During the last decade, an outpouring of measures in the public sector sphere has happened to facilitate ‘transformation process driven by design, to integrate design in the organisation and develop design capability and design culture’ (Holmlid & Malmberg, 2018) in order to meet the needs of citizens.
With this in mind, for my Master’s course Decision Making and Business Intelligence, I’ve decided to write an essay about two different approaches to collaboration in the public sector – rational and creative.
Whereas the rational approach to policymaking is based on deduction, induction, objectivity and analysis of the evidence at hand, the design thinking approach is anything but. It’s charachterised by innovation, collaboration and creativity. Even though such work is still largely confusing for the public sector and its decision makers due to the difference in culture, it is still a powerful tool that has the capability to solve public issues.
This essay hence explores the role of collaborative design methods, specifically focusing on decision making, and the differences they make in contrast to current rational and systematic-decision making processes in the public sector. It concludes that, when using design thinking as a complement to policy making, it works to improve the traditional ways of policy thinking and policy design, but its implementation largely depends on design readiness and maturity of the organisation – in order words, how it is operationalised and used in practice by governments and other key policy actors.
You can read the essay here.
