Ishmael Interactive

Laetitia Wolff, founder of BESIGN School in France, discusses place-based regenerative design—an approach that prioritizes understanding specific community contexts and existing social infrastructure before proposing solutions, rather than imposing top-down institutional fixes. Through projects ranging from rebuilding police-community trust in Brownsville to empowering invisible small business own...

Before you jump in… Ishmael Interactive subscribers get our business intelligence delivered every Tuesday, directly to their inboxes. Subscription gets you: * Early access to the weekly pod * Accompanying articles and team analysis providing context and commentary on the interview * Access to the entire Ishmael Interactive back catalogue of CX and business intelligence publications * Special acces...

Aaron Meyers and Ana Monroe explore synthetic data—AI-generated customer information that alleviates privacy concerns, accelerates product development, and can prove highly effective for organizations. They also examine the challenges of this approach, including how synthetic data can reinforce organizational dead ends, encourage individual silos over collaboration, and create an overwhelming volu...

Before you jump in… Ishmael Interactive subscribers get our business intelligence delivered every Tuesday, directly to their inboxes. Subscription gets you: * Early access to the weekly pod * Accompanying articles and team analysis providing context and commentary on the interview * Access to the entire Ishmael Interactive back catalogue of CX and business intelligence publications * Special acces...

What's your take? Aaron and Ana debate how and if AI will replace entire career layers. Get full access to Ishmael Interactive at ishmaelinteractive.substack.com/subscribe

Four federal employees discuss the January-March 2025 reduction in force efforts at GSA that eliminated entire teams, including the Office of Customer Experience’s Service Design - Enterprise Digital Experience unit. The conversation reveals how the elimination of specialized teams doing digital modernization and customer experience work represents not just job losses but the wholesale destruction...

Before you jump in… Ishmael Interactive subscribers get our business intelligence delivered every Tuesday, directly to their inboxes. Subscription gets you: * Early access to the weekly pod * Accompanying articles and team analysis providing context and commentary on the interview * Access to the entire Ishmael Interactive back catalogue of CX and business intelligence publications * Special acces...

Join Ishmael Interactive this week as we talk to Derek Alton, government veteran and soon-to-be globetrotting Youtube star :) Alton has spent years inside government digital transformation efforts and now plans to travel the world documenting what he calls "civic punks"—the unglamorous rebels who ignore political theatre to fix the actual machinery of state. While politicians debate policy, civil...

Learn how BeHati Hart experiments with ChatGPT in her growing coaching practice. From building “bumpers” into her GPT to understanding the barriers to scaling, Ms Hart shows us the way she’s embracing AI technology from the small business side. Subscribe here or on Ishmael Interactive . Only subscribers get: * The full podcast delivered to their inbox, every Tuesday. * An accompanying article prov...

Most organizations treat visual design as window dressing—a final polish applied after the real work is done. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took a different approach during COVID-19, and the results demonstrate why aesthetics divorced from strategy is merely decoration, while design grounded in purpose becomes infrastructure. Cesar Rivera, formerly the CDC’s executiv...

Introduction As in our reaction post , the scramble to build in-house design teams in the federal government comes as somewhat of a surprise. But as in our other posts, we’re still here to serve. When I led the Service Design team in GSA, I wrote down how to build great, cross-functional design teams in the federal government as an article on digital.gov, Bringing Design In-House,* but I’ve furthe...

Aaron and George Aye from Greater Good Studio talk the bob and weave of positive action paired with genuine concern for the world. Get full access to Ishmael Interactive at ishmaelinteractive.substack.com/subscribe

In the sterile corridors of business firms, a curious form of therapy is taking place. Scott Kellum, Design Officer at Ishmael Interactive, has spent two decades conducting what he calls "talk therapy for business"—the process of brand discovery that strips away superficial desires to reveal deeper truths about organizational identity. The malady is widespread. Companies routinely confuse rebrandi...

Executive orders arrive with the fanfare of urgent necessity, though their actual urgency often proves debatable. The recent "Improving Our Nation Through Better Design" directive falls into this category—well-intentioned but perhaps historically naive about the timeline required for meaningful institutional change. Ana Monroe and Aaron Meyers, both of GSA’s Service Design team, offer practical pe...

In this week's vlog, Aaron chats with professional community-builder and beloved design mentor Rachel Elnar. Hear about her work building and sustaining community in an over-stimulated, over-saturated world. Her work has taken her to corporate giant Adobe, to thrive in the loose and fast-moving design world, and to give back as a mentor, including or Ishmael Interactive CEO Ana Monroe! Get full ac...

Government agencies across the developed world face a familiar paradox. Despite unprecedented investment in digital transformation—America alone spends over $100bn annually on federal IT systems ¹—public satisfaction with government services remains stubbornly low. The conventional wisdom holds that wholesale modernization is the answer. The evidence suggests otherwise. When Silence Becomes Dysfun...

Any good basketball coach knows that a quiet team is a losing team. When your folks aren’t talking, they don’t trust each other, and they’re not working together. The crowd can feel it, too: desperation in sports almost always arrives quietly. As with basketball, so goes any organization. If you are in any large organization, especially if you work on an internal team, speaking up might not come n...

In the world of government contracting, where acronyms multiply like rabbits and money comes in colors, a peculiar figure sits somewhere near the middle: the Contracting Officer's Technical Representative (COTR). Part translator, fortune-teller, and marriage counsellor, these professionals weave together legal requirements and the delivery of the work—a multi-disciplinary job even for the federal...

In 1945, an economist named Albert Hirschman invented a market concentration inde x that shows the relationship between international trade and power. He recognized that even though it is convenient to consider trade as neutral, the basis of the “invisible hand of the marketplace” concept, trade is in fact always imbalanced because different economies have different starting points, advantages, an...

This week, Aaron and I share the journey of responding to our first federal solicitation response! Stats: * 90,000 solicitations pared down to a tight 12 pared down to a readable 3. * +30 hours spent in response. * 12 pages of response. * 80 pages of appendices. * 1 minor injury sustained. Conclusions: * CORs write dense-but-understandable requirements. * Every small business should do this at lea...

Like many managers, Jason Lamb started his leadership journey in unexpected places—from dungeon mastering D&D campaigns to coordinating military simulation games. But his real breakthrough came when he discovered a fundamental truth about team building that many corporate leaders miss entirely. While many managers obsess over processes, automation, and organizational charts, Jason found that the s...

One of the most interesting things I got to do in my federal career was to help create and maintain agency strategic priorities. Now, you might not be in a federal agency, but if you’re in any kind of business, this process is probably familiar to you. I kept my involvement in this process laser-focused on digital experience, because that was my remit, but it was fascinating to be able to talk wit...

In this vlog, Aaron and I talk: * Continuous market research in the federal acquisition space * How to make the bar for termination of a contract more tough-but-fair * Mariana Mazzucato, and * Number 2 pencils That’s right! Give it a listen, and let us know what you think by commenting or emailing us at ishmaelinteractive@gmail.com. And speaking of studying, our CEO Ana is sharing her research on...

Ishmael Interactive Board Member Felecia Edwards is a veteran, a PhD, and a job seeker. Listen to her take on how the rise of certification demands is almost outweighing the importance of degrees, her experience learning human-centered design with Ishmael Interactive’s Ana Monroe, and how being mid-career leads her to search for jobs that provide fulfillment—not just a paycheck. And if you’re inte...

What does Dungeons and Dragons have to do with Hotel California and Service Design? They’re all systems in which you can live, maybe forever, and continue exploring. And they’re also all systems that need to serve new customers as they enter the door. So how do you balance offering continuous value to your forever fans with welcoming new participants? Find out in Aaron’s talk with Maria Alberto ,...