MindBlog Dansk

MindLab

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

Posts Tagged ‘Welfare’

Christian Bason

20 percent better, 20 percent cheaper

By March 26th 2013

This article previously appeared in Monday Morning Blog.

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.

Christian Bason

The public sector manager’s responsibility

By January 11th 2013

This article was previously published in the Danish weekly Mandag Morgen.

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.

Jesper Christiansen

Should we transform systems or perceptions of systems?

By September 12th 2012

How do we help or support people that live in situations that do not fit into the system’s categories? This question is constantly reoccuring in the development of our public service systems. A very obvious example of this is the area of social care for vulnerable families which is increasingly becoming a nightmare scenario for Western nation states across the world. These are often families at risk accessing a large amount of different services and are involved in several case plans at the same time. How do we coordinate and integrate services that are addressing such different issues like child behaviour and education, domestic violence, drug or alcohol abuse, unemployment or work injury, financial crisis, unstable housing, physical or mental illness or other common hardships of everyday life?

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.

Christian Bason

Public sector innovation must move from Strategy to action

By November 25th 2011

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

Innovation strategies are currently being developed throughout the public sector – including in the government. This is encouraging and long overdue. But the challenge will be to create strategies that lead to innovation in practice. The following presents a little more than five examples of what this means.

 “Can you give me some concrete examples of innovation for our coming strategy process?” (city manager). “Can you give a presentation to provide inspiration to our strategic work with innovation, now that we are a free municipality?” (development director). “We are finalising our innovation strategy, but what can we do about the incentive structure?” (municipal development consultant). These are examples of enquiries I receive from the municipalities. At the moment, I hear them almost daily.

Right now, interest in innovation in the public sector – particularly in the municipalities ­– is rapidly growing. This topic has certainly been on the agenda for years. But it is no longer a matter of isolated projects or initiatives. Innovation is now a strategic agenda that has the undivided attention of top management – both in the municipalities and national government. After the election, the victorious parties have set a national innovation strategy in its programme.

It is nothing new that the government will propose initiatives to boost research, development, productivity and growth in Danish companies. But it is new that a national strategy for innovation also includes the public sector. And it’s good timing – not just in relation to developments in the municipalities, but also in relation to the world around us. Other countries are already in full swing. If the government establishes a strategy, it will place us in the current of countries such as Australia and Sweden, who in recent months have adopted ambitious action plans to promote innovation in the public sector. For example, Canberra passed an Australian Public Service Innovation Action Plan.

The need for a more strategic and systematic approach to public innovation has rarely been greater. The challenges are many, whether we are speaking of education, employment, health or even productivity in the public sector. As shown by the municipal leaders’ statements above, the question is not whether innovation is needed, but rather how we will choose to approach the task of innovation. So what key considerations must a public sector innovation strategy include if it is to make a difference? Here are five questions:

  1. What should the strategy be about? In my book, “Leading Public Sector Innovation” (Policy Press, 2010), I emphasise that a good public innovation strategy requires direction. What key challenges must the strategy specifically focus on? What significant national, regional or municipal initiatives will we invest in to increase the probability of finding truly radical, innovative solutions? What should comprise the strategy’s portfolio?
  2. How will we work with innovation? Which means, methods and processes should the strategy utilise? For example, will we emphasise new technology, research, employee-driven innovation, or strengthening the involvement of citizens and businesses? Or will we use a mix of these? Are we seeking incremental or radical innovation? Do we even have a clear idea of these different forms of innovation? Do we have the competences to use them?
  3. Who must be involved? Innovation is made possible from the top, but is executed from below. Should the strategy primarily involve stakeholders in the public sector, or should there be a collaboration between a range of state, regional and municipal organisations, private companies, NGOs, or citizens themselves? What activities can ensure that the involvement happens in practice and that it focuses on practical, effective solutions rather than special interests?
  4. How will we measure the success of the strategy? Public innovation occurs when new ideas are implemented and create value for society. The bottom line is completely different from that of the private sector. Or rather, bottom lines. There are four in all: Productivity, service experience, effects, and democracy. Are some of these dimensions to be prioritised more than others? How will we continually document that the strategy delivers results?
  5. Where will the strategy be rooted? Where will we embed the strategy in the organisation so that we both secure top management focus and a broad commitment? How and by whom is it to be executed and what governance structures will ensure that it happens?

In fact, there is a sixth question that may be the most difficult of them all. When the Australian government announced its new innovation strategy back in May, I received an e-mail from one of its key advisors. “They’ve even included ‘courage’!” he wrote. The Australians thereby point out that strong and courageous leadership is essential if we want to translate innovation to action. How will we choose to approach this challenge?

Jesper Christiansen

Should we aim to create urbanity in public governance?

By June 25th 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christian Bason

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.