Reflections on three years of strategic design at the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy
On being a strategic designer/leader… and what’s next.
The answer to unlocking a new experience, product, or service is sometimes buried deep within the organizational culture or the policy environment; the difference between traditional design practice and strategic design is that strategic design recognizes that this ‘dark matter’ is part of the design challenge… this notion of dark matter suggests organizations, culture, and the structural relationships that bind them together as a form of material, almost. It gives a name to something otherwise amorphous, nebulous but fundamental. — Dan Hill, 2012
This is a reflection on working with the dark matter of my organization for the past three years and the state of strategic design in the BC Public Service (BCPS). Opinions, observations, and reflections are entirely my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer or colleagues.
It’s been a great run as Director, Strategic Design at the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy (ENV), but I’m stepping away to join the Ministry of Energy, Mines, and Low Carbon Innovation (EMLI) as Director, Strategic Design at the Energy Decarbonization Division. This 7-month temporary assignment is a natural outgrowth of collaborative work ongoing between ENV and EMLI and I’m excited for all the compelling challenges that await.
Introducing strategic design to the ministry
In 2021 I was potentially the first person to hold an explicit strategic design position in the BCPS. It was a dream opportunity to step into this role and a privilege to define the position along the way. For many years I’ve been adamant the future of design leadership in the public sector would reside within the space that owns the problem; that is, not dependant on consultants or centralized teams — and I’m more bullish on that model of internal capacity and competency than ever. Our ‘dark matter’ is increasingly more complex than Hill described in 2012, with the need to consider DRIPPA obligations, policy entanglements drastically misaligned with acute civic problems, and the spectre/opportunities of artificial intelligence (just to name a few!).
Three years in and we’re seeing this role spun up at other ministries (Transportation and Attorney General), though more service design in positioning. The mission and remit of a design director should be appropriate to context: some organizations may be laser-focused on delivering priority services critical to both the public and government staff alike. Other design leadership roles may work more in the systems/strategic realm, working to reconfigure teams, cohere policy-to-delivery value chains, and transform the very nature of the organization as service provider. I feel as if my time at ENV has been a mixture of both, gliding between the macro and the micro, and I’m grateful for that variety.
Coming in, I knew how to be a designer; it was the leadership (and managerial) part that presented the growth space. Assuming a director-level position in government necessarily means a more intimate participation in bureaucratic machinations including human resources, budgeting, treasury board, procurement, and governance. I’m grateful for the handholding I’ve received in learning these skills, all of which are core to the strategic design skillset required to affect change at a leadership level. As I recently emphasized on a panel: if you want to be a design leader, you will have to lean into these often-dry aspects of working in a large organization, and furthermore, see them as key to your success as a strategic designer — the very material of design itself. To quote Honey Dacanay, bureaucracy is a system feature, not a bug.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m going to treat this piece as a standard retrospective: what went well, what was challenging, and opportunities for improvement moving forward.
What’s gone well
Overall, this experience has been wildly positive. I’ll do my best here to break down the discrete components of what’s made this role a success.
Leadership support. You simply cannot succeed in a middle-management style position (especially a novel one) without it. From my Deputy Minister through executive and divisional leadership, I’ve enjoyed explicit endorsement of ‘designerly’ ways of working since day one. I’ve also benefited from the trickle-down aircover this provides; when leadership signals this is how the work will get done, it’s the only way to really empower designers to do what they’re there for. Since early days working with BC Parks (check out our first ever weeknote!) I’ve had the wind at my back — so to executive at other Ministries, please offer this kind of active endorsement if you’ve put design in a position of influence. Otherwise, you risk the ‘tissue rejection’ sometimes experienced when the adoption of novel skillsets is refused by the powerful norms of the legacy organization. I applaud ENV executive for all they’ve done to help instantiate design at the Ministry.
Being a T-shaped designer. It’s not revelatory that a generalist skillset with deep thread of domain expertise is appropriate to a leadership role, but I can’t say I developed my career that way intentionally. Rather, I’ve always been a dabbler, interested in all types of design, from theory to making. Practicing as a service designer in the public sector for the preceding 5+ years helped mature my skills through the design spectrum, from content and interactions to research, generative methodologies, and systems thinking. I’ve also had great mentorship to grow my ability to coalesce datasets comprised of varying threads. In short, I was able to bring a lot to this role and offer quality ideation and critique across all tendrils of ‘design,’ with a special focus on qualitative inquiry and sharp synthesis.
So what education and professional background might benefit designer leaders? I believe it is challenging for someone who’s (for example) an expert UX designer but without a social sciences education or extensive research experience to step into the leadership domain; you simply need to be better rounded. For designers: broaden your skills at every opportunity. Understand how government works, politically and bureaucratically. To exec hiring the role: look for someone who can contribute more than what you might normally consider ‘design.’ In my experience, the most dynamic design leaders come from backgrounds of which formal design practice is only one part.
Amazing collaborators, strong relationships. Public service may be the ultimate team sport. It’s teams-of-teams which deliver outcomes and the dependencies we have on each other are irreducible. I’m known for raving about the culture at ENV; every day I note the positivity, constructive attitude, collaborative spirit, and solutions-oriented approaches that my colleagues bring to work. It goes without saying, but designers wouldn’t be anywhere without it. Every division at the Ministry has embraced design in their process, disruptive and disorienting as it’s been at times. But success is a positive feedback loop, and results legitimize the practice and mission. It hasn’t been easy or a linear progression, but we’ve shown up as earnest and honest collaborators, and so have the program areas we work with. This work is rarely transactional — relationships are the glue and fuel which makes things happen, and it’s hard to hyperbolize how important that is. I’m very grateful for the personal and professional friendships I’ve made at ENV, and how I’ve been embraced as a valuable contributor by my colleagues. It means everything.
Delivering results. The Service Transformation Branch strategy has always been delivery. We’ve consciously chosen to forgo word-heavy docs and slide decks in favour of being in the work with our collaborators; less talk, more action. Again, to the aircover provided by our leadership, we’ve been able to employ this approach to much success since the branch was formed. To name a few public-facing products/services we’ve had our hands in transforming and/or launching: bcparks.ca, camping.bcparks.ca, cleanbc.ca, goelectricbc.gov.bc.ca, betterhomesBC.ca, and Site Remediation Services at the Environmental Protection Division. But results come in many more shapes and forms than launches. Generally, that’s just the final output of a series of incremental successes (and setbacks) along the way.
I think we’ve done a strong job of investing our skills in areas which need them most at a point in time, then moving on to the next when things are stable. I’m grateful we haven’t received too much prescriptive direction from our exec with regards to allocation of effort, and rather have been allowed to orient ourselves to the priority problems to be solved and areas to bolster. ‘Delivering results’ for me has been just as much about teams, trust, process, culture, and how design can make for a more future-ready organization.
Expanding and embedding design. In under three years design has scaled across the ministry, finding its way into the nooks and crannies of program delivery through staff, sector partnerships, and/or ongoing vendor relationships. This is a huge win, and part of the normalization process for design as we seek to in-house our capacity to research, conceptualize, design, build, and improve products and services that meet the needs of the public. We have a lot to deliver on in our government digital plan, and truly multidisciplinary teams are one of the keys in that journey. We’ve also recently come to a sector agreement to standardize design classifications/job descriptions to allow easier hiring directly into core program areas, whether working on capital projects or in operational models. This is something we’ve been building towards for years, and it’s a major step forward in making ‘design’ just as common a team role as policy or business analyst.
One of the most important aspects of this role since 2021 has been to make it agnostic of me as an individual/agitator; that design could thrive in the ministry regardless of who ‘leads,’ or if there’s even a formal design leadership position at all (although there always should be, so long as this remains an organization of formal hierarchies and power/decision matrixes). When design is seen as a normal and necessary part of the service delivery process for British Columbians, I know I’ve done my job.
What’s been challenging
Policy to delivery. We’ve made strides but we’ve so much further to go. This recent piece by Laura Nelson-Hamilton is an inspiring reflection on policy/service design. As she notes, when policy has its own process, design and policy can often seem — and even feel — quite separate. And this is still where we find ourselves in ENV. I would have liked to make more progress on the deeper integration of designers into policy processes and the acceptance of ‘design’ as a natural part of the policy lifecycle. Our collaboration with colleagues from ENV’s Strategic Services Division on policy challenges (as related to service delivery) held much promise — we need to continue investing in this multidisciplinarity, stitching into policy work early, and framing service design as necessarily end-to-end, unpacking all nodes and connections in a service value chain — policy to delivery.
Legible practices. I reflected on the need for legibility and structure in my 2022 year in review post, emphasizing the need for tactility, coherency, and repeatability in rooting and scaling design in government. Questions I asked included:
What might be design principles specific to the ENV context? How might these align with BC’s digital principles?
Earlier this year designers across ENV co-developed design principles as a ministry practice community. This was a proud accomplishment as it was truly democratic in creation and speaks to our values and ethics. As well in 2023, The Ministry of Citizen Services launched the BC Government Digital Code of Practice, an evolution of the Digital Principles, substantiating what the development and delivery of good digital products and services looks like. We’re closely aligned with this corporate framework with unique aspects that speak to our domain and practice maturity. ‘Using’ these principles on an ongoing basis is less about rubric and more for meta-reference; are we doing the work in a good way? But I’d suspect designers across ENV would all approach this differently, based on context.
What are good practices for how we might work with our collaborators in the program areas? What does effective practice look like in setting the stage and integrating with product teams? What artefacts might help make our approach and practice legible?
These three questions require further interrogation, co-creation, and framework building. Program areas deserve consistency and predictability when working with design; as mentioned previous, we need to normalize design as to make it part of the basic functions of public service, not the esoteric craft it’s still often experienced as. Consistency is key — the ENV design cohort needs to develop standards of engagement, pattern language, output/artefact norms, and other conventions that just make design feel like an ordinary aspect of the mission. Much like the ENV design principles, this should be developed collaboratively by the designer cohort with inputs from program partners.
What story might we tell about design at ENV?
Narrative crafting is at the heart of design and key in how we move from synthesis to action. Given the often-reactive nature of my days through my tenure, I’ve yet to work on an overarching frame for our what, why, and how of design at the Ministry. I feel that the core value propositions of design — human-centricity, evidence-informed decision making, risk management, incrementalism, etc. — are decently well understood across the organization at this point. However, I’d yet to distill these threads of design’s role as the new normal into a few slides (the deliverable holy grail of government). And while it’s easy to eye roll at the cliché, a concise and pointed summary of the rationale for your role (and those of your peers) is a very worthwhile endeavour.
Governance. A word that means many different things to different people. In my opinion, governance is generally experienced more as a noun than a verb when it comes to [digital] services and the teams which deliver them. There are committees that receive briefings and consider the progress of things, but they often have less of a focus on decision velocity that’s right-sized for the iterative delivery model of design/product teams. It’s been tough trying to rectify legacy governance norms against the need to expedite decisions when working in designerly/agile ways. I wrote on this extensively at the end of 2022 and I think our progress has been varied. Leadership and staff transitions across key files didn’t help. Sometimes it takes a minor crisis to establish effective governance, other times it simply take a while to find the right people, rhythms, and outputs.
Ultimately this continues to be a narrative alignment exercise: who is the program/service for? What kind of decision rubric does that necessitate? How can the bias be to action, and how might that be a safe baseline? Who holds the purse strings and what are their incentives? How is risk managed proportionately and with a default to delivery? What role does power play in these calculations? Who is the decider and how might they feel empowered to do so?
Career trajectory. Public sector design leadership is still a nascent career, and, in my opinion, its ceilings are quite tangible. I felt very seen when Jen Pahlka described the frustration of the government change agent in this podcast with Ezra Klein; just enough power to get some stuff done, not enough to always make the change stick; inertia and resistance both up, down, and laterally in the system. Don’t get me wrong, I love the work, but I’m career driven and have a solid 20+ years ahead of me still. I’ve pretty much topped out how design leadership currently manifests as in the BC Public Service, but I do see myself as a ‘designer’ first and ‘leader’ second; does this mean I need to reverse the ordering of this self-image to keep progressing in the organization? Is an even more generalist skillset as public sector leader (with natural resource sector depth) the strategy to open new career opportunity?
I’d really like to see a Chief Design Officer position in the BCPS, located in central government, reporting to the Chief Digital Officer or government CIO. This position would carry mandate to standardize tooling platforms, practice, and team structures across the ministries, establish pathways for design, review key capital cases for the role of design and research, etc. I’d also like to see consistent director-level design positions central in every ministry (possibly out of Deputy Minister offices). Currently design is led across government in diffused and ad-hoc ways by folks who care a lot yet don’t wield much power to affect matters structurally. It would seem design as a senior leadership core skillset is still something for a v-next of the public service, and I’m still on the pointy end of things. I hope this organizational evolution happens within the span of my career.
Opportunities
Service transformation as a platform. The holistic service transformation practice means centrally coordinated excellence stitching together policy, cross-cultural collaboration, nation-to-nation partnerships with Indigenous peoples, data, technology, and design into something cohesive, coherent, and available just-in-time. Does this attempt to provide service transformation as a ‘platform’ (STaaP)?
Riffing on Tim O’Reilly’s concept of Government as a Platform, I believe STaaP might provide a legible, navigable, and predictable foundation from which to undertake and deliver complex transformation initiatives. Delivering our corporate services as a platform is about untangling the omnipresent knots for users (our collaborators). This model of ‘platform’ allows for seamless interoperability between core services (to leverage the technology metaphor, our ‘apps’) that can be configured or extended for context. More of X, less of Y, ease of access, and relative certainty in process and outcome. This will require new infrastructure to underpin these efforts in open, sustainable, and approachable ways, but should not be limited to something like a portal or playbook. The transformation platform is qualitative and relational. It requires unconventional team competencies, compositions and collaborations, silo decomposition, new standards for delivery, and occasional untethering from the fixed (generally financial) cycles of government.
I think we’ve made important progress on the integration of our Ministry corporate services into something bigger than the sum of their parts, but there’s so much more to synthesize. Vision and narrative are key but it’s the learning-by-doing in a risk-tolerant environment that will produce new legible practices. These experiences will form new organizational capacities that could be bounded and framed as STaaP, to be ever measured, iterated, and improved.
Design coordination across government. First, a big shoutout to the folks convening and programming the BCPS design community entirely off the side of their desks. But this isn’t really about professional development or networking. Most this opportunity goes to my notes in the career trajectory section above; it’s challenging to coordinate design across ministries (for example, to delivery truly connected services) when you don’t have a direct contemporary to work with. What I’m making the case for is congruous, distributed design leadership as a critical gateway to our organizational delivery ambitions.
Most ministries delivering complex omni-channel services are still reliant on vendor support which lacks the open-ended time (and budget) flexibility required to really navigate the dark matter of their problem space. Design leadership positions at every ministry isn’t a cure-all but at least provides a consistency of practice and the opportunity for the cohort to coordinate their work in proactive and intentional ways, as a supplement to the steering committee-style model that is generally leveraged in multi-ministry delivery spaces.
No one in the BC Government ‘owns’ design, and no one group is responsible for setting and supporting practice standards across the entirety of the organization. This would be a huge lift, and likely untenable as a mandate, even with only ~200 designers currently working amongst the over 35,000 public servants in BC. Design shows up differently depending on conditions; embedding design in a consistent way across every ministry enables self-organization, collaborative standardization, and innovation based on context. It creates effective line of sight into shared problems, opens opportunity to design and build together with patterns and platforms, and delivers better outcomes that bolster government’s efforts overall.
Final thoughts
I hope this long-form reflection is of use to designers, design leaders, and leadership in general. Heck, I hope there’s kernels in here for all public servants, or anyone who’s worked in large, complex organizational environments. Strategic design is still very much a build-the-plane-while-you-fly it career, but in all honestly, that’s how I like things — it can be quite freeing if you’re able to sit with the ambiguity and uncertainty.
Design is here to stay in public service and the further dissemination and embedding of design leadership positions is inevitable. I hope the folks who step into these roles will bring deep curiosity for the esoterica of government, a passion for helping colleagues and the public alike, and the stamina required to work in a bureaucracy. I again extend my gratitude to everyone to everyone who’s taught me something along the way — I only hope the reciprocity was there from my side. See you soon, let’s figure out how to electrify everything.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this piece, please comment below or send me an email — Kevin
Thanks to Marlieke Kieboom, Kelsey Singbeil, and Cyrus Molavi for feedback on version of this post.
