From Servants to Stewards: Design-led Innovation in the Public Sector (Part 4)
I look at the situations and problems where design-led innovation really shines and that need it most. I’ll also explore political contexts beyond the federal level, the U.S., and the Global North in general and how design-led innovation has had an impact there, or has the potential for impact. I also make some concluding remarks.
Haven’t read from the beginning? Click here to go to Part I.
The globalized, neoliberal context in which public sector organizations of all kinds work provides unique, often very complex challenges. Unfortunately, the current organizational mechanism available to those trying to respond to challenges doesn’t help as much as it should. One-size-fits all approaches to providing solutions, often based on a one-size-fits all understanding of problems, won’t cut it. The UNDP elaborates:
“The past model of societal governance based on increasingly specific and numerous silos of deep expertise no longer appears fit for its purpose. Governments are required to work at the intersection of multi-disciplinary, multi-actor knowledge. To answer the right questions correctly, solutions are less likely to be found in any one single silo, however sophisticated it may be, but in a mix.”¹
Which is to say, the challenges organizations need to solve don’t fall squarely within any one expertise, domain, or organizational department, as no single one fully encapsulates an adequate understanding of the problem. When one shifts their understanding of design from creative deliverables to the competencies within an organization committed to cultivating a deep understanding of a problem and a process for bringing together a diversity of perspectives and expertise, all while bearing in mind the resources and constraints of a situation, the relevance, importance, and even necessity of design becomes clear. The “wicked problems” that Richard Buchanan describes are, in part, why design thinking became popular and why it grows in importance as a strategy for anyone attempting to have a social or political impact.²
At its core, design is really just about reconfiguring available resources to solve a problem. This in turn helps people to achieve something or understand and use information in a way that they couldn’t before by “synthesizing from the different parts to potential new, holistic solutions, interpreting the findings and generating a divergence of ideas and concepts, shaping possible solutions that take account of complexities at an abstract systems level.”³ These complexities are all around us, and a guiding tenet of good design is not to provide a solution of equal or greater complexity as the problem, but the most straightforward and testable solution. In the course of this extraordinary convergence, the designer connects previously unrelated resources and information into a series of actions that are both complete and simple. As designer and thought leader Jon Kolko notes, “people need help making sense of [complex systems]. Specifically, people need their interactions with technologies and other complex systems to be simple, intuitive, and pleasurable.”
It should be noted here, that many public sector organizations have better understood their problems by close partnerships with organizations in the private sector. An endless number of great solutions have resulted from private-public partnerships where the public sector organization didn’t have the resources in house to deliver on an effective solution. And there are many great and laudable cases where either the resources or stomach for risk didn’t exist, and government served as a platform for startups with a vision for addressing the problem. While we often hear about accelerators or see partnerships at work, understanding them as a part of a larger design-led innovation system at work gives, at least for me, a great context for understanding the potential roles the public sector can play.⁴
But this represents quite the shift, doesn’t it? Rather than the complex systems that serve as interventions in complex problems that were poorly understood, like the rollout of the prescription program enacted by George W. Bush’s administration, design-led innovation proposes a deep understanding of a problem that integrates up until now an unheard of level of participation from various, often divergent perspectives, and then starting simple, with small, scoped solutions that won’t break the bank. Gall’s law states that “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work.”⁵ Jen Pahlka, founder and director of Code for America and one of the minds behind the USDS, echoes the importance of this approach in the public sector, saying in Delivering on Digital that “If there’s one thing government needs desperately, it’s the ability to quickly try something, pivot when necessary, and build complex systems by starting with simple systems that work and evolve from there, not the other way around.” As time goes on, the policy expert whose power comes from having the ear of the decision maker may lose some clout to “those who create new spaces and places for more complex, interactive, and inclusive policy conversations.”⁶
Understanding the journey a human being takes to get a solution from what you’re offering is critical. And a product that’s the best thing since sliced bread becomes a frustration that alienates users if you haven’t made it easy for them to pay you, or you pummel them with spammy emails, or you make it next to impossible to lodge a complaint or change a flight, or the service guy gives you a 4 hour window in which he’ll show up, and then doesn’t.⁷ And this has very real, almost perfectly analogous manifestations in the way people interact with government. “So much of what shapes a customer’s experience comes before and after the actual transaction. While a veteran may have a very positive relationship with his doctor, if he has to jump through hoops to get an appointment, or receives an erroneous bill that should never have come to him, there’s little the doctor can do to improve the overall experience.”⁸
Another terrific example is taxes. In what world does it make sense to make it difficult for people to give you money? But sometimes this just requires a reframing: our tax system is very explicitly built around catching folks who break the law, rather than that vast majority who want to follow the law and get on with their lives. In Denmark, Christian Bason addressed this very problem, saying:
“If success depended on helping people comply with the tax code, rather than on catching people not complying, that would have fundamental consequences for all aspects of the organization’s activities. From running an organization focusing mainly on control (and on process), the leadership would have to build an organization focusing mainly on creating results and outcomes.”⁹
Fishman, Hosea, and Datar refer to this as “lowering the burden of compliance”, which I think we’d all welcome–in most cases, existing regulation feels less egregious if it wasn’t such a pain to follow the rules. Think of the the armies of lawyers, accountants, consultants, organizations and individuals wasting time and money in their effort to follow the law. While some technology has helped, in just as many cases it’s caused even more errors. In one instance of the work of the Innovation Lab at the Office of Personnel Management, what was believed to be a software glitch turned out to be a poorly designed part of the process. With very little work, the organization corrected the problem and simplified the application, and the result “will reduce improper payments by 10 percent, or $600 million, by the 2019–20 school year.”¹⁰ In many cases, though, the system and regulations in place are just stupid or overdetermined, extending far beyond a simple pain point. But experience design is the most effective way of identifying those laws that are serving more as bottlenecks than getting the results the policy makers who made the law originally intended.
Understanding the entirety of a user’s journey, from their first exposure with your brand, to visiting the website or getting on the phone with sales, to getting an account set up are crucial. And on the other side, once already in the application, a great company makes sure they have the mechanisms in place to observe the interesting or unexpected ways people are using an application, or hearing ideas for improvements or how to fix something that may not work the way users want them. This also includes great help documentation and easy access to support, or maybe periodic phone check ins. Lastly, there’s a whole aspect of marketing that focuses not on getting in new customers, but helping the customers you have to succeed or interact with each other as a community, with content that inspires them to try something new with the application, make new connections, or better succeed at their job.
As a designer, I don’t succeed unless the people that use the products I help to make succeed, and often that success looks different depending on the person I interact with. Sometimes they aren’t even a “user” of the technology, strictly speaking, but someone who interacts with our brand outside of our main application. I certainly don’t create and manage every aspect of a user’s journey, but I do help to create that narrative between the various competencies, and as a result avoid the silos that seem to inevitably crop up in a company of virtually any size. And very importantly, with a clear, shared objective in place and agreed upon metrics, staff throughout the chain of touch points have a lot of room to experiment and play, in order to improve on their part of an overall process.
My very good friend James Alefantis owns a couple of popular restaurants in Washington, D.C., where he trains his staff to prioritize two things so common in any restaurant: get someone a drink as soon as possible after they’ve sat, and get people’s checks delivered and processed the moment they want to leave. James identified the most important bottlenecks in a restaurant experience, and if his staff gets these things right, they have a lot more wiggle room on the rest of the experience. Indeed, none of this is new, and the world of manufacturing has made a science of systems and value chains.¹¹ The innovation here is not a new idea per se, but the application of an idea that has been around for quite some time. It just hasn’t been effectively applied to public sector service experience. And much like manufacturing or hospitality, by understanding the entire value chain and human experience, it’s far easier to identify parts of the process that are better suited for a public sector partner, rather than being managed by the public sector organization itself, such as a good customer relationship management system or help documentation. And understanding that partner’s role in the larger system makes that relationship a far more easy one to manage.
For a quick crash course for public sector workers thinking about customer experience, check out these tips:
1. What assumptions are you making in this government service? Are they still valid…with your current stakeholders and modern behaviors?
2. Where are the biggest pain points and frustrations in the process? Where can you decrease it? How can you increase delight?
3. What is the normal behavior of citizens when interacting with government? Alone or with family? If online, at home or at the library?
4. How are people finding out about you? How can you optimize that?
5. Why are people not doing items you want, such as paying parking tickets? Is there a design flaw that could fix the problem?
6. How can design thinking reinforce employee behaviors you desire (healthy behaviors, customer service behaviors)?
7. Does the language make sense to citizens?
8. What hours should you really be open in your buildings to meet citizens’ needs?
9. What is the citizen experience on filling out your forms?
10. Where are people getting stuck in the customer service process?¹²
Knock out even a few of these and any public sector organization would be well on its way to being leaps and bounds ahead of their counterparts.
While I hope I’ve demonstrated that while design-led innovation could have a huge impact, actually adopting it initially doesn’t have to be a total overhaul and reinvention.¹³ Nonetheless, making empathy the core value of policy and service creation turns the traditional relationship with government on its head, and transitions those working in the public sector to a role of advocates and stewards. Yes, many products and services have been developed without a strong emphasis on empathy. But I don’t see how designing policy and government interventions effectively can happen without it.
Take the service design experience, for example. Implementing a new process or service delivery mechanism requires a sense of the way that potentially many different personae will use it. For example, some will prefer the phone, others a quick transaction on a website, and others may be blind, and therefore require certain accessibility affordances (this is a requirement of all government digital services, by the way). Many of those humans may have fundamentally different problems, depending on their socio-economic status, age, or the region in which they live. The dimensions of the problem just got much bigger than “pay your bill”, but nonetheless may still have a simple set of solutions. Without empathy throughout the value chain, a designer may miss some of the necessary affordances required for a service to solve the problem for as many people as possible. Who knows, after an empathy-driven research period, the designer may discover that on the outside, many of these problems look very diverse, but that there’s a core, yet unexpected, pattern in the problems that the various personae have that no one knew about.
Government services for so long have resembled an algorithm, and technology has only made delivering on that algorithm faster. But the big assumption is that the algorithm is correct, which historically speaking, hasn’t really been true for virtually anyone for a long time. Great design is not an algorithm, and much like any other profession, machine learning is automating some of the core skills that designers have sold to clients. However, as Obama said, “this is not mathematics; this is biology and chemistry. These are living organisms, and it’s messy. And your job as a citizen and as a decent human being is to constantly affirm and lift up and fight for treating people with kindness and respect and understanding.” At its core, design finds the real problem, addresses shortcomings in the system, and through empathetic co-creation delivers a solution that is not only a better fit, but is agile enough through iteration to constantly improve.
Similarly, no algorithm can appropriately acknowledge that none of us live, work, get sick, or raise a family in a vacuum. We exist within a complex web of social and economic relationships, from which our beliefs, values, and needs stem. Similarly, the policy or decision makers that have to sign off on almost any government intervention are part of a web themselves. In the anecdote that introduced Part I, I recounted how a policy maker wanted a requirement, but ultimately that requirement didn’t test well. She came around to not having it because it would have threatened the overall success of the project. Empathy is key to navigating those relationships, and understanding what success really means for all the stakeholders involved. None of these interconnections need to represent debilitating connections, but can instead serve as valuable resources to an empathic designer.
Lastly, I can think of few products outside of domains like healthcare or insurance in which the provider of the service is connecting with the recipient at a moment of great vulnerability. Our interaction with government services is a moment with the potential for some of the strongest and most complex emotions we’ll ever feel, from participating in our children’s educations to getting arrested. Too often, at almost every one of these moments we feel dehumanized by the government. We’re a number, to be dealt with according to certain protocols. As I noted in the more narrative section above, approval of and faith in government hasn’t been high for most of the last 70 years, and certainly never in my lifetime. Given the challenge and opportunity to make a genuine, wholehearted connection with people at their most confused, and in their greatest need, empathy as a guiding force should be table stakes.
While I’ve talked a great deal about the federal government, or public sector organizations in a more general sense, many of the services above aren’t provided by the federal government at all, but on the state and local levels, with or without funding assistance from the federal government. And while efforts on the level of the U.S. federal government like 18F and USDS, and abroad in the U.K. and Denmark inspire me, I strongly believe that the greatest potential for design-led innovation lies on the local and state levels, and in resource-poor or emerging economies.
I’m not alone in thinking that design-led innovation’s could reshape the narrative and the delivery of services on the city level. Stephanie Wade, the former director the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s Innovation Lab, now helps to run Bloomberg Philanthropies Innovation Teams program, in which trained design and innovation specialists embed in city governments to help empower those already within it to start working a bit differently. Simply the fact that a large philanthropic organization has seen the potential of design-led innovation and has invested significant resources in its cultivation speaks tons about how the idea is catching on. And the fact that Stephanie, with a background in reshaping the federal government from the inside, has chosen to focus on cities is equally resonant.
The results of the city partnerships with Bloomberg Philanthropies has been dramatic. By deploying innovation teams into urban contexts and allowing them to focus directly on problems and work across silos, cities located both in the U.S. and abroad have made headway on wicked problems that for years seemed perniciously stuck. In New Orleans, Bloomberg innovation teams focused squarely on the murder rate the city, and within a year brought it down to levels not seen since 1971 by uncovering the hotspots where most homicides took place and redirecting services to those locales. Ethnographic research in Boston conducted by its innovation team uncovered a barrier to having more affordable housing unique to that community: residents have a low appetite for high-density living. The solution going forward will focus on better incentivizing micro-units and providing bonuses or rebates for living in areas with a high volume of residences.
This work, and in fact underlying much of my own research, suggests what many of us already know: that one-size-fits-all prioritization of problems and top down solutions don’t work and that identifying and solving problems on the local level first should shape the larger conversation across a diverse set of communities located in equally diverse geographies. And for governments that intend to make life better for citizens that have a broad diversity of experiences and cultivate greater resiliency within a large domain of communities, the application of this assumption could have a significant impact on the look and feel of public sector organizations going forward.
To better understand that broad set of experiences, I had a conversation with a friend, Joel Nihlean, who helps develop content and other resources for the Texas Association of Counties, where some of the counties are larger than the state of Rhode Island. It is home to the most diverse county in the country (Fort Bend County), and encompasses some of the country’s largest metro areas (the Houston metro area has a larger population than the country of Denmark). Not only are counties responsible for many of the services available in Texas, the diversity of the counties (Harris County, where Houston is, vs. Loving County out in West Texas, population 95) speaks directly to the importance of eschewing one size fits all solutions. And mandates from the state level require similar levels of performance but don’t necessarily dictate how those benchmarks should be reached.
“The state’s so damn big [Texas is bigger in square miles than France], with its cultural and regional differences…inasmuch as a change in process would make things better and cheaper, they’d be very interested. Cutting costs and doing things better…people are into that,” Joel said. And what would you guess is one of the most pressing problems facing Texas counties? If one was to only base his or her presumptions on the reputation of Texas and listen to the national narrative, you’d think national security and immigration in this border state are top priorities. “Mental health facilities,” Joel said. Government facilitation of mental health services? In the cradle of the Tea Party Movement and one of the most famously red of states? Counties at their very leanest are responsible for transportation infrastructure and criminal justice. Think of the famous Old West county judge, who in a more rural Texas county is also essentially county administrator. Those picked up by law enforcement for a domestic disturbance or other similar incident because of a mental health issue get put into the criminal justice system, thereby draining scarce county resources. They bypass the more appropriate set of services that will help them receive treatment and avoid the expense of a criminal justice process. The state of Texas, however, has failed to adequately fund or mandate mental health service solutions. The counties are on their own.
“There are 254 counties in Texas, and 254 solutions,” Joel said. To some who are used to a big corporate environment or large government organization, this kind of statement may cause a painful cringe. But when looked at through the lens of design-led innovation, this is an incredible opportunity to get things right for the people of those places. It’s not appropriate that the solution to the problem in Harris County, which has 83 hospitals and thousands of public sector employees, matches the solution in Oldham county, where Joel says, “The judge has a secretary who answers his phone. That’s it.” Each of these counties has an opportunity to understand what the problem looks like for them, and try out solutions instead of working against top down mandates for how to work. The Texas Association of Counties plays a big role in this process. They communicate with the various counties and elevate solutions that seem to have some success in a given context. This can provide a bit of a head start to another county who hasn’t found a great solution, and can iterate on the one that worked for their purposes.
Unfortunately, the struggles and issues faced by a handful of communities seem to dominate the national narrative, instead of great success stories bubbling to the surface, especially by cities with visionary leadership and a design-led innovation approach.
“Innovation isn’t something that you just pull out of the air. Innovation is something that needs to be built on what you’ve already got. In our case that’s true in terms of our software, which is a tradition of hard work and creativity and industry, but also hardware that has new value, which in our case had to do with the discovery that the same right of ways that use to carry goods on roads and rail now carry signals through digital infrastructure such that the fiber that carries the internet runs right through the industrial corridor of South Bend.”¹⁴
The above quote comes from the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, home of Notre Dame University, which in 2015 saw its first population growth in 150 years. Here’s one from another part of the country:
“Government is designed for experts — you have to hire people to get through it. A big part [of our work] is designing for the first timer, the newcomer . . . we want to say, ‘What would it look like to make it a level playing field?’’”¹⁵
That’s a quote from Anthony Lyons, city manager of Gainesville, Florida, home to Florida State University. The quote comes from an article in Fast Company about reinventing the city, which they did with a little help from IDEO based on human-centered design. The results so far? The Department of Doing mentioned above, a centrally-located “front desk” for the city, a one stop shop for, among other things, getting everything taken care of to start a business, rather than having to jump from department to department. “When you go pay your hotel bill, you don’t go to finance department — you go to the front desk,” Lyons said. “Trying to get all the right permits to open a business, you have to go from place to place and that’s aggravating. The goal is not to get a permit; it’s to open a business.” As an aside, I reiterate the importance of cultivating skill sets, as it took a year to recruit the director of the Department of Doing. From Buffalo, New York, to Chattanooga, Tennessee, cities are leading the way in facilitating design-led innovation at every level of government.
Boston, right across the river from me, has gotten out in front too:
“To understand how well the city is serving its citizens, the City of Boston created a unified baseball-inspired index. “CityScore” combines 24 different metrics from across city departments — from crime and Wi-Fi availability, to energy consumption, public safety, economic development, education, and health and human services, along with citizen satisfaction scores. A value above one means that things are going better than planned while anything less than one signals that intervention or remedial action is needed.”¹⁶
Boston can now get smarter about the interventions it makes, trying things out and seeing if they can move the needle on metrics that measure how successfully the city is meeting the objective and vision that the leadership of the city has established for the entire city government.
We’ve talked a lot about American government, at this point at almost every level. But what about outside of the Western developed countries. Singapore, for one, has invested heavily in the idea of design-led innovation (still smaller than Houston, as a point of reference), again with the help of IDEO. They’ve completely rethought how they provided government-sponsored healthcare, managing their native and foreign workers, and even encouraging Singaporeans to have more children.¹⁷
But what about more resource-poor contexts? Apparently, design-led innovation is succeeding in select places that meet those criteria better than almost any other project worldwide. I spoke with my friend Owen Sanderson at ideo.org, IDEO’s non-profit arm that works using grants on projects that may not be able to afford traditional IDEO services. Here, Kenya especially leads the way. It partnered with Vodafone to create a service called MPESA, which began as a money transferring service and expanded into a system in which citizens can pay their bills or taxes or repay microfinance loans, largely using just SMS or a low-grade application built into a SIM card. In these contexts, a team from ideo.org applies many of the lessons already addressed in this research to the projects that they work on, namely empathy and cultivating a “team-as-deliverable”, rather than strictly an application or process. Empathy is key, given the sometimes very unique local context. “First, understand local context, how people learn and collaborate as compared to US or Europe,” Owen said, noting one use case in which an application was provided to help farmers repay microloans. Where things like finance are a very private and personal thing in the U.S. or Europe, in the communities where Owen works in Africa, people are far more comfortable taking out a loan with a group of friends, and it works much better for them than if they had done it individually. In many of these contexts, design-led innovation may be more successful because it’s not replacing another formalized system. I want to stress here that I don’t wish to imply that systems don’t exist. They most certainly do. But things like a robust banking sector, let alone e-commerce, are new to even some places in the U.S. The UNDP puts it very well:
“Design thinking is not, however, a prerogative of developed governance systems. Design thinking does not seem to necessitate specific preliminary governance capacities which, if lacking, prevent developing countries from embracing it. The opposite might by contrast apply: emerging jurisdictions might well encounter less organizational and cultural rigidity because their public administrations are possibly less formalized and more flexible and suffer less from path dependencies and inherited bureaucratic imprints. Such general potential is arguably the most promising feature of design thinking for its diffusion across the globe. Observation and research into its global spread and application will be able to generate more evidence in this regard.”¹⁸
The following is a quote from Frame Reflection, which discusses the ways in which “design rationality” can serve as the basis for untangling difficult or seemingly impossible policy debates:
“The social design process is inevitably political. The designing system is a coalition of actors who have their own interests, freedoms, and powers. If that coalition fragments…the designing system becomes an array of antagonistic parties whose interactions no longer qualify as designing.”¹⁹
While one might read this as a pro tip for executing on design process, I can’t help but come at it from a different angle. If one is to understand the designing system as our democratic government itself, created in order to balance what economist Albert O. Hirschman identifies as the passions and the interests, this quote makes sense on a much broader scale. In many ways, what we do now no longer qualifies as designing, regardless of the message one chooses for that design.
Design-led innovation is in absolutely no way a replacement for effective and wholehearted leadership, nor, as we’ve seen, can it even really exist without it. As Andrew Blum from the United States Institute of Peace notes:
“Design thinking excels when there is some consensus on the problem at hand. People don’t like to be stuck in traffic as the result of parallel parkers. If the goal is clear, design thinkers are really good at working on identifying new pathways to get there, and finding creative ways of removing hurdles along those pathways. But what if there is a lack of consensus on the problem?”²⁰
In many contexts, we have a tension in which we can’t seem to agree on what we should do at all, or frankly even a commitment to solving a problem in the first place. Many policy makers would much rather get elected based on rhetoric alone. But even then, consensus isn’t a guarantee that what’s right will be done. Max Weber first alluded to that caveat in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. One of my favorite articles, written by Mark Slouka, riffs on a similar notion famously posited by Bertrand Russell in an article titled “In Praise of Idleness”. He paraphrase an ethic that is not exclusively, but is certainly quite prevalently American: “Indeed, at times it seems there is hardly an occupation…that cannot at least in part be redeemed by our obsessive dedication to it: ‘Yes, Ted sold shoulder-held Stingers to folks with no surname, but he worked so hard!’” And it’s difficult to create a government that seeks to be the steward and protector of all, when there are clear differences of opinion in terms of who should receive protection, who should be advocated for, and based on which aspect of their identity.
In many ways, the best and most effective designers in the public sector out there right now are many of the policy makers themselves. In a recent interview on NPR, Representative Cheri Bustos describes one way in which she connects with people in her district:
“We do something that we have dubbed Cheri on Shift. My name is Cheri and I do shift work. I job shadow people who are processing carps — the fish. I deliver UPS packages. I drive forklifts. And I look at what people are doing for a living.”²¹
She is actively using empathy to understand the lives of her constituents. I’d be cynical about this normally and suppose that it’s just for show, but she does it all the time, and even if it is for show, I’m sure she learns something. And there are many more representatives just like her who spend a lot of their time conversing with constituents and understanding needs. But while we may think of empathy as a valuable tool in a design sense, it’s also a very effective weapon in the fight to gain power in the emotional sense. Emotional empathy, and its siblings fear and shame, are incredibly effective mechanisms for exciting the crowd.
Unfortunately, it seems that like with many things, the talent or capability for that kind of empathy is morally agnostic. And there’s certainly no shortage of government entities in the last 150 years of history that played on empathy in order to systematically and efficiently do evil and destructive things. Even now, in those countries where design-led innovation has taken hold on the widest scale are also the countries where nationalism, bigotry, and xenophobia have seen the sharpest rise.
Transformation toward design-led innovation doesn’t have to start as something revolutionary or costly, and the resources applied toward this proliferate almost exponentially with every year that goes by, in a kind of network effect as more people are exposed to this way of working.
So to close, I’d like to provide an answer to my original question, and some of the questions that arose, and the answers to which I hope I’ve given a clear discussion. First, can design-led innovation, strictly understood and defined as I have throughout this research (and if you haven’t yet, check out Parts I, II, and III for a more rigorous discussion of the topic), with a strong focus on HCD, have a positive impact on government and our satisfaction with it? Ab. So. Lutely. I have a stronger sense now of its potential than I ever have, and a very clear idea of the ways in which it can be implemented without alienating everyone already in the public sector. If anything, I think it would raise the satisfaction of public sector workers, in addition to making work in the public sector a more attractive option for people in my generation. Transformation toward design-led innovation doesn’t have to start as something revolutionary or costly, and the resources applied toward this proliferate almost exponentially with every year that goes by, in a kind of network effect as more people are exposed to this way of working.
Second, will design-led innovation fix all our problems? Nope. Could it help, and be a part of a larger effort? Ab. So. Lutely. Even now, the Democrats and Republicans who didn’t support the current president elect wonder how they can clarify their vision to better reflect the realities of the country. I can’t think of a better place to start. A political renaissance is sorely needed, because to reiterate Shon and Rein’s point, “the designing system becomes an array of antagonistic parties whose interactions no longer qualify as designing.” We must do something, and it can’t be based on rhetoric or promises alone, but a clear strategy and a way of working. And if anyone isn’t convinced that changing the way we work could have a ripple effect of positive consequences, think about how transformational design-led innovation would be in a place like Cuba or China. It would turn it all on its head. Based on how many talented, good-natured, creative people I met and learned about through the course of this research, I don’t think we need a full on head-turn. Maybe just a re-alignment, in which we’re having a conversation not on our differences or on fantastical threats, but the actual problems almost all of us share, and which we can solve together.
Matthew Burton from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau made a point that really resonated with me, saying that the best thing that could happen in our country is for more people to take a turn working in government. And I wonder, in addition to creating more opportunities to work in government, even if it was just participating in co-creation rather than just relying on our “3 minutes at the mic” to provide feedback that probably won’t even be integrated in the project, if we spun it a little bit how different we’d feel about the public sector.
Using the precepts of design-led innovation, those working in the public sector, from the postal worker, to the park ranger, to the Secretary of State, are taking their turn as stewards of the public good. They’re advocates for the people of the country and their interests. They’re our protectors, who save us when we’re in trouble. They’re hardly our servants. Innovation, design, capitalism, democracy: they could not be messier. And that is a brilliant and wonderful thing, as well as a very compelling opportunity. No, I don’t think that government itself should be the disruptive innovator in the same way we think of startups. Instead, it should be the nimble, agile steward of the public good, able to provide safety for the people while not standing in the way of organic and often chaotic change.
A few last recommendations: one major deficit that I identified in seeing how public sector organizations operate, and a huge difference from startups, is that those working within the public sector had such a higher level of vulnerability that really affected the risks they were willing to take. Vulnerability is a difficult thing, and it’s so important to have mentors or advisers and your disposal to whom you can honestly say “I don’t know what to do.” Even the highest managers need that, and social worker and researcher Brene Brown talks about this often. And in what may seems like a contradiction to some, a conversation with a friend of mine in venture capital reinforced this attitude: startups often times have advisers or non-investment board members with whom they can discuss challenges. If these small startups get access to advice when they don’t have to feel like they know all the answers, why not innovators in the public sector?
If you’re looking for an opportunity to do something high impact, go work in the public sector. The USDS is hiring, and it’s filled with creative people who are attracted to the work by the sheer scale at which they can affect change, and another very important fact: while you may be thinking that the government is a big, top-down organization that reflects the white, straight, male hierarchy — in that, you’d probably be right most of the time, but how do we engender change in this environment? Certainly not quickly from outside, and people get pretty defensive when political pressure is telling them to do their jobs differently. It’s a great opportunity for those who feel they have been disenfranchised by the government to take their place in the driver’s seat and make government a more representative, inclusive, and empathic instrument to serve the needs of all people. And speaking of opportunities, not a whole lot of these skills, strictly speaking, are taught intensively in any high school or college, although a good mix of science and liberal arts gets you pretty close. If you’re a city or state, hire some college graduates and train them up on this stuff, and maybe pay off some of their debt for their time. Meanwhile, they’ll learn a way of working they can take with them into the private sector or maybe even make a career in public sector organizations, flipping the script and making government work the best way to get the skills of the future.
Lastly, if you’re an agency or consultancy, considering brushing up on the needs of public sector organizations: not everyone can afford IDEO, and based on what I’ve learned, a lot of governments out there are clamoring not just for deliverables, but for training in how this is done. My guess is that you’ll find a lot of excited, creative professionals who just need the right tools, and are in a position to reach a lot of people. This is not limited to design work: a lot of government organizations are running on some pretty old school tech. The procurement process can be long and grueling, but jumping on as a consultant to help the existing tech resources learn things like agile or React.js or Amazon Web Services seems like it would be a much shorter path. And public sector organizations: be a little more clear and open about what working in the public sector (and the challenges faced by the public sector) are all about. In the course of my research, I found endless resources about HCD and innovation, and I continue to learn new technologies just based on the absolutely abundant amount of information on modern software development online. But I don’t have to tell you that working in the public sector probably requires a few skills that someone in a startup doesn’t have. Share that knowledge.
If I did my job, I presented a few more questions than I ended up answering. And that’s intentional. My hope here was to write something that represented not a compendium of solutions per se, but a great jumping off point; a way of getting myself up to speed as much as possible. It’s a point of convergence in a expanding and contracting cycle that makes up true understanding and learning.
Moving forward, together we’ll engage in workshops and produce other written or visual materials on things like citizen co-creation, and hopefully include some of our local public sector leaders so that we can all learn more about the challenges they face. Maybe we’ll even be able to help out. This project itself is an act of design, and I’ll continue to engage and develop with issues and new learning to help create a better understanding of the ways we can create a better government. Frankly, I’d love to see an academy stateside like the one developed in the U.K., aligning with the great work of someone like General Assembly, Startup Institute, or the Austin Center for Design to prepare willing and capable candidates for roles in the public sector, from design leaders to those just out of school or making a career transition who can play a great role on an established design team. I look forward to finding an opportunity to work with public sector here in New England to create an environment where a team like that could thrive.
I have never been more excited about government’s ability to effectively meet citizens needs, and to give everyone a voice in a way that’s truly productive and fulfilling. I don’t think our problems are squarely placed on the government to solve, nor have they ever been. But through the mechanism of government, at whatever level, we have the opportunity to provide a solution to a lot of the problems we face in our communities. It’s a shared burden, a shared responsibility, and shared opportunity to participate democratically and politically to create and act as stewards of the society in which we live.
Acknowledgments
This was a big project for me, and I couldn’t have accomplished it without the help of a range of actors, some of whom I’ve never even met. First, I’d like to thank William Eggers, Christian Bason, John Kolko, and the folks at IDEO for their incredible, thoughtful work to not just work for the public good, but to discover the most effective and empathetic ways of doing that. Similarly, I’m so inspired by the folks at the US Digital Service, 18F, the U.K. Government Digital Service, Denmark’s MindLab, as well as the many groups in the private sector such as Civic Hall Labs, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and Project H Design. Second, I’d like to thank my interviewees: Stephanie Wade, Chelsea Kelley, Joel Nihlean, Owen Sanderson, Matthew Burton, Christian LoBue in the office of my Congresswoman Katherine Clark, and Sarah Downey. Third, I’d like to give a very heartfelt thank you to Subforum, a Boston-based design consultancy, who supported me initially with the project design. Lastly, thank you to all of my editors, including my wife Victoria Choate Hasler, Ph.D., Ross Centers, Emily Carlin, and John Biebel.
- United Nations Development Program, Global Center for Public Service Excellence (2014)“Design Thinking for Public Service Excellence.”
- Buchanan, Richard (Spring, 1992) “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking.” Design Issues, Vol. 8, №2. pp. 5–21.
- Bason, Christian (2010) Leading Public Sector Innovation, University of Bristol: Policy Press at the University of Bristol. Pg. 140.
- “The last element of the solution economy is the solution ecosystems — the collaboration networks that come together to solve a specific problem. For example, companies, social entrepreneurs, foundations, and individual citizens are collaborating to revolutionize education and find low-cost solutions to housing the billions of poor people worldwide who live in slums. Wavemakers and the other elements of solution ecosystems are distributing vaccines. They are combating human trafficking on a more coordinated level than ever before. And they are solving society’s big problems through unique convergences of resources and uncommon alliances.” Eggers, William D. and Paul Macmillan (2013) The Solution Revolution. USA: Deloitte Global Services Limited/Harvard Business Review Press. Pg. 9. Also, if well managed public-private partnerships combine the best of both worlds: the private sector with its resources, management skills and technology; and the public sector with its regulatory actions and protection of the public interest. UNDP, 2104.
- John Gall, General Systemantics. Pg. 71.
- Bason, 2010.
- “But the majority of products, services, and systems are considered in the larger context of an experience scaffold — an ecology of thinking that needs to consider how a person experiences a given product in the context of the rest of their life. It’s impossible to drive a desired end-to-end experience without considering, and planning for, an interaction design framework that works across an entire system.” Kolko, Jon (May 2015) “Lean Doesn’t Always Create the Best Products.” Harvard Business Review.
- Tiffany Dovey Fishman, Kristy Hosea, Amrita Datar (2016) “Rx CX.” Deloitte.
- Bason, 2010. Pg. 71.
- Dovey Fishman, Hosea, Datar, 2016
- For a great, accessible book on this, check out The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt.
- Steve Ressler (January 2013) “10 Ways that Design Thinking Can Save Government.”
- “It is often by taking departure in the relationships with citizens and redefining them, that public organizations can create more radical efficiencies, generating better outcomes at lower cost. Interestingly, it is striking how little it often takes to generate the ‘professional empathy’ that is the basis for such insight.” Bason, 2010. Pg. 153.
- Myers, Margaret (August, 2016) “This Rust Belt mayor found the secret to innovating in his hometown.” The Renewal Project.
- Budds, Diana (October, 2016) “How One Florida City Is Reinventing Itself With UX Design.” FastCo Design.
- Dovey Fishman, Hosea, Datar, 2016
- IDEO, “Singapore’s Road to a Human-Centered Government.”
- UNDP, 2014.
- Schon, Donald A. and Martin Rein (1994). Frame Reflection. New York: Basic Books. Pg. 168.
- Blum, Andrew (June, 2013) “Design Thinking and the Politics of Atrocity Prevention.” A View from the Cave.
- Interview (December, 2016) “Rep. Bustos Recruited to Help Improve Democrats’ Message.” NPR.
