Blog 7: The Collaborating Public Servant — Practising “Deep” Systemic Design (with)in Government

Published in

Unbounded Affairs

27 min readMar 20, 2023

Artwork blog 7: “Can’t help myself” the robot that makes us question who is more vulnerable: the human who built the machine, or the machine that is controlled by a human? By Sun Yuan and Peng Yu.

Soundtrack blog 7: Hania Rani — F Major

Read other blogs in this series: 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) Collaborative Design Story (blog 8) and 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” for a relational future. How to deliver “good” public services in an increasingly “complex” world?

In blogs 1–4 we talked about the underlying theories, ideas and approaches for designing (inter)systemically in a public service context. Blogs 5–10 give ideas for how public servants can start designing for “relationality”. By situating designing public servants “in between” people, places, public services and the natural order of “life” we can gain the ability to “shapeshift” and create “relating” sets of public services, programs and policies that actively work with and resonate with modern day complexity and uncertainty. But where to start? In this blog we discuss how to recognise the potential to practice “deep” systemic design, and suggest ways for introducing new design practices and behaviours that invite people into new ways of “collaborating”.

Before we get to this, let’s recap a few things from the previous blogs in the “Unbounded Affairs” series.

Blog Recap

In blog 5 we suggested to increase the awareness of the “complex context” in which designing public servants are being invited to operate in. We identified clues for recognising at least 3 different public design scenario’s:

“Light” public design scenario (see blog 6 for a “practice” story)

Typical design timeline is short (6 months — 1 year), with a focus on designing a product or a service. There is little space to explore the bigger picture, there is no intention to share power, and no time is taken to design collaborations first before starting with the design of the product.

Example: design a single public service, for example design a webpage or product that supports citizens to apply for income assistance in an unexpected life event, such as losing a job or a home.

The design focus that could generate expanding systemic views and widening approaches in this scenario is deeper “relating” (see blog 5).

“Deep” public design scenario (see blog 8 for a “practice” story)

Typical design timeline is somewhat longer (1–4 or 5 years, but typically not longer than an election cycle). There is space to question the ways things are “done”, typically because something pressing “surfaced” that requires government action. There is space to form new collaborations and question power structures, but it needs to be actively invited.

Example: design for an understanding or a collaboration that can influence a set of public services, for example design a program, policy or set of new policies that can simultaneously support people in an (unexpected) life event, such as housing policy, income policy and health policy.

The design focus that could generate expanding systemic views widening approaches in this scenario is deeper “collaborating”, in which deeper “relating” is nested within.

“Far + wide” public design scenario (see blog 10 for a “practice story)

Typical design timeline is very long from the perspective of a human life, or a government (5–50 years). There might not be a “set” design project. Instead the designing public servant creates collective learning spaces across government silos, “in-between” existing structures and actively involves people outside government structures, such as academia and community organisations.

Example: design for a new set of principles and values to guide how any kind of public service delivery across the entire organisation is being approached and designed, for example: design a new public service mindset or approach that moves away from aiming for individual “service access” towards aiming for services that enable thriving, aspiration, success and “wellbeing” for all people in a community in relation to their environments.

The design focus that could generate expanding systemic views and widening approaches in this scenario is deeper “learning”, either preceded or followed by different ways of “collaborating” and “relating”.

This scenario will be discussed in blog 9.

Visual 1: “shapeshifting” intersystemic design by expanding “relationality” of designing public servants — V1 — CC-BY-4.0 Marlieke Kieboom, 2023

Contextual “awareness” might help designing public servants to better understand which step to take next: decide which new design practices and behaviours create the best chance to “escape” confining, oppressing, affirming, re-iterating systemic views, cultures, processes and structures that do not serve a future in which humans honour “life” on earth in perpetuity.

Each scenario comes with suggestions and invitations (“hacks”) for how to start shifting views, behaviours and practices, accompanied by an (animal, folk or technological) “shapeshifter” figure to aid our visual memory. Each scenario will also be accompanied by anecdotes and illustrative practice stories (blog 6, 8, 10).

Visual 2: Recognizing a light design scenario in terms of timing, space, focus, collaboration forms, power sharing, conflict and timeline — Marlieke Kieboom (2023) — CC-BY-4.0

We have called this new, emerging practice intersystemic “shapeshifting” design. This practice might be particularly useful for a growing group of public servants who feel seemingly stuck “in between” visible and invisible “boundaries” of the government context they work in and the needs of people and environments who are experiencing detrimental outcomes of multiple, interacting crises, such as income inequality, diminishing bio-diversity and climate change.

Visual 3: Intersystemic Shapeshifting Design for Public Service Transformation — Marlieke Kieboom (2023) -CC-BY-4.0

By “shifting” our own and others views — away from human-created “systems” that serve infinite economic growth towards seeing how our human view is in interaction with the natural order of “life” — we could shift (systemic) “shapes” in government organisations:

ways of thinking within the public service, from domination towards collaboration and co-partnership
ways of designing public policies and service, from individual disconnected services towards sets of interrelated and interconnected services
ways of re-balancing socio-economic and ecological imbalances, from “individual” well-being centred on solely (“marginalised”) humans towards a “symbiotic” well-being between communities, places and the natural world over time and generations

Visual 4: The Designing Public Servant as “Shapeshifter” in between public services, people, and systems towards a relational future — Marlieke Kieboom (2023) — CC-BY-4.0

This blog speaks to a “deep” design scenario about being a collaborating, designing public servant who carries an ability to relate and therefore generate “deep” systemic shifts.

Recognising a “Deep” design scenario

The first signs for the possibility to collaborate and work in a “deep” design scenario can show up in conversations in colleagues, managers, executives, and sometimes even Ministers. Listen for subtle cues, such as:

“We don’t know, let’s try and find out”
“We want to better understand the system, and the connections”
“We don’t know what we’ll get out of this, and that’s ok”
“We can take some time to figure it out”
“We need an overhaul of program X”
“We need to redesign the system”
“We have done harm”

In a “deep” design scenario we can more actively question why a governing body has the services, programs or policies it offers, and why we should consider redesigning in fundamentally different ways.

A “deep” systemic design scenario could be described as:

→ an experimental work space to question why things are the way they are
→ there is more time, typically 1–4 years, and therefore also a larger budget
→ seeking a new way of working together is intentional, not accidental or a hidden “part of the process” .. and if this is not the case, try to make it so!
→ conflict resolution and strategic design facilitation play or should play an active, visible and intentional role
→ instilling learning about different points of view (relating), and learning about different tools/approaches is an intrinsic part of the systemic design process
→ power sharing and shared knowledge production are active and intentional elements of the design process, but … not always the case
→ a way of working that typically sprouts in one Ministry or a program area but holds the potential to spread to other parts of the Ministry and even to other Ministries across a jurisdiction
→ typically involves opportunities to change laws, policies, legislation but also work cultures and internal procedures

→ A “deep” work space is sometimes opened up by journalists who uncover major systemic failures often presented as “scandals”. For example:

In 2021 the Dutch childcare benefits scandal or “Toeslagen Affaire” uncovered that algorithms led to falsely accusing low-income parents and caregivers of fraud by the Dutch tax authorities. As a result people from ethnic minorities were disproportionately impacted in many areas of their lives, including justice and housing. The Dutch government fell and different committees were set up to investigate which changes are needed.
In 2022 the remains of 215 children were found at a former residential school in Kamloops. This opened up investigations about the role of the state and the catholic church in the abuse and disappearance of Indigenous children at “residential schools” across Canada.
In 2019 a New Zealand Newsroom story about a young, Indigenous Māori mother being threatened to give up her baby to state authorities led to the resignation of the most high placed executive Ministry official and a systemic overhaul of the Ministry for Children to address systemic, institutionalised racism and inequality.

The fault lines that are created by these kinds of events open up opportunities for investigation and change at the highest government levels. It is important for politicians and public servants to recognise these opportunities and seize them as a political space to yet again widen our ways of seeing and doing.

In “deep” systemic design “code” our main focus is on creating new collaborations to expand our views and widen our approaches to acknowledge complexity and relatedness. In this scenario the public servant does not only have an opportunity to create deeper “relating”, but also deeper “collaborating”. In a way a “deep” scenario re-introduces all the elements of systemic design “light”, but we can be way more intentional and take more time to relate with a larger group of people over a longer time period.

What are the “hacks” that we can create in this scenario, starting points that could help create new collaborations for “relational” public services? Trying out one or more of these practices could provide starting points to start “collaborating” together in more systemic, relational ways.

Visual 5: Introducing 3 shapeshifting “hacks” in a deep design scenario that could help to generate new collaborations: 2-track design, hybrid teams in hybrid places and an intersystemic design process. The illustrative shapeshifter are: the mutable rain frog,

Hack 1: Two-track design

Illustrative shapeshifter: Pristimantis mutabilis, or the mutable rainfrog, also know as “punk rock frog” is able to change texture to match its surroundings.

In a “deep” systemic design design space it can be helpful to take on a “two-track” design mindset. One track responds to what the people in the “old” system want to see (“deliver”) in a short time frame (let’s say 1–2 years), while the other track designs and imagines what the “new” future could look like in a “long time” frame (anywhere from 5 to 50 years). In practice it means to work in a “light” and “deep” way simultaneously. How does this work?

Let’s say a group of public servants in a Ministry, let’s say Health, is given the following assignment to “redesign a service”:

Standardise and digitise the way MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) requests come in to reduce patient wait lists

In the “light” space we would start service design in the “old” way, with an intentional focus to create more “relating” (see blog 5,6 for inspiration on how to do that), for example simply by questioning how the solution is related to the assumption of reducing patient wait lists. In the “light” space one could still generate simple, short term, practical solutions that support the development of the service or “solution” that the “old” system has in mind, for example by undertaking design research to design a standardised MRI-intake form and look into how API’s (Application Programming Interface — a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other to extract and share data within and across organizations) and tokenization (a way to anonymise and secure personal health data) could be linked up across different digital health applications that are used in hospitals.

But at the same time we could also start working in the “deep” design space, by creating space for new collaborations, for example between jurisdictions that typically don’t work together, and between groups that might typically not talk to each other. These new collaborations could actively question, explore and research the “why”, “when”, “how”, “what” questions, such as:

Why do people increasingly want or need to look inside their bodies?
What is the value of increased MRI access, and for whom?
How does a healthcare practitioner decide an MRI is needed?
How do healthcare providers collaborate and share knowledge in the MRI-process?
How does training and learning of healthcare providers who use MRI’s happen?
What kind of ecological footprint do more “MRI”-machines create?

In the “deep” design space we can experiment with different ways to better understand and relate to people’s different viewpoints (for example doctors, patients, technicians, particularly from different cultural backgrounds) and uncover how and why those waitlists came to be, and how to work together in different ways. What else can be done, besides buying more MRI machines and digitising the process? Feeding the insights of the “deep” space into the “light” space can help make the design of the service more robust and resilient, while creating more space for alternative collaboration, insights and learning.

Australia’s national centre for social innovation TACSI calls this approach “two track thinking”. TACSI innovators use it as a way to frame a situation on two different levels: the strategic level, including the wider system within which the problem was embedded; and the service level, to address immediate and specific challenges for a certain group of people. This way of working has the ability to acknowledge that structural, big systemic changes are needed while also acknowledging that change is needed right away, preferably “tomorrow”. Mieke van der Bijl Brouwer, who is both a systemic design practitioner and academic, writes about this practice:

“For example, TACSI developed service prototypes to address child protection in the short term, as well as a prospectus of the big picture systems changes required to generate larger scale changes. A TACSI team member comments: “So I guess we’ve got these two tracks now. We’ve got these prototypes that our [target users] can go to and say, ‘Oh look, we’re doing these things that are tangible’ and alongside that, we’ve got this prospectus that we’ve created that we’re just working with another set of funders around now, to look at how we can begin to conceptualise what a different system or different parts of the system could look like.”

Adjacent to 2-track design is figuring out what the “long-term liabilities” are on the balance sheets. Calculating “future costs” is a way to trick a government “system” that values lowering costs and lowering risks into behaving differently. We can invite designers, business analysts and programme experts to step into a different future by calculating the economic and civic “costs” of our current short term “solutions”, versus what would long term prevention strategies cost, and what kind of value would both strategies create. One our blog series reviewers reflects:

In highlighting long-term liabilities, it can often re-wire individual bureaucrats’ risk tolerance and willingness to experiment.

How much does the government foster care system cost? How much does intergenerational trauma cost? How much does it cost to leave people “unhoused”, poor or addicted? How much do “disconnected relationships” cost? How much would it cost to reconnect our thoughts, our lands, our people? What kind of value would it bring? We could present present and future costs adjacent to our annual government budgeting cycles, and present them in “artsy” ways as an antidote to sensitise people to the “real” costs of long term disconnection.

How to sensitise people to the “real” costs of long term disconnection?

Hack 2: Create a hybrid team in a hybrid government-societal place

Illustrative shapeshifter: MIT scientists are developing “4D materials” that are designed to deform over time in response to changes in the environment, like humidity and temperature. They successfully created flat structures that can transform into much more complicated structures than had previously been achieved, including a human face.

In a “deep” scenario we are intentionally creating time and budgets to create new kinds of collaborations. How to go about this?

Designing a core team

A core design team exists of approx. 7–10 people who are dissimilar and diverse (ie. cognitively, culturally, socially), consisting of people with lived experience, place-based knowledge keepers, designers, Ministerial program folks, people in service provider roles, the “unheard/invisible” design council (see “light” scenario). People are all compensated for their time like they are in a normal job. As a service designer in a large government unit shares:

“You need a team of conveners, holders of the visions, herders of the knowledge. Folks who curate and convene learning, to move things along to make sure things are happening.”
“Everybody involved in “the thing” should be involved in understanding “the thing” in a cross-functional place in a multi-disciplinary team: policy wonks, service delivery people, people who use the services, technologists, a peer researcher. Everybody needs to be paid for their time. Some members of the systemic design teams need to be politically fluent and understand how bureaucracy works.”
“In this team no-one is an expert since expert mindsets don’t bring us the right things all the time. People who use your government services don’t have a bachelor degree in this particular service. They just are having good experiences or shitty experiences, or they are not even able to access these services.”

Naming the team / program

What to name this new team? It is important to not name teams or projects after innovation approaches, ie. “the systemic design team”. New approaches such as systemic design are sexy, sometimes too sexy. Before we know it the program lead becomes the “systemic design” guru who gets drawn into every Minister meeting to give talks and presentations about this “wondrous” new approach, and the team gets overbooked for “systemic design workshops” and “systems mapping facilitation”. This dynamic encourages reliance on “systemic design professionals” who are going to “help us do it” and takes agency away from work teams and their partners. When this dynamic happened in the systemic design Alberta co-lab, the leaders quickly pivoted away from it. They started saying “no” to all the workshops, and instead chose 2–3 projects that got all their attention. One of our systemic design community partners reflects:

“In building capacity for systemic design in government we really have to ask ourselves: how do we think and do differently? But it’s always the focus on that thing, looking for a silver bullet. “Don’t you have that design tool thing? That systems mapping tool?”. Like … can you just train everybody in innovation and systems change will just gush forth?”. There’s always that thing that people hope for. And then we have to throw a wet blanket on it and say: “Well, you’re gonna have to work on the long game stuff for the culture pieces to shift those, which are really hard, and yes, to learn these tool pieces as well.”

Let’s not make this work about the approach or the tools. Let’s make it about the outcome or relationships we are after, and name teams accordingly, such as “The Right Relations Collaborative” or “New Energy Futures”. Make the new approach secondary, but let it shine from underneath wherever we can as a powerful, “magical” and attractive design approach.

Systemic design stewardship

The process is overseen and hosted by a skilled systemic design facilitator or “steward”:

“Stewardship is the art of getting things done when everything is not fully under your control. The steward never loses sight of desired ends, yet always remains open to new means.” (Sitra, Helsinki Design Lab).

A systemic design steward is skilled in facilitating, hosting and leading collaborative, decentralised and distributed design processes, in which conflict and healing are a natural part. One of the service designer in our “Unbounded Affairs” thought collective describes this role as “seeing yourself as a meta-ecologist”:

“As a design host you try to see the relationality between discrete parts, as a sum of the whole. You see the causal relationships they’re in, and you try to work in ecological ways, like in a ripple-effect, where you do something and it sets things in motion.”

Hybrid places

At the political level, a systemic design approach is not attractive at all. Most politicians already know what they want and when they need it to be delivered by, while working in this scenario requires being comfortable with an “unknown” outcome. How to then best position a systemic design team or approach in this “deep systemic design” scenario? One of our conversationalists for this blog series — who worked inside a government systemic design team- thinks it should be a hybrid space, “on the Ministry margins”, “in between” the outside and inside of all things “government”:

“We [the systemic design team] were kind of like a kidney transplant. People knew it was a good thing, but the potential for rejection was always high. So you have to understand and see the anti-bodies. They are trying to see and understand something that’s completely different from a traditional program, and it delivers a different kind of value.”
“I think systemic design, like complex adaptive living systems, needs to be able to live and breathe. The moment you put it in a centralised team, it will start behaving like the system it sits in. In our work we really played around being on the edge of government. We still had access to that rich kind of information that exists in governments. But we also had enough flexibility to not have to comply with all the rules that policy and program elements have to comply with. We wouldn’t have had that if we sat deep inside a Ministry, where we would have been subject to all the protocols that government decision-making is subject to. It made it easier to engage with people outside the government, not having to jump through all the usual approval hoops.”

Ideally a “systemic design” team has one leg “in” government, and one “leg” out so it can be “ruly” and “unruly” at the same time.

Hack 3: Introducing an intersystemic “shapeshifting” design process

Illustrative shapeshifter: In Celtic and Norse mythology, selkies or selkie folk (Scots: selkie fowk) meaning ‘seal folk’[a] are mythological beings capable of therianthropy, changing from seal to human form by shedding their skin.

Public servants can not only become “shapeshifters” themselves by chameleoning, escaping, transforming, relating, collaborating, learning, but they can also carefully introduce a new intersystemic design practice called “shapeshifting design”, as spoken about in blogs 4, 5 and 6. Here we repeat some of the elements and ideas:

Co-navigate the co-design process together

Once the core, hybrid team has come together, time should be taken for deep and slow listening. What are each others stories? Where are we coming from? Time should be taken to for the process of co-designing the co-design process to acknowledge values, assumptions and power positions. How do we want to work together as a team? What are the design principles we want to adhere to? What will be signs to stop, pause and reflect? What kind of philosophy will our decision-making process be based on? Are we choosing a “deep democracy” model, or a “consensus-based” model, or both? Designing public servants have to be(come) knowledgeable in the different choices we can make and include people with skillsets who know how to guide and apply these decision-making processes in public systemic design contexts right from the get go when starting to work together on a project, program or initiative.

Distributed decision-making processes

Centring trust and sharing power in decision-making processes is equally necessary. If we do not intentionally re-design our decision-making processes and start sharing power right from the beginning, then we will fail to liberate systemic interactions. Questioning existing hierarchies, or distributing power is not an easy task, especially in a 1 to 4 year time span.

Many leaders surround themselves with people who are similar to them and want to please them instead of giving a frank assessment of what is needed. One way of opening up existing structures could be to introduce a small team of “wise rivals” that surround a Minister, Mayor, elected council, hereditary chief. A team of “wise rivals” could offer executives different points of view, derived from “deep systemic design” insights to challenge the consensus within the organisational culture.A tool like “Loomio” could also offer an easy way into “distributed” decision-making in large groups.

What seems key is being able to establish a process to overcoming common patterns and hurdles in groups that need to make decisions together. Rich Bartlett, practitioner and builder of decentralised communities, wrote this useful document on “Patterns for Decentralised Decision-Making”.

Community-led design research

In place-based, community-led design research one or more trusted local community organisations with longstanding community ties become active, respected and properly compensated partners in the systemic design process, starting even before the research phase. This practice contributes to flipping power dynamics. The approaches used in community-led research or “radical participatory design” can be both qualitative and quantitative, for example in this example on revitalising the neighbourhood of “Scarborough” in Toronto. It is key to include the cost of community-led design research in our systemic design budget upfront.

Decolonise design language and processes

Introduce decolonised design language that uses both Western-based (square) “service design” notions of linear design processes as well as decolonised approaches to understand and acknowledge complexity in systemic design, for example by using more circular design words and visualisations

from linear “alignment” to “encirclement”: how and when do we open or close collaboration loops, how will we co-design our co-design process?
from “discovery”, which implies discovering something completely new, to “uncovery”, a practice that unearths “unseen” but present dynamics, relationships and problems and makes them more visible to an audience
from a process of “ideation” (generation new ideas) to “design sponsorship”: a process of connecting mind and body to answers that are already out there, and that are just seeking our connection and support
from “end-to-end” to “beginning-to-beginning” service design. What comes to live and die in our systric service design processes?
from “prototyping products” to “prototyping and experimenting with new collaborations that are based on a new understanding of a situation”. What would come out of these collaborations?
from design “roadmap” to design “crossroads”: what will we do when gears shift and we encounter a new situation that requires a new design process? How will we recognise it and how will we go about responding to it, together?
from “stakeholder” to “community member”, “co-navigator”

Convene for adult development, conflicting emotions, healing harmed relationships to build healthy new relationships

We often sanitise conflict out of design processes. We try to think it away and if it comes for us we stare at it like a deer in the headlights. Convening and hosting systemic tensions through conflict management techniques is an art and systemic design facilitation is an essential, vital design practice. If done right, “conflict” can surface people’s real assumptions. A systemic design practitioner in a Provincial government in Canada reflects:

“People wanted to build this [oil transporting] pipeline, but there was a lot of resistance, and people were responding to that resistance with their own resistance. Once we started bringing the people with opposing views together, we started seeing what the foundational policy assumption was behind wanting to build that pipeline: “fossil fuels till 2050”, 100%, it was unshakeable. Once you know that that’s what people are basing their decisions on, then you can start unpacking that. Systemic design is about pulling these assumptions out of ourselves, instead of creating something fundamentally new.”

In their monograph “Deep Equity and Systems Change”, Cheryl Petty and Mark Leach make a plea for doing the “inner work”:

“Underestimating the depth of inner work and racial healing needed for collective transformation will result in inadequate systemic change. We need to develop the capacity to deal constructively with emotions of all members of the system as they naturally emerge, including pain, denial, anger, guilt, fragility.”

In their monograph they describe inner work as:

“Inner work can take the form of any number of healing approaches — hiking, biking, yoga or other physical practices, therapeutic bodywork, sacred traditional approaches, sound/music, dance, or other means that we are using to heal, cleanse, restore, renew, re-center, re-ground, anchor, and connect us more to ourselves and to each other, in fierce kindness, dignity, honor, and courage. These are the mechanisms that will allow us to see more deeply what is true, what is needed, the pathways forward, and how to pursue them without fear, or at least with a lot less fear. .
One of our practitioners in our collective reflects on this important public systemic design practice from a community perspective:
“The idea of healing in systems is a really beautiful and important frame that captures both the human dimension of systemic trauma and its legacy. It’s a more generous and much less technical idea. What would it mean to heal within these systems, to heal the relationships, to heal the systems themselves?”
“Our bodies can feel pain and grief and experience disease when our relationships are out of alignment with each other. When working with communities of colour, communities that have suffered marginalisation for so long, you come to understand that the journey to engage with systems change has a healing component.”
“This is less obvious for those who hold power, that they too could bring this kind of healing, that kind of vulnerability in honouring healing, because it’s the transformation of ideas and world views in systems that are holding the systems in place. For people who need the systems in place that’s also necessary a step, and that takes cracking open and a vulnerability and a willingness to admit that the system that people and governments and others are upholding, are causing harm.”

Distributed trust-based funding

How to fund “deep” systemic design initiatives? One of our systemic design practitioners we spoke with thinks centring “trust” in funding patterns plays an important role in shifting power dynamics:

“What currently happens in systemic research is that funders, and especially governments, go out to collect all the knowledge they can find about what is happening. In doing so they centre themselves as this “depiction of the system”. Then they decide how and where to “intervene”, by controlling the money and the metrics. This old world/new world thinking then becomes embedded and built in in our perception of “the system”.
“This is the opposite of a trust-based, participatory approach, in which we trust and honour and centre the people closest to the problem. But the old world-new world folks just don’t see it, don’t understand it. They are like: what?! we should forgo all of this analysis? What about credibility? And then I’m like: wow, these people really didn’t have to confront the equity crisis themselves.”

Key for systemic design approaches is to apply “hybrid” funding models, where different partners pile resources together. Ideas for how to do this are found in this report on “systemic capital design” (2022).

“Deep” Systemic Design: Outcomes

A “deep” systemic design approach helps widen our views, approaches and understandings at the seams of systemic interactions, to look inside the “cracks” between ourselves, society, environments and governments, to see what lives in them, what holds them together, and who or what relates. It creates chances to open up government structures to start “seeing the unseen” and start collaborating in different formations.

In blog 4 we shared a story about a “deep” collaboration over the regeneration of a “river catchment”, as told by a “systems navigator” with deep experience working in both the public service and with communities — and who is mātauranga Māori. He is based in Auckland, Aotearoa — New Zealand. He speaks to the importance of taking the time to form collaborations in which people can relate to each other:

“We, the two “Western” and “Indigenous” system co-navigators, influenced the city council to slow down. Slowing down time is crucial to co-navigate our different ways of decision-making. Our tribe’s ways of decision-making requires for our communities to come together, to slow down time, to enable conversation over time, to not default to one person who is going to make a decision. This is out of sync with Western forms of decision-making processes. This isn’t an easy thing to negotiate, but the time you spend in creating and evoking a state for that collaboration to happen, once you “anchor” that from a time perspective, things will move quite quickly, because you got people on board, you got trust. We are now in a space where we can really acknowledge and recognize multiple perspectives, multiple approaches.

Moving into a “deep” systemic design approach can help us into thinking differently about which public services to design, and for whom, and which design entry point to take. A “deep” scenario actively invites us to move away from a “human-centred” design approach that takes “marginalised” humans as the design entry point, towards a design scenario that centres communities, places and designing conditions that are conducive to regenerating “life”.

Visual 6 & 7: Most public service design scenarios still hover mostly in between “current” / “light” design scenarios, while there is more and more interest to move into “deeper”, more “collaborative” design scenarios that create more “relationality”. Through expanding our contextual awareness of the complexity we operate in, we can expand our horizons and create opportunities for different design entry points and invite different kinds of design behaviours, such as relating, collaborating and learning (see visual 7). Marlieke Kieboom (2023) — CC-BY-4.0

Even though “deep” systemic design might hold localised, transitional power, it might not truly hold transformative power. One reason for this might be found in that it doesn’t require humans to change the way everyone thinks or organises within or across complex organisations. Are we able to truely question what is driving us to do what humans do, even in a “deep” design scenario? Often mental work models and mindsets of people who were not part of the deep design project stay the same, and so do many other elements surrounding the “deep” design exercise. Since “deep” systemic work often happens on the experimental fringes, it risks staying there, or getting absorbed by other systemic forces at play — something we’ll see at play in our next blog. When asked about this challenge a systemic designer in a Canadian government position pondered:

“The structures of the organism, the [government] organisation, need to change in a way, in order to be able to fully embrace what systemic design and related approaches are offering to bring to the table. But we want to adopt this kind of thinking without changing ourselves. It’s where you’ll hit a wall.”

What we do see in “deep” design scenario’s is that everyone who was part of one, knows they were. It often forever changed their way of thinking and doing ever since their “deep” shifting experience. They never revert back to the old ways of doing. They have therefore permanently transformed and are bringing their learning forward to their next work project. This is a worthwhile outcome of any “deep” design project.

What’s Next

In the next blog we will speak about practicing inter-systemic design in a “deep” work scenario. We will share a new practice story from the “in-between” by Ontario-based “institutional” architect Robert Boraks, about how re-designing prison spaces together with people with Indigenous world views can help to change the way governments, and society at large, think and act about our actions, such as “punishment” and “incarceration”.

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 “in-between” 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)