Trauma informed organisational and digital transformation

Opencast’s Senior Service Designer, Dr Angela Orviz, co-led a workshop at SDinGov Conference 2025. The session, co-led by Dr Priscilla Chueng-Nainby from the University of Edinburgh, and was entitled From Awareness to Action: Co-creating a framework and guidelines for trauma-informed digital services. Here, Angela explores the issue in the context of the workshop.

Organisational and digital transformations within government are complex and impact every part of the organisation, including its people.

Employee engagement throughout the journey helps create the foundation for more achievable and sustainable outcomes. However, top-down approaches can build a collective trauma response of mistrust, fear, frustration, resistance and disengagement – triggered by a lack of transparency, communication and involvement.

Leveraging design as a core component in that journey enables a more transparent, compassionate and evidence-based approach that helps build confidence, strengthens engagement and delivers measurable impacts.

Our approach: A workshop to build a framework

Drawing on real experiences of government employees, our session highlighted the human cost of current approaches to change and encouraged participants to explore more compassionate strategies.

The interactive workshop had five goals:

Shed light on employees’ traumatic experiences of organisational transformation.
Share insights and ideas for user-centred design (UCD) practitioners seeking to embed more compassionate approaches in digital transformation.
Position design practices as an alternative.
Collectively explore how we can prevent, mitigate, and heal organisational trauma.
Begin to shape a framework and guidelines for trauma-informed organisational change.

Our workshop was a follow-up session to SDinGov: Virtual, an online session hosted in March 2025 where Dr Chueng-Nainby, Joan Herlinger (from Joan Herlinger Design) and Bukola Jolugbo, from Joshua’s Army, introduced how trauma-informed principles could be used in UCD practice. Find out more about the workshop here.

Addressing the gaps in our human-centred approach

As catalysts of change, design authors and practitioners often categorise the public sector – and by extension its employees - as resistant to change. However, we rarely stop to reflect on why? What is triggering that resistance?

I would like to argue that we disregard the emotional and traumatic experience of change endured by government employees as unjustified resistance.

Change is disruptive and distressing. It creates uncertainty, loss of control and fear – all hallmarks of trauma.

If we truly want to be human or user-centred, we must take into consideration the emotional experiences of employees.

Findings: Key challenges we uncovered

The emotional impact of transformation

Here are some examples of how top-down restructures and digital transformation can inflict trauma on employees:

Top-down structures

The unexpected merging and dismantling of teams in top-down restructures has a strong emotional impact on employees

Phase 1: Decision making often happens behind closed doors, often led by assumptions made at the top.
Phase 2: When structural changes are rolled out, organisational leaders are met with chaos, distress and resistance. Employees’ frustrations, helplessness and anger for not being consulted is palpable.
Phase 3: Employee resistance and complaints often force leaders to implement feedback mechanisms to re-engage employees, safeguard good practice and identify gaps between the new teams. However, this feels too late and too fake for employees, who respond with mistrust and disengagement.

The emotional cost of change can be great for some employees. Common experiences I have observed:

Some people had been in the same team for decades, so their teams were like their family. Suddenly, they were moved not only to a different team, but to a different building where they did not know anyone. They felt alone, sad, and out of place. They lost trust and motivation.
Another common scenario was that of merging teams that had conflicting values and working cultures. The lack of support to bridge the gaps between them often led to aggressive power struggles.

These experiences resonated with workshop participants, who shared their stories as both the victims and the agents of change.

Digital transformation

As with restructures, digital transformations are complex to manage – often subject to unforeseen changes in policy and priorities, technology limitations and budgetary constraints. At the same time, product and technology driven approaches can lead us to believe that breaking complexity into small, manageable pieces will help us to deliver faster.

So, we can focus on designing micro-services without always understanding their dependencies within the wide ecosystem. This can lead to projects, initiatives and programmes being paused due to unforeseen dependencies:

Strategic and governance decisions that are not in place.
Other micro services that are not ready to link into the wider end-to-end service and need to be re-prioritised to complete journeys.
Innovative solutions that are not aligned to business operational needs and thus resisted by users.

The lack of system thinking slows down transformation and initiatives being cancelled without any tangible outputs for operational teams have a negative impact on their engagement.

Moreover, siloed working and a lack of cross-boundary alignment often means unexplored gaps and overlaps that lead to duplication of effort, conflicts in ownership and disjointed systems. Poor documentation management means that insights get lost between initiatives, and new teams start from scratch.

Government employees will tell you stories of failed attempts of change that ended nowhere, complain about their continuous involvement in repetitive research, and their confusion on who can help them bridge the gaps.

Minimum Viable Products (MVP) that add no value

The push to deliver quickly often means improving micro-services bit by bit. We produce MVPs with that viability often being determined by whatever can be delivered in the next three to six months. But do our MVPs add value or make things more difficult for operational teams?

Incomplete systems often force operational teams to develop their own tactical, clerical solutions to overcome the gaps left by digital teams.

Claire Rooney, senior content designer at Opencast, champions the renaming of MVPs to Minimum Value Products, to help us think about ensuring that the changes we deliver actually add real value'.

Reflections: What can we do

Positioning design-led approaches as an alternative

We believe we have the tools and skills to prevent, mitigate and heal organisational trauma. Design’s holistic, human-centred, evidence-based, participatory and iterative approach can enable Government to deliver a more informed, effective and compassionate transformation. But leaders need to be brave and bold and embrace a less comfortable way of doing things.

Embracing human-centred approaches to transformation does not only benefit employees. It benefits the organisation and the people they serve. Disjointed internal systems and employee resistance and frustration are not conducive to efficient services and better outcomes for citizens. When employees feel seen, listened to and supported their engagement and motivation can have great impact on service efficiency and outcomes.

Participatory approaches boost internal buy-in and adoption, but they also foster innovation and quality by leveraging a staff’s intricate knowledge of systems, services and users to design better operating models, processes and tools.

What can we do from the delivery space?

UCD practitioners can rarely lead the organisation’s approach to transformation. But even from delivery teams, there are ways in which we can influence transformation efforts to be more cognisant of employees’ transformation experiences:

Empathy: We need to extend to employees the same level of empathy that we grant citizens; and not dismiss organisational trauma as unjustified resistance.
History of Transformation: When coming into a new change project, it is important for us to understand how historical changes have impacted the people working in that space.
Transformation Alignment: We need to go out of our way to understand overlaps and coordinate with other teams so that we don’t overwhelm operational teams with repetitive research queries.
Minimum Valuable Products: We must balance pains and gains before we decide to move into beta. If the gaps and workarounds needed to embed the new solution create bigger pains for operational teams than the value gained, maybe it is not worth changing yet.

Workshop outputs

Our workshop participants explored new ways to prevent, mitigate or heal organisational change trauma by drawing on principles from trauma-informed practices, design principles and feminine leadership. Priscilla has collated some of the workshop’s outputs in a newsletter published on LinkedIn.

At Opencast, we work with people and build trust across organisational layers to ensure we do the right thing and make a positive difference. If you are interested in embedding these practices in your organisation, get in touch with us.