“We create and re-create narratives throughout our lives to make sense of what happened, to process experience, to interpret and reinterpret our view of the world as life unfolds. I believe that beautiful and difficult process is what it is to be human.” Lauren Oakes For me, significant transitions in life prompt such introspection and recreation of narratives – to reflect on key moments that have shaped who I am and how I think. Recently,...
Posts on Organisational Design
Last week, the OPSI hosted a Rules as Code meet-up for government and inter-governmental organisation (IGO) officials. The meet-up was the first of several that the OPSI intends to host in support of a growing movement in public administration inspired by the promise of Rules as Code (RaC). We at OPSI believe in the promise of RaC as an emergent approach, something we explored in our RaC primer. We think that this is something which...
Christian Bason, Ph.D., is the CEO of the Danish Design Centre Editor’s note: The OPSI has partnered with the Danish Design Centre to further explore the application of tools and methods to public sector challenges. This article explores the varied spectrum of design disciplines and practices and provides guidance on how to choose the best design method, drawing from the diversity of design toolkits in the OPSI Toolkit Navigator. It also signals what is next...
We are taking OPSI’s portfolio exploration and assessment support into the virtual realm. We are asking for 20-30 minutes of your time to share initial thoughts and feedback on our first draft of questions for exploring: The way your organisation’s innovation portfolio is oriented Your organisation’s overall portfolio management capability Following the set of questions, there is an example output based on hypothetical inputs. We…
For better or worse, the minutiae of government operations can easily fly under the radar of the average person. Not so, in the domain of education. The success or failure of an education system hits close to home, as most people have been through it. If they later come to care for learners who go to school, any faraway memories of textbooks and schoolyard games transmute into something more urgent. The school becomes a locus...
OPSI reflects on the Edge of Government event in Dubai.
We suspect that the world does not need another toolkit. There, I said it. This hunch is reinforced when I am met with wincing but affirming smiles each time the topic emerges in conversation with public sector innovators. We want to move beyond the innovation toolkit Hi, my name is Angela Hanson, I am a design lead at the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI). My work involves innovation methods and tools, a topic...
We are living in an age where access to government and politicians is ever increasing, educational levels are rising, and yet we trust government institutions less and less. On 11 October 2017, OPSI ran a workshop exploring “Trust in Government in a Digital Age” as part of the OECD Global Parliamentary Network meeting. The workshop had three goals: first, to introduce parliamentarians to new methods of working on complex problems; second, to put these methods...
In September, OPSI launched the report “System Approaches to Public Challenges: Working with Change” on dealing with complexity in public policy. To take this work forward, we launched a series of workshops with leading countries to discuss how systems approaches could change the everyday functioning of government. We held the first one on September 6, 2017 in Brdo pri Kranju in cooperation with the Prime Minister’s Office of the Government of Slovenia. This work was...
Have you ever felt bogged down or stuck when you were trying to introduce something new? When you just felt like it was easier to give up? At the start of an innovative project – whether it starts with a cool new idea, or with a problem that provides an opportunity to rethink how things are done – there can be a lot of energy and enthusiasm. The sense that things could be better, that...