Blog 9 — The Learning Public Servant: Rewilding the Mind in a Government Context

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Unbounded Affairs

22 min readMay 10, 2023

Artwork blog 9: Through his works, Goa-born Subodh Kerkar, presents the idea of inseparability of fishermen and the sea.

Soundtrack blog 9: Ólafur Arnalds — Woven Song

Read previous 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?

After discussing how to recognize a “light” systemic design scenario and be(come) a “relating” public servant, and coming to see a “deep” systemic design scenario while evolving into a “collaborative” public servant, we have arrived at blog 9: how to recognise and act upon a “Far + Wide” design scenario by (re-)activating our inner “learning” public servant over time. Let’s first do our blog recap before diving into blog 9.

Blog recap

In blogs 1–4 we talked about the underlying theories, ideas and approaches for designing “in-between” differing systemic views in a public service context. We explored why it is so hard to “shift” anything in a “complex” (interconnected) government context, from processes to people’s mindsets (blog 2). We shifted our focus instead, from changing or designing “systems” towards seeing ourselves (designers) as part of and in between “the system” and “the thing” (public policy, program, service, product) that ought to be “designed” (inter-systemic design, blog 3 & 4). How might we interact with our minds and our differing (human-created, wholistic, Western, Indigenous) worldviews on what ought to change and why? How to design, or maybe even un-design, a world in which humanity lives in co-creation and abundance with everything “more-than-human” (animals, plants, soil, water) on this earth, in perpetuity?

Blogs 5–8 gave clues for how to work with these questions in an environment that does not naturally invite them: “government” bureaucracy. How could designing public servants increase awareness for their complex work contexts? We provided clues for how to recognize a “light” (blogs 5 & 6) and “deep” (blogs 7 & 8) systemic design work context and introduced 6 shapeshifting “hacks” to widen and expand our views, behaviours and approaches from which “relational” sets of public services, programs and policies can sprout. “Relational” public services are services that have the ability to generate public value for both human beings and their natural environments.

We explored how human capabilities such as “relating” and “collaborating” together can help grow more awareness for our “systemic” surroundings and expand the boundaries, for example from a “light” design scenario to a “deep” one. However, the mindsets of people who are not part of a “light” or “deep” design “project” often stay the same, and so do many other elements surrounding these design exercises, such as societal values (for example, how we value taking “caring” of each other and our environments) or organisational values (for example, how governments value cost reduction and efficiency over generating human or planetary well-being).

This became even more clear in both practice blogs, where the “intractability” of complex societal situations (high opioid overdose deaths — blog 6, high numbers of imprisoned Indigenous people, blog 8) is tangible, visible and apparent. Why is that? When asked about this challenge a systemic designer in a Canadian government position pondered:

“We realize that the structures of the organism, the [government] organisation, needs to change 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.”

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

Is breaking down that invisible, mental wall or “mindset” an imperative to generate the ability to “shapeshift” complex adaptive (human-created) systems such as “governments”? “Shapeshifting design” suggests that it is possible for people (and the systems they created) to shift their interactions towards creating more balanced (less oppressive, more free), relational outcomes (“shapes”) by design:

by “jumping on” and moving along at the same speed at which the “system” is moving (take the invitation, “jump” on the project and slow it down)
by “mimicking” the behavior of the system (follow the “rules”, dress codes and question them)
by working “in between” people, places, worldviews and public services as part of the system (work with people across “silos” and acknowledge how our own views, behaviours interact with our designs)

We were able to see how these “shapeshifting” techniques yield interesting outcomes (see the river catchment story from a Maori perspective, blog 4). What is that other “magical” trait, besides “relating” and “collaborating”?

Let’s dive into blog 9, where we explore the role of infinite “time” and unbounded “learning” in our intersystemic public service design practice.

Far + Wide Design Scenario

Systemic public (service, program, product) designs are often perceived as bounded 3 to 5 year “projects” or “programs”, with a budget, a timeframe, outcomes, outputs (see “light” and “deep” scenarios, blogs 5 and 7, “water” and “mining” stories in blogs 2,3).

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

“Design” means “making decisions” with creative freedom: what do we consider and take care of, and what do we leave out when creating something. Designs thus sprout from our ways of thinking and generate “externalities”: the costs of intended or unintended consequences that occur elsewhere, outside of the project, program or service boundaries, for example for future generations or for people who are less visible or important to the “designer”. One example is: designing “green” policies that stimulate the use of e-cars and e-bikes to reduce carbon emissions leads to having to dig up more lithium in dangerous mines at the cost of human health, lives and environmental pollution. “Green” policies that originate from an economic “growth” paradigm fail to question: why do humans have a need to keep moving faster, and use their time in evermore efficient ways (see blog 3)?

So what then ultimately is “systemic design”? Shana Agid (artist, designer, teacher, and a long-time member of the Critical Resistance) shared their view in a panel session “Confronting legacies of oppression in systemic design” at RSD 11, 2022:

“To me it [systemic design] is about the very hard work of changing what we [humans] understand as change. I would argue that most reforms to “systems” do the work of showing up to that system. That can be a very hard thing to live with, when we are trying to change things in real time.”

Stepping into more “unbounded” spaces while working collaboratively within current systems (i.e. working in a government job) is key in order to start responding to our current day, entangled, interacting poly-crises, such as income inequality, diminishing biodiversity and climate change. But how to do this kind of “in-between” “inter-systemic” design work, while acknowledging the curious “systemic design dilemma”: how big may we “bound” the things that we want to design across time, place, space and relationships, while acknowledging that we need to make design choices now, especially in such a decisive decade? (blog 3).

It is within this frame that we would like to introduce the “far & wide” systemic design scenario, in which recognizing opportunities for designing public servants to “slow down” (time) and to create space for “learning” (expanding our minds, our awareness) take center stage. Why should we think about “time” and “learning” in tandem when designing public services?

Time is a mind boggling, vastly complex concept when thinking about it deeply. We already touched upon how different (Western and Indigenous) worldviews approach the concept of “time” in different ways (blog 4, blog 8). Viewing contemporary public service challenges in different “time” frames brings up interesting questions that expand far beyond our government jobs and our tiny blog series, but can bring important considerations to our public service work:

What would it mean for designing public services when we go from thinking in linear ways (always propelling forward) to thinking in circular ways (“things” evolve and die, come back in a different shape, regenerate)? (see blog 4 and intermezzo)?
Are we designing public services for the here and now (current generation), or are we taking into consideration how our current situation came to be (3 generations back) and will we consider the effects of our designs for the future (3 generations to come)? (see also: 7 generations principle, Indigenous ways of being)?
How is time that we put in delivering human “labour”, and the speeding up of “time” supportive of extractive capitalism? (Read: Resisting a Rest by Lydia Philip, 2022, Follow the Money — Waterworks of Money, by Carlijn Kingma, 2022)
What happens when we perceive our climate crisis as “energy blindness” (Nate Hagens): in not even 150 years humans, who as a “superorganism” is only 300.000 years young, expelled millions of years of stored sunlight (oil) into the atmosphere. How much time and energy will it take to “restore” that energy and return to a healthy balance? (Listen: Bend not Break series 1–5, by Nate Hagens and Daniel Schmachtenberger, 2022)
After the last “black hole” evaporates in our universe trillions of years from now, will time become “meaningless”? (Watch: Timelapse of the future: A Journey to the End of Time, 2019)
What can humans learn from how animals, such as the octopus, perceive time? (Read: “Octopus Time” by David Borkenhagen, 2023)

Another reason why we should be thinking about “time” is the fact that it took hundreds of years for our meta-crises to coalesce, culminate and reveal itself into the seemingly “unprecedented” patterns that we are seeing today. A 4 year “project” or 1 democratic government “election cycle” will never undo or shift any of it. Short time frames instead make it easy to gravitate back to the “old ways” of doing things. Architect and visionary Indy Johar (Dark Matter Labs) speaks to “why” a more long “time” view is needed to undo 400 years of “understanding” the rules of “life” as something “separate” of ourselves:

“We’ve been living in a 400-year-old [enlightenment] vision of our world based around Newtonian physics and Cartesian logics, based on separation of object and subject. Now we’re starting to see the world in terms of entanglements, interdependencies, externalities, a re-entangling of the world at a philosophical, material, social, liabilities and cost level.” This means that every “smallest detail should be reassessed at a planetary scale.” (..) “We could think of this as the “Enlightenment” meeting the “Entanglement”.” “It’s about the fundamental deep re-imagination of our world.”

What happens when we “take the time”? When we “take the time”, we can come together, to get to know each other and come to a shared understanding of a situation (such as in the river catchment story of blog 4). We can adequately understand and register how environments and people respond to introducing new “services” or “ideas” and reduce the risk of creating grave, negative “externalities”. Even though “taking the time” to learn might feel counterintuitive, since we are living in such a decisive decade, it is the most activist thing we can do in a society that wants us to speed up at all costs.

It is in this space of slowing down that we can create space to learn freely, in conversation, that we can reform and re-value in relation to each other and everything living and non-living. It is in this place that we can transcend time, and bring our learnings from different places, and different views into “being”, even when we weren’t “successful” in creating “systemic change” in a given project or scenario. What matters is creating deliberate spaces to stop, pause and reflect to better understand where we are coming from, and where we are going. We need to re-learn how to learn in deeply relating and collaborative ways. What matters is that we expand our views and widen our approaches far & wide beyond our dominant “growth” paradigm.

The “far + wide” design scenario can feel particularly overwhelming, and feel unusually “impossible” in our government “project world” where everything is focussed on delivering in the “now”. Deadlines come up fast all the time: deliver “human” insights in your service design project in 4 months, pretty please! Stopping and pausing, expanding our views, and asking “deep” questions will be met with accusations and pressures, such as: “stop creating “unnecessary” scope creep” (see blog 8).

But it’s this act of resistance, of “stepping out”, to create a space for collective learning, that is of imminent importance to help us see where and how public service designs could genuinely respond and “take care” of people, places and the planet. Shana Agid continues their thought by sharing their view on “time” and “temporality” in relation to systemic design (RSD 11, 2022):

“The critical questions that I hope to introduce in the [systemic] design work that I do is: always thinking about the history that got us to where we are, the present experiences that people are having and the future experiences that people are trying to shape so whatever we do in the moment is accountable to all three simultaneously.”
“That requires a different orientation towards time and temporality. (..) It slows everything down. That is not superwelcome in systems thinking or design practice: moving slowly, not having solutions, leaving things open-ended. (..) When I start talking about this it all kind of feels impossible. But there’s an everydayness to it that we can’t forget and that is about: how we interact, how we make decisions, what skills do we have?”

What to focus our “learning” efforts on in the “far & wide” scenario, since the net is casted so wide at the planetary level? It helps to focus on majorly “confusing”, contentious, complex situations where tensions are high and societal “cracks” are visible, for example in the current “opioid death crisis” or on “deforestation” debates. We will find that in those debates the political and societal debates on either side are often focused on changing “the” system based on a noun: stop the drugs/give the drugs, cut the trees/save the trees. But the deeper crisis lies in how we relate to ourselves in terms of trauma and healing, and how we relate to each other and to the natural world in terms of how connected or disconnected are we, from ourselves, from the “other”? How respectful are we towards the “rules” of life? How did we become “settlers” and “Indigenous peoples”, “colonisers” and “colonised”, “oppressors” and “oppressed”, “traumatizers” and “traumatized”?

It is in this “contested” space that the “designing” public servant can step in to generate learning opportunities, conversation and debates with their peers and colleagues (inside and outside their organisation) about how we relate to and value ideas such as “ownership” versus “guardianship” over land, trees and human bodies. How can humanity reconcile over 400 years of extractive capitalism and “Enlightenment”? How can we move into a mindset that is focussed on “post-economic growth”? Our initial “learning” gesture can be as small as popping a deep, unexpected design question in a 1-hour Zoom meeting to prepare for an upcoming “service analytics workshop” (“Is our government vaccinating people to generate health and well-being for humanity, or to safeguard a labour force for economic growth?”) or as big as organising a week-long event on how public service organisations can safeguard the future of humanity. What matters is to learn how to create spaces to invite ourselves and others to “learn” since learning plays an important role in how complex systems, and humanity as an “organism” within, can evolve and adapt over time.

What else can designing public servants do in this space while working in an institutional, government context? Let’s introduce 3 more “shapeshifting” hacks.

Visual 3: Introducing 3 shapeshifting “hacks” in a “far & wide” design scenario that could help to generate new learning over time — Marlieke Kieboom (2023) — CC-BY-4.0

Hack 1: “REWILD-ing” the public design mindset

Illustrative shapeshifter: Schooling in fish is understood as a strategy tp reduce the risk of predation. Through studying shoaling herring and their exposure to killer whale calls, scientists have established that risk awareness influences collective responsiveness and information transfer among schooling fish.

After 8 blogs we can distill a basic “open” public systemic design mindset that consists of 6 “principles” or practices that any public servant or designer can practice at all times, both in their personal and their work lives, regardless of a systemic design “project” opportunity.

The principles are simple enough to remember and generate discussions and learning with our peers, colleagues, even our partners, parents or kids. These “principles’’ ignite learning and contribute to an evolving public systemic design practice. We can think of it as introducing an alternative, personal public “oath” beyond the one we swear to when starting our public service careers: the R.E.W.I.L.D. public design mindset. Don’t us public servants love a good acronym? Write it on your hand on a frustrating work day, print it on a t-shirt!

R: Relate to each other in new collaborations: Gain deeper understanding of how people see “systems” and “design” in different ways, and how people position themselves within to reveal and overcome systemic (i.e. ecological or equitable) imbalances that are held hostage by the “deep paradox” that we found in the work of public systemic designers (blog 2, 4)
E: Expand our views and empathize: Grow awareness of the “systemic design dilemma” by not only widening our views on systems, design and systemic design approaches through practising “squircularity” in our designs (blog 3) but also by expanding our empathy outwards, beyond those we know, to those who we affect, even into the natural word, such as animals, plants and trees.
W: Widen our approaches: Acknowledge the “paradox of systemic design” in government and the double “double binds” within (innovate! — don’t innovate! and diversify! — stay similar!) by widening our systemic design approaches into time, space and life-forms such as through “viewrelating design” (blog 4)
I: Imagine inter-generationally: seeing where we came from over time, where we are now, will help us imagine where we are going as a “species”. Everything is (inter)connected. Create spaces where we can imagine alternative futures (blog Intermezzo)
L: Liberate: Find unique, contextual and place-based ways to respond to and “jump out” of or “escape” and liberate ourselves from the “hard” tasks that all systemic design practitioners in any government context have in common. The 5 hard tasks are: opening up, distributing power, overcoming pressure to deliver now, reposition the value of stories as tools for learning, and develop personal/organisational transformation (blog 4)
D: Distribute and diversify stories, power and love: Showcase practical, diverse examples and stories of public “systemic design” to inspire people to start practising themselves, to invite people to share power and to ultimately enter into an act of love and caring for each other and all things living and nonliving on our planet earth (blogs 6, 8 and all the quotes and anecdotes in between)

Visual 4:R.E.W.I.L.D. the Public Servant Mind, public servant with brief case and flowery head in wide, open field, generated with DALL.E— Marlieke Kieboom (2023) — CC-BY-4.0

When using these “rewilding” principles, systemic design acquires the ability to evolve and design itself through ourselves and our own contexts, without it becoming a static, prescribed systemic design “methodology”.

Loosen up & expand our minds!

Hack 2: Reflexivity in Collective Learning Movements

Illustrative shapeshifter: In a “proof of concept” scientists made 4-D fish-shaped shapeshifting micro-robots that are guided with magnets to cancer cells, where a pH change triggers them to open their mouths and release their chemotherapy cargo. The idea is to reduce unpleasant side-effects of chemotherapy.

As mentioned previously in the Intermezzo blog, the practice of reflexivity can be defined as an “ongoing scrutiny of the choices that are made when identifying and integrating diverse values, priorities, worldviews, expertise, and knowledge.” (Merritt Polk, 2015, in: M. Van der Bijl Brouwer, 2022). The practice of structured, reoccurring reflexive personal and group practices, such as journaling, story telling and evaluative dialogue can support “liberation” in innovation processes.

You, the reader of this blog series, are part of this blog series: by interacting with, and responding to the blogs, we, the collective of “Unbounded Affairs” across the globe have started researching, reading, writing and learning together. Through reading and writing together we are sharing a “knowledge production process”, which is a powerful way to alter and expand hundreds of minds in tandem, in real time (see blog 10 for a “practice” blog finale).

Collective “reflexivity” is something anyone can introduce in their own government design work. It can start really small, with a small learning group in a work team. One can watch videos together, introduce peer learning about different worldviews, study systemic design, read articles to deepen our thoughts on a topic, seek connections outside our work and social circles, and take courses together.

Within these small collectives we can practice with inventing and introducing “rewilding”: new language, new words, new frames and new concepts that recognise and acknowledge interrelatedness, instead of separation, such as done in this blog series through words like “squircularity” and “viewrelating”. New words, languages and concepts have the power to rewire our brains so that we can fundamentally “see” and perceive in new ways. Which new words could we introduce to “hack” polarised debates in our own public administrations?

Hack 3: Facilitate “in between” learning practices & training for peers and executive leadership

Illustrative shapeshifter: “Bre’r Rabbit” is a central figure in an oral tradition passed down by African-Americans of the Southern United States. Through this folktale we learn a subversive trick. We learn to identify not with the fox, whom the system would deem virtuous, but the rabbit who ultimately has the moral high ground. (Thanks for the tip, Victor Udoewa)

In these rewilding “do-think-learn” design spaces we can also introduce systemic design training, facilitation and education for both our public servant peers as well as executive public leadership. What would a “field school” for public servants or executive leadership in systemic design look like? (one of the ideas that sprouted from our “Unbounded Affairs” collective).

Within such “field school” we think it would be wise to not focus too heavily on copy-pasting systemic design “methodologies” or “theories” of others to “change the system”. Instead we could teach and share ways to generate our own new, creative ways of learning, seeing, doing, collaborating and knowledge sharing in our own contexts on topics that play out in front of us. How to become creators of a YouTube Channel or podcast, how to start writing a blog series, how to design a course, how to be an “in-between” public servant, how to go outside and learn from the context we live and work in? How to deeply learn together about topics that value the future of humanity within the boundaries of this earth? How to be an academic, YouTuber or course facilitator and a public servant?

Within this effort we ought to be “squircular” (see blog 3) in everything we do, from building relationships with communities to talking to our executives to designing services. We can build journey maps, systems maps, personas, service blue prints, powerpoints, graphs and analytics, and we can dance, sing, make art, and bring magic, ceremony and rituals into our practices to bring about healing, dreaming and imagination.

In this open, imaginative design space, we are free to ask questions at the deepest, ideological, pattern or paradigmatic level:

What does government look like in the era of post-industrialisation, post-capitalism, post-growth and post-colonialisation?
Should public service designers stop practicing “user” research “with” people who have been most disadvantaged from “colonial” settler practices?
What if every government in the world had a “Ministry of Unbounded & Entangled Affairs”? The Ministry of Unbounded & Entangled Affairs takes a public “viewrelating” design approach and has long standing relationships with local communities related to “unbounded & relational affairs”. The “Ministry of Unbounded & Entangled Affairs” would take a long-time perspective, and would include all living and non-living life forms into its policy designs.
What if a public service position was not a role to hold for a lifetime or a career, but a well-respected societal role with a time-limit (ie. a max of 10 years in government, a max of 4 years in 1 role at any level in the public service)?
What if governments were connected to the regeneration of bioregions or watersheds, instead of the boundaries of nation-states?
What does government leadership look like in the absence of centrally and hierarchically positioned leaders?

To conclude

This “far + wide” systemic design scenario might sound or feel a bit “soft”, “intangible” or “meta”, especially in a work environment where we are used to everything needing to be “logic”, “normal”, “real”, “measured”, “efficient”, “cost-based”, “peer-reviewed” and “evidence-based” to get to tangible “results” in faster, better, bigger ways. Taking time to learn, create and knowledge-share “in-between” is at “odds” with the current system precisely because it does not want us to “liberate” ourselves while it serves the status quo (see blog 2 to learn about the “systemic design paradox”. Therefore it is the most liberating, shapeshifting, systemically profound act a public servant can undertake. By observing shapeshifting, one becomes a shapeshifter, and by becoming a shapeshifter the systems that surround you will shapeshift with you.

It is our task to bring our leaders along in recognizing the immense possibilities of rewilding the public service by enabling and supporting “in-between” designing public servants. It will be from this place that “relational” public services will sprout: responsive to our earth’s boundaries and free of oppression.

It is thus ok to be “soft” and “meta”, to not have all the answers. It is ok to fundamentally slow down now, if we can change the course for all of humanity.

It is ok to fundamentally slow down now, if we can change the course for all of humanity.

What’s next

In our very last and final blog, blog 10, we introduce the practice story of the blog series itself as an example of a “far & wide” design scenario, in becoming “learning” public servants. How was the blog series created? What was hard, easy, and fun about it? What did the blog series generate for the authors and for people worldwide?

See you for blog 10!

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)