What It Takes for Progress to Take Hold: 10 Lessons
Practice has a way of revealing what matters and stripping away what doesn’t.
After twelve years, what’s clear is this: Public Works Collaborative is—and always has been—a space where people with different experiences and expertise come together to advance health and well-being. Our work consistently sits at the intersection of science, data, and design.
What’s changed is the precision with which we practice. Today, we have a clear understanding of what matters to us—health and well-being; how we contribute—by helping organizations discover new ways of thinking and working that are human-centered, data-driven, and system-aligned so progress is made where it matters most; and where our efforts have the greatest impact—across healthcare, senior living, and community development.
We’ve learned that growth for growth’s sake doesn’t serve us or the work; what does is moving forward with intention. And it’s that intention that brings us here. Looking back at the lessons stand out—not as principles we set out to prove, but as patterns that persisted, shaping our practice and purpose.
1. Health is a practice, not a prescription.
Health extends beyond the clinic into the social, economic, and environmental systems that shape daily life. It takes form in the places where people live, learn, work, play, and grow. In complex ecosystems like these, design solutions succeed only when they reflect the lived and operational realities of the people who create, deliver, and use them.
2. Complex systems require shifting how we see, not just what we solve.
When research treats experiences as static or singular, it misses the dynamic realities shaping behavior and outcomes. Progress requires new ways of seeing and understanding systems as a web of interconnected behavioral, cultural, environmental, and operational drivers.
3. Pain points signal symptoms. Leverage points drive change.
Over-indexing on pain points narrows problem-solving to surface-level fixes. Shifting the analytical lens to leverage points reveals opportunities for optimization and innovation—places where targeted changes can produce out-sized impact.
4. The hardest part of innovation is not ideation—it’s integration.
Innovation succeeds when it serves the mindsets, motivations, and systems that must adopt it—and is paired with a strategy to support the necessary behavior changes for it to take hold across the ecosystem.
5. Data matters when it means something.
AI is accelerating information generation—but data alone doesn’t change how people think or how organizations operate. Change requires translation: making quantitative and qualitative evidence meaningful for different people with different perspectives and priorities.
6. Design fails us when designers fail to empathize with us.
Empathy is a critical capability for strategic designers. What’s labeled “user error” often reflects designers’ inability to understand the lived and operational realities in which a solution must function—or to translate that understanding into products, services, systems, spaces, or policies people can actually use.
7. Agility requires learning and unlearning. Practice cannot be performative.
Building real capability requires more than exposure to new ideas. Concepts stick only when people see them modeled, have repeated opportunities to apply them, and are supported with time, permission, and psychological safety to practice, question, and adapt.
8. Strategy translates insights to action.
Strategy is the practice of making deliberate, evidence-based decisions about focus, priorities, sequencing, and tradeoffs—so progress is made where it matters most.
9. Adoption requires behavior change—internally and externally.
Design solutions can be elegant and evidence-based, but will struggle to gain traction if they don’t account for how people discover them, what motivates use, how they fit into daily workflows, and what support sustains behavior over time.
10. Progress is contingent on the questions we’re willing to ask.
Meaningful, measurable impact depends less on expertise or method than on a sustained willingness to question assumptions, learn, unlearn, and adapt.
