In government, that’s radical. A quick caveat here: Helping governmental agencies treat their constituents like customers they hope to retain should in no way be translated as advocacy for the privatization of those functions (as seems to be the desire of the current administration). Rather, government can benefit from public-private partnerships that bring some private best practices into public sector work. Brooks said: “Trust is our share price. We don’t have market pressure, but we do have to deliver on our promise to care for veterans. We’re trying to measure how we’re doing with our customers just as the private sector has been doing, so we can quickly make improvements where people are getting stuck.”

Amber Schleuning, deputy director of the V.A. Center for Innovation and a fourth-generation veteran, never thought she’d work at the V.A. But she began to hear from others she served with, her dad (also a veteran) and his friends about the problems they were having interacting with the system.

“We decided we had to do something,” she told me. “I had this idea of talking to veterans and learning what their issues were. I began to learn about things like human-centered design” and started with “this smushy idea that we didn’t know enough, so let’s just start talking to people and build some qualitative data to better understand what’s going on here.”

This endeavor took human-centered design as its starting point, and Schleuning’s use of “smushy” is appropriate. Human-centered design means designing for people by first understanding what they actually need. In the case of the V.A., not having the input of staff members and the veterans themselves would have made this project untenable.

Among the first projects was a tool to improve the V.A.’s benefits claims process. Few of us, veterans or not, would report many satisfactory experiences filing claims anywhere, but trying to do that at the V.A. was on another level. Tens of thousands of veterans already wait longer than five years for a final appeals decision, and the V.A. continues to face rapid growth in its appeals workload. Some 80,000 veterans have appeals older than five years; 5,000 have appeals older than 10. The number of pending appeals climbed by 35 percent to more than 450,000 between 2012 and 2015 and is projected to soar to more than 2.2 million by the end of 2027 if there’s no significant reform.

The real work is shifting the employees’ perspective and the users’ experience. In the case of the claims project, the form used to look like this: