This article is a summary of insights from an event with Christian Bason hosted by Apolitical in January 2024.

“What if our most urgent policy challenge is to enable new transition collaborations across sectors — to enable many different actors across a complex system to move together?”

Christian Bason

Paris’ roofscape is a sea of grey; 80% of the roughly 130,000 roofs are made from zinc, which absorbs heat and can make the elegant Haussman buildings unbearably hot in the summer. Residents on the top floors are four times as likely to die during a heatwave as those lower down.

But what if it were a sea of green? A living, breathing, cooling, water-retaining, biodiversity-boosting Parisian garden in the sky?

If the scale of that vision seems daunting or farfetched, consider this: Across our cities, 80% of the buildings of 2050 have already been built; 97% will require renovation to be fit for the future.

In the age of climate change and rapid technological transformation, few challenges facing policymakers are of the small and simple variety. To meet the moment, Christian Bason argues, they need to expand their thinking to match the scale and complexity of the problems.

Bason shared his thoughts at Design&Delivery in January, these are some of the key insights.

Beautiful, sustainable, together

"The key to solving complex, systemic, long-term problems across sectors and levels is to address them together."

Christian Bason

The vision for a green Parisian roofscape belongs to the French start-up Roofscapes. In 2023, it was one of several winners of the New European Bauhaus (NEB) ‘Rising Stars’ prize. Bason presented the NEB as an example of the kind of expansive, sector-bending thinking he’s calling on policymakers to embrace.

Dall-E, Green parisian roofscape

The vision for the NEB is to breathe beauty, soul and culture into Europe’s green transition. “[We] need to give our systemic change its own distinct aesthetic — to match style with sustainability,” said President von der Leyen in a 2020 speech.

We’re not used to hearing government talk about style and aesthetics. The NEB is not a top-down commission for approved art and design. As Bason explained, it’s more radically inclusive, based on design principles that are suitable for the specific nature of the mission, and not traditional government policies and programmes. These principles include:

  • Co-creation and collaboration, mobilising diverse types of actors across sectors, from city governments to artists, engineering firms and architectural practices.
  • Flexibility, iteration and agility; it’s not an “Evidence-based monolith”.
  • Being life- and systems-centred, not just thinking about users.
  • Reusing what’s already available, in terms of existing funding mechanisms and programmes, to move more quickly.

“This novel policy was a policy in making; it was an iterative, evolving, sketchy, scaffolding of a policy rather than a well-thought-out, analytical, evidence-based monolith.”

Christian Bason

Design for policy in the New European Bauhaus

Perhaps what is most significant about the NEB is that it’s an example of a policy initiative which, by its very nature, requires government to embrace an unpredictable collaboration with diverse partners. The only way to cultivate beautiful, sustainable spaces is together.

Magically imploding sectors

“Sectors [are] something we take for granted. We often find ourselves confined in our sector rather than thinking, doing or acting across them, just like the New European Bauhaus.”

Christian Bason

What is the significance of a start-up like Roofscapes trying to improve the climate resilience of a major global city like Paris; or an institution like the EU trying to build a new aesthetic movement?

What these examples demonstrate, Bason explained, is how the sectoral pillars of our society are shifting. Government, businesses and philanthropic/civic organisations are reimagining what they can do and how they can do it, and that creates opportunities for policymakers.

A design dichotomy

“Actually, the sectors are not expanding. Our thinking about sectors needs to expand, but in a way, the sectors are imploding.”

Christian Bason

The sectoral shift which Bason described is one of convergence, rather than expansion. The sectors are moving closer together rather than drifting further apart.

Governments are (re)learning how to lead innovation, the £85 billion EU Horizon Fund being one of the most significant examples of this in recent years. And digital technology is enabling public services to become more individualised and relational, rather than siloed and inflexible; artificial intelligence will accelerate this trend.

Meanwhile, the private sector is moving beyond the Friedman Doctrine. Bason highlighted how the agenda-shaping World Economic Forum, for example, is now leading conversations on stakeholder capitalism. Bloomberg estimates that funds dedicated to investing in businesses that promote better environmental, social and governance outcomes hold $7 trillion in assets. And the philanthropic sector is increasingly proactive, less paternalistic and more outcomes-driven.

D&D figure 2: imploding sectors

Bason argued that this implosion creates opportunities for policymakers to design policies in new ways that lead to more impactful and sustainable outcomes.

A new kind of leadership

“Next generation innovation calls for… a new breed of leader. Not innovation managers, but mission managers who focus on achieving a long-term vision of change together with a wide range of stakeholders.”

Christian Bason

If these ‘magically imploding sectors’ create new opportunities for policymakers to bring about more impactful and sustainable change, the essential question becomes how do we engage everyone to address the most complex problems?

Bason shared his perspective on what he sees as a new type of leadership required for our age of complexity: not innovation managers but mission managers. As Bason describes it, mission managers “recognise that solving their [organisation’s] challenges requires a different approach to leadership, one that involves working with new partners and stakeholders across sectors.” These leaders:

  • Sustain the long-term impact of a policy and the cross-sector collaboration required to achieve it;
  • Nurture joint decision-making and governance over time;
  • Manage a portfolio of interventions directed toward a shared goal, while sharing learning across an ecosystem;
  • Communicate the impact of the mission with a cohesive narrative.

8

The urgent challenge

In a recent article, Bason highlighted a 2023 LinkedIn post by Martin Østergaard Christensen, the City Director of Aarhus Municipality in Denmark. In the post, Christensen reflects on the “wild problem” facing his community. By 2032, 50% more people in his community will require care but the workforce is only projected to grow by 10%. So what, then, Christensen asks?

He argues that to address this challenge, the city will need to mobilise people it hasn’t mobilised in the past: citizens, relatives and other professionals.

It's an example of the bold, expansive thinking required to take on a daunting problem. Perhaps the urgent policy challenge in this age of wicked and wild problems is less about what to do and more about how to enable everyone to do it together.

Photo credits: Photo by Philippe Dehaye on Unsplash; Dall-E: AI impression of green Parisian roofscape