Innovation in the public sector: spare tyres and fourth plinths

The article takes a design perspective on the issue of innovation in the public sector. It argues that innovations aimed at improving the efficiency of the public sector seriously risks making it dangerously fragile at a time when it needs to become more adaptable. Drawing on Donald Schön’s ideas on the role of government as a facilitator of learning, rather than as ‘experimentor for the nation’, the paper argues that more attention should be paid to resilience and redundancy as key principles for policy designers. Introduction The emphasis placed upon the need for the public sector to become more innovative has been a central argument of (so-called) ‘new public management’ (NPM) since the late 1980s. This has resulted in considerable redesign of public sector organizations and institutions and modes of policy delivery. Much of this has been influenced by the belief that, where public goods and services could be delivered through markets, they should be privatised in some form or other, and that what remains within the public sector could be redesigned so as to make them behave as if they were subject to (quasi) market forces and become more ‘business like’. The key design aims have been to ensure that the public sector should be so reformed as to make it more efficient, effective and economic, and give value for money to the taxpayer. In this paper I want to consider this belief in marketization, ‘3Es’ and VFM and other varieties of NPM as an approach which can fail to take account of a number of critical aspects of good design and may well produce a public sector that has been overdesigned for poor performance and increasingly unfit for purpose. Indeed, I want to argue that the emphasis on making the public sector more lean and mean – that is more efficient and better able to deliver value for money – seriously risks making the public sector dangerously fragile at a time when it needs to become more robust, resilient, adaptable and able to cope with rapid and cascading change and the stress of managing organizations working at full capacity. Following Herbert Simon’s definition in his Sciences of the Artificial, I take design to be an appropriate way of thinking about human beings as problem solvers. The natural sciences, he argued, are concerned with knowledge of ‘how things are’, whereas design is concerned with knowledge of ‘how things ought to be.’ When we study public policy we are engaged in the task of understanding human beings as they seek to design artifacts so as to attain goals and solve their problems. Hence, he argued: Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state. The proper study of mankind is said to be man..[but if] people are relatively simple [and] most of their complex behaviour may be drawn from their environment, from their search for good designs...then we can conclude that, in large part, the proper study of mankind is