A Buyer’s Guide to Design: in Government

Tips for public officers commissioning design phases of work

I n recent years, design has gained a foothold in government, with more public sector agencies employing design-based approaches in their innovation efforts from policy, to operations and service delivery, so as to serve their customers and constituents better.

But buying collaborative and non-linear processes like design is quite unlike buying say office equipment or enterprise software, where you mostly know what you’re going to get and how to set it up to deliver value for your organisational needs.

How then do public sector agencies get the most out of hiring design consultancies or commissioning design phases in their work, from policy to operations and service delivery?

As a former public servant running his own innovation consultancy (Jason) and a design consultant spending time in public service (Shan), we have witnessed the evolution of design in government from both sides.

Drawing on learnings from our peers, mentors, and our own successes and failures, we wanted to identify key factors that enable transformation teams to get results more easily, less painfully, or even earlier in the game.

7 tips for government agencies buying design

1. Reframe the problem from the perspective of end-users —
And do this before you commit any resource

If Singaporeans take pride in efficiency, how much more so for our policy wonks! However in our drive to solve problems, getting into implementation mode right away runs the risk of agencies solving the wrong problems or worse, scaling the wrong solutions.

When a project brief lands on your desk, gather 2–3 members of the team to gut check, “Have we jumped into solutioning before we really understood the issue or why the situation is the way it is?” As Peter Drucker wrote, “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.”

Reframing doesn’t need to take a lot of time, and it must not become an intellectual debate. Do a quick discovery sprint, speak to 1–2 problem owners and end-users, get out of the office and observe people interacting with your service. Even a couple of sessions will unearth material on how best to approach the problem. You are driving out flawed assumptions and keeping your analysis on the right track, especially if the problem is complex and has many underlying root causes and factors.

If you really need external perspective, you can include a problem-reframing or scoping phase in your tender, or appoint a “cost consultant” or “technical advisor” to do so before calling a larger tender.

2. Clarify your potential paths to market

Now that you’ve a good sense of what to solve for, have a working model in mind of the channels that will be needed to operationalise the effort downstream. Find out what’s available in your ecosystem to deliver the solutions that arise from the work. Who holds the keys to the kingdom?

You must have top-level sponsorship and buy-in from key decision-makers. Who are the people that stand to gain from the project’s success? Are there staff or technology resources that will be called upon to deliver operations or service? If behaviour change may be needed from customers, what are some levers or cultural tools that can support it?

Don’t feel overwhelmed that you may not have access to all the resources right now. It’s more about thinking through which parts of the business will most likely be affected so as to establish your game plan. That way, the team can move forward being smart about engineering opportunities, onboarding people, overcoming obstacles and unlocking resources as you go.

3. Form your team, divide and conquer

People either make change happen or stop it. You can’t take it for granted that everyone will be for your project, as everyone is motivated differently after all. However, do your due diligence to understand what might be in it for different people.

Do this through group ‘looking in’ or kickoff sessions, where you engage key stakeholders at different levels of the organization and facilitate activities for groups to voice hopes and fears in a structured, safe environment. (Check out our Tips for Facilitators here before you run your next workshop!)

As a core team, figure out who your champions, advocates, skeptics or bystanders are, and brainstorm strategies to engage each category. Some of you might have a more natural inclination or ability to engage certain folks so you can divide and conquer your focus.

4. Know who you are signing with

How do you tell which consultant is the best fit for you? Discerning the strengths and weaknesses of different consultants is important, but unless you’re in the industry yourself, it can be hard to tell. Probe deeper to unearth your consultant’s innate inclination or bias based on their background and portfolio. That’s not to put design consultants in boxes, as they are categorically fluid thinkers!

But consider if their core capabilities, be they in digital design, spatial design, product design, branding, visual identity, management, transformation or organisational design, match the requirements of your brief. What have they designed in your problem space? Do they have the requisite capabilities to take your product to market? Are you at upstream visioning and strategy or just-get-it-done phase?

Consultants describe themselves as multi-disciplinary, but it depends on the makeup of your assigned team and the resources they can call upon when needs arise, outside of their core strengths. Ask to meet your project team before starting, noting that proposed resources may have been re-assigned by the time you sign, after the various legal and accountability clearances that take awhile. If you’re not familiar with the industry players to make a call, talk to other agencies or clients who have been there, done that.

Most of all, do aim for overall value, not base decisions on cost.

5. Go native! Communicate upfront and often with your consultants.

It can feel counterintuitive to divulge highly contextual information to consultants, or to co-locate and co-create throughout the project. Aren’t you paying them to do the work? But truth is, your active participation enhances the outcome and helps them help you.

The best design consultancy projects involve more of your time and manpower to work closely together, because complex problems require contextual input. What you sow in co-creation, you reap in alignment. When the end result is not a grand unveiling but a strategy that everyone has contributed to, implementation has a greater chance of succeeding. Note that co-creation is not micro-managing but discovering and building together, allowing your team to go on the adventure too.

So do close ranks with your design consultant. Tell them what’s happening within the organization, key milestones, related projects, even internal politics and how to navigate it. Match their deliverables timelines to your deliverables timelines, giving lead time for the necessary inputs. Provide useful context that might drive your reporting concerns.

Negotiate the time, manpower and budget to spare on your project, so they know what they are in for and can scope resource around your constraints.

6. Expand the toolkit — design alone is not enough

Where possible, gather complementary methods to tackle the brief. For example, blend qualitative with quantitative approaches to policy decisions. Statistics help us understand ‘what’ — the nature and distribution of a problem among the population, informing how much it’s worth pursuing, while ethnographic observation and design thinking help us understand the ‘why’ — that drives people to behave the way they do, informing what can be done beyond the current state.

Or apply change management and organisational development methods to sustain the impact. Organisational engagement, when done well, is a huge factor to success as ultimately, innovative, disruptive ideas don’t implement themselves. While users are the centre of the design, your colleagues are the centre of the implementation. Engaging them, sharing stories to inspire and motivate and giving them the right empowerment, roles and systems to succeed are as much part of the design as the ideas themselves. Use internal messaging — posters, videos, social media posts, postcards from the field, etc to build positive energy to get through the rough times.

7. Be like water.

Sorry we had to go all kungfu master on this one! When you’re innovating in an environment with operational legacies and entrenched behaviours, unlike building a new product on a blank canvas, you’re bound to hit some rocks. That may make you go, ouch. This is where having a flexible outlook and an adaptive strategy come in handy.

As a joint team, whether internal change agent, or consultant brought in to offer fresh perspective, not only should you expect resistance, but accept it, roll with it, and work around it to find openings. Use any friction in views to move the conversation forward, not stall. After all, resilience isn’t about having your way, but finding a way that works. Innovators don’t presume success every time; breakthroughs cannot be rushed or forced.

Just as water works around barriers and moulds itself to the environment that contains it without suffering hurt, be willing to sacrifice your set path, flowing through and around obstacles to discover alternate paths.

Ultimately, pushing for change is never easy, so take joy in the journey together. We certainly have!

While we are coming from a Singapore-based perspective, we are interested in how consultants in other geographies and industry contexts tackle related challenges. As we continue in our goals to inspire and connect designers, internal consultants and change agents, we welcome comments to add to collective wisdom as we go. Lived to tell the tale? Write to us! Jason & Shan — The Coop Editors.

Jason runs Outsprint, an innovation design consultancy that creates products and services for social good. He used to work at the Public Service Division bringing human-centered design to bear on multi-agency projects.

Shan has led design and innovation programs for complex challenges for 9 years as a design researcher, and 5 as a founding member of IDEO Singapore. She is currently spending time in public service and in the area of data science.