This article was written by Marika Tammeaid, director of development at Itla Children's Foundation.

There are many people who are keen to label the public sector as both rigid and useless.

In my experience, that is not the case: there is a wide and deep will among public servants to develop the public sector and its ability to develop and meet citizens’ expectations better.

Part of this willingness for renewal has been manifested in the boom in GovLabs and innovation labs, which has reached all the continents and, despite some fluctuations, does not seem to fade. Many positive traces of this boom can be read on the articles of Apolitical.

• Want to write for us? Take a look at Apolitical’s guide for contributors

But there is one thing, which, in my mind, deserves a deeper gaze: the role of public sector leaders. Have they actively engaged with the new methods for co-creation and design, and have they taken these practices to heart?

Beyond design thinking

Unfortunately, the answer to that question seems to be no.

Despite some outstanding champions, the majority of public sector leaders have yet to engage fully with the new open and dialogical styles of forming and applying government policies.

One reason for this might be that some of the “let’s spread design to government” projects have been keener on increasing the amount of service designers in government organisations than truly and dialogically finding methods to tackle the real issues on the government agenda.

Another, more profound, reason might be that design methods originating from industrial art, engineering and product development have a tendency to narrow down the study object to a limited problem to solve with end-users. This does not work in the sphere of systemic and interdependent policy issues that public sector leaders are dealing with.

The problem focus suits the networked world badly, where connectivity and context are key, and the public sector constantly makes moves and decisions between contradictory interests and towards ambitious and broad societal goals. Luckily, we have already seen some rise in strategic design being more useful for agile policy formation purposes.

At this point, some might ask why it is important that the leaders themselves also participate in these new ways of working. When nobody has time for everything, isn’t it enough that they reserve money and resources for the innovative public servants to work with arising issues?

Partly yes, but still, in these times of self-organising ways of working, the leaders of public organisations have a key role to play. They make countless decisions affecting the everyday life of citizens, not only at local governments, but also in central government functions.

Their actions and leadership have a profound impact on organisational cultures, as well as possibilities for the public sector to renew itself and achieve results. And they are the key for redesigning the public sector structures and workflows, which respond better to the needs of citizens and act as enabling catalysts in societal developments.

Public sector leaders should participate more in design lab projects, but that alone won’t renew the public sector as a whole or make it work in a more strategic, interoperable and agile way.

“By renewing the ways of working in the public sector, we are talking about a profound change in mindset from rigid power structures to co-creation”

By renewing the ways of working in the public sector, we are talking about a profound change in mindset from rigid power structures to co-creation. It’s the shift from “government as machinery” thinking to human- and service-centred leadership. We also talk about a profound systemic change, empowering public servants to renew their role.

In order to enable these mindset leaps, there is one valuable tool available: leadership training. This kind of training can have a bad rap, but don’t let that fool you. Long-term training provides indeed both a time and a place for renewal and mindset change, in this case as a future building platform.

Taking training to the next level

Because society is changing rapidly, we need new co-learning opportunities to keep us updated.

In Finland, we have had a unique opportunity to complement the sporadic terrain of public sector leadership training thanks to the Sitra Innovation Fund, which made investing in public sector leadership capabilities a strategic priority.

We invited all the top civil service leaders from the ministries and some central agencies to long-term leadership training of 11 days with intermediate assignments. Around 90% of them accepted the offer.

The group consisted of 140 top leaders, beginning with secretaries and undersecretaries of state, and was divided in mixed groups of up to 25 participants. Each of the six groups formed for a fixed period of eight months — a living testbed for cross-organisational and cross-sectoral phenomenon-based cooperation. I got the opportunity to follow this experiment firsthand as a learning designer and trainer of the program.

There were three core learning targets running throughout the program:

  1. Leading public policy as a network of organisations working systemically for the long-term goals;
  2. Fostering an enabling leadership style; and
  3. Developing meta-skills for supporting both renewals.

The training program covered themes and global trends such as renewability of the public sector, experimentation and new operational models for complex problems, shifting from public management to public service, strengths-based leadership and renewing leadership culture. But the most important element is how we conducted the training.

Training in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world means equipping the participants to face complex and wicked issues with no preconceived or ready-made answers for how to think or take action.

It’s about getting rid of the naive idea that there is a knowledge-based solution to every problem and that providing new knowledge by lecturing would generate a new kind of action.

Useful training is about learning by doing and putting ideas into action in real settings, broadening horizons and developing thinking skills, as well as fostering dialogue and joint sense-making.

Training sessions should also make use of the previous skills and capacities of participants, enhancing both individual and joint goal-setting and enabling solutions-focused mindsets. It is only when we combine different kinds of knowledge with skills and experience in a manner deviating from how it has been done before that new solutions arise.

It was important that all six groups worked almost simultaneously and within the relatively short time frame of 18 months, as our goal was to create systemic change in central government.

The timeframe and scope of the training project were profound enough for a joint vocabulary and an enabling mindset to start to grow within the government. The participants reported that it was great to recognise in daily work that colleagues from other ministries were on the same wavelength.

Observably, the participants also started to choose more enabling and participative styles of interventions, both in policy matters and in leading their own organisations.

Mindset matters

Leaders, like all  other professional groups, benefit from confidential discussions and networking with peers, and supporting this community to develop is one part of a training setting. At the same time, it is important that the training does not create a bubble separate from everyday life.

An important part of the learning design are activities that take the learners to real service touch-points, develop capabilities to simply observe without an immediate need to categorise, judge or decide anything, help to gather multi-angled information and practise the new skills.

Public leadership is a very demanding task in a diverse and uncertain world.

Having to shoulder heavy responsibilities at the edge of uncertainty can also be paralysing. One key function of good leadership training is to unleash the personal and joint resources needed to tackle serious issues.

That requires a lot from trainer’s side, too — first of all, giving up the customary knowledge-gap approach, where teaching is about transferring knowledge from one to many, and replacing it with a growth mindset and supporting the strengths-based personal agency of every participant.

“It is a remarkable shift to creating a positive learning spiral that has important ripple effects on leadership culture and interaction in real-life settings”

It is a remarkable shift to creating a positive learning spiral that has important ripple effects on leadership culture and interaction in real-life settings.

In order for leadership training to live up to its potential, both trainers and participants need to challenge their beliefs of what knowledge building and renewal are about and start reforming their established practices.

Co-creation and design thinking can and should be part of carrying out public sector missions in a human-centred way. That applies to both how public organisations function internally and how they function in relation to citizens, companies and other organisations. In cases where the training tradition within the government renews itself, learning design also has a lot to offer for this renewal.

Talking about change and making a change are two clearly different things.

— Marika Tammeaid

Marika Tammeaid is a solutions-focused coach, learning designer and leadership trainer with long government experience. She has written a book, Leading Public Administration_, together with colleague Petri Virtanen, which will be published in the beginning of 2020 (Springer)._

Picture credit: The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash