REFLECTION ETERNAL | A SERIES OF REFLECTIONS FROM A PARTICIPATORY DESIGNER IN THE PUBLIC-SOCIAL SECTOR

Designing in Bureaucracy

A letter to fellow designers and the next generation of designers working in bureaucratic institutions

Photo by the blowup on Unsplash

It’s a dream come true for systemic designers to see bureaucracies —governments (e.g. innovation labs, bilateral foreign aid agencies) and multilateral institutions (e.g. UN agencies) — opening spaces that seek their talent. “Designing in Bureaucracy” in 2021 looks very different than even five years ago in many places. Today, designers no longer have to work through a design firm or a NGO to influence large public service bodies, they can in fact be working within them if they choose to.

Designers and non-designers alike have written and spoken brilliantly about designing in government and beyond, including on all its trials and tribulations. And yet nothing quite seemed to set me up for my experience in bureaucracy, including the many years prior working shoulder-to-shoulder with civil servants and experts in multilaterals and bilateral institutions.

That’s why I am pausing to reflect on this past year and offer fellow designers and aspiring designers in bureaucracy (and frankly, for me too!) a few lessons learned and tips to navigating these spaces:

First, expect moments of cognitive dissonance. This means that as designers you’ll encounter moments when you think you are talking about the same thing as your colleagues, but you aren’t. Months later, you’ll realize that when you were saying “X”, they were thinking “Y” and vice versa. This can be confusing, and sometimes very challenging. Stick with it and identify those moments. When you catch your breath, take note of how you might get on the same page as your colleagues —ask yourself: how might I meet them where they are, while also translating what I mean? Once you get some ideas on how to meet them where they are, practice it — many meetings, many emails — but eventually you’ll see what resonates and what doesn’t. Throw out the bits of design jargon that doesn’t work (no matter how much you love it), and find new ways of describing the essence of what you’re introducing and aiming to do.

Second, note the differences in ways of working but don’t push your way of doing things. Here is a list of common differences that I’ve identified between designers and experts in bureaucracies:

• Reactive v Proactive Stance. A reactive stance in bureaucracies can force a quick pace of discussion. This seems unintuitive because we’ve mostly heard that bureaucracies move slowly. And yet this isn’t a contradiction — because while the movement is slow, the wheels keep turning! That intense churn is what you will feel and see. A designer might bring a proactive stance, one that stays silent as many pieces come together, to then make sense of it and put it into action. It is important that a designer finds a balance between the reactive and proactive —everything cannot be proactive and yet everything does not require a reaction.
• Frontloading v Emergence Planning. In bureaucracies, plans are required to get permissions and greenlights. Things can’t move without the plan. This frontloading is commonplace. However, for a designer the plan comes to be as it emerges. This puts any designer in a “chicken-and-egg” situation. A designer in bureaucracy needs to learn how to satisfy the frontloading and in parallel, set expectations of iterations to come and needs for agility going forward.
• Producing v Acting. In bureaucracies, what designers may think of as a “process” or “act” (with multiple steps), is often an output. For example, “strategy” is a strategy document and “concept” is a concept note. For a designer, strategy is the act of strategizing and concept is the act of concepting. A designer will need to find opportunities to create the action beyond the product.
• Solo v Group Play. Building off of the point above, a strategy document, concept note or project brief is often drafted by one person and commented on by others in a bureaucracy. As designers, you know that design is a team sport and therefore, the draft cannot be made unless the team does it together. For a designer, this means proactively asking to create moments with colleagues that feed into the drafts, as opposed to asking them for thoughts after.
• Discursive v Embodied Practice. Connecting to the last point, the “team play” in a bureaucracy is more often than not a series of meetings, in which discussions take place. For designers, much of the discursive can be converted into the embodied. This means a designer will need to facilitate meetings that invite the “doing” even when colleagues may not always be up for it, owing to time constraints and other pressures.

What does this mean for design and designers in bureaucracy? Given these differences, how can we still be effective?

I have four simple tips:

1. Do our homework. Walking into a bureaucracy, we only know what we know. We don’t know who’s been navigating the institution we’ve walked into, and how they’ve been doing it. Ask and keep asking questions to learn how it’s been done and how it continues to be done.
2. Learn the mundane stuff. Bureaucracies are filled with structural constraints. What are they? Is it the contracting modality? Is it how the budget flows to your team? Is it how your institution connects to its related institutions? Find out what makes the institution tick, and learn those processes. They might not be the sexy aspects of work (or the ones you expected to need to know), but they are the important ones.
3. Untangle the dependencies. Remember the wheel that keeps turning? When does that wheel stop? What enables the wheel to stop turning? Bureaucracies are big and often come with complicated structures and an intricate web of relationships. Who does your team rely on and listen to? Who does that person report to? What does that person care about? Your work is dependent on many connected up structures and people, so map out what that looks like to begin navigating it.
4. Identify and work with the “technocratic” and the “political”. Roadblocks in bureaucracies can be less familiar to designers — two common ones are technocracy and politics. When people are experts in their subject matter, they can become technocrats who are driven by the substance that they care about. Bureaucracies have hierarchies and politics play out as one might expect, with many moments of “looking toward bosses”. Determine what motivates the people around you: politics, technical subject matter, or something else. This will help you learn their mindset and collaborate with them.

One last hard lesson I’ve learned as a designer in bureaucracy is to not be attached to outcomes. I believe that we can’t have expectations of us, or the bureaucracy, changing at that exact moment that we probe. We are merely sowing seeds, and some will bloom in time.

Designers in crime — what have you learned from your experiences? How do you navigate bureaucracy? I’d love to hear from you!

This is the first post in “Reflection Eternal”, a series of reflections as a participatory designer in the public/social sector. Reflection External is a borrowed term from the hip-hop album that inspired the author.