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Christian Bason
chb@mind-lab.dk

Christian holds a M.Sc in political science and is currently working on a PhD-project on public managers as designers. Prior to joining MindLab, Christian led the public organisation and management practice of Ramboll, a consultancy. Christian is passionate about transforming the public sector's ability to better meet the needs of citizens and society. Christian is also a university lecturer, and has presented to and advised governments around the world. He is a regular columnist and blogger and the author of four books on leadership, innovation and change in the public sector, most recently Leading Public Sector Innovation: Co-creating for a Better Society. (Policy Press, 2010). You can also find Christian on LinkedIn.

Christian Bason

A new welfare model – yes, but how?

By April 22nd 2013

This article was previously published in the Danish weekly Mandag Morgen.

Co-production of our welfare tasks, whereby we activate citizens’ own resources and the resources of those closest to them can provide us with a cheaper and better public sector. That is some claim. After all, where are the benefits going to come from?

Once, when I was a young hopeful management consultant, we were asked by the Ministry of Finance to “deconstruct” the benefits of outsourcing. In other words: If outsourcing of public sector tasks to private companies can mean an increase in efficiency by perhaps ten per cent, to which factors could this be attributed? Is it possible to find a range of examples in which there was an increase in efficiency and isolate the reasons from one another in a way that indicates which factors generated which savings?

This is not the kind of job you turn down when the order comes from by the Ministry of Finance, which is paying for the privilege.

Outsourcing fails managers

This resulted in an inspirational journey all the way to Jutland and to successful or less successful outsourcing experiments, year 2000-style. Sadly, the conclusions from the exercise that were published in a blandly-titled publication called “Efficiency through competition” were not so inspiring. The benefits were primarily down to good management and the reason why outsourcing meant good management was pretty banal. When implementing the outsourcing of a municipality’s care for the elderly, for example, it meant that you were able to get rid of bad managers and replace them with better ones. A more rigid way of saying it might be that outsourcing thus became a way of circumventing the development of good public sector management and of taking responsibility for getting rid of those who did not possess the right skills. We even noted in the publication (due to respect for the fact that there are skilled public sector managers out there) that “the efficiency of a well-managed public sector welfare task cannot be increased significantly based on competition”.

This leads me to the point for the day: The reason why we can achieve this in a wide range of welfare sectors in a way that is both better and cheaper, as I wrote here recently, is purely and simply down to the fact that they are not being managed well enough at the present time.

Users’ motivation generates energy

In a research project about public managers as designers of welfare, I have taken a look at the origins of some of the future models for welfare. And here it turns out that public managers experience two things when they engage in innovation that is based on design methods such as ethnographic research, user involvement, visualisation, experiments, etc.

First of all, managers acquire new insight into why their current efforts do not succeed well enough, and how they can develop an entirely new relationship with their users. This was for example the case for Christina Pawsø, who was head of Camillagaarden, a workshop for mentally handicapped adults in Odense that won Local Government Denmark’s Award for Innovation in 2010.

Working together with a design agency, Pawsø took initiatives to listen to the users and asked them to share their hopes, dreams and desires for stimulating and meaningful lives. Pawsø became aware that it was actually the users themselves who held the key to both increased productivity and increased job satisfaction.

“I became aware that we do not have to be ahead of our users, but rather behind them or at the most beside them.” says Pawsø.

This was reflected in the fact that if Camillagaarden’s users did not want to take part in theatrical activities, then there was no reason to start them up, even if you had already hired someone to help out with it. The organisation of tasks needed to be based on what users wanted to do and where they had the motivation and resources to contribute. This in itself meant that it was possible to complete a greater number of activities with fewer employees. The more general point here, however, is that you trigger an incredible amount of energy in an organisation when you find ways in which users can thrive and even take co-responsibility for the production of welfare, be they mentally-handicapped adults, patients or perhaps pupils.

30 per cent greater efficiency without outsourcing

Secondly, managers who employ design methods are able to shift focus away from their use of resources and daily activities towards the results or effects they create. At Camillagaarden, there was a shift on the part of the employees away from the notion that “this is what we think we should be working towards”, in favour of “actually, it’s you, the users, who have the best idea of what works for you”. As a result, the focal point of the relationship is no longer the services that the organisation has “on the shelf”. The focal point becomes the difference that managers and employees are able to contribute to creating for the users. It is a hugely powerful transformation tool.

Camillagaarden illustrates that skilled public managers are perfectly capable of figuring out how to switch to a different and better business model. The changes set in motion by Pawsø and her colleagues led to significantly increased well-being and job satisfaction for the mentally handicapped adults, while Camillagaarden was able to handle 30 per cent more users with the same number of employees.

Now, that is what you can call an increase in efficiency. With no outsourcing whatsoever.

 

Christian Bason

20 percent better, 20 percent cheaper

By March 26th 2013

This article previously appeared in Monday Morning Blog.

The government’s Growth Plan for Denmark implies a DKK 7 billion modernisation of the public sector, but a mere four lines describe how this is to be done. Are we capable of developing welfare together with citizens? Is there even a basis for upscaling our ambitions?

What would happen if we focused more on assisting the husbands/wives of dementia sufferers to cope with living with a spouse who is ill? How would weaker school pupils cope if the local sports club coach was involved in their academic progress? How about equipping the well-functioning family to assist families in crisis?

As I have mentioned previously in this blog, we need to apply a new humility to the way we plan public policies and services, in a manner that takes citizens’ everyday lives more seriously.

Co-production is such an approach.

The concept of co-production is not a new one but can be traced back to the seventies, when American political scientist and Nobel prize-winner Elinor Ostrom pointed out the interplay between professionals such as social workers and police on one side, and the citizens they are trying to help on the other.

Ostrom’s major discovery was that effective public services depend just as much on citizens’ knowledge, resources and motivation as they do on professional skills.

Co-production starts out by asking how to generate the best possible effect for citizens and how to activate both citizens’ own resources and the resources nearest to them. This requires public organisations to plan their activities based on actual considerations of which types of partnerships between citizens, family members and organisations will have the greatest impact on the result.

This does not necessarily mean that we should delegate the production of public services to the citizens themselves, or to voluntary organisations or private companies. What is genuinely new about co-production is that the relationship between citizen and system is considered equal from the outset.

Three principles for co-production in practice

Together with my colleagues from MindLab, I drew up three central approaches to planning the work on co-production in practice in the new publication Co-production: Towards a new welfare model.

First of all, the task needs to be redefined from the point of view of effect. Across the three welfare areas I mentioned in the introduction (dementia, special needs education, families at risk), it could look like this:

A move away from the old notion of helping citizens suffering from dementia, in favour of a new perspective on how to best provide their family members with both skills and breathing space; a move away from focusing on what weaker students can’t do to instead focusing on the resources available to them; and a move away from considering when to forcibly put at-risk children into care, in favour of being curious about how to get families in crisis back on their feet.

Secondly, we must invest in enabling citizens’ own resources. This could mean setting up a family-members’ café in the municipality, where family members of those suffering from dementia can share good advice and recharge their batteries to cope with their demanding lives. Fredensborg Municipality is working on this, for example.

It could mean equipping and training sports and leisure clubs to enter into partnerships with the school and the municipality (with the focus being on weaker pupils’ learning environments) so that everyone works together. This is being considered on Langeland.

Or it could mean running courses to enable families who are able to give back to help other families who are struggling to cope with everyday life. This has been done in Australia and Denmark for years, including under the auspices of the Red Cross family network.

Thirdly, we must do away with the role of authority. Public organisations often meet citizens in an authority capacity, simply because they have the power to do so. The consequence is that the public sector becomes powerless when it comes to creating positive change in people’s lives.

We must replace the concept of authority with the more open term platform, which means that the role of the public sector becomes more supportive and facilitating for others. In the field of dementia, it may be that the platform is reflected in a family network. In the field of special needs, the municipality might set up a website where young people can share experiences and challenges with others in the same situation and get advice and support from their peers. For families, it may be that the public sector supports the positive collaboration between at-risk families and socioeconomically-advantaged families, and follows up on their progress.

Raise ambitions

Co-production has implications for virtually every aspect of public sector modernisation work: management, financial management, procurement, digitisation, skills development, etc. Co-production raises questions such as:

• How do you manage welfare production if your role is not to exercise authority but to deploy resources to create a desired effect?
• What does it mean to be professional once we recognise that the citizen – e.g. student, patient, senior citizen – has an equally important role to play in the creation of welfare as the professionals do?
• Which approaches are able to activate those resources that are of greatest benefit to the citizen and how do you identify the right interaction between family members, friends, local communities, associations, companies and other public organisations?

These are difficult questions, but they are not insurmountable and are certainly worth getting to grips with. Experience with co-production, both at home and abroad, indicates that challenging our traditional understanding of how public service is created offers enormous potential.

I suggest that we would be able to create an even more appropriate and meaningful service for citizens in a series of service areas, while at the same time reaping a 20 per cent benefit in terms of costs. You could call it “20 per cent better, 20 per cent cheaper”.

That would indeed be an ambitious modernisation strategy.

Christian Bason

Empathy is the new black

By January 23rd 2013

This article previously appeared in Monday Morning Blog.

In her televised New Year’s speech, Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt made it clear that the public sector must become more efficient. Yes, but how? In my experience, an important prerequisite is that we grow the ability to put ourselves in other people’s place. We must base the creation of better and more productive welfare on empathy.

In fact, the professional ability to put oneself in the citizen’s place is a central component in several recent successful efforts to modernise the Danish public sector.

In late 2012, the Selsmose School in Høje Taastrup won the Local Government Denmark prize for innovation. The school, where about 95% of pupils are of non-Danish ethnic origin, has achieved impressive educational results, and currently ranks significantly above the national average in a number of subjects.

The key to the school’s success lies in the recognition that pupils’ well-being and happiness come before their scholastic learning, and that it is necessary to involve a broad community of actors in the local area – housing associations, businesses, parents and relatives – to foster support, enthusiasm and energy around and in the school.

Selsmose School’s transformation was thus rooted in a deep empathy for the children’s world and its larger context. Next, the results were supported by a significant administrative effort to involve both personnel and the local community in creating positive change for the pupils.

In the area of employment we see a similar tendency toward thinking far more in terms of empowering the individual citizen, for example in Copenhagen Municipality’s Borgeren ved roret (Citizen at the helm) programme.

After a decade of control and coercion, authorities are beginning to adapt a holistic view of what it takes to bring the individual unemployed person closer to the job market. The new measures make new (and cheaper) digital tools available to the public, so they themselves can tailor the services to their needs. Simultaneously, public employment services can be more personalised to the most vulnerable individuals, i.e., more focused on individual needs and challenges.

This way of working is an expression of the notion that public service – “welfare” – is based on real insight into what is important for the individual person. In the Copenhagen Municipality project there is a clear expectation that an effort will have a greater effect when it is “people-centred”.

Putting oneself in others’ place

What the two cases have in common is that – consciously or unconsciously – they involve empathy, as perhaps best described in American novelist Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird (published in 1960, during the Civil Rights Movement), when lawyer Atticus Finch tells his six-year-old daughter Scout that: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it”.

In present day Great Britain, renowned thinker and RSA think-tank director Matthew Taylor says that we in the 21st century need a new Enlightenment, noting that empathy will be a core competence for future citizens.

Can we create a humanistic think tank?

In recent years, economists have been good at telling us about the terrible economic situation, and one economic think tank after another has been founded to provide ever more “hardcore” analyses of what it will take to increase public sector productivity. Yet, paradoxically enough, it is not from economists that we should expect to find the key to getting “more from the same” in the public sector, as the Prime Minister requested in her New Year’s speech.

Empathy and insight into people’s actual experience, motivation, behaviour and needs – which could drive new and more productive public sector business models – requires entirely other kinds of skills. We must become much better at using the knowledge produced by behavioural psychologists, sociologists, ethnographers, cultural analysts and other humanists.

The object of humanistic studies is indeed the same as that of welfare efforts, namely people. So why not start a new humanistic think tank, focused on public sector renewal and productivity, and on how we could create an even better welfare system with the individual person as the defining element.

The time is ripe. For the “soft” is on its way to becoming the “hard”. Empathy will be the next big thing in the welfare debate of 2013.

Christian Bason

The public sector manager’s responsibility

By January 11th 2013

This article was previously published in the Danish weekly Mandag Morgen.

Public sector executives can begin taking greater responsibility for creating real change for Danes. Their tasks include practicing the concept of “systemic contexts”.

“Climate change was the systemic cause of Hurricane Sandy,” wrote researcher George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science at the University of California at Berkeley, in the introduction of a recent article published in the American online news website, Huffington Post.

In the article, he provokes the many pundits in the United States who claimed in the wake of the devastating hurricane that climate change may have played a role, but that it was not the cause of the devastating hurricane.

Lakoff argues that climate change was the cause – if we understand the kind of cause we are talking about. This requires that we understand the difference between two types of causation: systemic and direct.

Systemic causation may sound rather abstract, but according to Lakoff it is quite familiar: Smoking is a systemic cause of lung cancer. HIV is a systemic cause of AIDS. Drunk driving is a systemic cause of traffic accidents. And last, but not least, sex without contraception is a systemic cause of unwanted pregnancies.

Direct causation is also well known: Hitting someone in the face is the direct cause of the pain they experience. Throwing a rock through a window is the direct cause of the broken window, etc.

According to Lakoff, the challenge is that direct causation is straightforward to understand and control, but the systemic causes are what really matter. Thus they are important to understand.

A systemic cause can be one of many and can be due to a variety of factors. It is often indirect and works through a chain of relationships. It may reflect a probability or arise through a feedback mechanism.

Public sector managers’ responsibility

Why is all of this interesting to managers of public organisations (or advisors to managers in public organisations)? To quote Lakoff:

“In general, causation in ecosystems, biological systems, economic systems, and social systems tends not to be direct, but is no less causal. And because it is not direct causation, it requires all the greater attention if it is to be understood and its negative effects controlled.”

In other words: Public sector managers are responsible for creating change via systemic causation. This has implications for their approach to management and leadership, whether they are responsible for reducing accidents at work, preventing food scandals, improving well-being in day care institutions or creating innovation and growth in the Danish economy.

One of the most common excuses I hear from public sector executives when it comes to creating tangible results for citizens and society is that there are so many other factors in addition to the efforts of the municipality, region, agency, or ministry, all of which impact the success of a desired change. For example, the efforts of other organisations, companies and people, economic trends, etc.

Lakoff would respond that this is precisely the point: Public sector results – results that must be created in a complex and changing reality – are not usually about making a direct impact on the world.

Management and systemic causation

If you want to strengthen your ability to lead through systemic causation, there are three things you should do:

Firstly, you should establish a clear overview of the system or the network of stakeholders that comprises the cause-effect chains in your area of responsibility. My experience is that public sector managers rarely do this formally – but why not do this using graphic or digital mapping, for example?

Secondly, you should work consciously and strategically to influence all of the stakeholders in the area, thereby increasing the systemic impact on the issue you are working to address. For example, by actively seeking to influence all stakeholders that have any sort of connection to the set of relationships that create or diminish a safe working environment at Danish workplaces, the factors that promote or hinder our food safety, the stakeholders and actions that affect the way our children develop and thrive in day care institutions, etc. This may also involve targeting the complex relationships that ultimately form the competitive and innovative power of our universities and businesses.

Yes, this is already being partially done today. But no matter what political area you look at, it is not being done with sufficient clarity or direction.

Thirdly and lastly, an acknowledgement of systemic causes entails taking responsibility for the effects that are ultimately created for citizens, companies and society – despite the fact that they do not occur as a direct result of decisions or actions over which you have control. Taking that kind of responsibility would be fitting for many public sector managers.

Christian Bason

Innovation machine helps New York schools

By October 22nd 2012

This article has previously been published in the Danish weekly, Mandag Morgen.

As a consequence of poor results in New York schools, the city council has established the iZone organisation. It has led the schools through a thorough change, in which responsibility and freedom go hand in hand. Now the next paradigm shift is waiting.

A couple of months ago I blogged on humble policy development, about how we often assume that new public policies, regulations, budgets and programmes  automatically become the reality we imagine. But I also wrote that the truth is often otherwise: It is often the case that at the end of the day there has been no noticeable change for the people.

So, we must find smarter ways from policy to practice. The question is how?

Recently in Denmark we were visited by an organisation which I believe shows the way from strategy to concrete change in the public sector. New York City has established the organisation iZone under the Department of Education as a tool for transforming the public school system.

iZone is the culmination of a transformational process that has brought the New York schools from crisis to consolidation. Now the focus is on real innovative thinking about what a school can actually be.

The school crisis, which was at its worst ten years ago, meant that only 40% of a class year in the New York public schools obtained their diploma.

The consolidation was a matter of holding school administrators accountable, yet freeing them. It was made possible to dismiss administrators who did not achieve results. Direct review of the schools’ academic performance was implemented, with publication of results for the best and worst institutions alike. On the other hand, administrators were for the first time allowed to manage their own budgets, and were given much greater freedom to set up their school’s structure and teaching as they wish.

The accountability meant that the worst administrators were removed, and their was great pressure to produce results. At present a good 60% of a class receive their high school diplomas. That is a vast improvement, but naturally not good enough. So how does one carry out the next paradigm shift?

Innovation is the answer, and that is precisely the phase that the New York schools have entered. This is taking place on the basis that administrators are having difficulty using their newly accorded freedom to think differently in practice. Therefore, the New York Board of Education concluded that they need help – innovation help.

iZone, or the New York City Innovation Zone, was founded with the aim of formulating a number of central principles for school reform, then actively helping schools to transform the principles into local changes.

The idea is to help more than 200 public schools to rethink their efforts. Here are three principles iZone is following which I believe could inspire Danish politicians, top officials and public developers:

  • Establish a main idea. iZone puts citizens at the centre of how schools will create value. The main principle for the reform work in New York is individualised learning, i.e., the idea that every student has his or her own way and pace of learning. The idea is not just attractive, it is also supported by comprehensive scientific evidence. iZone has made great efforts to communicate the concept clearly to the schools.
  • Start with the administration. According to iZone vice-director Stacey Gillett, iZone’s success will stand or fall according to which administrators will commit to the programme. This entails, for example, that a school cannot get by with merely sending in a formal application to participate in iZone. The school will also be visited by the iZone team, and the school principal and key staff will be thoroughly interviewed about their ideas for changes at the school. The purpose is to ensure that there is genuine commitment and sufficient competence to bring the new measures to life.
  • Invest in the innovation process. The very central premise of iZone is that the board invest significant resources to support the school’s efforts to find its own solutions and measures that work best for it. This involves extensive process support, partly from a central team in New York consisting of former school principals and others with deep sector experience, in an ongoing dialogue with the schools, and partly from a wide variety of designers and innovation experts who can facilitate the schools’ own local processes by rethinking and redesigning teaching forms, physical facilities and the use of technology, for example. the schools themselves choose whom they will work with. Even experts from Sweden and Great Britain have been invited to help. Just think about that point for a minute: The Americans are asking Europe for help in rethinking public service…

iZone is thus an innovation machine. It is a break from the notion that if we just provide the right economic incentives, the people “out there” will surely figure it out. Nonetheless, iZone is investing significant resources to make the vision of “focus on the student” a reality.

According to iZone’s Stacey Gillett, around $200,000 (1.5 million kroner) is being used in each school over three years for process support. With 200 schools (25% off the total in New York) in the programme, the sum corresponds roughly to one-thousandth of the city’s overall annual school budget. Altogether, it is a matter of around 75 million kroner annually, when we are talking about 200 schools. The funds come partly from the city, partly from independent foundations such as the Gates Foundation.

This leads me to a central question: Are we in Denmark ready to invest as much as one-thousandth of our overall operating budgets in process support  in the social sector, the health sector, the education sector – in order to increase the likelihood of succeeding in what we want to do?

If the answer is yes, then let us see some more innovation machines on the Danish public landscape. Only in that way will we go from policy to practice.

Christian Bason

Transforming our public management culture: A provocation?

By October 8th 2012

A few weeks ago I attended the conference local design public in Lille, run by the French region’s innovation platform La27e Region. I was asked to contribute to the opening session with a brief presentation intriguingly titled “Dear public managers: A few good reasons to transform our management culture.”

Preparing for this, I found it disturbingly easy to point out a number of problematic characteristics of our current culture. Here is what I said:

“Dear public managers. We need to transform the management culture in public organisations because too often, what you say is:

“Citizens need to understand the system”, not “We need to understand citizens”.

“I am just here to manage the law and the budget”, not “I am here to make a positive impact for citizens and society.”

“I wish all the changes would go away and that my job would just be stable and secure”, not “My job is about adapting to the changes happening in our economy and society, and to create a more resilient public sector.”

“I must control how my employees use their time and resources”, not “I must create an environment that authorizes my employees to continuously experiment, fail, learn and find better solutions”.

“Citizen involvement is about doing quantitative satisfaction surveys”, not “citizen involvement is about going up really close, using ethnography, video, audio and graphics to see for ourselves how citizens experience public services — and then to involve them in exploring new solutions.”

“As long as my boss and our political masters are happy, I am doing a good job”, not “I am systematically documenting that my organisation produces better outcomes – and I am absolutely adamant at improving them.”

“It is the fault of other stakeholders, the economy, globalisation and the weather that our organisation is failing to meet its goals”, not “We need to work smarter and more effectively with our stakeholders to affect more change, in spite of external circumstances”.

“We develop new policies by thinking, writing, holding meetings, and occassionally briefing interest organisations about our plans”, not “We co-design policies, collaborating at a very early stage across government departments, with stakeholders and with end-users to explore problems and possible solutions, using new media, graphic illustrations, and models. We don’t ‘consult’ on policy. We run policy workshops.”

“Design is superficial branding and styling”, not “design is about applying deeply human approaches to value-creation for citizens and society, combining graphics, products, services and systems in more effective ways that meet our needs today and in the future.”

Dear public managers. Our management culture needs to change because we have too little empathy for those we serve, not enough appetite for trying out new approaches, and because we have insufficient ability to document and learn from our results.

We need to transform our management culture so more decision-makers say, ‘I take responsibility for creating a better future that makes everyone better off — whatever it takes!’”

Christian Bason

“We believe in evidence-based policy. Yeah, right!”

By August 22nd 2012

This article has previously been published in the Danish weekly, Mandag Morgen

There is much talk about measurement, and how public services must deliver better results. But the fact is that only very few politically governed organisations base their operations on their ability to create a positive impact on the world.

Shortly after I started my first government job, I overheard a conversation about a brand new policy programme evaluation. The discussion between the two civil servants went something like this: “Well now we have to explain these evaluation results in the parliamentary committee. And then we need to say that we take them seriously.” To which the colleague replied: “Yes, because here we believe in ‘evidence-based policy’” – which prompted mutual laughter.

I was somewhat surprised by this conversation. I had dedicated a significant part of my professional life as an evaluation consultant and had actively participated in setting up the Danish Evaluation Society (Dansk Evalueringsselskab – DES). I was convinced that public organisations should, fundamentally, measure and operate based on the difference they make to citizens and society. In other words: Are we generating the learning and well-being in our schools that we want? Are we getting the health benefits we are paying for? Are we really helping our unemployed back into work? In short: Is Denmark becoming a better place in which to live and work as a result of public organisations’ efforts? At the end of the day, that’s what “results” are all about.

Now that I have spent half a decade in the public sector, it seems quite natural to me that civil servants – whether they work for the state, a region or a municipality – laugh at results measurement and at the double-digit millions of kroner we spend on it every year.

Firstly, many other important factors determine good decisions in public organisations, beyond concerns for “documented” impact. The most important factor is presumably political considerations, both tactical and strategic, including how to make the minister or mayor look good.  Another (related) factor could include the appropriate timing of publishing evaluation results. It could also be consideration for the organisation’s existing mission, operational priorities and focus, for its employees, for various stakeholders, etc.

Secondly, many impact measurements and evaluations are encumbered by a lack of reliability. They can be based on a weak empirical foundation; they can be difficult to interpret; data can arrive too late to be considered as a basis for decision-making; and there can – first and foremost – be a lack of clarity surrounding the causal connections: In a complex social environment, is it really our organisation’s efforts, or lack thereof, that are responsible for the unsatisfactory results?

Thirdly, many organisations are not at all clear about what their effects are, or should be. In my experience, a great number of them confuse activities (what is being done, such as delivering teaching) with outputs (e.g. that a number of students have completed a course) with effects (that the students have in fact learned something).

One could say that many organisations have not, at the end of the day, managed to put great effort into completely clarifying whether they have had a positive or a negative influence on their surroundings. And they do not seek to create systematic, organisational learning in connection with their efforts, such as through experiments or user involvement.

Finally, a factor that I have only recently started to realise is this: The Ministry of Finance, at least in Denmark, is not particularly preoccupied with results. They are more interested in the public sector’s relationship to inputs, in other words money and other production resources. At a time when public sector finances are under severe pressure and a new Budget Law is in the offing, this is not particularly surprising. But if the Ministry – which traditionally sets the tone for public sector management, reforms and good governance – does not exactly embrace result- and impact measurement, then who should?

Indeed, what justifies the public sectors existence is not a specific use of funds; rather, it is that the public sector makes a positive difference to citizens and to society – and (one might be tempted to add) does it for as few resources as possible.

We must therefore not reduce efforts to measure “results” to tactical political manoeuvring. Results and evidence are not that difficult to understand, nor that difficult to work with in a systematic manner. We have far too much to lose if we fail to take it seriously. And that is no laughing matter.

Christian Bason

Where is the humility in policy development?

By June 22nd 2012

This article has previously been published in the Danish weekly, Mandag Morgen.

I recently heard a minister say that simply passing a new law in Parliament by no means guarantees change in the real world. If we know that policies don’t necessarily work just because a decision has been taken, why do we keep pretending otherwise?

When Aarhus University anthropologist, Nina Holm Vohnsen, defended an award-winning PhD project on policy implementation, she highlighted that many policy developers develop new initiatives to suit a reality that does not actually exist. In her thesis, she describes this as developing a policy to “Ground Zero”: a completely empty place on society’s map where pretty much nothing exists already and where a new or amended policy can perform its work unimpeded.

The reality is obviously different.

People – citizens, companies, other public organisations and institutions – are busy with a whole lot of things that make the world complex. In fact, they are so busy that the interdependencies between actors, activities and consequences are almost impossible to decipher. Just think about all of the administrative levels, organisations, roles and people involved in the health or education sector. In reality, policy developers often give up in the face of an obscure and complex reality, and return to the safe notion of “Ground Zero” –  even when they know, deep-down, that it doesn’t exist.

This could be forgiven if there were no helpful tools available. But there are. An intelligent approach to effective policy development requires three things:

  • - That we genuinely want to understand what is required in order for a policy – regulation, expenditure, service, etc. – to work in practice;
  • - That we acknowledge that the reality is more complex than we might initially think;
  • - That we adopt an approach to policy development which takes the complexity seriously and which reflects a humble consideration for what has a realistic potential to make a difference.

In 2007, the Welsh complexity researcher, David Snowden, wrote an article in Harvard Business Review which became one of the most quoted pieces that year. In it, he presented a model for decision-making under different circumstances: simple, complicated, complex and chaotic. The key distinction that policy developers should be aware of concerns the difference between complicated situations and complex situations.

A complicated challenge could, for example, be: “How do we build a bridge across the Oresund?” Although undoubtedly a challenging task, it nevertheless involves relatively well-known parameters. We know the strength of various steel and concrete constructions, etc.; and we can calculate which solutions will carry a certain amount of traffic. In complicated situations, the approach to problem solving involves the following activities: examining the situation, making an analysis, and developing a solution. In other words, we can find a solution providing we have enough bright minds and a very powerful calculator. Coincidentally, this is often the way we develop polices when we feel we are doing a thorough job.

A complex challenge could be the question of how we get more young people to complete a youth education programme. This is a social problem with a wide range of participants, organisations, institutions, etc., in which young people’s experiences, values and norms also affect their behaviour. The interdependency between various participants and people is significant, and we don’t necessarily know all of the relationships and interactions. Which initiatives will actually get more young people to choose and complete a course, and which may have the opposite effect, or have no effect at all?

According to David Snowden, complex situations involve the following approach: test different solutions, record the effects, and develop the best possible solution. Test again, and again.

Note the reverse sequence of the development process: because we don’t already understand the connection between the causes (solutions) and the consequences (effects), we need to feel our way forward. We need to start with provisional suggested solutions and see what happens. This approach to policy development differs radically to the one we would normally adopt; developing policy under complex conditions thereby presupposes a considerable amount of humility for how much knowledge one actually has in advance, even as an expert. This requires the ability and courage to introduce the world to initiatives which have yet to be perfected, and then to expect feedback from the people affected by them. Finally, it presupposes that we systematically examine what works – and are equally systematic about taking the consequences of the feedback we get.

In a future characterised by a huge amount of pressure on public resources, and with limited progress in the most important policy areas affecting our societies – health, social affairs, employment and education, to name some of the most important ones – we must become much better at developing policies in areas involving great complexity.

I would therefore like to invite you to join a new cross-public sector network on humble policy development. It could have been called “The network against Ground Zero”, but I would rather call it “The Alliance for policy development that works”

Why don’t you join me?

Christian Bason

When nudge meets design

By May 23rd 2012

This article has previously been published in the Danish weekly, Mandag Morgen.

The question is not whether the public sector should seek to influence the behaviour of citizens. The question is whether it does so effectively enough. To do so, we need to take advantage of the inspiration offered to us by the principles of nudging and design.

A central premise of economic theory is currently under revision: people do not necessarily behave rationally. On the contrary, as thinkers as diverse as Daniel Kahnemann (psychologist and Nobel prize winner) and Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler (Chicago professors of law and economics respectively) claim, people behave like… well, people.

In other words, we sometimes behave irrationally, and, as social beings, our decisions are influenced by our habits, norms and relationships with others. We do not behave with the sole intent of maximising “utility”. This means, in a broader sense, that our behaviour depends heavily on the context in which we find ourselves.

As an example, Sunstein & Thaler highlight that we are much more likely to take the stairs than the lift when presented with a sign that says: “Most people choose to take the stairs.” They call this principle nudge – to signify that it only takes a few simple adjustments to influence people’s behaviours considerably.

This makes nudging an interesting topic for the public sector – since we in the public sector are preoccupied with getting people to do more of what we want them to do and less of what we don’t want. More exercise, less smoking, more salad, less fat, more subscriptions to organ donation, fewer people politely declining, quicker payments of arrears, fewer debtors, etc.

A British tax authority has looked more closely at this last example in the context of behavioural economics. When they changed the wording of a letter addressed to citizens with significant tax debt to “More than 90 per cent of citizens in your district have already paid their taxes,” payments by debtors rose significantly.

In fact, the British are now so enamoured with the principles behind nudging that they have set up a special unit, the Behavioural Insights Unit, which reports directly to Prime Minister Cameron. This unit has completed a number of interesting studies on nudging in recent years, in part under the guidance of the economist Richard Thaler.

What is special about nudging is that people are given the freedom to choose – they simply need to choose between different alternatives. There is no financial pay-off or penalty involved. Here in Denmark, the tax authority, SKAT, has already used the nudge principles on a website that is very familiar to most Danes: TastSelv, an online service for taxpayers.

It started a few years ago when a couple of smart tax employees began to think about ways to “nudge” more Danes to decide whether they wanted to receive a paper version of their annual tax return when they were going online to check it anyway. Should people choose not to receive the paper version, this would save money.

Their thoughts led to a range of experiments with different placements of an online button, which enabled the visitor to click on “No thank you” for the paper version. The button already existed but was buried deep in the form. After involving citizens in trialling various different solutions, the tax employees found a more suitable place for the button, which made it easier to decline the paper version.

The result? During the first five days of using the new function, more than one million Danes clicked “No thank you” to the paper version. This not only saves a few square metres of rain forest, it also saves a significant amount of taxpayers’ money.

One could say that the practically-minded people in The Danish Ministry of Taxation redesigned the digital service based on the principles of nudging. By “redesign” I mean that they did three things:

  1. 1. They questioned the status quo: have we designed the current solution smartly enough?
  2. 2. They used experiments to come up with a more effective solution by developing possible options (prototypes) for various solutions and testing them directly with citizens.
  3. 3. They used the knowledge they acquired through citizen involvement to develop and implement the new solution.

This way of solving problems could also be called design attitude. This refers to an approach to the world which contends that the world can be improved, that one needs to understand how people behave if one wants to change it, and that one should always seek to develop concrete, tangible solutions. Design attitude combines analytical reasoning with sympathetic insight, empathy and an understanding of what actually delivers change.

This cocktail of nudging and design is incredibly powerful, providing we understand how to bring it into play. It promises something that we are under increasing pressure to deliver in the public sector: ways to create better results for less money. By synthesising these principles, it is in fact possible to develop solutions which are virtually free and which do not require a host of new laws and rules. People’s actual lives, motivations and behaviours are what form the basis of this approach.

Critics – not least in the UK – believe that nudging has the potential to be used as a form of manipulation, because by nudging the public sector proactively attempts to get people to do something that they might not otherwise have done. Think about this point for a minute. Is this not the purpose of all politics? Providing we are open about the terms and background of the redesign of public sector efforts, I can’t see the problem.

The question is not, after all, whether the public sector should try to influence people. The question is whether we are doing it successfully.

Christian Bason

Profound reforms needed in the public sector

By May 14th 2012

This blog has previously been published in the Danish magazine Monday Morning.

It is in relation to the citizen that the need for public sector reform is greatest. Despite the public sector’s ardent willingness to adapt, implementing these ‘profound reforms’ remains problematic.

In 2009, when the financial crisis appeared to be at its peak, I wrote a column for the Danish weekly, Mandag Morgen. In it, I argued that it was necessary for the public sector to take action and thereby demonstrate how important the public sector is to our economy when the private financial markets fail. The public sector alone was in a position to provide bailout packages to the banks, acquire crisis-hit companies and implement more sensible regulation of the financial sector.

At the time I wrote that the public sector was part of the solution. Today, however, it increasingly appears as if the public sector is part of the problem.

The most significant welfare areas – both in Denmark and in the countries with which we compare ourselves – require things to be done very differently. By this I mean that reducing expenditure in certain areas by a few percentage points or prioritising slightly more rigorously is not enough. On the contrary, what’s needed is a fundamental transformation of what we perceive to be public service. One could call this ‘profound reform’.

Profound reform is about ascertaining a new set of principles for defining public service and using these principles to redefine organisations,  projects and processes. An essential aspect of profound reform is that its guiding principles can emerge from many sources, for example internally within public organisations, in not-for-profit organisations and NGOs, in the private sector, or among the citizens themselves.

The consequences of profound reform are barrier-breaking for public sector managers and their employees, since the profound reform necessitates a public sector that:

- Shows empathy for the individual citizen, family and local community. It is thus based on greater sympathy for the citizen than for the system.

- Builds on the principle that the individual is an expert in his or her own life, and thus challenges professional competencies/‘professionalism’.

- Takes as its starting point people’s and groups’ actual behaviours and needs as opposed to classic economic or professional considerations.

- Focuses on the long-term social and economic effects on the individual and community instead of on short-term budget optimisation.

- Organises efforts for citizens in a way that focuses on their service experience as opposed to on public sector organisation.

There are in fact enough good examples of profound, innovative reform if one looks at it from an international perspective. Whichever welfare area comes under focus, radically more effective and significantly less expensive models – compared to those familiar to Denmark – do exist.

As an example, both the US and Australia have found better and cheaper ways of helping vulnerable children and young people while avoiding the expense of forcible removals by adopting a health-oriented family approach whereby families help other families. Also, in both the UK and the US, efforts to support people with learning disabilities have been made more effective through individual budgets, ensuring a better and more efficient use of public resources. Moreover, as has now become well known, Fredericia Municipality in Jutlland has massively improved and increased the effectiveness of its home care efforts by systemising daily rehabilitation.

Despite the increasing demand, however, profound reform remains a rarity in the Danish context. This is because the problem lies in the fact that genuine profound reform requires the public system – the public sector architecture – to change in equally profound ways.

In all of the the above-mentioned examples the relationship between citizens and the public sector has changed fundamentally:

- In terms of families, efforts have been made to take advantage of the unique strengths exhibited by diverging families who have experienced – and managed to overcome – tough challenges. They are therefore able to help other families in crisis. This represents a complete shift away from perceiving the families as the problem, towards accepting their ability to provide the solutions if given partners who understand how to help them on their way.

- With regards to people with learning disabilities, the reforms are evidence of how even the most intellectually vulnerable are better able to manage their own money than professional social workers and therapists.

- In terms of home care in Denmark, it has been acknowledged that most elderly people actually prefer to live the life they have always lived as opposed to one characterised by home care dependency. It does, however, require assistance to enable individuals to regain their physical and mental strength.

In light of the reforms currently being announced at the highest level, there is little doubt that people want radically new ideas on how to structure our public services.

The pertinent question is whether our public sector leaders and their employees have the imagination and determination to push through the kinds of profound reforms that are in fact needed. 

Christian Bason

EU design leadership

By May 1st 2012

In the spring of 2011 the European Commission asked 14 design experts for recommendations on design a driver for innovation and growth in Europe. MindLab is part of this group, the European Design Leadership Board.

But is it possible to develop a design policy without involving a wider circle of users and stakeholders? And should new methods of “co-design” not be applied in such a process? For these reasons, the European Design Leadership Board invited a select group of 65 people to develop policy propositions along with them. Aalto University serves as secretariat for the expert panel and designed the workshop in collaboration with MindLab.

The expert panel will issue a final report of recommendations, in part based upon the workshop sessions, to EU Commissioner Tajani, who is responsible for European policy regarding enterprise and industry matters. The Commissioner will receive the report at a ceremony in Brussels late June.

Below are photos from the workshop session by MindLab and a short film by Aalto University.

Christian Bason

Two governance challenges

By January 2nd 2012

This blog has previously been published in the Danish magazine “Monday Morning”.

There is a lot of talk about innovation in the public sector – and with good reason; but a new way of thinking should never be an end in itself. The vision should rather be to discover new and better principles for the future of public governance. In this regard, there are two great challenges to be met.

The asymmetry problem
The first challenge is an asymmetry problem. Our public sector management suffers from an imbalance between those who bear the cost of an activity and those who reap the rewards. This asymmetry means that public authorities often lack a clear incentive to undertake tasks in a way that is overall the best and least expensive for the individual as well as society. The challenge is complicated by the presence of a second asymmetry that emerges in practice: silo asymmetry. The public sector’s organisation into various administrative domains (horizontally), and into national, regional and municipal administrative levels (vertically) impedes holistic thinking. It is, of course, impossible to conceive of a public sector without any organizing principle. But the silo asymmetry means there is a need for much stronger and binding cross-sectoral management processes than we have at present, at the top level as well as the operational level. We have spoken of “joined-up government” for more than a decade, but where has anyone really implemented the leadership and management models that will allow the cohesion to become real?

Time asymmetry The outcomes of public sector efforts are created over time – in some cases over several decades. But those making the effort (e.g., national prisons making enormous investments in rehabilitation) are not those who will reap the subsequent rewards (e.g., municipal social services, which will save money when former convicts find employment). Where do we see actual new management models that take on this dilemma? This is where one could explore whether social finance or social impact bonds can help short-circuit the time asymmetry by finding investors willing to pay for long-range societal outcomes – in exchange for a return that reflects the risk they run. This requires a completely undogmatic approach to whether the investors are private, public or NGOs. This is one of the areas in which the British-American organisation Social Finance is working.

Relationship problems
The second challenge is that public governance and management is often based on a flawed perception of the relationship to citizens. There is still a widespread notion that public authorities best achieve results through control and regulation. At the same time, there is an opinion that as a public official one cannot take credit for the results of one’s efforts, because many other (external) conditions are involved. Nonetheless, we need a more radical shift from control to service; a service-oriented relationship to the public is generally much more effective and inexpensive. The Danish Tax Agency has already demonstrated this through its Compliance Strategy, and the Danish Working Environment Authority, with its new 2020 plan, is headed in the same direction.

Top executives in government must take responsibility for the results they create, even if they are achieved indirectly or through others. We have (again) spoken for many years about networked governance, but incredibly few organisations are explicitly practicing it. There needs to be far greater focus on what I would perhaps rather call value chain governance: a laser-sharp eye for those causal connections and resources outside one’s own organisation which will create value and results for the end-user. We must step back from the abstract practices of administration and toward a sincere interest in what will make a difference in the lives of real people. This includes, not least, an eye for how people’s own resources can be part of meaningful coproduction with the public sector – also as an “active citizen”.

Semiautonomous municipalities as frontrunners?
There is enormous potential to be realised if our public institutions seriously address these two governance problems. It would give us more holistic approaches to how to get the greatest outcomes for our tax income and catapult our public institutions into new value-creating partnerships, not least across municipalities, regions and the state.

Some rather radical innovation processes must come into play for the new governance models to become reality. Perhaps the small handful of “semiautonomous” Danish municipalities, which the government has recently given the license to experiment beyond current rules and regulations, are ready to pick up the gauntlet?

Christian Bason

What can public sector managers learn from Steve Jobs?

By December 21st 2011

This blog has previously been published in the Danish magazine “Monday Morning”.

I have always thought that there are limits to what public sector managers can learn from their private sector colleagues, but after reading the new biography of the late Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder and CEO, I have come to think differently.

In mid-September, I had the unusual experience of seeing a roomful of French central administration department heads being taught innovation by an American computer company. The occasion was a summit meeting on public innovation held by “Bercy”, as the French Ministry of Finance is popularly known. In that context, an Apple European director was invited to talk about the secret behind the California firm’s incredible ability to constantly innovate.

Think about it: The French central administration elite deigning to hear about the experiences of a private American company? The financial crisis must really be hurting the French public sector!

Nonetheless, the assembled appeared to listen attentively to the presentation. At one point the Apple director emphasised the company’s ambition that every new product be “magical and transformative”. In other words, customers must have a totally exceptional impression of what Apple does for them. During the ensuing plenary discussion among the French managers, the man next to me (a British consultant, the only other foreign participant) leaned forward and pointedly said: “Imagine if your services, too, were perceived that way: magical and transformative”.

The room fell silent. One could sense the managers’ pondering. Magical and transformative social assistance? Magical and transformative foreign service? Magical and transformative postal service?

And yet… Well, why not? It’s one thing if a teenager is willing to spend a month’s paper route money on an iPad 2 because it is so delicious (in Apple terminology) that one wants to lick it, but whether it should be magical and transformative to be treated at hospital, go to elementary school or be helped by the job centre is another matter. After all, our public institutions are responsible for a range of more fundamental and at times vital functions. Why isn’t the ambition so high as to make it a transformative experience to be in contact with the institutions that literally matter so much in our lives?

Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs, died shortly after the French conference, and shortly thereafter came Walter Isaacson’s biography of the man. I read it as soon as I could get hold of a copy, with a hidden personal agenda: Would there be other insights from his life or from Apple that could teach us something about innovation in the public sector? There were. Let me give three examples:

First of all, Steve Jobs always put himself in the customer’s place. He was never satisfied with what Apple’s hoards of engineers, designers and developers suggested. There was always something that could be done better to create a better user experience. Luckily, Steve Jobs was in many ways an archetype of the company’s target group: a culturally radical music lover. He insisted that computers and technology should be understandable and usable by ordinary people in everyday situations. That is why he was the first to commercialise the graphical user interface that we today take for a given in all computers, but which Apple still does best. And that is why he insisted that the company’s latest transformative technology, the iPad, should not have a pointer. The most intuitive thing is obviously to use our fingers to navigate the screen.

Secondly, the visionary Jobs made Apple employees tremendously proud of their work. One of his best-known sayings came when, at a company retreat, he invited his staff to join him in “making a dent in the universe”. Not a small ambition, yet one that you could say has been realised by what is today the world’s most valuable company, whose products are found in the hands of millions of people the world over. How many public sector managers have such an ambition?

Thirdly, Steve Jobs created a design-driven organisation. That is, Apple’s very organisational DNA – management structure, development processes, IT infrastructure, work methods, production, logistics and marketing – are put together with the sole goal of ensuring that the customer has a fully integrated experience of Apple’s stores, products, packaging and services such as iTunes and App Store. A central concept in this context is that Apples chief designer, Jonathan Ive, reports directly to the CEO. This means that it is design that guides the business’s decisions; not technology, not the financials, not marketing. The design is, at the end of the day, what the customer experiences. As design and innovation guru Roberto Verganti – a great Jobs admirer – so precisely said, good design is “the creation of meaning”. Apple’s organisation is highly geared to creating a meaningful experience for the user. A magical and transformative experience.

Could a public service organisation hire a “head designer” to report directly to the chief executive? Might it have a chief executive who is personally, deeply engaged in every detail of the concrete service provision, in citizens’ experiences and in inspiring employees to do things they wouldn’t think possible?

Naturally, we in the public sector can never create as elegant and coherent solutions and experiences as does Apple, given the necessity to balance conflicting political requirements, considerations and pressures in a social and institutional world that is all too complex and unpredictable. Nonetheless, I believe we are duty-bound to try, especially since our “business” does not concern something as banal as electronic products, but rather the lives and welfare of people. In this, Steve Job’s insistence that we all deserve a better experience can serve as a pretty relevant guideline.

Christian Bason

Public sector innovation must move from Strategy to action

By November 25th 2011

This blog has previously been published in the Danish newspaper “Monday Morning”.

Innovation strategies are currently being developed throughout the public sector – including in the government. This is encouraging and long overdue. But the challenge will be to create strategies that lead to innovation in practice. The following presents a little more than five examples of what this means.

 “Can you give me some concrete examples of innovation for our coming strategy process?” (city manager). “Can you give a presentation to provide inspiration to our strategic work with innovation, now that we are a free municipality?” (development director). “We are finalising our innovation strategy, but what can we do about the incentive structure?” (municipal development consultant). These are examples of enquiries I receive from the municipalities. At the moment, I hear them almost daily.

Right now, interest in innovation in the public sector – particularly in the municipalities ­– is rapidly growing. This topic has certainly been on the agenda for years. But it is no longer a matter of isolated projects or initiatives. Innovation is now a strategic agenda that has the undivided attention of top management – both in the municipalities and national government. After the election, the victorious parties have set a national innovation strategy in its programme.

It is nothing new that the government will propose initiatives to boost research, development, productivity and growth in Danish companies. But it is new that a national strategy for innovation also includes the public sector. And it’s good timing – not just in relation to developments in the municipalities, but also in relation to the world around us. Other countries are already in full swing. If the government establishes a strategy, it will place us in the current of countries such as Australia and Sweden, who in recent months have adopted ambitious action plans to promote innovation in the public sector. For example, Canberra passed an Australian Public Service Innovation Action Plan.

The need for a more strategic and systematic approach to public innovation has rarely been greater. The challenges are many, whether we are speaking of education, employment, health or even productivity in the public sector. As shown by the municipal leaders’ statements above, the question is not whether innovation is needed, but rather how we will choose to approach the task of innovation. So what key considerations must a public sector innovation strategy include if it is to make a difference? Here are five questions:

  1. What should the strategy be about? In my book, “Leading Public Sector Innovation” (Policy Press, 2010), I emphasise that a good public innovation strategy requires direction. What key challenges must the strategy specifically focus on? What significant national, regional or municipal initiatives will we invest in to increase the probability of finding truly radical, innovative solutions? What should comprise the strategy’s portfolio?
  2. How will we work with innovation? Which means, methods and processes should the strategy utilise? For example, will we emphasise new technology, research, employee-driven innovation, or strengthening the involvement of citizens and businesses? Or will we use a mix of these? Are we seeking incremental or radical innovation? Do we even have a clear idea of these different forms of innovation? Do we have the competences to use them?
  3. Who must be involved? Innovation is made possible from the top, but is executed from below. Should the strategy primarily involve stakeholders in the public sector, or should there be a collaboration between a range of state, regional and municipal organisations, private companies, NGOs, or citizens themselves? What activities can ensure that the involvement happens in practice and that it focuses on practical, effective solutions rather than special interests?
  4. How will we measure the success of the strategy? Public innovation occurs when new ideas are implemented and create value for society. The bottom line is completely different from that of the private sector. Or rather, bottom lines. There are four in all: Productivity, service experience, effects, and democracy. Are some of these dimensions to be prioritised more than others? How will we continually document that the strategy delivers results?
  5. Where will the strategy be rooted? Where will we embed the strategy in the organisation so that we both secure top management focus and a broad commitment? How and by whom is it to be executed and what governance structures will ensure that it happens?

In fact, there is a sixth question that may be the most difficult of them all. When the Australian government announced its new innovation strategy back in May, I received an e-mail from one of its key advisors. “They’ve even included ‘courage’!” he wrote. The Australians thereby point out that strong and courageous leadership is essential if we want to translate innovation to action. How will we choose to approach this challenge?

Christian Bason

Global impressions – Part II

By March 1st 2011

From The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI) in Adelaide, to Melbourne’s VPS Innovation Action Plan, to Sydney-based strategic design firm Second Road, and to some cutting edge research environments, Australia is in many ways leading innovation in public and social services. During my 10-day visit there in late November 2010 as part of the Social Innovator Dialogues, covering five cities and engaging with public servants, social innovators and the academic community, it was clear that there is a rapidly growing awareness of not only the need for more innovation, but of how to bring it about.

Redesigning family care

Perhaps the most striking example I came across was in South Australia, where TACSI is engaging to help transform ‘chaotic families’ into ‘thriving families’. Chaotic families are typically characterised by high levels of alcohol abuse, violence, unemployment, and dysfunction. TACSI, a not-for profit, is applying ethnography and design thinking – much like MindLab’s work – supplemented by engagement with the state authorities, which are also co-funding the project. For the past eight months a public manager from the state’s Department for Families has been seconded to the project. In that capacity, she has no longer acted formally as a manager, but has participated together with a small team of a designer and a sociologist in exploring how the families live their lives, with the aim of finding new opportunities for helping them to become “thriving families”. When I visited, the project team was beginning to see the results of their work – going far beyond insights into the families’ lives, to generating concrete positive change in their situation.

The project has facilitated links and collaborations between the positive deviant families with the families at risk and is thus generating a positive circle of building resources and helping the strengthened network of families help themselves to tackle the challenges they are facing.

Carolyn, the manager seconded to the project, describes TACSI’s families project as a ‘resourcing model’, which is radically different from how she has worked during her 10-year career as a manager. “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.”

Whether it will be possible to bring the project findings to bear on the public administration’s current practices, and actually redesign the state’s entire approach to at-risk families, remains to be seen. However, just like we at MindLab seek to demonstrate how new insights can lead to real change, TACSI has certainly already made a powerful contribution to how we think and act in such a difficult field of social policy.

Digital innovation enablers

A few thousand kilometres East of Adelaide, the Victoria Public Service continues to pursue its one-year old Innovation Action Plan, embedding collaborative networks through use of new social media. During my session with public officials there, there was constant blogging and tweeting via smartphones and iPads – still something rather rare amongst even the more innovative Danish public servants. As our conversation unfolded, listeners in the US, nearly a dozen time zones away, joined in and commented on the posted remarks. As there has since been a change of government in Victoria, it will be interesting to see whether the Action Plan is sufficiently resilient to adapt and work with a shifting political landscape.

Strategic design in practice

During the final stop of my tour, to Sydney, I had the opportunity to visit 2nd Road, a well-known design consultancy, and engage in dialogue with founder Tony Golsby-Smith and senior adviser Jenkins. Interestingly, the firm’s approach to strategic change has largely been driven from the field of rhetoric, emphasising ‘strategic conversations’ with decision-makers. Interestingly, Second Road has had a long-standing engagement with the Australian Taxation Office, making them one of the exclusive few private design firms with more than a decade-long experience with strategic design in the public sector. See the case here.  Moreover, 2nd Road’s Julian Jenkins has published their experiences rather extensively, which provides for very interesting reading on the potential of design for public organisations.

And now to something completely different…

Travelling from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere is much less of a change than the shift from Western culture to Japanese society – the final stop of my late 2010 journey. Part III of this blog will share the dialogues we had in Tokyo over the potential of Future Centres, space as ‘Ba’, and the role of Japan’s government in engaging citizens in new innovative practices.

Christian Bason

Making the big society work: Is trust the missing ingredient?

By February 11th 2011

During my recent three intensive days in London, presenting at the Department for Communities and Local Government, at the Overseas Development Institute, and at The Guardian’s Public Services Summit 2011, the hot topic was the Coalition Government’s vision for a Big Society. In the face of some first setbacks, such as the withdrawal of one of the pilot cities, Liverpool, will the vision prove resilient enough? And more fundamentally, how to make the grand idea a reality while public service budgets are cut so massively?

What to make of it?

On the one hand, Britain is clearly endowed with extremely smart, engaged and capable public servants and not-for profit and business leaders. They are asking all the right and difficult questions about how a big society vision could be made practical and workable. They are searching for innovative solutions that can help, and they are extremely open to outside input. Even better, in many pockets around the country, it seems that innovative models for new forms of collaboration, engaging citizens and communities, are already up and running. From time banks, were citizens can earn credits for voluntary work and “cash” them for other services, to diversifying service provision to ngos and businesses, and to a growth in service design projects run by the likes of Participle, ThinkPublic and the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, new approaches are flourishing. Most want to make the big society work.

On the other hand, one senses confusion and frustration. Implementing a major vision for society alongside almost unprecedented cuts to public services is a tough call. As one panel participant said at the Guardian’s public services summit, communities should be seen partners with the state, not as alternatives to it. Following this line of thought made me think that devolving power, finance and responsibility to local governments implies that the local level must become more, not less, of a partner with central government. However, when the new UK local government bill not just devolves power, but also requires an amazingly detailed level of transparency of public expenditure and reporting of it (public bodies must publish all expenditure items above £500 online, and the salaries of senior officials), one can’t help but think: Does central government really trust the local level to be able to step up to the challenge? Are central government departments prepared to let go, perhaps limiting themselves to demanding better outcomes, at less cost, in return? Are national politicians prepared to, in their own words, stop tinkering? If not, can the Big Society become a success?

Christian Bason

Global impressions – Part I

By January 12th 2011
How can we in government change our thinking and current practices to tackle a much  more turbulent and difficult economic environment? How might we connect in more meaningful ways with citizens, businesses and communities to bring about real change? How do we, ultimately, get more and better services for less? These are some of the key questions currently facing public sector leaders. During the global launch of my book “Leading public sector innovation: Co-creating for a better society” I’ve  had the opportunity to connect with government colleagues in several countries to discuss where public services are heading.  Here are some first impressions.
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In London, the point of departure is that public services have become financially unsustainable, and that radical new and more cost-efficient delivery models must be found. “Ouch!” was how The Economist, in their editorial, characterized the austerity measures introduced by the Coalition Government, starting with a harsh emergency budget in June 2010.
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Ouch!

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Following subsequent historic budgetary cuts of nearly 20 percent over the next four years, the  UK discussion is now focusing on, amongst other things, a major devolution of power, and of how a ‘Big Society’ model might enable everyone — ordinary citizens, community organisations, third sector organisations and business — to engage in co-production of what was formerly known as ‘pure’ public services. In that context, the RSA Public Services 2020 Commission has proposed the compelling vision “From social security to social productivity”. At a major Summit at the RSA in November, members of the Commission emphasized how three shifts are necessary to secure the UK welfare state for the future: A shift in power from (formal) government organisations to (informal) actors; a shift in finance to new models of co-finance and/or individual investments, and a shift in culture to a more  democratic and socially responsible society. See my own, and other’s, contribution to the RSA Journal on how the vision of a Big Society could be realised.
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In London there was also the opportunity to engage with the Innovation Unit, and discuss their excellent work on radical efficiency. Radical efficiency is a comprehensive approach , based on study of more than 100 cases across a number of countries, of how to deliver radically different, better and lower  cost public services. Read The Innovation Unit’s blog about the book launch session co-hosted with the Institute for Government.
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In Paris, the discussion is more about how to build the political momentum and courage to actually embrace more fundamental change. In France, irrespective of the fact that the country’s economic challenges are pretty much as significant as elsewhere, it is apparently more legitimate to focus on better and potentially more costly public services, than on how we could really achieve more with less. However when I shared the Innovation Unit’s point in that perhaps it really is a question of “more for more”, because radical efficiency is largely achieved by leveraging more resources, just from outside of government, it caught the French’s attention! Visit the site of French innovation lab La 27e Region to see how service design is being applied in fields such as education, regional development and sustainability.
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In Brussels — from the European perspective — the thought leaders at the Lisbon Council reinforced the point out that what is needed now is political leadership. See for instance Executive Director Ann Mettler’s passionate call for European action, “If not now, then when?”. During our book launch session there,  the conversation with key policymakers at member state and EU level emphasized that the problem isn’t for politicians to get reelected in spite of new austerity measures. The track record from countries like Greece and the UK so far shows that the public at large does understand that such measures are necessary. The key problem for politicians is to find the radical new solutions necessary in a world without abundant funding for public services. This is where, of course, the message of co-creating for public services enters. Read about Lisbon Council’s work in innovation and see my Brussels presentation here.
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Lisbon Council book launch: Panel session

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So, public services in the Western world are under increasing pressure, the hunt for better models of service creation and delivery is on, and new models and approaches are emerging fast. The twin messages of innovation and co-creation seem to make sense in those contexts, but in different ways. How about other parts of the world? Watch this space for Part Two about trends and solutions in Australia and Japan…
Christian Bason

Leading innovation: A journey, not a destination

By October 27th 2010

Today my new book, Leading public sector innovation: Co-creating for a better society launches.

LPSI_front_cover

Flipping through a copy, still almost warm from the printer’s, it strikes me that if there is one key message in it, it is that building the innovative public organisation isn’t a destination, it’s a journey. Why? Because…

It is not enough to start talking about innovation and what it means to the organisation.

It is not enough to put an innovation strategy in writing.

It is not enough to recruit a talented, diverse workforce.

It is not enough to leverage new digital media to drive collaboration, and to power new service solutions.

It (even) is not enough to build innovation labs or put into practice new design-driven methods for co-creating new solutions with citizens and business.

It is not enough to start measuring  innovation activities and results.

…and pure, raw courage to initiate new ideas and solutions in the face of stark opposition is not enough either.

The most ambitious, professional and results-oriented public managers I know are, rather, trying to leverage all of these dimensions, and more, in order to create truly innovative organisations. They recognize that reshaping public bureaucracies for the 21st century  is a long and difficult journey with no final destination in sight. As times of economic austerity clashes with demographic change and rising  service demands, it is a challenge to even keep pace with the wicked problems that are facing us every day.

For simplicity,  I therefore argue that the journey towards the highly innovative public organisation must be led simultaneously across four dimensions:  Creating consciousness of what innovation is and means to the organisation; building capacity to innovate, from political context over strategy and organisational structure to people and culture; mastering a process of co-creating new solutions with people, not for them; and finally, to display the courage at all levels of management to really lead innovation.

Although many are trying, I have yet to see a public organisation that can honestly say it is working effectively on all four dimensions.

Who will be the first?

Christian Bason

Guesswork

By August 15th 2010

One of the things that most struck me the most when I left my 10-year career in management consulting to lead MindLab was all the guessing that went on in the Danish central administration. Public servants were routinely guessing what their boss thought would be an appropriate course of action on a given policy. They were also guessing what their boss’ boss might think (this would be the deputy permanent secretary). And, obviously, most of all they were trying to guess what the permanent secretary might eventually think. (Who of course has been guessing all along what the political boss — the minister — is thinking). Tremendous amounts of time is spent on this guesswork, not just on the guessing, but on drafting courses of action that might (or, more often, might not) be what the ‘hieararchy’ is looking for. Compared to my experience in consulting (in a much flatter hierarchy, and in a very different organisational culture), this guesswork seems to me to be a significant waste of time and, thereby, tax payer’s money. I have seen policy development processes that arguably should have been completed in a year or less take twice that time, with no discernible increase in quality or political relevance.

Of course there are some reasons for all the guesswork, and the time the policy development process takes:

First, policy development is often a complex progress, where the positions of various stakeholders (such as political majorities and minorities, lobbyists, industrial organisations, etc.) need to be taken into account. And there are of course delicate matters of timing, which may mean that a wonderful piece of new policy can be put in the drawer for months until the time is ripe for launch.

Second, senior managers in government have very tight schedules. They must be available at all times for their own boss and particularly the minister. They simply can’t fit in the time and resources to engage systematically in collaborative dialogue, brainstorming and idea generation, just because some of their staff need it. At MindLab, where we regularly run workshops focusing on high-level policy development, it is a rarity that anyone above the level of Head of Division can spend more than an hour in a work session, if that much.

Finally, paper work takes time. The century-old tradition of drafting papers to go up the multiple rungs of hierarchy and back lives on. Sometimes the process can be extreme, with little benefit. Recently, a senior official told me that a case concerning just 5 mio kr. (less than USD 1 mio) had dragged on for more than two years during which several government departments had haggled over who was to foot the bill.

These all (somewhat) understandable reasons.  But still, it seems the process just isn’t good enough. How to rid ourselves of all the guessing going on, and how to conduct the policy innovation process more efficiently?

First, as I wrote in an earlier blog post, even though innovation is a terrible word, we do need a language of innovation. We need it because we need to be more conscious about creating more efficient and creative everyday working practices. As British professor Fiona Patterson, who studied everyday innovation practices across more than 800 companies has found, “(…) organisations that clearly articulate what is meant by ‘innovative working’ are more likely to be successful in their attempt to encourage innovative behaviours”. No  serious new discipline  has, I believe, ever taken root in modern organisations without having a distinct vocabulary.

Secondly, other than speaking in meaningful ways about innovation, we should simply start meeting in a different way.  Key public servants desperately need to meet with each other  in better prepared, more focused sessions to actually craft policy together, rather than to just let lowly minions guess their best in writing and then give them the thumbs up or down. Senior public servants, advisers, junior staff, and — even — external stakeholders such as citizens, businesses, academics, interest organisations  and ‘wild cards’ need to collaborate much more consciously and intensively, if we are to come up with the effective and intelligent solutions we need. Smarter collaboration would save tax payer money, not just because we’d save substantial time and frustration by reducing all the guessing. It would also save tax payer money because such forms of co-creation have a much higher chance of producing  outcomes that actually work.

Christian Bason

Why is innovation a terrible word?

By July 12th 2010

I’ve had my government-issue HTC smartphone for a while, but it wasn’t until recently that I noticed that the phone maker has written ‘htc innovation’ with miniscule letters on the side of the unit. As if the company wanted to make really sure that I realise I am holding an innovative piece of technology. Probably the wording was slashed on last-minute by the marketing people. ‘It can’t hurt’, they might have been thinking. Who doesn’t want innovation?

Innovation is everywhere, and everyone is claiming it. From my phone maker to producers of washing detergent to space agencies and national governments, innovation is something many people agree is somehow important, but few can really express how. ‘Innovation’ becomes a panacea for any problem because, in essence, it expresses that whatever the challenge is, it is being dealt with successfully. But like a wet bar of soap, ‘innovation’ somehow eludes a firm grip. Paradoxically, we want it, but can’t really express it. That is why, when we at MindLab drafted our communication strategy three years ago, it stated that “‘Innovation’ is a terrible word. But there’s nothing wrong with its content”.

How does innovation become a terrible word? In organisations that are not used to working in new ways, which do not enthusiastically embrace new ideas, and which do not necessarily thrive on on-going change, innovation can become a diffuse, abstract and perhaps even dangerous term. Innovation may be perceived as  anything from wild creativity, ‘letting your hair down’, to a management fad, or to loosing control to risky experimentation. No wonder that some people, and in my experience in particular people in government, dislike the word.

However, if ‘innovation’ wasn’t part of our vocabulary, we’d have to invent it. Innovation is the only term we have that captures the notion of creating something new that works. It embodies the dialectic of inspiration (generating the new ideas we need to create the future we want) and execution (the practice of getting things done to create value).

As opposed to ‘creativity’ or ‘invention’, innovation is therefore, and perhaps surprising to some, highly practical. The best of  the (vast) literature on innovation not only offers extremely useful perspectives on strategy, leadership and organisation. It offers a set of professional approaches, tools and methods which can help make the process of creating the new solutions we need, whether it be a new product or a public service, conscious, strategic and systematic.

Because the concept and practice of innovation offers us something valuable, or even essential, we need to take very seriously those who dismiss it. Rather than just slapping the word on everything we, as scholars and practitioners, say or do, we must take care to give it the meaning and content needed for the sceptics to become curious and, eventually, embrace it.

But to place the practice of innovation more squarely at the heart of government, we need to continue to show what it is, and how it works in practice. That is why we at MindLab spend so much time documenting and sharing our cases with others within the ministries we are part of, and beyond — online and in person. To be convincing, innovation has to be concrete.

As for my phone? Well, it works OK. But honestly? There are more innovative models out there.

Christian Bason

Can diversity give us systematic innovation?

By March 16th 2010

So, yesterday morning I was interviewed by Danish national radio about systematic innovation. What is that?

The occasion was that on March 15th, the Copenhagen-based think tank Monday Morning launched its ambitious “The Entrepreneurs of Welfare” report on how innovation happens in Danish government. More than 2400 people from government, business and the third sector (myself included) have contributed to the study, which emphasizes that what everyone wants in order to create change is ‘freedom’ and ‘responsibility’. OK…?

More interestingly, although the report shows that new welfare solutions are certainly bubbling up to the surface everywhere in Denmark’s public landscape, the depressing fact is that very few of the innovations are goundbreaking or transformative. Further, the solutions often happen randomly, carried through by a few lonely entrepreneurs and in spite of the multitude of barriers we all know characterise new thinking in government.  My answer: Seems like we need more systematic and strategic innovation.

What is then systematic innovation? ‘Systematic’ is about conscious, explicit, with purpose. And ‘innovation’ is about divergence and variance. Maybe even risk.  So… could we systematically, purposefully, stimulate the variance that drives innovation?

Does a homogenous welfare state like Denmark not need to strengthen the ability of institutions to experiment with their own unique models of service delivery — and arrive at what they believe is the best way of creating value to citizens? If yes, we might need to forget the ‘one size fits’ all model, and start accepting a greater divergence of delivery models. Should we encourage more privately-run day care institutions, schools and hospitals? Should we strengthen the opportunities for NGO (third sector) actors to contribute with their skills, expertise and commitment in care for handicapped or for tackling environmental challenges?

Should governments’ role be less of running the core operations of the welfare state in search of ever-higher homogeneity, but rather to encourage vastly different delivery models,  only measuring them on their results? What might be required of our systems,  organisations and (not least) funding if we were to accept that innovation is driven by variance,  not homogeneity? Could ‘systematic’ innovation also be about government consciously encouraging and managing diversity? What might that mean to equality, and to what we define as the welfare state? And more importantly: What level of energy and passion might be released if we embraced diversity and rewarded success?

Christian Bason

Must innovation labs be value-driven?

By October 25th 2009

On Oktober 12-13, 20 leaders of innovation labs gathered with academics and policy experts from the European Commission to formulate a vision for labs in Europe by 2020. The challenge was to show how innovation labs might help solve complex social, environmental and economic challenges through sustainable, human-centered and democratized innovation. See Stepháne Vincents photos from the event, which was held at MindLab, here.

Lots of topics were discussed, drawing on insights from the practical work taking place at diverse organisations like NESTA Lab and the Innovation Unit of the UK, la 27e Region of France, and Medialab Prado of Spain. One of the most fascinating aspects of the conversation was the question whether innovation labs are value-driven? Because if a particularly strong sense of mission and purpose is crucial for labs to be effective, what does that mean for the potential of labs, and what are the implications for how to create, lead and grow them? To shape relevant future policy, might we first have to better understand how values are selected and cultivated in a ‘lab’ enviornment?

The discussion made me think back to early 2007, when we started on the journey towards the second generation of MindLab. One of the first things we did in our newly assembled core team was, in fact, to formulate a set of common values. Through a creative process, we arrived at the following five value statements, which have proven to be, in fact, central to our daily work:

Challenge. We challenge traditional thinking and bureaucracy

Communication. Our communication is inspiring and straitforward

Cooperation. We challenge each other’s thinking

Atmosphere. We drink black tea and green coffee

Results. We experiment with the objective in mind.

We often refer to these values when making key decisions: Who to join the team, which projects to take on, how to relate to the barriers we encounter, how to treat each other, who to collaborate with externally. (Ohh, and what kind of coffee to drink!).

Our values are, in many respects, of greater operational importance than our strategy.

So, yes, MindLab is value-driven. And perhaphs innovation labs have to be, in order to maintain a strong sense of purpose and direction in the midst of a chaotic, complex and difficult reality.

I would therefore like to extend an invitation to our fellow innovation labs around the globe to join the conversation here on MindBlog:

What are your values, and what do they do for you?

Because perhaps by understanding the role of values better, we can also learn how to create effective innovation labs that can help shape the future we desire.

Christian Bason

What could design do for government?

By August 25th 2009

INDEX seeks to improve life. So does government.

Copenhagen this week is dominated by design. On the beautiful Kgs. Nytorv square, world class designs are on display in transparent plastic bubbles. This Friday, a select few of them will win the prestigious biannual INDEX:Award in categories like body, home, work and play.

Now, that’s all very well. But there isn’t an INDEX: prize category for government.

What if there was? Could design also change the way government works? For INDEX: the slogan is “design to improve life”. Believe it or not, but most government agencies are created to improve how society works and how life in society is lived.

What if design thinking characterised the very way government develops new services and policies? At MindLab we are increasingly learning how design can dramatically improve the process of shaping future visions for society, both in the abstract and the very practical. From climate change strategies to how we meet individual citizens at a job centre, the design process offers us a new way of realising desirable outcomes.

What could be the contribution of design to government? Here are some suggestions:

See everything as an experiment.

Challenge the status quo.

Value the citizen.

Be concrete.

Co-create.

Visualise.

Iterate.

Could these seven principles transform how government works? Perhaps. When a network of 25 design experts and practitioners meet in Copenhagen this coming weekend for another design event, the Co’creation summit, to write a manifesto for the future of design, my guess is that some of these principles will be part of the package. For many of the participants, this will not be very surprising. But if public managers really, really took design to heart, it could be the beginning of a revolution.

Christian Bason

Why should government care about social innovation?

By July 25th 2009

Returning from the Social Innovation Exchange (SIX) summer school, which was held in Lisbon on July 14-17, I am feeling energized and confident that social innovators hold the key to many of the new ideas and solutions that our societies so desparately need. From health care to education to climate change, their efforts create real value to citizens, every day.

MindLab presents at SIX Summer School

MindLab presents at SIX Summer School

However, to most people in government, at least in Denmark, social innovation is still a broad and vague term that doesn’t elicit much enthusiasm or even recognition. In a welfare state where every third person in employment works for the government, there isn’t a lot of consideration of potential social solutions coming from outside government…

So why should government care? Following my conversations with fellow innovators at the Lisbon event, I would suggest at least three pressing reasons:

First, bureaucrats aren’t smarter than anyone else. So, to get the best ideas to tackle wicked social problems (or, in SIX terms, “Fixing the Future”), we need everyone to contribute — not least savvy social entrepreneurs.

Second, social innovators are close to the citizens. One of our key challenges here at MindLab is to get citizens and businesses involved directly in the public sector innovation process. To most social innovators, a deep understanding of the underlying, implicit or explicit needs of citizens is at the very heart of their work. For government to remain legitimate and relevant, it has to support those that make a difference in people’s lives at the local level.

Third, a critical challenge for any innovator, whether in government or beyond, is to not only get the ideas but turn them into practice. Social innovators possess the skills and dedication to get their visions implemented, and not only can government learn from that, government can benefit from creating mutually positive alliances and partnerships with organisations whose ideas have already stood the hard test of meeting reality — but who may need the power and scale of government to make the solutions available to many more.

Social innovators at work

Social innovators at work

Even if we succeed convincing our colleagues in government of these benefits, I still see a major challenge that must be overcome: How do we empower government to not just understand, but also to support and strengthen social innovators? Perhaps part of the solution is that government itself must become more innovative. That was at least MindLabs message at the SIX event. What do you think?

Christian Bason

Larry’s three laws: Lessons from Stanford’s Center for Design Research

By June 25th 2009

“We are dogmatic about prototypes.” So says Larry Leifer, a university professor and the Founding Director ofStanford University’s Center for Design Research. Over the past 25 years his institution has produced more than 40 design research Ph.Ds, all of whom are closely cooperating with some of the world’s leading companies to solve specific problems. When you visit the Center for Design Research, as I recently had the chance to do, you are struck by how down-to-earth and practically focused the work of the institution is. The design school is linked to Stanford’s engineering area, and the engineers’ feel for technology and practical problem-solving is contagious. Many of the students have obtained a Masters degree in technology before coming to the design school. A peek into the school’s biggest room reveals 4-5 groups of students working dedicatedly on projects for companies like BMW, Panasonic and SAP. Flat screens are ubiquitous, the walls are all covered with whiteboards, and large notices describing case studies and project descriptions hang beneath the ceiling. Lego bricks lie scattered on the shelves, and in one corner of the room sits the entire dashboard from a German passenger car. On the other hand, there are no partitions separating the various workgroups, and no bookshelf stands more than waist-high.

Work environment at Stanford's Center for Design Research
Work environment at Stanford’s Center for Design Research

“We believe that in a knowledge environment, we ought to be able to see each other,” says Larry Leifer. He says that over the years he has become known for “Larry’s three laws”, which describe the work of the design school:

#1: Design is a social and technical activity
#2: Preserve ambiguity
#3: All designers redesign.

What is the significance of the three laws? From MindLab’s perspective they also make sense when you apply them to the public sector’s development processes. Let’s try to reinterpret them:

#1: Public sector innovation involves the generation of a deep understanding of the social reality we want to modify, as well as finding solutions – including technological ones – that are capable of bringing about positive change. Only a minority of public-sector innovators would disagree with that assertion. Maybe we are just not good enough at being at the leading edge with regard to the latest technological advances. For instance, how many public organizations have fully exploited the potential that mobile technology offers?

#2: Public sector innovation requires being willing to stick with uncertainty and ambiguity well into the development process. In our experience, this kind of divergence is essential for sparking off the understanding of a problem, as well as for generating novel solutions. Sometimes you have to take a detour in order to reach your goal. However, this is an area where public development officials, and their bosses especially, begin to lose their nerve. “When will we reach our target?” “Now is the time for us to bring this to a conclusion.” “Precisely how does this activity help us to solve the problem?” Such doubts are understandable, but sterile. The innovation process requires having confidence that it will hit its mark even when it doesn’t seem as though it will.

#3: Public sector innovation requires iteration: being willing not only to design a possible solution, but also to test and redesign it. At MindLab we believe that the learning process that unfolds through experimenting with partial solutions, obtaining feedback from citizens and businesses, and then refining the solutions, is extremely valuable. It merely requires a willingness to get involved with incomplete measures or initiatives, plus the courage to accept the consequences of the feedback we receive.

So where do the prototypes fit into this picture? Well, a prototype – whether of a dashboard or a public sector service process – makes a solution tangible. And unless it has been made tangible it cannot be tested or developed further. At the same time, the prototype is a tool that demonstrates how it is possible to turn ambiguity into something concrete and turn it into a solution that combines social processes with technological opportunities. It is therefore quite reasonable to be dogmatic about using prototypes. Without them we would be breaking all three of Larry’s laws.

Larry Leifer talks about design research
Larry Leifer talks about design research
Christian Bason

Leadership. The secret formula of a successful public sector?

By April 7th 2009

On the afternoon of Monday, April 6th, in a small and rather dark auditorium at the Copenhagen Business School, Alexander Kroll from the University of Potsdam concluded that the term “leadership” is quite rare in public management. That theme came back to haunt me three times over the rest of that day.

First, it haunted me at the workshop. More precisely, a review Mr. Kroll conducted of more than 1.200 academic articles about New Public Management shows that only six percent of them mentions the word “leadership” at all. Now, that might, or might not, be a problem. As a British professor commented, perhaps the reason leadership didn’t pop up more often is that the review was limited to New Public Management — and many, if not all, academics in fact distinguish between leadership and management. If that was the explanation, we wouldn’t have much of a problem. Leadership could still be a central feature of public administration research.

Fun aside, I did get the feeling that we were dealing with a serious question. The workshop participants spent some time debating the leadership theme, and a Brasilian participant asked whether leadership didn’t have to do with a notion of moral authority rather than (administrative) position. For exactly that reason, leadership in the public sector might be suspect in itself. It is not the role of public employees to lead. Moral authority is the sole domain of politicians, not administrators. A scary thought, I believe. But true?

The second time leadership showed up was during my own presentation in the late afternoon. A U.S. professor asked about MindLab’s experience with successful cross-ministerial collaboration and innovation. What does it take? I humbly apologised for not being able to come up with a better suggestion than … leadership. He agreed and said he couldn’t come up with a better suggestion himself. So, perhaps leadership isn’t dangerous, but rather critical to the success of the public sector?

The third time leadership emerged as a theme that Monday was in the late evening, when I visited the blog of the newly established NESTA Lab, an organization focused on public sector innovation, much like MindLab. On their blog, director Rowena Young describes a lunchtime conversation with her new team about innovation leadership in the public sector, and what it would take to switch more managers on to public sector innovation. They decided on the following recommendation:

Start somewhere. Better to have lost in innovation than never have innovated before.

I couldn’t agree more. And maybe the same applies to leadership. Let’s get the secret out.

MindLab at the IRSPM conference at the Copenhagen Business School.
MindLab at the IRSPM conference at the Copenhagen Business School.
Christian Bason

Towards the risk-free society? The shape of government and accountability after the financial crisis

By April 6th 2009

“Public enemy number one”. This was the title of the first slide of political science professor Donald Kettls keynote speech at the IRSPM public management conference in Copenhagen today. The public enemy in question was Sir Fred Goodwin, former head of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), and target of public outrage since he decided to keep his pension in spite of the bank’s receiving £45 billion in public bail-out money.

Broken window at former RBS head Fred Goodwin's home: Public outrage manifesting the new shape of accountability?
Broken window at former RBS head Fred Goodwin’s home: Public outrage manifesting the new shape of accountability?

RBS is but one of a string of private companies that are now owned partly or fully by government. That puts many companies into the type of public scrutiny that government is used to – and these days, many of them don’t look too pretty in the eyes of the masses. So, while government has been increasingly privatized, private companies are now being governmentalized. The key question then is: If the boundary between public and private is blurring, what is accountability in the post-financial crisis world? Kettl’s short answer was: We don’t know. He then offered several ways forward, only to conclude again: We don’t really know.

One interesting approach, though, is the Obama governments’ pledge to show citizens exactly how the US financial stimulus package is being spent, thus cutting through the accountability issue by aiming at full transparency. At the website www.recovery.gov it is in principle going to be possible to trace every federal dollar spent. According to Donald Kettl, the Obama administration has even considered using Google Earth to allow citizens to see how the government spending trickles all the way down to their neighbourhood.

One pattern that emerged from Kettls tour de force of the future of accountability became strikingly clear, however: Government action seems to be directed at eliminating or at least heavily minimizing risk. Through government interventions around the globe to curb the financial crisis, administrators are trying to shape a new public order which is, if not risk-free, then at least risk-averse. Citizens and businesses should never again be so vulnerable to the whims of financial markets and economic forces. Government should be our friend in times of crisis (and prevent crises from recurring). Such a new order will, however, require a much deeper understanding of risk by government administrators. And even if we upgrade our risk management skills considerably, the risk-free society is likely to be impossible to attain. Because, with Kettls words: “We only know what we want after we see what we get”. In today’s complex world order, we may not know what the risk was before it’s too late. Perhaps the post-financial crisis world will look quite similar to the old one, after all?

Easter sunlight hits participants at the IRSPM conference in Copenhagen
Easter sunlight hits participants at the IRSPM conference in Copenhagen
Christian Bason

Rethinking government. Can anthropological research hold the key to public sector transformation?

By April 5th 2009

On April 6th, 7th and 8th MindLab is participating in the annual conference of the International Research Society for Public Management, IRSPM. The conference takes place in Denmark at the Copenhagen Business School, and is thus an obvious opportunity to share our perspectives on the future of the public sector and, not least, our current Ph.D. research.

MindLab is now hosting a total of three Ph.D. students – all of them with a background in anthropology and ethnology. Their fields of interest are quite different, however, ranging from sick leave reform to tax compliance, to public-private innovation processes.

Why do we believe that anthropological research can improve our understanding of what it takes to create more effective public services and policies? Let me just offer a single but powerful reason:

Anthropology can offer an outside-in perspective on the public sector. Anthropologists have a highly developed ability to immerse themselves in the subjective reality of life as it is lived. Not least, they go behind immediate attitudes, and examine actual practices, for instance through observation. Viewing the world of public sector interventions through the lens of citizens and enterprises holds a promise of showing us a different reality – a reality we need to understand if we want public policies to be sufficiently relevant to the groups they target. Although our projects are far from finished, I’ll try to share a taste of the themes they might address:

How does a major public sector reform unfold from top to bottom of the implementation chain, and how are the political objectives translated into concrete interactions between citizens and front line staff?

What are the concrete practices that shape tax compliance in small and medium sized enterprises, and how are they created?

Under what circumstances can cooperation between public and private actors unleash new social innovations?

I hope and expect that, in due course, you can read about the answers (and new questions) that this research raises. So stay tuned.

Christian Bason

Welcome to MindBlog

By February 28th 2009

Today MindLab powers up the dialogue on innovation in the public sector – and you’re invited to take part in the conversation. We will actively use this blog to share experiences, case examples, research results and methods from our collaboration on innovation projects in the three ministries MindLab is a part of: The Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs, the Ministry of Taxation and the Ministry of Employment. In addition we will look far beyond the Danish state administration to gather new perspectives  on innovation: From other public sector practitioners, from academia, from the private and third sectors and of course, from Denmark and abroad.

We are launching this English variety of the blog in the hope that MindBlog will prove relevant not only for our colleagues in the three ministries, but for everyone with a passion for transforming the public sector and creating value for society.

No matter where you are, we hope you will let yourself be engaged with us and the themes we address.

In short, it is our ambition that MindBlog will be the most valuable place to harvest inspiration and knowledge when you work with public sector innovation. As far as we can see, that place is missing today, even as innovation has become nearly as much of a buzzword in public organisations as it has been for decades in the private sector. Exactly because the term is pretty much everywhere, and thus in risk of losing both content and meaning, we believe it is essential to stimulate a more nuanced and deeper conversation about how to create better social solutions, and turn them into reality.

Meanwhile, two particular perspectives characterise the prism through which we at MindLab see the world – and those two perspectives will also influence this blog:

The first perspective is user-centered innovation: How can we best involve citizens and businesses directly in the innovation process, and what kind of value can it generate? How can users, civil servants and other stakeholders participate in a fruitful interplay, that can trigger new ways of thinking about public services and public policy?

The second perspective is cross-cutting collaboration and alliances: How to promote a sound process for cooperation across departments, sectors, and across public, private and social domains? It is our experience, that to place citizens and businesses at the center of the innovation process automatically forces us to think beyond the traditional “silo” organisation of the public sector we know. That places the two perspectives in a natural relationship to each other.

All of MindLabs staff contributes to the blog. That means that you can expect a broad palette of angles and approaches to innovation, which also represents our different professional backgrounds – from design to anthropology, and from media to political science. We experience it as a strength in our daily work that we hold different perspectives and interests – we hope that you will experience the same. Enjoy your reading. We look forward to hearing from you!