Author: Maike

Categories
How do you do research? Visual working

Visual interviewing

Tijdens een workshop bij DUO over datavisualisatie.

I increasingly use diagrams, drawings and infographics when I interview someone. Since corona, I often interview digitally. At first I found this very inconvenient and impersonal, but I also discovered the benefits. Precisely because it is digital you can very easily draw together and organize information schematically.

In this blog some examples of how I approach visual interviewing and some tips for getting started yourself. I think it would be fun to organize a workshop or meet-up about this sometime, so I’d love to hear if there’s enthusiasm for that.

Drawing together

“I can’t draw at all” is the first sentence that rolls out of many people when I introduce this method. That changes when we get down to business and the interviewee loosens up and finds it easier and easier to tell and participate. And at the end, “now it’s much clearer for myself, too.”

I call it visual interviewing, drawing together, schematic conversation, picture talking… Think of a nice name. It means that as we talk, we directly visualize how things fit together. This can be done, for example, by making a mind map together, a timeline or some other useful arrangement. During the conversation, you put all the information directly in the right place, which helps both of you get to the point and immediately see if the story is complete.

And yes, you may also just use text while drawing.

A few examples

Janet Ramesar and I created a timeline together. That one went back ten years to the present. On the timeline, we posted her experiences with child care subsidies. You could see it getting more and more complicated over time. By lining it up like that, you saw cause and effect very clearly. It gave us a foothold to broadly capture the story in a short period of time. We created the entire timeline in a 1-hour zoom session. Janet told, I shared my screen and posted what she told directly on the timeline. If I misplaced it, she corrected me: ‘no, that should be first. That one should be more to the right’. It gave us both something to hold on to.

A snippet from the timeline Janet and I created together about her experiences with the child care subsidy.

I later used the timeline format myself when I charted a month out of my relationship with the government. And I applied it in a project for Werk aan Uitvoering where, together with Maureen Hermeling, I interviewed someone from Loket Geldzaken of the Municipality of The Hague (on my blog I called him Puzzler Patrick). The three of us thus mapped out complex case histories involving debt.

A snippet from the timeline of Puzzler Patrick and Mr. N.

At the Ombudsman, during a series of interviews with colleagues, I used not a timeline but a drawing of the organization. The key question was “how should we organize our own activities to have a greater impact on the government?” In each interview, we drew together a new picture of our ideal organization. While making that drawing, I kept asking why-questions. What I learned from those conversations I described in the blog about a professional listening standard. This is the basic drawing I used as a start for the conversations (i.e., before everyone started shuffling around with it and making a new drawing):

At the beginning of the corona crisis, I got to work for a while with the team that made the corona apps at the Ministry of Health. From Jasper, my husband I had just received an Ipad at that time. I took it along on my visits to the local health organizations (GGD) and outlined with the staff the source and contact tracing and the bottlenecks they experienced. For example, we made these kinds of sketches:

Last example, also with the Ombudsman. In a short brainstorm about signals and complaints as input for research topics, we drew them so you could immediately see the extent of the signals and the overlap with the rest of the topics. This was a first sketch that we could develop later.

Why it works

Drawing together just works nicely. Even in on-site conversations, it’s easy to grab a flipchart: “Shall I draw it out?” and the confusion of speech disappears like snow in the sun.

Digitally, it can be done just as easily. You share your screen, you draw how you envision it, and the other person can immediately respond, “no, you have it all wrong, it should be just like this.”

Creating together means organizing and structuring the story together. It is immediately tangible. You can see it before you. You catch the words in focus before they slip away.

The input is the output. You have the basis for the result and documentation ready immediately after the interview. After talking with Janet, I only needed an extra hour or so myself to make everything neat and write out the keywords. After a check from her, it was finished.

Talking digitally is much less impersonal this way. You are working together. You don’t necessarily have to see each other at all, because you share your story equally and are creative together. That activates even though you are both sitting behind a remote screen. And as an added bonus, you won’t have to type out another stack of post-its or flip charts after the event.

This is what you need

  • a digital drawing tool. I use Miro, but you can also, for example, connect your Ipad to your laptop, draw along and share your screen. Or use another digital tool, there are plenty of them.
  • a basic architecture. Think about how you will set it up in advance. Are you creating a timeline? A schematic of the organization? A mind map of questions and answers? Or something else? In Miro, you have handy ready-made templates that you can use.
  • Skills to sketch visualization. It doesn’t have to be perfect right away. Thinking out loud “hmm how shall I portray this” is fine. The other person then also helps, and you give the other person a chance to make together. In a master class taught by Stefanie Posavec (known for Dear Data), I learned the basic techniques for working visually. I wrote this blog about it and later gave this workshop about it at DUO.
  • program to video call and share your screen

For advanced visual interviewers:

  • also give the other person editing rights in your program. Then take time for a brief intro and explain how the drawing program works. I set aside at least 10 minutes for this and do some practice together. Sometimes it is difficult and it might work easier if I draw and ask questions myself. The other person then thinks with me and gives me drawing instructions. That’s why I call it visual interviewing, because you help the other person tell their story in pictures or diagrams.

Getting Started

Enthusiastic to also draw together with your colleagues or the person you are interviewing? I hope this is of some use to you. It is fun to see how you tackle it, so please share your results with me (and others!) too.

Categories
How do you do research? Not part of a category Visual working

How we can see an automated decision

With increasing talk of algorithm supervision, it is important to know how a third-party study of algorithms can be conducted in government. Preferably in such a way that day-to-day implementation processes are not disrupted but according to the principle that government shows itself.

Since January, I have been working with a very nice group to design a work method for this. We focus mainly on the fixed, ‘dumb’ algorithms and not yet on self-learning algorithms. In this blog, a behind-the-scenes look at our approach, initial observations and two questions for you.

I can just see it

When I had just finished the study The compassionate civil servant, I was sitting with Marlies van Eck on a terrace in Utrecht toasting. She mentioned that she had a follow-up idea to her dissertation (on legal protection in automated chain decisions). Her main conclusion was that, as a lawyer, she could not say whether citizens were sufficiently protected because she could not see the algorithms. The government was a black box, so how can you test whether the decisions it makes are right?

Over my beer I said “but, how weird, because at the Executive Agency of Education, where I worked, I can just see them’. Of course, I immediately began to doubt myself when I said that, but I looked up the photo interview of Cees-Jan talking about decision rules from which the code is then derived. And I mentioned that we were also working to derive the calculation tools on duo.nl from these decision rules so that, as a student, you can simulate how the computer will decide in the future how to pay off your student debt.

Opening and viewing

I am reminded of our conversation frequently because “being able to see the algorithm” is central to this research.

Marleen Stikker writes in her book The Internet is Broken that you only really own something when you can open it up to fix or change it. If you can’t, as with most contemporary technology, the device owns you. Can we open up government’s computers and see how they decide and possibly change that if necessary?

This area is still relatively unknown. The Dutch Tax Service has developed a method for making algorithms testable and explainable. The State Audit Office and accounting firms are preparing for this new task. The General Audit Office has developed a review framework. Recently, the State Council issued a report on automated law enforcement, among other things.

But what is suitable for a financial expert may not work for a researcher who wants to do a legal check. It is also tedious for an implementing organization when different disciplines and organizations consider the use of algorithms at different times and burden the implementation with questions. Both for researchers, and for implementing organizations, a more integrated approach is important.

Say no more. So with a group that I spontaneously get imposter syndrome from, we started in January to experimentally design a method for this. The group: Marlies van Eck, Steven Gort, Abram Klop, Robert van Doesburg, Mariette Lokin, Carlijn Oldeman, Giulia Bössenecker and me. Colleagues from the Executive Agency of Education and the Social Secutiry Bank are cooperating and offering us their automated decisions as trial material to design the method on.

What we want to achieve

Allright. We want to develop a working method for conducting third-party research on a government organization’s use of algorithms. To this end, we have formulated a thought scheme:

  • We study how the use of algorithms can be examined simultaneously legally, financially and model-wise[topic].
  • because we want to know which discipline would like to see which research questions answered[rationale].
  • so that we understand the least burdensome approach to a multidisciplinary and comprehensive assessment[significance].

To keep the research sufficiently concrete but also manageable, we propose that the working method should meet the following four objectives:

  • the working method allows a lawyer to make a judgment on the legality and propriety of the system,
  • the working method allows a data scientist/ information scientist to make a judgment about the quality of the system,
  • the working method enables an accountant or internal controller to make a judgment about …[to be completed, see also help question at the end of this blog],
  • the working method is suitable for repeated use in various public organizations.

Designing the method

In a series of on-site making days, we will work with a government organization. Lucky for me: the first 2 making days are at the Executive Agency of Education in Groningen where I live.

To arrive at a working method that can stand on its own within a few months, we take an embedded and iterative approach. But we must remember to design ourselves out of the method as well, and thus critically examine our bias. We learn by doing: we dive into an algorithm and record our process. Then we reflect on our process and make it explicit. What comes out of this is potentially the method we want to develop.

This is how we shape the creation process:

Outline of the design process divided into the 4 making days and intermediate actions

Together with the Executive Agency of Education, we chose a few automated decisions that are part of the big decision whether or not a student will receive a student loan: the nationality test, the age test and the partner test. Beforehand, we were given the sets of decision rules of these three tests to study firmly.

We decided to look from three perspectives or levels of abstraction. Different questions are important for each perspective.

Perspective 1 is the algorithm itself. How does the decision come about?

  • What are the decision rules dealing with the nationality test?
  • What sections of the law are the decision rules based on?
  • How are the decision rules programmed?
  • How are they included in the work instruction?
  • What data is needed and what are sources?
  • How is the decision explained to the student (user) in personal and general communication?
  • What interaction does a student (user) have with the algorithm and how does this influence the decision?

Perspective 2 is the creators of the algorithm. How does the algorithm come about?

  • Who (what roles and also individuals) are involved in the creation of the algorithm?
  • What considerations were made in the creation of the decision rules?
  • On what basis do these individuals make these trade-offs? What personal bias is there?
  • Is there documentation of this creation, and if so, what is recorded here and for what purpose?
  • What is implicit and difficult to make explicit here? In other words, what do we not know (yet) or cannot know (anymore)? How does this come about?

Perspective 3 is ourselves, the supervisors so to speak. How does the method come about?

  • How did we proceed? What questions did we ask? What worked well and what didn’t?
  • Which questions belong to which discipline (lawyer, accountant and information scientist)? Is there any overlap? Were all disciplines able to get their answers? How do they reinforce each other?
  • What knowledge and expertise do we have that allows us to ask these questions?
  • Can we reproduce our process next time? What would be different?

‘How crazy it is here’

The first day of making was wonderfully chaotic. We were flying in all directions, asking all kinds of questions, and Jean and Cees-Jan from the Executive Agency of Education were infinitely patient to answer all questions. Sometimes we ended up in heated discussion about the way the organization was organized, only to conclude after an hour that that shouldn’t matter at all for the method. Or as Steven so aptly noted, “I couldn’t care less how it is put together.” :’)

After this day of making, Marlies wrote a first blog with her observations and I made a video for the scientific guidance committee and the sounding board group.

Video (in Dutch) showing the experience of the first day of making at the Executive Agency of Education.

The second day of making went a lot more structured. In preparation, I visualized on a digital board all the steps from law to decision. I asked Cees-Jan if he could fill in everything from another decision (the partner test). This was not so simple because the information and docs had to come from all sorts of nooks and crannies of the organization.

I printed what I got (or left a step open) and put the steps on the floor. Underneath I put 3 long sheets of paper for the questions the lawyer, accountant or developer could ask. Perspective 1 and 3 are below each other. We took all afternoon to fill them out and see if we could get answers directly from Cees-Jan and colleagues (perspective 2).

An impression of what that looked like:

In two weeks we will have make day 3 at the Social Security Bank. That will be uncharted territory for me, fun! We are going to look at the age and partner test in the state pension.

In preparation, I digitized the large board we made on the ground at the Executive Agency of Education. It became a version with questions and a blank version for the Social Security Bank colleagues to fill in themselves. We are going to test this prototype and see if this is already a tool for self-assessment to show as an organization how your algorithm comes about and makes a decision.

Through this miro board, you can better zoom in on the prototype. You can also post comments here, and feedback is welcome!

Prototype of the working method we will soon test with the Social Security Bank

Two questions

You can see that the accountant’s perspective has no questions yet. Here we are still searching. Auditors are very busy around February and March because of wrapping up the previous year. So we haven’t been able to include much input from that side. Do you know more about this or know someone who can help, let me know.

And of course: feedback in general. In this blog, I describe our making process and show the prototype. I’m curious what you think of this and how it would work in your organization. After design day 3, we would like to update our prototype and share it with organizations to use without us for self-assessment. So we want to learn from your findings in turn.

If you would like to help with this, please send me a message. You can do so through maike @ klipklaar.nl or the other known ways. Thanks!

Categories
(Un)understood citizens A compassionate future Not part of a category

Three lessons I learned at the National Ombudsman’s office

Samen met een deel van team Gaswinning van de Nationale ombudsman op bezoek in Groningen. Fotograaf Hans Roggen.

My last week at the National Ombudsman’s office is entering. A year ago, I started asking all kinds of new questions that I wanted to learn. The main one: what do you see when you look for a while not through the blinders of government but really from the perspective of the citizen? In this blog, three lessons I learned last year.

Blinkers off means seeing more

When you work in government, you unintentionally have blinders on. This is not on purpose; it happens automatically. It is incredibly difficult not to have the frameworks and agreements you know so well as a civil servant in the back of your mind when you hear other people’s stories.

When you take off the blinders, the starting point is not the regulation or its implementation, but the question: what kind of society do we want to be? What kind of perspective do citizens want? In what context does their life take place? And only then: what place does government have in that story, including my little piece of service provision?

One of my questions a year ago was: how do your experiences with government affect the life you lead and the confidence you have in your future? What causes trust to be lost and how can government restore trust?

Among other things, I dove into the world of gas extraction: cracks in walls, a debate about what is safe and a lack of perspective and trust in institutions. I sat with Groningers in the garden telling their stories, got in the car with people giving a tour of their village and joined courses for case workers and social workers in the earthquake area.

Together with the National Ombudsman on a working visit to ‘t Zandt. Photo by Hans Roggen.

It was usually not about specific procedures, sometimes it was, but more often it was about confidence in the future. About children growing up without feeling comfortable at home. About not knowing whether you should remodel your house now, or not. About falling behind on maintenance, maybe wanting to move, but can you still get rid of the house? Your life put on hold by a sluggish government. Communities facing not only the effects of gas production, but also shrinkage, an aging population, social problems and high energy prices. But certainly not all doom and gloom either, life goes on. Babies are born, people get new jobs or relationships, dedicate themselves to the neighborhood and meanwhile we live, yes, I live there too, on one of the most beautiful pieces in the sprawling Netherlands.

When you’re making public services, it’s super hard be guided by that whole context. But I found it liberating to take off the blinders and listen to stories freely. Without blinders, my gaze was more open and I saw more.

I dare not say I now have a ready-made answer on how to restore trust. But I saw how to get rid of it, though.

When I was in Valkenburg in March one of the residents left homeless by the floods said: “Maybe naive, but during the floods Rutte, the King, Grapperhaus came here, and ‘the government jumped into the breach,’ they promised. I believed it and thought ‘we’ll deal with it.’ But now there is fuss about who pays the bill and whether the water damage is due to horizontal or vertical water. Meanwhile, no contractor wants to work here yet.”

That’s how you lose confidence.

Camille points toward The Geul that flooded last year. His house is still uninhabitable and there doesn’t seem to be any progress in changing that anytime soon.

By going there, you hear the real stories. You see the consequences of a decision that leads to new problems you had not anticipated. You learn this in practice and not at your desk. Listening without blinders means questioning your own assumptions. Not always determining the research question in advance, but going in that direction with an open mind.

I practiced it once at DUO. I asked students to write cards that they thought we should know. Back to the office with those post cards, I got an uneasy feeling. What was I supposed to do with it now? Most of it was about stuff that was out of our hands. Which brings me to my second lesson.

From the citizen’s perspective, government is hassle and chaos

At DUO I was part of the system, at the National Ombudsman I was on the sidelines. You immediately have a better overview because you can survey the entire field at a glance. You also immediately see what a tangle of players and rules it is. So whether you really have a good overview, again, I don’t want to say.

Government is fragmented and cut up into all sorts of loose chunks. Each piece has a defined task or assignment. Within those organizations, all sorts of things have also been cut up and delineated. From an organizational perspective, I understand that, because you have to create structures somewhere and break up big jobs so that the work becomes manageable at the level of teams and employees.

But the citizen’s context is then increasingly difficult to fit in, though. Cash flows including organizations’ own funding run along those cut lines and with them, accountability for the success or failure of the mission. That rich context of the living world of citizens gets lost. Because who can take responsibility for that? Or should I say dare?

The Groninger Gasberaad made this overview of all agencies involved in the consequences of gas extraction in 2020. It has since changed.

Last year, I spoke to representatives of different levels of government. With employees of various implementing agencies working together in chains, with administrators and also with a few ministers. Super fun to hear so many different perspectives, but also sad to see how much speech confusion there is between them. And how much distrust there is between the organizations.

For example, between local governments and the state. Difficult problems are passed back and forth like hot potatoes. That is not a sustainable way of working together. How to do that when major social changes call for a collaborative approach? As with the energy transition where citizens are in big trouble with their energy bills and cannot keep up in the energy transition. Or to give perspective to the generation growing up in debt, with no chance of good housing and steady work? When the climate damage will soon really erupt and be physically felt by most people?

Then we need a government that works well together, listens well and is open to feedback from citizens and each other.

I am really shocked by this.

The government is arguing with itself and you are still living in your garage. A resident from Meerssen tells how he got into a jam with the Wts (Damage Compensation Act) after the floods last year.

I didn’t realize it much myself as a government employee. I told a friend of mine who works at the municipality in Groningen the other day. She said once that she could tell from my blogs that I worked at the National level of government. Her response: ‘Gosh, you sure are late to the party’. She and her colleagues had long since figured that out. So that was my blind spot!

I’d rather not be on the sidelines

This lesson I learned about myself. I wanted to take the blinders off and learn more about the citizen’s perspective, but then I lacked insight into the dilemmas of government itself. After making recommendations from research, I wanted to get started. But then again, that wasn’t my job this time. That is not what the Ombudsman is about; that is what the government itself is about. Rightfully so, but too bad for me.

I want to work on those “wicked problems” myself. Wicked problems are problems that are networked, whose context is constantly changing and that involve a variety of competing interests. We can only address these if we start both from the citizen’s perspective and then work from a strong public partnership. We need both.

Screenshot from a presentation on The Energy Bill. This is the story of Ellen who contacted us. I photographed her at home and highlighted in her story what “her energy transition” looks like.

In recent weeks, for example, I worked with colleagues on a story about the citizen perspective in the energy transition (not yet online). For a workable narrative, that includes the story of the government and not just the citizen. After all, it’s about the interaction between the two.

It’s about how to design schemes from broad societal questions and feedback, make them fit together, how to align policies accordingly, and thus design cyclically with citizens. Basically how we design government together.

I like that the most anyway.

Categories
(Un)understood citizens How do you do research? Visual working

The cash flow maze

Tijdens de overstroming vorig jaar is in Valkenburg een kade ingestort en nu tijdelijk gerepareerd door het Waterschap. Het pand rechts staat leeg, de gevel hangt nog altijd gevaarlijk naar beneden.

Almost a year after the floods in Limburg-South, how is the damage compensation going? Have people already returned to their homes and “is everything back to normal”? Or not? In early March, I went with a colleague for three days to Valkenburg aan de Geul, Gulpen-Wittem and Meerssen to see for myself the aftermath of the floods. I took my camera with me.

In this blog, you can read about how we approached this visit, about my musings on these types of events in the future and what effect they have on citizens’ relationship with government.

The trigger

In January, Reinier van Zutphen, the National Ombudsman together with Jan, a colleague, paid a regional visit in Limburg as they often do. Among others, Reinier spoke with the mayor of Valkenburg, Daan Prevoo. He told him that with that aftermath, things did not go well at all. The following week, Jan asked if I wanted to go with him to Limburg on short notice for a bit longer to see exactly what was going on. I went along because I did research on the effects of gas extraction last year and we saw some overlap at first glance.

From Monday to Wednesday, we were guests of the three municipalities most affected during last year’s floods: Valkenburg aan de Geul, Gulpen-Wittem and Meerssen. Staff who are working a lot with the aftermath of the floods had created a program for us.

But first: what happened last year?

During the week of July 14, it rained tremendously in Belgium and Germany. This led to floods that then flowed into South Limburg. I found this clip from the youth news that shows well what residents had to deal with:

On July 16, after a crisis council, the cabinet formally declared the flood in South Limburg a national disaster. On BNR that day: “This means that the cabinet will put into effect the Damage Compensation Act. That way, victims will quickly get clarity on whether their damage will be compensated by the government, if their insurance does not cover it.”

But so it’s not going well. We went out for three days with employees of the three Limburg municipalities to get a picture of this ourselves.

Beforehand, Jan and I looked for all kinds of things. I visualized this on a timeline. Approximately what has happened and what bottlenecks do we already see based on what we find online?

Timeline with initial assumptions of the problems – click for larger

We used this timeline as a conversation starter on Monday. Our questions in this regard were:

  • Who are the key parties in the aftermath and how do they relate to each other? How do the most affected areas differ?
  • What are causes and effects that have happened in recent months? Are there chain reactions?
  • What are money flows and who has access to what?
  • What bottlenecks are there and do they have relationships with each other?
  • What do residents and business owners notice about this? How do consequences impact them and those around them?

On large flip charts we mapped out the answers. By the end of the afternoon, my head was full of all the money flows and dead ends in the arrangements. How do we make sense of this?

Real stories from real people

The following days we visited residents and business owners. I had my camera with me to immediately capture what we encountered.

For example, with a man my age in Valkenburg who will probably be living in a cottage with his girlfriend and baby until next year. He is caught between the insurer and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), no one wants to get burned on the likely problems with his foundation. He is now receiving an allowance from a private fund to find out what the problem is so that things can move forward again.

Man points to the Geul behind his house and explains how in 7 minutes the water forcefully rushed into the house and ripped out the facade.

At a couple in Gulpen-Wittem who are still doing a lot of work in their home. After last June’s rising water, they again placed sandbags at the doors, the now sweetly babbling brook is flowing directly behind their home. They would like organizations to help them how to proactively protect their homes from future high water but there are no arrangements for that. They are for damage afterwards though.

Husband leans against the garden table as he talks about the interventions he wants to do around the house. The sandbags are still up against the house.

A gentleman in Meerssen who still lives in the garage because the house has not yet been renovated. He is left with a gap between damages and compensation of 80,000 euros that he has nowhere to invoice.

Man shows how he is temporarily living in the garage because the house is not yet habitable again after the floods last year.

All indicated that they had different expectations, perhaps naively, when it was said last year that the floods were a disaster and that the government was going to help them. A year later, that turns out not to be so simple.

How do we move forward?

I see two routes in front of me.

In the short term, I think we need to make the maze understandable. The maze of money flows and schemes that are there for residents and business owners but have dead ends where citizens get stuck. The stories we encountered are examples of this, these people are at the end of such a dead end and cannot go on.

How can the government design such a maze? Probably with good intentions, I know few rogues in government. But still: the government promises something, which is positive, only to design squishy bureaucracy. Why are we doing this? And how come it turned out this way? What can the National Ombudsman do in this regard?

Street in Meerssen where there is still a lot of tinkering and bulky trash and building materials on the street.

In the long run, I think it would be interesting to delve into future events related to this kind of climate conflicts. The people we spoke to, both resident and mayor, are all concerned with the next time this will happen. Because there is no question in their minds that this is not an incident. Something needs to be done in the Geul Valley.

Who is in charge? In part, if still possible, to prevent such major floods from happening again, to warn when they happen and to deal with the consequences quickly and appropriately?

In the hedge along the Geul, you can still see the washed-up grass hanging which was carried away with the flood last year.

Last year, I read many books about climate change and what lies ahead. What should citizens expect from government in this type of climate conflict? And what does this mean for how government designs itself?

This is still a new area for me. So I would love to hear who I can talk to further about that and what to read or listen to about it. Let me know.

Categories
Not part of a category The compassionate civil servant

How to reflect

Maike kreeg veel hulp van collega's: fotografie, eindredactie en meedenken. En soms bij het verfraaien van een portret.

The Department of Civil Service Professionalism at the Ministry of Interior asked if I could list some of my designs from my research on The Compassionate Civil Servant that could help other civil servants reflect. I love doing that, so why not for you too?

The Compassionate Civil Servant is a self-examination at the Executive Agency of Education (DUO) into what role empathy for citizens plays in our relay from law to counter. I asked my colleagues if I could photograph them as compassionate civil servants. This produced frank conversations. My colleague looked at himself through my camera. And together we looked at all the portraits and what we learned from them. Are we happy with what we see in the mirror? Or do we want it to be different, and how?

The photo interview is not the only reflective experiment I designed. In this blog, a list of other examples, what they are based on (so everyone can get started themselves) and who I was inspired by.

You can read why reflecting is important in my essays on The Compassionate Civil Servant. Or watch in this short film about the study.

Methods and experiments I designed

Starting from a central question, I designed experiments to explore sub-questions with participants. This big question was: how can digital government have an understanding connection with citizens.

This method of inquiry is called design research. On this blog, I kept track of the approach and progress. I wrote out all the experiments and findings, and I shared the material so that another organization could easily use it as well. All blogs about the creation of the research are in the archives.

In my designs, reflection plays a major role. I divide the experiments to reflect roughly into 4 categories.

  • Relating to the other person. For example, in the rope conversations between students and officials. Or the experiment Stories for Civil Servants in which I played legal texts over a student’s personal story and had colleagues respond to them. Or the role-play the drama triangle I did with a class of students and a few colleagues.
  • Listening to how the other person relates to you. For example, working with students and giving them the lead on how they want to explore their relationship with DUO. Or when I myself confronted passersby at the market in Rotterdam. I collected cards from students for colleagues.
  • Relating to yourself. That happened in the photo interview, of course. And also in the experiment A Timeline where colleagues reflected on when they could or could not be a compassionate civil servant. I later did this timeline regularly with a group of officials, and it always leads to great conversations.
  • Relating yourself to the whole. After each blog I wrote about a compassionate civil servant, colleagues joined the conversation. On the government portal, in the elevator, at the coffee corner. From all the photos together, I made an exhibition. I also organized many semi-public meetings where anyone could exchange stories, often including students. Compassionate civil servant Gabe told (in Dutch) how he experienced all these conversations a year after his photo interview (for my exam :)).

Gabe: “making the implicit explicit.

My inspiration and influences from the work of others

You will find all sources and influences from the study neatly listed. I highlight a few.

Donald Schon’s 1991 book Reflective practitioner, how professionals think in action is the Bible, a tough one admittedly, but the Bible nonetheless. For me, by the way, this blog where I think out loud and can engage in conversation with fellow officials is a way to reflect-in-action as this book describes.

The book Moral Leadership by Alex Brenninkmeijer. Organizations, leaders but also every individual, no matter how small your part in the whole, everyone can and should show moral leadership. In his argument, he falls back on the ingredients from Aristotle’s art of reasoning: logos, pathos and ethos. I wrote about it in the essay ‘Room for our own humanity’.

On the Hidden Design website you will find the strategy and steps I took to set up my design research. The strategy circles and the ways I set up and analyzed an experiment. By the way, they also offer master classes to master this way of design.

I used Jet Gispen’ s Ethics for Designers toolkit to work with colleagues to dissect some of DUO’s service delivery products and reflect on our role.

Joost and Britt during the review of my exhibit at the Willem de Koning Academy.

The work of my classmates Joost van Wijmen and Britt Hoogenboom is intertwined with The Compassionate Civil Servant. Joost uses confrontation and experience in Encounter, his research of the altered body. He makes you feel things and helps you use your body in the process. The timeline I had officials create is a copy paste of his timeline he has seniors create about their changing bodies. Britt explored how she could use images to help people understand each other better. She uses awareness, delay, empathy and connection in her designs. Ideal ingredients for a good reflection. She designed the photo exhibit for me so that it entices officials to do a good deal of their own reflection when visiting. I also met with them every other week on Tuesday nights at a pub to discuss each other’s research. That critical reflection together also helps 🙂

And Astrid Poot. I did not yet know her when I made The Compassionate Civil Servant; she started her research on ethics when I had just finished. But I love how cool she does that. Follow her progress and findings, as she is far from finished. (I was also allowed into her podcast earlier this year where we had a cool conversation about both of our research, fine listening tip – if I may say so myself).

Is reflection allowed to have consequences?

While researching The Compassionate Civil Servant, I stayed with reflection itself, the methods I designed to do so, and what I learned from this first set of reflections. All the spin-offs that arose in the organization (and beyond) were not really under my control. I let that go fairly early on; I was fine with it rising above me, gladly so.

But I sometimes found it difficult, that I can’t really explain well what The Compassionate Civil Servant changed in organizations. How do you measure this? Sometimes I hear snippets of choices made in other organizations because they were inspired by, or read something on this blog.

With her research, Astrid is also designing a language to talk about reflection and what changes it leads to. This in turn gives me guidance to better examine and place the fragments I catch. For example, Astrid uses this ladder in her ethics research. Reflection I would put in the first or second bullet.

Reflecting is the beginning. When you start this, anything can happen. That’s exciting, and super. There should be room for this. You can take that space yourself, and if enough people start doing that, things will change.

For example Jean, the analyst in the photo series sighed in his photo interview that he couldn’t do much with empathy as a public servant. After this experience, he set out to shape his analyses from the perspective of the citizen and not just the organization. He wrote a memo to the board on how to give citizens’ doing abilities a concrete role in policy. He was later invited to talk about this at the Academy of Law.

Jean began interested. He helped with the research from the beginning, first in the background later actively participating. He began to change his own approach and set to work to create a new standard so that his analyses properly include the citizen perspective from the beginning.

Of all my colleagues who participated, I can tell that kind of story. Whether they participated in the photo interview and were in full glory on my blog, or in another experiment, or even when they were readers, such a collective reflection does something to you. And it should!

My goal was to initiate a government-wide reflection on our relationship with citizens. And what impact each individual official has on this, wherever you sit in the relay from law to counter.

Whenever I got stuck for a while, I would watch this video.

Can you also do “a compassionate civil servant” with us?

I have been toying with the idea of creating a toolkit of all the experiments. After all, they are all already on this blog, most of them even with instructions and downloads. But reflecting is not plug and play. A tool here, a conversation there. In doing so, I make it too flat, and shortchange my own research.

Reflecting on the relationship between citizen and government, on your role as a civil servant in it, that is something that needs to be done continuously and facilitated. It is a culture change. You can’t do that with just one fun workshop. So as far as I’m concerned, don’t pick one nice experiment from the list, no, pick them all. Because together they have an effect.

Or better yet, design ways to reflect with each other yourself and involve your colleagues. Invite your target audience to that as well. Ha, then it’s about something!

I concluded my essays on the research with three words: open, fair and inclusive. That, as far as I am concerned, is the core of the reflection that needs to be initiated in government. Openess, fairness and inclusive to/ with citizens.

Categories
(Un)understood citizens Not part of a category The consequences of gas extraction

Participation on steroids

De foto bovenaan deze blog maakte de dochter van Nicole van Eijkern op de ochtend van de bewonersavond. Het is het laatste deel van hun oude huis dat gesloopt is.

Wednesday evening, 8 p.m. A residents’ evening at Village Hall de Pompel in Overschild. I parked my car on Meerweg among the construction materials because there is a lot of reinforcing going on in Overschild.

It was the farewell week of Susan Top, secretary of the Groninger Gasberaad. During the day, she walked from village to village with prominent figures involved in the gas extraction issue. On this Wednesday evening, she recounted the state of affairs for those who wanted to hear. There was a small group. The die-hards, she called them, they had not yet dropped out.

This week she was interviewed by the NRC. A snippet from this:

“A lot of people think the problems are solved. The gas tap closes, a blow of money goes towards Growingen, done.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Some of the homes are still unsafe. “There you can only fill a cup of coffee halfway because otherwise it will overflow, that’s how crooked the houses are.” Moreover, the seriousness of the bureaucracy in Groningen remains underexposed, while as a result more and more Groningers are dropping out, Top observes. “Many victims have become totally numb, because they have had to make choices for years, the consequences of which they cannot oversee.”

Reports full of errors about their homes, which they have to correct themselves. Government letters suddenly reconsidering promises made. Envelopes with six leaflets inside that you have to do something with. “The responsibility lies entirely with the public, while these people did not ask for the earth quakes. It was done to them,” Top said. “But the government lets them swim first, then drown. They just let them down. I really find that unimaginable.”

She sighs. It is not just the fault of one minister or of NAM, she says. There are flaws in the system made in recent years.

From: NRC, Sept. 27, 2021. These people did not ask for the tremors. It was done to them, Mark Middel.

Weaknesses and incomprehensible patterns

In my previous job, at the Executive Agency of Education, I also investigated flaws in the system. I called them dark patterns.

I learned that in government, we can only design the system world with the wisdom of the citizen. Only by first looking at the living world of citizens can you devise a good system world. If you don’t, things will go wrong. All the best intentions notwithstanding, government then goes into overdrive and bureaucracy grows like algae in a summer canal.

That effect reinforces itself. The less you know citizens, the less you talk to them, and the less you know them again. I explored this earlier in the child care benefit scandal. There Janet Ramesar called on the government not to reduce her and so many others to victims, but rather to ask her to help and invite her as an expert. After all, she knew better than anyone else what was wrong.

What is participation?

Since working at the National Ombudsman, I am learning a lot about participation and voice. It strikes me that much of the literature is about participation in the public domain and especially in your community. For example, in your neighborhood, at a solar farm to be built or the station neighborhood that is going upside down. There are participation guides, ladders, and manuals for professionals on how to organize this.

In addition to this public-space participation, you have two more levels of participation, I think. And in Groningen, those are upside down.

LevelsWho should open the door?
Your own life, your own homeYourself
Your environment, the public spaceYou meet in the middle, the government organizes
The system of governmentThe government

You have the individual level, of your own life and your own home. Here you are the boss. In the earthquake area, the government knocks on your door and you “must” participate in your own reinforcement operation. Your home is not safe, the government says. You lose control of it; the government takes it out of your hands.

The third level is that of the government itself. That’s how she makes the system world. How it decides which counters to have. What the customer journey of your experience how you do business with the organization looks like. How she sets up objection procedures that you have to go through if you disagree.

Again, citizens would like to have a say. They want the government to know how to deal with them. This is precisely where participation is much needed: we can only make a good system world from the perspective of the citizen. If we don’t, then we put all our wrong assumptions about the citizen into the systems and processes. It is not surprising that these then do not match reality.

How can we connect to reality if we make the system world behind closed doors?

Stories are there for the taking

In my job at DUO, I was always looking for enthusiastic students to do an assignment for us. Or who enjoyed visiting us at Kempkensberg. Then I dragged my colleagues into the cafeteria: look, a real student who wants to talk to you. And wants to share how she uses our services, what goes wrong and what could be better. I always had to look carefully for these types of students. Most were reluctant to share their stories with DUO and make time to do so.

When I started at the National Ombudsman in May, I discovered: in Groningen, the stories are there for the taking.

For example: Groningers have actively united in advocacy organizations, such as the Groninger Gasberaad and the Groninger Bodem Beweging. Groningers very faithfully keep an eye on their own files and know very well how to explain to you where things are pinching. Some keep a blog. You come to them, they show you whole timelines of how it all happened.

One of them, Nicole van Eijkern, emailed me a black-and-white book she made with acquaintances. For problems they encountered, they thought of possible solutions. There are books like I’m Waiting from Dagblad van het Noorden for which dozens of residents have been interviewed.

There are even two special knowledge platforms that have focused purely on the issues surrounding the consequences of gas production, the Kennisplatform Leefbaar en Kansrijk Groningen and Groningen Perspective.

How much participation, wisdom and knowledge do you want?

Participation on steroids

If I had still worked at DUO, my job as a citizen researcher would have been redundant in 1 fell swoop. Citizens report themselves in Groningen. It is participation on steroids and it should be the dream of the learning government.

I think it is a telling sign that Susan Top is quitting.

Whether that feels like giving up? “Yes, actually a little bit,” she says, after the silence. “Because you don’t quit thinking that it’s all settled and done now.” […] “Actually, it’s shocking how many issues that were already on the agenda in 2014 are still on the agenda now.”

From: NRC, Sept. 27, 2021. These people did not ask for the tremors. It was done to them, Mark Middel.

During the residents’ evening in Overschild, she told of an encounter that morning at a family in the midst of reinforcement. One wall was torn down and behind it they found to larger cracks than was anticipated. The NCG-owned operation was shut down. First, the IMG had to re-measure the damage. Phone calls. Scheduling a new visit. The construction workers drove off in their van, and just like that, days and weeks pass. And the residents … yes, they are waiting again. It is one of the consequences of the government’s separate counters, while from the beginning residents had asked for one counter.

Working together as equals

How then? It starts with wanting to see reality. With listening and hearing stories.

Also at the residents’ evening was a young guy who had just worked at the NCG for 3 months. He had quit a great job in Amsterdam, he told us. He worked in the IT department, basically had no contact with residents, but wanted to hear firsthand from residents how they saw it. Found it a bit exciting too, if he was honest, the NCG had not the best reputation. But he asked a lot of open-ended questions and was curious about the answers. He was one of the last to go home.

It is something small, and the Groninger who has been waiting for years will read this with a heavy dose of cynicism. But ultimately, this is where it starts: asking open questions and listening. To then acknowledge reality and invite the other as an equal partner. Adapt the processes together. Together, tease out loopholes in the system, reinsert them and straighten them out.

The initiative for this lies with the government.

The photo at the top of this blog was taken by Nicole van Eijkern’s daughter on the morning of the residents’ evening. It is the last part of their old house to be demolished.

Categories
How do you do research? Not part of a category

New work = new questions

It has been quiet on this blog for a while, as I began a new adventure in May: working at the National Ombudsman. In this blog, I share what prompted me to make the switch and what new questions I will be working on in the near future.

If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, I’m sure the switch will come as no surprise and you’ll also recognize that I invariably begin each new project with a bundle of questions. So a great first blog about a new adventure.

In April, I was a guest on the podcast Astrid and Vasilis Talk Easy (listen tip!). It was my last week at DUO, and in the podcast I talk at length about why I love working in government and why I’m continuing to work at the National Ombudsman.

Beautiful drawing by Astrid Poot about the podcast

In January, I told my manager at DUO that I wanted to work with issues that are government-wide. Problems for citizens with the government don’t stop at that one counter; that’s what I wanted to learn more about.

We agreed that I would look for the next step and coach colleagues to take over my role. I still mapped out as much as I could, for example, our research methodology, which I could very usefully use in my application to the No (new acronym yay).

But before it came to that, I started looking. After all, what exactly did I want to learn?

Government-wide, citizen-based

During that conversation with my manager, I had been working one day a week for a while for the Work in Progress Program where I was co-writing a government-wide vision for shared service delivery. It struck me that it is difficult for government organizations to take responsibility beyond their own boundaries for problems that citizens experience, even though this is necessary to really improve the relationship between citizens and government.

I also noticed that I had blinders on myself. I had been working at the Executive Agency of Education for 7 years and was mostly concerned with digital services, cash flows and education. I sometimes got comments on this blog “yes, you work for the national government for sure, with the municipality things are very different you know”.

Your relationship with government is broader than digital (financial) services. And I don’t really know much about that yet. So I wanted to engage with topics about citizens’ environments, their homes, their lives, the goals they themselves have and not necessarily just the (digital) contact with the government.

Last November, I tracked my own relationship with the government for a month. I visualized my contact (however small) with a government counter and what departments, processes, organizations, ministries and laws were behind it. It was some work, but I learned a lot.

An experience with one counter intervenes with the experience with another process. Some things came to me all at once, but the organizations didn’t know about them. Small encounters, sometimes unconscious, didn’t seem like much, but piled up, I had a stressful month.

The first sketch I made when I wanted to chart a month out of my relationship with the government

I met Janet Ramesar and together we mapped out her experiences with the government around the benefits scandal. On a timeline you can see how one turns into the other: you have one relationship with the government and interaction with one organization is not isolated but builds (or breaks) your entire government relationship.

I decided that over the next few years I wanted to look at the dynamics between government and citizens from different angles, in order to gain better insight, fine-tune my vision and iteratively improve that relationship between government and citizens in the places where I work. Spending time looking through the glasses of the National Ombudsman fits perfectly with that goal.

What does the Ombudsman do?

You can go to the National Ombudsman if things go wrong between you and the government. We will help you get started if you call, email, send a message through the website, mail, or smoke signal. Complaints from citizens can also become patterns. In this case, we examine structural problems and trends in government. With this, we want to help government learn to be ever better at being there for its citizens and acting properly.

The National Ombudsman is a person, Reinier van Zutphen. He was appointed by the House of Representatives. But the National Ombudsman is also an institution, an organization with 200+ colleagues who support the person the National Ombudsman is working for.

As project manager, I am responsible for one of the research topics on the ombuds agenda, the one on Livability. This includes studies such as the energy transition, environmental law and the effects of gas extraction in Groningen and its surroundings. In addition, I will be working on our own research structures and the effect we are having with them to help the government learn.

First weeks of work in pictures

The collection is expanding

About what I learn and do, and how I approach it, I continue to write. Following the example of the wonderful comic A day at the park, I am adding the following questions to my growing collection:

  • How do your experiences with the government affect the life you lead and the confidence you have in your future? What causes trust to be lost and how can government restore trust? For example,with residents in the earthquake area.
  • What patterns interact government-wide, and how can you organize responsibility (and thus solutions!) for this in a chain of organizations?
  • How can we tell citizens’ stories that do justice to their perceptions and complexities, when they do not fit into the estimated boxes of government?
  • How do you structure and organize ombudsman research to help government learn? The National Ombudsman has the feedback loop of citizen – policy – counter, what can I learn from this how to organize that kind of feedback loop government-wide in the government itself?
  • How can the government bring citizens along in major changes such as the energy transition so that it is fair? What does this mean for citizen participation, the way you interact with government and how it organizes its services?
  • If the government withdraws itself more and leaves more to the market or to citizens themselves, how can the government still remain available to citizens to help them when things go wrong or support them in their new civic role (for example, with the new Dutch environmental law)?

Oh, and with each book or article I read, this list gets longer. So I’m sure there will be some blogs coming out of that in the near future :). If you have any tips, on the above questions or new questions, let me know, great!

Categories
(Un)understood citizens The consequences of gas extraction

Urban eyes

The first time I saw struts on a house was years ago when I went to lunch with Fiora, a colleague. In the middle of her kitchen were four struts. The kitchen table fit right in between. A chair on all sides, you could walk around it and it would be full. It was an idyllic little house next to the church in Huizinge. We ate a cheese sandwich and we didn’t necessarily talk about it. This is Groningen.

Fioor now lives with her girlfriend Wieneke in Bedum and she is no longer a colleague but a friend. Two months ago I was there with Jasper, another kitchen table, this time with gin tonic. “I got the job,” I cheered. “What does the National Ombudsman actually do?” asked Wieneke.

I explained. “If you can’t work it out with the government, you can come to us. We deal with your complaint and we help the government learn from it. So we also do broader research, and especially with the latter I’m going to work on.” I hadn’t finished talking or Wieneke slapped her hand on the table. “Well, I do have another complaint for you then.”

Appingedam’s hanging kitchen. Left some struts. Upper right there is an unsafe chimney.

I knew they were remodeling. The front facade and living room had been impassable for weeks. In the winter, I had enjoyed bobbing along in the rented hot tub to break the grind of sitting in the kitchen every day. I knew they had earthquake damage. But they had discovered new damage during the renovation, even quite large ones, and had to stop the job halfway through, call the IMG again, wait, hesitate, go ahead with the job, or not, or do, with the risk that it would have to be reopened later anyway. So they were back in the kitchen, in that kitchen for months, and still went ahead with the renovation but tried to not get too attached to that beautiful color on the wall because it might have to be redone later. Fuss, fuss, fuss.

“And now that it’s almost finished,” I asked, “what are you going to do with the outside?” “Yeah, what else can you do,” said Fioor. “Stuccoing, sealing? It won’t look great anymore anyway.” You can really only put a band-aid on it; you won’t get your beautiful stones back.

The Hinkoostingstraat in ‘t Zandt has turned into a construction site.

I have now been on the job for 4 weeks as project leader for Liveability at the National Ombudsman. The subject of livability includes, for example, the research we are doing on the environmental law, energy transition and also the gas mining damage and earthquakes in Groningen and its surroundings. How does the government treat its citizens? Does she do that properly?

Last week, my colleagues and I were in Groningen for three days talking to residents with damage, seeing how the strengthening of houses was going, and speaking to all kinds of agencies and hearing their side of things. Colleagues slept in Appingedam, I slept in my own bed in the city of Groningen. By car, I drove back and forth, several times a day on the N360. From Appingedam to Garmerwolde, to Kantens, through Loppersum, ‘t Zandt and back towards Delfzijl.

Strengthening can be done in several ways. For example, by “wrapping” the house with prefabricated blocks.

In Appingedam, a lady told of her difficult objection process at the IMG. In Kantens, we were given a tour by a couple. Hop, into the car, through the village. Past their old house that was now a lawn, the neighbors still had no reinforcement advice. Through Centerparcs, as they called the temporary change houses on the outskirts of the village, toward their “new” farmhouse where, on top of the pile of bricks that was their kitchen, they told how it should be again.

Next day a tour of ‘t Zandt where the entire village is reinforced. From the main street, we walked along de Molenweg. While the right side of the street had already received a letter for reinforcement, the left side still knew nothing. In the neighborhood app, it went back and forth. What is going on? The further we walked the more the village turned into a construction site around us.

The Molenweg in ‘t Zandt. The right already has clarity on reinforcement; the left does not yet.

In the evening back home, for once I didn’t take the N360 but drove back via the Graauwedijk and the Rijksweg. Roadways that I normally love to take when I take my inflatable canoe out to boat somewhere in the province. I ride here so often, I paddle between these villages. I have been reading about the earthquakes and following the news for years. I myself have some damage to my home in the city.

But with my urban eyes, I had not seen that it was like this. I did not see what the couple from Kantens was pointing out from their car. What it is really like to live among struts and cracks.

Categories
(Un)understood citizens The compassionate civil servant

Not whistleblower, but gatekeeper

In recent weeks, I have been glued to the tube. I am watching the House of Representatives and their questioning on the problems in government implementation of policy. I listen back to all the interviews at double the speed as I walk around the neighborhood. The hearings cover both the major issues at the Temporary Committee on the Implementation Organizations and very specifically the child care benefit scandal.

Yesterday I listened to our boss of all, Prime Minister Mark Rutte. He was referring to Ms. Palmen’s memo, which was questioned a week earlier. In that 2017 memo, she raises the alarm to her management team and writes in plain language that something bad is going on.

Rutte called that memo a whistleblowers alert.

I was startled. By saying that, he is basically saying that if you disagree with your manager and hit the emergency brake hard, you are a whistleblower. That when you provide unwelcome feedback to colleagues and managers neatly through the official process, because that is what a memo is, just internally in your own organization, you are a whistleblower.

Mark Rutte on the memo and the ‘Rutte doctrine’

As a public servant, you would rather not be a whistleblower. That’s really not a fun role and might come back to bite you later.

I know this because I am a public servant myself and regularly go back to my organization with difficult feedback from citizens. I am one of thousands of officials in the “implementation proces”.

Understanding and yet misunderstood

I work at Uncle DUO (as students sometimes call the Executive Agency of Education), and it’s my job to find out how students, citizens and school employees experience our (digital) services. I think my work is super. I get everywhere, even into people’s homes, and I hear the most wonderful stories. And sometimes the saddest stories of people who feel misunderstood.

Postcards from students for my colleagues

I also know that whistleblowing is not cool because for the past two years, in addition to my work as a user researcher, I have been studying public service problems and blogging openly about them. I did a photo project photographing my colleagues as a compassionate civil servant. You might think, huh, what does that look like? Well, my colleagues wondered that too. When are you a compassionate civil servant actually? And why can’t you be one? We talked about that and at the end I wrote a blog about each portrait.

Rose photographed a compassionate civil servant

The reasons why my colleagues are not (or cannot be) compassionate is what I call the dark patterns of government. To understand them, I consulted all kinds of experts, for example Reinier van Zutphen, the National Ombudsman, and Mark Bovens, a member of the Scientific Council for Government Policy. Both have also been guests at the hearings in recent weeks.

Yes, Minister

Last summer, in completion of the study, I wrote several essays on debegripvolleambtenaar.nl about those dark patterns and how we can break them. During the hearings, I heard my essays come alive again. For example, one of the essays is aptly titled ‘We cannot be compassionate civil servants because we are afraid it will become political‘. By the way, the working title I first had was Yes, Minister, after the British TV series of the same name.

In this essay, I talk about the classic hierarchical line that is the default in many government organizations. The minister determines and the implementation executes. In between is a steep ladder of managers and directors, from law to counter. They bear the responsibility, but the substance of implementation lies with the officials in “the operational layer”.

Still from Yes Minister

In conversations in Parliament, the Oekaze Kok came up frequently. The Oekaze Kok says that as a simple civil servant you should neither talk to members of parliament nor journalists. It was about “greening”: difficult messages were made a little less difficult up the ladder all the time.

Who was also invited in the hearings: public administration expert Paul ‘t Hart. He wrote a year ago in the Volkskrant that “fear reigns in the civil service towers. Yes, I do recognize that. In fact, there were many colleagues who did not dare to be photographed. Afraid to speak out and afraid of “the consequences.

I found it scary myself to blog about it, so openly on the Internet.

Not a whistleblower, but a gatekeeper

Through my research on government performance, I discovered how to be a compassionate civil servant: by taking your role as gatekeeper seriously. Indeed, at the public counter, policy becomes real. We, the officials who man the front desk, or no, even better, we, officials who make the front desk including all automated counters: we are the gatekeepers. Through us, the citizen meets the government.

Emine Uğur, also a civil servant, articulated this very strongly on Twitter yesterday.

So officials in implementing organizations do bear a responsibility too, not just our bosses. The responsibility how we guard that gate.

Citizen feedback is seeping into our organizations from all sides. We have citizens on the phone every day, they show up on our website, leave messages in our feedback tools, show up on our Facebook channels and submit their concerns and complaints to us. I wrote earlier in this blog: it is my job to research the experience of citizens, and I am certainly not the only one in government with this job. Sure, things can and should be done more often and better, but the officials in the implementation really do listen to the citizens.

Being a gatekeeper means that we also do something with what we hear. That means writing difficult memos, bringing bad news to the surface, giving feedback and putting our foot down when we need to choose the citizen over the boss. That is what I call begin a compassionate civil servant.

But how can we do that if we are not allowed to give feedback to our managers? If they ‘green’ our signals? When we have to listen not to the citizen, but to the boss?

When the Prime Minister calls us whistleblowers while we are just doing our job as gatekeepers?

Government, show yourself

It can be different.

Public administration expert Mark Bovens calls it horizontal accountability in his book The Digital Republic. Where it is usually vertical, the minister does the talking on behalf of everyone, and the implementation thus keeps its mouth shut, horizontal accountability is about the whole ladder being accountable for choices made.

A government that shows itself. All the layers, open and honest and not just the nicely polished bits. Especially the dilemmas, the difficult trade-offs and how government is building a compassionate connection with citizens.

Let me give an example. This summer, I collaborated on the CoronaMelder app. This app was created in openness. I walked along with staff at the local health organizations and observed and interviewed them as they conducted source and contact tracing. After each visit, I wrote a report that was published on Github. With my own name signed to it.

As a result, I took just a little more time than usual to do my reports neatly. I asked a colleague to check in with me to make sure I had substantiated the conclusions. After several weeks, the file grew. You could compare different versions of the app’s design and the research it was based on. Everyone could see how the final app came about, including the crazy ideas that fell through halfway through. In a community, critical citizens and experts thought along. I got difficult questions from them, why I was researching certain things and not others. I also received help to explore further together.

Working open means getting to know lots of nice people 🙂

Working this openly can be done at any level. Of course, it goes beyond “posting something on Github,” but it’s the principle that counts. Taiwan’s Digital Minister, Audrey Tang, for example, records her conversations so citizens can read them back because she believes it is important for everyone to be able to see how and by whom she is influenced. How beautiful!

As a society, we want a transparent government that is accountable. A government we can follow and engage with. For that, we need to know how that government operates and we need a level playing field. Government, show yourself so that citizens can come to you. Such an open culture is diametrically opposed to calling internal memos whistleblower signals.

Good example follows, Mr. Rutte: your colleague from Taiwan uses this tool to record and automatically annotate conversations. Taking notes is so old school; there’s an app for that now.

Categories
How do you do research? Visual working

Documenting your user research well

Kladblaadjes met aantekeningen uit het interview

For some time I have wanted to write about documenting research. Whew, you’re thinking now, never mind, that’s not a sexy topic. Important though, so in this blog I show very specifically how to properly capture research results. I work for the public service as a civil servant, so I might as well give away my secrets 🙂

Earlier I wrote about why good documentation is important. If you want to work openly, getting your documentation right is a must. At the Executive Agency of Education, where I work, it comes up every year in our good research intentions. And it’s important if you want to make decisions as an organization not on gut feelings, but based on an understanding of your user.

What is good documentation?

The same rules apply to recording your research as to any information. It should be:

  • accessible: anyone in your organization can access it (and if you work openly, anyone outside)
  • findable: the insights are searchable and the information reaches the right people
  • understandable: enough context for every reader, even if you are new to the team
  • actionable: clear conclusions and recommendations that you can deploy and they are well substantiated

Most research at organizations goes hand in hand with development or policy teams who then work on it. That means working in short iterations. The easiest way is to document each step directly. Your research file will naturally grow with you. I do that in 4 steps:

  1. I begin with the research question. This is also usually the reason for the research.
  2. I write and show how I handled it. What is the method, who were involved?
  3. What did I learn? Based on what?
  4. How do I proceed?

It works best when all the research is together and not scattered among departmental disks. Different teams sometimes work for the same user. Standing all together, they can easily use each other’s insights. And when something contradicts a previous study, you can see that. This is how you learn as an organization (without endless meetings, hehe!). I wrote this blog about it earlier: Everything we know about the customer, we all know.

From audio to drafts to blog to essay

An example. For the portrait series The Compassionate Civil Servant, I also tackled it this way. I began with an interview. I recorded that in audio and photographs. Later I listened back to everything and sometimes wrote 10 A4 sheets of paper. I also used Happyscribe for this on occasion, but writing on paper works nicer for me. In my draft, I marked the main points I learned. I looked for any additional context to that (desk research). I summarized everything in a blog with recommendations for myself on how to proceed in the research. After 17 interviews, I summarized all the insights in essays on The Compassionate Civil Servant.

From raw data to wisdom

When I document a research moment, I not only tell what I discovered, I show it. I provide examples and substantiate conclusions with quotes, in text or audio, and visuals.

You should not believe it because I write something, but for the evidence that comes with it.

In my interview with Henk as a compassionate civil servant, this process looked like this (from the “behind-the-scenes” video made by Aljan Scholtens):

The photo interview with Henk and documenting it

From Henk I no longer have my drafts, but from Johan I still do. Especially for you here they are on the blog.

  • Draft sheets with notes from the interview
  • Format of the blog with key insights

Another example: CoronaMelder

Over the summer, I walked along with staff from the Public Health Service in their work to fight the coronavirus. I was not allowed to make recordings, so I typed along live with every conversation. On my laptop, I made folders with a document per visit, or sometimes per person I spoke to.

After the visit, I went through that again. First to correct all the typos of fast typing. Then to discover patterns that I underlined. Different subjects I gave their own color. For each topic, I worked it into an insight. We shared those insights, along with the context of the research and the observations on which it was based, on Github.

What themes were the interviews about? What did I see while walking along? How did employees work with all the systems and with each other? Did something come back regularly, how?

When listening in with a source and contact tracer, for example, it looked like this. Green highlighted is about how the Covid measures are told, orange how people respond to them, yellow how contacts are mapped and blue is about the systems used. We found green and orange information especially important when designing the notification CoronaMelder sends via your phone. For comparison, here is the documented research from that day.

It’s not just about what people say, but what you see, what people do and what happens around you during a research moment. In one of my first visits, several employees told me that they have to work differently all the time. “At every press conference another change is announced and we have to do our work differently.” In the corridors I saw flip charts always showing the new approach, the old sheets lying on the floor in the corner. This follow-along day then led to this insight“The process changes every week.

In all this documentation, you can see exactly how I go from“what did I see” to“what do I know now” to“next step. At CoronaMelder, all research and insights are published on Github, and searchable in Sticktail (the program the researchers work in). That way, the whole research file is together and our wisdom as a team and as an organization grows “naturally” as we do more research.

What to record and what not to record

Of course, there are limits to what information you keep, how you do it and for how long. Consider the following

  • information about individuals. Of course you ask permission for the research, but you usually don’t have to tell in your documentation exactly who it’s about. Sometimes video footage is fine, do ask extra permission for this if you want to share it. (I usually send it too: ‘look, this is how I used it in the report’).
  • information that is irrelevant or outdated.
  • information that should not be shared. This is especially important if you work in the open. Where is the cut and what should not “go out”? Consult on this and discuss who determines this and on what terms.

And make sure your information is easy to find. I use categories and tags on this blog. At the Executive Agency of Education, like at CoronaMelder, we work with Sticktail which also makes tag-based searching in all your research easy. Give documents and folders good names that everyone can understand (not just you). That way you never lose track.

Documenting will never be completely sexy, but hopefully this will get you a long way. Good luck!