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Posts Tagged ‘design’

Christian Bason

Transforming our public management culture: A provocation?

By October 8th 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christian Bason

When nudge meets design

By May 23rd 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christian Bason

EU design leadership

By May 1st 2012

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

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

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

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

Anette Væring

Rethinking something as traditional as a meeting of the Council of the Ministers?

By May 1st 2012

As a part of the Danish presidency of the Council of the Eurpoean Union the Ministry of Business and Growth hosted the informal ministerial meeting in the Competiveness Council on the 2nd and 3rd of February 2012. MindLab has been in close collaboration with the international department of the Ministry of Business and Growth in both planning and executing the meeting. The special contribution of MindLab has revolved around the concept for the meeting, user involvement, application of design techniques and visualisation. See how a different format for a ministerial meeting can look here.

Read about the thoughts behind the meeting and read about Mindlabs case

Christian Bason

What can public sector managers learn from Steve Jobs?

By December 21st 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christian Bason

Global impressions – Part II

By March 1st 2011

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

Redesigning family care

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

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

Carolyn, the manager seconded to the project, describes TACSI’s families project as a ‘resourcing model’, which is radically different from how she has worked during her 10-year career as a manager. “It is bottom-up, it has end-user focus, and there is no fixed structure, criteria or categories. The work has been extremely intensive. We have focused on motivation and on strengths within the families – identifying the ‘positive deviances’ where some families are actually thriving, even though they shouldn’t be, according to the government’s expectations. We have focused on finding entry points and opportunities, rather than just trying to mediate risk. It is a co-design, or co-creation approach, and it has been entirely new to me.”

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

Digital innovation enablers

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

Strategic design in practice

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

And now to something completely different…

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

Christian Bason

Global impressions – Part I

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

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

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

Design as a driver against climate change

By September 29th 2009

This is a small film we produced in the aftermath of the Manuel Toscano speech & workshop during Copenhagen Design Week. Music by Apollo Music.

Anette Væring

MindLab event during Cph Design Week 09

By September 8th 2009

MindLab hosted a speak and a workshop on Sep. 2nd, on the topic of ‘Design as a driver against climate change’. The speak was given by Manuel Toscano, from the NY based design studio ZAGO.

See the video and the pictures below.

Christian Bason

What could design do for government?

By August 25th 2009

INDEX seeks to improve life. So does government.

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

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

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

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

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

See everything as an experiment.

Challenge the status quo.

Value the citizen.

Be concrete.

Co-create.

Visualise.

Iterate.

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

Rasmus Kolding

Speech by Bill Moggridge

By June 25th 2009

Bill Moggridge of IDEO gave a speech at MindLab last week, and this is the full video. Please share and enjoy!