It takes two to tango
Doing public service design in Argentina
By Pablo Fernández Vallejo & Nicolás Gicovate
How can we foster a design mindset and an empathic and human-centered approach to policy making and policy implementation? As service design practitioners working at the Laboratorio de Gobierno of Argentina we aim to do just that.
Over the last few years, we discovered that in order to put forward our way of thinking and doing policy, we needed partners willing to dance with us to the tune of service design. This might look rather obvious but it was not self-evident at the beginning. Creating a fruitful collaboration and engaging with partners has been at times a challenge as formidable as the ones we want to help solve through good policy.
In this article, we describe some key dimensions of engaging our clients and creating a rewarding collaboration.
From showing off to dancing together
Back in the beginning, our assumption was that partners would not want to engage with us because of our lack of credentials tackling public policy challenges. This meant that most of our effort was put into ‘selling’ our services and showing how we thought we could help them. This approach worked quite well, allowing us to land some very interesting and exciting projects. Yet, as time went by, many projects were getting entangled, or faced unexpected challenges, such as lack of commitment from our partners or a mismatch of expectations in terms of the value that we were delivering. Eventually, we realized the main problem was not that we were not good at getting our message heard, but rather that we were not putting enough effort into getting to know our partners before engaging with them.
So we went back to the drawing board to rethink our partner engagement strategy. We had inspiring conversations with other teams from around the world facing similar challenges in different contexts, i.e. the UK’s Policy Lab and Denmark’s Mindlab. We decided that instead of selling we needed to engage in a hands-on conversation with prospects. So we designed our first meetings as working sessions. This interactive approach enabled them to get to know and feel how it is to work with the Laboratorio. For us, it implied that we could empathize with them and draw a diagnosis of their main organizational dimensions and their vision regarding a specific problem they were attempting to solve. Thus, our first meetings changed drastically from a credentials’ presentation into a participatory workshop. We turned it into a short trial to test how we felt “dancing” together. If there is a match we continue performing together on a project basis.
Time to dance
How can we maintain this connection throughout a project? The answer to this question is our continuous search. So far we discovered a few experiences that yielded promising results.
Sparking empathy through video ethnography: In various projects, we did what we call an empathy capsule. It consists of a video presentation with a strong observational flavor, testimonies and a powerful emotional punch. This provokes in our clients a deep connection and sense of ownership and purpose. We designed this piece in such a way that it could be shared and distributed by our allies and champions within the client organization.
Shaping the conversation to enable strategic decision making: Going through a user-centered innovation process has been described by some of our partners as something akin to doing group therapy. Making time for meaningful conversations among stakeholders and with users allowed them to articulate, challenge and co-create a shared organizational vision opening the way forward.
Challenging the narratives of failure: In this domain, we still have plenty of work to do. It has been difficult to put civil servants in a trial-and-error mindset because failure is never an acceptable outcome. We would like to find ways to show value in the possibility of learning fast through small-scale trials. We are still in the search.
Service design is a particular kind of dance and, within the corridors of government, it should be played out in specific ways. Learning the first movements of this dance was not an easy job. We believe mastering this art is a never-ending journey. But we have learned one thing: It takes two to tango and the main challenge in this choreography entails creating and keeping partner connection.
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Pablo Fernández Vallejo helps deliver value to people and organizations through design. He is a service designer at the Argentinian government lab at the Secretariat of Modernization.
Nicolás Gicovate is a social researcher playing at the intersection between ethnography, creativity and design. He works at the Laboratorio de Gobierno of Argentina.
