Tales of government innovation from Bangladesh

This article is written by Jaideep Prabhu, author of ‘How should a government be?’ and Professor at the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School, and Marvin Fernandes, Visiting Fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School.

• The problem: Government is slow to change and services tend to be top-down.
• Why it matters: Keep pace with the needs of 21st-century citizens.
• The solution: Design-thinking-based innovation training at scale.

In order to improve public services, governments around the world must empower their civil servants with the tools and techniques necessary to design and deliver new ways of working.

One such programme is the a2i initiative, established in 2007 by the Prime Minister's Office in Bangladesh, which aims to encourage innovation (including culture change at scale) among public sector employees. By 2019, the a2i programmes had trained over 70,000 civil servants from 43,000 government offices.

The a2i design thinking programme

The programme is an inclusive whole-of-government one that is open to all public sector employees. On day one, each participant is introduced to design thinking methodology, generates initial hypotheses about a particular problem they could each solve and develops their own preliminary service process simplification maps using ‘TCV’ criteria. (TCV stands for the reduction of time, cost and visits required by the citizen to avail of the service and a term that went viral as opposed to terms such as ‘innovation’ or ‘design thinking’. Similarly, ‘business process engineering’ became ‘service process simplification’ and ‘E-governance’ was renamed ‘service at the doorstep’.)

On day two, each participant is randomly assigned to groups of 4‒5 people which then conduct anonymous ‘secret shopper’ visits to a government department where none of the group members has previously worked. By anonymously assuming the role of an ‘ordinary’ citizen, each participant is expected to record insights from both public sector employees and relevant customers and other constituents.

This plan is designed to “lock-in” each participant’s focus on implementing an innovation that solves the specific problem they had identified.

On day three, each participant visits their own department. To maintain anonymity, individuals choose locations where they have no existing working relationships. Here, each participant is asked to anonymously observe interactions between employees and citizens and record any salient insights that emerge.

Over the final two days, participants move from the ‘empathise’ and ‘define’ phases of the design thinking methodology to a greater focus on the ‘ideate’, ‘prototype’, and ‘test’ phases. Using insights gained, each participant then revises their service process simplification map to better meet TCV criteria, turns their most promising ideas into initial low-fidelity prototypes to be developed and finalises an innovation implementation plan. According to a2i, this plan is designed to “lock-in” each participant’s focus on implementing an innovation that solves the specific problem they had identified during the boot camp.

Post-programme work

After the programme, each participant is encouraged to design and schedule “cascading workshops” within their own department and exhorted to work with a range of stakeholders including citizens, colleagues and supervisors.

The final step in implementing new initiatives in Bangladesh is a nationwide roll-out. This involves relevant departments and a six- to nine-month implementation period. However, when the individuals who came up with the ideas leave, institutionalising the innovation becomes difficult. Implementing new ideas can require a different mindset, people and funding, causing the project to lose its initial enthusiasm. Collaboration, often in the form of public-private partnerships, is necessary to overcome these obstacles. Standard government processes can stifle the project.

While the programme is successful in identifying and running pilots, the challenge comes in scaling up these ideas and taking them nationwide.

Some examples coming out of the programme: a field-level cooperative official developed an online application to streamline the registration process for cooperatives, which led to a reduction in time, cost and visits by 60-75% and cut out middlemen that were charging for a free service. A second employee came up with the idea of creating VIP cards for the rural poor to give them access to health information and services, which led to the number of rural citizens visiting the health complex tripling from 12 to 40 per day.

Going beyond the programme

While the programme is successful in identifying and running pilots, the challenge comes in scaling up these ideas and taking them nationwide, which often requires a different mindset, set of people and new process of funding and improving the project. Out of the nearly 1,800 pilots the a2i process has identified and run, only about 40 to 50 have been scaled up, a challenge that the team continues to work on.

From the a2i programme, we can learn several important lessons for driving government innovation. First, civil servants need deliberate training in designing solutions from a local and citizen's perspective. Second, empathy training is crucial, as civil servants are smart but often overestimate their capabilities and work in a vacuum. Third, training should be experiential and participants should prototype, iterate, and test solutions. Fourth, rather than using private sector language, new and relatable terms should be developed and deployed. Finally, scaling up new initiatives is a crucial but challenging step, and may require a different mindset and set of people including public-private partnerships.

We'll be following the progress of the a2i initiative and other government innovation programmes in our upcoming podcast and training programme for civil servants. Stay tuned for more updates on how governments are working to improve services for citizens around the world.

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(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)