The NAV scandal: Lack of collective insight

The field of design has changed in recent years. The fact that we have now managed to free ourselves from the idea that design is only about creating an object like a chair, car, or magazine has opened up an entirely new design universe. Designers can now contribute to so much more: services, experiences, policy, or administration.

Our era's greatest design challenges are therefore within areas such as democracy, climate, and health. There is an incredible amount that we as designers can and must help solve going forward.

Systemic design clarifies connections

The complex challenge we face has put the design field of systemic design on the map. It contains several complementary methods that make it possible to work with complex challenges. One approach is to use "giga-mapping" – large system maps – where one visualises how different entities, relationships, and technologies interact. Such a map enables those involved to have conversations about complexity and to find solutions to the challenges it uncovers.

These deep conversations are long overdue. Recent "hype" with co-creation processes and workshops yields limited and superficial results when it comes to systemic challenges. The facilitator and problem owners are left with many good thoughts, suggestions, and intentions, but these prove difficult to act upon once back in everyday life.

In Norway, systemic design has surged in the last couple of years, especially within the public sector. Much of this is thanks to initiatives by the Ministry of Local Government and Modernization where design is central to simplifying and improving the public sector. A good example is StimuLab, which stimulates user-oriented experimentation and innovation.

Facilitation remains a key competence in handling complexity, but with the help of a system map, one creates the necessary basis for in-depth and exploratory conversations. Combined, this provides a backdrop for unraveling and understanding the overall challenge before proposing measures.

What can we learn from the NAV scandal?

Perhaps the most overwhelming aspect of the system perspective is that there isn't one single solution to the problem. A new innovation doesn't change the system. It requires a multitude of innovations, adjustments, and interventions to change a system. And this is what we as a society are currently facing.

Take the NAV scandal as an example. It's currently in a phase where there's a hunt for a single scapegoat. Is it a minister in the current government? Is it the NAV director? In other words, the opposite of coming together to collectively explore what went wrong, learn from it, and begin a joint journey to find solutions.

After the parliamentary hearing, Aftenposten wrote, "everyone took responsibility, no one took the blame." The fact is that our society and our institutions have become so complex that it is both difficult and not always so relevant to find a single scapegoat. If we as a society fail to handle the complexity we face and fall for the temptation to look for scapegoats, we lose the opportunity to learn and continuously make necessary changes at the system level.

One of the pioneers in system oriented design, Professor Birger Sevaldson at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), believes that we must acknowledge that systems, just like individuals, have intelligence and consciousness. This collective understanding has its own term: "hive mind." "Hive," referring to a beehive, means bees work closely together in a group as if they were one organism. It's the same with companies, ministries, organizations, nations, or other geographical entities; they can get stuck in uncritical conformity or possess collective intelligence.

Sevaldson believes that in the NAV scandal, we can speak of uncritical conformity. A flawed collective understanding that has imposed limitations at all levels. He also believes that when a system begins to see the outlines of an error, it is usually discovered in several places at roughly the same time. And then it takes a little while for the entire system to understand and accept.

Complexity topples societies

In Morgenbladet on November 6, 2019, Thomas Hylland Eriksen writes about Joseph Tainter's book "The Collapse of Complex Societies." He believes the book is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the challenges we face today. Tainter is a professor at Utah State University and through his studies of past civilizations, he has found that the reason they collapsed is that they failed to manage, and especially to finance, complexity. His most general finding is that collapse begins when the return on investments declines. There may be other factors – epidemics, invasions, and natural disasters – that are the immediate cause of collapse, but a society in an expansive growth phase will usually manage to recover from such events. Tainter draws parallels to where our society stands today and believes our inability to understand and discuss complexity is disturbing – and can contribute to societal collapse.

If we are to use the NAV scandal for something positive, it is to understand how many levels the system failed on. We must use what has happened for learning and conversations about how complex our administration has become over time. The government and parliament are keen to simplify and improve the public sector. If we are to succeed, we must understand and manage complexity. The nightmare scenario is that great effort is expended on individual measures. Let's give an example:

GPs now offer dialogue with their patients through the app "Pasientsky." Patients can book appointments, send messages directly to the GP, and renew prescriptions. This has proven to be a popular service for patients who can easily send questions directly to their doctor. The GP, for their part, has seen an increased workload on top of an already stressful everyday life. Some doctors report up to 80 messages they must answer after the workday ends. This is an example of a short-term efficiency gain that has created a better service for the patient but increased the workload and complexity for the doctor.

To improve and streamline the public sector, one must have a systemic view of development work. One must both zoom in on the patient's needs and zoom out to see the organization of the healthcare system.

Perhaps what one should ask is whether the influx GPs are exposed to is appropriate. Could it be that many who contact their GP actually need something else? Could it be that more people actually need a psychologist, which would reduce the pressure on GPs? Such things are discovered if one zooms out enough in a design process.

Systemic design is important for the public sector, which has increasingly opened its eyes to service design. A good designer zooms out and sees the entire system, the entire life, the entire planet, and then dives back into the system to see the individual user and their needs. Service development should always happen in context. The art is knowing when you have zoomed out enough. Systemic designers have methods for this. Therefore, an ethical responsibility rests on designers to ensure that they always zoom out enough, and thus help ensure that the right questions are asked.

We need new ways of working

How can we ensure that the system doesn't slip up again or that a "quick fix" simply creates new challenges? How can we ensure we don't get more NAV scandals? How can we handle the complexity we face?

We need entirely new conversations about the challenges we have. Ever since industrialism began, we have primarily organized the private and public sectors hierarchically. Our society and organizations are therefore characterized by silos. These silos and the lack of coordination between them make it difficult to address the challenges we face.

Systemic design is a method for building bridges between today's hierarchical silo organization and the system in which one operates. The insight that hierarchies cannot handle complexity also opens up questions about how we must organize our society and our organizations going forward.

Perhaps part of the answer can be found in Frederic Laloux's book "Reinventing Organizations." He observes a tendency for top leaders in both the private and public sectors to struggle with making the right decisions. Complexity requires coordination and a holistic understanding. This creates fear in leaders who feel that the basis for decisions is failing. Employees spend weeks preparing their leaders for important decisions, but the top leader's hectic agenda means they don't have time to delve into the work the employees have done. In addition, many important decisions are never made. Top leaders have become the bottlenecks of hierarchical organizations.

By using systemic design and good facilitators, it is possible to break this pattern. We can then use collective intelligence to solve our era's greatest challenges instead of hunting for scapegoats among top leaders. Perhaps the agenda in future leadership meetings will be replaced with system maps?

Fact sheet: Systemic design

Systems thinking is the science of connections. In systemic design, systems thinking is combined with design thinking.

Our mental capacity is limited, and visualizing complex systems and their connections helps to improve our ability to retain details, relationships, and find critical points.

Systemic design zooms out – and zooms in. The traditional view of a designer: "user-centricity" is complemented by "multi-centricity."

In an era of systemic crises, the user-centric approach alone is not capable of solving the challenges we face. Systemic design handles multiple agendas. Agendas can still be user-centric, but they can also be on behalf of the non-human, such as a city district, a natural area, or an organization.

At the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), a unique version of systemic design is being developed. It goes by the name of System-Oriented Design.

Halogen has its own studio for public administration design. The studio has assignments for ministries, public administration, and public organizations.

Read more about systems-oriented design