Blog 2 — A Complex Matter: Designing with Complexity (with)in a Public Service Context

Soundtrack Blog 2: Dreamers Awake — Rival Console (Persona, 2018)

Artwork for Blog 2: Follow the Leaders — by sculptor Isaac Cordal

Follow the leaders

Read other blogs: Prologue, Introduction (blog 1), A Complex Matter (blog 2), Systemic Viewpoints (blog 3), Shapeshifting Design (blog 4), De-methodising Design? (intermezzo blog), The Relating Public Servant (blog 5), Relating Design Story (blog 6), The Collaborating Public Servant (blog 7) Collaborating Design Story (blog 8), The Learning Public Servant: REWILD-ing the mind (blog 9) and Learning Design Story (blog 10)

Systemic design thinking and practices are gaining momentum by entering the field of government policies, services and program design. In the 10–part “Unbounded Affairs: Systemic Design (with)in Government’’ blog series a diverse collective of thinkers and practitioners explores the concept of “public systemic design” to generate “symbiotic” well-being between communities, places and the natural world.

In blog 1 we introduced the blog series to our audience. The goal of this blog series is to simultaneously question and advance our practice and our thinking on public systemic design while also introducing systemic design in accessible ways to a wider public sector audience. Some of the central questions are:

• how can public servants work with irreducible “complexity”?
• what is the role of “systemic design” when developing and delivering public services for the public good?
• how can public servants become more cognisant of dynamics and actors that reproduce “oppressive” systems ?

Before we dive into the theoretical underpinnings of “public systemic design” in our next blog (Blog 3: Systemic Viewpoints), we first have to come to see and understand the contextual “complexity” in which public servants are doing their work. Why is a different public sector response to current societal and economic challenges needed? What is challenging about current public sector innovation approaches, such as “human-centred” public service design? We uncover a less-talked about “deep paradox” that challenges public systemic design practice, and public sector innovation at large.

This blog can get a bit technical at times, but we will use two stories, one about water and one about mining, that tie our thinking back to the practice of everyday “public service/government” life. Take some breaks and deep breaths in between, while pondering and reflecting on the meaning of it all in relation to ourselves and our work, maybe with a cup of tea and a colleague or two?

Visual 1: “An Incomplete Picture of the Nested Layers of Complexity when Designing Public Services in a Government Context” could help as a visual guide when reading blog 2. The 3 groups of people are placed in a randomn matter— Marlieke Kieboom V1 — CC-BY-4.0.

A Complex World

Let’s start with situating the concept of “government” in an increasingly interwoven, entangled, relational, “complex” world.

Without a doubt governments have the proven and unique ability, capacity and infrastructure to support and incentivise major socio-economic innovations at scale, such as smashing spacecraft into Earth-threatening asteroids, creating incentives to stimulate the use of trains over aeroplanes and introduce international laws to protect old forests.

Now that both people and information can travel at ever increasing speeds, the concept of “government” is under pressure to modernise. Public administrations have to respond to increasingly complex tasks that transcend both the boundaries of their ageing structures (modern democracy, nation-states) as well as the actual physical borders of their (local, provincial, federal) jurisdictions. Examples of these transcending, complex tasks are:

• reducing climate change causes and mitigating the effects of climate change
• dealing with the aftermath of the global COVID-19 pandemic, such as inflation, labour shortages
• responding to increased human migration
• responding to the spreading of misinformation and “fake news”
• responding to the introduction of a decentralised, global, peer-to-peer digital currency such as Bitcoin

At the same time governments are still equipped with “old” ways of governing that were formed after the second World War and spurred by the age of Industrialisation such as administering rules, procedures and policies to guarantee predictability, equality, reliability and accountability of government actions for their electorates within their nation-state boundaries. In exchange for people’s taxes, governments have measures in place to “protect” the “privacy” of citizens, and to create “security” at “nation-state” borders. They also have a responsibility to provide access to public services for their constituency. At this structural level we are also seeing increasingly complex dynamics:

• Increasingly polarised political viewpoints between people in public debates, especially on traditional and social media
• Increasingly complex service delivery in socio-economic areas of public health, poverty reduction, housing, in which complexity seems to culminate especially for people who are most dependant on receiving government services
• Increasingly complex digital service delivery, in which digital solutions requires to communicate across “government silos”, work with legacy systems, while upholding traditional public service values of security, privacy and access, and while having to keep up with developments in the private sector (such as cloud-based technologies)
• Increased expectations from citizens of the quality and (speed of) delivery of government services, especially digital government services
• Deeper erosion of democratic values at societal and state level
• Increasing income gaps between economically wealthy and economically poor people
• Increased levels of privatisation of public services, for example in healthcare and insurance
• Increasing societal awareness of how colonisation has played and is still playing a role in accruing economic wealth

The friction created and the tension of this collision of “old structures” being met with new dynamics become visible at the seams, in societal “cracks”. People are increasingly losing trust in traditional government structures. There is a palpable unrest and grief that many people are experiencing (“What’s going to happen next? What is our world turning into?”), but that is hard to put into words or numbers.

Another, less talked about place where these tensions are at play is the public service. Public servants work at the intersection of government and society in various roles, from operational service delivery to policy making in a wide range of fields including healthcare, education, public safety, and social services. In democratic nations, public servants are accountable to the government agency or department they work for, as well as to the citizens of the country or community they serve. They may also be accountable to elected officials, such as members of parliament or city council.

Despite their important role, public servants are often not highly visible or widely discussed, yet they make up a considerable portion of a nation’s workforce. We would think that being placed “in-between” governments, parliament and citizens would make the public servant a natural key player to navigate the aforementioned complex tensions and dynamics. However, from the accounts that follow we will see how intensely difficult it is for public servants to respond in meaningful ways to complexity and uncertainty in their day-to-day jobs.

Why is that? Let’s take a deeper look.

“Complexity” in “Complex” Public Contexts

What is “complexity” in a government context? Let’s start to unpack this concept with a story as told by a (Canadian) public service designer in a conversation for this blog series:

“As a service designer I was given the task to go out in the field to improve the digital application process for groundwater licensing in our Province. We set out to take a human-centred service design approach. But to give you some context… We were brought in at the 12th hour. The legislation had passed 2 years ago, and the whole policy and program was going to roll out over a decade, fundamentally changing how groundwater sources are managed. And I was only given a couple of months, weeks to do my design research.”

“So I go out in the field, and I find out pretty quickly that most people will just never licence their water, based on their ideological rejection of the regulatory regime … their government. Changing some fields around in our digital application form wasn’t going to solve that.”

“I also came to see the shortcomings of our own methodologies around engaging the public. There had been a formal, traditional, consultation and engagement period around the legislation, but it was not systemic in its intent or execution. Therefore it didn’t produce systemic insights. Instead the entire process was a linear, mechanistic sort of value chain, structured in some kind of pyramid shape that only served the needs of one of the parties involved, in this case, the government.”

“Fast forward and the way groundwater is being managed is still troublesome. For me this experience shone such a bright light on how we don’t think or act systemically in government about really important things like … water.”*

*Read more about the complexity of groundwater licensing here.

Next we will discuss complexity from four different angles: from a task perspective, a methodological perspective, an organisational perspective and from within our human, political selves.

Complexity From a Task Perspective

What is the public service designer in this story feeling challenged by? Let’s first look at complexity from a “task” perspective.

What initially looked like a “complicated” task turned out to be a very “complex” task. The service designer was sent out to redesign and digitize a form, but came back with insights and questions on how people think and perceive groundwater governance over time and across space/place.

Both the designer and the task are situated in and influenced by a “complex” context: the interacting dynamic between government and society. Complex tasks in complex contexts can be understood as (be warned, it gets a little technical here):

• consisting of multiple, interconnecting components: individual people, institutions, material infrastructures, and natural environments — all of which are entwined in layers of cultural meaning, social values, rules, political views, and histories
• the interconnected components are interconnected in complex, adaptive systems, but it is not possible to identify clear linear or causal relationships between them
• interconnected components and systems influence each other and are in a dynamic, relationship in which the “whole is greater than the sum of its parts”;
• interconnected components and systems adapt and evolve through feedback loops and “emergence”, but this process is unpredictable
• examples of complex tasks in complex contexts are: sparrows changing direction while flying in formation, musicians who intuitively and collaboratively perform in a musical improvisation, understanding how human immune systems evolve and adapt over 200,000 years on planet Earth

When working on a complex task in a complex context, cause-and-effect can only be understood in hindsight because there is no way to reverse engineer the process by which the system came to be. The impact of a human activity or a set of interventions in complex contexts can also not be fully anticipated in advance, and there is no individual “owner” of a complex challenge in a complex context as interrelated “problems” cannot be independently solved.

Working on complex tasks in complex contexts comes with a great deal of uncertainty. How innovation or “emergence” happens when working on “complex tasks in complex contexts” is still poorly understood. Thus acknowledging “complexity” in any context requires freeing our minds of linear, disconnected, individual thinking in “problems” and “solutions”. We can not single out a problem, and when we do, we risk making the problem bigger, since we are only trying to “solve” a part of it.

Through their design research, the service designer discovered that their task was far more complex than redesigning a form. The situation was about redesigning the relationships between government and people over time and across places over a very important natural resource: water. However, the service designer did not have a mandate to work at this level of “complexity” in their assignment.

How to design for relationality in a government context?

Complexity From a Methodological Perspective

Now let’s take a look at “complexity” from a methodological viewpoint. Our service designer mentioned they are using a “human-centred” service design approach. What is the origin and purpose of a methodology such as service design?

Service design is the process of designing and organising the various (digital and non-digital) elements that make up a service in order to improve the quality and effectiveness of the service for the people who use it. In a government context these elements could be: policy, regulation, digital and in-person service delivery and back-end systems that support governments in delivering the service, for example changing a person’s last name through an online government form. Public service design then involves understanding the needs of the people who use the service (citizens), as well as the goals and objectives of the service provider (government) across multiple touch points (email, phone, in-person, webcontent).

Like many other public sector innovation methodologies (such as Lean, Agile), service design finds its roots in business management, business administration and software development, not public administration or philosophy. It was developed to reduce costs, optimise efficiency and increase consumption of specific goods and services by individual humans for private companies in a competitive market. It is a naturally linear (“take step 1, take step 2, and you’ll get the result”) and intentionally reductionist (breaking a problem into pieces and resolving each of the pieces) process to solve problems for individual customers and companies. Yet public (institutional) bodies are tasked with responding to complex challenges and with meeting all (people’s) needs in equal ways, with diversity in mind. Is “end-to-end” service design then a suitable approach to design public services?

In the past decade the addition of “human-centred” service design has brought a broader view on designing services for and with people in communities. In a process of “co-design” governments and communities shape and design new services, outcomes and relationships in and for human society together. However there are two forms of critique currently emerging in relation to “human-centered” public service design.

First, human-centred design stimulates a gaze “outward”, and inadvertently or deliberately puts the onus on (often already marginalised) people in need of a government service to come up with perspectives on how government services are supporting them or failing them. It situates people who use government services, rather than the systems and people producing the services as the subject of design research. It can therefore fail to interrogate how human-made systems create inequities. It is imminently important to look at who or what is being centred (and consequently who or what is being “oppressed”) within those systems, and to recognize the political role and identity of the “designer” (more on “designing” in blog 3).

Second, human-centred design unsustainably centres “humans” over all other forms of life. There is an increased recognition that humans are part of complex ecosystems and that we should focus on designing for a “web of relations” between humans and all other living and non-living “beings and things” on Earth, such as … water. Critique on man’s destruction of nature in the age of the “Anthropocene” first emerged in modern, Western literature in 1864 (Man & Nature, George Perkins Marsh) but has been around globally in oral histories of Indigenous peoples long before the age of colonisation.

How to practise a more “oppression-aware”, “life-centred” public service design in a government context?

Complexity From a Ministerial Perspective

Yet another challenge for our “poor” service designer is found in the compartmentalisation of the public sector in general, and in “innovation teams” in particular.

Our current governments are still modelled after industrial-age car assembly lines, in which everyone is separated into their own specialisations and expertise. “That’s just not in my wheelhouse” is a commonly used phrase in the public service that quite literally refers to how we think and operate.

Innovation teams typically work in separation on socio-economic-environmental challenges in traditionally silo-ed government contexts, such as “Ministry of Housing,” or “Ministry of Environment.” Consequently they can then only respond to a fragment of a problem they work on, as part of the Ministry they work for or in, in the particular innovation methodology they prescribe to (ie. Lean, Behavioural Insights, Service Design) all the while being subject to typical 4-year policy cycles due to the way our democracies function. However the challenges they work on transcend their Ministerial or jurisdictional boundaries. For example, a housing crisis requires many Ministries and community organisations to work together, not just the public servants in the “Ministry of Housing.” The climate crisis requires countries to work together at a global level.

How this translates to work is that people mostly work on their own “assembly lines”, typically approaching complex tasks in isolation and in non-cross-disciplinary ways. In our conversations about this topic one of our community-focussed public service design practitioners commented:

“It typically goes like this: let’s convene a bunch of experts in a room, because the Minister or the Mayor needs something to show in 4 months from now. Let’s get a consultant. Then let’s look at some high-level data from surveys and focus groups, when you know it’s always the same people who have time to show up. But they will say they have consulted “the community”. And then you get the consultants to put some kind of strategy together, in isolation. And you invest a ton of money and roll it out. And then what you find is, is that the people who are affected by the thing, let’s say “creating accessible parking lots in the city” will tell you: that’s not the right thing. We don’t need another app. We need something else.”

Now let’s look at this dynamic from the perspective of a citizen who is struggling with their mental health, and who has two children and consequently lost their job and their income, which makes them at risk of losing their home. They would have to apply for different services with different Ministries (ie. Housing, Health, Income), while other Ministries might take notice of the situation (ie. Ministry of Children and Families). The individual then carries the responsibility to understand how these services interact with each other (ie. how does income assistance affect applying for educational scholarships?). Ministries on the other hand do not carry this responsibility. There is no incentive or mechanism that looks at how the entirety of services work together (or not). This situation may result in further entrenching an individual, even entire communities.

People’s lives are intrinsically entangled, relational and complex, yet governments at large, and Ministries in specific, do not (yet) acknowledge nor reflect this reality. What would a future organisational government structure look like if it were to reflect “entangled lives”?

Complexity Within Our Human and Political Selves

Public service bodies aspire to be void of “government politics”. However public workers themselves are not “blank slates”. Humans are complex and diverse beings, who interact with complex, adaptive systems through our own lenses and lived experiences. For example, our service designer might have feelings and opinions about groundwater licensing since they are human themselves, and humans use and drink water. What happens when we engage and work with complex matters if we see ourselves as seemingly “external” and “objective” to the policies, projects and programs we work on? What are we missing out on by leaving our human complexity by the door?

Second, there is an invisible yet palpable “blurred” line between the work of the “partial” political parties in governments on the “one side” and the work of “impartial” public service workers on the “other side”. The political reach within the public service can be far more substantive than is commonly acknowledged. As one Federal government public service employee noted:

“My director, Deputy Minister and Minister all bow down to their political party leaders as if they are Gods. In my Public Service Oath it says I have a duty to question their decision making to hold them accountable for their actions and spending. In reality, I am met with resistance whenever I bring up questionable ways of doing business. So I just stopped doing it.”

What if we were to bring our own human complexity into the public service?

Complexity in the Outcomes

How does choosing not to work with “complexity” then show up in our public service work?

Trying to run governments or ministries as if they were small, separate “businesses” that “solve” seemingly unconnected problems for service-consuming “customers” or “clients” (people, citizens) with incremental, optimising, short-term “solutions” that are mostly decided for by executives and politicians is problematic. Complex contexts don’t respond well to linear reductionist approaches. “Solutioning” then ends up in an expensive (tax-dollar wasting) game of whack-a-mole that could potentially cost far more than had we looked at the bigger, more long-term picture right from the get go.

This way of working also has other unintended consequences and “knock-on” effects that show up in unexpected ways:

• It creates public outrage and political backlash as people easily recognise short-sightedness, especially people who are directly impacted and who were consulted through quick, one-way invitations to engage on the topic, further eroding public trust in government’s decision-making processes
• It prioritises short term projects to create political “wins” for folks with powerful positions in the governing party/parties instead of long term visions and strategies that are designed in collaboration with marginalised communities
• It stimulates a strong focus on improving the lives of some humans (not all, especially already marginalised communities) and spurring economic growth, while focusing less on the needs of our environments
• It creates a strong focus on “numbers” to prove “progress” while socio-ecological contexts can not be understood, measured or adapted in purely metric ways
• It makes us miss out on looking for and creating system shifting insights and nurturing diverse, long-term cross-government-societal collaborations that could help create resilient, diverse and adaptive futures and restore previously harmed relationships

So to summarise: yes, work in the public sector is a complex affair, without it being recognized as such. And bear with us for a little while longer, it gets more complex. What is towing in the undercurrent, underneath the tasks, methodologies, organisational structures and our human, political selves?

A Deep Paradox

In the public sector, the concept of “complexity” must be unpacked and made visible. However, a specific deep “paradox” that is unique to working in government often remains hidden and contributes to the complexity of those who seek to design or change at the systemic level. It is important to uncover, unpack, and recognise this paradox, also within ourselves, in order to better understand and potentially overcome the tensions it creates.

It is important to mention that the underlying pattern of the paradox is contentious in a public service context. This underlying pattern is so accepted and ingrained in our thinking and actions that it is hard to make visible, and even harder to bring up, even though it may contribute to some of our own biases. Furthermore it’s dominant and global in nature: some, if not all governments are subject to this (global) overriding system of action.

Let’s start with telling a story as told and experienced by one of our (Canadian) conversationalists, a “systemic design consultant”, to illustrate our point.

“Recently I worked with a government service design team to work on mining reform. The work was triggered by a few recent mining incidents that threatened local communities with toxic waste spills, while at the same time there was a need to better track greenhouse gas emissions. So this team, you know, with all the good design thinking and prototyping approaches concluded that it was best to find ways to modernise the public engagement and information system around mining policies to reach more government transparency. So they set out to redesign a whole new system around how mining is communicated, with tracking impacts and so on.”

“But what they didn’t touch on is the completely broken mining tenure act, which disregards any form of Indigenous relations or ownership of the land. That underlying part, the colonisation of Canada, was not tackled at all despite the fact that for decades, people have been saying that this mining act allows you to”‘stake a claim” by pushing an online button while it acts on Indigenous traditional territory where title and rights have not been resolved. To me this work really questioned: what needs to be systemically redesigned here?”*

*Learn more about “online stakes” and “mining” in First Nations territories on independent media platform the Narwhal.

The underlying pattern that the person above is describing and experiencing is the design of our extractive, capitalist economies, with a neoliberal, game-theory inspired growth paradigm as its cultural driver (“bigger, faster, better, more!”). This pattern is anchored in maximising profit, accruing private wealth for individuals and private companies by colonising people and utilising their labour to extract and hoard all available natural resources from the land.

This paradigm based on values such as “dominance” and “ownership” has given certain groups of people extraordinary amounts of wealth and has provided them with powerful, advantageous positions in both society and in our institutions. Furthermore this pattern has made us ignore and forget that there were other ways of living and connecting to the world’s resources previous to the introduction of extractive capitalism 400 years ago. For example, to certain Indigenous cultures the concept of “land ownership” was non-existent. Instead natural resources were stewarded, guarded and shared. People didn’t take more than they needed, and people considered future generations in their day-to-day actions.

Where lies the paradox? The paradox lies in that governments not only have come to serve this dominant paradigm through deeply institutionalised laws and regulations (for example to protect the fishing, forestry, oil extraction or mining industry, also by the means of “policing”), but are also tasked with reducing the negative effects of extractive capitalism in the environmental and social realm, for example to reduce climate change effects or provide access to secure, affordable income or housing for people who may be disproportionately disadvantaged by the outcomes of extractive capitalism.

To “complexify” matters, this paradox is also deepened by (at least) two intrinsic feedback loops or “double binds”. Here “double binds” are understood as “catch-22” situations in which, whatever action we decide to take, we cannot escape unpleasant results.

The first one is in the area of innovation. Complex, adaptive systems need shocks and people taking risks to spark innovation and change. However governments have been designed to guarantee predictability, equality, reliability and accountability to its constituency. They are naturally risk-averse and work to protect the privacy of citizens and the security of the “nation-state”. These “systemic” features make it hard to innovate in governments themselves. Public sector workers who try something new quickly run into legacy systems (processes, forms, rules, culture) that don’t support their new practice. Instead all the alarm bells go off: don’t innovate. It’s a perpetual cycle, a “double bind” of innovate! — don’t innovate!.”

The second one is in the area of diversification of ideas, worldviews and people. Complex, adaptive systems require diversity to evolve. Colonisation and wealth accumulation gave certain groups of people powerful decision-making positions in governments and public sector bodies. Once holding these positions they further institutionalised laws and policies that are advantageous towards the ideas of extractive capitalism and their own socio-economic positions. People who bring other, diverse views are then rejected, as their views may threaten those who hold power. This creates another double bind: “diversify! — stay the same!”

Visual 2: Deep Paradox in public systemic design: double binds disabling systemic shifts within a government context. Marlieke Kieboom V1 — CC-BY-4.0

Not seeing or recognising this deep paradox in public systemic design practice, or its built-in, double binding systemic features risks perpetuating the status quo and can lead to innovating unequally and incrementally, not systemically. To go back to our (Canadian) storyteller who attempted to work on mining reform in a public government context:

“I get it that with prototyping you get a quick win. You get to change something small, yet incremental, to build momentum. It offers on-ramps and creates buy-in. Where executives say: “Oh, this was worth investing in, look at the progress, look at the efficiencies, look at the better engagement and outcomes that we have.” But the problem with that approach is that it often leaves undiscussed and unenclosed these very fundamental systems, where colonial assumptions are embedded in our law, our legal contracts. And so our government is then tasked to administer these policies.”

Overcoming the Paradox: a Relational Public Service

The sheer level of complexity, as well as the mostly invisible double “double-binded” paradox is why some people might believe that radical “change” can’t or won’t come from people who work “inside” governments. Our “groundwater” service designer shares their doubts:

“Working in public service systems requires a willingness and necessity to accept hard findings, and make hard choices and to do hard things because systems are irreducibly complex and fraught with contradiction and inconvenience. These are things that are incompatible with the superimposed version of “the government system” that we would want to think we operate within. It is questionable whether we can even really truly apply systemic approaches within our work, within the organisations that already exist, because there is an unwillingness to do the things that are really required to address cause, and not just effect.”

After reading a draft of this blog a “systemic” service designer from our “blog series thought collective” reflected:

“I worry a bit about the sheer level of complexity that you lay bare here. It could read as “woe is me” or “I can’t do this or that because I’m a public servant”. This is interesting because to one set of readers it may come across as “the public sector is ineffective” while to another, it may come across as “wow, look at all the challenges they are trying to overcome just to do a decent job!”. Not sure how to reconcile this. But I do like that it paints the reality of what we live on a daily basis.”

We might not be able to reconcile. In the words of Audre Lorde, poet and black, lesbian feminist: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” (1979). Should we then disassemble or abolish “the house”? Or is there a way that invites the master’s house — and its inhabitants, public servants — to dismantle and renew itself, from the inside out? Or a little bit of both?

We think there is value and inspiration to be found in exploring the latter proposition, from the perspective of the “designing” public servant who is becoming aware of this paradoxical task in their public service work, and who is seeking to connect with communities who are searching for future alternatives. What can we do to transcend and overcome the paradox? How can we work with and within “complexity” in a government context, while aspiring a public service that is reflective of nested, relational layers? What if we could unleash the capacity and aspiration within thousands of public servants to work with complexity, instead of trying to leave it behind?

Let’s take these questions forward into our next blog, where we explore both the potential and shortcomings of an up and coming public sector innovation approach that could enable public servants to work with and within complexity and uncertainty: “systemic design”.

Systemic design is globally gaining momentum as a new approach for “public sector innovation”. Systemic design, also referred to as systems innovation, system-shifting design, systems oriented design or (co)-design for complexity, brings together systems thinking — a way of looking at the world and its complex challenges as interdependent and connected — and design practice — a pragmatic, iterative and collaborative way to generate creativity, imagination, initiatives and interventions — to transcend and expand our thinking and actions to work with(in) complex challenges (see Sevaldson & Jones, 2019, System-Shifting Design Report, 2021).

Could “systemic design” be a viable approach to work with complexity in the public service? Let’s wrap up with going back to the service designer in our groundwater licensing story. They share why they remain hopeful:

“Governments do big things, you know. We just have sort of forgotten that or decided that they won’t or can’t, or shouldn’t. Governments create laws. That’s a big stick, right? I think the power is there to work within the government to do big and important and amazing things. But, that’s not really how it’s seen or being done right now”.

What’s next

In our next blog we introduce “systemic design”, and specifically “public systemic design” as a new and upcoming approach to work with complexity in a public context. The following questions will be discussed:

• What kind of system(ic design) are we talking about?
• How do we understand the words “system”, “design”, “designing” differently?

In our exploration we uncover different systemic views and a curious systemic design “dilemma” that deserves more awareness in both the public sector and in the systemic design community. How can we overcome this “systemic design dilemma”? We will introduce “squircularity” as a bit clunky yet promising systemic design principle to help us think and design outside the confining “box”.

Further reading, watching, listening

• In this “complex world” it is also not all doom and gloom. We can also see glimmers of more hopeful futures that are emerging and becoming visible. Watch this session at the Systems Innovation Festival (2022) to get some inspiration!
• Modern day governments are increasingly recognising that they have to work with and within the complex societal “cracks”. They experiment with taking more of a mission-based approach and using novel innovation methodologies, such as anticipatory governance modelling (Finland)
• “Who can remember a more challenging time to be a public servant?”, ponders scholar dr. prof. Max French. Check out the conference: “Towards Relational Public Services: Cultivating Outcomes Through Engagement, Learning And Systems”. June 14/15 2023, Newcastle Business School.
• Watch “Expand: How to Stretch the Future by Design” where Christian Bason (CEO Danish Design Centre) talks about the importance of expanding our ways of thinking about time, proximity, life, value, dimensions and sector in public bureaucracies.
• Learn more about “double binds” and the works of late anthropologist Gregory Bateson and his daughter Nora Bateson by watching this video on “double binds” and the “ecology of mind”
• Learn more about the complexity of policy making in “The quest for complex policy: Exploring the tensions between simplification and complexification in public policymaking”, a PhD dissertation by Hans Joosse (2022)

About the Author, this Blog Series and the Collective

Get in touch! My email is: first name dot last name @gov dot bc dot ca

Marlieke Kieboom (white, she-her, Zeeuws-Flamish-Dutch-German and “unknown” roots, MSc Political Anthropology + MA Complex Emergencies, immigrant settler* in Canada | Turtle Island) is a public service designer with 20+ years of experience and knowledge in the fields of social innovation, systemic (service) design, complexity science and public policy. Marlieke has led major collaborations between academia, governments, non-profits and communities in Europe, Canada and Latin America. She finds joy in developing new approaches for coming to see and relate to each other and the complexity of our worlds in collaborative, participatory and decolonised ways. Read more about what inspired Marlieke to write this blog series in the Prologue.

Marlieke wrote this blog series based on conversations with a like-minded and like-hearted collective — the “Ministry of Unbounded & Entangled Affairs” — whose people work and think at the intersections of design, public policy, complexity, social justice and deep ecology. The series was written over the course of 2022. Read more about the collective and the blog series in Blog 1.

Marlieke currently works for the Public Service of British Columbia in the field of public service and systemic design. This blog series was written in her personal time on personal title. Her personal views are mixed in with the collective she spoke with. They do not represent the political views of the government she works for.

Consider making a one-time contribution via Paypal or becoming a supporter on Patreon to get early access to upcoming blogs and express gratitude for 300+ hours of “free” research and to nurture future writing, community building and the development of open learning material on systemic design for public servants. Thank you!

* “A settler is someone who benefits from the privilege of having their worldview imposed upon the lands and the bodies of everyone living in these lands” — Chelsea Vowel (Vice, 2019)