Course on exploratory ways of working for wicked problems

There are clear political decisions and concrete management signals that mean that the public sector needs to adapt to a changing society. The new guide to the instruction for official studies and reports (utredningsinstruksen) sets high expectations for how the public sector handles complexity, ensures participation, and adopts experimental methods. This work challenges established ways of working because solutions require coordination across established management lines, sectors, and levels of administration.

Halogen has extensive experience navigating this exact complexity. We have therefore developed a practical training programme that gives employees in ministries, directorates, and municipalities the tools they need to meet these new expectations. It is designed to be a starting point for practice development that is closely tied to the participants' existing day-to-day work.

The course has been delivered in collaboration with selected ministries and is designed to challenge accustomed approaches and framings, expanding the room for manoeuvre in cross-sectoral study and development work.

Purpose and learning objectives

The course equips leaders in the public sector to make sound decisions in the early phase of change processes by gaining a richer and more precise picture of:

• Involvement: Who should be involved, when, and how?

• Planning: What types of tasks should the changes be broken down into?

• Robustness: How can you ensure that plans withstand future changes?

The course introduces ways of working that fall outside the typical public sector "toolbox" and trains participants through practical application and group reflection.

New tools in the toolbox

Through half a day of theory and practical case work (workshop), participants learn to use new tools to:

Systematise the stakeholder landscape

Map who decides, who you depend on for implementation, who holds legitimacy, and, not least, who is affected by a decision.

Sort and build a shared understanding of problems

Work in ministries, municipalities, and directorates often involves highly complex issues, but what happens if we break down the challenges in new ways? In the workshop, we work on identifying what types of problems or opportunities your real-world cases actually consist of.

Through a sorting exercise, it becomes clear what can be solved with solid professional practice (the complicated) and what requires targeted exploration (the complex). Once we agree on "what kind of problem" we face, we can also choose the most effective strategy to solve it.

Strengthen participation to increase capacity for change

Participation is not only important because the law requires affected parties to be heard; it can also be crucial for understanding a problem correctly. Participation and collaboration are also prerequisites for successfully implementing what has been planned. By systematising the stakeholder landscape in a more nuanced way, we can challenge established models for who to invite in. We shift our focus from rigid routines to the actual journey of change.

Navigate possible futures

Describing future scenarios is an effective way to make uncertainties tangible, making it easier to discuss choices and potential consequences across disciplines, backgrounds, and administrative levels. In the course, participants will learn a concrete method for selecting relevant uncertainties and using them to build a set of comparable future scenarios that can lead to even more specific and productive discussions.

Low barrier to entry and close to day-to-day work

We establish a safe workshop environment where participants bring in their own practical cases from their daily work. This is not about large-scale experiments, but about testing concrete tools through simple, small-scale tests. With these tests as a shared starting point, we discuss and explore subject matter and methodology together.

This workshop provides space to trial ideas using simple means in a short time. The goal is to create an efficient and pleasant learning climate that equips the organisation to meet complex requirements with confidence and practical experience.

Are you curious about whether this workshop setup could be suitable for your organisation, programme, or project? Get in touch with Paul Chaffey for an informal chat.