Leading Public Design

Discovering Human-Centred Governance

Bason, Christian

• Editore: Policy Press
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781447325604
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Politics & International Relations
• Categoria: Public Affairs & Administration

This powerful new book provides a clear framework for understanding and learning an emerging management practice, leading public design. Drawing on more than a decade of work on public sector innovation, Christian Bason uses his extensive practical experience and research conducted among public managers in the UK, the US, Australia, Finland and Denmark to explore how public organisations can be redesigned from the outside in, shaping policies and services that are truly experienced as useful and meaningful to citizens, and which leverage all of society's resources to co-produce better outcomes. Through detailed case studies, the book presents six management practices which leaders in government can use to involve citizens, staff and other stakeholders in innovation processes. It shows how managers can challenge their own assumptions, leverage empathy with citizens, handle divergence, navigate unknown territory, experiment and rehearse future solutions through prototyping, and create more public value. Ultimately, Leading public design provides a pathway to a new and different way of governing public institutions: human-centred governance. As a more relational, networked, interactive and reflective approach to running organisations, this emerging governance model promises a more human yet effective public sector.

PART ONE

COMPLEXITY, DESIGN AND GOVERNANCE

TWO

The public sector and its 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. (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).

The difficulty for institutions, expressed in this chapter’s introductory quote by American journalist and writer Walter Lippmann in his 1925 work The Phantom Public, to ‘handle’ public problems, has thus not become less pressing with time. Why haven’t we made more progress in our ability to address them? One prevalent argument is that the very nature of the problems the public sector faces is changing faster and more profoundly than our institutions are able to reform. This also entails that current modes of public management are out of touch with the challenges they are intended to address. There is no shortage of research and literature that raises this point (Carlsson, 2004; Seddon, 2008; Eggers and Singh, 2009; Mulgan, 2009; Parsons, 2010; Bourgon, 2012; Ansell and Torfing, 2014; Colander and Kupers, 2014; Doz and Koskonen, 2014; Hassan, 2014). To understand the need for public organisations to reinvent, to innovate – to redesign – we must first try to understand their current context better.

This chapter thus examines the context of present-day governance. I discuss the character of contemporary government challenges, and the nature of the problem space in which public managers increasingly find themselves.

The inability of government to address ‘the public’s problems’

Nobel prize laureate in economics and professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Herbert Simon, wrote in his seminal work, Administrative Behaviour, that ‘To the 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, p 128). This could imply that the management tools and approaches that public managers have inherited are still good enough, and effective enough, in addressing our contemporary challenges.

However, a growing number of voices argue the opposite. Take, for instance, Jocelyne Bourgon, a former top-ranking civil servant in the Canadian public service, now turned author and teacher. She suggests 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, p 19). According to Bourgon and many of her contemporaries, these ‘new circumstances’ have to do partly with the volume and scope of the issues and challenges that governments are expected to deal with, and partly with the characteristic of 21st-century problems.

At the same time, the range of government activity has become all-encompassing. Bruno Latour (2007, p 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 or the air we breathe, governments have in recent years been called to action. The vision paper I mentioned from the European Commission states how citizens today are more than ever aware of their rights and have better access to information via information technology – and hence, the more they know, the more they expect governments to do (European Commission, 2013a). Perhaps the shift over the last few decades has been a 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 can be seen as essential (Mazzucato, 2014). The wider issue, however, is whether the nature of the problems faced by public decision makers has remained stable.

Wicked problems and complexity

Some scholars point out that the problem space, or context, within which public organisations operate, severely constrains and challenges effective government action. In 2004 a professor of innovation, Bo Carlsson, wrote a contribution to the excellent book Managing as Designing concerning ‘Public policy as a form of design’. In this chapter Carlsson asked:

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. (2004, p 36)

Carlsson argues that ‘sensible’ policy (or public management, or strategy, or governance) might not be the same as ‘rational’ policy. But then what might it be? Framing the challenge of how to govern effectively as a design problem suggests that design may contribute to addressing it. Contextually, as Carlsson highlights above, there is a growing recognition that the social systems that governments seek to influence are ‘complex and adaptive, and continuously evolving over time’ (Colander and Kupers, 2014, p 5). This could imply that at least a significant set of the problems faced by public managers call for new or different kinds of policy and public service responses.

As discussed above, Herbert Simon (and many of his contemporaries) did not substantially believe that problems could differ in their nature. However, if some types of problems are fundamentally different than others, might it then also be that the way of addressing (if not solving) them would also have to differ fundamentally? Let me first consider the notion of ‘complex problems’ before returning to ‘wicked problems’, since the two concepts are related, but not the same.

Dealing with double-sided complexity

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 and Kupers, 2014, p 47). Goldsmith and Eggers, in their work on networked governance, underline that ‘increasingly complex societies force public officials to develop new models of governance’ (2004, p 7). Marco Steinberg (2014) likewise points out that the complexity at hand is caught between human behaviour, 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 under-estimated (or simply not understood) the extent to which the problem space they find themselves in is fundamentally characterised by wicked and complex problems. Issues such as education, health and social policy are all characterised by a very large set of actors acting simultaneously, by extremely high numbers of users and thus interactions, and by unpredictable dynamics. Partly, the argument is that megatrends such as rapid changes to life-styles, health, globalisation, demography, immigration, mobility, deregulation, technology and so on 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’ (Hassan, 2014, p 17). Similarly, Wayne Parsons (2010, p 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, globalisation and other megatrends, 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, p 4). An important point here is the phrase professionally designed, which points to the classical role of policy experts deriving ‘solutions’ and proposing decisions on the basis of rigorous data and analysis.

Characterising ‘wicked’

Another characteristic of public problems is the notion of ‘wicked problems’. One fundamental way of distinguishing between problem types is the following.

• 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, 2012, pp 20–1) or ‘hard’ (Martin, 2009, p 95), they can be effectively addressed through rigorous analysis and it is relevant for decision makers to draw extensively on knowledge of existing evidence and ‘best practice’ (Snowden and Boone, 2007).

• Wicked problems. These are ill defined and can be addressed only 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 that then reveal underlying and hidden relationships. Many public policy problems fall into this category, since, as paraphrased by Wayne Parsons (2010, p 17), the design of public policies is ‘a very different matter from that of designing for a moon landing’.

Originally, Rittel and Webber (1973) put forward 10 criteria to characterise wicked problems, the first among these 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, ultimately, wicked problems can be identified by four dimensions, which are presented here, with some additional substance provided 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 elusive. Part of the reason for the confusion around causality is also that many public problems are ultimately behavioural. In particular during the last decade, research ranging from Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s work on how people make decisions, Thinking Fast and Slow (2011), to Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational (2009) and Thaler and Sunstein’s runaway success Nudge (2008) and Sunstein’s more recent Simpler (2013), has pointed out that human behaviour 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 2008 global financial crisis, fields such as behavioural 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 problem or just a manageable consequence of the quest for growth?

• The problem does not fit into a known category; in fact there are no ‘classes’ of wicked problems. Snowden and 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 ‘evidence-based policy’, which implies that policy decisions should be based on solid knowledge of ‘what works’.

• Attempts at problem solving change 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, non-linear 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, p 41) formulates it...