Five ways public sector changemakers can solve wicked problems

Kafkaesque – a word used to describe confusing and maze-like bureaucracies that confound all those who dare enter. The term originates from Franz Kafka, a European novelist whose works often featured protagonists trying to navigate nightmarish bureaucracies.

#ProveKafkaWrong was the theme of 2024’s Creative Bureaucracy Festival, an annual event that seeks to bring together public sector changemakers and creative bureaucrats from around the world to discuss key topics in public sector innovation.

I was invited to cover the conference and moderate a session on the lessons that Asian digitalisation strategies can offer, building on GovInsider’s past efforts covering digital government innovation around the world and digital public infrastructure initiatives emerging from Asia.

This year’s Festival saw its English-speaking sessions covering a wide variety of themes, including digital modernisation strategies, protecting the rights of future generations, and eliminating bureaucracy. Here are five big ideas from this year's sessions.

Lessons from Asia’s digitalisation journeys

Speakers at a forum titled Germany’s Digital Administration: Which Lessons Can Be Learned from Asia? shared that robust legal foundations, encouraging ownership, and attracting talent were some of the key drivers of successful digitalisation initiatives in India, Singapore, and Taiwan. The forum was organised by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Foundation.

Speakers discussed how strategies such as Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative, India’s digital public infrastructure approach, and Taiwan’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) for judicial sentencing, could be templates for Germany’s digitalisation journey – a country otherwise known for its digital shyness.

“What I took away from the presentations is that there's not necessarily one recipe for success or a blueprint you can copy. Every nation has figured out their strengths, their approach to things, and how to apply that to a digital state,” shared DigitalService Germany’s Chief of Staff, Magdalena Zadara, during the panel.

The foundation has released a new report, titled Public Digitalisation Strategies: Case Studies from Singapore, India, and Taiwan, which explores how the three countries have attracted tech talent, created the legal infrastructure to support digital identity initiatives, and introduced AI tools within the judiciary.

Never waste a crisis

In a keynote speech on the main stage, Mikey Dickerson, who founded the United States Digital Service in 2014, shared how leaders can take advantage of crises to build new opportunities.

“The secret to making a change in a big, entrenched organisation that doesn't want to change is very simple: it's that most of the time you can't. It is not possible,” said Dickerson.

Despite that, he explained that there are windows of opportunities where “the rules are suspended, the resistance is less, and it is possible to change things in a significant and durable way” – in other words, during a crisis. These include moments where the organisation faces an existential threat, significant time pressure, or during an unexpected event.

Potential changemakers should look out for these Black Swan events if they wish to disrupt entrenched ways of doing things, he shared.

In 2014, President Obama tasked Dickerson with setting up the United States Digital Service after he helped save HealthCare.gov after its disastrous launch – a recovery effort that Dickerson’s team made the cover of Time Magazine for.

Build intergenerationally fair systems

Climate change, AI, ageing populations – these are long-term challenges all countries must deal with, but long-term strategies are often hamstrung by the short-term demands of electoral cycles.

Former Future Generations Commissioner of Wales, Sophie Howe, shared with attendees how Wales decided to protect the interests of future generations and set out a long-term vision for the country with the Future Generations Act, guided by seven well-being goals determined by a national conversation.

“[The Act] sets out the overarching principle that all of our public institutions, right down to our municipalities and everything in between, must demonstrate how they are meeting today's needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” she said.

During her time as Commissioner, her team was able to stop plans to build more motorways and roads by questioning whether those investments had taken the well-being goals into consideration. Today, efforts have gone into public transport and active travel initiatives instead, she shared.

This year, the United Nations will be releasing a UN Declaration for Future Generations and would be appointing a UN Special Envoy for Future Generations, building on the Welsh initiative.

Take a product approach

When developing services, government agencies should embrace an iterative, product approach to building policies, processes, and services and move away from following standard processes.

This was what Montenegro’s former Minister of Public Administration, Digital Society and Media, Tamara Srzentić, shared, speaking about the need to build user-centred services that improve the lives of regular people.

“People experience governments through delivery,” she said.

When 13,000 Ukrainian refugees entered Montenegro in 2022, her team worked closely across agencies to meet their emerging needs quickly, including improving connectivity by providing laptops and chargers. The country has also introduced an empathy challenge to train civil servants in user research and in improving service journeys.

“We need to move away from a process fetish and streamline procurements by funding services that support teams and products, not just outsourcing outcomes.”

Reduce bureaucracy to raise trust

“By eliminating bureaucracy, an unnecessary burden on people and businesses, it increases the trust in government,” said Hesham Amiri, who is an advisor at the United Arab Emirates’ IUAE) Prime Minister Office.

Leaders from the UAE spoke about how the country has initiated the Zero Government Bureaucracy (ZGB) programme to eliminate 2,000 unnecessary processes, reduce time spent by users to complete processes by more than 50 per cent, and remove all redundancies from service delivery.

In the past, foreign nationals who have children in the UAE had to get their documents attested by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a set of processes that would take up to 14 days. Thanks to a ZGB initiative, this has been simplified to one unified process that can be done online, shared the speakers.

The programme is being run as a “grassroots” movement, which encourages civil servants to identify problems using a #zerobureaucracy hashtag on an internal social media platform. There are monthly and annual awards of up to US$30,000 (S$40,000) to recognise the teams that have done the most to simplify government processes.

To watch the English language keynote presentations from this year's Creative Bureacracy Festival, click here.