More often than not, project leaders at MindLab are struggling to justify methodological choices and ways of doing research. MindLab is researching the public sector qualitatively.  The problem is not the creation of new knowledge itself, but how to put it into legitimate use.

Drawing on John Dewey’s ‘The Public and its Problem’, Bruno Latour argues for a more realistic definition of “what it is to know something scientifically” (Latour 2007:2). The problem, says Latour, is that the cognitive abilities with which civil servants act are linked to science rather than research. This is far from the same thing. Science in this sense is linked to objectivity, an already finished ‘map’ from which political plans can be drawn out and followed. The notion of research takes the learning process seriously and links action and knowledge in a more fruitful way:

“Whatever has been planned, there are always unwanted consequences for a reason that has nothing to do with the quality of the research or with the precision of the plan, but with the very nature of action. It has never the case that you first know and then act. You first act tentatively and then begin to know a bit more before attempting again” (Latour 2007:4)

The state is therefore never allowed ‘to act like a state’, Latour writes. This means that civil servants are forced to put their knowledge into calculated forms that, in the name of governance, has to be ‘picture perfect’. But precisely because the public sector is changing constantly and every policy and political decision have unintended outcomes, they are bound not to stay that way. Observations of consequences of for example welfare services are subject to error and illusion, since the public welfare sector constantly is posing new contextual settings in the interaction between the state and the citizens.

The legitimate use of ‘research’ rather than ‘science’ in policy making would be an ideological shift that could create a much more fruitful space for innovation in the public sector. Since ‘the state always has to be rediscovered’ (Dewey 1927:23), the emphasis should be put on exploring and learning about the realities of the citizens and accepting that unintended outcomes comes with the premise of action itself. Not calculating what we already know. If you want to redraw the map, you cannot know the right thing to do in advance. Instead, you can accept that ‘the map’ needs constant redrawing since it will never fully fit the real landscape. This important ideological and scientific distinction is what MindLab in my view is contributing to illuminate.

References:

Bruno Latour (2007): ‘How to think like a State’

John Dewey (1927): ‘The Public and its Problem’

Quote in headline: Latour 2007:5

At MindLab we often experience how innovation the public sector can be a complex matter in a system that seems to be built for stability and not for development and change. John Seddon addresses this issue in his new book ‘Systems Thinking in the Public Sector’ where he tries to come with solutions for what he calls “the failures of the reform regime”.

According to John Seddon innovation in the public sector is drowning. An intense monitorism poses systems of extreme control which leaves public workers demoralized in a high rate. Seddon argues that this is due to the neglecting of one almost too evident matter: the creation of systems based on the implementation of service experience from the points of view of workers and users.

He introduces what he calls ‘systems thinking’ which is based on the basic thought that the design of the system determines how actors behave. The only plan you will need, he argues, is knowledge by studying the system and the flow of demand in customer terms. Seddon puts it this way: “Things always go wrong. If something is going wrong predictably, you can only turn it off by re-designing the service”.

This should be done by involving public workers in control and development. “If you want someone to do a good job, design a good job to do. Workers have to have the means to control and improve their own work. The work of managers then changes to a cooperative role, working on the system. Working on the work with the worker”.

The measuring of public service should instead be based on the actual local work that is being done and in this way make room for variety and unexpected innovation. Thus, for Seddon there is no good way to set up target standards because they will always be arbitrary and never fit on a broad scale. This means, as we often underline at MindLab, that the complexity of public demands should be taken into account and policy should aim at coping with these rather natural and human circumstances.

This doesn’t mean that governments should stop talking about visions and purpose. As Seddon puts it: “It’s entirely legitimate for the government to talk about purpose, but it must be the managerial responsibility to make choices about measures and method”. This changes the locus of control and puts public workers at the centre of understanding and improving their work. As it should be according to Seddon to avoid a regime “that looks for policy-based evidence, not evidence-based policy”.

Quotes taken from the lecture ‘Cultural change is free‘ at 2009 conference of the Human Givens Institute.

Also read “Systems Thinking in the Public Sector” (John Seddon, Triarchy Press 2009) and check out The Systems Thinking Review.

The urban city is often presented as a place of significant segmentality which makes self-presentation a complex matter with varied ways of making one known to others. It is not only a place with segregation of roles in different groups and networks. It also segregates moral judgements. In the city people can, at least situationally, slip out of their existing social settings and participate in different groups and partnerships with different expectations and values (see Hannerz 1980). In this respect, urbanity provides an interesting frame of thought when trying to grasp the concept of change in the public sector.

The public welfare sector is often seen as a problematic and unlikely place for significant change and innovation. The way forward is by many claimed to be based on the creation of new partnerships which are able to combine and take advantage of different competences in close interaction and cooperation. This is thought of both in terms of public-private innovation partnerships and public-public partnerships between different public actors.

In both cases, the new organizational setting aims to develop new possible solutions which the different actors otherwise wouldn’t be able to develop. And in both cases, the goal is to enhance what Professor Garth M. Britton at the CBS-conference ’Contemporary Issues in Public Management’ called ‘change capability’. He understood this as an individual’s or organizational group’s “capability to change capabilities”.

Central to his argument was that he saw public value as the basic strategic driver for the partnerships aiming to change the public sector. He argued for an understanding of the relevant units and linkages between them in terms of values, operational and administrative capability, and the authorizing environment. As he puts it: “The interrelationships between formal and informal actors in chains of public value creation (complex and fluid) are a fundamental source of adaptability and change capabilities”.

One of the issues of these interrelationships is the question of agenda and experience of the actors involved. Going into a partnership which has a new, defined purpose gives possibilities in terms of generating new roles and identifications in the particular partnership. However, this process is difficult if existing professional agendas are strictly maintained in the partnership and the individual thus feel a strong obligation to keep certain ideas about for instance work practice. In other words, the interrelationships of one individual can collide with each other when he or she has to take different agendas into account.

This issue was among other things the concern of Adina Dudau who in her presentation at the CBS-conference focused on the interactive identities in welfare partnerships. Her argument evolved around negotiation when public or public-private actors cooperate about the change of welfare issues as it depends on one or more of the interdependent levels of motivation. The catalysts and obstacles of the partnership are to be found in the ‘complex whole’ consisting of individuals, professions and organisations. The most productive and innovative partnership, she argued, occurred when the partnership worked as a new established organization and a ‘cross professional identity’ was created. In comparison, longer standing organizations tended to be more resistant to change.

So that creates a dilemma. On one side you want to draw upon the existing experience of the different actors, but on the other you want to have them forget where they came from in order to abolish existing ties and make worth of their experience in the new organizational setting.

This leads us back to the concept of urbanity. For the urban individual it is legitimate and accepted when he or she separates his or her engagement in different networks and groups without making one known to the other. Whether you are a representative of a company or a public unit you are in the same way participating in different types of network with different levels of importance to your main work place. The difference is that here you are often obliged to keep your main role which make your participation on other networks a complex matter.

To think urban living into innovation partnerships is interesting because it leads to following questions: what if the individual participating in a welfare innovation partnership wasn’t confronted with his or her particular role in that partnership? What if the only parameter of moral judgement was the one inside the partnership? What if innovation in the public sector becomes a matter of temporary roles in new established organizations and cross-professional identities instead a matter of doubt in terms of confronting the new establishment with one’s existing organizational setting?