We Should Not Build Bridges Together

In an elaborate interview, Fredrik Scheide, special strategic advisor at the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (Nav), shares his view on international government service design. A deep dive into best practices from Norway, law-making and legislation, clear language and accessibility, whistling for lost canaries, fake mustaches in Alabama, ziplines, and the necessity to stop building bridges together… but to also build bridges together?!

Fredrik is an experienced leader with extensive experience in transformation processes and digital transformation, in both the private and public sector. He works extensively on value-driven product and service development, and in recent years has worked on establishing agile governance frameworks for the public sector. He has led the work on Nav’s product development model and benefits framework.

‘We Need a Bridge’

Let’s kick off with a story illustrating a key message about what we get wrong in government service design, based on a true story. Norway is home to many islands. For one of these islands, there was a strong demand from its inhabitants for a bridge to the mainland, or at least, that’s what politicians believed, but we’ll get to that. 

The ferry service to travel from the island to the mainland and vice versa, was getting increasingly more insufficient, due to increasing needs to frequently be on the mainland. This ‘need’ from the island’s few hundred inhabitants, spearheaded a campaign of local politicians who took their constituents at face value, and promised that a bridge would indeed be built.

The bridge was built, and as you can probably imagine, building bridges is extremely expensive, easily hitting a billion euro’s, dollars, whatever currency applies to you. To compensate for this huge investment, people were expected to pay a toll, and a hefty one at that. This resulted in all kinds of unwanted and unexpected side effects: “For example, people bought a second car: one for on the island, one for on the mainland. They would walk across the bridge to avoid having to pay a toll upon each crossing. Other people purchased a boat to get to the mainland and back. Taking the ferry was no longer an option, as the service was suspended. Most families ended up moving from the island due to the toll.”

“What the politicians failed to understand, is that going to the open market with a request to ‘purchase’ a bridge, will steer engineers to only present ideas on how to build the perfect bridge, meeting all desired specifications”, Fredrik shares. “Had they gone to the market with a request for a solution on how to get the inhabitants to the mainland (the actual need), without mentioning a bridge, they would have gotten alternative solutions, like a tunnel, better ferries, or perhaps… a zipline”, Fredrik says jokingly. 

Asking the wrong questions

This story shows how we often rush to find a solution without truly understanding the underlying problem or need. Instead of exploring the situation, we jump straight to alternatives that fit a set of assumed specifications.

Take the bridge, for example. Was it really necessary to build one? What if, instead of asking “How should we build a bridge?”, the question had been: “Why do we need a bridge?”. If the answer was the obvious one — because they need to get to the other side — then the solution space instantly expands. A tunnel, an improved ferry service, or any number of other options might emerge.

“But what if we went a step further and asked, and just to make a point: why do the inhabitants need to get to the other side in the first place? Perhaps the real need was simply to improve communication. In that case, a physical connection might not be required at all — perhaps something as simple as setting up a digital service could have met the need, without building or operating any transport infrastructure.

Unboxing governments

This story is a perfect example of our tendency to build bridges immediately when someone needs something, without understanding the actual problem and if it needs a bridge as a solution. It tangles into Fredrik’s view on how we design services, whereby a lack of understanding problems and peers, limits us in creating and optimizing services. “Government services are designed in a fixed framework, a box. We leave little room for creativity, to think outside that box and go out of our way to really understand a problem. That’s how we end up building bridges all the time. In my experience, innovation just as often lies in the decision of not building anything, and sometimes stopping something yields more value.”

He elaborates. “Legislation acts as the box. All we’re doing in government is translating legislation into code and services. The law is the specification upon which we build. When we speak of an agile government, we can only be as agile as the legislations we’re translating”, Fredrik insightfully shares, also highlighting how lawmakers essentially determine what services should ‘look’ like. “This way of designing and optimizing services is almost the standard in every country.”

Thus, service designers are basically limited by whatever legislation was created separately from them, ‘separately’ being the key issue here. “We create the box by… sticking to our own box”, Fredrik shares poetically, by which he means: if lawmakers, service designers, technologists, content creators, and many other public servants don’t work together, there will always be a conflict of boxes, and a lot of bridges.

What if you bring lawmakers into your design process? What if you help them understand the problem you’re trying to solve and think of a solution together? This has been the essence of service design in Norway for the last five to six years. “If you sit at the table together, lawmakers will become less afraid of making mistakes in legislation, because they understand the problem and feel part of the collective effort of finding a solution. What’s more, technologists, content creators, service designers and what have you, will understand how to tweak a solution to comply with legislation, and let’s not forget, actually challenge the legislation. Due to this multi-disciplinary approach, legislation then no longer is ‘fixed’, it’s malleable. It becomes bendable, like a circle, and not fixed, like a box.”

Creating legislation

Including jurists and lawmakers helps to co-create new paragraphs in the law of legislation. Colleagues in law can then open the dialogue with lawmakers from the overarching departments, who can then discuss proposals with politicians. “On every layer, colleagues will be included in the design process, with a clear understanding of why certain legislation is necessary to address a specific problem. It’s a democratic, open process.”

“Our approach at Nav to working multi-disciplinary with legislation, differs greatly from most countries. Our law book is only one book of a few thousand pages, which seems like a lot, but it really isn’t. Most countries have several books, some taking it very far. For example, countries like Germany and the United States have more than a dozen books on child support alone.”

This illustrates the different approach per country. In many – if not most – countries , a great deal of the laws are incorporated at the ‘highest’ level of the law, whereas in Norway, general laws are stated in the law book, but the interpretation of that law, is determined by the underlying ministries and agencies, making it much more agile and malleable.

Departments are given responsibility of a section of the law. Organizations linked to that department give practical interpretations of that law. For example, one of the services our agency offers, is unemployment benefits. The law states you have to be an active job seeker to be eligible for these benefits. Nav, working together with lawmakers, then defines what ‘active job seeker’ means, which gives us the freedom to come up with a definition that fits with what we experience in practice on this specific topic. “Writing laws and legislations is far too important to be left to legislators alone.”

Adding deeply detailed interpretations and descriptions of a law at a high level makes it hard to execute subsumptions: the act of including or incorporating something under a more general category or concept. Many countries detail the laws at too high levels, and some take it too far. Fredrik: “In California, US, you’re not allowed to whistle for your lost canary after 19:00h, and in Alabama, it’s illegal to wear a fake mustache in church that causes laughter.” The law is written in extreme detail, but choosing this approach makes it more likely to miss possible situations. ‘I wasn’t whistling for my lost canary, dear officer, I was simply teaching my parrot to imitate a kettle”, It’s a reminder that over-specific laws risk missing the point entirely.

Language and accessibility laws in Norway

Interpretations of law in departments is the way to go for Norway. Just recently, the Language advisory department introduced the clear language law. This law states that everyone has a right to clear information. All organizations, both public and private, must abide by it. It follows the example of the accessibility law, in which is stated that all services need to meet certain accessibility requirements.

Organizations can get a fine if they don’t meet the criteria for accessibility or clear language. “Fines for not complying with the clear language laws I expect to come in the near future. For not meeting the accessibility law, fines have already been given to parties. Scandinavian Airline SAS was fined a €15,000 a day for not having an accessible booking system. They needed two weeks to fix it. You can do the math.”

Such fines set an example for the seriousness of making services accessible and clear to understand. “You won’t get fined straight away, but you do need to demonstrate you’re working on these topics seriously”, Fredrik says.

Clear language is not about using simple words

So how does one meet the language law in Norway? Fredrik tells us it’s about more than using simple words. “It’s about structuring a message and how to convey it. You need to put the letter into context: who are you writing for and why? The ‘why’ is what you start with. ‘This is why we’re writing to you’. Before, we used to cite all kinds of legislation and unnecessary information, almost giving people a heart attack when they read a letter. Now, we take a step back and think about the context of a person.”

The clear language law in Norway doesn’t state how to write, it states that when you write, the person who receives your message should be able to understand the letter in the first sentence. “That’s why you need to start the letter with what your reader needs, not what you need. It’s also recommended to work with bullet points and standard text that is the same for everyone, to avoid confusion. If a letter is about an approval or disapproval of a request, explain the decision. ‘You have been denied unemployment benefits, because …’”

Words do have an important role to play though, but understandable words alone don’t make a good letter. “But you should use everyday language. If you do need to use specific terms, make sure to explain them in your letter. But following a checklist to structure a letter is the main focus in Norway.” Find the checklist for clear language in the Nav toolbox (Norwegian).

We should build bridges together

Fredrik concludes: “We should build bridges together metaphorically, but we should not build bridges together literally. Restructuring the government system is complicated and takes a long time. That annoyed me when I first started working in public service. Everything takes so bloody long. But a friend and collegue of mine said: “You should be more worried when it goes really fast.” Democracy takes time. We need to balance taking care of our democracy and getting things done. In terms of law making: look at the limitations of the law, see what you can do within that framework and discuss with legislators: “Are you comfortable with interpreting legislation this way, so we can do x or y?”. Legislation is not a box, it’s a circle.”