Bridging the Divide
How Design Challenges the Fault Lines in the Public Service
The most visible split in the structure of the public service is the divide between policy and delivery. In discussions about digital government, this divide is often left unacknowledged as the focus tends to be on improving how government builds and delivers services, not how it makes them from a policy perspective. However, digital government initiatives bring with them new ways of working, thinking, and being. More specifically we’ve seen an introduction of design methods into the public service as a tenent of digital government transformation. Without addressing the unique structural dynamics design finds itself within the public service, the promises of digital government will be slow to fruition. This post explores the dynamic between design, policy, delivery, and the public service using the concept of fault lines as articulated by Donald Savoie and Michael Wernick.
The Fault Lines of the Public Service
The separation of policy and delivery in the public service creates an organization with a clear division of responsibilities and duties. In the book Democracy in Canada: The Disintegration of Our Institutions Donald Savoie calls this division between policy and delivery the “fault line”. Those above the fault line, the policy people, are responsible for thinking about, analyzing, researching, writing, monitoring, evaluating, and approving what government does and how they do it. Delivery people, those below the fault line, are the ones responsible for operationalizing the policy, working on the front line or behind the scenes processing applications, answering questions, publishing information, or building software.
While Savoie articulates a binary view to this division, Michael Wernick’s recent post on the “Nine Fault Lines and Seams in the Federal Public Service” elaborates a more complex matrix of divisions, but nonetheless calls out the same tensions between policy and “operations”. For simplicity in this post, I’ll use the term ‘delivery’ to also mean operations.
Aside from dividing responsibilities within the public service the fault line appears to have an interesting impact on the attitudes, behaviours, and mindsets of those working on each side. Savoie claims that depending on which side of the fault line you work in, your priorities will be different noting that “Those above the fault line tend to look up to the political process and [executive council] for guidance and accountability, while those below consider that they are accountable to a variety of actors from their immediate supervisor, oversight bodies to their clients.” In other words, those above the fault line are primarily focused and attuned to what is going on above them at a political and strategic level, those on the other side are most concerned with the day to day operations of service delivery.
As mentioned above, these fault lines are not just mindsets, they are very real organizational divisions that can create an organization at odds with itself. This creates both upstream and downstream effects. Important strategic changes from central government “from the top” may be undermined if delivery programs do not believe it contributes to what they see as the true problems that citizens face. Those same challenges experienced on the front line often get ignored as they struggle up the chain of command if they don’t align to a strategic policy agenda (even if they solve a real problem). While there may be some tensions between these sides for various reasons, what I’m interested in is the role that design plays in bridging this divide as well as how these fault lines impede design.
A Public Service Resisting Design
Despite numerous government strategies being “citizen-focused” or “citizen-centred”, I’ve always been surprised why design, more specifically human-centred design, hasn’t taken root in the public service. I can point to reasons around internal capability and established working models, but Savoie points to a subtle mindset shift that exists on each side of the fault line that may provide a deeper explanation. He says that “those closest to the front lines…feel their primary accountability to citizens/clients while those farther up may feel primary accountability to citizen voters and taxpayers, as mediated by the political process.”
This difference in mindset is easy to understand. The front line deals most directly with the people accessing government services. They are a witness to the struggles of bad policy (or let’s face it, poor delivery) whereas those above the fault line — policy folks — don’t have this same visibility and thus understand the public in a more abstract sense: voters and taxpayers. Additionally, policy work often needs to balance the needs of many, which doesn’t always align to empathizing with individual lived experiences. I think this difference in perspective and visibility into the citizen experience is one part of the challenge, but it doesn’t fully explain the common points of resistance seen with design in government. I believe Savoie’s comment that those above the fault line see accountability being ‘mediated by the political process’ to be a critical concept.
Design resistance is not a rejection of empathy toward the individual, but rather a challenge to power. A key tenent of design is to utilize user research methods with people who use the designed thing, in this case a government service. A curious response I’ve hear about user research in government goes something like this: “if we learn about what they need, then we’ll have to do it.” or “The policy tells us what we need to do.” One would think that by learning what people need you’d be more motivated to do it! Senior leaders in government aren’t opposed to providing what people need or want, but they do have an understanding of how power and decision making happens. This resistance reflects a broader cultural issue, the fear that aligning with user needs might create tension with political directives, the top down direction of power, decision making and accountability.
When design enters to the public service, we are inadvertently introducing new ways of working that asks the institution and the bureaucracy in subtle ways to reverse the hierarchy of power and your sense of accountability when sitting above the fault line. Design is less inclined to look up for guidance and more inclined to look “down” and “out” to the very people who experience a policy or service. User research brings a level of visibility about the citizen experience into the public service that can potentially challenge the natural flow of decision making and accountability coming from the top. When a senior leader worries that user research will force the organization to do something, it’s not because it’s a bad idea but it may put them at odds with the direction outlined by decision makers. This begs the question: Who am I, as a public servant, accountable to at the end of the day?
Brace yourself for a somewhat controversial statement: Public servants are not accountable to, nor do they truly serve, the public. This is something that is rarely articulated yet structurally embedded within the DNA of the public service, despite public servants professing statements like “We work for the people, we serve the people”. In Canada’s parliamentary democracy, the government and more specifically the Minister is accountable to the public. The public service serves the democratically elected government by developing and enacting its policy agenda. And there is a long chain of hierarchy built into the bureaucracy to uphold this flow of accountability. The public service is not designed to meet the needs of citizens, it is designed to meet the needs of the government.
For many public servants this is probably an unpopular or uncomfortable position to view your work from. Many public servants wear a proud badge of serving the public. And of course they do that in many ways with great success. What I hope to highlight by pointing out this dynamic is a greater understanding of how decision making and power play out in the public service, and how design cannot thrive without acknowledging how, where, and why it best fits within the public service. While the value of design may already be successfully utilized below the fault line, those above the fault line may not fully embrace its true potential. In my opinion, design must find itself in spaces above the fault line to guide how policies are services are developed.
Bridging the Divide
The fault lines and seams of government aren’t going anywhere. But by understanding where they exist and the organizational dynamics they generate we can consciously work to bridge them. There are strategies and patterns that have proven successful to challenge the structural mindsets that come from the policy / delivery divide. To bridge the fault line, governments must create multidisciplinary teams that embed policy and delivery roles together. Design and user research must be prioritized at the outset of the policymaking cycle so that the processes and methods are not relegated to the delivery side where true change can sometimes be too little to late. And by including design up front, above the fault line, the public service can balance the needs of users with the government’s political mandate and directives.
