MindLab was a "grenade in the bureaucracy" - here are the lessons learned
MindLab wanted to connect civil servants to reality and provide creative fuel to develop their toolbox. Innovation Designer Jesper Christiansen talks about his career where he has been on the frontline of the mission to make politics more citizen-centered. This is the first of two articles.
In 2009, Jesper Christiansen entered Slotsholmen with one vision: to change the way politics is developed. It wasn't a Master's degree that brought him behind the stone walls of Borgen. He had a master's degree in anthropology and over the next four years, he would write a PhD under the think tank and the innovation unit MindLab.
The goal was to understand the change logic of public organizations and, based on this, devise new approaches and tools.
Inside Slotsholmen, behind a glass door with a diagonal striped pattern, sat the group of designers, critical social thinkers and innovators that Jesper Christiansen would become part of. They had already been working on the vision of making politics citizen-oriented for seven years.
Jesper Christiansen.
Piles of paper with interviews with citizens and practitioners lay on the height-adjustable tables, and under each table was a drawer cabinet in MindLab's lime green color. Adjacent to this was the organization's iconic egg-shaped room - a space that formed the framework for new meetings across Slotsholmen.
MindLab is an innovation lab in the heart of central government, where the think tank's innovators began working cross-ministerially with the ambition to recalibrate the public sector from within.
People needed to be at the center of the policy process, and the bureaucracy needed to be designed for that. MindLab articulated itself as "a grenade in the bureaucracy". The ambition was to create radical change.
The lab didn't find all the answers, but that also serves as a point in itself. They saw the work of cultural change as a learning process that is based on the officials' daily work - it is a continuous process, not a one-size-fits-all.
MindLab worked to develop everything from the overall ecosystem of ministries and organizational collaborations down to the individual's understanding of what the goal of their work is.
Today, Jesper Christiansen works as a program manager and development partner at the Bikuben Foundation, and INVI spoke to him about the learnings from MindLab's work in the central administration in Copenhagen in this first of two articles about Jesper Christiansen's work.
The physical space of innovation
MindLab's physical space should stimulate innovation.
"The purpose of designing the physical space was to leave the normal interest-driven meeting culture and engage people in collaboration and to rethink problem solving," Christiansen explains over a half-scratchy connection from a Boston subway line.
By that logic, the space also functioned as a meeting place for everyone from students to senior executives. The intention was to abolish hierarchical differences and create a space to collectively explore new possibilities.
However, the physical space ended up having the opposite effect. The space unintentionally became a symbol that innovation was not taking place in the core tasks for which the ministries were responsible. It created the feeling that innovation was something extraordinary that required special spaces and conditions.
"In the beginning, the innovation agenda in the public sector grew very separately from policy development. So it was almost like 'let's do an innovation project over here and then we'll do policy over here at the other end'," says Jesper Christiansen and continues:
"That's why we saw great potential in integrating innovation methods and approaches into policy development and as part of the way things were done in general."
MindLab's egg-shaped room. Photo: Anette Væring
The door is unlocked to the "holy land"
It was the basic attitude towards the tasks of civil servants that MindLab was often involved in challenging. Many - and Jesper Christiansen - refer to it as the mindset.
"Mindset is about your own way of thinking. It's about how your basic logic is in relation to the way you work."
"We wanted to make room for a logic where you understand the world as more complex and therefore unpredictable. So that when you make a plan, you know that things are not going to work out the way you intend - and that's what you plan for," says Jesper Chrsitiansen.
It was not an easy mission.
But citizen involvement and democratic participation were the keywords that would unlock the door to what the MindLab innovators felt was almost sacred land.
One of the consequences of working close to the citizens' reality is that you need to work in an experimental, learning and iterative way, gathering knowledge, repeating and improving continuously. Both to understand what actually motivates the need for change and to test what difference the ideas actually made.
This was contrary to the thinking of the civil service at the time - and perhaps still is to some extent.
"The civil service seemed to work on the assumption that it is possible to create change through strong analysis and planning prior to implementing initiatives," says Jesper Christiansen and continues
"An important part of MindLab's contribution was about breaking this culture and trying to create a better dynamic between policy and practice."
MindLab in the engine room
Between 2012-14 MindLab was involved in the reform of disability pension and flex jobs, and for the first time it gave MindLab the opportunity to get right into the heart of policy development.
The disability pension and flex job reform challenged the way municipalities work, and this was the opportunity for MindLab to come in and contribute. The iterative and citizen-centered approach could solve some of the resistance they encountered.
First, MindLab was given a role in the implementation process. They were hired to be curious about what happens in practice in the very early stages of reform.
"Normally, a reform will set up an evaluation setup where you plan in advance when to measure whether it works or not," says Christiansen and continues:
"We didn't measure whether the initiatives worked or not. We just had to go out and be curious about what was actually happening in practice."
Together with MindLab employees, the Ministry of Employment collected qualitative data. They documented the experiences, lessons learned and dilemmas of all parties involved in putting the initiatives into practice.
First and foremost, it was about empathizing with the experiences of everyone involved: citizens, frontline workers, team leaders, heads of administration. Against this backdrop, they explored how to create the right interplay between political intentions and practical reality.
New insights, new behavior
They were able to take a different approach to investigating a reform, and the new perspectives also provided new insights that politicians could use when dealing with the media.
"Mette Frederiksen [then Minister of Employment] was actually better equipped to answer some of the criticism that always comes when you have a reform. She was closer to reality and practice, which meant she could give some different answers," says Jesper Christiansen.
It also gave rise to a more strategic conversation about what policy process the Ministry of Employment had, which meant they started to rethink some of the processes.
"We went from linear thinking to a more circular process. The point here was mostly to create space for and proactively deal with the things you can only learn by trying to act," says Christiansen.
As part of that transition, they worked visually. They mapped what is already being done in policy development and, based on the visualization of the project journey, they examined whether there was anything in the different phases that could be done differently.
MindLab was the world's first public innovation lab. Their vision for change was in many ways uncharted territory, and their experiences (and mistakes) provided essential insights. Among other things, they found that change was partly dependent on their continuous presence in policy development work. A fundamental problem.
That's why Jesper Christiansen started looking deeper into how development partners and capacity builders can help create lasting cultural change.
Read the next article, where Jesper Christiansen explains how he worked with just that in the UK, Colombia, Canada, Australia and in international institutions.