thing, to build the momentum, to show the work. Is there an argument in that?

[00:29:14] Chelsea Mauldin: I absolutely, and I think, and, but I don't even know that, I would say it has to do with maturity.

[00:29:18] Chelsea Mauldin: I think that the tools, the tools can be distractions. Um, so during the pandemic when we couldn't be together to do, um, data collection and synthesis, we of obviously moved all of our data collection and synthesis processes into digital tools. Um, and in a certain way that allowed us to significantly increase the social science rigor of the work that we were doing.

[00:29:53] Chelsea Mauldin: Now we have a, a big database of a whole bunch of individual data [00:30:00] units, all of which have been tagged, you know, and we can manipulate that database. But also what we observed is that then the team is spending so much time tagging and manipulating the data that they don't have enough time left to actually think creatively about what that data is suggesting about people's experience.

[00:30:25] Chelsea Mauldin: So we are actually very deliberately in the last couple of years thinking about how do we, how do we dial back or how do we replace certain digital processes with a return to non-digital processes? So that we can allow teams to have more open-ended ideation space, um, as opposed to like data manipulation.

[00:30:53] Gerry Scullion: Yeah. You, you kind of, um, inferred thick data there. Yeah. Um, Trisha [00:31:00] Wang's term, um, can you talk to me about, um, really about the, you know, encouraging the use of that, uh, kinda mindset about the data and, uh, the management of data at that within a government level? Kinda, 'cause I actually spoke to Dana Al last week about this.

[00:31:21] Gerry Scullion: Oh. And Dana was like, you know, maybe research repositories. Aren't that good. Maybe, maybe they, they can slow us down because in their perspective, it could take four or five years to get a tool like Dovetail or something through the Yeah. Through the process of procurement. Right. What's your thoughts on this, um, as regards research repositories, and I guess we're gonna have to put those two ladders together.

[00:31:46] Gerry Scullion: Ai, um, which is artificial intelligence for people out there. I haven't heard about ai. I'm, um, where are those people? Yeah, exactly. Um, what, what's your, what's your thought, um, around [00:32:00] the kind of repository piece and AI and management of this within government when so new, you know,

[00:32:07] Chelsea Mauldin: well, I should say in full disclosure that we are in the midst of, of building a significant data repository.

[00:32:15] Gerry Scullion: Okay. In New York.

[00:32:16] Chelsea Mauldin: Uh, well, in, in, um, yeah. Where. In the cloud.

[00:32:22] Gerry Scullion: In the cloud, okay. Yeah.

[00:32:24] Chelsea Mauldin: So the, um, data repository that we're building, the first version of it lives online at the people say org. And what we have been doing is conducting research with older adults across the United States in multiple communities, um, and doing multimedia research collection with them so that we end up with, with video, um, and then, uh, putting that video online in a way which is searchable.

[00:32:56] Chelsea Mauldin: Um,

[00:32:57] Gerry Scullion: Chelsea, the rest of the podcast, this is what we're gonna [00:33:00] talk about.

[00:33:01] Chelsea Mauldin: So

[00:33:01] Chelsea Mauldin: that, so there and thing? Yeah.

[00:33:06] Gerry Scullion: Okay. Go on. Tell us. I'm dying to hear

[00:33:09] Chelsea Mauldin: more about it.

[00:33:11] Chelsea Mauldin: So I, here is where I have, I have felt that there was, there were some problematic things. The civic research space that we were not resolving, that multiple of us were researching the same issues, the same problems that particularly, uh, Americans with lower incomes were experiencing and attempting to access social safety net services.

[00:33:37] Chelsea Mauldin: We were all doing the research,

[00:33:39] Chelsea Mauldin: but

[00:33:39] Chelsea Mauldin: no one had any access to anybody else's research.

[00:33:43] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:33:43] Chelsea Mauldin: We were all doing this, we were all discovering, uh, interrelated issues, but we had no way of, of sharing it or building off anyone else's work. And this felt, um, felt really kind of fundamentally problematic. [00:34:00] Like,

[00:34:00] Chelsea Mauldin: yeah.

[00:34:00] Chelsea Mauldin: The analogy I've been using is like if every time a physicist wanted to do some physics, they had to sort of reprove the laws of gravity. Like physics would not have advanced very far. Yeah, very true. Um, so there was an issue around that, around the data being collected, not being. Accessible and reusable.

[00:34:19] Chelsea Mauldin: It also meant that, you know, the, the labor of doing qualitative research, collection and synthesis, um, it kept being redeployed to explore the same issues as opposed to digging deeper Yeah. Into issues that had already been explored.

[00:34:37] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:34:37] Chelsea Mauldin: And then it also felt to me like we, so, you know, if you've conducted this kind of research, you know how powerful it is and how as a researcher it transforms you.

[00:34:52] Chelsea Mauldin: It transforms your understanding of people and the world to hear people talk about their experiences, [00:35:00] and yet the researcher is the only one typically who is privileged to really hear those stories. Yeah. And then we do this sort of transmittal of the stories to people who have power and who wield power.

[00:35:13] Gerry Scullion: Yeah.

[00:35:14] Chelsea Mauldin: And that felt like we were, we were like not capitalizing on the power of the stories that we were hearing.

[00:35:25] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:35:26] Chelsea Mauldin: And that if we could actually have policymakers hear people talking about their lives Yeah. See them, that we would be able to much more effectively advocate for change. So we became committed to the idea that we needed to do multimedia research and we needed to make, find ways to make that multi-media research public.

[00:35:51] Chelsea Mauldin: Wow. I. I'm

[00:35:53] Gerry Scullion: in love with this idea. Okay. Right. So was this a [00:36:00] brainchild of Chelsea or was this a brain brainchild of, of, of the team? And I'd love to know what was the first steps Yeah. That you went through that to really kind of flesh out if this was viable. And then there's another question there around management of the data and Sure.

[00:36:16] Gerry Scullion: Other people who, who are not public policy lab. How, how do you handle that relationship? Right.

[00:36:23] Chelsea Mauldin: So, uh, a bunch of these, these problems that I'm describing are ones that had obviously been sort of like floating around in my head. Things that I obviously would talk to my colleagues about. Um, and then, but really I think a, a, what lit a spark for me was a project, um, actually run in, uh, the UK called Engage Britain, where a theme, uh, run by, uh, led by Miriam Levin.

[00:36:51] Chelsea Mauldin: Um. Uh, recruited a hundred statistically representative, uh, UK residents to [00:37:00] participate in, uh, a series of conversations around policy issues. Mm-hmm. Um, and I just thought, oh, that's fascinating. It's fascinating that what she's constituted there is a statistically representative pool of, uh, nationwide residents.

[00:37:22] Chelsea Mauldin: Um, but she's recruited them not for survey work. She's recruited them for qualitative research. Yeah. And so that sort of started me thinking about what kinds of equivalents to that could operate in PPLs work. And that ultimately led to this idea to create really a, a three-part tool. One, a standing panel of Americans to whom we could return for longitudinal civic research.

[00:37:52] Chelsea Mauldin: Uh, repository that allowed us to collect the data from, from the people with whom we conducted [00:38:00] research. And then a kind of public portal that allowed all of that data to be accessible and searchable by researchers and oth and policy makers. Wow. Um, so we were sort of ready with that idea, but no, no outlet for it.

[00:38:13] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah. When, um, some wonderful colleagues at a foundation out of California called the Scan Foundation, a philanthropy that focuses on improving policy and service delivery, particularly in the healthcare space for older adults mm-hmm. Came to us and were asking us if we could do some research, um, with them and for them, and we said, yes, but can we do it in this particular way that we want to try to do it where we actually collect the data and in a multimedia way and then make it publicly available and bless them.

[00:38:43] Chelsea Mauldin: They were like, yeah, this sounds like a great idea. So, yeah. Uh, we have been now in close partnership with the Scan Foundation for the past couple of years. Um, PPLs team conducting the research, um, really focusing on the policy experiences, um, and [00:39:00] needs of older Americans. Um, and for us, the next step is to take this v one version of the standing pool of respondents and the, um, repository in the platform and turn that into a V two version, which is accessible to any civic researcher who wants to have similar capabilities

[00:39:23] Gerry Scullion: so that any other civic researcher Yeah.

[00:39:27] Gerry Scullion: How do they provide their, their authenticity because, you know, without the lack of unions or any of this kind of stuff, how'd you get around that?

[00:39:37] Chelsea Mauldin: I think that what we will, uh, need to do, if we can actually get to the point where we're building this tool is, um, we'll. We will want to do some vetting Yeah.

[00:39:49] Chelsea Mauldin: Of the researchers who we are making the platform available to. And that, you know, obviously if you're gonna collect, um, data from folks with the [00:40:00] intention of making it publicly available and particularly multimedia research where people's faces are visible, their voice is audible.

[00:40:08] Gerry Scullion: Yeah.

[00:40:09] Chelsea Mauldin: We go through a, a very detailed consent process to, uh, be certain that our respondents actually understand what, what we are collecting information from them for, and that they are genuinely comfortable with their story being public.

[00:40:28] Gerry Scullion: So an informed consent.

[00:40:29] Chelsea Mauldin: So really making sure that that consent process is, is, um. Good and, and ethical. Um, it's gonna be super, we obviously pay everyone for participation.

[00:40:42] Gerry Scullion: Yeah.

[00:40:42] Chelsea Mauldin: So we have, we will have a set of essentially professional requirements that we would need to pass on to anyone else who uses the platform.

[00:40:50] Gerry Scullion: Of course.

[00:40:51] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:40:51] Gerry Scullion: Um, so what, what kind of data are you taking? Personal, identifiable data, like names and date of birth. And

[00:40:58] Chelsea Mauldin: we, uh, [00:41:00] we want to know as little as possible in the realm of that kind of PII like we are not asking anybody for their date of birth. We ask them, we track an age range, for example.

[00:41:11] Chelsea Mauldin: Okay. We want a birthday. Um, we're obviously not asking anybody for their identification, their social security number in the United States, which is the national identification number.

[00:41:19] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:41:20] Chelsea Mauldin: Uh, we are consenting people to allow us to retain. Their contact information because we want to be able to go back to them over time.

[00:41:31] Chelsea Mauldin: But we obviously keep all of that PII in a separate database from where we keep all of their, uh, story data. Um, everyone is assigned an alias. Okay. They also get to contest their alias. Like if they don't like the alias that we've assigned to them, they can, they can tell us they want a different alias.

[00:41:52] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah. Nice. So we're people's real names. And then when, before we, we publish the data publicly, [00:42:00] uh, we, we scrub it. So in as much as anyone is saying, oh, I went over to my sister Mary's, we're gonna scrub Mary outta the Okay. Um, so that, those kinds of, uh, personal identifiers and other, you know.

[00:42:19] Gerry Scullion: I'm, I'm actually feeling rumblings in the ground here of, uh, GDPR in Central Europe.

[00:42:27] Gerry Scullion: They're just, and how that would actually work in Europe. But, but generally speaking, um, what's the outcome that you're hoping to achieve by doing this, and how would you measure that?

[00:42:40] Chelsea Mauldin: Sure. Multiple outcomes. The measurement question of course, is a thornier one. Yeah. But, um, we are, uh, interested in helping policy makers, people who are elected officials or appointed officials better here, and understand the needs of members [00:43:00] of the public when they're making policy decisions.

[00:43:02] Chelsea Mauldin: And we have already seen some interest where, uh, you know, member, the staffs of members of Congress. Have been interested in, uh, seeing this video data, for example.

[00:43:14] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:43:14] Chelsea Mauldin: Um, we're interested in supporting people who run programs inside of agencies better understand their beneficiaries or clients' needs so that they can actually change service delivery.

[00:43:29] Chelsea Mauldin: So we've had a number of people who were in executive roles of, uh, government agencies share the data repository with their staff members, for example, and say, you need to go and look at this stuff so that you can understand this one service delivery problem that we're trying to address.

[00:43:48] Chelsea Mauldin: Mm.

[00:43:48] Chelsea Mauldin: Um, we're interested in supporting researchers in better understanding what is going on in the world.

[00:43:55] Chelsea Mauldin: So we've had a number of researchers use data from the repository to support [00:44:00] academic research articles. Um, but where we think it will actually be super helpful for civic and design researchers is that. You don't have to then re research things that are already known or knowable. Yeah, yeah. That you can actually build on knowledge rather than having to redemonstrate.

[00:44:23] Gerry Scullion: Yeah. I love that. 'cause like there's certain aspects of, you know, when you're researching going back over all ground, it, it, it kind of, it is kind of like hearing the same story over and over again. But like being able to cut that outta the process and, you know, focusing at a much targeted perspective when you're researching will be much more rewarding.

[00:44:44] Gerry Scullion: Plus government doesn't have to pay for all that inefficiency as well. Um, which usually I'm sure gets people excited in government. Can I talk to you about one other thing because I know, um, I'm.

[00:44:58] Gerry Scullion: But policy [00:45:00] prototyping. Okay, so whenever you're, uh, working within government and you hit that wall where you're saying, well, actually the policy says this and, you know, this is like a, a bone of contention for designers. 'cause they go out and do the research and they say the policy needs to change and then it doesn't happen.

[00:45:16] Gerry Scullion: What advice, and if you could give this in under 50 words or less, I'm joking, bringing it back to you, like if you had a set of keys to unlock the, the, you know, policy prototyping mindset, what would work in 50 words or less?

[00:45:35] Chelsea Mauldin: Well, I wanna say's a really

[00:45:36] Gerry Scullion: hard one

[00:45:37] Chelsea Mauldin: very quickly about the word policy because I think we use a single word to mean at least three different things.

[00:45:46] Chelsea Mauldin: Okay. There is uh, there is legislation, there is statute law. Things that people who are elected to sit in a legislature, they pass a law, and that law [00:46:00] enables some action by government and or appropriates money to, for the government to spend. So that is a certain kind of policymaking. Then there is a sort of policy of rules and regulations.

[00:46:13] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah. The, the enabling legislation has occurred, but now the executive agency or the ministry in a parliamentary context has to actually figure out what, what, how they're going to regulate or implement whatever the new policy is.

[00:46:30] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:46:30] Chelsea Mauldin: Then there is the, what we think of as like the little p the, the policy of everyday systems and program decision making done inside of delivery organizations.

[00:46:44] Chelsea Mauldin: Okay. All three of those things could rightly be called policy. You're obviously going to have to approach, um, using or, uh, inserting a human-centered point of view [00:47:00] into those different contexts quite differently. Yeah. Like the, um, I was just talking, uh, with another colleague about, um, how legislative staffs have constituent services teams, people whose job it is to receive calls from the public who people who are having trouble with some service and it's the job of that legislative staff to try to solve that problem.

[00:47:28] Chelsea Mauldin: But those folks are essentially qual researchers. They too are collecting stories from the public and attempting to respond to them. Yeah. So how do we provide a set of design strategies and design tools to those folks who are working inside of constituent services teams in legislative offices?

[00:47:46] Chelsea Mauldin: Meanwhile. A, in a delivery stack, there are going to be people in leadership decisions with whom you can have a conversation about full cycle service design. How do we actually invent a set of new tools and materials [00:48:00] that can be inserted at every level of operations inside of government to alter the way that the service feels and is deployed?

[00:48:08] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah. Um, so I think, I guess my, my, my, fewer than 50 words answer is. You have to know what kind of policy you're attempting,

[00:48:19] Gerry Scullion: you're going after. It's hard to speak in 50 words or less, isn't it? Just putting it out there. Just chay gave me a little bit of a task before about what I did and I tried to do it within 50 words and I spoke for four minutes.

[00:48:31] Gerry Scullion: Um, so can I just on a very kind of tactical, um, level, your role within PPL as you refer to it as, um, versus somebody who's probably doing research or service design, they're more on the tools, so to speak. What does your role entail? Are you still on the tools or is it mostly kind of communicating at a strategic level to, to build the pipeline of work?[00:49:00]

[00:49:00] Chelsea Mauldin: I have, um, attempted to the great relief of my team to get outta their hair and let a bunch of smart professionals do their job.

[00:49:12] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:49:13] Chelsea Mauldin: Um. And they are of course, um, thinking about what we tend to refer to as tools and materials.

[00:49:20] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:49:21] Chelsea Mauldin: Meaning everything from, you know, digital, you know, systems to hard copy forms, ev and everything that spans in between.

[00:49:31] Chelsea Mauldin: But they are, um, strategic, many of them very strategic thinkers who are also interested in questions of how do you change the ways that people in leadership positions operate public systems. Yeah. So a good bit of their work is also thinking about what kinds of mental models, what kinds of interaction models, what kinds of new strategic approaches to thinking about the service [00:50:00] delivery.

[00:50:00] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah. Can they design and, and share and collaborate with leadership folks about to change the ways in which a service. Like the posture of the service toward the public's needs. Yeah. Um, I sadly do not do that work anymore, except in as much as I occasionally dive bomb in and have complaints about people's comma placement.

[00:50:27] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:50:29] Chelsea Mauldin: But

[00:50:31] Gerry Scullion: in your perspective,

[00:50:32] Chelsea Mauldin: yeah.

[00:50:33] Gerry Scullion: Um, when the conversations, if the conversation anymore comes around to ai Yeah. Within government, yeah. And you know that, and I know most government agencies aren't probably set up for the best use of AI yet they're still struggling with, you know, trying to get the latest version of Excel and Outlook and teams working in some organizations.

[00:50:55] Gerry Scullion: How do you handle that conversation and what advice do you have to government organizations who are [00:51:00] potentially internally hearing this huge desire for ai, um, and wanting to apply it in the civic, um, space?

[00:51:10] Chelsea Mauldin: I feel like in some ways this is just the same conversation we've been having for 10 or 15 years about the use of digital service delivery as well.

[00:51:19] Chelsea Mauldin: You know, a kind of a desire to say, well, can't we just make an app and have the public go use that app? Um, I feel that in a United States context in particular, this is not a nation that has any, um, uh, respect for or sense of common cause with poor. Like I don't, I think that in an American context, living in poverty as is seen as a personal failing, as opposed to a thing that has any kind of institutional or social, uh, roots and, [00:52:00] um, therefore there is a sort of desire to not have to engage with the lives of the poor, the needs of poor.

[00:52:08] Chelsea Mauldin: Um, and I think that digital tools form a distancing, uh, provide a distancing opportunity, let us withdraw from the bodies of the poor, you know?

[00:52:19] Gerry Scullion: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:19] Chelsea Mauldin: Um, and AI seems to me to be a further elaboration of that tendency in the American context.

[00:52:27] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:52:27] Chelsea Mauldin: Um, that being said, and you know, if I had a dollar for every time I'd made this argument, like we are still walking around inside of bodies and living embodied lives, and as long as that is the case, there is going to be the necessity of human beings to engage with each other as other living embodied creatures.

[00:52:51] Chelsea Mauldin: Um, it will never be sufficient to ex, you know, abstract ourselves out [00:53:00] to some kind of, you know, pure data representation.

[00:53:06] Chelsea Mauldin: I understand. Um,

[00:53:07] Chelsea Mauldin: I understand. So I, I, I think it is fundamentally wrongheaded to think that one can replace humans with non-human representations.

[00:53:24] Gerry Scullion: Yeah. Especially in relational context,

[00:53:27] Chelsea Mauldin: right?

[00:53:27] Chelsea Mauldin: Context.

[00:53:28] Gerry Scullion: Yeah.

[00:53:28] Chelsea Mauldin: Can we use AI as a useful tool? Sure. You know, I, I also use spellcheck as a useful tool. Like there are all kinds, I mean this, that is a glib comparison, but like there are all kinds of ways in which we can use digital systems and digital tools to enhance our human experience. But, um, I would propose to you that as of yet, at least we should not be attempting to replace.

[00:53:59] Gerry Scullion: And again, [00:54:00] I feel like I'm putting words in your bit, but what are the risks? In automating, say, frontline interactions with ai mere perspective.

[00:54:10] Chelsea Mauldin: Oh, well, I mean, I think the obvious risks of people are complex and, and unpredictable. Yeah. And the ability of, uh, digital systems to respond to the particularity of an individual human being and their life context and their needs and their preferences and their aspirations.

[00:54:36] Chelsea Mauldin: As of yet, we don't have systems that are subtle enough to be able to that.

[00:54:41] Gerry Scullion: I love it. Can I just ask one final question and then you're off the hook and then you can go and finish your coffee. Okay. Um, I'm really enjoying this conversation. Looking ahead. Um, we both probably have. 15, 20 years left in work.

[00:54:58] Gerry Scullion: Uh, [00:55:00] professional work, I'd say ahead of us. What does civic design look like when it comes to the point where you're kind of going, yeah, I think I'm done. What does it look like from your perspective?

[00:55:11] Chelsea Mauldin: I mean, there are two things that I'm very much focused on working on, at least for the next five years.

[00:55:19] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:55:20] Chelsea Mauldin: I would like to get to my villa in the south of France sooner.

[00:55:23] Chelsea Mauldin: You have a villa?

[00:55:26] Chelsea Mauldin: I'm working my way. One.

[00:55:27] Chelsea Mauldin: Nice. Uh,

[00:55:30] Chelsea Mauldin: the, the first is this thing that I've already talked about in the context of the data repository. Like how do we make all of this work that we are doing more public and more open? Um, we were recently able to do a project where, uh, we helped the city of New York redesign all of the application and onboarding processes for a major.

[00:55:53] Chelsea Mauldin: Affordable housing, social housing program. Um, and then we were able to go to the federal government and say, [00:56:00] Hey, we just did all of this work for one of the largest public housing authorities in the country. Can we figure out how to make this work available for all the other public housing authorities in America?

[00:56:11] Chelsea Mauldin: And, and we have now done some of that work. So, um, this question of how do we make, how do we, uh, increase the scale of the value that we can deliver by figuring out how to make the work that we do more publicly available and more open for remixing, rebuilding, re adaptation Yeah. By other government partners.

[00:56:38] Chelsea Mauldin: So that is sort of thing one. The other thing I'm very interested in is this question of, of, of timescale, of innovation. I feel like, um, many of us who are doing service design work in government, there are like real problems right now and we are often trying to [00:57:00] design interventions for systems for more or less immediate deployment.

[00:57:06] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:57:07] Chelsea Mauldin: Meanwhile, there are a bunch of smart people thinking about like long-term futures. How do we think about, uh, you know, climate issues on a 20, 50, a hundred year scale? Um, but it feels to me like there is this missing timeframe that I've come to think of as the next administration timeframe.

[00:57:30] Chelsea Mauldin: Mm. It's,

[00:57:32] Chelsea Mauldin: you know, on, in the US we have four year political cycles.

[00:57:36] Chelsea Mauldin: How do you design for a future, which is going to come into being. Six to 10 years from now when potentially a different political party is in power than at any level of government. How do you create those? Um, how do you design for deployment of services [00:58:00] that are wholly new systems approaches and integrate that with the reality of political cycles?

[00:58:08] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah. Which are not necessarily invested in doing work that's going to benefit the next administration.

[00:58:14] Gerry Scullion: That would require a whole rethink of the structure of government. And presumably,

[00:58:22] Chelsea Mauldin: or maybe, you know, I'm a service designer. I believe that I can, I believe I can design the future in a variety of ways.

[00:58:32] Chelsea Mauldin: So the question is how to take what we all know about inventing things that don't yet exist. For sure and think about doing that in a complex political environment of the Not right now.

[00:58:49] Chelsea Mauldin: Yeah.

[00:58:52] Gerry Scullion: Wow. Look, Chelsea, I'm, I'm gonna wrap it on that 'cause that is a nice one to, to, to leave us on. I'm gonna put a link to the Public [00:59:00] Policy Lab into the show notes of this.

[00:59:02] Gerry Scullion: If it's okay, I'll put a link to your LinkedIn.

[00:59:04] Chelsea Mauldin: Absolutely. Please do. And also put a link to the people say,

[00:59:07] Gerry Scullion: which

[00:59:08] Chelsea Mauldin: our data repository.

[00:59:10] Gerry Scullion: Absolutely. I'm gonna check that out now as well myself. Great. Um, is there anything else you wanna give it a shout out to? Anything else that you're working on that maybe people might be interested?

[00:59:19] Chelsea Mauldin: Two things. If people, uh, watch this anytime soon. Um, I will be at the World Design Congress in London. Nice. Uh, now, next week. Wow. Yeah. And would love to chat with anybody who wants to come chat with me. And then the week after that, I will be in Helsinki for the annual conference of all the applied ethnographers epic.

[00:59:42] Chelsea Mauldin: Cool. Um, so anyone is at Epic in Helsinki, um, with my friend and colleague, Marco Steinberg. Who was the founder of the Helsinki Design Lab and who now teaches at Alto University will be running a little side event on, uh, design and democracy. So if people [01:00:00] are interested, nice. Uh, look out for news of that.

[01:00:03] Gerry Scullion: Fantastic. Listen, chasy, I wrap up every episode and this is HCD by thanking people for their vulnerability. 'cause I know you come on here, you don't know which way the conversation's gonna go. Uh, it does require a certain amount of vulnerability. So thank you for your time and just giving the space as well to ask these questions.

[01:00:19] Gerry Scullion: I really, really appreciate it. Thank you so much,

[01:00:21] Chelsea Mauldin: Jerry. It was a pleasure and so good to talk to you. And I hope that you are able to edit out all of the, um, construction noise in my background.

[01:00:29] Gerry Scullion: We don't, you leave it all in. It adds, adds to the magic of it all. Thanks so much.

[01:00:34] Chelsea Mauldin: Well, great speaking with you.

[01:00:35] Chelsea Mauldin: And please, uh, please be in touch if you'll be in New York anytime soon.

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