PSI: limits & barriers
it could be amazing, if only…
“ The society is changing at high pace and governments should change as well to reconnect with it.”
— François Jégou, SDS
Service design driven activities and projects in the public sector are increasing and data from various researches prove that the phenomenon is growing. As we have seen, the public sector is already the biggest client of service design and SDN’s report identified specifically five different areas where the discipline can play an important role and have a huge impact: policy making, cultural and organizational change, training and capacity building, citizens engagement and digitization.
“Public sectors all over the world are facing tremendous changes: they have to save costs and produce better-quality outcomes. They have to fulfill the digitalization demand maintaining human relationships with citizens and innovate the culture of provided services. In the last decay, many countries have reached service design in order to help them find “blue oceans” solutions to go beyond a new way of improving things.” — Birgit Mager, SDN
But, despite the recognized potential that design could have in innovation, there is still a huge gap between the theoretical and the practical world: the practitioner community is small and the number of successful projects that actually succeeded in having a relevant impact is little.
The reasons that cause this gap should be searched in the main limits and barriers that characterize the public sector innovation — and, even more specifically, the service design-driven PSI.
Along the research path and thanks also to the experts’ interviews, we have had the chance to come up and summarize the main obstacles that make the journey to innovation really hard. We grouped them in three main areas:
- lack of knowledge
- complexity
- communication
Each cluster will be analyzed one by one in detail, in three different publications.
Lack of knowledge
As said, the first set of barriers that can be found in this growing field is around the topic of «knowledge». First of all, we have to say that the word itself has many different meanings when linked to the collaboration between service designers and public sector servants.
For instance, it can be related to mutual and little understanding of each other’s job. In fact, the public sector doesn’t really know what service design is about, which are its methods, approach, processes or either which are the discipline’s principles. And, from the opposite side, service designers have very little knowledge about government structure and functioning. They don’t know how the public administration works, which are the internal and external dynamics or even how to deal with it.
This brings us to one of the first wall that design often needs to step over: the big gap in the education system. This gap makes the collaboration between the two actors really difficult and slow, particularly in the early stages. Public organizations and citizens shouldn’t be the only one learning about design methods: designers should try more often to study and understand public sector processes, procurements, and bureaucracy.
“(…) most design students have very little knowledge about what working in and for governments is like, what is the language of government, what is the logic and the role of government. And, likewise, very few people who go to schools of government, have any exposion to innovation processes, to design, to ethnography, engagement.. all the things that the design students will have.
There is a very fundamental problem that is the fact that education systems, from the two perspectives, are not alligned.” — Marco Steinberg, SNOWCONE & HAYSTACK
Getting to know the other field from zero is something that requires time and that usually takes up precious moments from the project phase. As a matter of fact, it is really important to understand that the education of public managers towards design and design thinking is a gradual procedure.
“My thesis posits the argument that you cannot just convert managers — whose background is maybe in business or policy — into designers. But you can train them to engage with design as a process, to leverage it, or use it to achieve their organization’s goals” — C. Bason
The first level of education they should deal with the development of a certain “design awareness”, that puts the design on the manager’s radar or in other words: why public managers should buy something that they know nothing about?
While at the same time, it’s also important to introduce designers and public managers alike to a shared “language and terminology”. This is another consequent — but not less important — issue that slow down the spread of this collaboration. The two fields use very specific e diverse words and key terms that can make the communication before and also during projects really hard, causing even misunderstandings along the way. The creation of a common language is fundamental in order to coordinate and measure innovation. Without a shared system of meaning and terms innovation gets lost at the beginning of its journey.
The creation of a common language is fundamental in order to coordinate and measure innovation.
So, knowledge issue is the first big barrier we’ve just analyzed, that involves a weak education system, little awareness about the two fields and the need to create a shared language to speed up the collaboration.
Keep reading PSJ to discover the other two clusters of limits and barriers 👈👈👈
.a big thank you to François Jégou & Marco Steinberg, for our illuminating interviews.
.if you didn’t read it yet, go and have a look at SDN’s report.
