My “why” habit

How life as a service designer drove me into a PhD

In this newsletter, I like to talk about the patterns and cyclical behaviour by which our public sector organisations attempt to change and adopt new ways of working. First, I had begun to see repeating cycles developing in my own working life: for years I feel that I was hired into jobs in which I was supposed to either directly improve a system or process, or help the organisation set the conditions to do so. With a few exceptions, I'd find myself hitting brick walls - smack bang in the middle of my job description.

With some distance now, 3 years into my PhD on public management, I know a lot more about why that is: public service institutions continuously get impulses that tell them they need to be more “people-centred” and “accessible” - both from the top and from the outside. So it makes sense that they create positions or write contracts with a specific aim to do that. They just try to do the right thing, answer the obvious need.

But when you as a specialist try to carry out these responsibilities, you sooner or later into a ceiling effect. This usually happens at the point when you can point your finger at the systemic issues, the governance procedures, workarounds, funding logistics and competing interests, that ultimately prohibit your organisation from meeting its own strategic goals. And the people who hired you – they see your point, they’d like to help, but they tend to realise alongside you that the barriers are way beyond their discretion. Now they have a frustrated nerd at their hand, and they try and do their best to make you function within the system.

Perhaps it's a version of to the Peter principle – the idea that people get promoted to the level of their own incompetence.

Service designers work towards the level of their own incapacitation.

More than once, I found myself wondering if my very job description pitted me against my organisation. The logic appeared to be:

We want you to challenge the status quo and bring about change – but not like that! Softly, slowly, without disturbing anything… So really, by not changing anything about the fundamentals at all.

I've talked about this so often with my colleagues. I'm also well aware that people in many corporate functions feel that their expertise is underappreciated and underutilised. Particularly lawyers and accountants, “if they had called me earlier, I could have made this a lot easier for us all.” Fair.

David Graeber’s seminal rant on “Bullshit Jobs” hit quite hard for me (if you haven’t read this yet, do it). His post took off because he described something many perceived, but could not quite put a finger on.

In the case of people- and change-centered jobs - it’s not that these job should not exist per se, or that their purpose is nonsensical – it’s the intangible, but persistent gap between intention and reality that these kind of functions fall into.

Getting personal

The most infuriating thing to me is that while you're struggling to negotiate your way out of this gap and try to find a way to at least “add value” in some shape or form,

you watch your employer continuously issuing new strategies, vision papers, and organisational value statements that parrot the very language that you can't get anyone to listen to.

(Never more than in the context of restructuring - hence my interest in this particular method, btw)

You see executive leaders declare that “people are at the centre” of a project you’re working on – while you’ve done nothing but twist yourself into knots in an attempt to convince the project manager to make space for the most basic kind of user-research.

This state of affairs becomes very personal and introspective after some time. Because you (and often your manager) might start asking: what am I doing wrong?

I must not be using the right language, I must get better at managing my stakeholders, playing the internal politics. It’s up to me to understand and play the system better. If only I found the right way to make my case… it would work, right?

I know so many people-centred, UX, design-y people who chastise themselves, and wonder why they can't just stop caring about the level of impact their work can have – why not just do the job as far as it's possible and be ok with that?

After committing to this way of thinking, I once found myself in the most vacant, vapid cycle of inside baseball. Spending all my time in coffee catch-ups to “manage relationships”, get the goss, and try to find a sliver of opportunity to do the job that I was hired to do. Jokingly, senior managers introduced me with light-hearted jest “we don’t really know what they but, but anyway…”, and I endlessly refined my slide deck that tried to explain what the heck my job was.

I was hired to explain my existence, over and over again. Then I had enough.

This is where a counselor I once saw through Employee Assistance talked about my “why” habit. That I seemed to have an inherent need to understand WHY something was happening to me - considering it was a human-built environment I was wrestling with.

I could see what I experienced was undeclared but consistent, it had form but no substance, it showed reliable patterns of behaviour that seemingly acted exactly in opposition to what was articulated (and financially invested in).

Why? Why the heck was that?

This is what ultimately drove me into the arms of academia. As odd as that sounds...

I said early on that I consider my PhD a form of self-therapy, and I was bang on with that. You get a lot of talk in your early days of a doctoral study that you’re about to embark on a rollercoaster. But for me, it’s been 3 years of hard work and focus, but I can’t say that I had any bigger downturns (yet, touch wood).

While I kept waiting for something to go wrong, I actually seemed to thrive. I have my own project - and though the work is lonely and against my natural inclination to reflect and discuss things with peers, it just works.

My PhD has forced me to follow a structure of exploration, sensemaking and formal articulation of the institutional dynamics that I wrestled with, that turned out to be the tonic I needed.

The fact that I may be stressed and under a degree of pressure, but I feel a great sense of fulfilment and meaning in my work, tells me a lot about what I’ve been lacking in (not all, but) most of my work.

Comfort in knowledge

At the outset I was worried about the amount of reading I know I’d have to do – but as it turned out, reading papers by some nerd in another country that addresses the same paradox issue I’ve been banging my head against for years was (and is) immensely relieving.

I learned I was not crazy for seeing things as I did, I was not alone – there are others out there who take this serious enough to commit their time to the study of these strange patterns in human behaviour – and perhaps most importantly:

There are names for the phenomena I knew were there, but couldn’t graps: organised hypocrisy, institutional amnesia, bureau-shaping and path dependency, to name a few.

Illustrative photo of a pathway through books Photo by Jaredd Craig

Here’s why I now know this to be so important for my sanity:

The very core existence of any institution depends on its persistence, its stability. Therefore, there are all these dynamics and incentives that defend its ingrained norms and habits from interference. Each actor inside the organsation enacts them, often quite unaware, or by cutting themselves loose from personal responsibility by declaring that needs must.

The addition of any types of roles into such structures whose main purpose is to develop, modernise and change that institution are fundamentally in a paradoxical position. From the outset, they don’t stand much of a chance.

That said – there are institutional actors who collectively and individually have access to the levers that COULD make a difference. If we really wanted those change-focused capabilities to have an impact, we COULD rework the permitting dynamics. The list of what that would take is long and cumbersome... and I won’t even go into it, because one individual leader with a certain conviction alone will not do –

The critical mass that it would take to really shift things is one of the main defense mechanisms that the institution has against disruption.

That’s the theory – but in the end this plays out on the battle field of people and their livelihood. A manager is put into a position where they’re expected to bring in this people-centered, change-focused capability - so they do. And when they carry out the tasks that they’re hired to do, the manager will get plenty of institutional signals to show that this behaviour is actually unwanted. So the manager has to do what they can to shape the person they’re hired into a worker that fulfils the strategic expectation (have “customer focus “), but not actually interfere with how the institution functions: so into a ritual, a performance, a rubber stamp.

I can see these things now, because I’ve dunked my head into a barrel of research for 3 years. I can label dynamics and recurring patterns for what they are. That has afforded me an emptional distance that I can carry as a shield. And most important for my sanity:

I know that what I experienced was, and is, real. I can believe myself and my instincts. And that’s worth 3 years of discovery, every moment of it.

I’ve started this substack to have a weekly opportunity to pull apart what I learned, what I see, and what I can articulate better and better.

That said, I’ve come to a point in my PhD when I can see the runway to land on, fast approaching. I hope to hand in my thesis in October (ish), and my focus needs to narrow more and more to get that done.

So while I believe I still have a lot to share, I’ll need to get more protective of my time in the next months and write here when I have something burning to get off my chest. So you might see me post a little less frequently in the next few months.

With this more introspective post, I’ll be back with more substance very soon.