Cat Macaulay, Chief Design Officer

Kate Arrow  0:02  Welcome to Leading Insights. Today we're joined by Cat MacAulay. Cat could you tell us a little bit about your role?Cat Macaulay  0:14  Sure. So I'm the chief design officer for Scottish Government's digital Directorate. And that's a fairly new role, I think. Well, I know for Scottish Government. First time we've had the chief design officer. And really what I'm there to do is, I suppose a couple of key things. So one of them is helping to introduce the idea of user centred design, particularly around the design of services, but not exclusively, as as one of the ways of working and thinking that we need in government in the modern government, you know, until, till fairly recently, Scottish Government in particular was a fairly benign kind of government in the sense that it didn't tend to directly deliver many services to its people.  It outsourced the delivery of most services and so it was really more of a policy generating organisation. And that changed a lot with the introduction of a number of the devolved powers around things like social security, tax generating powers and so on. And so suddenly, we had to learn how to design and deliver services ourselves, as well as think about, you know, the role of policy in directing the design and delivery of services elsewhere. So, I was brought in fairly early on as one of the early sort of batch of designers coming in trying to help out with this and took responsibility for growing what was a sort of community, you know, practice community, but also a professional community, but also for helping to think about what bits of design that you know, design methodology that were largely developed in the private sector and what bits of those are really relevant for government work, bits are less relevant and how do we combine the kind of Drive for participatory democracy that is quite embedded in the heart of Scottish Government with design and design thinking as a toolset and a way of approaching service delivery in particular, and bring those two things together and really drive them into the heart of government effectively. So I've been doing that for about five years now, which astonishes me but there you know, time flies.Kate Arrow  2:22  Can you tell us a little bit about your career journey to get to there. Where did you start? Cat Macaulay  2:25  Okay. The first thing I would say is, I've never considered myself to have a career journey. It was a decision I actually made very early on when I was a teenager, because I  read in this book something about the Native Americans of Vancouver Island in Canada having a saying, which basically amounted to you better do lots of interesting things in your life otherwise you will be very boring when you're old and telling stories around the campfire. Who knows how true that is? Or if it's just apocryphal, but anyway it impacted on me and so I Sort of meandered through most of my 20s and early 30s not really thinking particularly about what I was doing, other than following my nose around things that interested me. So I started out as you often do, doing all sorts of juggling three jobs and restaurants and nightclubs and things like that. And I set up a cafe in Edinburgh, I fell into doing that it was the first LGBT owned and run cafe in Scotland, towards the end of the 80s 1980s. And I meandered out of that and into a job in news monitoring for one of the Maxwell Corporation companies, which was entertaining in the late late 80s, early 90s meandered out of that into working in international age during the Balkans war, meandered out of that into a number of other kind of roles in the community sector and then eventually ended up running a small company doing information systems development and design while studying for a master's in a PhD, and then eventually that led me into becoming an academic. And then eventually that led me into becoming a consultant in industry and then that led me into Scottish Government. So it's not really been a career path. It's been a career meander. But the common thread I think, in all of them when I look back has been designed, you know, I've had a, I've had an interest in how we solve problems well, and, and how we build the solutions to those problems. Well, from very early on, and that is, that is a threat I can see in my career, such as such as it exists in the earliest days.Thomas Lamont  4:44  I love your job title. That's my favourite.Cat Macaulay  4:47  Yeah, me too. Thomas Lamont  4:51  What challenges have you experienced across those different roles?Cat Macaulay  5:00   I suppose I should contextualise by saying I'm getting on a bit now. So I'm in my 50s. And I left school and then University in the mid 80s, straight into the teeth of one of the big recessions back then, and came from, you know, well, I suppose most of the challenges that I've faced in my career have more to do with who I am than anything particularly to do with the jobs themselves. Because, you know, I've never really fitted in the world, you know, I was, as a kid, I was definitely odd. I was very, very tall. And I realised quite early on that I was gay. And that had a huge impact. So, you know, first of all, before I came out to live in the world, and then after I came out, you know, for quite a long time, it did impact my job choices and my job opportunities. I still lived during the era when things like section 28 were in force. And when we ran the cafe, you know, it was a time when we just weren't understood or accepted in the way they are today. I remember being involved in one of the first demos in Scotland Against section 28. And it's hard to remember, but this was before pride happened. You know, there was no parade back then. And there was about six of us standing on princess street in a Saturday, chanting about gay rights, and, you know, facing the kind of horrified looks of the passers by. I remember going for jobs and  I always made a point of coming out at jobs because I just sort of thought, I don't want to have to work somewhere where I can't be out. And you know, you would see right away on their faces and that was it. You were either running or not.  When we were setting up the cafe and we went for a loan and you know, we went to several banks to try and get a little startup loan, which was quite normal back then, because there was another recession happening. So there was quite a lot of support for small businesses starting up and you know, literally being told we wont fund perversion and showing us the door. You know, so it, so that impacted a lot of my early experience of, of work, you know, I always saw jobs where I could be comfortably out. And, you know, in many ways that was, that was really helpful and good, because it did allow me to, to live openly, but at same time, it did absolutely limit the things I could do. And later on, you know, that sort of started to flatten out a little bit, but not entirely, and, but then in my very late 20s, I was diagnosed with MS. And that, again, was another complete change for me, suddenly, I was, you know, looking at a life and something that I hadn't really anticipated having to deal with. And at that time, certainly, you know, the kind of the standard, kind of medical response to a diagnosis with Ms was, you know, don't don't exercise don't have any children, you know, prepare to retire, you know, when I was 29 at that point. So, there was very little support, very little advice on how to manage it in your career. So you know, Right away, I needed to jump into a career that had a pension. So I didn't have a pension. And so that's why I started the journey towards becoming an academic. And that's actually just driven me ever since is just holding on to a pension of so...