The era of the cheese slicer is over

But they're not going away. We might change the wording from time to time, but the need for restructuring is still very much there.

As proof of this need, before the summer, we received our first parliamentary report on innovation in the public sector. 

"The government's goal is an efficient public sector that delivers good services to its citizens, has a high degree of public trust, and finds new solutions to societal challenges in cooperation with citizens, businesses, research communities, and civil society." 

That sounds great, doesn't it! But how will the public sector still be able to deliver these good services and find new solutions while handling the perpetual restructuring that's going ahead?

Well, one approach we believe is worth looking at is what is called New Synthesis (Bourgon 2011, 2017, 2019, 2020). New Synthesis is the result of an international research collaboration led by the Canadian researcher and public servant Jocelyne Bourgon. Countries such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, and Denmark are working together to develop the public sector. The goal is to balance traditional tasks with ever-increasing demands for restructuring. The framework's starting point is that one must think holistically every time something new is to be developed. At the same time, one must maintain the social contract with citizens to deliver all the services that make society function.

The time for regulation and cheese slicers is over

Bourgon's main point is that we will not find solutions to societal challenges such as societal exclusion, climate change, and the refugee crisis through legislation. That time is over. Nor will it help to pull out the proverbial cheese slicer and demand "more for less." The complexity of the challenges we face means that we must understand the bigger picture and draw upon the sum of society's and citizens' resources. In this way, we can create solutions that are well-anchored, sustainable, and robust.

The 1.5 ºC target is a hindrance

Bourgon emphasizes the need to define what one is trying to achieve. The goals we set must balance a sufficiently broad perspective with the possibility of achieving concrete results. A challenge, then, is that humans are naturally linear thinkers. It is difficult for us to see connections within and between different systems. We primarily see what is here and now. Bourgon provides an example:

The 1.5 ºC target of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has not yielded measurable results so far. 1.5 ºC is a goal that is difficult to relate to in terms of scale, scope, and time. It encourages CO2 cuts without a holistic perspective on what the challenge truly consists of. Thus, the goal gives us a false sense of security, Bourgon believes. It actually prevents us from taking the necessary steps, which are about how society is organized, rather than helping us make the right choices. To achieve the 1.5 ºC target, we simply need a whole new mindset. We must address what Bourgon refers to as the root causes.

Find the right leverage points

In 1997, researcher and author Donella Meadows published her theory of Leverage points. Meadows is best known for being a driving force behind the data for the book The Limits to Growth (1972), which she co-authored. During a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) meeting in the 90s, she discovered that a new system was being built up without established mechanisms to control it. This was the beginning of her thinking about the 12 points one must understand to ensure that a system develops in the right direction. Her conclusion, just as in New Synthesis, is that the greatest opportunities for change lie in our mindset. This stands in contrast to the politics we are surrounded by every day, where changes are primarily discussed in terms of percentages and numbers.

Society is perfectly designed for the results we see

The American professor and author W. Edwards Deming wrote in his book The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (1993) that "every system is perfectly designed to achieve the results it gets." Bourgon and Meadows think along the same lines; society is designed to give us exactly the results we witness today. If we want to achieve something different, the systems that make up society must be designed differently. Bourgon further believes that public authorities and governments are best suited to create the basis for these comprehensive, collective changes.

The New Synthesis framework embraces the more modern, co-creative and co-producing public sector, which finds solutions together with its constituents.

Old and new mindsets in beautiful union?

Let's take a look at the model that Bourgon & Co have created. The framework addresses traditional public tasks, such as the fundamental social contract between the public sector and citizens. The public sector is to deliver efficient services in return for taxes and fees. In addition, the New Synthesis framework incorporates the more modern, co-creative, and co-producing public sector, which finds solutions together with citizens.

The New Synthesis framework consists of four areas: Compliance (order and control), Performance (efficient services to citizens), Emergence (co-creation and co-production of services), and Resilience (building capacity and robustness in citizens and society to cope with change).

The first two areas, compliance and performance, represent tasks that all public leaders must handle. In parallel, these same leaders must also master what the framework refers to as emergence, i.e., co-creation and co-production. Co-creation means that the public sector invites businesses, academia, organizations, and citizens to come together to find solutions to challenges in society. Often, co-creation results in working together to develop the solutions, leading to co-production.

This is a demanding task for those who lead the public sector, but also for citizens. Therefore, the public sector must also facilitate a society where citizens have the capacity to participate, understand their role, and acknowledge the changes that the entire society must go through in the years to come. In other words, it is the public sector's responsibility to make citizens robust members of society who can cope with the coming changes.

Must the public sector control development?

As mentioned, Bourgon believes that the public sector is best suited to orchestrate such radical changes. But radical restructuring and innovation can happen in another way. In Finland, a partnership between business, organizations, academia, and administration is being tested in a foundation called the Smart & Clean Foundation. The goal is to establish a closed-loop system for plastic. The foundation is co-financed by the public and private sectors and consists of six cities, 14 companies, four universities and research institutions, in addition to ministries and policy instruments.

Here, it is the foundation that orchestrates all actors, not a public authority. In an article in the Academy of Management Review (2006), Charles Dhanarai of Kelley School of Business and Arvind Parkhe of Temple University highlighted the importance of a neutral orchestrator. They address the issue that an actor accustomed to being large and dominant can quickly undermine co-creation. The approach taken in Finland, by establishing Smart & Clean as a neutral orchestrator, mitigates the risk of this.

To the question of who should orchestrate collaboration in the future, the answer is likely that there is room for different models. The biggest challenge, as we see it, is leadership. Leading co-creative processes that are meant to lead to concrete results is demanding. That today's leaders, in both the private and public sectors, must lead and involve in new ways going forward, is confirmed in the Deloitte Global Millennial Survey 2020. The report reveals that millennials and Generation Z are very concerned about larger societal issues, and that the COVID-19 pandemic has strengthened their desire to help drive positive change in both local communities and around the world. They want businesses and governments to mirror the same commitment to society that they themselves have. In that case, changing with a cheese slicer won't work – then we need radical transformation and new synthesis.