People-centred Hub

Welcome to our People-centred Hub! Discover everything you need to lead meaningful transformation with people at the heart of every decision. Explore a series of expert-led webinars, insightful thought leadership articles, and practical tools - all designed to guide leaders to deliver people-first change.

Events programme

We launched an exciting four-part event series focused on people-centred transformation, bringing together expert insights, practical strategies, and cross-sector collaboration.

In partnership with Digital Leaders, we engaged public sector audiences and senior government leaders in meaningful conversations about delivering real impact.

Listen to our webinar and discover how to cut through the hype, drive purposeful change, and use AI to empower the people it serves.

Meet the speakers

Fiz Yazdi – Sopra Steria Next, UK Managing Director

Fiz is the Managing Director of Sopra Steria Next, where she leads transformative, human-centred consulting across both public and private sectors. With over 20 years in strategic consulting, she brings deep expertise in shaping experiences that drive real impact for people and organisations alike. Before joining Sopra Steria, Fiz led award-winning design consultancy CXPartners, where she guided teams delivering major transformation programmes for global brands including Google, Facebook, and the NHS. Beyond her role on Sopra Steria’s executive team, Fiz is a UK Executive Sponsor for Women in Leadership where she champions inclusive, people-first innovation that enables businesses - and the people within them - to thrive.

Becky Davis – Director of AI, Sopra Steria Next UK

Becky is Director of AI at Sopra Steria Next, leading innovation through AI with over 20 years’ experience in business transformation. She integrates technologies like generative AI to solve complex challenges and improve operations. Committed to responsible AI, Becky focuses on enhancing efficiency, accelerating digital transformation, and delivering positive societal impact.

Mark Skinner – Head of Design

Mark is a design leader with 12 years’ experience across Health, Public Sector, and Financial Services, helping organisations improve services and outcomes. He leads complex programmes with a systems-thinking approach, driving lasting change through improved processes and collaboration.

Sophie Grencis – Director of Consulting

Sophie Grencis leads public sector consulting at Sopra Steria Next, specialising in user-centred design and innovation. She has partnered with organisations including the Home Office, NHS Blood and Transplant, AXA, and Google to deliver measurable impact by placing user needs at the heart of their work.

Erika Bannerman – Managing Director, NHS Shared Business Services

Erika Bannerman joined NHS Shared Business Services in July 2020, bringing a wealth of leadership experience from across the public and private sectors. Prior to this, she served as Executive Officer of Capita’s People Division and has held senior roles at organisations including Manpower Group and Brook Street.

Neil Gladstone – Data & AI Practice Director

Neil joined Sopra Steria in May 2024 to lead the UK Data & AI Practice, partnering with clients to deliver efficient and ethical Data and AI solutions that support organisational transformation. With a career spanning multiple industries, Neil has consistently focused on driving business value through technology. He was Futures Director at Roke, leading a tech and AI business and held senior roles at Siemens Rail and led tech transformation programmes at the BBC.

Webinar - Human-centred transformation in the age of AI

This webinar explores two AI-driven futures: one that empowers people through ethical leadership and innovation, and another that risks harm through lost trust and rising inequality. Becky Davis offers practical steps organisations can take today to shape a responsible, AI-powered future. 

Watch here

Webinar - Shaping the future of AI through design

AI is transforming both internal operations and customer interactions. While it promises efficiency and personalisation, prioritising tech over human needs can lead to bias and exclusion. In this webinar, Mark Skinner demonstrates how design can centre AI around users, helping organisations spot risks early, reduce wasted investment, and enhance both user experience and systems.

Watch here

 

Webinar - The AI challenge: How to deliver transformation that serves people

This online panel brings together senior leaders from government, business, and AI transformation to explore how organisations are turning AI ambition into reality. Panellists share practical approaches to responsible, people-centred AI, from embedding ethics into decisions to building cultures of trust and innovation. Through real-world examples, the discussion addresses challenges like governance, data complexity, and change management, while highlighting opportunities to unlock AI’s potential.

Watch here

 

Webinar - Shaping 2035: how purpose and empathy drive the AI we want

Step into the future with Becky Davis, who shares an inspiring vision of what a typical day might look like a decade from now in an AI-enabled world. This future-gazing session dives into how AI can enhance our lives and workplaces - if we choose to build with intention.

Watch here 

What is people-centred design?

People-centred design is both a philosophy and a strategy that places the needs, preferences, and values of the people you serve, whether citizens, clients, or end-users, at the heart of every decision, process, and interaction.

Over the past two decades, this approach has reshaped how organisations operate. It has introduced practices such as:

  • Discovery research to understand real user needs
  • User testing to validate ideas and designs
  • Iterative delivery to continuously improve services based on feedback

These methods are now widely adopted across sectors, helping organisations stay relevant, responsive, and impactful.

The benefits of people-centred design

Organisations that embrace people-centred design experience a range of benefits, including:

  • Improved service quality through better alignment with user needs.
  • Increased trust and loyalty by showing empathy and responsiveness.
  • Better decision-making informed by real-world insights.
  • Greater efficiency by removing friction and streamlining processes.
  • Enhanced innovation through deeper understanding of unmet needs.
  • More inclusive services that work for everyone.
  • Stronger relationships with the people and communities they serve.

Why it’s essential for every organisation

People-centred design isn’t just a private sector priority, it’s vital for all organisations, especially in the public sector. As AI continues to transform how we live and work, the real challenge is ensuring that change is responsible, inclusive, and focused on people.

Importantly, people-centred design champions customer, citizen and colleague centricity, recognising the many perspectives that matter:

Customer centricity: for private sector organisations focused on digital transformation and exceptional customer experience.

Citizen centricity: for public sector teams designing inclusive, human-centred services.

Colleague (or Civil Servant) centricity: for organisations looking inward, building cultures and systems that empower their people.

5 ways to accelerate people-centred design success

We studied how leading organisations across Europe work and found a clear pattern: the organisations that perform best are the ones that place people at the centre of how they design and deliver their services. We discovered five keys to people-centred maturity:

High-performing organisations give teams the autonomy to act on what they learn from users. Decisions are not held tightly at the top. Instead, they are made by the people closest to the work and the people affected by it. This leads to faster progress and fewer delays caused by layers of approval.

This shift is not about removing leadership oversight. It is about balancing top-down direction with bottom-up evidence. Senior leaders set clear outcomes, and teams use insight to decide how best to achieve them.

Crucially, high-performing organisations prioritise user insight over internal preference or hierarchy. When decisions are shaped by evidence rather than opinion, the result is better-quality services and stronger user outcomes.

Organisations with strong people-centred maturity do not rely on assumptions. They routinely test ideas, gather user insight and seek out the stories that help make sense of data. Qualitative evidence is treated as essential, not optional.

This behaviour creates a culture where teams expect to validate decisions. Insight becomes a shared resource rather than something held by a single team or specialist function. Everyone is encouraged to learn from users, not just those in research roles.

By questioning assumptions early, organisations avoid costly mistakes later. They reduce risk, make clearer decisions and create services that are grounded in real needs.

People-centred organisations recognise that good services rely on well-supported teams. Employees need the right tools, platforms and processes to work efficiently and adapt quickly. When technology is chosen based on user impact — not cost or internal politics — teams can deliver improvements at speed.

These organisations invest in flexible, modular technology that is easy to update. They reduce friction by giving teams access to tools for prototyping, testing and iterating without delay. This accelerates delivery and makes it easier to respond to changing needs.

When teams feel supported and equipped to do their best work, morale improves. Employees gain a clearer sense of purpose because they can see the impact of their decisions on users and colleagues.

High-performing organisations design their operating model around services and the people who use them. They invest in specialist roles such as research, design, product management and service design — and ensure these roles are embedded early in delivery, not brought in as a late fix.

These roles sit within multi-disciplinary teams that cut across silos. Teams work end-to-end on services, collaborating closely rather than passing work between disconnected departments. This structure shortens feedback loops and improves the quality of decisions.

By giving specialists autonomy and integrating them with engineering, operations and policy colleagues, organisations create teams with the full capability to understand problems and deliver meaningful improvements.

The biggest difference between high and low-performing organisations is how well they communicate. In high-performing settings, teams understand how their work aligns with wider organisational goals. Strategy is visible. Decisions are shared. Teams know what others are working on and why.

Continuous communication also includes sharing user insight. When frontline teams pass on what they observe, and delivery teams share what they learn through research and testing, the whole organisation becomes better informed.

This open flow of information reduces duplication, improves coordination and leads to faster, better decisions. It creates alignment, which is the hallmark of people-centred organisations.

Insights

Read our latest insights, where our subject-matter experts explore a host of relevant topics including shaping the future with data and AI.

| Anna Boscoe, Mark Skinner

Five principles for keeping the focus on people
Discover five practical principles to keep users front and centre in your organisation, from exposure hours and co-design to personas and user stories.

| Mark Skinner

Five ways to accelerate people-centred success
Explore five proven strategies to embed people-centred thinking, enhance collaboration and communication, and drive organisational success through decentralisation.

| Susannah Matschke

Shaping the Future with Data, AI, and Customer Centricity
Discover how high-quality data, strong infrastructure and user-focused AI strategies drive adoption and deliver real business value. Learn the keys to successful AI implementation.

Contact us 

Mark Skinner
Mark Skinner
Head of Design
Contact