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Co-creating for a Better Society
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The second edition of this significant text has been thoroughly revised to take account of the latest literature, case studies and international developments in the field. Drawing on global research and practical examples, Bason illustrates the key triggers and practices of public sector innovation.

Each chapter includes a refined ‘how to do it’ toolkit, and two new chapters have been added, one which discusses the rise of innovation labs in the public sector, and a practical chapter focused on change leadership, to complement the existing chapter on leadership roles.

The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students in public administration, management and policy, as well as managers, project managers and staff in public sector organisations.

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To see that a situation requires inquiry is the first step in inquiry. (John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 1938, p 111)

Carolyn Curtis is a public manager in Adelaide, South Australia. She has been seconded for nearly eight months to a project on how to redesign services for ‘chaotic families’. These are families that are typically characterised by high levels of alcohol abuse, violence, unemployment and dysfunction. For the past eight months Carolyn has no longer acted formally as a manager, but has participated 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’. Carolyn says:

“I was trained as a social worker to assess and categorise 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 pre-designed ‘programme’, with fixed criteria and no end-user involvement.”

Carolyn 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. She says that by taking an end-user (family) perspective she has been able to critically reflect on the results of her agency’s work:

“It is bottom-up, it has end-user focus, and there is no fixed structure, criteria or categories. The work has been extremely intensive.

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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. (Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public, 1925, p 121)

Governments are paradoxically, and often in equal parts, seen as part of the problem and part of the solution.1 Famously, then president-elect Ronald Reagan stated in 1981: ‘In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.’2 The inability of public organisations to effectively address societal challenges has again and again been a fundamental point of contestation. In what was possibly the defining work on public governance in the 1990s, Osborne and Gaebler (1992, p 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.

Viewing US society today, and considering contemporary debates on public schools, on healthcare reform, on terrorism, crime and city budgets, this all sounds eerily familiar. Europe is not much different. In a 2013 policy paper 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’ (European Commission, 2013a, p 1).

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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, p 5)

On 26 May 2011 the international news magazine The Economist featured the cover headline ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’, depicting an artificially created Earth. The issue noted that, according to geologists, humankind is entering a new era where the majority of our planet’s geological, ecological and atmospheric processes are affected by humans. Our civilization’s entry into the Anthropocene, literally meaning ‘The Age of Man’, underlines how our species is increasingly shaping our environments not only locally but also at a global scale to meet our needs. This shift is characterised by some as ‘the human turn’, a world in which ‘man has increasingly moved to the centre as a creature that has set itself above and beyond, and even reshaped, its natural surroundings’ (Raffnsøe, 2013, p 5). This fact has wide-reaching implications for many of our natural scientific disciplines and for our understanding of our role on the planet. The human turn can be construed from a range of angles – geological, philosophical, social and industrial. The coming of the Anthropocene might also be seen as the culmination of the last several hundred years’ design of the increasingly human-made environments 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, p 8).

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It is both misguided and remarkably premature to announce the death of the ethos of bureaucratic office. (Paul du Gay, In Praise of Bureaucracy, 2000, p 146)

Often, when I have been involved in conversations on the future of government, the term ‘bureaucracy’ has been invoked as the ultimate threat to innovation and change in public organisations. However, the daily reality of almost every manager and employee in the public sector is that bureaucratic management is a fundamental part of how they work. As new forms of innovative ways of working are introduced, they must thus come somehow to co-exist with the existing paradigm. In one public organisation that I have worked with, the staff chose to embrace the interplay between bureaucracy and innovation by coining the term ‘innocracy’. They recognised that in their work (taxation services), there might be a need for fresh thinking and innovation, but some of the core bureaucratic ground rules were probably sound enough.

Certainly, the presence of bureaucratic governance cannot be ignored. Peters (2010, p 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 will they for discussion in this book. My sense is that without an honest recognition of our bureaucratic legacy and its strengths and weaknesses, much work to bring design into play in public organisations will remain unrealistic, out of touch with reality and naïve.

I thus start this chapter by providing a classic typology of three eras of public management: traditional public administration, new public management and networked governance.

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A distinctive approach to ‘service design’, which seeks to shape service organisations around the experiences and interactions of their users, presents a major opportunity for the next stages of public service reform: a route to get there. (Sophia Parker and Joe Heapy, The Journey to the Interface, 2006, p 9)

In Part One of the book I provided a conceptual framework through three chapters: the character of public problems; the evolution of the design profession; and the search for the next governance paradigm. The questions I raised were what approaches may contribute to the journey towards a new practice of public management and governance – and what role design might play.

A small but increasing number of public managers are now experimenting with using design to make the transition towards a different way of governing. It is their efforts and experiences – documented via a range of case studies – that form the heart of this book.

This chapter kicks off Part Two of the book. First, I provide a brief overview of the case studies on which this book is based. Second, I describe and discuss how the public managers studied came to commission design work in the first place: what were their entry points into drawing on design skills and expertise? What motivated them? What were their expectations as to how design will assist them? Third, as an extension of this, I provide a typology of the design approaches found across the cases: what are the kinds of concrete methods and activities associated with ‘design approaches’? Fourth, I share an overview of the key issue in this book: how does the exposure to design matter to public managers? How do they engage with design? This model, which integrates design methods with leadership behaviour, forms the conceptual framework for the following three chapters.

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The first step in any problem-solving episode is representing the problem, and to a large extent, that representation has the solution hidden inside it. (Richard Boland and Fred Collopy, Managing as Designing, 2004, p 9)

This chapter shows the role of design in catalysing an exploration of the problem space. First, I share and discuss how design approaches can be used to explore how public interventions are experienced by citizens and business, drawing on highly qualitative research methods from ethnography and anthropology. Second, the chapter considers how managers, through various types of interplay with the design approaches, reflect about the challenges they are facing, and the types of questions they ask themselves and their staff. This I call questioning assumptions. I consider two central themes: how do these managers think about the problem space from the outset – sometimes before they choose to engage with design? Further, as they begin to collaborate with designers, how do design approaches influence their thinking? Third, I analyse the extent to which the managers draw actively on the design research, typically field-work among end-users (citizens) or among staff at the ‘front-stage’ interaction level, to leverage empathy. Again, I build the analysis from the patterns emerging from the empirical material I have collected. What is the role of design practices, including highly qualitative ‘emphatic’ data, as well as visualisation tools? How do the design approaches bring citizens’ experiences into play, and how do managers consciously, strategically use this knowledge to start to catalyse organisational change? In this analysis I consider the interplay between the exploration of user interactions, on the one hand, and the ensuing challenging of pre-existing assumptions across the wider organisation, on the other hand.

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Transforming the system means passing through zones of uncertainty. (Donald Schön, Beyond the Stable State, 1971, p 12)

If there is one word that sits at odds with government, it is probably ‘creativity’. However, for new, powerful ideas to emerge and become available for further development, scrutiny and testing, creativity is needed. The ability to embrace a divergence of possible solutions, and to keep those options in play for an extended period of time, is one of the characteristics that distinguishes truly innovative organisations from mediocre ones. However, as I have often suggested, public organisations and staff are sometimes decidedly afraid of ‘the Post-It’: worried that wild and unruly creativity, especially when it involves other actors outside the organisation, will unleash chaos and lack of control, and perhaps lead to political liabilities.

The previous chapter analysed how design methodologies, in part inspired by ethnographic research, contributed to making particular representations of the problem space for public managers and to bringing ‘empathic data’ into play. Approaches such as field research, generating emotional and empathic data, and visualisation of user journeys were key in this process.

The second dimension of design concerns the processes of identifying which possible actions to take – sometimes with the starting point in the input generated through user research, sometimes simply starting with an ambition, vision or inspiration to create change. This can be perceived as even more challenging than the research work, since the process now becomes more future oriented. Even though managers in government routinely are called on for their advice and suggestions, the practice of systematically generating new scenarios for the future is often not well developed.

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Design is an exploration about people and their future ways of living. (Elizabeth Sanders, 2014, p 133)

Design is often understood by lay people as an end result: as the forms, visuals and expressions that we see as products and graphics, and that we call things and signs. Design approaches are perhaps most powerful when used to finally give form, to create the tangible artefacts that humans can engage with physically and emotionally. The ability to deliberately create user experiences and to make services and products desirable and attractive is, in this sense, at the heart of design. One might call this enacting new practices.

However, when it comes to design for service, for the creation of new experiences for users, the end result is highly contingent on changes in organisational processes and behaviours within public institutions. This turns our attention, again, to the experience of the public managers, and their staff and stakeholders, as they are involved in the design processes. How are they able to turn alternative scenarios into tangible changes that can ultimately be felt and experienced by someone outside the organisation? This chapter first explores the role of prototyping as a key process whereby design proposals are developed, refined, described, given form, shape and expression. How are prototypes significant in the processes of organisational engagement and of asserting what might work best in terms of achieving intended outcomes? Second, I explore and characterise the leadership engagement with design I call ‘Making the future concrete’: how do managers work with designers and their methods to enact change? How do they relate to the power of prototyping and experimentation? Third, I discuss the final of the six management engagements with design, the tendency to insist on public value.

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Design is fundamentally about value creation. (Angela Meyer, 2014, p 188)

The creation of value is somewhat of a holy grail of public sector innovation. Yes, it is great to explore problems and opportunities, it is fine to develop new exciting ideas and it is gratifying to see those ideas tested, refined and eventually implemented. But so what? If, ultimately, new solutions do not make a positive difference to at least some part of the world, how can all the effort be worthwhile? As the quote above indicates, and as I also suggested in Chapter One, proponents of design approaches do not hesitate to claim that design creates value.

Part Two, which includes the preceding four chapters and this one, has opened up and explored design approaches as they unfold within and beyond public organisations. I have mapped the kinds of processes associated with design work and analysed how public managers engage with key dimensions of design. Now it is time to take a bit of a step back from the concrete developmental processes.

This chapter examines the patterns among the book’s cases in terms of three different perspectives: what appear to have been the most significant triggers of change and transformation? What do the results, or outputs, of the design work ultimately look like? And to what extent are there signs across the cases of subsequent creation of public value – directly or indirectly – by applying design methods? First, I summarise the findings across the previous chapters in terms of how design contributes to change processes in the cases studied.

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