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.

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.

The result is more than 60 apps and web services, most of which have been developed by amateurs and all free or low-cost. One of my favourite services is called “Fruit Fly”. Quite simply, it is a map with all fruit trees on public ground in Vienna. The user views fruit trees on a map with colour coded pins – a new colour for each type of fruit. The result is an excellent overview for those craving a free piece of fruit. A walnut, sir? Those little snacks are apparently all over Vienna. Care for a pear? Hard to find without the app, but head towards western part of the city, and you should be able to find a few. Of course the web service shows if the fruit should be ripe for eating.

While this example may seem marginal to the big picture, it is only scratching the surface. The European Commission estimates that the unrealized potential in open data is worth 40 billion € EU wide. What is interesting about this, however, is not so much the potential of innovation of making public data available. The point is rather that we are witnessing a radical new way of doing government. Most obviously, it marks a relationship of co-creation between citizens and government, where government is not the sole provider and developer of services, but rather via platforms for development facilitates a range of different initiatives. This requires new skill sets not readily available in public organizations, but most of all it requires the courage to accept the loss of control. And the lesson from Vienna is that with the right amount of courage, there are endless opportunities ahead.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!’”

Currently, most interventions focus on one family member or in relation to one aspect of the problem. This is one agency maintaining its responsibility by living up to the standards that is defined within their own formal area of responsibility. While the direct result is that families usually have to adapt to the agenda of the system rather than the other way around, the consequence for the families is that they often experience rejection from the system and an inability to live up to what is demanded from them. Instead of being helped into a productive process, the system becomes an additional risk factor for the families and a barrier to (rather than driver of) change.

This is not only an inefficient and ineffective use of public resources, but becomes a question of public legitimacy since prolonged involvement with services without achieving progress is resulting in a general mistrust in the system’s ability or even intention to help them. In the UK, they have called this the ‘gyroscope problem’ (see figure). Outside of the family, a lot of agencies, organisations and institutions ensure a tremendous amount of system activity. Yet on the inside, for the family, nothing changes. All this money and effort is being used simply to maintain the status quo.

(The Life Project)

Working with the leading Australian design consultancy ThinkPlace, MindLab took part in a project that set out to address these issues and transform the service system dealing with vulnerable families in the ACT region of Australia. The purpose was to develop new capabilities and processes to co-design and co-produce services with current service users as part of introducing a new human-centred, systemic approach to improve outcomes for vulnerable families. Through design research of the actual experiences of families at risk in the ACT region, new perspectives for collaboration between public agencies, community sector organisations and citizens were created through a new empathetic relationship in relation to the experiences of citizens. New ideas and policy proposals for rethinking and reshaping the service system were developed in the continuous interaction between strategic decision makers, frontline staff and the families.

Perhaps even more important, there was a profound recognition of the project as a first iteration in a larger cultural change consisting of building a capacity for a more human-centred and outcomes-focused approach. This not only meant that, in relation to every insight or idea, the question of its systemic implications was raised as an inherent part of the process. It also implicitly implied that the project productively questioned the current perceptions of what ‘a system’ is or could be. What the project largely showed was that in every positive progress experienced by families, an unscripted approach had been applied in the service system. Usually this was done by community organisations working from the approach that problems, as well as what kind of activities that were needed to address them, were to be defined with the families themselves.

You can read and view more about the project in the link provided below. For now, I want to question if we are somehow caught up in an unproductive understanding of ‘a system’? The insights coming out of the project to a large extent coincide with some general points from our general work in MindLab. We continuously see how the involvement of citizens and other users in innovating public service systems and taking the complexity and context of their situation seriously at least poses three important design challenges that all seem to expand our current perceptions of what a ‘systemic’ approach can consist of:

-  Professional generalists: how do we become systematic in an ‘unscripted’ way? There is a need for becoming less scripted and work with citizens rather than deliver services to them. Working unscripted with focus on outcomes will necessarily pose the question of whether we have to work silo or sector-based to provide the accountability that is needed to secure civil and legal rights?  

-  Building relationships: how do we go from ‘referral’ to ‘connection’? There is a need for taking ownership of the whole problem by building and facilitating effective relationships and networks around citizens to ensure continuity, coordination and ‘case-handovers’ in their situation rather than focusing on ‘finishing’ their cases. Does sharing responsibility in a relational way counteract a consistent and systemic approach in dealing with citizens in complex situations?  

-  Providing context: how do we go from ‘episodes’ to ‘stories’? There is a need for an approach that can ensure that the whole contextual complexity of the situation is taken into consideration when decisions are made and case plans are defined. Rather than mainly relying on fixed standards or individual or social crisis to emerge, could the system to a lesser degree be crisis-driven and reactionary and instead build on the ability to relate to the contexts and experiences of citizens? 

Co-designing better outcomes for vulnerable families in the ACT.

For more inspiration, see also the Life Project in the UK.