Improving commissioning through design thinking

Mintrom, Michael; Thomas, Madeline

doi:10.1080/25741292.2018.1551756

Cited by 11 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Lastly, the interview with the lab's director and coauthor, showed the limitations that arise when design is restricted to only implementation activities and not included in more strategy-level actions. The organizational level was thus found to mirror what has been in found in literature (Buchanan, Junginger, and Terrey 2017;Howlett, Ramesh, and Perl 2009;Mintrom and Thomas 2018) on the wider policy level. Thus, even on the organizational level, strategy and implementation need to be paired activities, highlighting the need for the integration of design as a core competence of the organization.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 69%

“…In terms of the latter, Mintrom and Thomas (2018, p. 313) view design thinking, through its use of iterative, context-based innovation, as a way to help close the gap between policies and how they are experienced by citizens as they interact with public services. This is particularly important given that the failure to design for the contexts in which policy is meant to be implemented can lead to dramatic differences in the outcomes of policies across localities (Howlett and Rayner 2007;Mintrom and Thomas 2018). In both, the participatory and human-(user-)centered focus of design are celebrated as offering a new way to (co-)define, (co-)create, and (co-)produce public value (Blomkamp 2018;McGann, Blomkamp, and Lewis 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Policy labs challenges in the public sector: the value of design for more responsive organizations

Komatsu

Salgado

Deserti

et al. 2021

Policy Design and Practice

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Design has emerged as a discipline equipped to tackle the complex problems of the 21st century, primarily for its human-centered and experimentation approach and participative qualities. Through the discussion of a case study of a government design lab, formerly inside the Finnish Immigration Service, the question of how design can help public sector organizations better respond to their pressing needs is addressed, in an attempt to explore the value of design as it is being used by the increasing population of policy labs in governments across Europe. While these labs have been charged to bring innovation to government, there are several factors that hinder their roles as "challengers" of the system. Given the temporal constraints and limited decisionmaking power of policy labs, cultivating a culture of design has been identified by the authors as a promising outcome, acting as a generative tool for organizational change through its capacity to mediate between the production and consumption of products/services.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 69%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Policy labs challenges in the public sector: the value of design for more responsive organizations

Komatsu

Salgado

Deserti

et al. 2021

Policy Design and Practice

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“…Commissioning focuses on the challenges of front-line delivery as opposed to focusing on policy or budgetary levers. Often, commissioning involves engagement with, or delegation to, a third party to undertake a defined task [21]. The government does not provide the service directly.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are cases of public service commissioning where the application of DT methodology has improved the implementation of services. A description of its application can be found in [21] for the case of charter schools in the United States.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Design Thinking Methodology to Achieve Household Engagement in Urban Water Sustainability in the City of Huelva (Andalusia)

Bermejo-Martín

Rodríguez‐Monroy

2020

Water

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To advance to water sensitive cities (WSC) it will be necessary to achieve the commitment of the citizens, involving them in this transition. Citizen participation is considered essential, and one of the possible approaches to achieve this is through Design Thinking (DT), a human-centered methodology that allows creating a framework to develop the hydrosocial contract. The Suez group proposed the challenge of collecting initiatives to achieve more efficient use of urban water in homes, by conducting a pilot in one of its investee companies, Aguas de Huelva. Our research proposal, selected by the Suez group, to achieve greater engagement of households regarding efficient water use, was to develop a web-based prototype applying DT methodologies, which would allow us to generate new messages and meanings regarding water, producing an innovation of meaning that would enable tracking the progress of the results. This article describes the approved framework to carry out the pilot experience in the homes of the city of Huelva in Andalusia, Spain.

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“…Since evidence-based policy practice cannot fully, or even partially, inform the policy development (Wesselink, Colebatch, & Pearce, 2014), Mintrom and Thomas (2018) argue that 'design thinking can contribute to improved use of evidence in policymaking and in program implementation' in which '[p]olicy designers must be socially perceptive when gathering evidence and politically savvy when deploying it'. Brown (2008, p. 87) identifies a policy designer's most important skill as the ability to 'imagine the world from multiple perspectives -those of colleagues, clients, end-users and customers (current and prospective)'.…”

Section: The Relation Between 'Policy Capability' and 'High-quality P...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Policy Capability and the Quality of Policy Advice with Initiatives: Lessons from New Zealand Public Sector Agencies

Jahan¹

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<p>There continues to be discourse about declining policy capability at high government levels in Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Over the past 25 years, New Zealand public sector agencies have taken various initiatives intended to change policy practices with a view to professionalising policy analysis and advice. Policy practice refers to the activities of policy staff and agencies to contribute to policy analysis and policy advice. The initiatives indicate an ongoing resolve to improve policy capability and the quality of policy advice to the satisfaction of advice clients. This thesis examines the initiatives developed by the central government agencies and three agencies (two policy ministries and one council, a local government, which are collectively referred to as ‘agencies’) in New Zealand. The central government initiatives developed between 1990 and 2015 are examined to identify the concepts and ideas used to improve policy capability and the quality of policy advice and explain the contexts that influenced the initiators’ choice and use of initiatives. The initiatives developed between 2008 and 2015 by the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry for the Environment and the Auckland Council are examined in depth to identify and explain the initiators’ choice and use of initiatives. ‘Initiatives’ are used as a means to study organisational choices and activities, centred on the development, use and consequences of initiatives to build, improve or maintain policy capability and ensure high-quality policy advice. The research question addresses what initiatives are developed, why and with what consequences. A qualitative inquiry draws on evidence from the literature on policy analysis, policy advice and policy capability, focusing on the knowledge, skills, competencies and behaviours required to produce policy analysis and advice. Similarities and differences in the drivers, designs and approaches of the initiatives across three cases are analysed using data from documents and interviews with policy staff and experts outside the case-study agencies. The findings relating to central agency initiatives suggest that the focus of policy capability initiatives sought to standardise policy practices, ensure the quality of policy inputs with special attention to the use of evidence, tools and frameworks, bring a future focus to policy analysis, and promote collaborative policy analysis. Overall, these initiatives respond to the contextual conditions emanating from state sector reforms. The findings relating to agency initiatives suggest that policy capability initiatives are driven, approached and designed by the circumstances specific to the organisations (internal influences) and the expectation–response relation between the producers of and clients for policy advice at different levels (external influences). The similarities of the forms of the initiatives with slight modifications in their design but differences in their approaches across the organisations, imply that the initiators are influenced by the contextual conditions. The initiators’ used their insights and experiences to contextualise initiatives and mixed several ingredients for policy capability to ensure both policy analytical and management capability of policy staff. In some instances, they followed local and international practices considered ‘effective’ in other public-sector organisations. At other times, they responded to the circumstances specific to the agency and external influences on policy capability, and focused on meeting the clients’ quality expectations from policy advice. The findings confirm that improving policy capability is strongly reliant on the senior leaders’ and policy managers’ ability to identify and apply an appropriate analytical style to policy analysis and bring practical and contextual considerations to bear on policy advice. The appropriateness of the analytical style is determined by a range of factors such as the nature of clients, nature of the problem, political views on the problem, and the demand and supply of policy skills. The significant influences of contextual variables suggest that policy capability discourse can also be framed as the ability of the policy managers and senior leaders of the organisations to choose policy analytical styles that are fit-for-purpose. This conclusion reveals that the conventional understanding of declining policy capability as due to analytical deficiency is limited in its ability to account for the innovative efforts in New Zealand to improve both policy analytical and management capability at individual and organisation levels.</p>

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Improving commissioning through design thinking

Cited by 11 publications

References 27 publications

Policy labs challenges in the public sector: the value of design for more responsive organizations

Policy labs challenges in the public sector: the value of design for more responsive organizations

Design Thinking Methodology to Achieve Household Engagement in Urban Water Sustainability in the City of Huelva (Andalusia)

Improving Policy Capability and the Quality of Policy Advice with Initiatives: Lessons from New Zealand Public Sector Agencies

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