There are just too many lawyers! In Germany, 45% of people in government leadership positions have a law background. That’s by far the highest number in Europe—and a big problem, according to a new study.
The study ‘Innovation System Germany’ examined ways to “increase the efficiency and agility of public administration”. It identified significant digital skill gaps in the German public sector, which are linked to the lack of diversity of profiles. Related to this, the researchers found that less than 9% of public servants in leadership positions in Germany have multi-year work experience in the private sector. That compares to over 28% in the UK and 38% in Iceland. Only French civil servants have less private sector experience than their German peers.
Welcoming the 2024 Work4Germany cohort
The Work4Germany fellowship is there to change that. It’s bringing experienced innovators from the private sector into Federal government for the 5th year now. This week, the latest cohort started. And I had the chance to welcome the new 14 fellows and their ministerial counterparts. The fellows bring new ways of thinking and working, as well as very much-needed user-centred, outcome-oriented approaches to the ministries. The fellows’ backgrounds couldn’t be more diverse–ranging from organisational development and change management to business operations, communications and strategic design.
I have been supporting our fellowships long before I even joined DigitalService. In 2019, I welcomed a group of fellows at the Government Digital Service in London. In March 2020, the week before the first lockdown, I helped select suitable projects for the new year. In August 2021, I ran a remote seminar on ‘learning organisations and agile working environments’ for Work4Germany.
On Tuesday, I talked about transformative design in government. I showed what public service transformation looks like in practice, introduced the cohort to the ServiceStandard, and explained why a deeply inclusive user-centred design approach is vital to improving people’s experience with the state.
Most of my colleagues at DigitalService have worked in the private sector before. In the ministries, such remains a rarity. While the 14 new fellows are a tiny number compared to the about 500,000 employees in the Federal government, they have started to make a difference. Various people of previous years joined their ministries full-time after finishing their fellowship because they saw they could make a dent.
It’s also something we see elsewhere. The US have the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows, France’s Direction interministérielle du numérique (DINUM) established the concept of Designers d’Intérét Général, and there’s Canada’s Free Agents. All programmes are distinct. Yet, they shake up old structures, bring new skills and ideas into the public sector and change its culture. So, I cannot wait to see what change Work4Germany’s non-lawyers can instil!
Capturing the state of user-centred design maturity in Germany
It’s been about 15 months since we started the user-centred design community for the German public sector via the NExT network. In the inaugural event, we surveyed how user-centred your organisation is. About 50 people participated. It’s based on the UCD maturity quiz Clara and Kara developed a few years ago. We re-ran the survey this week.
It’s been over a year since we ran the first UCD maturity survey in the German public sector. In our @nextnetz.bsky.social community gathering today, we kicked off the 2nd round. I cannot wait to see the results and compare them. You can run it in your org, too: docs.google.com/document/d/1…
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) Sep 3, 2024 at 20:49
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Last year, we missed the opportunity to publish the results. Now might be an even better time to do so because we have 2 data sets to compare. Or, rather, we will have them in a few days. I will leave the survey open for some more days as the number of returns is still lower than last year.
Discussing what makes a good form
It seems that we have a rhythm with community work. We aim for four events per event series for the local meetup and the cross-sector gathering. That is manageable for us and keeps these event series on attendees’ minds without exhausting them either.
This week, we ran our third NExT UCD event in 2024. The topic was designing good forms. Incorporating the feedback from the last round, we limited the number of talks to only two. We heard from our colleagues from the City of Cologne who already presented as part of last year’s 24-hour conference.
The colleagues from @stadt-koeln.de share how they improve letters and administrative communication by structuring them better, simplifying language, and keeping them legally binding. They shared their #ContentDesign principles & content style guide. Great to see strong examples from local folks!
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) Sep 3, 2024 at 13:57
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In the exchange sessions and break-out rooms, I heard from colleagues across the country, mainly from the municipality level, about their day-to-day work on forms with the littlest capacity and capability.
One person working in a mid-sized city told me they are changing their forms solution for the 3rd time in a decade. Besides other responsibilities, together with a colleague, they have the task to recreate between 300 and 400 forms within the next 12 months. They pay a high license fee, so running the existing forms is no option. Some forms are simple and have no connection to case-working systems. Others are much more complex. They integrate with payment and electronic identity systems and tie to backend systems.
One must wonder if there is no better way to service 400 forms across 10,000 municipalities than everyone paying some private sector companies high license fees.
In the second presentation slot, my colleague Paul presented cross-service thinking on who needs to be involved in making successful forms. He drew up what we have seen multiple times for the short talk. His ‘triangle of actors’ contains 3 parties that need to be involved to create successful forms:
- Those responsible for forms – eg policy officers
- those who process forms – eg case workers
- those who use forms – ie users
While working on justice services, Paul consulted with colleagues working on tax and parental benefit services to validate his observations from one service area.
Using the momentum, Paul put together a short proposal for Code for America’s second edition of FormFest. It’s titled “Successful form design needs more than the users’ perspective”. FormFest takes place in early December. Let’s see if we can share our observations and tips on the international stage.
Doubling and then tripling our content design team
Linn, our second content designer, started on Monday. On Friday, we agreed to make another person an offer.
They will still have to accept it, but our content design sub-discipline seems to be going from 0 to 3 within less than half a year.
Today, our 2nd #ContentDesigner started at Digital Service! After our #UserResearch discipline quadrupled throughout the year, content design is catching up. With the first draft of a content style guide for public services in German, I want us to quickly create tangible value across the sector.
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) Sep 2, 2024 at 18:10
With content designers in 3 service teams and 2 different service areas, justice services and parental benefit services, we can think about our broader approach. In the justice space, we will trial a unique setup that I have not seen elsewhere: pairing a content designer with a legal designer. Both of them were excited when I proposed that to them. And the team and other people around are just as excited and curious.
Struggling with more diverse and inclusive hiring
Wednesday and Thursday were difficult.
A Person of Colour stopped the application process from their side. They sent a message that they did not see that our organisation is international and diverse enough.
While we have 21 nationalities, 91% have German citizenship, and our leadership team is all white people. Our organisation is not as diverse as it could and, one can argue, should be.
I knew we needed to do more regarding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The design and user research team is more diverse than a year ago. But overall, we have more people called Magdalena than Black women. And more people are named Christian or Christoph in our organisation than we have Muslim colleagues.
The organisation isn’t all white. Our DEI working group is doing good work, but we do a relatively poor job of making the ongoing efforts visible. This is feedback I got from another applicant some weeks ago.
We recently ran privilege check sessions over lunch. We ran workshops on how to make our work environment more inclusive. We look at data. And we have awareness posters up. There is a recently created little privilege mosaic game that people keep engaging with while in the kitchen space. It’s for educational purposes.
At the same time, our extensive ‘who we are‘ page almost exclusively shows white people. So, when non-white applicants don’t feel like our organisation is a place where they can thrive and instead fear there is a non-inclusive environment, talented people go elsewhere. It’s that simple.
We are a young organisation that was established in 2020. We mostly hire people from the private sector. So, people have expectations from the fairly diverse Berlin tech sector.
“Embrace diverse perspectives” is 1 of 6 values of our organisation, yet we don’t state what we are doing to ensure that. So there is more to do and more to communicate clearly.
Increasing team diversity links to the mentioned organisational value but also to 1 of the 12 qualities for effective design organisations by Skinner & Merholz I am using as a guide: “Diversity of perspective and background”. I mentioned some activities in the note from week 45 that we have not progressed enough. I will prioritise and make the goals for the coming months more explicit.
To make services work better for all people, we need to have service teams that reflect the population of Germany. Our Wie viele Menschen? tool gives us some answers for some dimensions and protected characteristics. For others, we need an employee demographics survey as a starting point. Such a survey was a vital starting point for the design team at GDS. With a data baseline, we could initiate various impactful activities to increase the team’s diversity. So, there is some work ahead of me.
What’s next
Kannika is leading. I am supporting. On Wednesday, we will run our first external peer review for the new parental benefits calculator in a hybrid setup. That is two novelties in one session. So far, all peer reviews have taken place in person, and they only included peers from other service teams inside Digital Service. Changing two fairly fundamental things at the same time can be risky, but we have to progress.
We plan to write a blog post about our evolving peer review format in the coming weeks and publish supporting guidance for others to follow.
Next week, I’ll seriously finish some blog posts. On Friday, I’ll be travelling by train from morning till evening, so I should get some things done.