Design as catalyst of new organisational readings

The International Research Society for Public Management

Panel #24 at the Annual Conference, Rome, Italy, 13-15 April 2012 Managing collaborative innovation in the public sector Paper to be presented at the conference

Design as catalyst of new organisational readings

Christian Bason Ph.D. Fellow, Copenhagen Business School Director of Innovation, MindLab Denmark

Abstract Design is increasingly seen as a discipline and approach that is central to innovation, also in the public sector. In particular, terms such as design thinking, service design, co-design, human centred design and strategic design – which signify collaborative and inclusive approaches to design practice – are gaining prevalence in a range of countries, and at all levels of government. However, as public managers are exposed to design processes in their quest for more innovative policies, services and organisations, what happens? This paper explores how managers in public service organisations embrace new and more collaborative design approaches such as user research and involvement, ideation, prototyping and experimentation, and what significance these approaches have for them. The paper seeks to interpret a set of first research findings using Morgan’s metaphor of organisational reading, and discusses what new readings – and innovations – might be enabled through design approaches. Finally it discusses briefly how managers might be viewed as designers and what implications Michlewski’s perspective on ‘design attitude’ could have.

Key words: Innovation in government, public management, design, organisational reading, collaboration

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Introduction These are turbulent times, not least for those working in the public sector. Budgetary pressures, organisational change and increasingly ‘wicked’ social, environmental and political problems are in many respects the order of the day. Looking beyond the current economic and financial crisis, the public management conversation has now for at least three decades focused on how governments can ‘reform’, ‘transform’, or ‘innovate’. A wide range of management approaches, many adopted from the private sector, have been applied over this span of time, ranging from total quality and excellence models to ‘reinvention’, business process reengineering to lean management and six sigma (Mohr 1969; Osborne & Gaebler, 1992; Bason, 2010).

During the last few years, some public managers have however begun using what appears to be quite different, and perhaps more effective, approaches to dealing with innovation and change.

For instance, in the London borough of Lewisham, Development Director Peter Gadsdon asked designers to help redefine how his organisation deals with homelessness. According to him, the design process became the glue that bound a number of different transformation processes together in a reframing of “homelessness services” to “housing options”. This enabled staff to view their work very differently, and led to significant improvements in productivity, service experience for users, and to smoother housing allocation. In the city of Odense in Denmark, manager Christina Pawsoe applied design-led methods to radically transform her institution’s offers to mentally handicapped adults, recasting them as social innovators. According to her, design-led methods recast adult mentally handicapped into social innovators, who now take charge of ideating and selecting new initiatives for their institution. This dramatically altered the respective roles of professionals and users. Productivity, as measured by the staff-to-user ration, went up by a third.

User satisfaction soared to the point where the institution has a waiting list for the first time in its 40 –year history. In Adelaide in South Australia, Carolyn Curtis, manager at the city’s family services, radically redesigned social interventions for ‘chaotic’ families, to try to help them thrive again.

Families were connected through a mentoring model, which engaged already existing resources in the community, with families helping other families; the service offering now more of a platform for change than classic “delivery”. According to a rough estimate produced by the design organisation TACSI, the Family by Family programme can help 200 families thrive again at the same cost of placing one child in foster care.

The situations these managers have found themselves in, reflect in many ways the point that “managers, as designers, are thrown into situations that are not of their own making yet for which they are responsible for producing a desirable outcome” (Boland & Collopy, 2004: 17). The way the managers appear to have dealt with the challenges they have faced has been to let their organizations apply a set of new and emerging techniques that in broad terms can be categorised as

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emergent design disciplines (Shove et. al., 2007, Sanders & Stappers, 2008). In each case, in spite of different national, cultural and organisational contexts, design appeared to help them on a journey towards more innovative solutions and radical organisational changes that might otherwise have been possible. But what really happens when managers apply and let themselves be exposed to design? What is the role of design as an intervention that might influence the manager’s ability to collaboratively lead organisational change?

This paper firstly puts the practice of design in government into the wider context of public sector innovation. It then expands on the new, emergent and more collaborative design disciplines and discusses how they can be viewed as mutually reinforcing and supporting more ‘traditional’ approaches to design.

I then briefly introduce my research design and methodology before turning to the key question of the significance of design processes for manager’s interpretation of their challenges and opportunities for action. My interest is the extent to which one could view design approaches as catalysts of innovation for managers within politically governed (public) organisations. To what extent does design allow for the engagement in different types of activities, and if so, are such activities deemed helpful to managers in their search for new solutions? Using Morgan’s metaphor of organisational reading, what kinds of readings do design approaches give rise to? I present some of the first concepts that have grown from my analysis of a number of qualitative interviews with public managers. I then turn to the idea, coined by amongst others by Boland & Collopy (2004) of design attitude as a way of viewing managers as designers. Inspired by Kamil Michlewskis further work on design attitude, I finally briefly explore the idea of managers-as-designers: Given that the managers have not just commissioned design, but have actively engaged with the process of innovation, in what way could we think differently about them as designers?

Public sector innovation in the spotlight Innovation can, in a public sector context, be defined as new ideas that are implemented and create value for society (Bason, 2010). The quest for innovation in government has in recent years increasingly been reflected in the literature (Borins, 2000, 2001; Mulgan & Albury, 2003, 2005; Mulgan, 2007; Osborne & Brown, 2005; Eggers & Singh, 2009; Bason, 2010). There is also some, but not much, academic research into the role of public managers in leading public sector innovation. Borins (2000) described innovative public managers as ‘Loose cannons and rule breakers, or enterprise leaders’. In the US, the Harvard Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation has published a work aimed at ‘public innovators’, who are to some extent framed as managers (Eggers & Singh 2009), and arguably Digmann et. al. (2009) and myself (Bason 2007, Bason, 2010) have tailored our books towards the management level, albeit not with much new empirical data on the individual leader’s practices or approaches. Generally speaking, the available literature is largely embedded in a public management tradition, without too much regard for what

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other disciplines – including design – might bring to the table. Exceptions are books such as Parker & Heapy’s The Journey to the Interface (2006) and Bate & Robert’s Experience-based Design (2007), which were among the first to explore the potential of new forms of design in a public sector context.

Towards collaborative design?

Public sector organisations in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, France, Denmark, the UK, Canada and the United States are to varying degrees and in different forms taking up design approaches as a tool to drive innovation and change (Bason, 2010, Dunleavy & Tinkler 2012). This apparent growth in design applications in the public sector also point to the flexibility, if not the indeterminacy of design, so that “much confusion surrounds design practice” (Heskett, 2002 p 2).

However as Herbert Simon proposed already in the late 1960s, design can be understood as the human endeavor of converting actual into preferred situations (Simon, 1969). As Buchanan has proposed, design can be thought of as a liberal art of technological culture. In this definition, design is viewed as an integrative, supple discipline, “amenable to radically different interpretations in philosophy as well as in practice” (1990, p 18). Current developments in design certainly seem to show that design has not one, but many shapes. According to Buchanan, design affects contemporary life in at least four areas: Symbolic and visual communication, the design of material objects (construction), design of activities and organized services (strategic planning), and finally the design of complex systems or environments for living, working, playing and learning (systemic integration).

It is Buchanan’s latter, service- and strategy-oriented application of design that is of main interest in the present paper. From a contemporary vantage point, Elizabeth Sanders and Pieter Stappers (2008) argue that design a discipline is indeed undergoing a significant transformation, which incidentally places it more squarely at the heart of an organisation’s ability to create new valuable solutions. Increasingly, designers and the design industry have realised that they can apply their abilities to a much broader context than merely ‘posters & toasters’ (the first two of Buchanans areas). Disciplines such as service design, which focuses on (re)designing service processes, or experience design, which focuses on designing a particular user experience, are in rapid growth.

Similarly, there is a rapidly growing interest of design for ‘social good’, which in part is captured by the movement of social entrepreneurship and social innovation (Mulgan et. al., 2006; Murray et al., 2009), and in part by the growing interest in public sector innovation (Mulgan & Albury, 2003; Eggers & O’Leary, 2009; Bason, 2010). Sanders & Stappers (2008) sum up this underlying shift in the role of design as a shift from ‘traditional’ design disciplines to ‘emerging’ design disciplines:

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Table 1: The new shape of design Traditional design disciplines visual communication design interior space design product design information design architecture planning Source: Sanders & Stappers (2008)

Emerging design disciplines design for experiencing design for emotion design for interacting design for sustainability design for serving design for transforming

These trends in the design discipline also reflect, with regard to the process of designing itself, that the notion of the individual, creative “artist-designer” is increasingly being challenged by design as a more collective process of designing solutions in interplay with those who are ultimately intended to use them. This idea of “participatory design” is by no means new, but it seems that over the last decade or so, approaches which that are explicitly oriented towards collaborative design of services and systems, have become more mainstream under headings such as service design, design thinking, strategic design, human centred design, co-design and co-creation. These forms of design often draw on other disciplines such as ethnography and cultural research in order to ground the design work in how people experience and engage with existing or future communication, products, services and systems (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). In short, we are seeing a design profession in which “competing paradigms coexist” (Shove et. al. 2007: 138).

Before I take a closer look at whether and how these types of design approaches are used in practice by public service organisations, I first present my methodology and research approach.

Methodology This paper is embedded in a wider doctoral research titled ‘Designing governance’. My research interest is descriptive and explorative in character. It focuses on the thoughts, interpretations and actions of public managers in and around various events and settings associated with the use of design approaches. The specific research questions addressed in this paper are: How do design approaches, if at all, influence public managers’ ‘reading’ of their organizational challenges and opportunities? How can their ‘reading’ be characterised? Are managers displaying ‘design attitude’?

Methodologically I take inspiration from Corbin & Strauss’ (2008) grounded theory approach to qualitative, explorative research. The emphasis is on eliciting meaning from qualitative empirical data, discovery, identification of patterns, and establishing conceptual ‘building blocks’ that can lead to theory. As Blumer (1969: 26) points out, concepts “are the anchor points in interpretation of findings”. I am thus conducting theoretical sampling, understood as the collection of data from

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places, events and people that will create opportunities to develop concepts in terms of their various properties and dimensions, uncover variations, and to identify relationships between key concepts (Eisenhardt 1989; Corbin & Strauss 2008). Further, the way in which I examine concepts is in a process perspective. As van der Ven (2007 p. 154) has suggested, a process model of research is one which helps develop a plausible story that enables the interpretation of meaning in relation to particular experiences and/or events. Since my interest is in the significance of the introduction of certain (design) activities and thus processes in public service organisations, this seems to be an appropriate research approach. The approach will attempt to take classes of observations apart and synthesise them into new meanings (Stake, 1995). The purpose of the process approach to the case research is to build process theory: Explanations of an observed progression of change events in terms of generating mechanisms that cause events to happen in the world and the circumstances when they operate (Tsoukas,

1989). In the context of the paper and more generally my Ph.D. thesis this, I expect, will imply a largely teleological take on organisational change, emphasizing states and processes such as dissatisfaction, search/interaction (for solutions), setting/envisioning goals, and implementing.

Empirically I explore multiple entities where change might happen, and the mode of change is largely constructive, as a sequence of events which emerges through “the purposeful enactment or social construction of an envisioned end state among individuals within the entity” (van der Ven, 2007: 203).

To identify organisations and thereby public managers who have utilised design approaches within the public sector in recent years, and which could be included in the research, have used multiple resources, building on my own unique vantage point in MindLab – the organisation I run – which has applied design principles to public sector innovation projects for the last decade, and which in itself offers potentially interesting empirical material. Relating to the fact that I am myself embedded professionally in the practice I am researching, I draw on 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 p 9). Mats Alvesson has made the argument that such self-etnography 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). Likewise, van der Ven (2007 p 177) points out that in revelatory research designs (as this one), “intimate familiarity with the phenomenon from qualitatively rich case studies” is needed to engage in abductive reasoning, which in turn can constitute the first steps in building new theory.

Additionally, and in order to ensure a broader set of empirical data than is accessible in my immediate surroundings, I have engaged with the wider, global design community, including organisations such as design councils, design industry associations, leading service design firms, design schools and academic research institutions, with government associations, national ministries

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and agencies in the relevant countries. Finally I have been in connection with design researchers at a range of institutions, centres and think tanks in the countries involved in the study. Currently the countries include Denmark, the United Kingdom and Australia.

A total of 15 qualitative personal interviews have been carried out, of which some have had a more exploratory character. Seven interviews are “full” interviews which form the first tranche of the total full-length interviews that will be conducted in the course of the Ph.D. study. The interviews have been largely open and can be characterised as contextual, as they have mostly been undertaken on-site in the organisations in question, and as retrospective as they have been focusing on eliciting the story, the narrative of the managers about their experience of the design process, largely in a chronological fashion. They have been of a duration of 1-2 hours, and have all been audio recorded and transcribed. In cases where the language has been Danish they have been translated into English by a professional translation service.

It should be emphasised that the present paper builds only on part of the empirical data that is envisaged, and that I am not yet confident that I have reached sufficient theoretical saturation. Thus I must take the precaution that conclusions can only be very tentative. As Corbin & Strauss (2008: 325) points out, “if data gathering stops before theoretical saturation occurs, the findings may be thin and the story line not very well developed.” I hope readers keep this in mind.

Design as catalyst of organisational readings What is it that the process of design “does” for leaders who wish to drive more powerful social change? When design approaches are applied in practice, how do they open up for new ways of seeing problems, interpreting opportunities, or for taking concrete action?

One approach to interpreting how design matters to management can be inspired from the notion that managers ‘read’ the situations they attempt to organize or govern (Morgan, 1986). In Morgan’s words, managers that are adept at ‘reading’ “(...) have a capacity to remain open and flexible, suspending immediate judgements whenever possible, until a more comprehensive view of the situation emerges. They are aware of the fact that new insights often arise as one reads a situation from “new angles” and that a wide and varied reading can create a wide and varied range of action possibilities” (Morgan, 1986: 12). The notion of suspending judgement, or gaining a new perspective on problems, appears to be one of the contributions of the design process. For instance, a manager says about her experience of a design process involving video ethnography that it ”has made me aware that there are some things we have to look at”.

While the analysis of my empirical data is still in its early phases, I have identified two potentially powerful, albeit still only tentatively defined, concepts relating to organisation reading that I will

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explore in the following. The first is ‘making problems visible’; the second is ‘shaping concrete practice’.

Making problems visible Design appears to makes problems visible in ways that allows managers, and their staff, to work on them. This seems to be tightly connected with the kinds of methods that typically are associated with the emerging forms of design.

Some methods relate to research. Designers have captured concrete human behaviour and action (for instance citizen interaction with front-line workers) through photo, video, audio, sketching, diaries and other self-documentation. Another set of methods relate to visualising, for instance through graphical diagrams or physical models, the “service journey” as experienced by users as they encounter a system. Consider the example of the Adelaide-based project concerning families in chaos: Designers captured what it felt like to be those families, and to experience the problems and challenges of a dysfunctional family by simply living with them. In other examples designers graphically mapped the system of public and non-public organisations that leverage resources to try to help particular users. This is what I in previous work (Bason, 2010) call “professional empathy”: The discipline of putting yourself in someone else’s situation, to explore how they experience what your organisation does to them. For instance, Carolyn Curtis, a public manager seconded to the families project run by the Australian Centre of Social Innovation in Adelaide, described her experience of the design methods as follows: “We were 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 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 judgement.”

Another example is in Odense in Denmark, where adult mentally handicapped users were given digital cameras to document their aspirations for their workplace; subsequently they co-designed new offerings and services though various visual ideation methods collaboratively with the managers and social workers.

‘Making problems visible’ as a concept relates to what new opportunities arise for managers to take action, and to create new organisational readings related to what kind of impact the organisation is having – or not having. In the words of another manager, she realised through the design research that “So far we have been describing [citizens] a service, not giving them one”. Another manager says: “In a big area of policy impact these things are quite useful, I think, for senior decision makers because they really get to see the real situations.”

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Interestingly, the design process casts the public manager very closely to the actual practice, the end result of policy decisions, organisation design, implementation, etc. As Shove et. al. (2007:134) have emphasised, this reflects how “designers have an indirect but potentially decisive hand in the constitution of what people do” – and in what people experience. To the managers here, their new organisational reading potentially projects them into the very role of the designer. As Morgan (1986: 335) emphasises, “there is a close relationship between the way we think and the way we act, and many organizational problems are embedded in our thinking”. For the managers using design, the processes propel them to reconsider how it is they think about the problems their organisations are facing. The question then becomes: Are they able to act on it?

Shaping concrete practice Another way in which the new forms of design seem to power innovation through enabling new organisational reading is by focusing the efforts of managers on concrete change. By this I again mean that the focus of design, as it unfolds in the instances I have explored, is to create something that is tangible. In the interviews, managers indicate that they have become so used to writing abstract memos, policies and strategies, that they have lost touch with what kind of concrete on-theground change they really intend to create. Because the designers typically insist on creating visuals – sketches, storyboards, mockups, personas, service journeys that represent current or future states – they ultimately focus the innovation process on the actual change that should or could happen.

Design approaches thereby help anchor the dialogue around the new interactions and social outcomes to be achieved.

For instance, in Odense, Denmark, the institution for mentally handicapped, manager Christina Pawsoe engaged the users in workshops where they would cut out magazines to create visual collages of the kinds of new and different activities they wanted. Many of the ideas developed in these workshops were quickly turned into practice, such as a new shop to sell the crafts and goods they produced, or a programme to give some of the proceeds to cancer research. These initiatives substantially increased the user satisfaction and quality of engagement with the service, and as they saw the concrete changes, their appetite for more increased. Today, Christina Pawsoe characterises the adult mentally handicapped users as the institution’s true innovators, and the professional staff recast as their servants who help users implement the new ideas they have created themselves. To Pawsoe, applying design led to redefining what it means to be a social worker: “We are still professional, just in a different way”, according to Pawsoe. The organisation today is in a way flipped outside-in, so that users are active and professionals are more passive. The nature of professionalism has been turned on its head.

In Morgan’s words, the new organisational reading enabled by design thereby “encourages us to take ownership of the part we play in shaping the problems we have to solve” (1986:335).

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In another example, in Lewisham, UK, the use of design approaches, according to the manager, helped ”change the culture in the service”. He describes how this change happened by first quickly implementing a few highly visible ideas, and then he saw the change gathering momentum.

Significantly, the highly involving processes, in his words, “cleared the barriers away for collaborating” among the staff and managers. The design team trained individual case workers in how to use video for design research. The case workers then filmed their own interactions with clients seeking public housing, leveraging this material to generate new ideas of how to improve the service. The final solutions here also reflected the different types of design that Buchanan proposes: Lewisham created new visual guides to assist clients in their application process (using a highly tangible story board style), it changed how case managers interacted with clients (amounting to what the manager calls a “profound effect” as it changed staff’s view on the service they were providing), and finally systems were redesigned (including smoothing the municipal budgetary process for the transition from providing healthcare for children to healthcare for adults).

‘Shaping concrete practice’ touches on the dimension of design that has to do with showing what exactly managers might do in terms of new, more innovative solutions – whether they are physical or service processes or systems. This is distinctive from other research tools such as quantitative surveys. Another manager, from the Danish Industrial Injury Board reflects as follows: “A user survey does not tell you how to improve things” (my emphasis).

A new reading of the ‘how’ of shaping new concrete practice through redesign is what takes place.

Discussion: Design attitude The tentative analysis above has indicated how the public managers which have been exposed to design are engaging in a set of activities around identifying problems and opportunities, seeking new ideas and solutions, and (potentially) acting on them through engagement with actors inside and outside the organisation. Whereas all managers likely take part in such activities in one way or another, “managers designing” could imply that they go about these activities in certain ways, in line with what Boland & Collopy (2004) have coined as a ‘design attitude’. 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” (2004, p. 9).

In this understanding, could design attitude help us understand the role of the public manager as someone who “drives innovation” by taking responsibility for designing organizational responses to the challenges and opportunities they face? How do managers more fundamentally relate to their role as problem-solvers and innovators? I will discuss this briefly in my conclusion.

In a further exploration of what ‘design attitude’ might entail, Michlewski (2008) undertook a doctoral study in which he interviewed a number of design consultancies, such as IDEO and Philips

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Design, and mapped the ways key people in design functions in those organisations viewed their roles and practices. He subsequently proposed the following five characteristics of design attitude: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Consolidating multidimensional meanings Creating, bringing to life Embracing discontinuity and openendedness Engaging polysensorial aesthetics Engaging personal and commercial empathy.

How do these design attitudes play out among the public managers I have interviewed in relation to my thesis and this paper? Consider how Anne Lind, Director in the Board of Industrial Injuries, reflects on the purchase of a new it system for her organisation: ”Back in 2005-6 or so, we decided to work towards a new it system which needed to be much more dynamic and which should be able to do ‘objective’ case management, that is, hyper-modern technology. What we spoke about was that we needed a new it system. And then I was home during my summer holidays, and I thought there is something wrong. One doesn’t ‘just’ buy a new it system. It is great that it is so smart and can do all these things. But that means that one puts those things into it, the ways we work, and then we don’t go any further. So the summer vacation meant that when I came back I established this Secretariat for developing our case management, which we call SUS, where we simply decided to go through everything, because an it system will never be better than what we put into it.”

This style of thinking and questioning assumptions seems to point to Michlewskis third type of design attitude, embracing discontinuity and openendedness. The manager does chooses to open up her organisation to explore what the implications can be of the new it system, and she in reality begins a journey to find out what they are going to “put into” the new system. Another example is from Pawsoe, the manager of an institution for adult mentally handicapped. She characterises her approach to innovation as change as follows: “We must make some trial-balloons, and then we see if it works. If it does not work, fair enough, so we just change it, so that we always had some new goal, or a new angle on something.”

This very brief consideration of the notion of design attitude is one which I intend to explore further in my thesis work. It touches on the distinction between “managers absorbing design” and “managers as designers”, and seems potentially useful in further research.

Globally, we are witnessing somewhat of an explosion of interest in the potential of design for public sector innovation (Bason, 2010; Dunleavy & Tinkler, 2012). The challenge now may be to provide the research base which can show the possibilities, but also the pitfalls, for those who wish to place design practices more squarely at the centre of the public innovator’s toolbox.

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About the author Christian Bason, 39, is M.Sc. (Political Science) from the University of Aarhus, and Ph.D. Fellow at Copenhagen Business School (CBS). His Ph.D. research is anchored in the Management, Politics and Philosophy Department and conducted with co-advisers Rafael Ramirez, Oxford Said School of Business, Banny Banerjee, Stanford University, and Richard Boland, Weatherhead School of Management. In parallel to his research, Christian is Director of Innovation at MindLab, a crossministerial unit for citizen-centred innovation. MindLab’s staff of designers, anthropologists and political scientists helps public servants apply design methods to new policies and services in the ministries of Business & Growth, Employment & Integration, and Taxation. Prior to joining MindLab in 2007, Christian held various positions at Ramboll, a consultancy, including head of labour market research and head of the public organisation and management practice. Christian is author of numerous articles and four books on leadership and innovation in the public sector, most recently ‘Leading Public Sector Innovation: Co-creating for a Better Society’ (University of Bristol: Policy Press, 2010).

Christian Bason has presented to numerous public organisations and societies around the world, including the ANZSOG 2011 Annual Conference, the IRSPM 2009 Annual Conference, the OECD, the European Commission, and amongst others US, Canadian, Japanese, French, Norwegian, Australian and New Zealand public sector organisations. In September 2011, Christian and his team organised the ‘How Public Design’ conference at Copenhagen Design Week, which included a range of academic contributions.

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