What if the biggest problem with your public service is something you haven't measured?
Governments measure performance, commission evaluations, and invest in transformation. Yet some of the most important questions remain unanswered.
Does the service actually solve the problem it was designed to address? Do the institutions responsible for delivering it share the same understanding of success? What happens between departments, across administrative boundaries, or when citizens encounter difficulties nobody anticipated?
GTF Pathways helps you ask better questions, uncover what is missing, and turn evaluation into a practical process of institutional improvement.
An interactive evaluation methodology, supported by the GTF Service Passport tool, developed by Government Tomorrow Forum.
Not another report — a different way to evaluate
Traditional evaluations often start with the information an institution already possesses: performance indicators, budgets, administrative reports, and internal assessments.
But what about the information it doesn't possess?
What if a critical aspect of service quality depends on another department? What if nobody has measured the citizen's actual experience? What if the service is performing according to its official targets but failing to deliver its intended public value?
Pathways is designed to bring these questions into the evaluation process.
Build institutional understanging
When the answer sits elsewhere, the evaluation becomes a reason to engage another team, agency, or stakeholder. The process encourages relationships that may otherwise never develop.
Move from assessment to action
Use the questions and gaps revealed by the process to inform deeper investigation, institutional dialogue, and better decisions about what to improve.
Interactive by design
Work through structured questions that challenge assumptions about how a public service or policy operates, rather than simply filling in another administrative form.
Make the invisible — visible
Identify missing evidence, unclear responsibilities, unanswered questions, and areas requiring further investigation.
The most useful answer might be “We don’t know.”
Imagine you are evaluating a public service. You know how much it costs. You know how many people use it. You might even know how quickly requests are processed.
But do you know whether citizens who abandon the process receive the help they need? Whether another institution has to correct mistakes made upstream? Whether the service's original objectives are still relevant?
This is where the evaluation becomes useful.
You now have a concrete question to investigate. Which institution owns the relevant data? Who can explain the missing evidence? What should happen next?
Pathways encourages users to go beyond what their own institution already knows. An unanswered question can lead to a conversation with another department, a request for evidence, a new understanding of a process, or the discovery of an institutional blind spot.
The evaluation becomes more than an assessment. It becomes a structured exercise in learning how government actually functions.
How Pathways works
Choose what you want to evaluate
Start with a public service or policy that matters to your institution, whether it is established, under review, or being redesigned.
Work through the interactive evaluation
Use the Service Passport questionnaire to examine the service through a structured methodology. Answer what you can, and identify what you cannot.
Discover the gaps
Examine where information, evidence, or institutional understanding is incomplete. These gaps become an agenda for further investigation.
Turn findings into better decisions
Engage relevant institutions, clarify responsibilities, improve your evidence base, and use the findings to guide the next steps in service or policy improvement.
Designed for people who improve governments
Government leaders
Gain a more complete understanding of the services and policies under your responsibility.
Transformation teams
Identify institutional dependencies and questions that conventional performance reviews may overlook.
Government advisories
Bring a structured evaluation methodology into client engagements and facilitate more substantive institutional discussions.
Evaluation and policy teams
Look beyond established KPIs to investigate service outcomes, evidence gaps, and opportunities for improvement.
Built from research. Designed for practice.
GTF Pathways grows out of Government Tomorrow Forum's international research into how public services and policies can be evaluated and improved.
The methodology builds on the work of the GTF Governance Lab in Geneva, bringing together perspectives on public administration, evaluation, institutional performance, and service design.
The Pathways methodology and its Service Passport tool translate that research into an interactive approach to public-sector evaluation.
The ambition is straightforward: to help governments move beyond knowing whether a service meets its targets, towards understanding whether it works, why it works, and what needs to change.
Your next improvement may begin with a question.
Choose a service. Explore the methodology. See what you know, what you don't, and what deserves a closer look.