‘At the cutting edge of the hardest stuff’: Five minutes with Carla Groom, head of human-centred design science at the UK’s DWP
In this sister series to our ‘Five minutes with’ interviews, we share insights from the civil and public service leaders who will speak at our Innovation 2025 conference. Taking place in London on 25 and 26 March, attendees will hear about how their peers are developing new approaches to policymaking and service delivery.
In this interview, Carla Groom, head of human-centred design science at the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions – who will speak in the session on Tackling groupthink in government – tells GGF about being a neurodivergent thinker in a traditional hierarchy, and her civil servant hero.
Click here to find out more and register for Innovation 2025
What drew you to a career in the civil service?
I wanted to work specifically on the introduction of automatic enrolment to workplace pensions. After studying psychology for 11 years (A-level to post-doctorate) this was an incredible opportunity to be part of implementing a groundbreaking, psychologically-informed approach to a huge problem: the impending pensions crisis. So I quit my industry consulting job and joined the DWP.
What have you achieved in your career that you’re most proud of?
I’ve been lucky enough to work on some huge challenges, from workplace pensions reform to a multi-billion pound restructure of the state pension system. But I’m most proud of the team I created and led over the last ten years, developing a fusion of science, human-centred design and systems thinking that helps create organisational capability for better decision-making. I like to tell my team that we work at the “cutting edge of the hardest stuff”.
What barriers or challenges have you overcome in your career?
I always knew I did things differently. I thought it might be because I had trained as a psychologist, or perhaps because I’d worked in the private sector, or maybe it was my atypical upbringing. Either way, it produced results that people seemed to like, but not ones that were easily packaged for interviews or development schemes. I nearly left multiple times because I felt so out of place and sometimes undervalued. It turns out that I’m autistic. I was informally diagnosed in 2017, and the NHS confirmed it in 2020. I wouldn’t say I had overcome it – the difficulty of being a neurodivergent thinker in a traditional hierarchy – but at least I now can give the challenge a name!
Which civil servant – past or present – do you most admire and why?
A phenomenal woman named Charlotte Clark was deputy director on workplace pension reform, and I followed her to the Child Poverty Unit, worked with her on state pension reform when she was at HM Treasury, and then she was my director for a year in the early days of my current team. She left for the Association of British Insurers in 2020, rejoined public service last year (the Financial Conduct Authority), and is still a good friend and mentor. To me, she is a once-in-a-generation leader. Her ability to create space for innovation and unusual minds, to inspire people to think anything is possible, to think at the level of whole systems as well as forensic detail, to value relationships and networking over process, and to stand behind the risks she and her teams take, is unparalleled. Automatic enrolment into workplace pensions will always be her biggest legacy – one of the most successful programmes in the history of government. And she’s a lot of fun.
Can you name one lesson or idea from abroad that’s helped you and your colleagues?
I have been hugely inspired by thinkers in North America. I am currently learning a ton from professor Gregg Henriques and his ‘Unified Theory of Knowledge’that explains how different academic disciplines fit together, how humans spend much of their time creating justifications to themselves and others, and much more. We were lucky enough to arrange for him to present at a Policy Excellence event at DWP last year.
Are there any projects or innovations in the UK that might be valuable to your peers overseas?
Design science! The approaches we’ve developed under this banner in DWP are universally applicable and derived from ideas I have collected from all over the world.
What attributes do you most value in people?
To quote a fabulous speech from Matt Hancock in 2015 when he was Cabinet Office minister “Empathy, curiosity and openness”.
Is there something about you that people find surprising?
That I’m a widow. It’s a testimony to modern medicine that it is rare to have lost a wife at 42, but cancer can and does take people long before their time. Ask me about my amazing late wife.
What’s your favourite thing to do at the weekends?
I absolutely love supporting my musician friends when they perform. I have no musical ability whatsoever but I can dance for hours from the front row which helps the performers keep their energy up. My preferred genre is electro-industrial, synthpop or what used to be called ‘indie’ but I’ll dance to anything with a thumping bassline or a distorted guitar. I even have a substack called PlanetCJ where I review gigs, though it’s been a little while since the last one.
What is your dream holiday destination?
Abu Dhabi. I was lucky enough to be invited by their government to visit and share my expertise back in 2020, right before the pandemic. The country is so incredibly beautiful, the people curious and kind, and the sense of possibility exhilarating.
Click here to find out more and register for Innovation 2025
About Mia Hunt
Mia is a journalist and editor with a background in covering commercial property, having been market reports and supplements editor at trade title Property Week and deputy editor of Shopping Centre magazine, now known as Retail Destination. She has also undertaken freelance work for several publications including the preview magazine of international trade show, MAPIC, and TES Global (formerly the Times Educational Supplement) and has produced a white paper on energy efficiency in business for E.ON. Between 2014 and 2016, she was a member of the Revo Customer Experience Committee and an ACE Awards judge. Mia graduated from Kingston University with a first-class degree in journalism and was part of the team that produced The River newspaper, which won Publication of the Year at the Guardian Student Media Awards in 2010.
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