Cascade into misery
A critical view on "blue skies thinking"
“Generate a cascade of new ideas with blue skies thinking” is the headline on this introductory article that inspired my title today. I mean no offense to the authors, and my opinion on this matter may be controversial with other designers – but it represents my experience with this matter best so I wanted to put it out there.
But let’s start at the beginning: yes, “blue skies thinking” means to remove the “realities of the present” with the expectation that this will allow you to see an issue in a new light and consequently find novel and innovative solutions. Most designers and agencies have their version if this, it may be one of the most fundamental building block of “design thinking”.
At the surface it made a lot of sense to me when I started out. When all I knew was “agency-land”, I often interpreted the behaviour of my clients as being stuck in a rut, always bringing up new reasons why a genius idea for improvement wasn’t possible. Pesky! They needed some fresh thinking – and mind you, that’s often explicitly what designers are brought in for, whether as agents from some shiny consultancy or as internal specialists onto an improvement project.
A ”blue skies” workshop is almost always the first step of such a project: get everyone together in a meeting room with stacks of post-its, sharpies and all the whiteboards one could wheel over, instruct and inspire them to throw everything they know about limitations and blockers overboard, and think freely, openly: what would the ideal state look like, if there were no restrictions?
You’d always have a few curmudgeons in such workshops, the eye-rolling, arm-crossing grump section pointing out that:
“We’ve tried this before and it didn’t work…”
I could write volumnes about this statement.
My design buddies and I came to expect that, and were were quick to explain to such heretics that we remove all obstacle and describe an ideal-state, so that we can attempt to reverse-engineer our way back from there to something that might be feasible in our working reality.
We basically attempt to make a controlled fall out of great height without a parachute, hoping that somewhere on the way down we can grab some branches and stand a somewhat safe landing.
But seriously – how often have you seen that work?
The problem, as I see it nowadays, lies in the very logic of “blue skies thinking” which is so well-represented in the title of the design article:
“Generate a cascade of new ideas”
The conviction is that “new ideas” (and preferably a bucket-load of them) are the ultimate answer to solving a problem that appears to be stuck. I blame Silicon Valley and Steve Jobs for this.
The underlying assumption is that we’re currently lacking the right ideas, or we’re blocked from seeing them. Yet, ideas NEVER seem to be lacking in public service. This may be against public service stigma, but indeed, public servants have well-qualified ideas on how to make things better in their little worlds, and they tend to pull all levers in their reach to try and bring them to life.
It’s the execution and the survival of the ideas through the many, many layers of governance, procurement, hierarchical ownership, strategic planning, legal boundaries, budgets and internal politics that warp and suck the life of any “fresh thinking” until it fizzles out.
In this environment, the “blue skies” process is set up to fail – or worse – set up to disappoint the teams that invest their time and effort into them.
In my experience, some team members do enjoy the process of getting away from all the restrictions for a while and even develop some hope that something might change, only to be crushed when the “sky-based ideas” burn out at re-entry into the atmosphere.
This also happens because public service leaders are quite happy to support a “new ideas” process (and even directly engage in one), but don’t tend to fully grasp the mammoth task of protecting any so-created idea on its path into operational reality. In my experience, they loose interest and move on to the new thing, adding to the development of a new generation of grumpy workshop participants informing the next facilitator that “we tried this before…”.
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The public service works under fundamentally different incentives and norms than a private start-up does, and I’m frustrated that:
we have still don’t seem to have the guts to develop design techniques and methods that fit the public service environment – not Silicon-Valley, self-driving, seed-funded, ideas-are-currency nonsense.
After more than a decade of looking for change in new ideas, I refuse to keep spinning this useless cycle. I look for progress in a few other ways:
Instead of blue-skies sessions, we could run: “what’s different?” sessions and ask:
has there been any change in budget, policy, technology or people in our environment that might have opened a door to revisit an aspect of a public service that we couldn’t move before?
No? That’s fine, we can check again later.
Yes? Then that’s where the starting point for a design process is.
Or, since we live in a world dominated by projects and programmes, why not commandeer some of their techniques that fit into their thinking better? I’m sure I will write more on “Planned vs. Actual” analysis another time, but for now just this much: compare how a public service is supposed to work on paper, and how it actually pans out – because innovation might just mean to make a concerted effort to make a service work the way that it’s actually intended to, rather than attempting to re-inventing it.
Like with so much I write about, many other ideas are tangled up with this. But I’ll call it here for 2024 and will take a break for a month until I’ll be back with “fresh thinking” in the new year.