Leading Public Design: How Managers Engage with Design to Transform Public Governance

Bason, Christian Doctoral Thesis Leading Public Design: How Managers Engage with Design to Transform Public Governance PhD Series, No. 21.2017 Provided in Cooperation with: Copenhagen Business School (CBS) Suggested Citation: Bason, Christian (2017) : Leading Public Design: How Managers Engage with Design to Transform Public Governance, PhD Series, No. 21.2017, ISBN 9788793579156, Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Frederiksberg, https://hdl.handle.net/10398/9480 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/209029 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Christian Bason Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies PhD Series 21.2017 PhD Series 21-2017LEADING PUBLIC DESIGN: HOW MANAGERS ENGAGE WITH DESIGN TO TRANSFORM PUBLIC GOVERNANCE COPENHAGEN BUSINESS SCHOOL SOLBJERG PLADS 3 DK-2000 FREDERIKSBERG DANMARK WWW.CBS.DK ISSN 0906-6934 Print ISBN: 978-87-93579-14-9 Online ISBN: 978-87-93579-15-6 LEADING PUBLIC DESIGN: HOW MANAGERS ENGAGE WITH DESIGN TO TRANSFORM PUBLIC GOVERNANCE 1 Leading Public Design How Managers Engage with Design to Transform Public Governance Christian Bason Supervisor: Robert D. Austin Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies Copenhagen Business School Christian Bason Leading Public Design: How managers engage with design to transform public governance 1st edition 2017 PhD Series 21.2017 © Christian Bason ISSN 0906-6934 Print ISBN: 978-87-93579-14-9 Online ISBN: 978-87-93579-15-6 All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies (OMS) is an interdisciplinary research environment at Copenhagen Business School for PhD students working on theoretical and empirical themes related to the organisation and management of private, public and voluntary organizations. 3 Foreword This thesis is the culmination of an academic, professional and personal journey, where I have become increasingly intrigued by the contribution of design to innovation in the public sector. As a public manager, what might it take to engage with design approaches to enact change, not only in discrete projects, but on a wider scale? What are the implications and responsibilities for public managers, and the meaning with which they conduct their jobs? This curiosity has led me to take on an academic challenge, where since mid-2010 I have conducted this Ph.D. project to explore in detail the significance of design work for public managers and for the future of public governance. It has been a unique opportunity to do this while taking responsibility for other tasks and opportunities, first as director of the innovation team MindLab, and later as CEO of the Danish Design Centre. It has also been a bit overwhelming, and certainly something I could not have done without tremendous support from many quarters. With these acknowledgements, I wish to thank the many people and friends who have accompanied me, and in numerous ways given me the energy and possibility to pursue what has become this thesis. First of all, I wish to thank my thesis advisor, Robert Austin, originally with Copenhagen Business School (now Ivey Business School), who has guided the development of the thesis from the start. Also, I am indebted to co-advisors Rafael Ramirez of Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, Banny Banerjee at Stanford University and Dick Boland at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management. A warm thank you to Eduardo Staszowski at the New School University’s Parsons School of Design, with whom I conducted a visiting scholarship. Along my academic journey I have also been extremely grateful for inputs and ideas from Richard Buchanan, also at Case Western; from Sabine Junginger at the Hertie School of Governance, Roberto Verganti at Milan Polytechnic, and from Stefan Meisiek, Daved Barry, Daniel Hjorth, Dorthe Pedersen, Carsten Greve and Lotte Jensen at Copenhagen Business School. A range of people in my professional network have been instrumental in enabling this work. From the outset, Betina Hagerup of the Danish Business Agency and Helle Vibeke Carstensen, then at the Ministry of Taxation, who both sponsored MindLab, were supportive of my plans. 4 Geoff Mulgan at Nesta has been an inspiration, as has David Halpern of the UK’s Behavioural Insights team, and Ann Mettler and Peter Droell, both at the European Commission. Stephane Vincent and Francois Jegou of La 27th Region have been great collaborators. Martin Stewart- Weeks, Tom Bentley and Nina Terrey have, from their vantage points in Australia, provided many opportunities to present and discuss ideas. To be able to take time away to write a thesis depended first on the professionalism and of my colleagues at MindLab, where many of the networks and relations leading to this work were established. At MindLab, Kit Lykketoft, then Deputy Director, was invaluable in running the day-to-day of the organisation during research-intensive periods, and Jesper Christiansen, formerly Ph.D. fellow at MindLab has provided insights and perspectives I have humbly built further on. Nina Holm Vohnsen and Karen Boll inspired me as well through their innovative Ph.D. projects. Since 2014 I have been supported by an incredible team at the Danish Design Centre (DDC), where special thanks are due to Chief of Staff Anne Christine Lyder Andersen, COO Sune Knudsen and project assistant Paw Wöhlk. MindLab and the Danish Design Centre are institutions under the auspices of the Danish Ministry of Business, under the leadership of Permanent Secretary Michael Dithmer. I am grateful that he and his ministry have allowed me to prioritize this research project alongside with my management duties. It goes without saying that this work would not have been possible without the 15 incredible public managers who have given me access to their personal leadership stories and experiences with using design. I wish to thank each of them for their time, commitment and openness in sharing their challenges and successes with me. Life, in all its “thrownness”, has been very much going on alongside this academic journey. My daughter Lillian was born approximately mid-way, and our other two children Julia and Christopher have grown from 3 and 6 years of age respectively, to nearly 10 and 13. I am indebted more than I can describe to my amazing wife Malene for her patience, understanding and resilience as I have pursued this project. Christian Bason Copenhagen, January 2017 5 Abstract in English In recent years, design has emerged as an approach to shaping public policies and services across industrialized and emerging economies. International institutions, national and local governments, foundations, philanthropies, volunteer and community organizations, and educational institutions at all levels have taken up a variety of approaches inspired by the field of design, often in response to growing pressures to innovate. But how these approaches influence public innovation – how they change the roles of public managers, how they help managers generate new ideas and solutions – and whether, as some have suggested, they might signal the rise of new governance models or paradigms – these issues have not, with perhaps a few exceptions, been rigorously explored. In this thesis, I explore these issues by examining the experiences of public managers who have pioneered the use of design approaches. More specifically, I confront three questions: • Characterizing design practice: Within public sector organizations, what does the application of design approaches entail? Why do public managers look to and commission design, and what tools, techniques, processes and methods are brought into play? • Design as change catalyst: How do design approaches, if at all, influence how public managers engage with their problems and opportunities for innovation? To what extent do design approaches help public managers achieve the changes they are striving for, and why? • Emerging forms of public governance: What form and shape do the outputs resulting from design approaches take? What are the links between design approaches and the emergence of new types of public solutions and governance models? To seek answers to these questions, I have employed a methodology based on comparative analysis of 15 case studies of public sector projects in which managers applied design approaches, across five countries (DK, UK, FIN, AUS and US). Inspired by grounded theory research, this has been a largely inductive, theory building exercise, which has relied on 6 personal interviews, observation, and archival data examination as data sources. In-depth analysis of individual cases and subsequent cross-case analysis has resulted in the identification of concepts, causal relationships, and patterns that transcend individual cases. The dual aims that have guided my methodological choices are 1) to contribute to a ‘nascent’ theory of the use of design in public management, and 2) to enhance practical understanding of how design approaches are used in the public sector. Application of this methodology has led me to findings that correspond to each of the three research questions. First: Design practice in the public sector can be characterized in terms of activities along three dimensions: 1. Exploring the problem space, which involves a range of ethnographically-inspired design approaches, including field work and visualization of user processes; 2. Generating alternative scenarios, in which graphical design approaches and creativity inducing methods are used to enable collaborative ideation and concept development; and, 3. Enacting new practices, which involves the use of prototyping and user testing to render possible solutions more tangible, and also various ways of envisioning idealized (future) situations. These dimensions of activity were discernible in all 15 cases, though to greater or lesser degrees. In addition, the tools and ways of working systematically and collaboratively that design provides appear to resonate with a contemporary conversation that suggests that the future of public governance should be more “collaborative” and “citizen-centered”. Second: I found six types of engagements with design, which can be understood as patterns of attitudes and behaviors among public managers, which were observed when design approaches were used in the organizations studied. These engagements are expressions of what happens between managers and design processes as the latter unfold. The six engagements I found are: 1. Questioning assumptions, which includes an a priori tendency to seek out ways of questioning one’s own assumptions as a manager, as well as a design-inspired tendency 7 that encouraged and enabled a manager to ask new questions about “what is going on” when her or his organization interacts with its users. 2. Leveraging empathy, which concerns the propensity of managers to seek and use “empathic data” generated from ethnographically inspired design techniques, in order to initiate processes of change in their organization. 3. Stewarding divergence, which refers to the ability to open, and keep open, space and time amid an organization and its routines to allow a diversity of ideas to emerge, linger, and flourish, while also maintaining for the staff an overall sense of direction and purpose. 4. Navigating the unknown, which concerns the ability of managers to handle constructively the insecurities and worries that design processes, with their inherent ambiguities, prompted in their own minds and in the minds of staff members. 5. Making the future concrete, which is tightly connected to the design practice of prototyping and testing possible solutions together with end-users, staff, and other stakeholders. 6. Insisting on public value, which reflects an orientation toward the outcomes of the organization’s activities and a dedication to producing multiple kinds of value, such as productivity gains, but also, very importantly, value for citizens or other constituencies. I show how these six engagements roughly correspond, in pairs of two, to the earlier identified three design dimensions. It appears that particular design approaches influence managers’ engagements, and that certain management attitudes and behaviors at least in part determine how significant the use of design approaches turn out to be. Third: I have inferred a relationship between the use design approaches and the characteristics of a possibly emerging public governance model. Managers who use design approaches seem inclined toward governance that, in comparison to historical public management approaches, is more: • Relational, in terms of a distinctly human and often longer-term perspective on the role of the public organization and its impact on the outside world; often this implies a reframing of the kind of value the organization is supposed to bring to citizens and society; 14 !Discussion: Design research for problem discovery .................................................. 184! !Conclusion: Management engagement with the problem space ................................ 193! 7.!Generating alternative scenarios ........................................................................................ 195! !Engagement #3 Stewarding divergence ..................................................................... 196! !Discussion: Decision-making versus future-making ................................................. 202! !Engagement #4 Navigating the unknown .................................................................. 205! !Discussion: Design as facilitator of divergence ......................................................... 212! !Conclusion: Manage as designers? ............................................................................ 217! 8.!Enacting new practices ...................................................................................................... 219! !Engagement #5 Making the future concrete .............................................................. 220! !Discussion: Making, enacting, telling and deciding from the future ......................... 227! !Engagement #6 Insisting on public value .................................................................. 231! !Discussion: Decisions from the future: The public manager as sensemaker ............. 234! !Conclusion: Design as future-making ........................................................................ 237! 9.!Design outputs, change, and signs of public value ............................................................ 241! !Design dimensions: Drivers of change ...................................................................... 242! !Design outputs: From prototypes to implementation ................................................. 245! !Signs of public value .................................................................................................. 251! !Conclusion: The design of public value? ................................................................... 259! 10.!Creating change in governance by design ..................................................................... 261! !Changing governance by design: A conceptual framework ...................................... 263! !Relational: Reframing purpose around people .......................................................... 265! !Networked: Shift to activating wider resources ......................................................... 273! !Interactive: Shaping processes and behaviors ............................................................ 277! !Reflective: Different ways of “knowing” and learning ............................................. 281! !Four governance characteristics ................................................................................. 285! !Conclusion: Discovering principles of governance ................................................... 287! 11.!Towards human centered governance? .......................................................................... 289! !Re-humanizing public organizations? ........................................................................ 290! !On the charm of skeletons .......................................................................................... 292! !Institutional shift: Overlay or disruption? .................................................................. 294! !On the performance of a human centered paradigm .................................................. 298! !Reflection on generalizability of findings .................................................................. 301! !Conclusion: Shifting governance model .................................................................... 303! 12.!Perspectives: Process, agency, and context of change ................................................... 305! !Cycles of change: The dynamics of design, management, and governance .............. 306! !Implications for innovation: Design as a change resource ........................................ 308! !Implications for management: Agents of change by design ...................................... 312! !Context: Towards an emerging governance model ................................................... 317! !Conclusion: An emerging research agenda ................................................................ 322! References .................................................................................................................................. 323! Appendix A: Overview of data sources by case ........................................................................ 337! Appendix B: Main interview guide ............................................................................................ 339! Appendix C: Invitation letter from Parsons the New School for Design .................................. 341! Appendix D: Author activities during the research ................................................................... 343! Appendix E: Glossary ................................................................................................................ 349! 15 Introduction: Design as a vehicle for exploration1 To see that a situation requires inquiry is the initial step in inquiry. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938:111) Scene: I am interviewing a public manager from the Department for Families in South Australia, in the offices of the Australian Center for Social Innovation. We are in a small meeting room on the first floor of an office building in central Adelaide; the table is elevated and we are sitting on café-like high stools. Warm afternoon light is streaming in through tall windows. The public manager, Carolyn Curtis, describes how she has experienced her full-time secondment for nearly eight months to an externally funded project on how to redesign services for “chaotic families”. These are families that are typically characterized by high levels of alcohol abuse, violence, unemployment, and dysfunction. For the past eight months she has no longer acted formally as a manager, but has participated together with a small team consisting of a designer and a sociologist in exploring how such families live their lives, with the aim of finding new opportunities for helping them to become “thriving families”. Curtis says: I was trained as a social worker to assess and categorize various social events. Throughout this project I have needed to undo all that. And that is difficult. I have been given the space, time and resources to really reflect on what we have been doing in our agency. We have handled these problematic families as a predesigned “program”, with fixed criteria and no end-user involvement. Curtis describes the new families project as a “resourcing model”, which she says is radically different from how she has worked during her 10-year career as a manager. By taking an enduser (family) perspective, she says has been able to critically reflect on the results of her agency’s work: 1 This chapter draws in part on Bason & Schneider (2014) and Bason (2013a) 16 It is bottom-up, it has end-user focus, and there is no fixed structure, criteria or categories. The work has been extremely intensive. We have focused on motivation and on strengths within the families – identifying the “positive deviances” where some families are actually thriving, even though they shouldn’t be, according to the government’s expectations. We have focused on finding entry points and opportunities, rather than just trying to mediate risk. It is a co-design, or cocreation approach, and it has been entirely new to me. We are ourselves experiencing the actual interactions within and amongst the families, and breaking them down to examine in detail how they might look different. It is very concrete, capturing what words they use (...) It all looks, feels and sounds different than what I did before. Taking an ethnographic approach is entirely new to me. It has helped me experience how these citizens themselves experience their lives, and has allowed me to see the barriers. I have had to suspend my professional judgment. The whole iterative nature of the project, that it is OK to change, has made me understand how much of what we do is a matter of attitude. In this project, we are capturing their concrete stories, and allowing immersion into their reality. Doing my own ethnography in this way has been a phenomenal journey. Curtis’s words express a range of significant observations. Her experiences, as a public manager of the Family by Family project, raise certain questions: What does it mean to “undo” one’s practice as a public manager? In what ways has the project been bottom-up and what does enduser focus imply in practice? Specifically, what does a “co-design” approach entail? How does ethnography come into play? What characterizes the “journey”, which this manager has taken? Why does the process “look, feel and sound” different than the types of development activities Curtis has experienced before? All of these questions relate to the deeply personal experience of being part of a particular process. She goes on to elaborate on the significance of the project for the organization she is currently a part of, and the potential for more systemic change: Today we as administrators meet the families reactively. We are trapped in a culture of risk. I can see we need a mindset change in my profession. We are 17 forgetting to see the potential. We are lacking openness and passion. (…) During this new project I have had to let go of myself as a manager and leader. Looking back now, I am seeing how the system could be very different. I have made decisions about removing new-born babies from their mothers that I now see weren’t at all necessary. That recognition is really painful. Curtis’s story leaves the impression that the application of the methods she describes – usercentered, bottom-up, iterative, etc. – have had an impact not just on herself as a manager and a person, but also, potentially, on her organization’s approach to its mission and role. Her experience in some ways even questions some often taken for granted expectations of government: The expectation that public organizations are relatively stable with predictable routines and practices, and that public managers are constrained, or bound, by a range of powerful conditions (Simon 1997): The rule of law, the operating principles of regulations, financial and budgetary demands, the identities, norms and roles of the professions public administration, of social work, of education, of nursing and so forth (Wilson 1989).2 How is it possible, given the long-standing and embedded conditions that characterize bureaucracies, to disrupt the status quo? If this brief narrative from a public design project was an isolated occurrence, or a random outlier, these questions would be of limited academic or practical interest. It could be that Curtis has a particular personal characteristic that makes her especially susceptible to the methods and processes that were employed; or, it might be that the particular institutional context of family services in Adelaide, Australia was somehow especially ripe for new insight, disruption, and change along the lines that Curtis describes. It could even be that her project partners – a designer and a sociologist – were extraordinary people who simply have a profound impact on those that they work with. But it is also possible that there is a more profound explanation consistent with Curtis’s sense that she has experienced a new and promising approach to the work of her profession. Examining this possibility is a central purpose of this thesis. 2 These presumptions have their origins in the rise of scientific management (Taylor 1911; Fayol 1916) as well as in Max Webers considerations of bureaucracy (Weber 1947). 18 A global rise of design in government Curtis’s story is one among a growing number of efforts by public sector managers to deploy what are increasingly characterized as design approaches to innovation in public sector contexts (Parker & Heapy 2006; Bate & Roberts 2007; Shove et. al. 2007; Bason 2010; 2013a; Boyer et. al. 2011; Cooper & Junginger 2011; Manzini & Staszowski 2013; Ansell & Torfing 2014; Bason 2014). Here, “innovation” in the public sector is considered broadly in line with the OECD’s Oslo Manual general definition of innovation as novel ideas that are implemented and produce value (OECD 2005; Daglio et. al. 2015). The rise of design approaches in the public sector is often framed in the context of new forms of citizen involvement and collaborative innovation (Lindqvist et. al. 2011; Bourgon 2008, 2012; Ansell & Torfing 2014). According to Bourgon (2008), citizen engagement aims at opening up new avenues for empowering citizens to play an active role in service design, service delivery and in the ongoing process of service innovation. International institutions, national governments, local government, foundations, philanthropies, voluntary and community organizations as well as educational institutions at all levels are taking up design approaches in various forms (Bason 2010; 2013a; 2014; The Economist 2013; Liedtka et. al. 2013; Mulgan 2014). The organizational anchoring (public or third sector) varies, as does the terminology: Service design, strategic design, macro design, public design, design thinking, human centered design, co-design, and co-creation are among labels used (Meroni & Sangiorgi 2011; Cooper & Junginger 2011; Liedtka et. al. 2013). What is common to all these labels and terminologies, in a public sector context, is that design is considered not in terms of building (architectural) design, object (industrial) design, or space, city and urban planning. Rather, design here refers to a diverse set of approaches to, methods for, and ways of thinking about intentional processes for creating societal change, generally focusing on public policies and services.3 In some instances, design capabilities are being embedded explicitly in the structure of government organizations, as in-house units or teams. Within the last five years, the United States, the European Commission, the United Kingdom, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Brazil, and Chile, amongst others, have set up their own “innovation labs”, “innovation centers”, 3 Design is defined further in chapter 1. The meanings of some of the key design labels, and other basic definitions used in this thesis are explained in the Glossary in Appendix E. 19 or “i-Teams” (Bason 2013a; Hassan 2014; Nesta 2014, The Economist 2014). In terms of policy domains, nearly every thinkable corner of public service provision has in recent years been connected to design: Environmental, education, employment, business, finance and taxation issues to health care and mental health and social care at regional and local government level (Parker & Heapy 2006; Meroni & Sangiorgi 2011; Polaine et. al. 2013; Bason 2014a; Manzini 2015). The enthusiasm for alternative approaches likely derives partly from the growing financial pressures on many public organizations (Bourgon 2011; European Commission 2012, 2013a, 2013b; Osborne & Brown 2013; Christiansen 2014). The global financial crisis of 2008 left many governments and their administrations in difficult situations. Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland have verged on state bankruptcy, thus have been under significant pressure to reform public services, pension systems, and perhaps even transform the fundamental relationship between citizens and the state. Governments in less dire circumstances have been adopted similar or even more radical measures. In the United Kingdom, the government has cut away nearly half a million public jobs since 2010. In the US, some state governments and cities have no funding for basic infrastructure; one major city, Detroit, has declared bankruptcy. The parallels between Britain’s “Brexit” and the US election of Donald Trump appear to express powerful citizen reactions to the challenges facing contemporary society, and perhaps even a widespread assessment that governments have failed to adequately address the challenges. Indeed, the willingness to explore design approaches seems linked to a wide and evolving assortment of policy problems that have not been addressed sufficiently. The attempts to control public finances are happening at the same time that these very same societies are confronting seemingly intractable social challenges, such as chronic health problems, an ageing population, new mobility patterns, growing immigration, unemployment – in particular among young people – and, in some countries, increasing income disparity and poverty. “Wicked problems” (Churchman 1967; Rittel & Webber 1973) are not unique to the public sector, but the label could well be said to describe many of the most pressing public sector challenges. And almost universally, the rhetoric summoned in response to the problems calls for more innovation in government to effectively deal with the challenges, to enable public service organizations to deliver more and better services at less cost (European Commission 2013a; OECD 2014). 20 Exploring the mystery of organizational transformation A growing body of empirical evidence indicates that design, in its various guises, is being tried by policy makers and public managers across widely different contexts and settings – nationally, culturally, organizationally (Boland & Collopy 2004; Bate & Robert 2006; Boyer et. al. 2011; Cooper & Junginger 2011; Manzini & Staszowski 2013; Lietdka et. al. 2013; Service Design Network 2016). Such applications of design approaches could be considered a reflection of the quest by managers and their organizations, not just to identify new public service or policy “solutions”, but also to explore new and possibly better ways of governing. By “governing” I mean the overall strategic approach to managing and organizing public bodies and thus, as Hufty (2011) has suggested: the processes of interaction and decision-making among the actors involved in a collective problem that lead to the creation, reinforcement, or reproduction of social norms and institutions. Design seems to have become a vehicle for exploration; an exploration that potentially challenges commonly accepted assumptions about public governance and bureaucracy. One might even ask whether design approaches are an expression of a growing “reenchantment” of the practice of public management and policy (Paquet 2009; Parsons 2010:26). On a more personal note, as a political scientist, I have over the past 10 years or so become increasingly interested in understanding the role of design in a government context. What roles might the methods, approaches and way of thinking of designers play in the context of public sector innovation? My own engagements with design have been multiple. Since 2007, I have authored, co-authored and edited a number of books on innovation and leadership in government, where design methods have featured an increasingly central role (Bason 2007; 2009; 2010; 2014; 2016; 2017); I have led the Danish government’s innovation team MindLab, which employed professionally trained designers; and I have served on the European Commission’s design leadership board and been chairman of a Commission expert group for public sector innovation. My present job is to run the Danish Design Center (DDC), a government funded institution that aims to strengthen the use of design by business. This Ph.D. thesis reflects a deep interest and curiosity about what design might offer to public organizations and public managers. 21 My various roles have given me what has been, in essence, a “ringside seat” from which to observe, engage with, and share experiences of the use of design approaches in government settings. On the one hand, this seat has provided me with a unique and advantaged position from which to collect empirical data, and equipped me with expertise that gives me a better chance to arrive at a nuanced understanding of the practices and issues I have observed. On the other hand, one of my roles, as what has essentially been an advocate for design approaches, complicates my role as researcher and scholar. Throughout this study, I have worked hard to set aside my advocate role and to engage in a dispassionate, careful, and curious role as an observer, data collector, cataloguer and analyst. I have endeavored to explore my own assumptions and preconceptions, and to be humble and skeptical as to what I am finding and learning. The methodology section of the thesis further details specific steps I have taken to deal with the challenge of such “close-up” research and to avoid the kind of premature “closure” that can develop from preconceptions. From the perspective of either observer or advocate, however, it seems safe to state that the emergence of design as a potential way to realize societal change points to significant and largely unresolved mysteries for public administration research. It is clear enough that something new is happening. What that is, how significant it is, whether it is everywhere the same, whether there are patterns across different applications, whether similar objectives are sought, and what is being accomplished – all of this is less clear and invites examination; which leads me to the main research question for this thesis: What happens when managers engage with design to achieve change in public sector organizations? This general question addresses not only the core of the current and growing debate over innovation in the public sector (Torfing et. al. 2014; Christiansen 2014), but also touches upon an important and rather fundamental issue in organizational change. A paradox, formulated by DiMaggio (1988:12), asks how there can be “changes in work organization that have neither been embraced by dominant organizations in the field nor by organizations to which dominant actors are tied.” In other words, how can change happen that is essentially novel and disruptive (Christiansen 1997), which is not a mere extension of current dominant patterns and merely 22 informed and justified by available “evidence” or “best practices”? What kind of management, or decision-making, approaches underlie such change? Might it be, as Carolyn Curtis’s story seems to suggest, that change in public organizations is made possible through new types of processes, which open up new opportunities and futures? Design on the one hand, and the institutional and governance context of public organizations on the other, can be viewed as two waves crashing against each other, resulting in unpredictable ripple effects. Imagine the (admittedly somewhat cliché) creative, fast-paced culture of designers as it meets the (equally cliché) old-fashioned bureaucratic culture of civil servants. Although both descriptions are stereotypes, there seems to be no doubt that the professionals who typically occupy the two domains – designers, artists, ethnographers and technologists on the one side and economists, lawyers and political scientists on the other – have very different world views and appetites for innovation and change (Michlewski 2014). The relationships between designers and government officials, viewed empirically, are thus not always easy, and are potentially ripe with contradictions, frustrations and conflict as much as with positive change and value creation (Mulgan 2014). Relationships become more complicated when one considers the context in which they arise. As Hernes (2008) suggests, contemporary organizations can be viewed as “tangled” and “fuzzy”. Managers act in a fluid world where the changes they take part in (or create) also changes them (2008:145). Public managers, in the midst of the dynamics of change processes, are witnesses who might, with their stories, help us understand what unfolds and interpret what matters. Recognizing that institutions, including the dominating institutions of public governance, rely on the action of individuals and organizations for their reproduction over time, might it be that this reproduction is challenged through the “rejection” of existing institutions (Oliver 1992:567) and the rebuilding of new ones? Or are current institutions and governance models rather more modestly supplemented, or “layered”, with new additions (Weick 2004; Agranoff 2014; Waldorff et. al. 2014)? Value propositions to explain the positive effects of design have been put forward by many actors, many of whom more or less explicitly claim that design is the “midwife of innovation” (iLipinar et. al. 2009; Brown 2009, Michlewski 2015). The most vocal proponents of design, 23 however, are usually either official design centers4 with a mandate to promote design in business and government, or expert groups or committees that have been formally established, often with a positive point of departure, to suggest ways in which design can create more value to society (European Commission 2012). These kinds of advocacy certainly seem to have “paid off in terms of interest” (Mulgan 2014). But is this ultimately a management fad, or is there more to it? Should the rise of design be of interest not only for practitioners of public policy and administration but also to the academic community? The body of scientific knowledge about the functioning and significance of design processes for changes in public management and governance remains quite thin. Although design is becoming part of the public reform agenda, there is no robust research base about it as of yet; our theoretical understanding of phenomena related to the application of design within public sector organizations fall far short of comprehensive (European Commission 2012; Mulgan 2014). Indeed, one might argue the same for the wider concept of innovation in public services, that it is still under-developed theoretically, despite an increasing volume of literature. This might be partly because much of the public sector innovation literature has drawn on product innovation research (rather than service innovation, which is arguably more appropriate to most public organizations); and partly because the innovation literature has rarely taken sufficient account of the particular political and institutional characteristics of the public sector (Hartley 2005; Osborne & Brown 2013). Some academic and practical work has been produced in recent years to illuminate design in the public sector (Carlsson 2004; Parker & Heapy 2006; Bate & Robert 2007; Bason 2010; Boyer et. al., 2011; Terrey 2012; Manzini & Staszowski 2013 Liedtka et. al. 2013; Bason 2014). However, none of this work has approached design from the vantage point of public managers, or focused on the implications for governance models. In short, there is a need to get “… a better grasp of how design thinking is used in the public sector to construct interactive arenas and spur innovation” (Ansell & Torfing 2014:239). My contribution to research, then, is not a case of “gap-spotting” to fill in the ever-finer cracks of existing theories (Alvesson & Sandberg 2013), but of proposing something a bit more fundamental, if still quite tentative: By exploring how managers experience their engagements with design approaches, I aim to arrive at a set of 4 The author is the CEO of one such body, the Danish Design Center. 30 31 Part I An emerging phenomenon 32 33 1. The changing nature of design Design is one of the basic characteristics of what it means to be human, and an essential determinant of the quality of human life. John Heskett, Toothpicks and Logos (2002:5) The cover of the May 26th, 2011 issue of The Economist sported an odd headline: “Welcome to the Anthropocene,” it said. The cover art depicted an artificially created Earth. The lead article explained: According to geologists, humankind has entered a new era, where the majority of our planet’s geological, ecological, and atmospheric processes are affected by humans. Anthropocene literally means “The age of Man”; announcing civilization’s entry into the Anthropocene underlines how our species is increasingly shaping our environments, not only locally but also on a global scale, to meet our needs. This shift has been described as a “human turn”, an altered state of affairs in which “man has increasingly moved to the center as a creature that has set itself above and beyond, and even reshaped, its natural surroundings” (Raffnsøe 2013:5). This turn has wide-reaching implications for many of our natural scientific disciplines and for our understanding of our role on the planet. “The Anthropocene gives rise to a landscape that is distinct and overarching, and in which the human being holds a new position and a new role” (Raffnsøe 2013:5). The human turn can be construed from a number of angles – geological, philosophical, and social. An important dimension, a causal factor, is industrial. But the coming of the Anthropocene might also be seen as the culmination of the last several hundred years’ design of the increasingly human-made environs in which we live: “The capacity to shape our world has now reached such a pitch that few aspects of the planet are left in pristine condition, and, on a detailed level, life is entirely conditioned by designed outcomes of one kind or another” (Heskett 2002:8). The notion that our planet can be transformed by design is not new. The universality of design is a key strand in much thinking and writing on design. Buckminster Fuller, the futurist, architect 34 and designer had suggested already in the early 1970s, in Victor Papaneks’ Design for the real world that “Design is everything” (Michelsen & Engholm 1999). C. West Churchman, in 1971, asserted that “We believe we can change our environment in ways that will better serve our purposes” (1971:3). Norman Potter opens his influential book What is a designer, with the statement that “Every human being is a designer” (Potter 2002). When asked about the boundaries of design, the renowned furniture designer Charles Eames famously answered, “What are the boundaries of problems?” (Moggridge 2007: 648). Design cuts across all other human activities as a particular concept that addresses how physical, commercial, social and public outcomes are created. As Manzini (2015) argues, much of this design activity is not intentional. As the digital, social and physical tools for designing are becoming democratized, “everybody designs.” Manzini (2015:37) distinguishes between “diffuse design”, by non-experts or ordinary people, and “expert design” by professionally trained designers. Likewise, Friedman & Stolterman (2014;viii) argue that design “…is always more than a general, abstract way of working. Design takes concrete form in the work of the service professions that meet human needs, a broad range of making and planning disciplines.” While it can be debated whether design is “everything”, it seems beyond doubt that “life in contemporary society is saturated by design” (Simonsen et. al. 2014: 1). But in reaching this saturation point, not least through an explosion of physical objects and expressions, design has also itself begun to undergo significant change. It has spread from a focus on forms and objects to focus as well on services and systems; its practice has changed as ideas about end-user and stakeholder involvement have gained currency; and its impacts have broadened with the rise of new ideas about the contributions of design to the theory and practice of management. At a deeper level, design is changing because the context for design is changing. Design, as a discipline, is being redefined by technological and social megatrends, which have significance for how organizations are run, products and services are shaped, and how value is created. As part of this shift in context, design is finding its way into the public sector. This chapter provides an overview of the context, history, and development of design, its movement toward “new” forms and meanings, and the emergent application of design in the public sector. It aims to un-wrap definitions and directions and to distill from these a rough inventory of the characteristics or sensibilities that distinguish design approaches. It develops 35 the idea of design management and the notion of public managers as designers (a theme key to this thesis). Finally I discuss the notion and role of design as a particular “attitude”. Origins and futures of design The rise of design as a distinct profession was a consequence of industrialization and the rise of mass production, which in turn was driven by developments in technology and in the organization of work (Manzini 2015). In this perspective, design is a key factor linking consumption and new technological opportunities. As designers found ways to create marketable products, which fulfilled people’s tastes and demands, they in turn influenced society’s culture of consumption. Although the activity of designers in itself may play a somewhat hidden role in society, the resulting artifacts do not: Design and designers are, and have been for many years, a sine qua non of the modern commercial system ensuring, through the activities of production and consumption, that people’s needs and desires (whether consciously acknowledged or not) are met by the visual and material images and artifacts that enter the marketplace and help us define who we are. (Sparke 2004:2). Sparke claims that design is an essential ingredient of modern society, culture, and identity, and that designed artifacts influence how we think about ourselves. Just plainly observing everyday life in our current society, it seems clear that objects of consumption – ranging from the clothes we wear to the mobile phones we carry, to our preferred forms of transportation – are powerful signifiers of our identities. In other words, there has historically been a “close-coupled, recursive relation between the design profession and the [social] structure of capitalist society” (Shove et. al., 2007; 120). Designed products influence how we behave in our daily lives. Fields as diverse as sociology, anthropology, behavioral science and technology recognize that material objects make particular social and practical arrangements possible. According to Shove et. al. (2007) this means that design is a medium through which social and commercial ambitions are materialized and realized. To understand what design means today, and how contemporary developments in design matter to the public sector, however, we must look back in time to the era preceding industrialization, 36 and trace a line forward from there to our current and future world of a post-industrial, networked knowledge society. As I will argue, design appears to be coming full circle, essentially reintegrating the processes of creating anew and the processes of (re)producing in numbers , which had been separated by industrialization. 1.6.1 Design and the splintering of craft Before the rise of mass industrialization, the structure of production was based on craft. The craftsmen – usually organized in guilds – were the conceivers of new products and related services and also their producers. Guilds were partly sustained by law, but even more by “the hands-on transmission of knowledge from generation to generation.” (Sennett 2008). Guilds, and the masters and workshops that belonged to them, represented an organization arrangement for tailored (i.e., customized) production. If consumers wished to purchase a new item of clothing, they would go to the tailor, discuss with him the style, fit and, quality, and the tailor would take measurements, before producing a bespoke item. Carpenters would design and produce furniture on a similarly individual basis; and so also would the blacksmith, who shaped pots, pans, and weapons made to order; each product would be unique for its person and purpose, and uniquely characterized by the craftsman’s individual trademark variations (Austin & Devin 2009). One might say that production was standardized: In craft production, conception and realization are linked and co-ordinated by the interplay of hand, eye and materials. The fact that the entire process can be accomplished by one person distinguishes its complexity, giving it a human scale and apparent simplicity that allows it to be experienced by both practitioner and observer as a comprehensible unity (Heskett 1980:7). Technology changed this. With the emergence and widespread use in the early 1800s of technologies such as the steam engine and harder steel, which could be used to create machine tools as well as replacement parts, it became possible to industrialize the processes of production (Hatfield, 1900). Increasingly, first in England and then in other parts of Europe and North America, traditional craftsmen evolved into larger businesses which engaged in greater and greater scales of production; with the innovations of standardization, the conveyor belt, and organizational and managerial principles to maximally leverage these, mass production was 37 made possible, and economies of scale significantly drove down the price of individual, though no longer bespoke, products (Austin & Devin 2009). As a further extension and consequence of industrialization, the work involved in design and production also became decoupled. The processes of designing began to happen not as part of production, but well before production; the notions of design work as distinct from production work, and of a “designer” who did not also produce the final product, came to the foreground. At the same time, the simplicity, or coherence, of the work of the craftsman, began to disappear. As John Heskett underlines, “In mass-production industry this coherence is fragmented, and the complexity of conception and making is exposed by its subdivision into a series of specialized activities.” (1980:7). Thus “…design came to be recognized as both an essential but separate feature of commercial and industrial activity, and also a specialist element within the division of labor implicit in mass-production and sales.” (ibid. 1980: 105). The same specialization, in broader terms, came to characterize the division between management and labor. Frederic Winslow Taylor, arguably the inventor of the modern division of planning and execution of labor, suggested that there are ways of planning and managing work functions that are more efficient than others. The role of management was to take over the planning of work, “for which they are better fitted than the workmen” (Taylor 1967), giving the management a distinctive “scientific” role of shaping work activity. This division of responsibilities between the manager and the worker became a fundamental part of management as it emerged as a profession, drawn on by the hunger of business and government organizations for ever greater scale and efficiency, spread by schools of business, management and administration. From the early days of industrialization to the present, management has become ever-more refined as the profession of planning – or, one might say, designing – making decisions concerning not only work, but the organizations, technologies and processes that enable production of goods and services. Driven fundamentally by the benefits and economies of scale and mass production, management has, arguably, enabled a grand material success story over the past hundred years: Ever-more products and services offered at ever-lower and more competitive prices, reaching and improving the material lives of billions of consumers across the globe. 38 The story of public administration and management has followed a similar trajectory. The rise of capitalist society in most developing nations was enabled by the rise of the state, and not only as the guarantor of basic property rights and securities, including the defence (or expansion) of national territory; the state played a wider role in encouraging the growth of industries, providing educated labor, and, increasingly, accommodating the economic, social and cultural needs of the population. In following this path, public administration followed the same logic as private firms: The role of the manager as planner, organizer and distributor of work grew more distinct as public organizations increased in scale and complexity. Public organizations too sought to harvest efficiencies from scale. Whether it was the establishment of modern health systems, such as the NHS (National Health Service) in the United Kingdom, or the expansion of public education, governments were in many ways successful not only as an accessory to industrial society but as enabler of it -- and as the assurer of work and welfare rights and benefits needed to underpin a socially coherent society. It is true, as political scientist Gösta Esping-Andersen (1990) has demonstrated, that models of welfare have developed very differently across Europe and resulted in quite different mixes of state, private, and social actors, and of centralized versus decentralized or de-concentrated governance. Nevertheless, as I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter, a general pattern of public governance based on roughly similar principles as that of private (industrial) firms, focusing on efficiencies of scale, is a common thread amid all this diversity. For private and public organizations alike, this usually meant that consumers, users, and citizens would generally experience rather standardized, homogeneous, mass-produced products and services, whether new toasters, banking services, or public school classroom lectures and books. As the Director of the Department of Correction in American state of Louisiana has allegedly stated, “The principles of management are the same, whether you’re making chocolate chip cookies or incarcerating people” (Downs & Larkey 1986:40). The similarities between public organizations and private businesses should not, however, be overstated. Public organizations have objectives that go well beyond efficiency, and which might lead to similar effects. For instance, in government, considerations of fairness and equality of access to universal services would typically mean that similar treatment of citizens was not only an efficiency issue, but one of democratic legitimacy and just government (Pollitt 2003). As I will discuss later, such particular roles of government are part of the governance legacy we have inherited and still must relate to today. As this thesis moves forward, the 39 particular context of public organizations should thus be increasingly clear, allowing for a nuanced consideration of the particular role of design. As the American policy analyst Graham Allison famously suggested, leadership in public and private administrative organizations are “fundamentally alike in all unimportant aspects” (Allison 1986). 5 What remains is that the role of management activity in organizations was to research, analyze, plan and ultimately decide what should be delivered to whom, when and how. The process of designing appeared to have forever been separated from the process of producing. Over the last few decades, however, this has begun to change. 1.6.2 The re-merging of design and production Just as the technology of hard steel manufacture enabled the acceleration and scaling of mass production, so have the technologies of telecommunication – in particular the internet and social media – rapidly changed the rules of production and of governance. This has been taking place alongside new societal patterns which increasingly posits individual self-actualisation as a value in its own right; this trend that was first articulated by Daniel Bell (1973) in the early 1970s in the context of the rise of post-modern society but have since become more widespread and arguable characterize much of the “millennial” generation today. Another factor which appears to add momentum to the role of individual consumers or users is the (re)birth of globalization and increased mobility, meaning not only that people move quicker and more flexibly to new jobs, homes, and experiences, but also that products, services and financial resources flow faster and more seamlessly across borders. But the most powerful influence on today’s supply of products and services is technology that propels the individual’s – as opposed to the “markets’” or a “segments’”— needs and wants into the foreground. In The new age of Innovation, the late C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan argue somewhat radically that: The focus on unique personal experiences is increasingly permeating industries as diverse as toys, financial services, travel and hospitality, retailing and entertainment … we are 5 It might be noted that according to Downs & Larkey (1986) this quote is ascribed to William Sayre. 46 characterize this as a capability as much as a practice (Heskett 2002; Jenkins 2008; Cooper et. al. 2011). Design as practice has also developed tremendously in the past few decades. Meyer (2011) notes pragmatically that design must be understood as a set of activities: “methods, approaches and techniques that provide its practitioners with a way of working together in a highly productive way” (2011:188). In terms of ways of working, perhaps the most fundamental shift has been from thinking of the lone, gifted, “heroic” designer as the key agent in design practice, to thinking of design practice as much more of a social, collaborative process. This does not mean that the iconic, gifted designer is no longer a key figure in our Western commercial culture; one might even argue that superstar designers have never been more celebrated. It also does not mean that there is no difference between highly professional expert designers on the one hand, and “everyday designers” on the other (Boland & Collopy 2004; Verganti 2009; Manzini 2015). However, across business and government significant strands of design practice are simultaneously shifting toward “co”: co-llaboration, co-creation and co-design., This shift emphasizes the explicit and systematic involvement of users, clients, partners, suppliers and other stakeholders in the design process and challenges the classic notion of a single, star designer (von Hippel, 2005; Shove et. al. 2007; Sanders & Stappers 2008; Michlewski 2008, 2015; Bason 2010; Halse et. al., 2010; Meroni & Sangiorgi 2011; Ansell & Torfing 2014). Variations such as participatory design and service design, which focus on (re)designing service processes, are rapidly growing (Bate & Robert 2007; Shove et. al. 2007; Brown 2009; Cooper & Junginger 2011; Polaine et. al. 2013; Manzini 2015). In particular, these new kinds of design “for” a variety of purposes are usually associated with a social or collaborative approach where outcomes are co-created or co-designed together with a variety of actors, often taking departure in the perspectives of end-users such as consumers or citizens. In fact, design is increasingly explicitly characterized as “human centered” (Brown 2009; European Commission 2012). This, in turn, has brought more research-oriented activities to design practice, including methods drawing on anthropology and ethnography. Halse et. al. (2010:27) suggests three major strategies that embody the notion of a design-anthropological approach: 47 Exploratory inquiry: Researching without a prior hypothesis to be tested, but rather aiming at understanding purpose and intent: why, for whom, and for what is a certain understanding directed? Sustained participation: “No design team will possess all the relevant knowledge by itself”, claims Halse et. al.; which suggests that clients and stakeholders must be engaged in a continuous dialogue. Generative prototyping: Taking problems and solutions as the basic elements of continuous loops of iterations. By experimenting and trying out different thoughts and actions, generative prototypes not only evaluate whether a solution will work, but also whether the understanding is right; this also allows new meanings to evolve within the network of stakeholders. So, the tools applied for collaborative design include, for instance, methods for creative problem solving, user research and involvement, visualization, concept development, rapid prototyping, test and experimentation, all of which help designers “rehearse the future” (Halse et. al., 2010). In the context of the emerging field of design it also seems clear that the role of the (specialist) designer seems to be shifting, toward process facilitator or coach (Shove et. al. 2007; Sanders & Stappers 2008; Meyer 2011). The degree of change here cannot be underestimated: The traditional role of the designer was to work with a client, either as an external consultant or in a design function within a firm, and to provide design “input” based on a brief or problem specification. In the collaborative mode of design, the role of the designer – while still drawing on his or her professional practices, attitudes and ways of reasoning – is essentially to involve actors, from end-users, to managers, to staff in a process of discovery and co-creation. The following figure, first suggested by Sherry Arnstein (1969) and later developed by Sabine Junginger, seeks to illustrate the span of roles of citizens’ engagement with public authorities on a “ladder” from highly subordinate to highly empowered.7 7 First relayed to me by Ms. Sabine Junginger at a paper presentation at the DMI research conference in London, September 2014. 48 Figure 3: Ladder of citizen involvement in decision-making Level Role of citizen Citizen control Delegated power Decision-making by citizen Placation Consultation Informing Decision-making with citizen Therapy Manipulation Decision-making for citizen Source: Adopted after Arnstein (1969) The table illustrates that citizens can be cast into widely different roles depending on the way in which government bodies choose to engage with them. 1.7.3 Design as a way of reasoning: Design thinking and beyond This set of definitions include design as a mindset (Sanders 2014), a way of thinking (Buchanan 1990; Brown 2009; Martin 2009b), or an attitude (Boland & Collopy 2004; Michlewski 2008, 2014). Over the past decade, design thinking in particular has come into common use in business (Brown 2009; Martin 2009b). Roger Martin (2009b) characterizes design thinking as the ability to manage and move between the opposing processes of analysis, involving rigour and “algorithmic” exploitation on the one hand, and synthesis, involving interpretation and exploration of “mysteries” on the other hand. At the heart of design thinking is thus, according to Martin, the balancing, or bridging, of two different cognitive styles: The analytical-logical mindset that characterizes many large organizations and professional bureaucracies, and the more interpretative, intuitive mindset that characterizes the arts and creative professions. Martin highlights the capacity for abductive reasoning – a concept originally developed by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce – which he describes as the ability to detect and follow a “hunch” about a possible solution, bridging the gap between analysis and synthesis (Martin 2007; 2009). As Piore & Lester (2006) as well as Verganti (2009) have argued, intuition and the ability to interpret information to form new solutions is the “missing dimension” of innovation. Tim Brown also acknowledges this explicitly, referring to Martin’s The Opposable Mind: “...design thinking is neither art nor science nor religion. It is the capacity, ultimately, for integrative 49 thinking” (Brown 2009). Perhaps the integrative nature of design has best been characterized by Buchanan, who states that design thinking is about moving toward “new integrations of signs, things, actions and environments that address the concrete needs and values of human beings in diverse circumstances” (1990:20). This directs our attention to understanding design as an approach to management, placing it “at the core of effective strategy development, organizational change, and constraint-sensitive problem solving” (Boland & Collopy 2004:17). The term “design thinking” has, however, attracted criticism. One of the earliest and most vocal advocates of design thinking, Bruce Nussbaum, distanced himself from the term in a widelyread op-ed titled “Design Thinking is a Failed Experiment. So What’s Next?” (Nussbaum 2011). In a book called Creative Intelligence released subsequently, he argued that organizations needed to foster creativity rather than embrace design. (Nussbaum 2013). Additional critique has come from within the design profession; some argue that the word “thinking” misses the point, since design is as much a practice, even a craft, as it is a particular way of thinking. Professionally trained designers would probably say that they think in action, or “think with their hands”, for instance by making or enacting (Sanders 2014). From this point of view, design thinking is considered somewhat shallow. However, there is probably no doubt that the label “thinking” has been instrumental in propelling design, as a discipline, much stronger into the awareness of managers, public as well as private. Design thinking, as a term and as it has been portrayed in a wide range of articles and books, has helped popularise design far beyond the profession and related practices. Michlewski (2015:144) has sought to create some order in the various design “frames” by suggesting that design thinking mainly places itself squarely between practical concerns of design professionals on the one hand, and the epistemic concerns of design researchers and philosophers. He characterizes design thinking as “a movement that promotes the philosophies, methods and tools that originate in the practice and culture of the design professions” (ibid.: xviii). As such, design thinking can be viewed as a set of heuristic principles and practices derived from design but simplified to become accessible to those not specifically trained or experienced as professional designers. When I launched my doctoral research, design thinking was a key term in my research interest. However, I have concluded since then that a more broad, open-ended, and perhaps humble and less prescriptive approach to thinking about design seems more useful for the inquiry at hand. For this research, I have chosen to remain open to a variety of interpretations and applications of 50 the word “design”, and be careful to not privilege or too easily accept any essentially derivative concept, such as “design thinking,” as authoritative. In summary, this section has discussed three perspectives, which help define design. As shown in the table below, I have characterized each perspective and how it is undergoing change. Figure 4: Changing definitions of design Design defined as Characteristics From To Plan Plan for creating graphics, products, services, systems. Commercial Social Practice Methods for creative problem solving, user research, involvement, vizualisation, concept development, rapid prototyping, test and experimentation. Expert Collaborative Reasoning The cognitive ability to move between the opposing processes of analysis, involving rigor and “algorithmic” exploitation, and synthesis, involving interpretation and exploration. Thinking Thinking-in-action These defining characteristics of design will be further explored in this thesis through observation of what actually takes place when design is used in public organizations, and through the practical, experiential lens of public managers. However, two more perspectives need to be considered, which move us further towards the relationship between design, management, and decision-making: Managing as designing, and design as a particular attitude. From design management to managing as designing8 Boland & Collopy suggest that “Managers, as designers, are thrown into situations that are not of their own making yet for which they are responsible to produce a desired outcome. They operate in a problem space with no firm basis for judging one solution as superior to another, and still they must proceed.” (Boland & Collopy 2004:17). On the issue of “thrownness” they refer to Karl Weick (2004) who argues that any design activity must necessarily take place in an 8 This section builds in part on Bason (2014a). 51 environment already ripe with “designed” activities.9 The role of a designer becomes, then, redesign, not designing, as it were, on a blank slate. The job of management, as designing, becomes one of balancing on-going decision-making with efforts to design (new) practices. Boland and Collopy’s edited volume further explores what a design vocabulary, a design “attitude”, and design practice might bring to the management profession. In a chapter in the Boland & Collopy volume, Preston describes the application of design to taxation policy-making, concluding that the approach helped the Australian Taxation Office clarify its policy intent in a more systematic way, and led to a realisation that “(...) our understanding of both user needs and our product range and strategy was even more sorely deficient”. Examples like this suggest that public managers may benefit from design approaches; perhaps, even that the manager, as a design leader, could become “the catalyst for transformation” (Jenkins 2008). Cooper & Junginger (2011:1) state that the intersection of design and management has generated decades of “lively debate” in the design and business communities. What are the relationships between design and management, and between management of design and design management? As new and more collaborative approaches to innovation in the public sector are coming to the fore, this question should be increasingly relevant to public managers. As service design, interaction design, human-centered design and strategic design approaches – in their various shapes and forms – are being applied to public problems, it becomes increasingly important to reflect on how managers relate to these strategies. 9 The concept of ”thrownness” can be ascribed to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who used the term (German: “Geworfenheit”) to describe the human condition as being “thrown” into the world”. 52 Figure 5: Paradigms of design management Function Design practice Design management Design capability Adds value through... Solves problems of design relating to... Develops and fosters design competency along... Achieves objectives of... Aesthetics, product innovation, differentiation Products, brands, services Top management, board members, design leaders, design consultants, design team, cross disciplinary design teams Managing design to deliver strategic goals Interpreting the need, writing the brief, selecting the designer, managing the design and delivery process All aspects of design in the organization, but principally products, brands and service Top management, board members, senior management, design management consultants Managing design to deliver strategic goals Humanistic, comprehensive, integrative, visual approaches Change in environment, society, economy, politics and organizations Every area of the organization Delivering sustainable organizations in the context of societal and global wellbeing Source: Cooper & Junginger (2011) Cooper & Junginger argue that the third paradigm – design capability – is particularly salient in public sector settings, as a reflection of the social and human nature of most, if not all, public policy concerns. A global environment characterized by intractable social, economic, environmental and political challenges calls for an increased use of design-led approaches to problem solving: “Because the skills and methods that constitute design are useful in responding to the challenges facing us today, designing is now being recognized as a general human capability. As such, it can be harnessed by organizations and apply to a wide range of organizational problems.” (2010:27). 53 The question then becomes not only how design approaches are in practice applied in public sector organizations to tackle public problems, but also the evolution of design capability: how public managers themselves “design” in their quest to proactively affect human and societal progress (Boland & Collopy (2004). This indicates several interesting challenges for the public manager as designer: What kinds of situations do they find themselves “thrown into” and how do they relate to the nature of the type of problem space this entails? How do they in fact judge alternative solutions in order to make a decision and, perhaps most importantly, where do the alternative solutions come from? Of concern to this thesis is, of course, how public managers themselves engage with “design” in their quest to proactively use their organizations to affect human and societal progress. In search of design attitude We have seen that design can be viewed as a particular way of reasoning; however, in considering “design attitude” there is more to this perspective on design. Richard Boland has argued that “The way we narrate the story of our experience to ourselves and others as we engage in a series of events gives meaning to the problem space we construct and the calculations we make within it” (Boland & Collopy 2004:107). This perspective has an important relationship to my approach in this thesis. I am curious about how the public managers I studied tell their stories of innovation and change, which happens to be in contexts where design approaches have been utilised. How do they as managers and leaders think and act as part of that process? How do they “design”? To gain an understanding of this, it will be necessary to take an interest not only in what the managers studied in this thesis do, but in what they intend, or wish to do – and might not always achieve. Here, their underlying beliefs and values cold come to the fore. As I move through my analysis of interviews with managers, it will be a challenge to distinguish their own statements from (where data is available) other sources and the wider context of their actions. 1.9.1 Defining design as an attitude The notion of “managers designing” implies that they go about innovation activities in line with what Boland & Collopy (2004) have called a “design attitude.” In a somewhat similar vein, Tom 54 Peters (1997) speaks of “design mindfulness” as a way to approach problems, questioning what the manager can do to make solutions work better for the organization and/or those around it. Meyer (2011: 197) points out that in change projects building on internal expertise, “every organization has a few of these individuals who may not instinctively self-identify as designers or design thinkers but who display an immediately recognizable set of behaviors that tag them as design minded.” Similarly, the public managers I have interviewed for the present research do not think of themselves as designers, but do they perhaps display attitudes or behaviors that are “design minded” – and what exactly do such behaviors entail? Boland and Collopy define design attitude as the “expectations and orientations one brings to a design project” (Boland and Collopy 2004: 9). They make the point that: A design attitude views each project as an opportunity for invention that includes a questioning of basic assumptions and a resolve to leave the world a better place than we found it. (Boland and Collopy 2004: 9). They hereby frame design attitude in opposition to a decision attitude, which portrays the manager as facing a fixed set of alternative courses of action from which a choice must be made. A decision attitude is suited for clearly defined and stable situations and when the feasible alternatives are well known. The highly influential scholarship of Herbert Simon has, across nearly half a century, framed the role of management in terms of representing problems and making decisions between a set of alternatives. Design attitude, then, would seem to signal a break from that enduring tradition. Many of the problems facing managers – including public managers – in the current environment have unstable and complex characteristics, which may call for an increased focus on design attitude. By complex characteristics I refer to systems with large numbers of interacting elements; where interactions are nonlinear so that minor changes can have disproportionately large consequences; which are dynamic and emergent, and where hindsight cannot lead to foresight because external conditions constantly change (Snowden & Boone 2007; Bourgon 2011). Not all public problems are like this, but many are. We could therefore ask whether the concept of design attitude can help us understand the role of the public manager as someone who drives innovation, often in complex settings, by taking responsibility, in 55 different ways, for designing organizational responses to the challenges and opportunities they face? Let us explore in a bit more detail the concept of design attitude before returning to this question. 1.9.2 Five Dimensions of Design Attitude In a systematic exploration of what Boland and Collopy’s notion of design attitude might entail, Kamil Michlewski (2008) undertook doctoral research in which he interviewed a number of design consultants and managers from firms like IDEO and Philips Design and mapped how these people viewed their roles and practices. On the basis of this study he subsequently proposed five characteristic dimensions of design attitude. More recently, he has developed his thesis into a book (Michlewski 2015) and has tested a number of the design attitude dimensions statistically through a questionnaire-based survey administered to a sample of 235 designers and non-designers (174 classified themselves as designers). According to Michlewski (2015), the survey showed a statistically significant difference in the attitudinal dimensions between designers and non-designers. I describe these attitudinal dimensions in this chapter as a conceptual frame that might provide a useful interpretative contribution to my exploration of public managers’ approaches as they engage with design (not as a set of hypotheses I will test). The design attitudes as presented in Michlewskis most recent and developed (2015) work are as follows:10 Embracing uncertainty and ambiguity. Michlewski perceives this dimension in terms of the willingness to engage in a process that is not pre-determined or planned ahead, and where outcomes are unknown or uncertain. It is an approach to change that is open to risk and the loss of control. According to Michlewski, really creative processes are “wonky” and often stop-start. The challenge for managers is to not resist, but to allow for the creative process to unfold.11 One might say that this reflects an acceptance of Boland and Collopy’s (2004) point that managers operate in a problem space where there is no clear basis for judging one solution as superior to 10 The original (Michlewski, 2008) terminology on design attitudes was a little less straightforward, which perhaps reflects that his recent work (2015) is intended for a wider and also non-academic audience: 1) Embracing discontinuity and open-endedness; 2) Engaging polysensorial aesthetics; 3) Engaging personal and commercial empathy; 4) Creating, bringing to life; 5) Consolidating multidimensional meanings. 11 Based on email correspondence with author (February-March 2014) and subsequent cross-referencing with the new book (Michlewski 2015) 62 frustrations, but also whether the new version can still satisfy the old reasons (assuming they are still relevant). Answering the latter requires that we well understand those old reasons. 2.1.1 Principles of Weberian bureaucracy Peters (2010:147) suggests that, “Despite numerous changes in the public sector, Max Weber’s conceptions of bureaucracy still constitute the starting point for most discussions”; and so it will for my discussion in this thesis. The management and wider governance challenges that the Weberian bureaucracy sought to address provide a foundation for my consideration (in this chapter, and, especially, chapters 10 and 11) of the possible emergence of a new governance paradigm. In proceeding in this manner, I seek to avoid the trap that some have argued that the New Public Management (NPM) fell into by suggesting changes that appeared ”to rest upon an insufficient understanding (one might even say failure to understand) that existing patterns had not been developed without practical reason, and that departing from them might have serious costs that necessitated careful consideration beforehand” (Du Gay 2011:25). The question of how a society should be governed is by no means new. Aristotle treated the question in Politics. Thomas Hobbes famously stated that without a strong governing authority, “life of man, [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes 2011). Writing near the end of the 19th century, in a time of great societal and economic transformation, Woodrow Wilson, later a US president, describes the problem with pre-modern governance in his 1887 essay The Study of Administration: The trouble in early times was almost altogether about the constitution of government...There was little or no trouble about administration – at least little that was heeded by administrators. The functions of government were simple, because life itself was simple. Government went about imperatively and compelled men, without thought of consulting their wishes. There was no complex system of public revenues and public debts to puzzle financiers; there were, consequently, not financiers to be puzzled. No one who possessed power was long at a loss how to use it. The great and only question was: Who shall possess it? Wilson (1887:199). 63 Francis Fukuyama, in Political Order and Political Decay adds to this point. He argues that all modern societies were originally patrimonial states, where governments: (…) were staffed with the friends and family of the ruler, or those of the elites who dominated the society. These states limited access to both political power and economic opportunity to individuals favoured by the ruler; there was little effort to treat citizens impersonally, on the basis of universally applied rules. (Fukuyama 2014:198). It was against these early despotic administrative systems – in which “the lives and fortunes of all were completely dependent on the whims of a despot whose only law was his own wish” (Wren & Bedeian 2009:229) – that the principles of bureaucracy developed. The German sociologist and political economist and Karl “Max” Weber's notion of bureaucracy addressed concerns about despotism by formalizing organizational offices and roles. Weber insisted that these be based on competencies explicitly underpinned by rational rules, laws, and administrative regulations. The scope of power, the capacity to coerce others, was to be defined and limited by regulation, and the selection of people to assume positions of power determined in accordance with certifiable qualifications. Weber translated these broad ideas into specific principles; according to Wren and Bedeian (2009:231-232), Weberian bureaucracy is based on the following principles: • Division of labor: Labor is divided so that authority and responsibilities are clearly defined • Managerial hierarchy: Offices or positions are organized in a hierarchy of authority • Formal selection: All employees are selected on the basis of technical qualifications demonstrated by formal examination, education, or training • Career orientation: Employees are career professionals rather than “politicians”. They work fixed salaries and pursue careers within their respective fields • Formal rules: All employees are subject to formal rules regarding the performance of their duties 64 • Impersonality: Rules and other controls are impersonal and uniformly applied in all cases. The impersonal and uniform application of rules is a particularly contested feature of the Weberian bureaucracy. Weber describes the ways in which the ideal official manages “as when the official has “a spirit of formalistic impersonality, Sine ira et studio, without hatred or passion, and hence without affection or enthusiasm.” The dominant norms are concepts of straightforward duty without any regard to personal considerations (Weber 1947:340). Importantly, Weber’s concepts of legal authority and bureaucracy are ideal types: theoretical constructs that do not necessarily find their equivalent in the real world. 2.1.2 Benefits of bureaucracy To Weber, bureaucracy not only leads to a number of positive outcomes, it is a necessity for the functioning of modern capitalist societies. As such, he argues that capitalist society has a: (…) need for stable, strict, intensive, and calculable administration […] which gives bureaucracy a crucial role in our society as the central element in any kind of largescale administration. Only by reversion in every field – political, religious, economic, etc. – to small-scale organization would it be possible to any considerable extent to escape its influence (Weber 1947:338-339). Interestingly, Weber's point about “reversion” here seems to imply that if it was technologically possible (and perhaps politically and culturally acceptable) to revert to “small-scale organization”, then bureaucracy as he defines it might not be needed. Though it was surely beyond imaginable in the 19th century, it is worth asking today – and we will return to this later – whether technological developments of the late 20th century, especially the emergence of the Internet and new tech-enabled organizational forms, might make such reversion possible? However, as a modern organizational necessity, the Weberian bureaucracy allegedly leads to at least four positive results (Weber 1947; du Gay 2000): • Efficiency • Predictability and reliability 65 • Procedural fairness • Equality and democracy. A key benefit is thus the reduction of randomness, risk and unpredictability. An important point to note is that the production of public outcomes, understood as changes in the experience or behavior of people, business, communities and societies, does not seem to be considered by Weber as an important result in its own right. In other words, the ability of bureaucratic governance to lead to outcomes such as better health, learning, job creation, growth or a better environment are not centrally considered in Max Weber’s writing. Note how Weber (1947:337) argues here, based on “experience”, which positive results will follow when a well-functioning bureaucracy is established: Experience tends universally to show that purely bureaucratic type of administrative organization […] is, from a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and […] is superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and in its reliability. It thus makes possible a particularly high degree of calculability of results for the heads of the organization and for those acting in relation to it. It is finally superior both in intensive efficiency and in the scope of its operations, and is formally capable of application to all kinds of administrative tasks. Note that the emphasis here is not least on the ability to “calculate” (or rigorously analyze and predict), the ensuing results of the organization’s work that is considered a key benefit of bureaucratic governance. It is notably by rendering administration impersonal and thus separating administration from “private moral absolutism” that the state bureau affects “many of the qualitative features of government that are regularly taken for granted – for instance, formal equality, reliability, and procedural fairness in the treatment of cases” (du Gay 2011:18). According to Weber, the establishment of a bureaucracy does lead to one potentially important societal outcome, in that it “favors the leveling of social classes”. He describes this as a virtuous circle wherein the leveling of social classes in turn positively affects the development of bureaucracy by eliminating class privileges, which makes it less likely that “occupation of offices” happens based on belonging to a certain class or by the size of personal means. This 66 process “inevitably foreshadows the development of mass democracy” (Weber 1947:340). The efficiency of bureaucracy, in other words, is a prerequisite for effective democracy. Refinements of bureaucracy: An emerging science of optimizing decisionmaking Max Weber’s concept of bureaucracy was part of a broader movement rooted in academia and practice, which includes, in addition to Weber, other iconic thinkers, such as Frederick Winslow Taylor, Henri Fayol, Woodrow Wilson, and Chester Barnard. While these authors were united in their emphasis on efficiency and rationalization, notable differences in scope and emphasis exist within their writings. Taylor, in 1911, sought to improve industrial efficiency, often by seeking out the (sometimes counter-intuitive) "one best way" to accomplish a given task through experimentation and careful observation. His approach led to further structuring of the details of work by specifying how work should best be done, step-by-step. Working independently, but roughly contemporaneously, Fayol, with his article General and Industrial Management from 1916 (in English 1949) also proposed principles and formal statements notably similar to those of Weber and Taylor. Where Weber sought to rationalize collective activity partly to offset tendencies toward despotism, for Taylor and Fayol, considerations of efficiency came to the fore. A common theme in the work of all three, however, is the desirability of removing individual discretion from individuals doing the work, externalizing into abstract principles how work is done, and separating planning of work from its doing. Building on this work, practicing executive and scholar Chester Barnard (1938) added richness and nuance to this line of work that increasingly framed administration as a form of science, which could and should be subjected to experimentation to derive normative ideas about what might work better. 2.2.1 Towards a “science” of public administration Herbert Simon's celebrated book Administrative Behavior, first published in 1947, opened a new chapter in the study of administration. In it, from the outset, he deliberately connects with the already established tradition of casting administration as a science, aspiring to describe administrative organizations "in a way that will provide the basis for scientific analysis." What is new in Simon's approach, at least in emphasis, however, is his belief that "decision-making is the heart of administration, and that the vocabulary of administrative theory must be derived from the logic and psychology of human choice." It would be difficult to overestimate the 67 influence of this framing on managerial thinking. Eventually, this work, and its many derivative ideas – a body of thought that would win him the Nobel prize in Economics in 1978 – rerouted the movement toward making administration scientific into a theory of how managers make decisions. Or to be more precise, in Simon’s terminology, how managers make choices about alternative courses of action (Simon 1997:77). One might also see this movement as a shift towards de- and prescribing not only the structures and procedures of efficient organization, but towards de- and prescribing the procedures needed for the efficient making of decisions. When I write both describe and prescribe, it is because although there is much focus, especially among the academics, on how managers make decisions, these theories have often been turned into normative systems, approaches and even wide-reaching programs that frame how decisionmaking should be carried out. These movements have significantly, perhaps even overwhelmingly, influenced business and government across the latter half of the 20th century. Roughly concurrent with the initiative publication of Simon’s book, von Neumann and Morgenstern developed seminal work, first published in 1944, that founded game theory as a mathematical discipline (von Neumann & Morgenstern 1994). Fundamental to game-theoretic formulations was a search for optimal solutions, equilibria in which multiple rational actors making independent choices might arrive at best individual outcomes via mutual optimization. Although Simon's work explicitly departed from the idea that human actors could optimize, thus that optimization models were descriptive of human behavior, he nevertheless shared with von Neumann and Morgenstern the belief that seeking optimal choices, doing one’s best within individual limitations, was normatively appropriate. This notion, that decision-making is essentially about a search for best decisions, influenced much of the subsequent thinking about management. Operations research, or “OR,” which shared with game theory an orientation toward finding optimal solutions, also developed in this time frame. Operations research had its origins in World War II military management efforts, not least as planning the successful conveyance of cargo to Europe in ways that avoided Nazi u-boats (Waddington 1973). After the war, these applied mathematical tools and techniques (and their intellectual descendants) turned out to be quite widely useful. C. West Churchman et. al. explained in 1957 that: “O.R. is the application of scientific methods, techniques, and tools to problems involving the operations of a system so as to provide those in control of the system with optimum solutions to the problems.” 68 (1957:18). Emboldened by the early successes of OR, some proponents envisioned grand expansion of the field into a general, quantitative and rational approach to management and decision-making. For example, George Dantzig, in the early 1960s, ambitiously suggested that most societal and public problems could ultimately be stated as mathematical problems. He had developed a general framework that expressed problems in terms of a quantity to be optimized, represented as a mathematical function, subject to a set of constraints, represented as inequality statements involving the same variables. When problems could be thus represented, Dantzig noted that the path to optimal decisions could be “programd”: The observation that a number of military, economic, and industrial problems can be expressed (or reasonably approximated) by mathematical systems of linear inequalities and equations has helped give rise to the development of linear programming. (1998:10) Dantzig believed that production control and decision-making could eventually be almost entirely automated, leaving only limited roles for “human operators”, such as transmitting instructions from the decision-making calculus to the production system. According to Gill et. al. (2007), Dantzig proposed that even very urgent real-world problems could be subjected to system planning, modelling, and optimization. It would just be a matter, he believed, of committing enough people and resources. Dantzig’s conception of a “total system” approach to addressing, or in fact “solving,” complex problems ranging from investment planning, to engineering design, physical, biological and ecological systems as well as urban planning and transportation, made him a visionary of sorts. However, the idea that it would be possible to model any kind of problem in a way that fit well enough into his or similar frameworks, which would subsequently yield to the admittedly impressive mathematical techniques of OR, turned out to be problematic. As I will discuss later in this chapter, this has been a recurrent error of this tradition, to assume that all problems are well suited to analytical, rationalistic, and mathematical approaches (if problem formulators are clever enough). A high point (or, depending on your point of view, perhaps a low point) for application of this type of rational, optimization thinking came during the Vietnam War, when Ford Motor Company President Robert McNamara was invited to head the US Defence Department by president John F. Kennedy (he later also served Lyndon Johnson in this position, until 1968). As 69 the Vietnam War escalated, McNamara famously introduced OR related techniques into both war fighting operations and departmental administration. In war fighting, the techniques, which called for maximizing quantities such as enemy “kill ratios,” became discredited in time, as they encouraged officers on the battlefield to artificially inflate numbers, and the inflated numbers served badly in planning prosecution of the war (Turse 2013). 2.2.2 Rise of the policy analyst Such analytical frameworks acquired a more enduring foothold in administration, however, in the Defense Department and beyond, in the form of what became known as the Planning, Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS) (Downs & Larkey 1986; Amadae 2003). PPBS was focused, as a policy program, on considering decision alternatives, and eventually presenting thorough, data-driven and highly analytical recommendations to top policy level decision makers, including the President of the United States. At its roots, according to Radin (2000), PPBS took departure in, amongst others fields, microeconomic theory, quantitative decision theory, and techniques from operations research. As such, it shortcut and overrode more traditional approaches to decision making embraced by the military establishment (which made McNamara unpopular in those quarters).12 Although the assumptions, data, and analysis were made openly available for public scrutiny, the content of the models was ostensibly so incomprehensible that it was often impossible to retrace how the different decision alternatives had been arrived at (ibid. 2003). In an effort to salvage a systematic approach to management practices into the wider field of policy making, the political science scholar Yehezkel Dror, in 1967, published a Public Administration Review article called “Policy Analysts: A New Professional Role in Government”. Dror sought to distinguish policy analysis from systems analysis, and to establish the role of “Policy Analyst” as a particular government staff function (Radin 2000).13 Although this drew attention to the importance of considering a wider context for decision-making than systems analysis could ordinarily encompass, Dror was still focused on “systematic” tools. However, there was also the notion that an emphasis on futures and a search for new “policy 12 Part of the critique was that since McNamara used civilians as policy analysts, relevant military knowledge and judgment was not taken into account (Amadae 2003). 13 As a curiosity, Dror published, in 1971, a book titled Design for Policy Sciences. 70 alternatives” were important tasks of the policy analyst. The question then of course is how to evaluate such different “alternatives” against each other? The need to evaluate and compare complex alternatives led to the widespread use of another tool that rose to influence in policy decision making: cost benefit analysis (CBA). CBA had been introduced, in a US context, much earlier, in the late 1930s. Starting with the 1939 Flood Control Act the emphasis of CBA was to ensure that the benefits of a particular public intervention could be quantified and assured to not be lower than the estimated costs. But CBA found its way into wide use in the 1960s, applied not only by McNamara in his domain, but also across many others, including water resource planning and quality, recreation travel and land conservation. The important role of CBA in the US, and eventually in much public management practice across the OECD, continues into the present day: The Obama administration installed Cass Sunstein, modern day scholar and author, as head of a regulatory office responsible for calculating the expected costs and benefits of all key policies introduced by the US government (Sunstein 2013). 2.2.3 Design as a scientific discipline? Interestingly, and as a nod to the parallel developments taking place in the design field, it is worth mentioning that also industrial design in the first half of the 20th century experienced an increased focus on “scientific” approaches to solving (design) problems. Without taking the parallel too far, a case in point is the influential work of industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, whose design firm in the 1950s introduced anthropometry. Based on detailed measurements of “standard” male and female bodies, illustrated as the personas “Joe” and “Josephine”, Dreyfuss developed a set of measures, ultimately made public in the book Measure of Man (Dreyfuss 1960). Based on data from post WWII military records, this ergonomic data guide could be used to ensure that any design and its functions was fit for the human body. This work, which has come to include both physical and psychological dimensions, is also known as “human factors” and was influential in providing a degree of objectivity to industrial design (Flinchum 1997; Dreyfuss 2003).14 The work of Dreyfuss reminds us how the field of design can also take on rather scientific, analytical forms even as it is concerned with human experience. 14 It could be added that also iconic Danish furniture designer Kaare Klint was among the pioneers of anthropometrics, and the notion of an analytical approach to designing. Already in the 1920s he developed sets of 71 What I am attempting to demonstrate in this account of the history of the development of public administration thinking is that a movement toward “scientific” approaches established itself rather early and has remained an enduring feature of many dominant approaches to societal problems. In public administration, such approaches have been valued not only for their apparent efficiency, but also for their seeming objectiveness. By representing reality in equations and then turning over the process of solution to the impartial mechanisms of mathematics, it seemed that outcomes would be somehow fairer, free from the biased application of despotic discretion. In this sense, although the methods of OR, systems analysis, and CBA have travelled far from their Weberian origins, they are nevertheless the result of continuation of a line of thinking along a more or less constant trajectory, subsequently embraced by thinkers from Taylor, to Simon, to Dantzig, to Sunstein, and which occasionally leaked over into design practice (e.g., in the work of Dreyfuss). It should not seem surprising, then, that these ways of thinking shared assumptions and principles, including the following: • A single “best” solution can be found. First, the notion that there is an optimal “solution” that can be arrived at, just as there is in most mathematical problems. This implies that the “solution”, in this sense, is pre-existing, “out there” to be found, or chosen. It is a feature of the world waiting to be represented in a way that lends itself to programd solution techniques. • Scientific analytical and optimization approaches are the way to find the solution. Second, the “solution” can be approached to an ever-finer degree by the use of rigorous, data-driven analytic approaches. • The power of solution techniques will render human discretion in decision-making less relevant. Third – still being discussed vigorously today – that with the rise of more advanced analytical technology and computing and processing power, the role of human beings in arriving at decisions will be diminished if not entirely eradicated by artificial means. measurements with a particular focus on the relationships between the human body and furniture (Engholm & Salomon 2017). 78 problem space the manager is facing. Some also argue that there may not be a “best” solution waiting to be found by rigorous analysis, but that some very different ways and models of decision-making might be needed. Essentially, they are suggesting that we may need to start climbing entirely different mountains. In the following I explore what this entails. The public sector and its problems19 The rise to the top of the “mountain” of organized, efficient, structured, rationalized, systematized and knowledge-based decision-making has not necessarily been as successful as some of its proponents had hoped. Ronald Reagan stated in 1981 that "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."20 The past generation or so has seen a range of calls that lament the enduring crises of public organizations. Current global developments, notably the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union and the rise of a populist president in the United States, certainly underline the pressure on governments to meet and manage citizen’s expectations. 2.4.1 Calling for reinvention In what was possibly the defining work on public governance for that decade, and also a seminal work in articulating the needed reform principles, Osborne and Gaebler (1992:1) called for a “reinvention of government”, stating rather cataclysmically that in the United States: Our public schools are the worst in the developed world. Our health care system is out of control. Our courts and prisons are so overcrowded that convicted felons walk free. And many of our proudest cities are virtually bankrupt. Contemporary debates about public schools, on health care reform, crime and city budgets sound eerily similar. In a recent comment on Osborne and Gaebler’s vision of “reinvention”, and his own government’s efforts at implementing it, former President Bill Clinton said that, 19 This section builds in part in Bason (2014) 20 Inaugural address, January 20, 1981 (Reagan 1981) 79 I think we really did a good job with that reinventing-government effort when we started, but it was alien territory when we started (…) constantly re-examining whether you were actually achieving your purposes (The Atlantic 2014). The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, likewise highlights enduring challenges but also new forms of problems, stating that: “The evolution of society requires public administrations to tackle many new challenges, including those around demographic change, employment, mobility, security, environment and many others.” (2013a:1). Perhaps the shift over the last few decades has been the recognition that, for better or for worse, there is no single domain in our societies where governments are not expected to play some role. Even when it comes to stimulating innovation in industry and business, the role of government is from some sides seen as essential (Mazzucato 2014). Much of this ostensibly has to do with the changing nature of the problems public organizations are facing; however, much may also have to do with the principles from which we have derived our current models of governance, organization, management and decision-making, and the degree to which they are amenable to our challenges. In fact, has it not always been so that public institutions have found themselves challenged by the need to address “public problems”? Where the facts are most obscure, where precedents are lacking, where novelty and confusion pervade everything, the public in all its unfitness is compelled to make its most important decisions. The hardest problems are those, which institutions cannot handle. These are public problems (Lippmann 1925:121) The inability of institutions, expressed in the quote above by American journalist and writer Walter Lippmann in his 1925 work The Phantom Public, to “handle” public problems, has not become less pressing with time. One very prevalent argument put forward by observers of public policy and administration – including the academic community – is that the nature of the problems the public sector faces is changing while, at the same time, public management grows more and more out of touch with them (Downs & Larkey 1986; Attwood et. al. 2003; Carlsson 2004; Kelman 2005; Seddon 2008; Eggers & Singh 2009; Mulgan 2009; Parsons 2010; Bourgon 2011; Greve 2013; Hassan 2014; Colander & Kupers 2014; Doz & Koskonen 2014; Ansell & Torfing 2014). If that is really the case, this clearly goes against Simon’s contention that “To the 80 best of our current knowledge, the underlying processes used to solve ill-defined problems are not different from those used to solve well-defined problems.” (1997:128). The governance question becomes whether the Weberian model implicitly assumed that the modern organization faced a certain problem type, a certain societal reality, which was more stable and predictable than current problems and realities. Did Weber’s model rightly (for its time) address problems such as predictability, accountability, efficiency and scale, but fail to sufficiently (for our time) address the problem of creating better public outcomes for complex social and behavioral challenges? It is not my intention here to concede that optimization models of management were necessarily ever well suited even to problems that were “only” difficult or complicated. It seems however that the Weberian conception of public administration helped create an environment, a governance context, where an analytically driven “optimization approach” to decision-making became the ideal model of management. Jocelyne Bourgon, a former top-ranking civil servant turned author and teacher, acknowledges in A New Synthesis of Public Administration: Serving in the 21st Century that in some cases public managers will be able to rely on tried and tested past approaches and tools. However, in most cases “(…) they will need to chart a new course as they face new circumstances and unique challenges.” (2012:19). According to Bourgon, and many of her contemporaries, these “new circumstances” partly have to do with the volume and scope of the issues and challenges that governments are expected to deal with – in short, with the characteristic of twenty-first century problems. The volume and scope of government has become all-encompassing. Bruno Latour (2007:133) points out that no domain of human life is today beyond the boundaries of government responsibility and attention: “Every day we discover to our great dismay more elements to take into account and to throw into the melting pot of public life, not less”. In fact, whether it is the very climate we live in, the air we breathe, governments have in recent years been called to action. The Anthropocene is upon us. The human-induced consequences of environmental manipulation, industrial production, urbanization and mobility have become increasingly prevalent, not only in our physical and natural world but also in our social fabric. A European Commission vision paper notes that citizens today are more than ever aware of their rights, have 81 better access to information via information technology, and hence expect governments to do more (2013a). So, whereas “everything” is designed, “everything” is also the public’s problem. The wider issue, however, is whether the nature of the problems faced by public decisionmakers have remained stable, and (to reference Simon) whether it matters to governance and decision-making what kind of problem we are facing? 2.4.2 Wicked problems and complexity Some scholars point out that the problem space, or context, within which public organizations operate severely constrain and challenge effective government action. Carlsson (2004:36), in his contribution on the policy perspective of managing as designing, asks: How can you make sensible policy or strategy in a nondeterministic, evolutionary, highly complex world, that is, a world where the most desirable outcomes are unknown but there may be many possible acceptable outcomes, where change is characterized by both path dependence and unpredictability, and where there are many diverse components, interaction, and feedback among components and multiple dimensions to each problem? This is the design problem with respect to public policy. Carlsson argues that “sensible” policy (or public management, or strategy or governance), might not be the same as “rational” policy, as we have discussed it here. But then what might it be? Framing the challenge of how to govern effectively as a design problem suggests that there might be a contribution of design, to addressing it. In the following I will expand on this question of the character of public problems. Contextually, as Carlsson highlights above, there is a growing recognition that the social systems which governments seek to influence are “complex and adaptive, and continuously evolving over time” (Colander & Kupers 2014:5). This implies that at least a significant set of the problems faced by public managers calls for different kinds of policy and public service responses. One fundamental way of distinguishing between problem types is between: 82 • Tame problems, or well-defined, technical and engineering problems. These problems can be understood and addressed through an appreciation and careful, systematic assessment of their constituent parts. Although they may be extremely “difficult” or “complicated” (Bourgon 2011:20-21) or “hard” (Martin 2009:95), they can be effectively addressed through rigorous analysis. It is as a point of departure relevant for decision-makers to draw extensively on knowledge of existing evidence and “best practice” (Snowden & Boone 2007). • Wicked, or complex, problems, which are ill-defined and can only be addressed by way of systematic experimentation. These types of problems, or contexts, were first articulated in some detail by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber (1973). They famously argued that a certain kind of problems, or planning dilemmas, are better understood through examining the interrelations and dependencies between the constituent parts, and by “probing” in order to generate dynamics, which then reveal underlying and hidden relationships. Many public policy problems fall into this category, since, as paraphrased by Wayne Parsons (2010:17), the design of public policies is “a very different matter from that of designing for a moon landing”. This proposed distinction between problem types is key. As discussed in the previous section, scholars and practitioners ranging from Weber to McNamara, Dantzig and Simon did not seem to believe that problems could differ in their nature, at least not enough to fit badly with an analytical approach. However, if it can be argued that some types of problems are fundamentally different than others, might it also be that the way of addressing (if not ultimately solving) them would also need to differ fundamentally? Let me first consider the notion of “complex problems” before returning to “wicked problems”. The last decade has seen a significant rise in interest in understanding complexity – the theory and dynamics of highly interconnected systems. Part of the reason is quite possibly, as discussed above, that our 21st century world is in fact getting “complexer and complexer” (Colander & Kupers 2014:47). Goldsmith & Eggers, in their work in networked governance, underline that “increasingly complex societies force public officials to develop new models of governance” (2004:7). Steinberg (2014) likewise points out that the complexity at hand is caught between 83 human behavior, cultural traits, ideals, values, physical principles, and perceived facts. The task, says Steinberg, is to find the right simplifiers for issues spanning many domains. From a policy practitioner’s standpoint, this raises several questions, where one of the most pressing ones may concern the issue of diagnosis: How does one come to know what kind of problem space is in play – ranging from “tame” to “wicked” or perhaps “super wicked”? Given the problem dynamics, the policy environment, and the tools available, what kinds of process and potential solutions should we look for? The claim made by most observers seems partly to be that policy makers and public managers have underestimated (or simply not understood) the extent to which the problem space they find themselves in is fundamentally characterized by wicked and complex problems; issues such as education, health and social policy are all characterized by a very large set of actors acting simultaneously; extremely high volumes of users and thus interactions, and by unpredictable dynamics. Partly the argument is that the kinds of megatrends discussed in chapter 2, including rapid changes to life styles, health, globalization, demography, mobility, deregulation, technology, etc. all introduce new sources of dynamics and unexpected relationships. The social entrepreneur and activist Zaid Hassan, for instance, argues, that “…our current challenges are profoundly different than those of the past. Our familiar modern responses no longer work because they‘re based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what we are facing” (2014:17). Similarly, Wayne Parsons (2010:27) suggests that: We face problems for which causal relationships are so complex that we cannot know when one problem ends and another begins, or whether the problems themselves have been caused by previous or existing policies. We confront a world in which “what works?” is a simplistic and nonsensical question. “What works?” like probability, is a poor guide to action in a world in which “problems” are not continuous over time and space. Unfortunately, for all the recognition of the novelty brought forward by technology, globalization and other mega-trends, the sense that public problems are being ill-addressed is far from new. Donald Schön, in his 1983 treatise on reflective practice, asserts that “Professionally designed solutions to public problems have had unanticipated consequences, sometimes worse than the problems they were designed to solve” (1983:4). An important point here is the phrase 84 professionally designed, which points to the classical role of policy experts deriving “solutions” and proposing decisions on the basis of rigorous data and analysis. Schön could very well have been thinking of the decision-making and analytical models proposed by gentlemen such as McNamara, Dantzig and Simon here. 2.4.3 Characterizing “wicked” A key question in this thesis, then, is what might be useful approaches to innovation under the conditions in which public managers operate? For the purpose of understanding the context in which contemporary public governance and management is being challenged, and to understand the quest for new approaches and perhaps even vocabularies, it seems to make sense to dive a little deeper into our understanding of the wickedness of problems and the complex context in which public managers govern. Originally, Rittel and Webber (1973) put forward ten criteria to characterize wicked problems, the first being that they have no clear or final definition, and so can be continuously redefined. The original list contains some overlap and repetition; for the sake of clarity, Martin (2009) suggests that wicked problems can be identified by four dimensions. They are presented here with additional substance added from other sources: • Causal relationships are unclear and dynamic. Root causes of the problem are difficult, if not impossible, to identify; they are ambiguous and illusive. Part of the reason for the confusion around causality is also that many public problems are ultimately behavioral. During the last decade, scholars ranging from Nobel laureate Daniel Kahnemann’s work on how people make decisions, Thinking Fast and Slow (2010), to Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational (2010), and Thaler & Sunstein’s runaway success Nudge (2008) and Sunsteins more recent Simpler (2013), have pointed out that human behavior is not as easily understood as we might like to think, and cannot be predicted with much accuracy. Following the ostensible failings of traditional economics in the wake of the global financial crisis, fields such as behavioral economics and psychology have gained prominence. Another part of the confusion around causality is more political. In a public sector context, the root causes, and thus the very definition of the nature of the problem, can be highly prone to ideological contention: Is immigration a problem or a resource for a society? Is climate change a major problem or just a manageable consequence of the quest for growth? 85 • The problem does not fit into a known category; in fact there are no “classes” of wicked problems. Snowden & Boone (2007) have argued that this implies that available “good” or “best” practices cannot be applied effectively as a course of problem solving. This poses particular and important limitations to the public management notion of “evidencebased policy” which implies that policy decisions should be based on solid knowledge of “what works”. • Attempts at problem solving changes the problem. Devising potential approaches to the problem tend to change how it is understood; and implemented solutions are consequential in the sense that they create a new situation for the next trial; so, all solutions are “one shots”. This is not least the case in the highly exposed domain of public policy, where as soon as stakeholders learn of potential ideas, plans, laws or initiatives they start acting strategically and thus influence the policy landscape even before any action has been undertaken. This prompts the need for more iterative, nonlinear and possibly more inclusive approaches – what Halse et. al. 2010 call generative – ways of exploring and addressing the problem. • No stopping rule. Further, wicked problems do not have any firm basis for judging whether they are “solved” or not; as Rowe (1987:41) formulates it, they have no “stopping rule”. Solutions cannot be judged as true or false, but merely as “better or worse” (Ritchey 2011:92). Whenever a solution is proposed, it can always be improved upon. Due to the indeterminacy of the problem definition, there will always be alternative problem definitions possible, and thus entirely new solution spaces can be envisaged. In fact, one can question whether wicked problems can ever truly be “solved”. In a public sector context this issue is hardened by the many stakeholders often engaged in a particular policy field, which can have wildly divergent notions of what is “good” or “bad” – based not on empirical or “objective” data, but based on ideology, power calculations or institutional interests. 86 At times of rapid change and increased turbulence, Rittel & Webbers notion of “wicked problems” may even be too limited a notion; Stanford University’s Banny Banerjee (2014:71) characterizes some contemporary public challenges as “super-wicked” in that they: (…) Have most notably the additional attributes of massive scale, urgency and complex interactions between many subsystems that are themselves wicked problems. A “Grand Challenge” such as ensuring global water security certainly transcends our current disciplinary limitations but the real difficulty lies in the possibility that the nature of these challenges are emblematic of deeply entrenched flaws in our institutional structures, our underlying theories, definitions of success and our inability to act. Andrea Siodmok (2014) similarly proposes that the public sector is facing more ill-defined problems than it used to. She argues that such “mega-challenges” require a more holistic, qualitative, contextual and experience-based approach to policy. 2.4.4 The problems with wicked problems The implications of these insights for the issue of innovation and change in the public sector are potentially significant. Let me briefly discuss two perspectives. First, as Parsons (2010) underlines, recognizing that many of the challenges facing public organizations are akin to complex, wicked problems, run counter to the notion that accumulating and applying rigorous analysis and evidence of “what works” is the key to public service reform. The movement around evaluation research and evidence-based policy making, which has been strongly associated with the rise of the New Public Management governance paradigm (Hood 1991; Osborne & Gaebler 1992; Rist 1993; Pollitt 2003), is challenged. The same are, one might argue, the big data and analytics movements. David Snowden, in the now-famous Harvard Business Review article, asserts a similar point when it comes to decision-making under conditions of complexity and emergence (Snowden & Boone 2007). He asserts that the character of the problem space defines what are the most appropriate approaches to decisionmaking. Again, here he is in opposition to Simon (1997) who does not believe that appropriate decision-making process differs between problem types. In his so-called Cynefin framework, 87 Snowden suggests that under conditions of relative simple or even “complicated” problems, the application of “best” or “good” practice is relevant. As Bourgon contends, in such situations “governments know what actions are possible, and have relatively good knowledge about their most likely impacts” (2012:20). Public managers can relatively comfortably stick with their usual ways of doing things. But under conditions of a high level of complexity, managers cannot pull existing solutions off the shelf. Here, the problem is characterized by multiple actors and a high degree of interdependence. As Bourgon (2012) underlines, here, power is highly dispersed, and the problem space manifests a high degree of unpredictability and emergent characteristics. Instead, say Snowden & Boone (2007), decision-makers must “probe” their way to relevant insights about what would constitute effective action. In other words, managers need to act to the best of their ability, even if tentatively, then “sense” or register the changes and results coming from their actions, and then rapidly adapt their efforts accordingly. One could call this approach an ability to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity (Michlewski 2015). This understanding of management under conditions of complexity is in many ways at odds with the analytical, data-driven and rational approaches to management that we have inherited, and which arguably to this day are prevalent in public organizations, and indeed in many business organizations: “It’s hardly surprising, then, that embracing uncertainty and ambiguity goes against their very foundations.” (Michlewski 2015:53). All this is not to say that the possibly changing character of problems is the only argument for adopting a different approach to management and governance of public institutions. Perhaps, to again invoke the image of the mountain, the shifting nature of the challenges public bodies face simply accelerates the recognition that we may have climbed the wrong peak. Second, what if the tendency to frame public policy in terms of “problems” is in itself problematic? By suggesting that the business of government is to deal with “problems” – whether they are wicked or not – casts the public manager into a particular role. As Christiansen (2013) and Junginger (2014a) argues, the problem frame renders governments in a reactive position, one of analyzing problems and trying to deduce “solutions”, rather than one of appreciating situations that might give rise to creative new visions. Henry Mintzberg has made a similar argument when it comes to business strategy: By emphasizing how organizations must address problems through their strategy, there has been so much emphasis on analysis that people have forgotten that analysis is not synthesis (Mintzberg et al 2005). So, whereas there is a powerful argument for a new type of governing because of the changing nature of the 94 3.1.3 Models of public governance The need for better alignment between public organizations, their objectives and their changing context has certainly not gone unnoticed among public management practitioners and scholars. So, what are the innovations taking place within public administration, how is the existing legacy being challenged, and to what extent might the changes occurring even be somehow aligned with the innovations taking place within the design profession? In the following section, I will discuss this last point in more detail as I turn to a consideration of which new directions for public governance have been, and are being, suggested on the back of this criticism: How might alternative governance models seek to offset or ameliorate some of the main drawbacks of the bureaucratic or traditional governance model? These matters have been discussed in the public management literature intensely for the last two decades. My purpose here is to highlight some of the key themes from this vast literature. One of the most-quoted contributions to the public management literature of the past decade or two is Benington and Hartley’s (2001) distinction between Weberian bureaucracy or “traditional” public administration, the “new” public management, and “networked governance”. Figure 6: Competing paradigms: Changing ideological conceptions of governance and public management ! Traditional public administration New Public Management Networked governance Context Stable Competitive Continuously changing Population Homogeneous Atomized Diverse Needs/problems Straightforward, defined by professionals Wants, expressed through the market Complex, volatile and prone to risk Strategy State and producer centered Market and customer centered Shaped by civil society Governance through actors Hierarchies Public servants Markets Purchasers and providers Clients and contractors Networks and partnerships Civic leadership Key concepts Public goods Public choice Public value Source: Benington and Hartley (2001) 95 These three ideal types of public governance have framed much of the subsequent discussions on innovations in management and governance (Goldman & Eggers 2004; Hartley 2005; Pollitt & Bouckaert 2011). They are, however, in many ways artificial distinctions since one would be hard pressed to find any contemporary Western public sector organization, which did not display some form of hybrid, or mix, of them all. We have seen, in a previous chapter, the characteristics of bureaucracy, which emerged in the early 20th century. Before exploring the current search for the next paradigm, which Benington & Hartley called networked governance, but which I will generally characterize as emerging public governance, I will briefly discuss the key tenets of the New Public Management. The new public management: A call for reinvention The new public management, which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, offered a compelling set of principles that set off what has arguably been a world-wide public sector reform movement that has continued to this day (Hood 1991; Osborne and Gaebler 1992; Pollitt 2003; Alford 2009; Ansell & Torfing 2014; Hood & Dixon 2015). The British academic Christopher Hood first coined the term in his seminal article A public management for all seasons (Hood 1991). However, the probably most central work that sparked this movement was Osborne and Gaebler’s Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector, published in 1992. It is worth noting that the “burning platform”, or hopes for change formulated by Osborne and Gaebler, were strikingly similar to the arguments made today by proponents of the emerging management paradigms. For instance, consider this quote (Osborne & Gaebler 1992:15): Today’s environment demands institutions that are extremely flexible and adaptable. It demands institutions that deliver high-quality goods and services, squeezing ever more bang out of every buck. It demands institutions that are responsive to their customers, offering choices of non-standardized services; that lead by persuasion and incentives rather than commands; that give their employees a sense of meaning and control, even ownership. It demands institutions that empower citizens rather than simply serving them. 96 In Reinventing Government, Osborne and Gaebler introduced ten principles for New Public Management that they felt described some of the most innovative and forward-thinking public organizations of their contemporary society. In other words, they offered not so much ideas about what should be done to “reinvent” the state; they showed what was already happening. Among the principles, there was a strong emphasis on learning from the private sector and benefiting from the introduction of market mechanisms and principles to public service provision. The promotion of competition between service providers and the reframing of citizens as customers, who should be given a range of choices, were each devoted significant treatment in the book. In essence, the market mechanism, according to Osborne and Gaebler (1992:19-20), should replace bureaucratic mechanisms. They even suggest that public organizations should get into the business of “earning money” rather than only spending it. Additionally, public organizations should measure their performance not on the basis of their expenditures (inputs) or activities, but on the basis of the results and outcomes they generate. Since the reform movement was initiated by Osborne & Gaebler, numerous other scholars have observed, catalogued, commented and proposed how the new public management worked, or did not work, at accomplishing its stated objectives (Alford 2009; Pollitt & Bouckaert 2011; Christensen & Lægreid 2013). John Alford (2009) suggests that the initial success of Osborne & Gaebler’s work was in part that it posited an enthusiastic reform agenda with a wide range of alternative tools, which governments could turn to in order to become more efficient (productive) and effective (outcome-oriented). In total, Reinventing Government suggested 36 different alternative approaches to public service delivery (Osborne & Gaebler 1991). However, as governments from the US to the UK to New Zealand and Australia, and following suit in varying degrees, the Nordics and other northern European countries, embarked upon this new path, the contracting-out and market-oriented principles came to dominate. And these marketoriented tenets of the new public management have been extensively criticized in the context of the current debate on the emerging governance paradigm. Christopher Hood’s and Ruth Dixon’s evaluation of 30 years of new public management reforms in the UK provides one of the most comprehensive critiques (Hood & Dixon 2015). They draw on vast amounts of data to ultimately question whether British government, over the three decades long period, has become any better off through the reform efforts. The book has resonated widely outside the UK borders, including in Denmark. 97 Disappointment with what the new public management has become has led to new governance thinking, which includes some of the design based approaches that are the focus of this thesis. Although it is not widely recognized, Osborne and Gaebler did posit some of the principles that are now being discussed, and promoted as ways of dealing with the shortcomings of the new public management. Issues such as citizen and community involvement were there, but were largely drowned out by the managerial and market emphasis that evolved in practice. Osborne & Gaebler argued, for example, for more mission-driven goals, prevention, and decentralization of authority. Their highlighting of the need for government organizations to engage a wider span of sectors (public, private, civic) to address problems and create lasting impact resonates with today’s discussions on co-production and collective impact. Rediscovering the state: In search of an emerging governance paradigm Different ways of framing the emerging paradigm, which could replace or supplement bureaucracy and the new public management, abound, and go beyond the title provided originally by Bennington and Hartley. Alternative proposals include “Governing by network” (Goldsmith & Eggers 2004); “co-production” (Alford 2009); “collaborative governance” (Paquet 2009); “a new synthesis” (Bourgon 2011); “collaborative innovation” (Ansell & Torfing 2014); and “strategic agility” (Doz & Koskonen 2014). As Peters (2010:145) asserts: If bureaucracy has declined as a paradigm for the public sector, however, it has not been replaced with any single model that can provide descriptive and prescriptive certainty. Neither scholars attempting to capture the reality of contemporary public administration, nor politicians and managers attempting to make the system work on a day-to-day basis, have any simple model of what the contemporary reality is. Rather than a simple, or single, model for the next, emerging governance approach, a number of different models are currently in play. Christensen (2012) suggests that the organizational forms of public management have become increasingly complex and multifunctional. In a paper titled Ideas in Public Management Reform for the 2010s, Carsten Greve (2013) describes three selfstyled conceptual alternatives from the literature on public management. “Self-styled” refer to the fact that they all explicitly describe themselves as alternatives to the new public 98 management. It is useful, for the purpose of this thesis, to expand a bit on these conceptual alternatives as they largely make up the playing field onto which new approaches linked to design processes would be inserted. 3.3.1 Variations over an emerging governance model The emerging governance model is not a blank space, it is already full of ideas, suggestions, frameworks and approaches – some based on empirical practice, others perhaps still more theoretically informed. The interesting issue will be how design approaches might interact with it. Greve (2013) proposes the following alternatives: Digital-Era Governance, which has mainly been formulated by Patrick Dunleavy (Dunleavy et al. 2006a). Key components in this governance thinking is obviously the opportunities raised by digital (e-government) services, including issues of transparency, social media and shared service centers. Dunleavy et al. describe digital-era governance as being composed of three elements (Dunleavy et al. 2006a: Table 2): First, the roll back of agencies, joined-up governance, regovernmentalization, reinstating central processes, radically squeezing production costs, re-engineering back office functions, procurement concentration and specialization and network simplification. Second, a needs-based holism including client-based or need-based reorganization, one-stop provision, interactive and ask-once information seeking, data warehousing, end-to-end service re-engineering and agile government processes. And third, “digitization” processes including electronic service delivery, new forms of automated processes, radical disintermediation, active channel streaming, facilitating isocratic administration and co-production, moving toward open-book government. It might be noted that many of these suggestions resonate with Doz & Koskonens analysis. Public Value Management, which has been suggested by Benington and Moore (2011). Here the key themes include strategy-making, performance governance, and innovation and strategic human resource management. This strand of governance thinking builds in part on Mark Moore’s earlier and influential work on public value (Moore 1995). In terms of strategy-making for public value creation, according to Greve, Benington & Moore places public managers in “a strategic triangle” between a legitimizing and authorizing environment, an organizing environment, and a results oriented environment. Greve (pp. 55-56) suggests (referencing 99 Alford & O’Flynn) that the public value management framework has something different to offer than new public management. Whereas new public management is essentially competitive government, public value management is post-competitive; it focuses more on relationships, sees collective preferences as expressed, sees how multiple objectives are pursued, including service outputs, satisfaction, outcomes, trust and legitimacy, and it recognizes multiple accountability systems. Whereas the preferred system of service delivery under the new public management paradigm is (or has become to mean) the private sector, or tightly defined arms-length public agencies, public value management’s delivery system “is a menu of alternatives selected pragmatically.” New public value management also expands on the notion of “performance governance” as an integrated, institutional framework that includes use of data for managing not only performance but also transparency. Finally, according to Greve (2013), the agenda of public sector innovation is rather explicitly accommodated in public value management. Collaborative Governance, or New Public Governance. Scholars such as O’Leary and Bingham (2009), Osborne (2010a, 2010b), Donahue and Zeckhauser (2011) and Ansell & Torfing (2014) formulate this paradigm. Some of the central concepts are networks and collaboration, publicprivate partnerships and new ways of engaging active citizens. Greve (2013:58) points out that new public governance can be viewed as an overarching theory of institutionalized relationships within society, including relationships between public organizations and the for- and not-for profit sectors. New public governance hereby focuses attention on partnerships, networks, joined-up services, and new ways to work together. The numerous ways that citizens can become active and enter into co-producing relationships are key (Alford 2009; Newman and Clarke 2009). In this paradigm, the strategic orchestration of public-private partnerships, allowing sharing of risk or leveraging of resources, is also a key theme. Finally, when it comes to citizen engagement, new public governance suggests that efforts can be stepped up and become more systematic. The rise of public sector innovation and design labs, which I will discuss briefly towards the end of this thesis, may in part be seen as an example of this (Bason 2014). However, it is worth noting that the collaborative governance paradigm, upon closer scrutiny, is not so much expression of a radically different approach to an emerging governance model but draws rather extensively on the networked public governance and management tradition we saw already with Benington & Hartley (2001) and subsequent work such as Goldman & Eggers (2004). As I will explore further in the thesis’ chapters 10 and 11, it is 100 possible that design approaches might provide additional dynamism and even direction to this “collaborative turn” in emerging governance. 3.3.2 Emergent public governance: Replacement or overlay? A more general point concerning these different paradigms, starting at least with New Public Management, but perhaps including “traditional” bureaucratic public administration, is that they appear to include a broader set of ideas than are realized in practice. What is at issue may not so much be what a governance paradigm includes (or at least not only what it includes), as what gets chosen by public managers and their organizations “a la carte” from the paradigm to apply in practice. Put another way, the interpretation and concrete implementation of a governance approach – in a given context – is probably a strong determinant of its success. What is intended in a framework is not always what is realized; a framework gets credited or discredited based on what it becomes in practice, rather than on its own merits. The efficacy of an emerging paradigm could therefore also be judged by the likelihood that it lends itself well to implementation. Carsten Greve’s accounting of the state of the art certainly indicates that the search for the next, emerging governance paradigm is still very much on-going. While they differ in focus, some patterns seem to stand out across the three different alternatives described above. In a summary of these “post-new public management” reform strands, Tom Christensen (2012) argues that governance elements and networks are supplementing hierarchy and market as coordination mechanisms. Organizational forms such as partnerships and collegial bodies spanning organizational boundaries are being used more intensively. Networks have been introduced in most Western democracies as a way to increase the capacity of the public sector to deliver services (Klijn & Skelcher 2007). Christensen further suggests that there is a state-centric approach to governance in which public-public networks are a main component (Peters and Pierre 2003). Here civil servants have networking and boundary-spanning competences allowing them to act as go-betweens and brokers across organizational boundaries both vertically and horizontally. Additionally, public-public networks bring civil servants from different policy areas together to trump hierarchy (Hood and Lodge 2006), i.e. they become facilitators, negotiators and diplomats rather than exercising only hierarchical authority, which may be 101 especially important in tackling “wicked issues” that transcend traditional sectors and policy areas. What then of the models we inherited from the “traditional” public bureaucracy, and, in part, from the new public management? Agranoff (2014) suggests that bureaucracy will not necessarily succumb to a push of collaborative structures and networks; rather, it is likely that we will see complexes of “overlays” on hierarchical structure (2014: 41). Waldorff et. al. (2014:72) likewise draw on historical institutionalism to suggest that change in the public sector is essentially an incremental process which produces a “layering” of different institutions. In a given contemporary public organization, all three of Benington and Hartley’s ideal-types of governance models will typically co-exist in some dynamic mix. As does du Gay (2000), Waldorff and colleagues find that bureaucracy is in many ways still a “compelling” approach in current public management – and its “shadow” can still be found within many public innovation processes (Waldorff et. al. 2014:85). The legacies of “traditional” (bureaucratic) or “new” public management thus very much continue to form the backdrop and context against which the cohort of public managers studied in this thesis find themselves, and against which they work to find new “overlays” or even to “dismantle” their current systems. For example, they grapple with the inadequacies of market-based “competitive models” (involving outsourcing to private providers) that have become prevalent in employment and health services; or, they struggle to come to terms with a much more complex and nuanced understanding of “user needs” that the organization is trying to meet and address. The enduring strategic issue is one of adaptation and agility in the face of a changing environment. A key question, then, is whether the contribution of design approaches, and the possible emergence of a variety of new forms of governance, as suggested by Carsten Greve, merely “overlay” existing ones? Are these merely incremental change processes? This is what Waldorff et. al. (2014) would suggest, that the introduction of these new means “ultimately adds to the complexity of public sector governance” (2014:72). Or, alternatively, is there potential here for design to enable more radical “breaks” or even to allow “dismantling” of the governance models that constrain us inappropriately? 3.3.3 Designing as discovery? The avenue seems open for an exploration of what design approaches could accomplish, when it comes to implications for the future of emerging public governance. The critical implication that 102 I will state for now is that it seems public managers may need to discover for themselves what is the contemporary reality they need to relate to, and govern in, and then make their own judgments as to the best approach. That being said, the distinction between different governance paradigms allow us to characterize different structures, processes, and organizing principles we may find in our public institutions; and it also allows us to ask what a more “modern”, or perhaps “postmodern” or “reenchanted”, emerging governance model might actually look like. The last decade or so has certainly seen the public management debate not only in academic but also in practitioners’ circles begin to shift towards an emerging paradigm. From Goldsmith & Eggers’ volume on “Governing through networks” (2004) to Bruno Latour’s dry observation that it is time to lay New Public Management’s implicit attack on the state behind us: It is amazing that such a dispute could have passed for so long as a serious intellectual endeavor, so obvious is it for us now, that there is no alternative to the State – on condition of rediscovering its realistic cognitive equipment (2007:3, original emphasis). It is exactly this question of “rediscovering the state”, perhaps even more so than “reinventing it” which this thesis explores. The question becomes how to accommodate the need for a broader and perhaps different vocabulary and, dare one say it, concrete practices for transitioning and for navigating the process towards some different model of governance? In fact, it seems striking that for all of the observations that public management is changing in context and content, there are surprisingly few suggestions in the literature about how to manage the process towards the new situation. Many offer up general characteristics of the new models, but no one really seems to offer anything like a roadmap or navigational principles. As Paquet (2009:1) sums it up, “The lack of a fully suitable theory of governance and a suitable theory of the strategic state does not mean that we cannot work with what we have”. It is almost funny (but not quite) the kinds of process solutions some governance scholars suggest that managers try out in terms of facilitating change. Wayne Parsons (2010) entertains the idea of the “postmodern fool”, as a “court jester” (2010:104) to inject some creativity and “re-enchantment” into public services. As Parsons argues, the jester is an outsider on the inside, and as such by 103 way of his cunning wit he can question meanings and “open up spaces between the words”. The notion of “designers as jesters” is also discussed by Michlewski (2015:104), suggesting that a role as the “archetype jesters of the corporate world gives designers permission to be more playful”. Michlewski links the notion, more seriously, to the role of playfulness as critical in encouraging unexpected experimentation and exploration. In other words, the design profession might contribute with something beyond jesting, which one might call systematic play, or systematic creativity. These considerations resonate with some of the literature on “artful making”, creativity and entrepreneurial activity (Austin & Devin 2003), which tend to point out that arts methods, though they are different from the methods of management, are still methods, and reliable (the opening night of a play or concert can rarely be postponed… the tickets have already been sold). Perhaps it is, then, ultimately the rediscovery of the state, or more precisely, the ability of the state to transition to better generate desirable outcomes, which public managers should be concerned with. It is in this sense their process of rediscovery, by way of design, that concerns this thesis. The convergence of design and public management? I opened this thesis by suggesting that the worlds, and in particular cultures, of public management and design were akin to two waves crashing against each other – as if these two different domains of knowledge and professional practice would not be able to fruitfully coexist. In the last two chapters I have explored the context, foundations, and the emerging nature of public administration, management, and governance in the context of the kinds of problems facing contemporary societies. I have, using selected literature, mapped the landscape of the current debate on emerging public governance. I believe this account demonstrates that perhaps the most powerful crash is not necessarily between public governance and design per se, but between the “scientific”, bureaucratic and decision-making foundations of public management on the one hand, and the societal context in which we now live on the other hand. Is it rather a clash between a globalized, fast-paced 21st century world infused with technology being governed by institutions designed at the dawn of the 20th century? Is it the widening gap between the nature of our rapidly changing world and 110 some significant way”. One might say that research questions frame an intriguing “mystery” to be solved, which the researcher then goes ahead and tries to solve (Paquet 2009; Alvesson and Kärremann 2011). This thesis addresses the following key research question and sub-questions: What happens when managers engage with design to achieve change in public sector organizations? 1. Characterizing design practice: Within public sector organizations, what does the application of design approaches entail? Why do public managers look to and commission design, and what tools, techniques, processes and methods are brought into play? 2. Design as change catalyst: How do design approaches, if at all, influence how public managers engage with their problems and opportunities for innovation? To what extent do design approaches help public managers achieve the changes they are striving for, and why? 3. Emerging forms of public governance: What form and shape do the outputs resulting from design approaches take? What are the links between design approaches and the emergence of new types of public solutions and governance models? In the following I elaborate on each of the research sub-questions. 4.1.1 Characterizing design practice This first sub-question is inherently descriptive; it is what can be characterized as a first-order research question (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2013): It suggests tracking, or mapping, the kinds of tools, methods and processes that are brought into play when a public manager and his or her organization engages with “design”. In other words, what “goes on” when design is used within public sector organizations? What lies behind the words and the fog of innovation and design language? Importantly, however, this is not just a matter of looking at what is done when design methods are applied. It also involves mapping the reasons why public managers look to design in the first place. What are their underlying aspirations? What are they hoping to achieve, and what are then the methods they unleash, often helped by professionally trained design teams, to help them achieve it? 4.1.2 Design as change catalyst 111 The second question is explanatory, a third-order, research question (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2013). With it, I seek not only to understand what happens, but also why it happens: If design approaches influence the relationships between public managers and the world in which they operate, why does this happen? What is the role of the manager’s engagement with design, and what happens with the organization and staff throughout the process? In part, this question will also be addressed as a second-order, or comparative, question as formulated by Alvesson & Sandberg, 2013): In the experience of managers, to what extent are design approaches viewed as more useful, or effective, in bringing about particular desired outcomes than other management technologies that they have experienced? Note that my research design provides no way to directly compare design approaches with other management technologies, so any answers I offer to questions of a comparative nature will be drawn from the impressions of study respondents as derived from their past experiences. 4.1.3 Emerging forms of public governance The third research question is also explanatory, or third-order. It raises the issue of whether design approaches lead to, or are associated with, particular types of outputs or results, and thus whether they are indicative of particular (facets of) emerging forms of public governance. To the extent that new or different principles of public governance arise through the processes studied, can we see particular patterns that can be ascribed to the contribution of collaborative forms of design? Finally, let us briefly return to the overarching research question – What happens when managers engage with design to achieve change in public sector organizations? This question is partly explorative, since it ultimately seeks to understand the “mystery” of how public managers seek to use design approaches to achieve change. However, there is also a fourthorder, or normative, dimension to the question, since it “aims to produce knowledge about how something should be done” (Alvesson & Sandberg 2013: 15). Might there, at the end of the day, be learnings about how public managers, under certain conditions, should approach innovation and change? The thesis thus also seeks to add, if tentatively, to the repository of management technologies available to public managers. 112 A number of subsequent and (also) highly relevant questions could flow from these research questions. For instance: What conditions – especially conditions particular to the government context – influence or constrain how the approaches are used? Under what particular conditions are they most effective? What are the implications for the skills and competencies of public managers? Should design be considered a core innovation discipline, or capability, in government? These are all extremely relevant questions; however, even though they will be touched upon to some extent, they are beyond the core focus of the thesis. I am interested in the potential of design to enable public managers to drive innovation in government. This thesis seeks, therefore, to assess the significance of the use of design approaches by public managers as part of their efforts to achieve desired change. My key interest is in addressing issues such as “what happens”, and “what does it mean?” This study is therefore very different from one that sets about to test falsifiable hypotheses derived from an established theory via a deductive research strategy. My aim, rather, is to develop a conceptual framework that illuminates the relationships (following my research sub-questions) between 1) design approaches, 2) management behavior and 3) emerging public governance. As should be clear by now, this thesis is explorative in nature; I do, however, aspire to synthesize my findings into tentative new frameworks that might be subject to refinement in future research. My intentions have certain implications for my choice of methodology, which I elaborate on below. First, however, I reflect upon my stance in conducting this research while also playing an active role in the field I am studying. Expanding the research approach: Engaged scholarship My overall approach to the thesis builds on Andrew van der Ven’s notion of engaged scholarship as “a participatory form of research for obtaining different perspectives of key stakeholders (researchers, users, clients, sponsors, and practitioners) in studying complex problems” (2007:9). It has been natural for me to turn to this participatory approach since I have helped initiate, or otherwise been involved in, some of the cases that I am researching. My dual objectives of contributing to both practice and an emerging theory of design for public sector innovation also make such “double hurdle” research (Pettigrew 2001; 2008) very natural. Double hurdle research typically aims for both academic and practical impact, by engaging closely with practitioners and field members (Nielsen 2014). 113 4.2.1 Forms of engagement with my field of research My position first (January 2007 to October 2014) as Director of MindLab, and later (November 2014 to present) as CEO of the Danish Design Center, has given me privileged and unique access to fields and actors that would otherwise have been extremely difficult to obtain. My positions made me aware of cases, and gave me opportunities and resources to get up close to them. For instance, personal interviews on-site in Australia, the United States, Finland and the UK were made possible by my participation in related professional activities, such as delivering conference keynotes and seminar presentations. My closeness to the field has allowed me opportunities to experiment with design methodologies in new contexts, and to observe and analyze the processes as they unfolded. However, such a stance in relation to my subjects of study comes with challenges, also. As a researcher, because of my stance, I must engage in on-going self-reflection to ensure that I take my personal biases, world-views, and assumptions into account during data collection, interpretation and analysis (Suddaby 2006:640). I must acknowledge that I was, in some cases, an “obtrusive” observer; in the roles that I played other than researcher, I influenced, at times, the objects and processes I was observing. As Nielsen (2014:14) points out, the challenge becomes “how obtrusive data gathering carried out from an insider position can be optimized when the researcher is not only visiting for data collection purposes, but is part of the organizational field”. First and foremost, the nature of my stance calls for a very high degree of transparency in terms of what I have been doing, where and how, so the reader can judge the character of my engagement. My position within the field has allowed me to move between observing others doing the work, having direct interaction with research respondents, and communicating how I, in my professional capacity, reflect on the potential utility and challenges of using design approaches in the public sector (as well as in business more generally). The ways in which I have engaged with what I am studying falls into four broad categories: 1) Explicitly academic activities (e.g., observation, research interviews); 2) Engagement with wider communities of stakeholders in the field (e.g., by participating in professional meetings); 3) Engagements in the 114 context of MindLab and the Danish Design Center (e.g., sometimes conducting, or overseeing the conduct of, interventions); and 4) Engagement related to products (papers, chapters, books) I produced, which flowed from the first three categories of activities. In Appendix D I provide an overview of these types of activities, which I have engaged in as a practitioner-researcher, cutting across multiple domains of work and research. I now turn to a more thorough discussion of the dilemmas, pitfalls, and opportunities of being a highly embedded actor in the field of research, and what such a reflective approach entails. 4.2.2 A reflective approach One obvious question of methodological relevance is how I have handled the conduct of research into processes and activities that are driven, at least to some extent, by the organization that I have led. Mats Alvesson has made the argument that such self-ethnography has several benefits. “One rationale for self-ethnography concerns its capacity to come up with novel and interesting empirical material. The insider is, potentially, better positioned than the one of an outside ethnographer to reveal “the true story”, although position alone is insufficient to realize the potential.” (Alvesson 2003:178). Likewise, van der Ven (2007:177) points out that in revelatory case study research requires “intimate familiarity with the phenomenon from qualitatively rich case studies” to engage in abductive reasoning, which in turn can constitute the first steps in building new theory. But, as Alvesson has pointed out, a balance needs to be struck between closeness and distance. “The challenge of ethnography, and of most qualitative work, is to be close and avoid closure.” (2003:190). Alvesson emphasizes how the ethnographer’s focus shifts in getting up close to the efforts of one’s own organization. While the conventional researcher (with an anthropological orientation) may ask “What in hell do they think they are up to?” the self-ethnographer must ask “What in hell do we think we are up to?” (ibid.). A consideration here, in terms of my personal engagement in the field, is to what extent interviewees might have been influenced by my role as an expert. Similar considerations are mentioned, amongst others, by Katarina Wetter-Edman in her own Ph.D. thesis on service design (Wetter-Edman 2014), as well as by Nielsen (2014). Wetter-Edman suggests that as a researcher it is important to be aware how interviewees might adapt their language and wording to reflect that they see you as an expert, as they wish to mirror 115 or recognize the terms they hear you espouse. As I go through the empirical analysis in the coming chapters, this is clearly an issue to remain aware of. In some cases, I have interviewed a subject about her or his own experience with a design project immediately after he or she has heard me give a talk in my role as an expert about public sector innovation and design. The possibility is certainly there, in the five cases in my sample that are associated with MindLab design work, that interviewees have had some impressions about my views before I interviewed them. That being said, it is important to underline that these interview subjects, as evidenced by their titles and positions, are no “shrinking violets”, as it were. They are not members of a vulnerable or especially impressionable population. These are confident, mature, and experienced people who have over their careers developed a strong sense of their roles and who they are; although design approaches may appear novel to them, they generally do not lack the ability to interpret experiences or express themselves using their own language or concepts. This does not imply they do not take on particular concepts or expressions from the design field as they relate to it; but it is most likely that these concepts and expressions have come to them through their interactions with designers and design methodology (rather than through much less extensive interaction with me). Moreover, in my analysis of data I have reviewed their statements and expressions in an effort to identify signs that my words (in a keynote speech, for example) might have influenced their responses, as a further check on this potential source of bias. Additionally, a number of the cases studied, as also evidenced in Appendix A, contain material beyond my own primary data collection, including project documentation, presentations made by the public managers, externally conducted analyzes and evaluations, and so forth. This material has served as a useful resource upon which to check and reflect whether my interpretations resonate with those of others who have reflected upon or analyzed the cases. A final issue to mention is that, although I am in a relatively unique position in terms of access to both my own environment and other relevant case settings, public managers are (like their private sector peers) notoriously busy and hard to access, not just because they are attending meetings but increasingly also because they are entirely out of the office. So, while the researcher is there, the managers being studied may not be. “Modern management occurs in a net of fragmented, multiple contexts, through multitudes of kaleidoscopic movements. 116 Organizing happens in many places at once, and organizers move around quickly and frequently” (Czarniawska 2004, 2007). Achieving access to interesting data might therefore need a more focused approach. Similarly, in reflecting on the growth in qualitatively oriented management research, Edmondson and McManus (2007:1155) state that: “Although the potential relevance of field research is motivating, the research journey can be messy and inefficient, fraught with logistical hurdles and unexpected events.” For this reason, my primary source of data has been direct personal interviews rather than observation, as will also be discussed in the following sections. Methodological and theoretical considerations Overall, I have been concerned with ensuring a strong methodological fit across the key dimensions involved in the research. Edmondson and McManus (2007) emphasize that this requires a clear alignment between four dimensions: The research questions I am posing, the existing research available (including unanswered questions and unexplored areas), the research design (type of data to be collected, data collection tools, type of analysis, and sites for field research), and finally the academic and practical contribution of the work. Methodologically, I take my main inspiration from the overall framework for conducting casebased qualitative research suggested by Eisenhardt (1989), and more specifically from Corbin & Strauss’s (2008) notion of grounded theory building. This choice seems appropriate due to the state of existing research, the characteristics of the contexts and situations I am researching, the relative open-endedness of my research questions, and ultimately because the approach is wellsuited to my goal of developing a tentative conceptual framework with departure in qualitative empirical data. As Eisenhardt highlights (1989:5), this entails avoiding “thinking about specific relationships between variables and theories as much as possible, especially at the outset of the process”. I do not, therefore adopt a particular theoretical stance through which to examine the phenomenon of interest, though I have, in previous chapters, described at length previous research that places my current inquiry in a theoretical context. I expect to draw on these and other relevant theories to interpret and reflect on my findings as they emerge. This is also well in line with the point made by Edmondson and McManus (2007), that one can view theory development as a continuum from relatively “nascent” to more highly “mature” constructs and models. The present research is positioned more towards the nascent (or at best intermediate) 117 end of the spectrum, as it can mainly be expected to produce “tentative answers to novel questions of how and why, often merely suggesting new connections among phenomena” (Edmondson and McManus (2007:1158). My project thus becomes a matter of using the lenses that are most useful in achieving a better understanding of these questions and connections. Importantly, the “nascent” theory I am attempting to build concerns the somewhat blurry intersection of design and public management – two fields with each their substantial, and growing, theoretical foundations. It will thus be important to consider the resonances with those bodies of knowledge as I develop the synthesis of my findings. As Roy Suddaby suggests in his very precise piece on What grounded theory is not, the aim should be to seek a “middle ground” between “a theory-laden view of the world and an unfettered empiricism” (2006:634). It is exactly to ensure that I do not fall into the trap of the latter that I have put some effort into charting the historical developments and current debates, drawing on key literatures within design and public administration, management, and governance over the last three chapters. 4.3.1 Inquiring into an indeterminate situation Essentially I am seeking to inquire into an indeterminate situation, to understand what characterizes the “problem” of design-induced processes of change in the public sector (Dewey 1938). The societal, technological, environmental and political context of public organizations is in flux, causing many to argue that we are in a state of transition, or turbulence (Bourgon 2011; Christiansen 2014). Public organizations and their managers are themselves in search of a new, emerging model of governance that is, on the one hand, increasingly a focus of academic discussion, but, on the other hand, difficult to observe empirically. My insider access to their efforts to innovate suggests that I might have the opportunity to contribute to new theory by paying careful attention to their activities and their interpretations of them (Suddaby 2006:634). Meanwhile, the design community and profession is being changed by emerging forms of design theory and practice, challenging identities and previous understandings of what it means to design, or to be a designer. As design in its new, more collaborative forms is being commissioned and applied by managers, often as a novel approach, in order to create innovations in public organizations, what happens? Edmondson & McManus (2007) propose that in such situations where relatively little is known about a specific topic, and the research questions are open-ended, methods that allow data collected in the field to strongly shape the researcher’s developing understanding of the phenomenon are in place. Similarly, Corbin & 118 Strauss (2008) argue that qualitative research is uniquely positioned since it offers the methods and tools to develop concepts that can help us: • Increase our understanding of people in their everyday lives, including their routines, habits, problems or issues, and how they handle or resolve them. • Provide a language that can be used for discussion and debate leading to the development of shared understandings and meanings. These purposes fit well with my intention of not only answering descriptive research questions but also of exploring how public managers seek to “handle” and try to “resolve” the pressures they are under as they attempt to employ design as an approach to innovation and a way of moving toward an emerging governance model. As I mentioned in describing the first research question, this is not only a question of charting the use of design methods, but of charting the manager’s rationales for employing them in the first place – and also considering the wider consequences for public governance that may arise their efforts. Corbin & Strauss (2008) state that common understandings can in turn be used to build a professional body of knowledge and to enhance practice. As I have discussed, the entire notion of innovation in the public sector, and especially design-led approaches to innovation, seems ripe for the development of common concepts and strengthened professional practice. Additionally, there seems to be a significant lack of research-based knowledge of how public managers engage with design approaches, and what that engagement may require from them. In line with Edmondson & McManus’ (2007) argument for methodological fit, this underlines the call for a highly qualitative approach to the research. 4.3.2 Research as the exploration of mystery Applied rigorously, grounded research can be very technical and time-intensive, as it has traditionally implied very fine-grained attention to empirical material, minutely registering and coding vast quantities of qualitative data. However, as Juliet Corbin emphasizes in her preface to Corbin & Strauss (2008), the method has been modernized and in recent iterations become more flexible and open, less overtly “positivist”, and more reflective. With its origins in the works of, amongst others, the pragmatic philosophers Charles Saunders Pierce, John Dewey, 119 and George Herbert Mead, grounded research takes account of the (subjective) situatedness, or contingency, of social and cultural contexts. In epistemological terms, the method recognizes the important role of the perspective and experience of the researcher (Corbin & Strauss 2008:80) and the fact that multiple interpretations may very well arise from the same body of empirical material (Corbin & Strauss 2008:50). Ontologically, grounded research reflects that the world is fluid, dynamic, in flux, “tangled”, characterized by simultaneous splintering and emergence, and essentially socially constructed by the humans who inhabit it. One might also say, with Hernes (2008:143) that this type of research “…means paying attention to details and unexpected forms of data that might emerge from a tangled world”. As I am exploring how innovation processes take place, I also need a methodology that is open for fresh perspectives and is “attentive to issues of interpretation and process and that does not bind one too closely to long-standing assumptions” (Suddaby 2006:640). As I set out to explore the phenomenon of design in government, at a time of great turbulence and social change, my use of grounded research is a set of procedures and tools for exploring mystery. In line with what Alvesson and Kärremann (2011) have called a “mystery as method” approach, I am using empirical material for generative and illustrative purposes (rather than for rigorous and minute codification of data), to anchor my findings, and as a “critical dialogue partner” (Alvesson and Kärremann 2011:105) in developing concepts and relations between them. This implies a focus on exploration, discovery, qualitative and idiographic research, empathy, judgment, social action and interaction, meanings, cognition, emotion, closeness to the empirical material and successive induction (Alvesson & Skjöldberg 2000; Corbin & Strauss 2008). My emphasis is on eliciting meaning from qualitative empirical data, discovery, identification of patterns, and establishing conceptual “building blocks” that can lead to nascent theory, acting as “anchor points in interpretation of findings” (Blumer 1969: 26). I see such interpretation as highly central, as “…a productive process that sets forth the multiple meanings of an event, object, experience or test” (Denzin 1998 quoted in Corbin & Strauss 2008: 49). In line with Alvesson, this is also about recognizing that “empirical material is constructed, not just collected; interpreted, not just analyzed; and written, not just summed up.”22 22 Notes from April 7, 2014 lecture by Mats Alvesson at Lund University; Ph.D. course on Reflective and Creative Methodology. 126 evidence. One exception is documentation of results and outcomes; I draw on documentation from relevant evaluation reports and business cases directly related to the design projects. In the following section I present an overview of the managers and cases involved in the research. Data gathering protocol As indicated above, the core research activity has been to examine in-depth a number of design processes, and how the responsible public managers have (if at all) used these processes, activities and outcomes in their efforts to drive innovation and achieve desired change in their organization. A key balance to strike in this context has been between breadth (multiple observations allowing for qualitative analysis and pattern recognition) and depth (the ability to capture the richness and social dynamics of design processes vis-a-vis the managers I wish to study). MindLab, the public organization I headed until October 2014, served as a significant research platform. The organization continuously interacts with public managers across three major national ministries and one city government, and has an extensive national and international network in the fields of design, innovation and public sector reform.23 My subsequent work leading the Danish Design Center has shifted my focus into using design approaches in essentially transforming a public institution – an endeavor that is still in its early phases, but that has provided additional reflection and inspiration.24 The interviews have essentially fallen into two tranches: Exploratory and primary data collection. The first tranche consists of very open exploratory conversations with a total of six managers, who had some experience in engaging with citizen-centered design approaches in practice, or who might appreciate their potential value, as well as challenges and pitfalls. This round of interviewing helped inform the Ph.D. proposal and underpinned the development of the main questionnaire used for subsequent interviews. The second tranche includes the primary 23 www.mind-lab.dk/en 24 See for instance these reflections after ”Year 1” of leading the Danish Design Center: http://danskdesigncenter.dk/en/news/danish-design-centre-year-one-design-squared 127 data collection, consisting of 15 much more in-depth personal interviews focusing on concrete design processes. 4.6.1 Exploratory (preliminary) data collection The first tranche of exploratory interviews included: Figure 8: Breakdown of exploratory interviews Case Title Organization Country Date A Deputy Director Danish Business Agency DK Spring 2010 B Head of Division Ministry of Business & Growth DK Spring 2010 C Head of Division Board of Industrial Injuries DK Spring 2010 D Head of Division Ministry of Taxation DK Spring 2010 E Deputy Director NHS Institute for Innovation & Improvement UK Spring 2011 F Co-Chair Boston Mayors Office of New Urban Mechanics US Summer 2012 Total: 6 Interviews A-D and F were conducted in-person while interview E was carried out by telephone. Each interview had a duration of approximately one hour. It can be mentioned that the reason for the relatively late interview with the co-director in Boston was due to an immediate opportunity; the interview was used to reflect on the wider context of the thesis in relation to public and civic innovation, rather than to address a concrete design process. Some of the key insights from this round of interviewing, which informed the further research, were that: • The managers were ambitious and constantly seeking out tools and methods that would allow them to achieve concrete change within the complex settings they operated in • Design approaches, including ethnographic methods, were apparently making an impression; some managers characterized the methods as “disruptive” and a “paradigm shift” • They stated that gaining insights into concrete behavior by citizens and businesses was a key priority for them • The ability to use design to make solutions concrete and tangible was highly important. 128 The results of this research were fed into the Ph.D. application, used to inform the research design, and also formed the main empirical basis for the first Work in Progress (WIP) seminar. Importantly, it helped raise key themes and issues and to shape the research questions. 4.6.2 Primary data collection The primary data collection process has been a substantial undertaking, the main activity being personal interviews with public managers in five different countries. Approximately 25 hours of personal interview recordings, nearly 450 pages of transcribed interview text, and a range of secondary sources are involved. Additionally, my access to participant observation of the five MindLab-related cases involved several weeks of participation and opportunity to follow the design processes. See Appendix A for an overview of data material and sources. The following table displays the primary (second tranche) respondents involved in the thesis. They represent a balance between service and policy design, geographical distribution and content topics (public policy domains). To ensure transparency, the table also indicates where I personally played some form of active role in the initiation (decision on design support from MindLab), observation (e.g. workshop participation), steering (overall responsibility for and governance of project) or judgment of the project (specifically as a member of the Innovation Award jury for Local Government Denmark, the interest organization of Danish municipalities). 129 Figure 9: Case overview Case Title Organization Country Design focus Domain/theme Author’s role 1 Director General National Board of Industrial Injuries (BII) Project: No Red Tape: Young Injured DK Policy Labor market (industrial injuries) Initiate, steering, observe 2 Director City of Adelaide / The Australian Center for Social Innovation (TACSI) Project: Family by Family AUS Service Social (family services) None 3 Development Director Borough of Lewisham / Homelessness Services Project: Housing Options UK Service and policy Social (homelessness) None 4 Senior Strategy Manager Suffolk County Council Project: Healthy Ambitions UK Service Health (youth engagement) None 5 Manager Odense Municipality / Camillagaarden institution Project: User-driven innovation DK Service Social (mentally handicapped) Jury, prize awarded 6 Head of Division Danish Business Agency Project: Branchekode DK Service Business (registering new business) Initiate, steering, observe 7 Special Advisor City of Helsinki Economic and Planning Center Project: Business Permit Application FIN Service and policy Business (obtaining city permits) None 8 Head of Division25 Ministry of Taxation / National Tax Agency Project: Taxing Assemblages (Ph.D. research) DK Service and policy Administration (compliance with tax code) Initiate, steering 9 Head Nurse Rigshospitalet (National Hospital of Denmark) / Heart Clinic Project: The meaningful patient experience DK Service Health (patient involvement) Initiate, steering 10 Vice Chancellor Stenhus Community College Project: General Study Scheme DK Service Education (course development) Initiate, steering 11 Director, fmr. Principal New York City Department of Education / Olympus Academy Project: iZone USA Service and policy Education (new learning environment) None 12 Head of Secretariat and Visitation Holstebro Municipalily Project: The Good Kitchen DK Service Social (“meals on wheels”) None 13 Director of Strategic Planning New York City Department of Housing Preservation & Development (HPD) Project: Designing Services for Housing USA Service and policy Urban, social (citizen/resident engagement) None 14 Center Manager Kolding Municipality / Skansebakken institution Project: Design of Relations DK Service Social (quality of life for handicapped) Jury, prize awarded 15 Senior Consultant Danish Competition and Consumer Authority Project: Children, youth and marketing DK Service and policy Consumer (children’s online behavior) Advice on methodology 15 total The table shows that the cases cover a balance of both service and policy focus, and a quite wide span of policy domains, ranging from health and social services to business and the labor market. The table also shows that the author has played a somewhat proactive (initiation, 25 This is a different manager than interviewed in the exploratory round. 130 steering) role in five (1/3) of the cases. In two of the additional cases I had the role of jury member and contributed to giving an award for a highly innovative project; in both cases the award was given before I included the projects in the present research. The point that some of the cases have received rewards for their degree of innovativeness indicates that this might also be considered a sampling dimension. However, such external or formal recognition of the cases does not, as far as I can find in my research, necessarily mean that other cases are not equally innovative. However, as I will show in chapter 9, one can suggest the factors, which in the various cases, were the main drivers of innovation. From a theoretical sampling perspective, the implication that some of the cases studied are exceptional should not in itself be problematic, but could rather offer the advantage that certain important aspects and dynamics might be easier to identify. The purpose here will be to seek to understand to what extent the variances in these cases matter in particular ways. Data collection within each observation has been based on triangulation (Eisenhardt 1989; Nachmias & Nachmias 1992; Yin 2014). This implies that in addition to the primary qualitative data collection I have included the collection of relevant quantitative data (for instance data on program performance, such as productivity figures, user satisfaction surveys or outcome data), and of other secondary data including design artifacts (workshop templates, posters, film, images) and texts (internal research, consulting reports, evaluations, policy documents, etc.). For every case listed above, a variety of such material has been available. Additionally, it should be mentioned that for the five cases carried out with assistance from MindLab, I have often had the opportunity to learn of them through first-hand participant observation, through direct reports and immediate accounts. For each case, a physical document folder has been created, which includes the printed interview transcript, examples of material developed within the projects, and (where available) evaluation reports and other documentation pertaining to the case. This very substantial volume of raw data material can be produced upon request. However, visual examples that serve to illustrate processes or solutions from the cases are presented selectively in the text, especially in chapter 9. This points to the fact, as I will discuss further in the last section of this chapter, that I have drawn on a range of other processes in an expansion of my research approach, through “engaged 131 scholarship” (van de Ven 2007), which has allowed for a range of tests and refinements of the emerging analysis. I have, thus, had the opportunity to leverage a bit of “controlled opportunism” (Eisenhardt 1989:8) to expand my repertoire of data sources to obtain insights and commentary from stakeholders, test ideas with relevant audiences, etc. However, it is the primary, in-depth qualitative data collection that constitutes the backbone of my analysis for the purpose of addressing the research questions. The secondary data has been drawn in to validate interview statements, to identify figures, to access evaluation research on the concrete project in question, etc. Likewise, the engagement with stakeholders and the wider and rapidly emerging community around the design and public sector innovation space has been used for reflection and discussion, not as a main source of data per se. Drawing on grounded theory as the main analytical approach has meant that the data collection from the primary interviews has been conducted iteratively. After the first half dozen interviews, a first explicit exercise of pattern recognition was carried out, leading to the identification of a number of key categories or concepts (Nachmias & Nachmias 1992; Suddaby 2006; Corbin & Strauss 2008). They were elaborated in separate memos, and helped focus and prioritize the subsequent interviews. The exact number of managers involved has depended on the degree to which the qualitative research reaches saturation, and the value of adding additional observations begins to diminish significantly (Suddaby 2006; Corbin & Strauss 2008; Mason 2010).26 4.6.3 Analytical process The qualitative interview data were analyzed through a pragmatic application of the strategies of open coding and axial coding (Corbin & Strauss 2008). Coding denotes the process of extracting 26 By saturation I refer to the notion that when using theoretical sampling, at some point in the process the addition of more data becomes less fruitful to the development of theory, as the iterative process of building concepts, and relations between them, becomes increasingly fine-grained. Corbin and Strauss (2008: 144-145) put it like this: “Data collection leads to analysis. Analysis leads to concepts. Concepts generate questions. Questions lead to more data collection so that the researcher might learn more about those concepts. This circular process continues until the research reaches the point of saturation; that is, the point in the research when all the concepts are well defined and explained” [Original emphasis]. 132 concepts from the empirical data and subsequently developing them into distinct ideas or interpretations. The concepts I identified through this pattern recognition have then been analyzed for their inherent characteristics (descriptions) and for their dimensions, or variation. As the theoretical sample was traversed analytically, the concepts have become richer in description as well as in variation. I have written separate methodological notes on a number of the key concepts, seeking to identify higher and lower ranking concepts, and determining their characteristics and variety (open coding) as well as their relationships (axial coding). A useful methodology in this process was to map the key concepts and their relationships physically, using several large foam boards to tack on key themes from my memos, interesting quotes, and organize this material under increasingly clear and mutually exclusive headings. Over time, this categorization also led to an emerging structure for the thesis (see photo below). Figure 10: Pattern recognition to identify core concepts This process has thereby led to the identification of the core themes, or findings, which constitute the main chapters of the following section. In order to illustrate, by way of rich 133 description, some of the key characteristics and dynamics of the concepts, I have chosen to highlight selected narratives from public managers in connection to the various findings. I thus bring relatively extensive quotes and stories that reflect the managers’ concrete incidents, experiences and insights. The concepts have been built via reflexive analysis of data from multiple interviews, but the examples I have chosen to highlight are chosen to be particularly illustrative. As Hernes (2008:35) acknowledges, quoting Whitehead, in conducting process research, one looks for events, or “drops of experience”. Some respondents and their projects emphasize certain experiences, changes, dimensions and thus concepts over others, which means that “rich” narrative is more characteristic and to-the-point in some cases than others. Clearly there is some variety within the cases/interviews due to the variety in public sector contexts, type of problem, sector domain, and even the personality of the manager; however, the core concepts are those where there is a relatively high degree of consistency, and a robust pattern, across the interviews. 4.6.4 Looking for the looking-glasses My intent in this thesis is to identify a tentative conceptual framework, a theoretical structure, a scaffolding, through which to understand the role of design processes, as engaged by public managers, in the transition processes towards an emerging public governance. This quest takes departure in empirical data, and focuses on the discovery of concepts and constructs. Eisenhardt (1989:13) emphasizes that an essential part of theory building is to compare emerging concepts, theories and hypotheses with the extant literature – including with literature that is conflicting with the research findings. Likewise, Suddaby (2006) argues that grounded theory seeks a middle ground where prior knowledge is taken seriously but where the researcher avoids using theory to test hypotheses. So what kind of literature, what type of glasses, will I look through in order to interpret the identified patterns? As the three preceding chapters have illustrated, there is a rich range of perspectives, interpretations and propositions within the two main bodies of knowledge that are ultimately at the heart of this thesis. Together they naturally form the major prisms through which to explore the implications of the empirical research: Design and public management. In particular, it is the recent iterations, the evolving understandings, of these two fields, which are in play: 134 Design, which is addressed in chapter 1, and partly in chapter 3, encompasses the phenomenon of new collaborative forms of design, and the ways in which the design profession is evolving and making itself available as a contributor to public and social innovation. As the body of literature on the “new” forms of design, including service design, co-design, social design, human centered design and design for policy has grown in recent years there is a rich set of themes, concepts and relationships from which to draw. Public administration and management, or more precisely, emerging governance models (variously labeled, as discussed in chapters 2 and 3), are concerned with emerging notions of management, leadership and innovation in connection with public problem solving, policymaking, governance and emerging forms of service provision. As will be discussed in the conclusion to this chapter below, my main audience is public managers and the academic community focusing broadly on public administration, management and governance. Ultimately the theoretical concepts through which to interpret my findings will therefore likely be found among those of emerging governance models suggested by public administration and public sector innovation scholars such as Hartley (2005), Pestoff (2006), Alford (2009) and Osborne and Brown (2013), Parsons (2011), Greve (2013), Agranoff (2014) and so forth, which I have discussed in detail in chapter 3. This is also a key body of knowledge I hope to contribute to through my research. In terms of structuring the discussion and analysis I therefore draw, as a point of departure, on the bodies of knowledge found broadly within design and within the public administration, management and governance literature. Secondarily I will rather eclectically draw on the additional theoretical perspectives in order to “enfold” additional relevant literature to provide critical reflection and perspective to the discussion (Eisenhardt 1989). What would be fruitful additional lenses through which to interpret the application of design approaches in a government context? In the course of my research, particularly two domains have captured my attention and seem relevant to draw on as my analysis unfolds, in particular in the concluding chapters of the thesis: First, there is sensemaking. In my first Work in Progress paper I explored whether Karl Weick’s notion of sensemaking (Weick 1979; 1995; 2001), would be useful, to the extent that my interest was how public managers “made sense” of their experiences with design methodology, and sensemaking claims to be well suited for exploring policy making as well as in the context of 135 building grounded theory (Weick 1995:172). The manager’s sensemaking is of course in play when I examine what they experience and how they engage in the design process. Here, the most useful contributions by Weick seem to be his two chapters in Boland & Collopy’s 2004 volume on managing as designing, where Weick explicitly seeks to couple design, as a management and governance process, with sensemaking. I will draw this in particularly in chapters 10 and 11 as I consider the resulting (emerging) governance principles flowing from the different cases. Second, I have examined new institutional theory (Meyer & Rowan 1977; DeMaggio 1983) as a line of inquiry that could be well matched with the highly institutionalized context of the public sector. A few hints to this are included in my introductory section. This theoretical field is relevant because it lays out, with a solid base, an overall challenge which in a sense forms the canvas against which design and innovation plays out in public institutions: How can transformation be achieved in highly institutionalized settings? There are also some relevant fits with my methodological approach as it will allow the mapping of how managers within the studied organizations “subjectively experience organizational reality” (Suddaby & Greenwood 2009:15) and thus it may contribute with an individual level of analysis for the interpretation of institutional change. My object of interest, laid out in institutional terms, is the potential of these actors to manipulate particular facets of the organizational and institutional contexts in which they operate (Lawrence et. al. 2013). That being said, the larger conceptual challenge is to explore the implications for governance – which is a different unit of analysis, namely the organizational level. Also, there is the obvious link from institutional theory to sensemaking, with Karl Weick himself pointing out that because sensemaking is concerned with the “institutionalizing of social constructions into the way things are done” that “sensemaking is the feedstock of institutionalization.” (Weick 1995:36). It can be mentioned that I drew on the theoretical field when writing my Master’s dissertation, using mainly a neoinstitutional framework, and thus have a familiarity with it that might prove helpful.27 During one of my Ph.D. seminars28 I had 27 My M.Sc. (political science) thesis was carried out in international relations studies and titled ”EU-US Relations after the Cold War: A multiple-case study of the impact of international institutions on bilateral cooperation” (Aarhus University, 1999) 28 Copenhagen Business School: “Change and Transformation” doctoral seminar on new institutional theory, May 5-9, 2014 142 Fourth, I share an overview of my core findings concerning my second research sub-question: How does the exposure to design matter to public managers? How do they engage? This is the starting point for the subsequent and more detailed analysis in the following chapters. All of these sections serve the purpose of giving a sense of the key dimensions identified in the study. What are the variations and patterns found as to the use of design approaches? What are the sampling dimensions? And further, what are then the resulting types of engagement, and what issues seem to emerge? Commissioning design This section, and the two sections that follow it, address the first research question, about the characterization of design practice: Within public sector organizations, what does the application of design approaches entail? Why do public managers look to and commission design, and what tools, techniques, processes and methods are brought into play? Public managers continuously face difficult problems and dilemmas, which prompt a search for methods and approaches that might help overcome them. That is also the case for the managers included in this study. This situation fits rather well with the “wickedness” of public problems I described in chapter 2 (Rittel & Webber 1973). The types of pressure and motivations they are facing, however, vary somewhat from case to case. It is from slightly different starting points that managers come to engage with design approaches. What seems clear is that it takes the recognition of rather substantial challenges or opportunities. It is necessary to have multiple strong reasons for engaging with design – in many ways a foreign and strange approach to draw into a public sector setting. As one manager says, “It was a very, very long learning process to procure service design because we didn’t know what it was.” Another comments, that, “…no one [in our municipality] knew about service design.” Commissioning a largely unknown methodology for transforming the service or policy for which one is responsible is no small step to take in a system characterized by resistance to uncertainty. As one manager asks, “how to buy service design when you don’t know what is in it?” 143 Other risks play in as well. For instance, one manager worries that the design project would be met with jealousy by the wider organization because it will cast a spotlight on her unit. Another comments, somewhat in the same vein, that she is keeping knowledge about the project “under the radar” of the top management, because if they start paying attention to it, it would put too much pressure on the staff and might put the positive, if tentative, results in jeopardy. Across the cases I have studied, a wide variety of rationales for commissioning and engaging with design approaches can be identified. Usually it is not a single “trigger” or opportunity, but a set of interdependent conditions that in combination lead to the decision to obtain the assistance of designers. In the following I discuss the key factors, or triggers for commissioning design, which roughly fall in these categories: • Reacting to performance pressure: Public organizations are under pressure to cut costs or to produce different or better outcomes without additional resources. • Vision-driven change: There are organizational strategies or visions in place, or particular problems arise, which prompt the need for change. • Opportunity to access design skills: Design can be commissioned with some degree of support, or there are design skills available within the organization’s ecosystem, for instance in the form of access to innovation teams or centers. • Personal attitude of managers: The public manager in question is personally curious and interested in exploring new ways and methods of achieving meaningful change. The table below illustrates the distribution of these triggers across the cases: 144 Figure 11: Distribution of triggers of commissioning design! TRIGGERS FOR ENGAGING WITH DESIGN Performance pressure Vision-driven change (realizing public value) Opportunity to access design skills Personal attitude Example Announcement of annual percentage cuts in funding for hospital department. Wish by public manager to change organization and/or to demonstrate that more public value can be created Unexpected opportunity to access funding and/or resources to engage with design Unusual professional background and thereby an outsider’s (reflective) perspective on the organization Case 1 BII X X X 2 FamByFam X X 3 Lewisham X X X X 4 Suffolk X X X X 5 Camillagaarden X X X X 6 Branchcode X X X 7 Helsinki X X 8 Taxation X X 9 Rigshospitalet X X X 10 Stenhus X X X 11 iZone X X 12 Holstebro X X X X 13 Housing X X 14 Skansebakken X X 15 Competition X Although I consider these categories one at a time it is important to emphasize that they are not mutually exclusive or even easily separated in practice; it is more often than not, in the cases I have examined, a combination of these factors, which are in play. 5.1.1 Reacting to performance pressure First, a key theme is underperforming services and weak public outcomes, such as unsatisfactory quality of a “meals on wheels” program, the lack of ability to achieve taxation compliance amongst citizens and businesses, or recognition of overwhelming bureaucracy for businesses wishing to obtain a city permit. One dimension of performance pressure is funding. Much has been written about demands for increased productivity of public services in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis; as I state in my introduction, this has been a key backdrop to the consideration of new innovative 145 approaches to public administration. It might be slightly surprising, then, that only in about half of the cases I have studied for this thesis was the need for cost-cutting and achieving financial savings or benefits mentioned as a key reason for engaging with design approaches. For instance, in the case of the London Borough of Lewisham, the challenge was to maintain performance at more or less unchanged budgets while dealing with a massive increase in applications for homelessness services. “In 2009 it hit”, says Development Director Peter Gadsdon, and adds that “the recession started in 2009, and in a lot of the private sector people could not keep up with the mortgages”. This shift, then, was in fact a consequence of the financial crisis – and included a shift in the type of people and families needing assistance. Suddenly, formerly middle class and ethnically white citizens were in need of help. In spite of the drive to assist more people (a productivity concern), however, also in the case of Lewisham there was an interest in achieving better outcomes. Gadsdon: “(…) we were looking at how we could improve the experience for customers, and how we can help support them on the right pathway to housing.” So, financial incentives or pressures did not, in this case, stand alone. Another example of the role of financial pressure is the case of Rigshospitalet, the National hospital of Denmark. The Heart Center had for a number of years been under on-going pressure to increase operational efficiency to the point where the management team could not see any possibilities for finding further cost-reducing measures through already tested and tried means. The Head Nurse had become acquainted with design and innovation methodologies through executive education (a master of public governance program) and chose to not only write her Master’s thesis on the subject, but also to simultaneously try it out in her own organization. A third example of performance pressure is internal pressure on the management. In one case this was a clear incentive for change, even though it was also connected with financial concerns. Here it was harassment and dysfunction among staff that became part of the motivation to initiate a change program – and design approaches then happened, more or less by accident, to become the tool, with some surprising results. The types of pressures discussed above do not however seem to be mechanically translated by managers into something on which they need to act. Rather, the pressures are often framed by the responsible public managers as opportunities for change – for increasing productivity certainly, but often also for shaping more meaningful public services or creating better public 146 outcomes. One could thus argue that they are motivated as much by their own ambition (or vision) as by a particular external pressure. 5.1.2 Vision-driven change and public value A substantial number of the managers express, in various ways, a strong vision and desire to achieve better results – more public value. It is an open question whether this ambition would exist were they not at the same time facing a variety of pressures and dissatisfaction with the status quo. However, it is remarkable how uniformly the managers I have interviewed express a desire to enable their organizations to do better. Take for instance Head of Secretariat and Visitation in Holstebro Muncipality Paula Sangill. She describes a discussion with her deputy, Anne Marie, about her ambition to transform the quality of publicly provided food service for the elderly – meals on wheels: […] when you say local food service, you think of something with grey boring pork roast, with brown gravy and boring potatoes. We are tired of being conjured up in a corner where people think the public services are boring and second-rate, and if you cannot get something better, you can then always take it. We will break this. Sangill articulates her ambition as “not being content to be second-rate”, and that the municipal food service should “be seen as attractive”. Some managers describe the rationale as more exploratory, essentially laying the groundwork for future performance. Peter Gadsdon, development director in Lewisham, says, “We were always trying to find another way of achieving change and transformation”. Another manager, based in Helsinki, Finland, was planning a new economic development strategy for the city, and came across an interesting design consultancy, which spoke about how design could improve public services. The manager contends that, “when I heard about service design I didn’t know what it was”; she nevertheless proceeded to write in the project plan for the strategy that they will use design as an approach. 147 As this story about the design consultancy, which apparently made a convincing pitch to the manager, demonstrates, rationales for commissioning design approaches can also be influenced by the ambitions, or professional claims, of the disciplines of design and ethnography. For instance, reflecting on the Danish Ministry of Taxation’s decision to hire an ethnologist to carry out a Ph.D. project with focus on user experience, Head of Division Niels Anker Jørgensen says: “(…) we needed to be smarter about why people [users] did as they did. All our new anthropologically oriented staff had some dreams and hopes about what their discipline could bring to the table.” Part of the ambition for achieving change is also that the managers are occupied with achieving tangible results as an outcome of the work with design approaches. Here Sune Knudsen, a Head of Division in the Danish Business Authority (DBA) describes his ambitions for a newly started design project addressing how newly established businesses register their statistical classification code online. By enhancing their service experience and supporting easier compliance, he hopes that ulimately: “…businesses will save a lot of money, they will be more satisfied, you will get higher efficiency of regulation, and the public sector will save money.” Mr. Knudsen here describes quite a range of types of public value he is aiming for (I discuss the quest for realizing public value, and return to expand on this quote, in more detail in chapter 8). In the Skansebakken case, Jesper Wiese similarly reflects that once he had committed to the design project, he was adamant that it was carried out, even though at times there was “an immense pressure” both from external stakeholders and from the staff. He adds, “It is also a matter of being ambitious in your field.” A final example is Anne Lind, at the time the Director General of the Board of Industrial Injuries in Denmark. Lind says of her motivation to engage with design work: “If our users do not find what we do to be valuable for them, then our efforts don’t really matter.” Here, it is a strong vision that she wants her agency to make a difference to the citizens it serves. Other managers invoke the need to cut costs and save to increase productivity at a time where the public sector at large, following the global financial crisis, is under severe financial pressure. One manager sums up that although he is not happy with the idea of “a burning platform” it was still useful to make the argument towards staff that “everybody” in government had to save, and 148 so the same would go for their own institution. Hence, this supported and motivated the design project and the changes involved, even though its main objective was not to create particular savings. This indicates that the entire environment surrounding public service reform in the period studies, which in most countries implied some degree of austerity measures or financial limitations, could well play a catalyzing role for the design projects to be undertaken, and perhaps even for them to be successful. The figure below summarizes the kinds of changes that are at stake for the managers in the cases. It displays the types of public value suggested by Moore (2005), National Audit Office (2006, 2009), the OECD (Daglio et. al. 2014) and myself (Bason 2007, 2009, 2010), including the desire to achieve better service experiences for citizens and business; higher government productivity; better outcomes (changes in concrete behavior), or enhanced democracy (transparency, accessibility, accountability, etc.). The indications here are based on the initial expectations and ambitions with which the managers entered the design projects; in some instances, the aims for public value shifted significantly during the course of the project. Figure 12: Ambitions, expectations and hope for the creation of value through design AMBITIONS FOR PUBLIC VALUE Better service experience (How end-users experience the public service) Higher productivity (Cost savings at similar output or increased output at same budget level). Better outcomes (Changes in actions and behaviors by citizens) Enhanced democracy and regulation (Improvements in accountability, legality, transparency, participation) Example “We do not want to be second-rate, we want to deliver the best service” (Hostebro) “We could manage a few more rounds of savings, but then it would hurt quality. So we need inspiration” (Rigshospitalet) “Permanent housing is the ultimate outcome that we aim for” (Lewisham) “The last step before regulation meets the business users was simply not designed in an understandable way” (Branchekode) Case 1 BII X X 2 FamByFam X 3 Lewisham X X X 4 Suffolk X 5 Camillagaarden X X 6 Branchekode X X X X 7 Helsinki 8 Tax X X X X 9 Rigshospitalet X X X 10 Stenhus X 11 iZone X 12 Holstebro X 13 Housing X 14 Skansebakken X X X 15 Competition X 149 5.1.3 Opportunity to access design skills A number of the managers have simply come across design support as an opportunity that they thought might help them generate a certain change. In some cases, the opportunity seemed almost coincidental. What is characteristic however is that the managers are inclined to reach out for the opportunity, in an almost entrepreneurial way. Consider for instance the reaction of Head of Secretariat and Visitation in Holstebro Municipality Paula Sangill as she listens to a broadcast on Danish National Radio (DR), which describes how a new government program will provide design support to improve services. In the radio program she hears first the Minister of Business mention that there is funding available for service design, and then she hears a comment from the Dean of the Kolding Design School, a well-known public figure, politician and former Minister of Culture: I hear her saying something about how they really liked to be seen as part of a community that not only produces chairs and coffee pots, but as an integrated part of service thinking. Then I thought, oh boy, what is this. I have always been very interested in services, wherever I am, I pay a lot of attention to what is happening around me. Sangill conveys the sense that she gets excited and curious at the opportunity. Very quickly hereafter she submits an application for government funding support for purchasing design consultants. In another case the availability of external funding is also key. Here it is Christina Pawsø, a manager at Camillagaarden, an institutional work place for adult mentally handicapped. When consultants from Local Government Denmark (the national association of municipalities) tell her she can apply for funding for an “innovation program”, she is immediately attracted: I really put much attention to the fact that we could get a quarter of a million DKK to work with, and we could very well use that money. So it was a great motivation for me. 150 Christina does not necessarily know what the program would entail or what it would demand from her, but she senses that she could put the resources to good use. This kind of opportunism is also at play at the Skansebakken institution, where Jesper Wiese, a center manager, was invited together with his co-manager to a workshop at Kolding School of Design to learn about design methodologies. By coincidence he was the one attending since his colleague was unavailable. Jesper Wiese had no prior knowledge of what it would entail, but says, “…but it has also to do with taking the chance.” To some, the legitimacy and connection with the funding body is also important; for instance, in the Lewisham case, the Chief Executive of the borough was also on the Board of the UK Design Council, and thus played a key role in bringing the Public Services by Design program to his organization. In the Skansebakken project, which was carried out by the Kolding School of Design, legitimacy was added by the endorsement of the Dean of the school (who, as mentioned above, was generally active in promoting design in public services), and later by the Mayor of Vejle municipality who attended the first kick-off workshop of the project. This legitimacy perhaps also contributed to provide the funding, as the School obtained some of the project resources from the national Agency for Social Services (part of the Ministry of Social Affairs) as well as from Vejle municipality. There seems to be no doubt that the availability of funds or immediate resources for design work is an additional factor motivating public managers to take the step to engage with design. As a way to lower the transaction cost for trying something different in terms of management advisory services, such design promotion programs seem in many cases to have been important catalysts in the cases studied. 5.1.4 Reflection: Do the personal characteristics of managers matter? In an earlier chapter, I discussed whether public managers who engage with design could be characterized as “design thinkers” or as having a particular “design attitude”. While this is a dimension that will be explored further throughout the following chapters, the issue of what motivates public managers to engage with designers does move the question to the forefront: Is there something particular about these managers’ backgrounds, personal motivation and even their psychological setup that might differentiate them? Is there somehow a self-selection, or 151 bias, involved, which implies that these managers are especially prone to wish to engage fruitfully with design approaches? If so, it would be sensible to reflect on it up front. On analysing the interviews with managers, certain characteristics do seem to stand out. This does not tell us whether these managers are particularly “atypical” or “outliers” or, as the academic Sandford Borins has called public management innovators, “rule-breakers” and “loose cannons” (Borins 2000). But it does seem somewhat likely that they are not really at the center of the bell curve when it comes to appetite for change and development. These managers appear used to trying out new things. Consider some of the backgrounds of the managers involved in the study: • One manager was originally trained as a TV repairperson, but put himself through business school and then applied and won a public management position • Another got involved in sustainability issues as a UK policy maker and decided to stop driving a car herself but to run and bike to work places, then picked up half marathons; later she became head of development in a local council • One is a trained psychiatrist who worked in a hospital context but realized that to truly help patients, municipalities needed to do a better job; so she changed position to work in the local government context, ultimately driving change towards stronger rehabilitation efforts in social care • A development director works among mostly engineers in a city business development unit, but has a PhD in education and has worked extensively abroad; “when you have worked in Iraq you are not scared of a powerful city director”. • A center manager working with severely handicapped, who was trained first to work as a forest manager, later an educator, and who has held numerous other positions, working with a broad range of user groups, before becoming a manager in the particular institution. • A manager with a business education decided to enter a teaching fellows program, worked as a math teacher, then joined a government innovation initiative and was asked to run a New York City transfer school. This is not to say that there are not also a handful of managers with rather “classic” careers and 254 reduction of time spent was on behalf of the businesses; the service improvement would, in other words, matter a lot to them, and less to the tax payers indirectly funding the service. Going back to the case of Camillagaarden, the institution for mentally handicapped adults, manager Christina Pawsø noted an actualized gain in productivity that flowed from changes in relationships with citizens. The institution has added 30 percent more users with a fixed number of staff, and increased satisfaction. She gives an example: on average there is one social worker to eight users at Camillagaarden, but with the right type of engagement of users, a staff of two can easily handle 30 users over several hours at a time – which is, she notes, an approximate doubling of productivity. Pawsø explains how this is made possible by leveraging the resources and motivation of the individual user: “If you are put into a frame where all your resources are being used instead of everything you are having trouble with, then you can also help others. And this also gives value to the individual.” In the Holstebro “The Good Kitchen” case, the municipality registered a range of changes on the side of staff, which can be translated into productivity gains (and which also influence the service experience as discussed above). Among the key changes were strengthening of employee competencies and skills, a reduction in sick leave and improvement of motivation and job satisfaction (Liedtka 2013). A rough estimate, based on the responsible managers’ own data and assessment, is a productivity increase between 10-15 percent as a consequence of the project. At Skansebakken, an evaluation shows that employees have spent more time with half the residents (ranging from 5 to 9.9 hours per week) and less time with the remaining half (ranging from -5.5 to -17.9 per week). The total amount of time spent with residents has according to the evaluation decreased with 10.5 hours per week. This implies a certain, if rather small, increase in productivity at Skansebakken, while the number of relations between citizens and the outside world have increased (as discussed below). Signs of better outcomes A significant number of the cases show signs of change in citizen’s behavior and actions – what they do, how they act, how they relate to each other, or how they relate to their environment. 255 An example is the Family by Family project in Adelaide, Australia. In terms of the main goals of the program, which focused on creating more thriving families, 80 pct. of families answered that they were “better” or “heaps better” following the first coaching session. After subsequent sessions, 90 pct. responded positively that the intervention helped them achieve their goals (Community Matters 2012: 20). In Skansebakken, where the design project focused on redesigning and ultimately increasing the amount and quality of relations between handicapped citizens and non-professionals, the centre manager Jesper Wiese says of the experience of visiting and being at the Skansebakken institution: It is completely different now to come on visit. You know, fundamental things have changed. Actually, I was really excited now that we moved, if we would fall back into old habits. But everyone, including some I did not ask, have said it, “It is nice to come here’. And of course it is something to do with the physical environment also, but this is also a question of whether it is acceptable to have guests … It is those very specific things. Hanne has had a visiting friend. There is a 4th grade school class who come and sing. Now there is a big movement about creating voluntary relationships. It works. I think we have more than 35 [new relationships]. At Skansebakken, in terms of quantitative change, an external evaluation carried out by the Municipality of Vejle and the state-run Social Service Agency showed that among six citizens studied, they collectively gained 21 new relationships beyond the institution, corresponding to increases in the number of relationships per citizen between 13 pct. and 50 pct. (Vejle Municipality & Social Service Agency 2014; Bohl 2014).40 The evaluation report goes on to state that the tendency to form new relationships directly corresponds to the ambition that “citizens through the project would achieve new relations to family, friends, acquaintances, civil society, etc.” (Vejle Municipality & Social Service Agency 2014:24). The report goes on to say that the staff at Skansebakken “to a high degree have succeeded in facilitating new relationships 40 The number of new relationships mentioned by the manager (35) is higher than stated in the evaluation report (21), which may be due to the fact that the interview for the thesis was carried out after completion of the report. It raises the interesting point however that it seems as if data on growth in relationships continued to be collected at the institution after end of the project, and end of the evaluation. 256 where they are not themselves a key player”. Staff have played an active role in “setting citizens free” to gain new experiences. The value of this is underlined in the interview with manager Jesper Wiese, referring to one of the handicapped users: You do not need much. If you can sit down next to Jacob and read aloud from a book, then Jakob is happy for half an hour. And it makes his day better. It is as simple as that. It is simple, as Jesper Wiese says, but ostensibly the result of a quite long and intensive design process, which leads to this consideration of the power of a simple interaction like reading aloud from a book to a mentally disabled citizen. In Holstebro municipality, Poula Sangill contends that the staff have increased their focus on the entire value chain of the service offering, and have a stronger focus on the citizens who use the service, both in terms of food quality and in terms of service provision. There is increased focus on communication and interplay with citizens (Liedtka 2013). In the Housing and Preservation Department design project in New York City, a highly comprehensive 2014 evaluation report seeks to assess the findings and results from their “pilot”. Amongst other data sources, the report used a survey among more than 2,500 citizens who had interacted with the program. Respondents indicated that a range of changes implemented through the design work had positive impact, in terms of the citizen’s ability to reach better, more informed decisions about their housing options and application process: The evaluation team found that the pilots clearly met the proposals’ stated design objectives: to encourage information accessibility and exchange, account for applicants’ lived reality, and enable more informed decision-making (although findings were somewhat mixed regarding the first of those objectives). The pilots also achieved their intended short-term outcomes, to create stronger support for community groups that provide applicants with assistance and to generate greater access to information about the process (Public & Collaborative 2014:5). 257 As the quote, from the executive summary of the evaluation report, illustrates, the design project has resulted in tools, which shape different service interactions, improving not just the experience but the ability to make important decisions. Another outcome, which is tightly linked to the notion of co-production of services, and which I will discuss in the next chapter, is the ability of community groups, partners to the City administration in delivery of services, to perform their role more effectively. A final example of apparently valuable outcomes come from another New York City case, the iZone program on creating a student-centric digital high school, which embraces “asynchronous learning”. The implication is that because digital learning tools can be tailored to the individual needs and learning pace of each student, the students carry through their educational process asynchronously. The former principal of Apollo Academy, the school, indicates in a follow-up interview that there were significant improvements in learning outcomes as a consequence of the design work, in combination with a wider set of reforms in New York City’s public school system, which led to transformation of the school. Especially two kinds of improved outcomes are highlighted by Seth Schoenfeld, the principal: 1) Reduced absenteeism; and 2) Stronger educational progression, measured as “mastery” of subjects rather than only attainment of “credits” for passing courses.41 Signs of increased democratic engagement The signs of various kinds of increases in democratic variables, such as stronger democratic engagement, are often found in terms of transparency and insight for citizens into their own cases. One example is the Board of Industrial Injuries, which digitized the case management process and made citizens’ individual records available online. This was not a direct result of the design work but part of a larger process of digitizing the agencies’ interaction with citizens. One could very well also say that the HPD project in New York has strong democratic and participatory potential benefits to citizens, since the aim amongst others is to create a clear and understandable basis for understanding one’s rights and possibilities for accessing public housing. 41 Conducted in connection with visiting scholarship in New York City at Parsons School of Design, spring 2013. 258 In the Camillagaarden case, participation in itself was not a stated objective in the design project; however there seems no doubt that the massive engagement of the users of the institution in creating and designing their own activities had implications for the experience of participating and “being heard”. The table below seeks to sum up where there are such tangible signs concerning the creation of value. I have indicated the signs with “O” in order to differentiate them from “X” signifying the pre-existing intent or ambition for value creation, from the perspective of the managers, which I discussed above. Figure 32: Expectations (X) versus signs and indications (O) for the creation of value through design AMBITIONS (X) AND SIGNS (O) FOR PUBLIC VALUE Better service experience (How end-users experience the public service) Higher productivity (Cost savings at similar output or increased output at same budget level). Better outcomes (Changes in actions and behaviors by citizens, including higher compliance) Enhanced democracy and regulation (Improvements in accountability, legality, transparency, participation) Case 1 BII X O X O 2 FamByFam X O O XO O 3 Lewisham X O X O X O 4 Suffolk** X 5 Camillagaarden X O O X O 6 Branchekode X O X O X O X O 7 Helsinki** X X 8 Tax** X X 9 Rigshospitalet XO XO X 10 Stenhus X 11 iZone X 12 Holstebro XO O 13 Housing XO XO XO 14 Skansebakken X O O X O 15 Competition* * Too early to reach any conclusions ** No data available As the table shows, design processes seem to have led to perception of a range of the results that were expected, or hoped for, beforehand. In some instances, it appears that there is also value generated, which was not necessarily expected, or formally a part of the objectives of the design projects. 259 Conclusion: The design of public value? This chapter has illustrated some of the design outputs as well as a range of tentative documentation of the kinds of public value flowing from the design work, thus contributing to answering research sub-question 3. One more time: The objective of this thesis is not to conclusively demonstrate or prove that the design approaches lead to public value; however, it seems fair to conclude that there are at least indications that various kinds of change happens in conjunction with the design work, and that some of these changes are deemed positive by the managers involved. Further, in most cases the changes are more or less directly linked to the insights gained from various design processes, or from the ideas, concepts or prototypes that were developed. As Pestoff (2012) points out, governments can seek better ways of involving their citizens in the provision of goods and services, either for reasons of improving efficiency of public services, effectiveness of public policies, or to promote other important social goals, such as citizen empowerment, participation and democracy. At least for a subset of the cases studied in this thesis, there seems to be sufficient evidence that some of these kinds of value are being gained, in part due to the design work. 260 261 10. Creating change in governance by design The question of who is the producer is more complex than appears at first sight. John Alford, Engaging Public Sector Clients (2009:2) The objective of this thesis is to better understand the interplay between design approaches and public governance, through the lived experience and perspectives of public managers. More specifically, I wish to contribute with new knowledge by exploring the “mystery” of the role of design in creating changes in activities, services, and systems in a government context. I also wish to inform future action – by suggesting ways that managers might engage with design to spur change in public organizations. In terms of research design and methodology, I have emphasized that it would likely not be possible to build well-developed constructs and models in this thesis, but that I would rather combine my empirical findings with an emerging body of related research to build “nascent” or, at best, “intermediate theory,” which would present “provisional explanations of phenomena, often introducing a new construct and proposing relationships between it and established constructs” (Edmondson & McManus 2007:1158). Part II and its four chapters sought to illustrate how the change processes associated with design work unfold, and how this appears to matter to public managers. It addressed research questions 1 and 2 of the thesis. In opening Part III with chapter 9 I gave examples of some of the outputs of the design process, and discussed tentative signs of the creation of public value. I also highlighted that some of the contributions of design did not merely concern new graphics, products or services, but rather systems. By systems, I mean the elements and interactions between them which together function to create intended outcomes. In the private sector, the principles guiding such systems would often be called business models. In a public management context, they could be called governance models (Hartley & Benington 2001; Hartley 2005; Greve 2013). Although no 262 generally accepted and authoritative definition of governance exists, its origins are a clear indication of its meaning: Governance is derived from the ancient Greek word kubernáo, which is also the origin of the word government, and which means steering of a ship or cart (Wikipedia 2016). Hufty (2011) has suggested that governance is the processes of interaction and decisionmaking among the actors involved in a collective problem that lead to the creation, reinforcement, or reproduction of social norms and institutions. Question about governance models then become questions about the principles that guide such processes across dimensions like laws and regulations, financial arrangements, organizational structure, management procedures, public service operations, documentation, evaluation and accountability, and so forth. My point of departure in this chapter is the observation that there are several alternative paradigms, ideal-types or models, from which to view and interpret public governance – the alternatives I discussed in some detail in chapter 3. My intention now is to try to understand better the role that design-led approaches play in practice from a governance perspective: Might design approaches influence managers’ ability to discover new or different ways of governing that could be better suited to achieve their organizational mission (or in some cases, drive change in that mission itself), in order to produce public value? My intention is not to try to formalize a completely new governance model. That would require a rather different endeavor in scope and ambition. Rather, it is more humbly to understand whether public managers’ journey of engagement with design influences governance in practice (Hartley 2005; Bourgon 2011; Agranoff 2014; Waldorff et. al. 2014), and to distil what the emerging characteristics such approaches to governance might have.42 In this sense, I seek to provide nuance, substance and perspective to the current debate over the “next” public governance, which, as discussed, is far from finished. Another way of putting this: I am asking which possible dimensions of an emerging governance model are brought particularly into focus through design processes? This is an analysis of the third research question of the thesis, namely what consequences design approaches may have for public governance? Below, this chapter briefly summarizes the findings developed across the thesis by posing the question: What appears to be the significance of design approaches for innovation in public 42 For communication purposes I do give these principles a name, as a model of governance. 263 organizations, and for the management of these processes of innovation? This “significance” is illustrated through a simple conceptual framework. I then turn my attention to the issue of whether design approaches might contain or suggest the potential to shift governance models more broadly. Based on my empirical research, I explore what more general changes, if there are any, in the underlying governance models of public service provision are prompted through applying design approaches. In the cases studied, have design processes opened up wider considerations of the nature of public service provision that are more profound, or more fundamental, beyond the concrete design outputs of specific projects? If so, what is the nature of such wider considerations, and how have they been articulated across the cases? Using my research findings, I identify four characteristics of such broader consideration, four ways that wider governance impacts are being articulated. Each of these four characteristics is described in terms of empirical findings, then analyzed and discussed, in order to elicit their defining properties. Finally, I sum up in the form of a case-based overview that shows the patterns I have discussed. Changing governance by design: A conceptual framework In the previous chapter, I sought to identify the distinct kinds of designed “outputs” flowing from the different cases, and from the different design processes. However, more is at stake here than “outputs”. What if the consequences of applying design approaches in public organizations reach beyond the creation of graphical expressions, or new service processes, or various types of new products (often digital)? Might the more obvious outputs of projects that involve design, the products and services that emerge, or the ways in which they emerge, exemplify principles of system design, or governance that are – to some extent at least – novel? Normann & Ramirez (2004) propose that “as offerings change … so do institutions that transact them”. One might well wonder, then, if a new, or redesigned, emerging form of governance is the larger game in the quest for public sector innovation. Rather than focusing on stand-alone “solutions” individually, might we instead coax from these some ideas about fundamentally different ways of steering and organizing public organizations that could in turn yield a much broader set of 270 appropriating ways of doing things elsewhere and adjusting them to the task at hand, reframing the very notion of the business one is in along different lines. Paquest suggests that this reframing of “the very notion of the business one is in” can be driven by inquiry based on empathy, on holistic problem-setting, and prototyping. Further he surmises that the kind of reframing would be “essentially relational, as nets of on-going relations between persons, groups and environment” (2009:121) (this also hints at a networked quality of governance will explore further in the next section). This relational quality of emergent governance principles is in many ways present in my empirical research. Much of it seems to be “insight-led”, in the sense that it is closely related to the design research processes which drive discovery and generate empathy, and managers’ subsequent efforts to leverage this empathy by beginning to work it into the system, culture and perspective of the staff. In fact, part of this shift concerns a change in the very understanding of what outcomes the organization is supposed to contribute to creating, as well as how it should make that contribution; in that sense, the relational shift, at least in some cases, also concerns a reframing of the mission of the organization, as well as the activities needed to accomplish that mission. Ramirez & Normann (1994:75) define a frame as “the lens through which managers see the situation with which they are confronted”. The notion of reframing the fundamental problem, mission, meaning or effort in the organization “from” something “to” something else is thus quite prevalent across the cases. This reframing is most often articulated via the proposition of a different relationship between the organization and the citizens (or “users’) that it serves. Kees Dorst characterizes such reframing as design abduction. By this he means “both a new way of looking at the problem situation and a new way of acting within it” (Dorst 2015:53). In Kees Dorst’s definition, a “frame” is a proposal through which one can apply a particular pattern of relationships (or, as Charles Eames would have put it, arrangements of elements) in order to produce a desired outcome. As I also discussed briefly in chapter 1, designers are skilled at working backward from a desired outcome (or the problem of producing that outcome) and using abductive thinking to propose a wider set of alternatives to address it. This is a contrast to Herbert Simon’s insistence, discussed in chapter 2, that effective problem solving is mainly about choosing the most optimal from a given set of alternatives, and less about creatively, intuitively proposing novel solutions. 271 In the cases studied in this thesis, the reframing, or re-decision, of what matters to managers and their organization, is to a large extent centered around the relationship with citizens. John Alford (2009:213) suggests that “client co-production seems to sit most comfortably with a focus on outcomes”. In his consideration of what it means to co-produce public services with citizens, Alford argues that this calls for a recasting of our understanding of how public value is produced. The relationship, and the interactions, between the public organizations and its users, comes into play in more complex ways: To the question “What do clients want from our organization?’, a prior question must be added: “What does our organization want from its clients? This in turn calls for a deeper understanding of the value the organization is seeking to create and the processes by which it produces that value (Alford 2009:205). Alford points out that a re-examination not only of how citizens experience and gain value from public services, but also of the means, by which organizations produce it, are key when considering the engagement of citizens in the (co) production of that value. It is a relevant point to keep in mind, given the strong focus on user experience that the design approaches entail, and given the search for new ways of achieving value that drives much of the management engagement with design. As Botero et. al. (2012:6) state in a publication on peer-to-peer production of public services, “There are changes taking place in how the role of citizens in society is experienced – in terms of how they feel responsible for things happening – and also in what is expected from them.” In the cases studied, these changes seem to be unleashed, in part, through the design methods, for instance by the leveraging of empathic data to create new insights about the nature of the relationship with citizens. It may not be surprising that the co-design of new solutions with citizens enables more co-production with citizens. The question is what co-production entails, and how (co-)design contributes to it. From a theoretical perspective, the relational shift signifies the recognition that citizens to some extent always are “co-producers” of public value (Hartley 2005:29; Alford 2009; Bourgon 2011). Such peer-to-peer production, or co-production, is by no means a new concept. The term 272 was originally coined in the early 1970s; accounts vary on who was the originator of the term, but among its key proponents were Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom. According to Pestoff (2012:16), Ostrom developed the term to describe the “relationship that could exist between the “regular producer” (such as street-level police officers, social workers or health workers) and their clients, who wanted to be transformed by the service into safer, better-educated or healthier persons.” Over the last couple of decades, various more elaborate definitions of co-production have been offered. Jocelyne Bourgon (2012) characterizes co-production as “the shared and reciprocal activities of public agencies and people to produce results of public value” (2012:26). Edgar Cahn defines co-production as a framework and set of techniques used by social service organizations to enlist active client participation in service programming (Cahn 2004). Building mainly on UK experiences, Boyle and Harris (2009:11) describe co-production as: Delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families and their neighbours. Where activities are co-produced in this way, both services and neighbourhoods become far more effective agents of change. Normann & Ramirez (1994), in discussing the design of interactive strategy, argue that there are three types of relationships in a system of value-creating actors, such as the system of an institution for mentally handicapped adults, or one for dealing with families at risk, or a school: • Pooled relationships, in which each part of a system comes together to form a whole (as when different organizational units work towards a common purpose) • Sequential relationships in which sections of an organizational system produce outputs to a sequential process (such as in traditional value chain production processes); and • Reciprocal relationships, which are based on the mutual, ongoing interchange between two or more entities: The outputs of each section of an organization become inputs to the sections from which they get their own inputs. These are considered the most complex relationships and they characterize most service-producing organizations. 273 It seems reasonable to argue that the changes in the perception of the relationship between end users (such as mentally disabled adults) and public service organizations can be characterized as a shift toward recognizing that the relationship is (or should, or could be) a reciprocal one. Normann & Ramirez (1994:30) state that “Co-production is the term we use to describe the ‘reciprocal’ relationships between actors...”, and they elaborate that this view implies that the customer (or citizen) is not only a passive orderer/buyer/user of the offering, but also participates in many other ways in consuming it, for instance, in its delivery. John Alford (2009) similarly finds that reciprocity is central to co-production, and that it prompts the organization to truly offer the client, or user, something she wants. This in turn calls for a broader conception of exchange, beyond the traditional transaction of funds or services, to something which may include a range of other human factors, such as engagement, dignity, respect, trust, and so forth (Alford 2009:38), and even social aesthetic and moral values (Normann & Ramirez 1994:63). It also implies that value can be distributed more over time, so that citizens for instance offer their resources in turn for a potential future value. Networked: Shift to activating wider resources The second characteristic of governance that seems to arise from the application of design approaches is the identification and leveraging of a wider set of resources, in a networked fashion, in order to achieve the organization’s (redefined) objectives. As citizens, or human beings, and their experiences and behaviors are being repositioned as central to the organization, there is also a move towards deeper, more systematic engagement with the actors that are critical for the creation of value for them. This in turn increases the number and nature of strategic engagements that the public organization has – or is conscious of having. 10.3.1 Research findings Let us first take a look at how some of the different cases in this thesis suggest an expanded emphasis on networks within a governance perspective. In the case of BII, the design projects helped Anne Lind see how her organization can work systematically to re-align a range of actors such as other authorities, health care providers, and insurers, to produce more value with citizens. In the words of Anne Lind: 274 We have a lot of relations. We obtain information from general practitioners, specialist doctors, hospitals, work-medicine clinics, employers, trade unions, municipalities, regions, insurance companies, and sometimes the police. So in many cases it is at least 10 – and then the injured citizen – 10 to 11 different actors we obtain information from. For instance, this could lead insurance agencies to invest actively in their customers/the citizen’s rehabilitation (physical training, therapy, etc.). This allows for a much more coordinated way of helping citizens back to the labor market: a key outcome of the agency’s work. The underlying movement shifts the attention of the BII from focusing on process execution (correct case management; compliance; accountability) to desired outcomes (return to labor market). By focusing on the desired outcomes, the Board has launched a dialogue with these stakeholders about how to help users make a better life based on what best suits their situation. In the family by family case, Carolyn Curtis describes the new families project as a “resourcing model’, which is radically different from how she has worked during her 10-year career as a manager. “It is bottom-up, it has end-user focus, and there is no fixed structure, criteria or categories.” The key to the model is to engage “sharing families” which are “positive deviants” who display many of the same apparent characteristics in terms of social demographic as the target families, but which against the odds are doing fine. While the model was created through a design-led process, it draws on theories about multi-systemic approaches to societal problems and positive deviance (Pascale et. al. 2010). The ability to discover and leverage these families, voluntarily, as a resource to help at-risk families thrive is at the heart of the governance model of Family by Family. In the branchekode.dk case, the design research uncovers the critical roles of other actors such as Statistics Denmark and the Ministry of Taxation across the case process of registering a new business. In the case, the manager Sune Knudsen becomes aware that without systematic dialogue between his own agency, the Danish Business Agency, and these other actors, it will not be possible to facilitate business registrations that are more accurate. Part of the design concept therefore becomes a “back office” platform, which will enable workers across all three agencies to systematically update their joint definitions of which kinds of businesses belong to which kind of code. 275 In the taxation case, the manager Niels Anker Jørgensen asserts that the ethnographic research project has provided the organization with “a new perspective on the interplay between companies, bookkeepers and accountants”, leading to a reconsideration of the tax authority’s means of engaging with them to support better outcomes (higher tax compliance). As discussed extensively, the Skansebakken case is built on the principle that activating and engaging civic resources outside the boundaries of the institution will contribute to better quality of life to residents. The contributions of design to activating wider network resources are many in the cases studied. In some instances, it is the graphical mapping of systems and networks that has been key. In others, it has been to map citizen service journeys and thereby discover hidden or nonrecognized actors, such as when it turned out that the partners of injured workers were critically positioned to be an active part of rehabilitation processes. In almost all cases, there have been instances of designing workshops to engage stakeholders, to identify how they can contribute and why. 10.3.2 Discussion: On thrownness and networks in governance As Normann & Ramirez (1994) observe, relationships in co-production are not only more complex but also more multi-directional and simultaneous. The outside-in view of user experience that is provided by various design approaches (and the visualizations used to illustrate it) tend to expose the entire network of actors, including citizens who can potentially take part in value-creation. As such, the involved partners “create value together through inventing new relationships” (ibid. 1994:43). This discovery, or rediscovery, of outside actors which may be of critical importance to effectively addressing the problems at hand, reflects Karl Weick’s observation that typically, Designing unfolds in a world that is already interpreted where people are already acting, where options are constrained, where control is minimal, and where things and options already matter for reasons that are taken-for-granted (Weick 2004:76) 276 Karl Weick, drawing on Heideggers concept of “thrownness”, argues that people (and organizations) are “already in the middle of something”, meaning that designing never takes place on a blank slate. Rather, designing is almost always about redesigning in a given context, full of conditions, constraints, incongruities, and dilemmas. Design thus becomes not about pristine novelty but rather about “re-design, interruption, resumption, continuity, and recontextualising” (Weick 2004:74). As public managers reflect and appreciate the nature of the challenges they are addressing from a human centered view point, they come to discover other actors, such as agencies and public institutions at various levels, suppliers, industrial partners and businesses, who are “already acting’, in the middle of something.44 Normann & Ramirez (1994:42-43) point out that this is a general characteristic of our contemporary world. It is becoming so interrelated “that many actors are involved in co-production without consciously realizing that they are working together. This means that many strategic opportunities are seriously undervalued, sometimes dangerously so”. As managers become aware of and begin to engage other external actors in line with the relational perspective discussed above, they are prompted to new forms of behavior that can ameliorate this gap. The challenge, as the roles and potential contributions of these actors are brought to the forefront, is that they may need to be engaged to align their ways of acting with the problem and objectives in question. In other words, through the design process it is not enough to identify actors of importance to the problem, they must be activated in the reframed context that flows from the design work. The network perspective on governance has been elaborated from a range of sides, not least by Goldsmith & Eggers (2004:55) who argue that there is a distinct role for the “network designer” to identify possible partners, bring the relevant stakeholders to the table, analyze current operations, set expectations to the way the network will operate, assemble and enmesh its various pieces, and activate it. This design phase must, according to Goldsmith & Eggers, address issues such as policy objectives, tools used to activate the network, partners to involve, 44 This may also involve commercial partners and interests. Eggers & Macmillan (2013) have argued that new forms of collaboration between private firms, social innovators, philanthropies and government organizations arise in solution “ecosystems’ to address societal problems. 277 network design, and management and governance principles. In terms of on-going governance and management, Goldsmith & Eggers (2004:159) emphasize that the roles of senior and midlevel managers include the development of relationships and strategy, understanding customer (user/citizen) needs, and manage projects and outcomes. As such the (mid-level) public manager’s role shifts from enforcing rules and monitoring inputs to actively managing the network; they contend that new job functions and skills which reflect these roles need to be created and filled in public organizations who wish to take a network approach. The leveraging of wider resources is, again, linked to the notion of co-production. Normann & Ramirez (1994) characterize this as a process of reconfiguring, so that actors come together to co-produce value via what they call not a value chain, but a “value constellation’. This constellation, or network, is designed so that “its partners end up performing the “right” activities for them, engendering value creation on both, or rather all sides. It might be noted that in public sector organizations, which are typically concerned with the production of services and not products, and which deal with highly complex problem spaces, the notion of “constellation” seems a better fit than the more mechanistic, or industrial term “chain’. Similarly, Alford (2009) suggests that in a “public value chain” the social exchanges taking place will often have more parties involved, and more elaborate forms of reciprocity. In considering “a new synthesis” of public management, Jocelyne Bourgon (2012) highlights the ability to focus on outcomes and system-level results as a key driver of innovation. The key, in her perspective, it is the collective capacity for creating public results and achieve societal value. In the terminology of Normann & Ramirez, such “an effective offering” is “designed in such a way so that partners end up performing the “right” activities for them, engendering value creation on both sides, or rather all, sides” (1994:54). This notion was central in many of the cases, where managers, inspired by the design work, recognized that in order to engage the wider network they would have to extend a meaningful value proposition to them as well. Interactive: Shaping processes and behaviors From the enactment of tentative new practices to the creation of final graphical product and service “outputs’, the design approaches applied in the cases in this study seem to embody new processes and behaviors across the organization’s engagement with citizens and other actors. In 278 chapter 9, I showed a range of examples of outputs that result from such new processes and behaviors. It is important to highlight also that in many cases the solutions are not about standalone facilitated interactions. Rather they concern understanding how a range of different interactions (physical, virtual, distributed in time and space), are guided by the overarching relational perspective. These interactions go beyond the scope of what is typically characterized as “interaction design” (Moggridge 2014) or user experience design and are more characteristic of holistic “service design” Polaine et. al. (2013:87). 10.4.1 Research findings At Skansebakken, the “communication tree” (with the strange name “Georg”) was a device designed to facilitate concrete acts of hospitality, such as a visitor taking a book from the tree and reading it to a resident. Even though the manager, Jesper Wiese, was skeptical of this artifact, he reflects now that: Maybe it actually has worked, since we now sit and talk about it, because it has been such a visible “design thing” that constantly reminded the staff that something must change here. As a physical intervention, the point here is seems to be that the artifact contributed to maintaining the project intent in the minds of the staff. However, digital media also drove new interactions; for instance, the creation of Facebook pages on iPads facilitated new forms of digital meetings between users and outside relations. In the Branchekode case, it was necessary not only to create a new digital interface mediating interactions between startup businesses and the Danish Business Agency, it was also deemed necessary to build a back-end digital knowledge sharing system that could, over time, improve the accuracy and update the interactions across multiple government agencies. In the City of Helsinki, a new digital platform for accessing city permits was developed which essentially ordered the internal interactions across the wide range of city units necessary for obtaining a permit. 279 For the BII to realize a shift from solely ensuring legally correct case management to also managing towards outcomes, different devices had to be developed, including an online graphical guide for injured citizens to better engage with their case. Part of the solution was also for the organization to underpin its shift to digital solutions with new services, such as proactively calling new clients by phone to enable them to manage their case online. In the case of BII, these new solutions were to be enabled by a new organizational unit, a Citizen Secretariat. “The idea is with the citizen secretariat is to immediately ask the client, do you have access to a computer, do you have one nearby, if you could go online then together we could try to see how your case looks right now.” However, it is not only physical or virtual artifacts, or formally redesigned service processes which can underpin new interactions. The process of insight-led change, by creating empathy with citizens, can apparently play a powerful role too. An example is an assistant at Rigshospitalet who could not help hearing patients’ voices replaying in her head as she walked her cart around; to her, the relations with patients had changed because of the experience of listening to audio recordings of patient experience. The “meaningful patient experience’ became a guideline for her in a very concrete sense as well as for the management (in a very strategic sense) as it started re-organising professional processes around the patient rather than the other way around. In the Lewisham example, Peter Gadsdon, the development director, reflects on how the design process in itself has generated momentum and a culture of more continuous improvement among staff, not due to a particular “solution” but because of how staff experienced and were engaged in the process: [The process] sort of gathered its own momentum, and we then set up for the service, because they had lots of ideas, and we only implemented the first in that project. But then to get more of the staff to look at new ideas, and take on some more of them, so it continues the way of thinking and gathering insight and always trying to improve. It is like a bit of a culture thing. One might say that the ongoing exploration, or inquiry, by staff, into how to continuously develop more fruitful interactions in support of the organization’s (reframed) objective then 286 Figure 35: Some possible characteristics of an emerging governance model As the table attempts to illustrate, there are patterns across the cases, which indicate some possible changes in public governance. For each of these shifts there are implications for governance as well as insights about the ways in which the design approaches may contribute to their development as a facilitating factor. It is important to underline that these characteristics are tentative, loosely defined, emerging – as mentioned before, more a scaffolding on which to conduct further conceptual development. A critical question here could be whether the four characteristics here are really mutually exclusive, or they are just slightly different ways of describing the same thing? On consideration I would maintain that they are probably distinct in the sense that it would normally be possible to have one without the other. This is also illustrated in the table above, where not every case displays every characteristic; some include all four, while others display only two or three. However, let me briefly entertain the argument. EMERGING GOVERNANCE CHARACTERISTICS Relational: Reframing relationship with users towards outcomes Networked: Strategically activating new or different resources beyond primary users Interactive: Introducing new artifacts to mediate and facilitate collaborative governance processes Reflective: Other ways of learning and of “knowing” the organization’s impact in the world Example Reframing of relations with end-users towards the creation of outcomes (user experience, behavioral change), for instance towards empowering vulnerable families (Family by Family) or shifting to student-centric education (iZone) Engaging wider stakeholders and resources in contributing to co-producing outcomes, for instance engaging insurance companies to support rehabilitation of injured citizens (BII) or opening up relations (Skansebakken) Using graphical expression physically or online to facilitate new interactions and dialogues with citizens, e.g. case process map for homeless families (Lewisham) or among staff (Branchekode) Embedding more qualitative ways of informing management processes, for instance by continuously using service design or ethnography in elder care services (Holstebro) or by observing kids playing with iPads (Competition) Case 1 BII X X X X 2 FamByFam X X X X 3 Lewisham X X 4 Suffolk X X 5 Camillagaarden X X 6 Branchekode X X X 7 Helsinki X X X 8 Tax X X 9 Rigshospitalet X X X 10 Stenhus X 11 iZone X X X 12 Holstebro X X X 13 Housing X X 14 Skansebakken X X X X 15 Competition X X X 287 For instance, a public organization could realize and seek to change activities based on insight, which motivate a shift in relations with a particular group of citizens or other end-users. This would not necessarily entail that it would also engage with a much wider network of stakeholders, and work strategically with them to achieve more of the outcomes that the (new) relational perspective would call for. However, it would likely be so that a networked approach would render the relational shift, and activities flowing from the shift, more effective in achieving desired outcomes. Likewise, in order to engage a wider network, an appreciation and active use of graphical and physical artifacts to facilitate new interactions would likely make it easier to engage network actors in a reciprocal way, and influence their behavior around a joint intent to achieve desired outcomes. But there are still other ways of working with networks than through artifacts, or indeed in a highly interactive manner. Finally, the characteristic “reflective” concerns how knowledge is more continuously generated and processed by the managers and organizations engaging with design, focusing on perceptional, rich, qualitative, “empathic” types of data. Again, this is way of knowing does relate to for instance the relational characteristic, but is not the same, since it concerns an on-going management of knowledge, not the creation of novel insights. While they do seem to be distinguishable, the four characteristics appear to work well together, in a sense as mutual reinforcement. This is why these characteristics together form what might be called an emerging governance model, in that they seem to “fit” with each other. A point however is that the relational characteristic seems to be present in varying degrees as a governance ”output” in all the cases; this is not surprising since I earlier showed that some form of reframing did take place in every case studied; this could indicate that “relational” may be an overarching or guiding principle, which contributes to organizing the others. Conclusion: Discovering principles of governance This chapter has ventured to explore what the empirical findings can tell us about possible principles of an emerging governance model. I showed an overall model that displayed how the use of design approaches, and the engagement of public managers with them, might lead to the emergence, or contour, of different ways of governing. Subsequently, the chapter carefully elicited empirical material from across the cases to give shape and form to the principles – four in total – underpinning an emerging governance model. I used extant literature to interpret and 288 discuss the findings, and ended the chapter with a summary “map” of the characteristics across all the study’s cases. I then reflected upon the degree to which the individual characteristics are mutually exclusive, or to what degree they are somewhat interdependent. Here it seemed that the relational perspective might be guiding or, as it were, framing the other three; although this is more of a tentative speculation. In the next chapter I will further critically discuss the implications of my empirical findings and analysis outlined here. 289 11. Towards human centered governance? Twenty-first century challenges and the means of addressing them are more numerous and complex than ever before. Stephen P. Goldsmith & William Eggers, Networked Governance (2004:7) The wider context of applying design approaches in government, as I discussed in chapter 3, can be viewed as an emerging shift from a classic “bureaucratic” paradigm, combined in some degree with “new public management” components or overlays, towards something else, which has more recently been termed “networked” or “collaborative” governance, or “co-production” (Goldsmith & Eggers 2004; Hartley 2005; Alford 2009; Parsons 2010; Greve 2013; Ansell & Torfing 2014). As I discussed in the introduction to the thesis, this emerging paradigm, as it has been articulated by scholars and practitioners, seeks to embrace complexity, turbulence and emergence, recognizing that contemporary public organizations may face unprecedented types and scales of challenges. This chapter explores what the empirical findings I presented in chapter 10 could mean to the future of governance, given what we already know in terms of emerging “new” governance models. To what extent can the four sets of characteristics I have identified – relational, networked, interactive and reflective – be seen as incremental additions or “overlays” to existing ways of governing, and to what extent might they be expressions of more disruptive challenges to, or extensions of, the dominant paradigms? How might such emerging principles compare and contrast with the legacy public organizations and their managers have inherited? I first discuss the implications and nature of the emerging governance principles: Are they different in nature than the types we already know, and if so, how? Here I especially discuss how human centered governance can be viewed particularly as an approach to co-production of public services. 290 Second, I explore the implications of the seeming under specification, or “skeletal” nature of the characteristics I have identified, drawing on Karl Weick’s discussion of this concept. Third, what have we learned about the balance between “overlay” and “break” from past models, in terms of how an emerging human centered governance interacts with current, existing governance paradigms? Does the emerging model signify an incremental, or a more radical shift? Fourth, I explore how potential new characteristics of a governance paradigm might relate to existing models. I discuss how they would perform in relation to the standards, which were originally proposed by Max Weber in terms of government efficiency and performance. Would a different paradigm have the risk of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” and failing to deliver on some of the pillars of what we consider good government? Further, I examine how human centered governance might compare with Benington & Hartley’s 2001 ideal-types of governance models. Finally, before concluding, I ask to what extent it is methodologically reasonable to generalize analytically from the sample of cases I have studied to the population of (Western, OECD area) governance arrangements? Re-humanizing public organizations? In some ways, the characteristics I described in the previous chapter suggests a form of “reenchantment” of public governance, as a postmodern reaction to the disenchantment (entzauberung in Max Webers terms) of the modern organization. Parsons (2010:27) suggests that such a reenchantment requires that we recognize that the problems we face are of a “wicked” nature and do not have “solutions” that can be arrived at “purely through the exercise of reason and analysis”. Given the strong emphasis on the subjective experience of human beings – of citizens primarily but also of workers and managers within public systems – design might contribute to this reenchantment, or at least to the introduction of a different set of parameters for assessing the success of public management. First and foremost, as this thesis has illustrated, design 291 approaches tend to place human beings and their relations with public systems and processes more centrally in the public policy and service discourse. As Meyer (2011) argues, design’s essentially humanistic agenda makes it a powerful tool for enriching organizations. This seems to entail a more subjective, empathic, behavioral, contextual, “messy” and flexible appreciation of what it means to govern public organizations. But this is vague. Such vague concepts are not yet the basis for an emerging governance model. They do, however, suggest potential properties of a new model. These properties imply that the model might have to be of a more generally defined, and to some extent fluid nature, more so than the prescriptive and relatively fixed properties of traditional and “new” public management. The core shift would appear to be from models largely designed around the delivery of services to people, toward a model that is designed to better enable, in various forms and guises, the coproduction of services with people and other actors. Here we are mainly in the camp of Greve’s collaborative governance model, although this risks being reductive (Greve 2013). One might also signify it as a shift towards a more “human centered governance’, since the model takes into account “messy” subjective, emotional, relational human dimensions. What seems critical to understand then, is whether the emergent model is fundamentally different in character than the governance models most public organizations have inherited. As I mentioned in chapter 9, Alford (2009) underlines that a more human centric, co-productive mode of governance raises questions not only about what clients (users, citizens, people) expect from the public organization, but also about what the public organization expects from its clients. Likewise, as Ansell & Torfing (2014) contend, the role of service users is recast from passive consumers of public services to active citizens. This calls into question issues of public value and how it is created (Greve 2013). A central point here seems to be that in a human centered mode of governance, the appropriate modality of governing for public value creation varies. In other words, the emergent model of governance can probably not be entirely prescribed, or specified, to the same level of detail as its predecessors. Let me illustrate. In his careful and deep study of three cases of co-production of public services, Alford (2009:175) concludes that co-production is “beneficial” to the kinds of 292 organizations studied, but that the kind of public value generated by governance models of coproduction “reveal no particular pattern of “performance’”. In other words, the ways in which the new governance paradigm contributes value simply differs across the cases with no discernible pattern. Alford finds that the pattern of value is “haphazard” (2009:175) since the benefits of governance as co-production can accrue both in increased effectiveness (better outcomes) and in reduced costs (higher productivity), or both. Across cases of postal services, employment programs and tax administration (of which the two latter policy domains are addressed also in the present study), Alford finds that the (co-productive) governance model was valuable to different aspects of the organizations’ work, to differing extents, in different ways. As discussed in chapter 9, I similarly found signs of a wide spectrum of types of public value resulting from the use of design approaches that also varied to suit their contexts. This is a profound reflection of the complexity and “messiness” of the governance model itself, or as Goldsmith & Eggers have suggested, “one-size-fits-all solutions have given way to customized approaches as the complicated problems of diverse and mobile populations increasingly defy simplistic solutions” (2004:7). The considerations above indicate that we might actually know something about the properties of an emerging governance model, in terms of the relational, networked, interactive and reflective dimensions I have found in my research. In the following I will consider how we might understand these properties, first in terms of how specified/unspecified the model is, second in terms of whether it really represents, even if tentatively, an actual break from the existing modes of governance. On the charm of skeletons In spite of my attempt to characterize an emergent governance model in the previous chapter, it somehow seems underspecified in the sense that the specific management tools needed to then provide content to its dimensions are tentative, open, even elusive. The cases illustrate that managers come to terms with a certain lack of control, of emergence even, and recognize that the way to creating better outcomes or even higher productivity relies much on providing space for users and staff to find their own, meaningful path. The sense remains that the model is more of a framework than a prescription, less of a top-down management strategy and more of a 293 placeholder for bottom-up processes to take place. Of course, part of this is because the empirical material consists of projects, not of all-encompassing reforms. However, it is at least interesting that there are similar patterns and characteristics across these projects, which may have implications for the conduct of management and the future potential of the role of design in the public sector. In their consideration of the implications of complexity for policy making, Colander & Kupers (2014:276) suggest that, as a “far-reaching proposal’, governments should create eco-structures that are conducive to more bottom-up policy solutions, providing people with institutional space to self-organize in new ways to solve social problems, and encourage civil debate inside and outside the policy system. They contend that this implies that policy, and governance, cannot be controlled – but it can be influenced. Taking complexity seriously as the ultimate constraint for achieving public outcomes, they argue that policy must be “…designed to play a supporting role in an evolving ecostructure – it is not designed to control the system” (2014:10). Similarly, writing a decade earlier, Goldsmith & Eggers (2004) suggest that in a networked mode of governing, the ways in which governments achieve objectives will be likely to be “unanticipated” and flexibility and adaptability, for instance to include new partners and new relationships, become important performance criteria (2004:183-184). Karl Weick, building on the arguments discussed in the sections above, contends that good design, understood in the context of managing and governing organizations, is intentionally kept underspecified. He argues that in this search for stable and predictable “solutions” too often designers don’t know when to stop – the result being command-and-control and machine based management models. However, Weick suggests that there is “charm” in the notion of underspecification, of keeping design parameters open for interpretation – for managers, for front-line staff and indeed for users. Quoting Dee Hock, Weick contends that management becomes much more in tune with what is needed to govern in our contemporary world: understanding and coordinating variability, complexity and effectiveness (ibid. 2004:47). Normann & Ramirez similarly argue that as actors carry out their activities in value constellations, “it is not possible to take given characteristics for granted: co-producers constantly reassess each other” (1994:55). The charm of an underspecified, or skeletal governance model thus implies, for the way of governing and managing, giving up on clarity. This is perhaps a paradox when we have also seen that a (new) degree of clarity can arise from 294 insights in human behavior, through design approaches. However, the lack of clarity I am speaking of now is different: It is not a lack of clarity of insight into what matters; it is lack of clarity in terms of a recipe to “solve” the problem or capture the opportunity at hand. Institutional shift: Overlay or disruption? We have seen in this thesis that public managers appear to engage with design approaches in ways that bring forward new ideas, concepts, solutions and, in many of the studied cases, implementable organizational change. The kinds of change efforts undertaken tend to embody some or all of the governance principles outlined in the earlier chapter. It is a wider, and more open question, however, whether these shifts in understanding and engaging in new relations with citizens are expressions of a paradigmatic, “radical” or “disruptive” shift in governance, or more of an “overlay” or “mix” with existing modes, leading to incremental change at best. To what extent do the types of changes in service provision across the cases really signify breaks away from the current dominating institutional “template” of new public management, and to what extent are they more like reconfigurations through “bricolage” (Lawrence & Suddaby 2006:229)? I will consider these two perspectives of incrementalism on the one hand, and more radical, disruptive change on the other hand, and discuss them in the light of the research findings. As we have seen throughout the thesis, a wide range of the scholars who have turned their attention to the “what’s next” question of public governance contend that to the extent that something new might be happening, the new governance instruments – characterized by a balancing of the top-down and bottom-up perspectives, multiplicity of actors, taking complexity seriously and so forth – can be viewed as additional elements that are added on top of existing governance mechanisms of bureaucracy and the new public management (Bourgon 2011; Agranoff 2014; Waldorff et. al. 2014). Informed both by executive experience and careful research (Bourgon) and by the long-term view of historical institutionalism (Waldorff et. al.) the argument here is that change is incremental in nature, and that as new governance instruments arise they do not take something away, but rather add to the growing complexity, or complicatedness of the public service system itself (Christensen 2012). Waldorff et. al. (2014) argue in an assessment of multiple public sector innovation cases, that bureaucratic and NPM 295 modes of governance tend to cast their “shadow” over what is at surface more innovative, collaborative or “new public governance” practices. In line with these findings, institutional theory – arguably a key theoretical school in characterizing public organizations – expects that organizations only rarely change, since rationalized institutions create myths of formal structure which in turn shape organizations” (Meyer & Rowan 1977). Over time, organizations become increasingly similar in structure mainly due to adaptation to a socially constructed environment through three types of pressures: Coercive pressures which result from politics and power relationships; mimetic pressures arise as organizations, under conditions of uncertainty, take note of successful peers and adopt structures and approaches that are similar; and normative pressures characterize especially highly professionaliZed organizations who favor practices and structures that are considered morally “proper” (Boxenbaum & Jonsson 2008). A variant of this incremental perspective is Karl Weick’s argument, also mentioned in chapter 3, that any design efforts undertaken by managers are essentially re-designs or re-interpretations because of the “thrownness” of the situations within which public managers find themselves (Weick 2004:76). Weick asserts that any effort at organizational change must accept the richness and never-ending presence of context – empirical organizational, societal, behavioral factors and so forth, which imply that the word is “pre-interpreted” by the actors who occupy it. Weick contends that “thrownness suggests that design is incremental even when it aspires to be much more” (2004:77). For designers, this happens because as they relate to the client’s world – briefs, specifications, needs, expectations – they adjust and tune in and thereby “typically extend rather than upend” (2004:77). Clients (in this thesis, public managers), also pull design towards incremental, rather than disruptive change, since they assimilate and “normalize” design to not just fit with their existing practices, “bending” the solutions their way so they fit with what is already coming in terms of strategies and plans. This leaves only little wiggle room for agency. Such incremental design need not be negative; rather, for Weick, good design is exactly the kinds of design that take seriously what is already going on in the world, and offers useful extensions or amendments to it. However, it is worth underlining at this point that the cases studied by Waldorff et. al., the experience by Bourgon, and for that matter the design perspective taken by Weick, are not based on collaborative design approaches as they have been defined in the present thesis. Rather, the “innovation” projects and “designs” referred to by indeed by most other scholars who have examined cases of public sector innovation are either 302 possible to make statistical generalization on the basis of it. As Yin (2014) would suggest, we are in the domain of a multiple-case study, where the applied method is different: While survey research relies on statistical generalization, “case studies (as with experiments) rely on analytical generalization” Yin (2014:43). This means that the issue of generalization does not in itself concern wider populations or universes, but theoretical propositions. Each case can, according to Yin, be generalized from its particular instance in attempts to build broader theory; this is done through a replication logic, whereby the causalities and relationships indicated by one case study is sought after and studied in further cases, just like repeating an experiment (Yin 2014:53). This dynamic is roughly similar to the notion of theoretical saturation suggested by Corbin & Strauss (2008:263), whereby theoretical concepts are established inductively on the basis of qualitative data analysis. Given the rather large number of cases in the present thesis – what I have characterized as an “embedded multiple-case design” (Yin 2014:46) – there have been relatively many opportunities to replicate findings literally across cases. A number of the figures and displays showing the distribution of particular characteristics (for instance in the above analysis of an emergence governance model) underline this point of quite substantive replication. According to Eisenhardt (1989) this strengthens the validity of the constructs in that it helps verify that emerging relationships fit with the evidence in each case, and it increases the likelihood that the emerging theory will be “generalizable across settings” (Eisenhardt 1989:546). My systematic contrasting and discussion with the extant literature has further contributed to strengthening the findings. In line with Eisenhardt’s suggestion, it thus seems fair to expect that the application of design approaches in roughly similar public sector contexts such as the cases in this thesis should lead to roughly similar processes and, potentially, results. Certainly, however, my findings cannot as a point of departure be generalized to settings beyond the Western economic, political and social context in which the cases have been selected. Indeed, it is an open question if the dynamics would be the same for instance in Southern or Eastern European public sector contexts. New “experiments”, by drawing in and studying cases from other contexts, would have to be carried out, in line with Yin (2014), thus testing and further refining the theoretical concepts found in the present study. 303 Conclusion: Shifting governance model This chapter has discussed the empirical findings concerning an emerging set of governance principles, which may be summarized as human centered governance. The purpose has been to better understand what the implications could be for public organizations; what might a “rehumanized”, but more loosely and under-specified model of governance entail? To what extent shall it be seen as a shift from current paradigms, and to what extent is it likely we will se such principles and characteristics as “overlays” to the current hybrid of traditional and new public management models we have inherited? In comparing and contrasting the emerging public governance, it seems fair to say that it at least potentially signifies a relatively marked shift from traditional bureaucratic governance. I ended the chapter with a methodological consideration on generalizability of my findings, suggesting moderately that applying design approaches in similar contexts might well be expected to yield similar processes and emerging outcomes. In the next and final chapter I will reflect more broadly on my findings across the thesis, and discuss which new questions and implications arise, which are relevant for research as well as practice. ! ! ! 304 ! ! ! 305 12. Perspectives: Process, agency, and context of change Of the many activities of man, designing is one of the most fascinating and crucial. C. West Churchman, The Design of Inquiring Systems (1971:3) This thesis has explored the interplay between public managers who strive for innovation and change; the use of design approaches as a resource in this endeavor; and the possible implications for public governance. It has been driven by the question: What happens when managers engage with design to achieve change in public sector organizations? In this chapter I sum up my findings across the thesis by proposing an overall model that illustrates the mutual interdependence of design (process), management (agency) and governance (context). I describe it as a dynamic cycle of change. I then reflect on the wider implications of the findings through these three perspectives, or lenses. With each lens, I first briefly sum up what I have found in the thesis; I then introduce discussions that consider the implications of those findings for design and management practice, and for research. With the first lens, I discuss design process and method. I sum up the roles design approaches seem to have played across my analysis of the empirical cases. I consider what my findings might mean for the professional design community and (not least) the future education of designers in relation to public management. I suggest a range of research agendas that could be interesting to explore further. This is both a summary and an elaboration of my research subquestion 1. The second lens returns to a key thread throughout the thesis: Management and agency. What are the roles public managers play in enacting change? How can we understand the implications of the six management engagements? Here, among other considerations, I bring the issue of 306 decision-making versus future-making in leadership practice to the forefront, and point to potential research themes, reflecting further on research sub-question 2. The third lens looks into governance and organizational context. How can design approaches come to sit more comfortably, or at least fruitfully, in relation to public organizations? What are the organizational opportunities for embedding design to contribute to on-going practice of experimentation and exploration of an emerging model of governance? How might the governance context, as it emerges through use of design approaches, enable more authorizing environments for management agency? Here, I highlight the rise of ‘innovation labs’ as an organizational response to the pressure for innovation, and possibly a contribution to propelling the interplay between innovation, management, and governance forward. Finally, I consider whether there are more critical implications of a human centered governance paradigm that must be taken seriously be practitioners and scholars alike. This lens hereby reflects my third research-sub-question. Taken as a whole, these three perspectives constitute the thesis’s conclusion on the emergence of a potentially different approach to leading change in government, which unfolds in the space between managers’ agency and design approaches. Cycles of change: The dynamics of design, management, and governance This thesis has explored how public managers engage with design approaches, and how this may lead to wider implications for governance. However: does governance have a role in enabling such engagement in the first place? Or, in other words, how does management, or the agency of managers, connect to the process perspective of design work, and to the governance perspective, which determines at least some of the overall contextual factors in which organizational activities take place? Given what we have now seen, how can we understand the role of discrete projects, based on design approaches, and their implications for the wider governance characteristics deployed in public organizations? How do these characteristics in turn lend themselves to more or less possibility for agency on the side of public managers? 307 From viewing the interplay between design and public management as two waves crashing against each other, I now suggest a view that captures a dynamic and more complex interplay between design, management, and governance. The experiences of public managers that this thesis has uncovered indicate that design contributes to new understandings of the role of public organizations in achieving their purposes, specifically at the “project” level. However, these project-based processes seem also to lead to new understandings of how the organization might be governed. The figure below illustrates how the interaction between the management efforts to drive design projects, the innovation processes themselves, and the implications for the governance context might be mutually reinforcing. What I seek to illustrate are the dynamics between managers’ agency as they engage with innovation processes through design approaches, and the impact on, and role of, governance as the context. Figure 39: Cycle of governance (context), management (agency) and innovation (change processes) The figure illustrates how the governance context defines constraints and opportunities for the management engagement with design processes. In turn, the leveraging of design approaches and resulting changes influence the context in which agency of management is possible. [Document text truncated for crawler view.]