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What is human-centered design?

Photo by Sebastien Bonneval via Unsplash.

Next week at the CRI program, where I am doing my practical research this year, I am giving a human-centered design workshop. For the past six months, I’ve been walking through consultations, interviewing colleagues and working on a sub-project myself. This summer I analyzed all the data so far, and starting this summer I will share the insights with the team. Part of that is reflecting about how to apply principles and activities of human-centered design.

This blog is in preparation for that reflection workshop. I was looking for a handy and simple introduction to the subject of human-centered design, which I can of course share with you as well. For my colleagues, I made a nice little clickable blog in which they could put their answers right away, unfortunately you have to make do with static content. There must be a difference of course.

If you want to follow my research, subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

The first entrant

The essence of human-centered design, if you ask me, is still best explained by IDEO, one of the founders of the method (Kelley & Kelley, 2013).

There are many diagrams and pictures that explain the process and principles of human-centered design. Some have 3 steps, others 7. But all have fairly the same cycle. You put yourself in the situation of the person who has a problem, come up with one or more solutions, prototype one so you can test the idea and, again together with the person experiencing the problem, see which solution is the best.

In my research I use the ISO standard human-centered design for interactive systems. I chose this one because it describes the human-centered design process well, and because my research focuses on government services that, for the most part, go through interactive human-computer systems and everything that is involved at the “back end. Think IT systems, organizational processes and public policy.

I used the principles and activities from the ISO standard to compare all observations of the past months and interviews with colleagues. I always looked at what I saw reflected, and which factors helped to work this way and which things did not.

During the workshop, I am especially curious about how colleagues themselves view this.

  1. What do you understand by this principle or activity?
  2. How do you recognize it or not in your way of working?
  3. What do you think works well for you and what doesn’t?
  4. Where do you see room for improvement?

You can also ask these questions in your organization. If anything interesting comes up, I’d love to hear about it!

Principles of human-centered design

  1. What we create and conceive is based on an explicit understanding of users, tasks and their context.
  2. We continuously involve users in devising and creating solutions
  3. Our designs are practiced and tested with real users, this determines the choices we make.
  4. We work iteratively.
  5. Our designs focus on the entire user experience of the entire service.
  6. Our team includes people with different skills and perspectives to design together in a human-centered way.

By the way, a design can be anything. For example, a design for an interactive app in which you can see your debts, or a design for a settlement a citizen can make with the government. Or a design for adapted policies around legal protection.

A design is a potential solution to a problem.

Potentially, because the cool thing about design is that you can try something out. You do that by making an unfinished version of the design (a prototype) that you can test with real users. For example, people in debt, but also colleagues from the helpdesk who are making payment arrangements with a citizen.

If you work from these principles, you should – if all goes well – see that reflected in what you do and what actually happens.

Activities of human-centered design

Human-centered design is an iterative process, a cycle in which the last step restarts the first.

The only step, step 0, that still takes place before that is: planning the human-centered design process. This includes creating preconditions to work this way. The steps after that:

  1. Understand and specify the context of use. This context is both that of the user and all other parties involved in the problem.
  2. Identify the needs of users and other stakeholders. These may include opposing needs.
  3. Creating design solutions. In other words, coming up with solutions to the problem, how they fit the context of the users and what they need, and then developing this into tangible prototypes.
  4. Evaluate the design. You can do this with those tangible prototypes, but also do it over the long term. When solutions are already (partly) implemented, you keep monitoring. You use the feedback to iteratively make it ever more appropriate to the context of use, step 1.

If you would like to read the entire ISO standard human-centered design with all the explanations and definitions, please send me an email.

Resources

ISO. (2019). ISO 9421-210 – Ergonomics of human-system interaction – Part 210: Human-centred design for interactive systems. Geneva, Switzerland, International Organization for Standardization.

ISO. (2023). ISO 9421-221 – Ergonomics of human-system interaction – Part 221: Human-centred design process assessment model. Geneva, Switzerland, International Organization for Standardization.

Kelley, D., & Kelley, T. (2013). Creative confidence: Unleashing the creative potential within us all. Crown Business.

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(Re)considering design in public administration

Photo by Ivan Bandura on Unsplash

Can a design-based approach lead to better governance?

During the event From Steerless to Steering Power, organized by PONT, Kustaw Bessems talked about his new book, Stuurloos (Steerless). The room was full of people interested in the overlap between design and government. Kustaw mentioned 4 patterns that are difficult in government, and for each pattern a designer talked about its own practice in a public context and how such a pattern can be broken.

For example, one pattern was that the government is cut up into different specialties working hard in their own square inches. As a result, there is often no eye for the whole and problems are tackled from those individual boxes. That just does not lead to good solutions to the large social problems.

Een belangrijk principe van mensgericht ontwerpen is juist ‘uitgaan van de gehele ervaring van de gebruiker’ en van daaruit diensten en beleid ontwerpen. Ik vertelde hoe in de casus die ik onderzoek, het programma Clustering Rijksincasso, dit principe toegepast wordt en tot welke nieuwe diensten dit leidt.

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From an explanation video from Program Clustering State Debt Collection

A clear gap

“How can design-based approaches lead to better governance? Together with the audience, we discussed what it takes to “make it work” and what ingredients are already in place within government. At the same time, we also saw a clear gap.

On the train back I was thinking about that a bit more. Not alone, because with some design friends in government who were also there, I happily continued to text about it.

Indeed, I also see a gap. Fortunately, because it forms the basis for my doctoral research. I see two causes.

Rationality clashes with creativity

First, government practice is indeed unruly for designers. There is a hierarchy in public administration in which feedback from citizens, as users of services, must compete with democratically decided policy adjustments. This leads to a rather rational and technocratic approach to making policies and services and is at odds with the empathetic and creative nature of a design approach. I also write this in my first research publication of my PhD.

As a result, design is often seen as an exception: a creative project, just for the fringes of the service, or at worst – but now I’m being very cynical – as a fun team-building activity. Many designers working in or for government organizations will recognize this. It sometimes feels like working against the grain.

Naive about public traditions

The second cause is found if you look at the matter from the other side. The design approach, as taught at many design universities and art schools, takes no account, or at least far too little, of essential administrative traditions such as democracy and the rule of law.

Designers still too often see themselves as visionaries and even among fellow designers in the Netherlands I regularly hear comments about ‘those civil servants’ and ‘that government’. I always feel some cringe then because it is precisely designers who need a deep understanding of these traditions to be able to offer their qualities to that government. If you want to do something as a designer in the government, and you don’t know what the General Administrative Law Act is, then you’re basically finished, I think.

You probably understand how happy I was when last year, during a guest lecture for first-year Industrial Design students in Delft, a group looked at the Student Finance Act for their group assignment on DUO’s scholarship check.

Want a crash course in rule-of-law traditions? Then be sure to read the first chapters of Kustaw’s book Stuurloos.

Even more so

We actually do the government a disservice by pretending that the design approach is new and that it needs to learn it. Designing is its core business and it has been doing it for years. Government continuously creates strategies, policies and services to create a better society every day. She collaborates and involves different perspectives. In short: it designs. Only it does so from a different logic, but this is just as much a designing logic. This argues Geert Brinkman, PhD candidate at the Faculty of Public Administration at Erasmus University.

The gap may be much smaller than we think.

So I think it is time to tell a different story on this subject. A story in which the expertise of civil servants and designers are both embraced equally. A modest story about what they can offer each other and, above all, a lot of curiosity about the qualities on both sides. A story in which we search together for how our working methods should be adjusted, those of the government as well as those of designers.

Together with Geert, I am hosting a panel at the academic NIG Conference in Ghent on February 6-7, 2025 to explore this new story. Sign up for our panel 13 to participate.

We are looking for what this combined design approach might look like and are curious to hear from other scientists researching this. You can also participate if you have a research idea and want feedback on it. Who knows, maybe one day you want to embark on a PhD adventure too! If so, be sure to sign up.

Continue reading?

  • Trusting the process is not enough. Initial insights from my own doctoral research.
  • Bessems, K (2024). Stuurloos. Wegwijzers voor een land op drift. Das Mag Publishing.
  • Brinkman, G., van Buuren, A., Voorberg, W., van der Bijl-Brouwer, M. (2023). Making way for design thinking in the public sector: a taxonomy of strategies. Policy Design and Practice, 6(3), 241-265.
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How do you do research? Promoklip

Making sense of your research data

Photo by Bud Helisson via Unsplash.

This summer I am immersing myself in all the observations, conversations and activities I have participated in over the past six months. Since February, I have been following the Clustering Government Collection program. In early July, I got the bright idea to take a look at the data I had collected so far. That was quite a lot. In this blog I will tell you how I collected this data, and how I analyze it.

If you want to follow my research, subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

Last month I wrote about how I set up the empirical study. As an action researcher, I observe what is happening but also actively participate. I am following a government program that is redesigning services in the debt domain based on human-centered principles. You can read this blog here: case selection done.

PhD research timeline. The unfolded gray area runs from February this year untill now, which is what I am focusing on this summer.

In that blog, you’ll also see that I divide my research into several phases. The outcome of one phase determines the approach to the subsequent phase. I determine the approach together with the participants who participate in the research. This summer I am focusing on the “unfolded” gray area.

You always start with a question

There is, of course, a reason why you engage in a particular group and context. You want to know something. This semester I have focused mainly on 2 sub-questions:

  1. How do organizations create a service together?
  2. What helps and hinders them in the human-centered design of such a service?
Almost vintage post-it with the research question so I am reminded of it every week.

Before I began this doctoral research, I had some experience doing research. This blog is full of it! This is mostly applied qualitative research for organizations. Over the past two years, I have read a lot about the requirements of science for new knowledge based on qualitative research. In particular, I looked at how data is collected and analyzed in ethnographic and participatory action research.

An important principle, for example, is triangulation: using different data sources that complement each other. If you observe something in behavior, discuss it in interviews and find it in the organization’s documents used, your story is better substantiated. This also applies the other way around: someone can say something, but then if you don’t observe it or can’t find it anywhere in the organization’s archives, well….

My data-gathering strategy

I collected data in several ways. Some were intended as input to another way of collecting data, which were then important sources for my analysis.

I kept observations each week in a diary. In all, I have 22 diaries, ranging from 4 to 10 A4 sheets. I joined meetings, had lunch with participants and talked with colleagues between activities. I wrote down what was happening and what I noticed.

In early April, I organized a workshop with the program’s core team. Everyone made a timeline with moments that were defining for them. We then exchanged experiences in a group discussion and responded to each other’s timeline. I made a start on a joint timeline during the discussion.

The observations and timelines provided the input for personal interviews with 13 colleagues involved in the program. The interviews were free format. We discussed the timeline they had made and I asked about their general ideas about what good services are and how to make them.

I myself collaborated on a sub-project. I kept my own reflections in the same diary. I already wrote the blogs Reframing leads to new solutions? and A day with a court bailiff about this project.

I used program documentation such as mail exchanges, meeting notes and vision documents. There is even a Whatsapp message in my data collection! I used these documents primarily as additional substantiation for observations or statements from the interviews.

How the sources support each other looks like this:

Visual overview of how I use different data sources in my research.

Through the pile of data

In early July, I temporarily stopped collecting data. Time to see if I could already formulate answers to the questions. In 2 ways I went through all the data thoroughly.

My research focuses on change, and this requires time. Therefore, I chose a process lens to look at all the data. I explain how this works in the blog Studying a process. It involves plotting my data on timelines to see the sequence of events and actions in order to find underlying mechanisms. This timeline approach is the first way I went through the data.

On the wall of my home office I made a large timeline of a few years on which I placed the defining moments of colleagues. I added stickers with their names when they talked about such a moment or period in their interview. Then I divided the timeline into periods that made sense to me.

Me this summer. If you know, you know.

One such period I experienced up close: the past six months. I made a detailed version of this by going through all my diaries and noting the important events per week. Events that I influenced got an extra black dot. Judging by the growth of the black dots, my role changed from passive observer to more active team member the longer I was involved in the program. That’s fine, and I’m glad I captured this so well and kept my reflections on it in the journal.

1988 unique codes

The second way I went through all the data is by encoding it. Almost all of my data consists of text. Even the visual data have been “translated” into text as colleagues talk about it in the group discussion and their interview.

Of the conversations I recorded in audio, I made a verbatim transcript. For some, that took some getting used to, because every um is in there. No one talks in neat full sentences. Often we search for words and come up with a new ending mid-sentence. I wanted to follow the thought processes and excursions. And I wanted to stay as close as possible to the exact wording of the participants.

For coding all the data, I use ATLAS.ti. On their website they have a handy explanation of what coding in qualitative research entails. In short: I go through each piece of text to see what it is about. This I give a label, a code in other words. An average one-hour interview gave me 125 codes. In total, a first round of coding all the texts yielded 1988 unique codes.

While coding the texts, I was constantly thinking about my research question. So I paid attention to whether participants told how they made services. What processes are there and what steps do they consist of? Each step is given a code. Do they use design methods, and which of these are human-centered? Everything I encountered was given a code. What are they running into? And what exactly helps them? You get the point: a code!

This is what that looks like: a piece of interview with multiple codes.

In addition, I also coded a lot “en vivo. This means that you use the literal words of the participant as code. You do this when you want to stay as close to the data as possible. The reason I do this is that for designers outside government, government is often a closed world with its own language. To apply design in a public bureaucratic environment, we also need a common language. That’s why I don’t want to “translate” myself already while coding, but use the language of the government itself.

Examples of this type of en vivo codes that can be very instructive for designers:

  • An individual administrative decision: this is a term from the General Administrative Law Act. It is an official legal decision that an organization has a legal mandate to make. For example, the decision that you are not entitled to an allowance and must pay it back. You can object and appeal against a decision. These are measures of legal protection for citizens. Such a decision is a core part of a government service.
  • A front portal: a type of meeting in which decisions are prepared by officials. There can be all sorts of different types of front portals. Sometimes a decision has to go through several tables and therefore through several front portals to those tables. Especially if different organizations have to decide something.
  • the Minister’s bag: every weekend the minister is given the so-called weekend bag with memos for information or with something that needs to be decided. For civil servants, this bag represents a kind of deadline you work toward.

These en vivo codes can be combined to form a category, for example, a category describing how government decision-making works when you redesign services. Or a category on the legal aspects of service delivery. Some codes can also belong to both categories. This is something I’m going to work out over the rest of the summer. Then in a codebook, I’ll keep track of what main categories I have and what their definitions are. This will also allow me to start with a preliminary answer to my 2 questions: how do these organizations make a service together, and what helps and hinders them in designing it human-centered?

So how to proceed?

In early September, I will first discuss all the insights with the participants who participated. In qualitative research, this is called the member check. This is a crucial step in action research because you are working with participants in their own context. Do they recognize my preliminary answers? Do they have additions? Have I overlooked anything? At the same time, this is also an intervention because we reflect together on our way of working. This influences how the research will proceed. What do they see as the next step? We also discuss this together.

Are you also curious about the first insights? On September 12 in The Hague, I get to talk a little about my research at an event hosted by PONT with Kustaw Bessems of the podcast Stuurloos. You can sign up here!

Continue reading?

  • Coghlan, D. (2019). Doing Action Research in Your Own Organization. Sage.
  • Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: An expanded sourcebook. Sage.
  • Saldaña, J. (2021). The coding manual for qualitative researchers. Sage.
  • Small, M. L., Calarco, J. M. (2022). Qualitative literacy: A guide to evaluating ethnographic and interview research. Univ of California Press.
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Promoklip

A day with a court bailiff

Photo by Margaret Polinder on Unsplash

A few years ago, someone close to me called “what should you do if a bailiff comes by?” I didn’t know that at the time. Only on the third page while stress-googling I came upon a link to the Ombudsman with what you can do and ask. And what to actually expect.

This week I accompanied Hans van Dijk, court bailiff at GGN Zwolle for a day and saw the other side. The CJIB arranged this for me in my neighborhood. In this blog what I experienced and learned.

Photo by Florencia Viadana on Unsplash

I did not take pictures during the day. For this blog, I use photos of random doors from photo site Unsplash with the search prompt door AND dutch.

What the day looked like

A quarter to 9 I stood along the highway, first some coffee. What exactly are we going to do today? Hans showed a bin full of colored folders in the car. In each folder a letter or official document that we we’re going to personally drop by someone’s house. Sometimes it was an announcement and sometimes it was to seize someone’s property or salary. On top was an iPad with an app opened with more background information about the file behind the letter. For example with communication between the debtor and GGN, and whether more claims were also known.

We went driving, crisscrossing the city. Between visits, I was explained what the different types of letters mean and what Hans experiences as a judicial officer. I told about my research and we thought about how government services could be better for the people we visited.

Photo by Quaid Lagan on Unsplash

On one of the first addresses we gave someone a huge scare. The partner was not at home. That’s what the letter was actually for. The debt was huge. “I don’t know anything about that, how is this possible?” Leaving the letter, we had contact later in the day via a call. “Come up with a good proposal on how you could pay this off. Think about it for a while.” And also, “Do you have help to deal with this?” “No, I’m actually trying to piece it back together myself.”

“We don’t talk about money in the Netherlands,” the conversation between us in the car continued. “Also the other way around, if you ask someone ‘how much do you make?’ we always say ‘not enough’ and make a joke.”

We drove down a street: “This is where I’ve passed by every house a few times.” We got out and walked to the address on the letter. A traffic fine that had now risen to 3x the amount. “For these kids, it’s normal for the bailiff to come by. They grow up with this, it’s hard to do it differently themselves then later.”

What does seizure and settling means

In a short time, I learned a new jargon. When a claim reaches the bailiff, it has already come a long way.

For example, a claim for not paying your health insurance. Suppose you skip one or more months. There can be all sorts of reasons for this. Then first the insurer will send you a reminder or demand letter. When you fall 6 months behind, a signal goes to CAK and you become a so-called “defaulter. This also moves the debt from a private insurer to the government. At CAK, your health care premium goes up. You can make an arrangement here that you pay off the debt and go back to your own health insurance company and pay the normal premium again.

If you don’t, CAK will check if your employer can pay the premium directly to them. If all that fails, they transfer the claim to the CJIB. This is the government collection agency and they will send you letters again to try to collect the debt. Up to this point, it’s all called “the amicable phase.

Photo by Florencia Viadana on Unsplash

If CJIB is also unsuccessful, the claim goes to a court bailiff. Who first brings a letter to announce that a restraining order is coming. Two days later, the bailiff may come by with the restraining order. This is called “signifying. After 2 days of still not paying, the bailiff may seize things you don’t need.

You can still “settle” then. That involves agreeing on a way to pay. The bailiff then looks at the amount of debt and the latest repayment date. But they also look at your situation. Do you manage to repay sooner so you can get rid of it sooner? This is also in the creditor’s interest. If all that is not a tenable situation, because other claims are also coming your way, they will work with you to see what is possible. Sometimes they even advises the creditor to waive the (entire) claim.

If the bailiff is unable to reach a settlement or an agreement cannot be made, they can also seize your income from your employer. This is called “third party seizure. When multiple creditors want to do this, the bailiff who seized first takes coordination for how the money is divided between them.

These double seizures are quite complicated. In an earlier blog, I wrote about how stakeholders want to improve the existing situation and how a human-centered design approach can help with this.

For a couple of years now, the bailiff has been making a home visit for public debt first to announce the situation and engage in conversation. Sometimes you can then come to a solution immediately. If this does not happen, the process of service, injunction, seizure and third-party seizure still follows.

A train or river?

When I write it down like this, it seems like a process with a beginning and an end. A kind of train with stations where you could basically get off at any time. As long as you take action and open the door. At any time, in theory, you can pay the whole amount or through an arrangement.

Photo by Margaret Polinder on Unsplash

As we drove from address to address, I realized it was not a train at all. Most of the addresses were repeat visits. “Last year I had to impound his car,” he said. “A few months ago I was here too, but then with the mother.” “He just paid all the debts, but this is another seizure. And I see there’s another claim coming as well, hm, that really should have gone along with this.”

For most people, debt seemed more like a river that just keeps flowing.

Someone opened the door, took the letter: “Yes, all right, I’ll give it to the mcb.” Municipal credit bank. When I met with someone who worked there in my city last week, they said: “We try to help mainly with early warning and coaching, so that people can get a grip on their situation themselves.”

Photo by Ilnur Kalimullin on Unsplash.

The questions I take with me

What services can the government (re)design to reduce or even contain this river? Over lunch, we discussed how, on the one hand, some people have completely lost control of their finances. What do they need?

Some debts felt so meaningless to me, too. A fine with surcharges of which you could have already insured your car three times. Or being months behind in paying off your student debt when you can also use wildcards. You just have to know and be able to arrange it. How can you design for this in your services?

And on the other hand, a complete one-sided focus on individuals is also unjustified. Traffic fines are intended as an incentive for traffic safety. Paying off your student debt is an obligation to society. Paying for your health insurance makes sure we all have access to care. It seems so contradictory at times. I wrote earlier about looking both ways when it comes to government services.

Photo by Antonina Bukowska on Unsplash

A colleague at CJIB said in their interview, “It doesn’t have to be opposite. It seems like a contradiction, but it’s not. In an enforcement task, you can also be service-oriented. Someone has a right to that.”

If they are not opposites but can complement each other, what does that look like? So what kind of services do you make? Do services earlier in the process, such as an app with debt oversight, help make a dam in the river? Can the government set boundaries in a way that also helps you, the debtor, to hold on to control?

And what does your team and your organization need to do this? That is ultimately my research question. Subscribe to my newsletter to get answers to that in the near future.

Continue reading?

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How do you do research? Promoklip

Case selection done

Foto door

I have been working on my doctoral research for more than a year and a half now, and am now working on the emperical part. In this blog, an update.

You’ll read about what I research, how I select the case study and which one it turned out to be. At the end a timeline of what the next time looks like. To stay in the travel theme, the route is now pretty much set.

Status quo of government services

I often show the figure below to explain how government organizations make services now, and thus what I want to change with my action research. It is a oversimplification of a month from my own relationship with the government.

I kept track of what I experienced with the government and what is involved in government organizations. It struck me that most organizations create and offer government services as if they have a 1-to-1 relationship with a citizen, but in practice that is not the case. Someone is constantly switching with different organizations to do all sorts of things. And the outcome of one service often impacts another. The question is whether the collective values we start with at the top still work out that way for the individual. The answer: well, no.

I wrote this blog about it that kicked off my doctoral research.

The status quo when it comes to services the government makes for people.

How can this be done differently? And how can we learn that as government organizations?

To examine how government organizations are growing in making services that are good for people, I think it is important to be as close to such a service as possible. I don’t want to explore it in theory or in an isolated innovation lab. No, as close as possible to practice, with my paws in the mud, in the middle of the status quo. That’s where it has to happen.

By zooming in on one government service, I can examine how the organizations involved are developing themselves in human-centered design. Since February, therefore, I have been following the Program on Clustering Government Collections (CRI). They are redesigning the status quo around debt issues. The motto: one citizen, one payoff capacity, one government collection. This video shows how they do it.

How do you select a case study?

Actually, I have only known for a few weeks that CRI and paying off debt is really going to be my case study. The first few weeks I spent at the program were spent exploring their practices and formulating case criteria from the literature. In qualitative research, it is important that you do that very well selectively and can substantiate it.

In the end, I arrived at the following criteria:

  1. The organization/team redesigns a government service, in this case “paying off your debt(s).
  2. This service is provided by multiple organizations (service bundling).
  3. This service is in the social domain and is typical of a national semi-digitized public service.
  4. There is room to adapt existing structures, roles and processes (and organizations).
  5. The service is redesigned based on human-centered design principles (or there is room for that).
  6. I may participate as an action researcher.
  7. The team goes “full circle”: society, politics, policy, implementation and citizens are involved.
  8. There is organizational and political will for change.
  9. The organization/team supports and participates in an open approach.
  10. There is funding for the case.

I must honestly confess that I also cheated a bit. After all, I already knew the program and intuitively knew: something interesting is happening here. So I made a list of why I really believed this should be the case. I then turned CRI everywhere into “the organization.

I ended up with the above list which was far more ambitious than I could have hoped for a government case I would have access to as a researcher. If I didn’t know this existed, I wouldn’t have known this was possible, so to speak. And then my supervisor said, “Well, Maike, in science you also have such a thing as ‘opportunity,’ so go for it!”

If I adjust the status quo to what that would look like in CRI logic, you get this artist impression:

Broadly explored how organizations can work together to create services that are good for people. Services that allow citizens to get a grip on their debt(s) and prevent them from accumulating.

I have kept a journal of observations for 22 weeks now. Along with a series of interviews, I will analyze them this summer. That sets the stage for a second cycle of research that I am shaping with the team beginning in September. Soon I will write a blog on how I have collected the data so far and what my analysis strategy is.

Focus!

In the first month of my PhD, my supervisor explained to me that you start with big plans that get smaller and smaller, until you only have a postage stamp left. That’s what you write your disseration on. He sent me this comic that illustrates it perfectly. Now at first I thought that was just annoying because of course I was going to solve all the government’s problems, granted.

Meanwhile, I do need focus, so in June I decided to devote my entire PhD to creating services around this theme: paying off a debt to the government.

This does not necessarily mean that I am going to explore this from the CRI program all the time. I prefer to look broadly from this program this year and switch perspectives sometime during 2025. Then I want to zoom in deeper on a government organization that is part of that broad debt approach. This is what that might look like schematically:

Zooming in on the perspective of 1 government organization: how can it evolve to make services that are good for people from the whole?

It does mean that I won’t switch to other services that the government also makes. My insights on how government can make good services will probably apply to those other services, but it gives me peace of mind to go into the summer with an increasingly concrete stamp in sight.

Are you also engaged in services around “paying off debt” and would like to share your insights with me? Yes, please! Send me a message at maike@klipklaar.nl. I will also share it with the CRI program team.

Timeline

So the research is taking shape. And I have to, because in October I will be halfway there – in terms of time. This is what my timeline looks like right now:

The picket stakes are in the ground. Nice!

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Promoklip Visual working

Reframing leads to new solutions?

Actiefoto! Met prachtig ontworpen werkvormen door mijn designmaat Reinout Tiekstra

When you have been dealing with tough issues for a long time, it is sometimes difficult to find a breakthrough. It can seem like a problem just can’t be solved. These types of “wicked problems” are complex and constantly evolving. There are all sorts of parties involved that often have competing interests.

In government, we have enough of this kind of tough problems. In my research into how we can make government services that are good for people, I come across them regularly. I am currently researching how the government designs services for people in debt.

In my research, I look particularly at government organisations themselves. How do they learn and develop their own skills to better serve citizens? If you want to follow this research, subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

Kees Dorst, a professor in Sydney, wrote the first design book I read 8 years ago as a junior designer in government: Frame Innovation. He describes a number of steps you can take to see new solution directions for tough issues. You do this by thinking differently: by reframing the problem.

In this blog, you will read about how I am using this method with team members I am working with this year. The topic: how does the government seizure someone’s wages when they fail to pay a debt? This month we organized a collaboration day attended by about 40 people. We are still in the middle of the project, so this blog is a reflection on the approach in between. What do I learn about applying this design method in the government context?

The wicked problem

Many people who owe a debt to a government organization fail to pay it. A person can have all kinds of reasons for that. In the process of repayment, or the collection process as it is called on the government side, there are all kinds of steps. One of those steps is for the government to eventually seize your income. That is a major intervention.

To protect citizens, the rule is that such a seizure must never cause you to fall below the subsistence level. Yet it happens. Indeed, the government is legion; different government organizations do not know from each other if and who has already seized. So it may happen that you do get pushed below the subsistence level because the government is competing with itself to collect a debt.

On large boards, all participants wrote or drew the insights from their organization(s).

Solving this problem is proving to be very tough. There are all kinds of different parties involved that have different structures and interests. That’s partly how it was once set up and partly how it grew. Then there are all sorts of other rules that make it difficult to solve this problem, for example the rules about sharing citizens’ data between organizations. And the problem is also constantly changing. In recent years, we as a society have begun to think differently about debt. From “people don’t want to pay” to “people can’t always pay.

How do you look differently?

To understand and address such problems, Kees Dorst devised a series of steps he calls the reframing method.

Steps to arrive at new solution directions for tough problems.

As a team, in the weeks leading up to the collaboration day, we put together as much as we could of what has been done so far to address this issue. To fully understand the problem, we tried to adress everything that makes it so difficult. Often then all sorts of paradoxes come along. Things that at first glance are a contradiction that makes something fail, but don’t have to contradict at all. We also studied the parties involved. What makes them so different, and where is overlap?

On the collaboration day, we set to work naming key themes and seeing if we could come up with some new frames. How might we look at the issue differently?

During the collaboration day, we used this outline of the steps. This stage is the most abstract moment in the process.

Coming up with a new frame like this is always quite a challenge. Once you get it, you think “yeah, makes sense. But just try to think of it. To do this, you must first understand the problem well and examine it from different angles. A good frame helps you to then be able to formulate a good design question. In turn, you can think of solution directions that you can work out.

An example. A paradox in solving this issue is that the people affected are not involved. We assume that they have so little doing power, after all, they can’t pay off their debts either, that they can’t participate in the solution either. Thus we exclude them of the process unfairly. A new insight is that for a good solution, we desperately need the lived experiences of this group. We need to understand much better how things that are conceived work out in practice.

A good frame then is: the experience expertise of people with debt is the key to understanding the issue. A design question that fits with this then is: how can we position these people so that they can contribute their expertise?

Structure of the day

The collaboration day began with a rolling start. Throughout the room we had placed large signs on which the first steps of the method were visualized. Participants could add to them their own expertise. That content was the material we worked on for the rest of the day.

In the morning, each group engaged in a partial perspective. Are you looking through the perspective of the user, society, organization or technology? If you only look through that lens, what do you see? What makes it difficult and what opportunities do you see?

In the afternoon, we continued with those possibilities and came up with ideas to go with them. Again, we worked out those ideas in groups using a work canvas. This is what we will continue to do as a team in the coming weeks.

What can I learn from this for my research?

One of the participants came up with a wonderful quote. “We look through a straw, but with the citizen everything comes together.” Because government organizations are divided into all sorts of separate functions and teams, there are partitions between everything. There are few people who really have an overview of how things work and what the consequences are in practice. That is also what makes such an issue so complex. Where do you put the cut? Do you need to make the issue bigger? So big that it can’t be handled? But then again, many more people need to be involved, because each sub-issue has its own policy staff and product owners. At the same time, we have the luxury of cutting it up; someone in debt does not.

This paradox is not new to me. In previous studies, even before my doctoral research, I also encountered this often. I previously wrote an essay about it“Is there anyone with oversight?

With the group, we discussed all the insights from multiple perspectives.

On top of that, the pressure not to make mistakes is great in government. Failure is not an option because the consequences are dire. For individual citizens, and a social, political reckoning also follows. Yet we regularly fail precisely because we don’t get a shot at this kind of tough problems. This paradox leads to risk avoidance. Experimentation sometimes seems like a dirty word.

In government, you have to think big, but act small. This is a different approach than how government usually operates. The reframing method, and really any design method embraces precisely making, trying out and testing to practice with real people, and doing so as early and as often as possible.

How can you shape this in government? That is what we are going to work on in a small way, in this topic, in the coming time. And on a larger scale, what does this mean for applying design methods in government? Fortunately, I have a few more years to figure that out.

Want to read more?

  • Dorst, K. (2015). Frame innovation: Create new thinking by design. MIT press.
  • Schaminée, A. (2018). Designing with-in public organizations: Building bridges between public sector innovators and designers. Bis Publishers.
  • I summarized the first results from my own research on design in government in this blog: Trusting the process is not enough.
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How do you do research? Promoklip

Studying a process

Poster van een van de principes van goede diensten uit het boek van Lou Downe

In my research, time plays an important role. Or rather, processes that take place over time. To get a better handle on this, I recently took the Process Research course at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam.

In this blog, I share how I plan to use this way of looking at data and knowledge in my research. I see 3 possibilities for that and I will work them out in the coming time.

Actions and processes

But first: what is process research? If you have been following this blog for some time, you may be thinking, “hey, but you did action research, right?” Yes. In fact, you can combine the two perfectly.

If you want to understand something, you have to change it. This is a famous quote from Kurt Lewin, the founder of action research. With action research, you work with participants in real situations. Together you try to change something and reflect on it. Things just rarely go from A to B overnight; it takes time. You can study this change in 2 ways.

  1. A variants approach looks at the differences between A and B were they 2 separate pictures and thus explains the change.
  2. A process approach looks at how A becomes B. This is the moving image, the whole film. It is precisely the fluid process between A and B that is interesting here. This process lens allows you to better understand the mechanisms that make change possible.

Action research and process research both assume that organizations are made up of change and that the best way to examine this is from the perspective of the inside. That suits me perfectly, as a public servant who wants to explore how government implementing organizations are transforming into service organizations.

In the Process Research course, I learned about the theory behind this method of research. And in what ways to collect data and analyze it with a process lens to arrive at knowledge. I found it super interesting! If you would like to know more about this, or are looking for reading tips, send me a message.

My research consists of 3 layers and on each layer I think I can use this process approach well. I look at what good services are, how organizations make them and how, in this research, I learn about this along with you.

A good service is a process

Lou Downe writes, in the best book on good service I ever read, that good services are verbs. Often in government we call our service a registry, a portal or – even worse – an abbreviation that leaves no one actually knowing what the person on the other end, the citizen, wants to accomplish with it. What they wanted to do.

I have the poster myself at home!

A good service is a process with all kinds of actions in it. We visualize this in a customer journey. You can also link the organization’s processes to this. It’s called a service blueprint. So you can see over time how someone experiences a particular government service and what your organization does and organizes for it.

In my research, I look at what constitutes good service. I am doing that this year in a case study at the CJIB, in the Clustering National Debt Collection program. Here I look at what a good service looks like for people who have to pay a debt to the government.

I also look one layer above this. I look at how the government is redesigning this service and thereby changing it.

Redesigning a service is also a process

I participate in the team working to improve this service. I do that because I want to learn how organizations get better at making services that are good for people.

To track the growth in government in this, I record events over time. Together with the team I follow, I reflect on past events. For example, the other day we all made a timeline of the important moments in the project. In interviews, I then ask how people proceeded around those events. What the strategy is, what they care about and how they make choices. I’ve blogged about this method before: visual interviewing.

I also made my own timeline, because I am part of the team myself and think/work with them how the service can be better. This is my timeline, redrawn.

Drawing of my timeline at the CJIB

I’m still figuring out how to properly anonymize the data, but this is a little too much of it, I think, haha.

Later, I will put the timelines and stories side by side and you can see from multiple perspectives how the service is created and the organization(s) grow. Together we can then see what mechanisms are involved. And, of course, I hope to learn lessons that can work in other places.

My promotion is also a process

You can follow this research in a transparant way. I regularly show what it looks like behind the scenes. I do that through this blog and through a monthly newsletter. I get regular feedback from you on what I do and I find that very valuable. This open way of working, I call it open action research, is also a process and this is the third layer in my research.

The way I learn, collect and analyze data and translate this to new knowledge together with your input, can also be drawed out as a process. I am now writing a paper on my conceptual framework for the research. Secretly, all kinds of building blocks of this have been on this blog for a long time. Sometimes I don’t even realize it myself. Retrospectively, you can read back the entire thought process, the knowledge in the making, here. For example, this process looks like this:

Schematic representation of how I go from idea to outcome through the open-ended approach.

In the coming time, I will work on this approach and, with the team and together with you, I will analyze the initial findings. I am very curious to see what we will learn from it!

Continue reading?

  • Coghlan, D. (2019). Doing Action Research in Your Own Organization. SAGE.
  • Langley, A. (2007). Process thinking in strategic organization. Strategic Organization, 5(3), 271-282.
  • Tsoukas, H., & Chia, R. (2002). On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change. Organization Science, 13(5), 567-582.
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Not part of a category How do you do research? Promoklip

Full circle research

Foto van een waterval die echt super steil is
Foto door

Yesterday, more than 100 researchers working in the Dutch government met in Utrecht. The government-wide research community held its first real-life event, and the organization had to ask participants to attend with just 5 persons per government organization. If you had told me this 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. So many researchers already work in government. Super.

In this blog, I share my presentation: about the context in which we work and why researchers are necessary for good service delivery. We look back at how far we’ve come, and also ahead: what will it take to let the lifeworld of citizens guide the delivery of government services? I call that doing full circle research.

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The circle of democracy and service delivery

In my research, I use a division between the system world and the living world, with both a collective and an individual side. This creates 4 quadrants. On the collective side, Cabinet, together with representatives of the people, shape their vision of society. This vision is then translated into laws, policies and services for individuals. Only after interaction between citizens and government does this become a reality in the context of the people themselves, or in the living world. And also in the living world, individuals group together and try to implement their ideas about society, thus coming full circle.

Drawing the circle of democracy and service delivery
Drawing the circle of democracy and service.

Of this circle, people experience mostly the individual side. “People don’t experience policies, they experience services,” says researcher Sabine Junginger (2016). That means the job of public service providers is to translate collective value into individual experiences that are also valuable.

Want to know more about this collective and individual side? Then read the blog Executive and service provider.

That’s not easy. The practice of the system world now is often a big waterfall. It goes clockwise in a circle, from policy to service and pours out over citizens and society. If you disagree, you can show it in your voting record.

It may be different if we collect citizens’ experiences and introduce them, counterclockwise, into the system world. Those experiences can shape how we offer services and how we design services at all. For the policies enacted for it, and yes, perhaps also for the legislation and associated ideas about interventions in society and the effect it will have.

We have to turn it completely around. And we can, because that’s exactly our job as government researchers.

We extract experiences from the lifeworld. We have several methods and techniques to do this properly. Moreover, we are able to share these stories within our organizations in a way that motivates colleagues to take action.

We have shown that over the past 10 years.

How it began

In most organizations, it started with usability testing of websites and other screens. At least for me, too. I started working at the Executive Agency of Education in 2013. One of the first things I learned was how to set up and run a usability test. I visited schools with my laptop under my arm. In the office, I showed videos to colleagues and talked about how students or school employees experienced our digital services.

Look, so cute: my first steps in the research world.

In 2017, I started my blog. I shared what I was learning and what we were trying out. You also started sending me your experiences.

I saw that we were growing as researchers. We went from testing screens to exploring how to improve all interaction moments with government. We learned new research methods and devised more creative ways to share the insights within our organizations. We took a more holistic approach and also tried to get to know the person behind the user.

We worked smarter. In order to scale up, we started to bundle and archive our insights. We started to get better organized and research positions for that logistics side came up.

And then some of us started getting occasional phone calls from stray policy officials who needed to take make sure people could ‘do’ their policies. “I got your name through, maybe you can help me?” We certainly can.

And so with the insights from the living world, we went deeper and deeper into the system world.

So let’s dream on. Where do we go from here? What do I wish for our field?

More quality

To better understand the whole living world, both the individual as well as the collective side, we need to improve our work. For this, we need more diversity in research roles. The field is so large that no one is good at all the research methods we need. Neither is necessary. In the past, we had research teams consisting of one person doing everything, but that is no longer possible. A good research team includes usability researchers, strategic researchers, customer journey experts, behavioral scientists and more. We must embrace the full range of research methods.

Scholars from Sneek think with DUO

Diversity also says something about who we are ourselves. I still too often see a very homogeneous group when I look around. Especially we, who want to test the bias of the government, must also know our own bias. We have far too few people of color on our teams. One in 5 people has a visible or invisible disability, but looking around now, it seems that everyone has an invisible disability. Our teams are not diverse and that is a problem. As a result, we have too many blind spots that affect how we do our work.

Talking to people

I need to get something off my chest. It really should no longer be a problem to speak to respondents. Really. Come on. This is still far too often a problem in organizations. “Then what are you promising them?” “No, the GDPR.” “It has to be efficient.” Human contact, by definition, is not efficient; indeed, it gets better the less efficient it is. We can only do our job if we are allowed to have real contact with citizens. We shouldn’t put up with this stuff anymore.

Scaling up

If we really want to improve services to citizens, we need to expand our activities. It’s great that more and more development teams want to do usability testing in a sprint, but now imagine if all the teams in your organization wanted to do usability testing in every sprint? How are you going to manage that?

So we need to invest more in the organizational side. Contact with people does not have to be efficient, but we can organize our research work efficiently. This requires a different approach for most of us. The creative and human side is strong among most of us, but now it is time to embrace the blue side we know so well in civic service again as well.

Making policies and services together

I see more and more collaboration between policy and implementation, and research is the basis for that. I hope this becomes standard operating procedure in government. So that policies are based on insights from users and along with the developed services are always tested with citizens.

For this we need to stop that waterfall. I know I am raising a familiar point with this, and that we often complain about it. But we are not helpless on the sidelines. We can help stop the waterfall.

Sharing insights = working in the open

As far as I’m concerned, the best way to stop the waterfall is to share your work. Share citizens’ stories. Share how you do your work and what it brings. Also share the moments when things are not going well. In particular, stories about research insights getting stuck in a cumbersome process or on a system that is already finished help us understand how to work differently.

It often falls short of making a good shareable story as well. We are already so busy. To illustrate, I have spent about 1 day a week for years on this blog and giving and sharing presentations. And even now, on Friday afternoon, I am typing out my presentation from yesterday. I do this because I know it helps our profession move forward. Join me and contribute. After all, I only know what I happen to experience and see in Groningen here. Together we can learn much more.

It’s not real until it’s real

It is great that we are conducting pilots, living labs and experiments. But only when a citizen actually experiences better service, we can get coffee. Therefore, it is not strange to spend as much time sharing your work and following what happens with it as you do the actual research. What good is it if you put in all that effort and then nothing happens with it?

Let us strive to do full circle research. We start with the living world, with the citizen, of course. With the insights, we enter our organization and climb up the waterfall. We can. We work with others to adapt processes and systems, to adjust policies and, if necessary, legislation. We then re-examine how to translate those adjustments into individual experiences.

Full circle research begins and ends in the living world.

Full circle researching begins and ends with the citizen.

When I became a civil servant, my then manager Theo said, “Maike, it’s going to take a very long time for you to change anything in government. But if you succeed, you will have really accomplished something.”

So let’s start continue.

Continue reading?

This blog is full of tips on how to research and get your organization on board. For example:

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How do you do research? Promoklip

Fingers on the keyboard

Foto van persoon die de vingers op het toetsenbord houdt haha
Photo by Daniel Thomas on Unsplash

Writing an academic article on government services is very different from writing a blog. I have noticed that by now. I just sent the draft of my second article to my supervisor and it feels great.

While writing, I had a lot of help from other researchers who shared on Instagram, Youtube or on their blog how they go about it. So I do something in return of course.

In this blog, I show my writing process, how I prepare and what tools I use.

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A different ball game

I am not writing a book, blog or newspaper article, but a scholarly article. This is a very functional text and very different from what I am used to. You always write for your reader, and in this case my reader wants to know as quickly as possible, “what knowledge is in this piece and can I use it for my research?” There are rules associated with writing a scientific paper, which may also vary by research field.

For example, articles have a set structure: introduction, research question and aim, method, findings, discussion and conclusion. This took a lot of getting used to at first. If I shared a nice anecdote in the discussion, my promoters mercilessly moved it to the findings, or worse, deleted it completely from the article. If I gave even a small hint of the findings and what you could do with them, it was moved to the discussion. But as I plow through many articles myself, I am grateful for that logical format.

Photo taken from above of my desk with laptop and all sorts of notes on paper
Notes ready, tapping away

In April 2023, based on the data that 7 years of blogging gave me, I wrote an empirical article. Now I’m working on a conceptual piece. I now have a little more freedom to shape the article, but that also makes it immediately more difficult. The argument for my conceptual framework determines the structure of the article, so that argument must be excellent.

I use two articles as a guide for how to build such a conceptual piece. I make a theoretical synthesis of concepts found in the fields of design, services and public administration (Jaakkola, 2020). I bring these concepts together like an architect building a house (MacInnis, 2011).

Building arguments

PhD research is actually an education: with every step you take, you must first learn how to take it. So I took two courses to help me with writing.

  1. Philosophy of Science at Erasmus University. I learned what makes a good argument and how to check that the structure is sound. We had to analyze others’ texts and dissect them completely.
  2. Creative tools for scientific writing. For example, how to create overview for yourself, how to extract the main message from a paragraph and write towards it, and how to draw the reader into a text and hold their attention. And also: how to avoid writing those scientific sentences that seem like monstrosities. So that, even though it contains a lot of knowledge, it is also a bit of fun to read your article.

My writing process

After all this preparation, nothing stopped me from keeping my fingers on the keyboard. In January, I had three weeks, nonstop. I had also lost my voice, so I really couldn’t plan anything else.

During the second course, I wrote the introduction to the article, describing the research question, the purpose of the article and the approach to arriving at answers. This introduction covered about 500 words and I discussed it at length with my supervisors. After some scraping, I also sent it to Servsig, a service conference in June. It would be nice if I could give a presentation about the article there; I’ll hear about that later in the spring.

I had already done a lot of reading and made notes. As a library for scientific articles, I use Zotero, which is also useful for keeping track of references while writing. I read through all my notes again. I then created a visual outline in Miro with the main arguments and figures I was going to use, as well as the flow from one point to another.

Picture of my screen with all the figures while holding a tasty cup of coffee in front of it so you can't read everything
Expanded Miro board with all figures

So the real writing began quite functionally. I started with the main research questions and built the answer step by step in blocks. I added the main sources.

Then I worked out the blocks point by point. Each sentence I placed on a separate line with a number in front of it. The sentences were short and staccato. The important thing was that the argument was clear, and if it was, I marked the most important line. That was the point I was trying to make. I shuffled back and forth some more, looking critically to see if all the sentences were building toward that conclusion. And then I moved on to the next block.

I want to publish in an English-language journal, but I don’t really think in English yet. So I started in Dutch and translated sentences into English when I was satisfied with the structure. I used Deepl as a translation assistant to help me.

Making beautiful sentences

Now it was time to do what I used to call writing: make beautiful sentences. I removed the numbers and wrote the sentences together. Some sentences I added together. Other sentences I worked out and became as many as three sentences. I divided the information into paragraphs and again marked the main message for each paragraph, building toward the conclusion of the entire block. The sentences were much less staccato, but carried full-blown information. And of course I added all the references of the sources I relied on.

For editing, I used Edit.gpt. Mainly for English grammar, but also to improve overall flow. Some adaptations I adopted, others I did not. Then I checked that the sentences ran smoothly and were not too long. I did this by reading the text aloud.

When that was all done, I moved on to the next block. After completing all the blocks within a segment, I read through everything a few times. I watched the transitions from one point to another. I checked that all the research questions were answered and that the whole thing invited further reading.

And so last month I wrote a whopping 8,000 words.

Photo of my desk and window, with my legs stretched out in the window frame
8,000 words later

This writing is very different from typing a blog. At first, I had to get used to it tremendously. And it required an awful lot of discipline. With a blog, I usually wait for inspiration, but writing an article went step by step. In December, I resolved to take one step every day, or say, 300 words, so that I would have a draft ready by the end of January. And it succeeded. Even on days without inspiration.

Now what I wrote goes “into the mix. That means receiving feedback from my promoters. They will ask a lot of questions about the argument and rearrange things again. Some of the blocks also need better elaboration, but after 8,000 words I had a toasty brain. I am very curious to see what they come back with.

And about the content itself, because I understand that you are also extremely curious about that, there will be a blog later too :).

References

Jaakkola, E. (2020). Designing conceptual articles: Four approaches. AMS Review, 10(1-2), 18-26.

MacInnis, D. J. (2011). A framework for conceptual contributions in marketing. Journal of Marketing, 75(4), 136-154.

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Promoklip

Behind the scenes retrospective blog 2023

Foto van een kronkelende weg door de bergen.
Photo by Jack Anstey on Unsplash

Around the turn of the year, I usually write a review of the past year. And this year, of course, it is about my doctoral research.

The 2022 retrospective blog was about how I set up my research on government services that are good for (the) people. Since this year, I have been sharing an update every month with a nice group of readers on how things are going behind the scenes. That actually makes writing this blog more difficult, because I have so much material now. Death by data is what they call it at the university. All right, let’s get to work!

Would you also like an update in your mailbox every month about my research? Then subscribe to my newsletter (in Dutch).

On a beer mat

Every doctoral research project begins with an exploration of what we already know, to build on that. In the spring, I devised a strategy for this with my supervisors. The best strategy should fit on a beer mat, but a napkin will do as well.

Year 1 research strategy on a napkin from the cafeteria
The research strategy on a napkin

The plan is to do a theoretical exploration as well as a practical exploration. That last one is bonus. I already have a lot of practical experience which happens to be neatly documented on this blog. A shame to do nothing with that. These two explorations reinforce each other and together form the basis for further research.

In March, we saw that there was a very interesting conference in the fall that my practical experiences fit perfectly with. Only the deadline was already in April! It may be that I learned how to write a scientific paper in four weeks then, and I actually still need to recover a bit from it. But it worked and the article was also accepted. In October I presented it in Milan and, of course, I wrote a nice little blog for you about the results: trusting the process is not enough. ✅

The writing process

Then the theory

I did/do need more than four weeks for that. And this is an understatement. Wow, how hard I find this. Fortunately, I really like reading and writing, but it’s really different from what I’m used to.

In May, I took a course in Philosophy of Science for PhD students. I learned things that my sister was already learning during her undergraduate degree in college, but with a backhround of an applied college student, it was new to me. The question “what is knowledge?” was central, and the course helped me immensely to read texts more critically and to better substantiate my own arguments.

I wrote several blogs about these first steps in science:

Over the summer, my promotor Maaike Kleinsmann and I spent three days visiting Karlstad University, where Jasper van Kuijk, co-supervisor lives and works. Here we decided to adjust our strategy for theoretical exploration. We cut it into two parts.

Part 1: because my research is actually in three fields, the literature I want to use is also scattered (and a lot!). We are first going to make some good working definitions and properly conceptualize the phenomenon we are studying, government services, from those disciplines. I use this research framework:

Research Framework
From three disciplines, I zoom in on “my” phenomenon.

Part 2: then from that inner circle we are going to do a good search for everything that has been explored before me. I’m going to look at different sources:

  • case study research on improving government services,
  • research about the practices of officials who create and deliver government services, and
  • so-called “practitioner self-reports,” you know, those idiots from practice who keep a blog about their work ;). But also organizations that once shared a blog, a case study in their annual report, etc. They are not scientific sources (yet), we call it gray literature, but there is valuable info in them that I would like to have included.

To collect all this, I am going to collaborate with master students. And with you of course, you’ll later hear how. But wait, this is 2024 already, I’m doing a retrospective.

An official GO

In October, I had the 12-month meeting, as we call it in Delft. After the first year, you will present the progress of the first year and show the potential of your research to a committee of the university and an external expert.

It was a super fun conversation, with critical questions about the project and at the end a unanimous recommendation to move forward ✅.

In November and December, I worked on the conceptual framework on government services, and gave a series of presentations at my employer: the Executive Agency of Education (DUO). In fact, I was facilitatied to do this research last year by DUO, and I thought that was really special 🧡.

As an advisor, I thought about how DUO can grow from implementer to service organization. I helped with a number of concrete projects such as how we can set up checks of the move-out scholarship differently. And I ended the year with a workshop on my research for the board and tactical management. I also gave a super short summary at our employee event that you can read back here: Executor and Service Provider.

Working openly

Then I would like to say something about “working in the open” in this study. If you have been reading my blog for some time, you know that I share a lot. I find that super fun and it also helps me think.

I noticed last year that the time lines in science are much longer than in practice. Often I was pondering what to write next, because yes, you spend weeks and months on the same thing. Also, you don’t want to give away too many of your insights on your blog if they still need to be in a scholarly article. But I also don’t want to be a gatekeeper of interesting insights, because that’s exactly what we need in government.

Reading views!

I find it a tricky area of tension at times but I have built it up like this now:

  • This blog for short thoughts and to elaborate on something a bit more so that I can ask for feedback from you on it. And of course it will be on the blog as soon as I can share something that is finished.
  • The newsletter, where I can ask you questions even more easily, share loose snippets and communicate about the progress.
  • My second brain in Notion, parts of which are public and which I share through my newsletter. And parts of which are also nicely not public because it’s not finished yet, I’m free to think there and because occasionally what it says is also just crap.

I find working openly more difficult than when I started blogging. That’s because this is the most difficult project I’ve done so far and I am therefore insecure to share intermediate steps that could also fail. And because there are many more people reading along. Sometimes I miss the time when I was still messing around in a corner of the Internet without anyone noticing and caring.

But by working openly, I also learn a lot from you. Last year, more than ever, I received feedback from you on how certain things are going in your organizations, questions that are prevalent and insights from the field as well as from other scholars (hello, new audience). This is very useful for my research, so I will continue this approach in 2024 ✅.

How it continues, well, you’ll have to follow my newsletter for that or wait patiently for another blog to come online.

Have a good 2024!