MindBlog Dansk

MindLab

citizen-centred innovation - anthropological methods - service design - public development - communication - idea and concept development - innovation strategy - cross-institutional collaboration

Posts Tagged ‘Reforms’

Christian Bason

Profound reforms needed in the public sector

By May 14th 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rasmus Kolding

Easy Innovation?

By June 21st 2011

Creating an innovative group of people is easy but expensive – that was the main point of a talk I heard the other day. Since innovation is usually thought to be difficult – why, after all, would we hire consultants to do it all the time – I think that the statement deserves further thought. The speaker was PhD-candidate Vaughn Tan of Harvard Business School, who does sociological research on highly innovative work groups; currently at high-end restaurants like the Danish Noma. Since in today’s haute cuisine there is a constant pressure to innovate, how do they create a group that will spawn new ideas continuously?

The reason that innovation then is expensive begins with the hiring process. According to Vaughn, innovative groups do not form if people are hired through a process where the seemingly best candidate for the job impresses in tests and interviews and thus selected accordingly. Rather Vaughn suggested that people enter the group through a process he calls “negotiated joining”, meaning simply that the candidate is given responsibility and works with the group for a lengthy period of time (like 2-3 months) before actually getting hired. This helps defining roles, clarifying mutual expectations and loosens up the work flows because it requires a flexible mentality and approach to the work. This is an expensive process, but pays off well according to Vaughn. Indeed, some of the worlds top restaurants work in this way.

Since this is expensive but easy, where comes the hard part? During the talk, I became increasingly aware of Vaughn’s emphasis that really innovative organisations have a tactical rather than strategic approach to their work processes. Tactical manoeuvring means that you as an organization constantly respond to how the world changes – and that means that decision making in the organization must be rapid and not constrained by bureaucratic structures. However, besides an organisational culture that allows this to happen, Vaughn also emphasised that all levels of management must endorse this for innovation to lead to success. This is what the top restaurants of the world have understood and it is reflected in their hiring processes.

I think Vaughn’s observations resonate well with our own experiences with public innovation. Setting up the team, identifying problems and developing insights is not the hard part. The difficulties enter when you need your insights to bloom within organisations, when large organisational change is necessary in order to achieve results, and when innovation carries risks to organisation and managers. This is not to say that it is impossible – indeed a well defined strategy can set a direction that may handle this. Incidentally, here at MindLab we have revised our own strategy to improve and foreground our work with organisational change. These are, however, baby steps in a complex process that requires much thought and skill along the way. We all know the societal challenges ahead, but which public organisation will be the first Noma of government?

Christian Bason

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

By February 11th 2011

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

What to make of it?

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

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

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

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.