Canada tried to fix passports a decade ago. Here's what happened.

Canada's been trying to fix the passport system for a long time. Back in 2013, a small team of designers, developers, and policy experts got together to modernize the application process. They took a lean, iterative approach, focusing on the simplest fixes to the biggest problems first. This meant addressing boring things that offered huge improvements: they spent six months tweaking and testing the application form—which is where most applicants got stuck.

And then the government shut down the program, and rolled it into IRCC's massive Global Case Management System, where it ran into multi-year delays and huge budget overruns.

If you wonder why Canadians can't have good government services, Lisa Fast is the right person to ask. A career designer with a degree in computer psychology, she explains how the initiative launched, what it got right, and why short, iterative test-and-learn approaches trigger the immune system of big government..