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Research

Bryan Boyer

A new culture of decision-making?

By November 7th 2012

This is the second contribution in a blog series on innovation in policy.

I believe in the welfare state. I agree that we are beset by crises, but I’m optimistic enough to expect that humanity will weather them relatively unscathed as individuals, families, and communities. The question is whether our institutions will be as lucky.

 I’d like to begin with a riddle. What binds together the following…?

- A pop-up restaurant
- A Private school
- A Riot
- An Email

The consistent aspect that runs through these four items is that they all represent a vote of no confidence in the institutions of contemporary life. They are each tangible manifestations of a simple but clear statement: “the things you, government, have to offer, are not to my liking and I’m capable of doing something about it.”

Despite the best efforts of both government and politics, the monopoly that institutions have enjoyed since the age of the crown continues to decompose.

Riots in the street, as we experienced most viscerally last year from Tahrir to London, occupy the violent and destructive end of a spectrum. It’s easy to discount the London riots as inexcusable, but I prefer to see them with deep empathy as the right idea poorly — very poorly — expressed.

No one knows the exact source of the London riots, of course, but we know that structural factors like sustained high levels of youth unemployment and social alienation were significant contributing factors. We might chastise the young men (and surely some women) who took to the streets with their fists, but we can also read it as a powerful reminder that voting does not always happen at the ballot box.

After the riots came the post-riot clean-ups. Using email and social media — all privately operated alternatives to the post office, mind you — people took to the street with their own brooms and dustpans. They also brought with them invisible picket signs bearing a message in capital letters: WE DON’T WANT TO WAIT FO YOU SLOWPOKES TO GET A MUNICIPAL CLEANING CREW DOWN HERE!

So here we find ourselves on the other end of a spectrum that maps citizen-initiated activities from destructive to constructive. Citizen cleaning crews, pop-up restaurants, urban cycling in cities without cycle proper lanes, and countless other instances of positive urban activism are all examples of citizens who are rolling up their sleeves and getting on with a different way of living together. They’re impatiently living the future while governments are still trying to convince themselves that it’s OK to prototype.

As you can tell, Jesper and Laura’s paper gave me a papercut – it excited me and left me with a pang of discomfort because it outlined the realities of public policy in concept and execution in 2012. In doing so it makes me focus more carefully on what comes next. If I have any criticism it is that they were too soft on the public sector! My intention today is to heighten the sense of urgency in this discussion.

Increasingly the cost of interacting with institutions is so high that citizens prefer to accept the costs of self-organization or the risks of using services from private or third sectors. As our culture changes, the public sector will continue to find itself subject to competition in ways that it’s not used to. We must internalize this to our core.

But let me rephrase this more bluntly.

When a city builds a digital service, their competition is not other city websites. They are competing against Facebook.

When a ministry develops a service their competition are 3rd parties who act as sherpas, providing better service for a minimal fee with far less hassle.

When an agency provides guidelines, their competition is against the top search result in Google.

When I suggest that the public sector will find itself competing, do not mistake what I’m saying as a suggestion of neo-liberalization.

Rather, this new competitive landscape helps us understand democracy as an old technology, one that’s surely not obsolete but showing its wear and tear — as a technology that’s in need of a tune-up. And I use the language of tune-up specifically because it’s practical, implies banging on things, making small tweaks over long periods of time.

After Bruno Latour, I’d like to suggest that one of the things which have changed is the inputs to our democratic technology. We’ve moved from an era of “facts” where science helps us identify immutable truths, to an era where those facts are increasingly scarce, leaving us instead to grapple with ‘concerns’. In a world of facts, truth is found or discovered. In a world of ‘concerns’, truth is composed and re-composed.

For the public sector of yesterday, facts are the petrol that makes engine work. That our decision-making processes are locking up points to a failure in the engine itself: it was built for petrol but it’s running on something else, it’s running on composed matters of concern. With the former we press on the gas and go. With the latter we pedal all the time.

In conversations about the necessity of reforming the public sector I’m struck by the lack of enemies. We may suffer a “failure of agency” as the authors identify – and I happen to agree – but agency often comes in opposition to a clear and present danger.

In this regard, why are we not more scared of the status quo? We have not designed roads to have traffic jams, hospitals to have queues, services to remove personal agency, and tax forms to be confusing. We are realizing the financial, social, and ecological impact of the inherent risks of the status quo on a daily basis but we’ve become accustomed to them, as the cliché goes. The devil you know is assumed to be a safer choice, but I’d like to remind us all that the devil we know IS STILL A DEVIL!

The groups I started with, the ones exercising their votes of ‘no confidence’ have no problems seeing the status quo for the devil it is. My question today is what the public sector can gain by seeing them as a future. Not as abstract instruments and changes on a theoretical level, but as a new culture of innovation which is not owned by design, by social innovation, by government 2.0. Rather the combined mass of innovative activity across all of these sectors comes with its own unique set of rituals, roles, trinkets, and spaces. It has different ideas about the specific contents of the social contract, different thoughts about how trust is constructed and expended, different ideas about what’s risky and how to mitigate those risks.

Are we ready to accept that a new culture is brewing without such a polite name as “social innovation”?

Read Laura Bunt´s blog on allowing for uncertainty and complexity in government, which is the first contribution in the blog series on innovation in policy.

Laura Bunt

Innovation in policy: allowing for complexity and uncertainty in Government

By October 29th 2012

This is the first contribution in a blog series on innovation in policy.

Today’s global financial and social crises demand innovation not only in public services, but within the whole bureaucratic, administrative system of public governance. Yet innovation introduces uncertainty and unpredictability into decision-making which can sit uncomfortably with the status quo. What are new principles for decision-making that can be more conducive to innovation in the public sector?

Whether as a politician, civil servant, frontline worker or any other kind of decision-maker taking an active part in public governance, the notion of ‘crisis’ will be a familiar one. Whether in financial terms in relation to sharp reductions in budgets, in the changing shape of the public sector and the landscape for public service delivery or in face of challenges such as an ageing population or a rise in long-term health conditions that require thinking differently about the means of government and public services to respond, the sense of crisis is often seen as a ‘mobilising metaphor’ for innovation.

But the concept of innovation is not in itself a course of action. Rather, innovation implies a process of further discovery, creativity and exploration in developing new ways to respond to problems. In supporting the development of new models of public service delivery such as engaging people more directly in their own health care or systems that allow care workers to share information more intuitively, we often see the challenges of trying to demonstrate the value of the new approach and make it work within existing systems of bureaucracy, financing and decision-making. This presents innovators with a dilemma: on the one hand, how can we legitimise and validate innovative approaches through existing measures and standards? But on the other hand, how far should we try to challenge the default processes for decision-making and validating action?

A few weeks ago, we co-hosted a seminar with colleagues at Danish innovation agency MindLab to discuss the implications of dealing with the uncertainty and unpredictability of innovation in the context of the public sector, and the practical challenges in trying to marry innovation with the practice of policymaking as understood as ‘the rational guidance of human affairs’. In a paper published today co-authored by Jesper Christiansen and I, we wanted to explore what kinds of public sector processes could be more conducive to innovation in all of its complexity, and respond productively to the current state of crisis by creating an enabling environment for innovation.

As an example: how does focusing on outcomes rather than distinct solutions encourage a more ongoing, iterative approach to responding to problems rather than seeing public problems as something to be ‘fixed’? In addressing issues that are complex or where causation is unknown, identifying and having an impact on outcomes is part of a continuous practice of addressing and working on the problem with those for whom the outcomes is intended. How might this reframe expectations of what governments can and should achieve? How should government relate to citizens and others in coproducing outcomes? What is the right basis for decision-making in these contexts?

As another example: innovation in public sector context often brings a connotation of risk. Innovation, in that its outcome is unknown and unpredictable, is seen as risky in contrast to known, predictable outcomes (and familiar failures) of current practices whether or not they are successful. But what if we could turn this on its head, and see informed experimentation as the responsible foundation for decision-making in complex settings? Where is there an opportunity for applying structured methods for experimentation such as prototyping and ‘beta’ development to learn from practice in a more dynamic way? How can policy responses become more ‘perfectible’?

These are the sorts of questions we try to explore in the paper, and questions we will discuss in individual posts on this blog over the next few weeks. These ideas are very much the product of many different discussions and interactions over the past few years, not least from Jesper’s PhD research and recent seminars at MindLab and at Nesta. We hope the paper provides a basis for further debate and challenge, and please do share any thoughts.

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.

Jesper Christiansen

“Give me the map and I will reshape the territory!”

By March 31st 2010

Since I very enthusiastically engaged myself in the work at MindLab it’s been a part of my motivational narrative that MindLab as an ideological project stands out. Especially in terms of its attempt to grasp the experience of the citizen and using this research to create grounds for new policy solutions to make bureaucratic practices more in tune with real lives as they are actually lived. An even more significant ideological project, however, is how to think about and use the knowledge which is created.

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

Nina Holm Vohnsen

Labour market montage 1

By October 26th 2009

Academic work I // sketch for a presentation. I take a shower. Make a cup of coffee. Nescafe. Hotel room. I only pour half of it in my cup. Or I won’t sleep. I sit at the desk. I forget what I’m doing. Stare at the paper. Write the heading. The coffee. Tastes bad. Look at my cellphone. There is sand on the table. Look at the paper. Thoughts wanders off. The coffee. Tastes bad. Makes even real milk taste UHT. Why do phone cords always coil? Look at my mobile. Turn on my computer. The coffee. Surprisingly bad. I forget why I turned on the computer. Then I remember, though it wasn’t the reason to begin with. I switch to standby. One bullet on my list. I look at the coffee. Was it that bad? Yes. I finish it. Almost. I go insane. Push it away. Look at the mobile. Lean back in chair. Look out the window. Look at my mobile. Put down my pen.

Thought I // inspired by David Mosse. What if all the clever plans and schemes that policy makers go about developing serves no other purpose than being creative obstacles to those whose job it is to translate the politicians’’ intentions into practice? Thought II // inspired by Tim Ingold. How might you rethink policy (understood as an attempt at a prescriptive design) when you take seriously that shape giving is a constant process resulting from people’s engagement with life, each other and their physical surroundings and not an execution of any grand plan?

Irrelevant detail I // green eyes. Her irises are at least twice as big as any I have seen until now. They stabbed me or no one in particular through the stench of urine. Two gigantic jewels hovering above the cardboard box. Oh! She was just a junkie.

Academic work II // field work. He holds out a plastic bag. I don’t understand what he is saying, only that he wants me to look inside the bag. Guesstimate; there is about 40 boxes of pills in this plastic bag that he has brought with him into the computer room. He brings coffee and tea for the employees and the participants who have been referred to ‘the ‘sickness benefit package solution’. He hands me a cup of coffee with milk and asks me who I am? Praises the employees. And then; the plastic bag. He intents something but I have no idea what. I look into the bag at the pills. I think he tells me that he wants to talk to his caseworker about the pills. I know nothing about pills. Here is what I know: He holds a string of rejected job applications; if he doesn’’t get a job he wont be able to bring his wife to the country; the municipality has invested in a ‘sickness benefit package solution’ to get him full time employment; they pay around 1000 kr a week for 25 hour that are meant to put him ‘the citizen’ at the center and bring him closer to the labor marked. Here is what he knows about me: Nothing. 0. Zero.

Jesper Christiansen

Policy-based evidence or evidence-based policy?

By June 25th 2009

“If we want people to innovate, the responsibility has to be with them” (John Seddon, 2009)

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”.billede1

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.systems-thinking-cover

Jesper Christiansen

Should we aim to create urbanity in public governance?

By June 25th 2009

How to think about change in the public sector: thoughts from the CBS-conference ’Contemporary Issues in Public Management’

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?

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

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.