To see that a situation requires inquiry is the first step in inquiry. (John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 1938, p 111)
Carolyn Curtis is a public manager in Adelaide, South Australia. She has been seconded for nearly eight months to a project on how to redesign services for ‘chaotic families’. These are families that are typically characterised by high levels of alcohol abuse, violence, unemployment and dysfunction. For the past eight months Carolyn has no longer acted formally as a manager, but has participated with a small team consisting of a designer and a sociologist in exploring how such families live their lives, with the aim of finding new opportunities for helping them to become ‘thriving families’. Carolyn says:
“I was trained as a social worker to assess and categorise various social events. Throughout this project I have needed to undo all that. And that is difficult. I have been given the space, time and resources to really reflect on what we have been doing in our agency. We have handled these problematic families as a pre-designed ‘programme’, with fixed criteria and no end-user involvement.”
Carolyn describes the new families project as a ‘resourcing model’, which is radically different from how she has worked during her 10-year career as a manager. She says that by taking an end-user (family) perspective she has been able to critically reflect on the results of her agency’s work:
“It is bottom-up, it has end-user focus, and there is no fixed structure, criteria or categories. The work has been extremely intensive. We have focused on motivation and on strengths within the families – identifying the ‘positive deviances’ where some families are actually thriving, even though they shouldn’t be, according to the government’s expectations. We have focused on finding entry points and opportunities, rather than just trying to mediate risk. It is a co-design, or co-creation approach, and it has been entirely new to me. We are ourselves experiencing the actual interactions within and amongst the families, and breaking them down to examine in detail how they might look different. It is very concrete, capturing what words they use (...) It all looks, feels and sounds different than what I did before. Taking an ethnographic approach is entirely new to me. It has helped me experience how these citizens themselves experience their lives, and has allowed me to see the barriers. I have had to suspend my professional judgement. The whole iterative nature of the project, that it is OK to change, has made me understand how much of what we do is a matter of attitude. In this project, we are capturing their concrete stories, and allowing immersion into their reality. Doing my own ethnography in this way has been a phenomenal journey.”
The quote above contains a wide range of interesting observations. Carolyn’s experience, as a public manager and as a human being, of the Family by Family project raises a wide range of questions. What does it mean to ‘undo’ one’s practice as a public manager? In what ways has the project been bottom-up and what does end-user focus imply in practice? Specifically, what does a co-design approach entail? How does ethnography come into play? What characterises the ‘journey’ that this manager has taken? Why does the process ‘look, feel and sound’ different than the types of development activities Carolyn Curtis has experienced before?
Carolyn goes on to elaborate the significance of the project for the organisation she is currently a part of, and the potential for more systemic change:
“Today we as administrators meet the families reactively. We are trapped in a culture of risk. I can see we need a mind-set change in my profession. We are forgetting to see the potential. We are lacking openness and passion. (…) During this new project I have had to let go of myself as a manager and leader. Looking back now, I am seeing how the system could be very different. I have made decisions about removing new-born babies from their mothers that I now see weren’t at all necessary. That recognition is really painful.”
Carolyn Curtis’s story leaves the impression that the methods she describes – user-centred, bottom-up, iterative, etc. – have had a major impact on not just herself as a person and as a manager, but potentially on her organisation’s approach to its mission and role. In fact, her experience in some ways even questions some of our taken-for-granted expectations of government: the notion that public organisations are relatively stable, with predictable routines and practices, and that public managers in many ways are constrained by a range of powerful conditions: the rule of law, the operating principles of regulations, financial and budgetary demands, the identities, norms and roles of the professions public administration, of social work, of education, of nursing and so forth (Wilson, 1989; Simon, 1997). How is it at all possible, given these long-standing and embedded conditions, characteristic of bureaucracies, to disrupt the status quo?
If this brief narrative from a public sector design project were a single, isolated, random outlier, these questions would be of rather limited academic or practical interest. It could be that Carolyn Curtis had a particular personal characteristic that made her especially susceptible to the methods and processes that were employed; or it might well be that the particular institutional context of family services in Adelaide, Australia was somehow especially ripe for new insight, disruption and change along the lines Carolyn describes. It could even be that her project partners – a designer and a sociologist – were very extraordinary people who simply have a profound impact on those that they work with. Or could it be that Carolyn is at the forefront of a movement that leverages design approaches to truly make public sector innovation happen?
As it turns out, Carolyn Curtis’s story is not a single ‘outlier’. Carolyn’s work and Family by Family is one among a growing number of examples of managers using design approaches to innovation in public sector contexts (Parker and Heapy, 2006; Bate and Robert, 2007; Bason 2010, 2014b; Boyer et al, 2011; Cooper and Junginger, 2011; Manzini and Staszowski, 2013; Ansell and Torfing, 2014). By design approaches I mean systematic, creative processes that engage people in exploring problems and opportunities, develop new ideas and visualise, test and develop new solutions. In the public sector the use of such methods is often framed in the context of new forms of citizen involvement and collaborative innovation (Bourgon 2008, 2012; Ansell and Torfing, 2014).
Carolyn’s story mentions a range of positive, but also challenging experiences from the collaboration with the design team. More broadly speaking, among the benefits of using design in public sector organisations, the following are often mentioned (see also Bason, 2010):
• better service experience for end-users, such as citizens or businesses
• higher productivity in public service production
• better outcomes for citizens and business
• enhanced democratic participation, openness and transparency.
These benefits are typically reached because design approaches help public managers and their organisations on a number of fronts, including:
• deeper and more nuanced understanding of problems and opportunities from a human perspective
• creation of tested and tried solutions, services, systems and strategies
• improving or rethinking organisation and governance models
• increased ownership of new ideas and of organisational change inside and outside the organisation.
Finally, a benefit of using design methods can be that the organisation is empowered to run faster, more effective and precise innovation processes.
Given this spectrum of potential benefits, which I explore further in this book, it is perhaps not surprising that more public managers are beginning to take notice and to try out design for themselves. International institutions, national government organisations, local government, foundations, philanthropies, voluntary and community organisations as well as educational institutions at all levels are taking up design approaches in various forms (Bason, 2010; 2013; 2014a; The Economist, 2014; Liedtka et al, 2013; Mulgan, 2014). The organisational anchoring (public or third sector) varies, as does the terminology: service design, strategic design, macro design, public design, design thinking, human-centred design, co-design and co-creation are among labels commonly used (Cooper and Junginger, 2011; Meroni and Sangiorgi, 2011; Liedtka et al, 2013).
In some instances, design capabilities are being organisationally embedded in the form of in-house studios or innovation labs. Just within the past few years, governments in the United States, Australia, Denmark, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and Chile have set up their own Innovation Labs and ‘i-Teams’ (Bason, 2014c; Nesta, 2014; The Economist, 2014). Also, international bodies such as the European Commission, the World Bank and the United Nations (UNDP, UNICEF, others) are using labs and design methods. In terms of policy domains, nearly every thinkable corner of public service provision has in recent years been connected to design: from environmental, education, employment, business, finance and taxation issues to healthcare, mental health and social care at regional and local government level (Parker and Heapy, 2006; Meroni and Sangiorgi, 2011; Polaine et al, 2013; Manzini, 2015).
However, bringing design approaches into government is not without its challenges.
Design on the one hand, and the institutional and governance context of public organisations on the other, can be viewed as two waves crashing against each other, resulting in unpredictable ripple effects. Imagine the (admittedly somewhat clichéd) creative, fast-paced culture of designers as it meets the (equally clichéd) old-fashioned bureaucratic culture of civil servants. Although both descriptions are stereotypes, there is no doubt that the professionals who typically occupy the two domains – designers, artists, ethnographers and technologists on the one side and economists, lawyers and political scientists on the other – have very different views of and appetites for innovation and change (Michlewski, 2015). The relationship between designers and government officials, viewed empirically, is thus not always an easy one and is potentially ripe with contradictions, frustrations and conflict, as much as with positive change and value creation (Mulgan, 2014).
The relationship does not become less complicated when one considers the context in which it unfolds. As Hernes (2008) suggests, contemporary organisations can be viewed as ‘tangled’ and ‘fuzzy’. Managers act in a fluid world where the changes they take part in (or create) change them in turn (Hernes, 2008, p 145). Public managers, being in the midst of the dynamics of change processes, are the witnesses who, with their stories, might help us to understand what unfolds and to interpret what matters.
So, in spite of the rise of design as a new approach to innovation in the public sector, much is still not known about how design approaches work in practice, and even less in known about how public managers most fruitfully commission, lead and benefit from design processes. As an important emerging agenda for government innovation – alongside other agendas such as new technology, social media, open government and evidence-based policy – the design field needs a further grounding to become a mature management practice in the public sector. Such grounding, which can strengthen the use of design in leading public sector innovation, is the aim of this book.
Before turning to the book’s content, however, I’d like to share with you the background to the making of this book.
I met Carolyn Curtis, and had the chance to interview her, on a trip to Australia where I launched my previous book, Leading Public Sector Innovation: Co-creating for a Better Society (Policy Press, 2010). Carolyn’s story convinced me that I was already on to something important in that book, but also that the job wasn’t quite finished. I had introduced a number of ideas about how to achieve more innovation in the public sector: the ability to create new ideas, implement them and create value for citizens and society. These ideas took the shape of a broad conceptual framework. The story of that framework and how I have worked with it over the past years is key to the book you are now holding. The framework I introduced in Leading Public Sector Innovation focused on four dimensions, which I characterised as ‘the four Cs’:
• Consciousness, which introduced key concepts and a new language about public sector innovation and value creation
• Capacity, which addressed the need to build explicit strategies for innovation in public institutions and to leverage organisational design, more diverse recruitment practices and new technology so as to power innovation
• Co-creation, which provided a first set of suggestions for how to bring design approaches into a systematic process for driving innovation in government
• Courage, which was how I addressed the issue of leading public sector innovation; I proposed that managers fundamentally need to balance between inspiration (or creativity) and execution (or implementation) in order to become successful in making public sector innovation happen.
I argued that all these four dimensions, properly developed and applied, could help to overcome the numerous and well-documented challenges to innovation in government, such as the lack of a common language, tools and methods, under-investment in competencies, aversion to risk, lack of skills and insufficient management engagement from the top down. When I published Leading Public Sector Innovation, and had the opportunity to introduce its core concepts to public managers world-wide, it was my impression that the framework was useful overall. It gave some structure and rigour to an emerging field that had otherwise perhaps been interesting to scholars of public management, but also rather elusive to many managers and employees in government.
Since Leading Public Sector Innovation was published its messages have thus been tested thoroughly. I have conducted hundreds of presentations and training sessions based on the book, combining its framework with the methods and approaches that emerged from my team’s work at MindLab, the Danish government’s innovation team. From top-level managers in the European Union institutions to managers in the municipality of Copenhagen to Singapore’s Civil Service College, to the United States and Canada’s federal governments, I have introduced the approaches and tools espoused in Leading Public Sector Innovation. In some instances the book was taken up as a way to embed innovation more systemically in public sector institutions. For example, it provided direct inspiration for Australia’s first nation-wide innovation policy for the public sector (Australian Government, 2011). When the policy was published, an Australian colleague reached out to me and remarked how the document used the ‘four Cs’ as its foundation. “They even put in the courage part,” he exclaimed, rather astounded. Consider this for a moment: a major government that explicitly encourages public managers and staff, nation-wide, to be more courageous in pursuing more innovation in government. That’s pretty courageous in itself. However, if one reads the document it is also clear that that section of the policy was not particularly clear on how exactly to implement the recommendation!
And here’s the rub. Although Leading Public Sector Innovation provided a starting point, more needed to be done to transform the attractive idea of a more innovative public sector into practice. Already within the first few years after its publication, I realised that although the book provided a relevant foundation some important elements were missing, or at least under-developed. This feedback was confirmed through my hands-on experience leading first MindLab, and now the Danish Design Centre, which is a public institution devoted to strengthening the use of design in business and society. First and foremost, I have learned that the leadership role is absolutely critical for positive change to happen. When I ran MindLab our team could usually identify a successful project up front by the type of dialogue and engagement shown by the responsible leader on the receiving side of our design and innovation work. And since shifting my role from being an advisor on innovation methods at MindLab to running a public institution applying these methods at the Danish Design Centre, it has been painfully clear to me how hard it is in practice to drive meaningful, citizen-centred innovation. It is more than a little bit ironic that I am learning how tough it is to take my own advice. But it has made me realise how much public managers need concrete leadership methods and tools if they are to have any chance of really placing citizens at the centre of public services.
Concretely, I’ve become aware of three elements that need more substance and elaboration. They form the building blocks of this book.
As design approaches are now increasingly used in government settings across the globe, there is a need to map the current practice. What key methods are emerging, and how are they concretely being used by public managers to engage citizens, their staff, and wider stakeholders in driving innovation? This book defines and takes stock of the current state of design in the public sector. I propose three dimensions of design that reflect the cutting edge of public design approaches and that have been applied with success by managers to drive their innovation efforts.
When, in 2010, I suggested that courage is a necessary trait for public managers to truly make innovation happen, that was my best bet. However, encouraging managers to be courageous is not only easier said than done; many public managers flinch at the word, as it obviously involves some unspecified degree of risk taking and what one might call civil disobedience. Could there not be some more precise and operational behaviours that public managers might use to drive innovation? As public managers commission designers (whether as external consultants or internal teams) to work with them and their organisations, what kinds of leadership behaviour and engagement are critical to the projects’ becoming successful? What happens between managers and designers as innovative projects unfold? To what extent does it make sense to speak of managing as designing – the use of attitudes and methods of designers as part of one’s own management practice? Based on rich empirical data – stories from 15 public managers who have led and experienced design processes in public organisations – I suggest six behaviours, or engagements, that public managers can deploy to drive innovation and change forward. This focus on leadership engagement with design practice is at the heart of the book.
Third, as more and more solutions are developed using design methods, what are the wider implications for public governance? Could design approaches, over time, make an impact on how we conduct the overall strategic business of government? Could design help managers and their staff to discover a more impactful mode of running their organisations? In this book I argue that design projects can form a powerful pathway, enabling the transition to a different way of governing. Drawing on the empirical research as well as a range of academic literature, I suggest four defining characteristics of what I call human-centred governance. I discuss how this paradigm relates to the governance legacy we have inherited and I examine the potential dilemmas and pitfalls of bringing such principles into the context of existing governance arrangements.
Finally, in terms of context, this book explores the implications of the current policy environment for innovation approaches. I have found that there is an urgent need for many public managers to be more reflective, and nuanced, about the types of problems public institutions face. Scholars as well as policy practitioners and public managers have increasingly come to realise that not all problems are alike, and that issues of emergence, complexity and ‘wickedness’ of problems need to be taken very seriously. This does not mean that all public problems are complex and ‘wicked’, or that design approaches are suited for only certain problem types; but it might mean that design methods become even more relevant when many actors need to collaborate to find solutions under conditions of high interdependence, turbulence and complexity. In fact, you could argue that public managers today are facing a double complexity: as the external policy and societal environment has become more complex, so have the internal structures, processes, technologies, professions and governance arrangements established within and by public organisations. Managers who wish to innovate therefore have to deal actively with complexity on two fronts: externally as well as internally. My proposal is that design methods can help cut through them both, creating new meaning both for end-users and for internal staff.
Leading Public Design: Discovering Human-Centred Governance is thus essentially a companion, or extension, to Leading Public Sector Innovation that develops these three key elements – design, leadership and governance – in the context of complexity. This book is in that sense deeper, but also wider in scope, in its ambition to advance the practice of public sector innovation.
The three strands in this book, the underlying case studies and its key insights derive from a comprehensive academic research project anchored at Copenhagen Business School (CBS). This research has been conducted as a PhD project in parallel with my daily work running MindLab and the Danish Design Centre. The research ran from 2010 to 2016 and explored how public managers in practice have engaged with design-led approaches to public sector innovation. A range of additional university partners have been involved, including Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management, Oxford Saïd Business School, Stanford University and Parsons School of Design.
The main data material informing the book derives from this academic research and includes 15 case studies on public managers who have commissioned and experienced design processes at first hand. The cases, which are based on personal, qualitative interviews with the managers, cover five countries: Denmark, the UK, Australia, Finland and the United States. About a third of the cases are projects that were carried out by my team at MindLab, and where I therefore had some direct or indirect involvement. My relation to these cases is thus a reflection of engaged scholarship (van de Ven, 2007): ‘a participatory form of research for obtaining different perspectives of key stakeholders (researchers, users, clients, sponsors, and practitioners) in studying complex problems’ (2007, p 9).
The case interviews have been supplemented by secondary documentation relating to the specific design projects, such as process documentation, evaluations, business cases and impact assessments. The research approach has drawn on grounded theory, implying that the emphasis has been on identifying emerging patterns, archetypes, categories and relationships bottom-up, building on the empirical data (Suddaby, 2006; Corbin and Strauss, 2008). The ambition has been to develop new insights into how design can contribute to catalysing change in the public sector, with a particular view to the role of managers (Edmondson and McManus, 2007, p 1158). The research has provided a unique window not only into the relative importance of design methods for public managers, but also in particular into their personal leadership practices as they leveraged design approaches to address their organisations’ challenges and capture new opportunities.
Although the research and PhD thesis form its backbone, it is important to say that this book deviates from the academic research project in certain important ways. First, for the purpose of clarity, much of the text has been updated, and in some instances I draw sharper and more pointed conclusions. Second, the more normative parts of this book – recommendations, suggestions and advice – do not derive directly from the research but have been added to give more direction and guidance to the reader. Not all recommendations can be traced to the research; rather, they are based on my practical experience and the experience of others I have worked with.
Who is this book for? The normative character of the recommendations implies that this is intended first as a book for practitioners. The main audience for this book are policy makers, managers and innovation specialists in public and social organisations who wish to make change happen in a reflective, meaningful and sustainable way. Designers and design firms, management consultants and other advisers who work closely with government agencies and organisations are also obvious audiences. Leaders in private firms who contract with public organisations or who are interested in bidding for new innovative partnerships with government should also find the book useful. Finally, it is my hope that the book will be a contribution to the academic community – scholars and students both within public management, within design research and more widely in innovation management.
Beyond this introduction, the book is structured into three parts. Part One provides the background, definitions and context; Part Two develops the practice of leadership engagement with design; and Part Three suggests the building blocks of a new form of public governance. Each of the book’s chapters concludes with a practical ‘How to do it’ set of suggestions and recommendations.
Part One: Complexity, design and governance
This part of the book introduces the context in which design approaches unfold in government settings.
In Chapter Two I explore the nature of public problems. I argue that the use of design is linked to a wider and evolving set of policy problems that may not be sufficiently addressed today. The current attempts of many nations, in the wake of the global financial crisis, to control public finances happen at the same time as the very same societies are facing seemingly intractable social challenges such as chronic health problems, ageing, unemployment – in particular among young people – and growing income disparity and poverty. Even though ‘wicked problems’ (Churchman, 1967; Rittel and Webber, 1973) are not unique to the public sector, they characterise many of these particular challenges. To understand the potential value of design, as well as the need for a different way of governing, we must first understand the nature of the problems and challenges that designers are invited to help to address.
In Chapter Three I map the rise of new, collaborative and more socially oriented methods and forms of design. I discuss alternative design definitions and briefly examine design history from its roots in craft towards today’s use of design as an increasingly recognised approach to collaborative innovation also in the public sector. Along this analysis I reflect on how design in some ways is coming ‘full circle’ to a re-integration of production (craft) and user experience, enabled by new technology. The chapter further discusses the concepts of design management and design as management; and I consider design attitude as a perspective through which to understand how managers relate to design processes as they unfold in their organisations.
In Chapter Four I briefly chart the emergence of public management from its bureaucratic foundations to the new public management and up to the present. In particular, I characterise contemporary discussions of new networked and co-productive paradigms of public governance and I examine how the development is linked to questions of the nature of public problems and complexity. Finally, the chapter shows and explores some surprising similarities between innovations in governance and in the design profession.
Part Two: Leading design for public innovation
The second part of this book has to do with the real challenge of leveraging design for public sector innovation: the role of leadership. In much of the current literature and research in the area, the issue of leadership behaviour in relation to public sector innovation is under-developed. However, if public managers, their staff and, ultimately, the citizens they serve are to gain the most from design methods, they need guidance and practical advice on what it takes to lead the processes involved.
Building on my empirical case research among public managers, this book unfolds the leadership dimension and breaks it down into six concrete engagements, or practices. With design approaches as the opportunity, I map and analyse how these six practices are deployed by public managers in very different contexts, often with similar aims and intentions. My hope is that by sharing the stories of these managers, others can be inspired, draw on their practices and avoid some of the pitfalls they encountered. Who knows, perhaps basing oneself on these practices might even stimulate some additional courage to make innovation happen.
Chapter Five provides an overview of the design methodologies and processes that have been applied across the case studies. What, in practice, characterises the design work? How was it commissioned? The chapter also presents the overall analytical framework for the book as a whole. In Chapters Five through Eight I unfold the key concepts that may contribute to our understanding of the significance of design approaches, and how public managers relate to them. A key theme across these chapters is the notion of ‘engagement’ between managers and the design methodologies, tools and processes. I have structured this part so that three dimensions of design are the organising principle, while the six key management behaviours are presented as pairs, two in each chapter. In this vein, Chapter Six considers design as the exploration of public problems, Chapter Seven expands the role of design in establishing alternative scenarios and Chapter Eight analyses how design can catalyse the enactment of new futures.
Finally, Chapter Nine provides an overview of the types of outputs that result from the design processes and how they lead to the creation of public value. In it, I ask what the solutions flowing from design processes look like, and what the evidence is that design approaches really make a difference.
Part Three: Towards human-centred governance
This third part of the book discusses the emerging governance agenda and analyses the potential rise of a more human-centred governance, building on the characteristics of design approaches and outputs. In the course of my work and research I have found that the use of design can be considered a reflection of the quest of public managers not just to identify new service ‘solutions’ but to explore new and possibly more effective ways of governing. In other words, whereas the aim of much innovation work in government is to ‘solve’ discrete problems – or sometimes to address a particular new opportunity – the wider game that is at stake is how we run our public institutions. This game, the game of governance, is important for two main reasons, the first being because well-designed solutions to discrete problems usually cannot be effectively implemented without also changing the governance context in which they are to function. Take for instance a more flexible, citizen-centred service that empowers users to achieve better outcomes and that in order to do so cuts across the domains of two different government agencies. For that service to work, new arrangements might need to be found not only for the day-to-day running of the service but also for funding it and allocating resources across the two different organisations, for documenting and evaluating the service, for holding the staff and managers accountable and so on. It might seem that design approaches lead to singular new solutions, but often these solutions challenge the governance context as well. Or, one could say, these solutions open up new questions – and may even provide some tentative answers – about how we run our organisations.
Second, for more public managers to begin to work effectively with design methods, so their governance context might need to change. How are they held accountable, how are they evaluated, how much space, time and resources do they have for innovation work? As I will discuss in the book, some governance frameworks function to stimulate and enable innovation and change; others may very well stifle it. If we wish to embed design approaches more firmly into the fabric of public organisations as an approach to dealing with change, then do we not need to examine our current governance mechanisms as well?
Chapter Ten discusses the role of design in catalysing not only particular new ‘solutions’ but also the emergence of a new and more relational, collaborative and co-productive public governance model: human-centred governance. The chapter explores what characterises the types of changes in governance that are implied (at least in part) through design approaches. What are the particular patterns? What are the defining characteristics of a new form of human-centred governance that is catalysed by design?
Chapter Eleven brings human-centred governance into context. I discuss to what extent this model really might be different: at an overall level, what distinguishes it from other contemporary models? I also consider to what extent this model can be as effective at achieving desired public objectives and outcomes as the models we have inherited. I conclude the chapter by proposing how a positive, reinforcing cycle combining design approaches (innovation processes), management engagement (leadership action) and human-centred governance (organisational context) might work.
Chapter Twelve shifts the attention back to the particular roles of public managers in engaging with, and leading, the design process. I summarise how these roles have been presented in this book and how they can be understood. What is the nature of the particular management behaviours the book has shown? How can the role of the public manager be seen more as that of a future-maker rather than (only) that of decision-maker?