Avoiding the Public Policy Crash: Towards a Design-Thought Public Sector Innovation - An Example from the European Union (EU)
“What If the EU Was a Start-Up, Its Citizens Its Customers, and Public Policy the Product - Would You Buy It?”
Imagine you walked through the EU online store and found promoted its latest arrival, let’s say, “The TTIP”. Imagine you didn’t know what it tasted like, what socio-economic consequences - be it on health or food standards - it had, or whether it was worth the price to pay. Why would, or should, you add it to your basket? What is the selling proposition? Upon whom is it to actually define the latter? Aren’t you as a well-informed X-Y-Z-generation customer sovereign (enough), to engage in the making of the product governance? - Design (thinking) says yes.
Redefine Public Policy: The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication (see Gladwell, 2008). The same seems to hold true for ‘public policy crashes’, e.g., TTIP, to name but one. Yet, communication problems, rooted in whatever kind of socioeconomic and cultural legacies, are not indelible: Today’s public policy-making institutions should not use institutional heredity as an excuse for administrative deadlocks (see Fukuyama, 2013). Such complacency puts progress and prosperity of entire societies at stake. We need a new approach to public policy creation in 21st century democracies - one that focuses on forms, relationships, behavior, and real human interactions.
R(innovate) the 21st Century Myth: Such a human-centric approach should identify societies’ problems collectively, prototype ideas rapidly, and eventually evolve into tangible artifacts and nonfunctional models to solve those problems (see Mootee, 2013). Insights into planned policy content would be shared step wise. Citizens would be actively engaged in policy-making procedures. As such, trust between the governing and the governed could be restored: In today’s information age, non-communication is seemingly the root cause to citizens’ politics and policy-making skepticism. That ‘diplomacy is no more than secrecy’ has nowadays turned into a widely disproved myth, with the ‘blackbox TTIP’ constituting the prime example at EU level. When incorporating empathy and prototyping ‘by default’ into policy-making initiatives, the EU could live up to today’s desire for transparent, innovative, and socio-centric public sector governance, while at the same time boosting integrity of and belief in EU institutionalism.
Design-Think EU Commission: Design thinking - originally used in private sector product innovation - acts as such a ‘default’ mechanism. It aims at developing socially meaningful and targeted ideas while relying on intuition, pattern-recognition, and co-creation. Typically, design thinking draws on fours steps (Kelley and Kelley, 2013) [remark: remember to recall the imaginary start-up situation outlined in the introductory sentence]:
1. Inspiration: Observing people’s behavior in the natural context or talking to lead users amongst them helps discover potential directions of product ideas. While connecting with people’s needs and motivations fresh ideas are developed.
2. Synthesis: A broader context is being mapped from the patterns and themes identified during step one. From the single-case observations and individual insights obtained, objectively valid truths are derived.
3. Ideation: Numerous divergent product ideas are drafted, rapid and early prototypes are established. They need be concrete enough for being adapted in learning loops based on end users’/customers’ feedback.
4. Implementation: The designed product idea is being refined and prepared for its launch. Most importantly, early launches - based on prototypes - provide additional opportunities for learning loops.
Design thinking provides thus an iterative and cumulative learning process through exploration and learning, sense making of observed variables, shaping of possible outcomes, while analyzing the latter influence on the status quo. The potential for design-thought policy is given: It generally acts as the crucial qualitative and in-depth perspective to citizen-centric and foresighted public policy-making. It can ensure extensive integration of citizens’/stakeholders’ concerns and add value as a control variable to existing impact assessment and online consultation practices (e.g., under the EU Better Regulation/ REFIT initiative). In future, it can complement quantitative social media analytics or digital social innovation platforms through its focus on real-world human interaction (e.g., workshops).
Draw on the Whole Brain of the EU: EU founding father Schumann was convinced: “Sans l’individu, rien ne se passe.” Still, 60 per cent of EU citizens feel they have no power to contribute to EU decision-making (revealed by a voting at Expo Milan 2015, Europe Day, May 9th). The EU holds an enormous amount of creative human potential. Assuming that good ideas are found at the top constitutes a peril to EU’s future development. The most innovative 21st century companies, for example, have substituted their command-and-control organizations with a participatory approach characterized by collaboration and teamwork (Kelley and Kelley, 2013). Such group ownership can be equally fruitful in the public sector to co-create public policy solutions that optimize for meaning. As author and zeitgeist Werner Erhard once said: “Create your future from your future, not your past.” - We owe it to the EU’s consecutive integration process, to my own and future generations and the founding fathers, as well as EU citizens as a whole, to design Europe, and think Union.
Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash
