Charles Landry’s first career as a Brussels bureaucrat ended with a failed exam for a permanent contract at the age of 27. The experience gave him an enduring dislike of big organisations, but he has spent the rest of his life thinking about how to fix them.
Landry, now 75, is leading a march to overhaul public sector bureaucracy. By bringing innovation and private sector ideas to often bloated, inefficient, state systems, he wants to make them more attractive to employees and better at serving citizens.
He says a range of government officials, academics, entrepreneurs and private sector advisers from across the world are now treating “public sector innovation as both an imperative and an opportunity . . . from policy design to service delivery”.
Bureaucracy has never enjoyed a good reputation. Philosopher Hannah Arendt called it the “most cruel form of rulership”; novelist Joseph Conrad, the killer of “anything that breathes the air of human endeavour”.
For a growing number of leaders and practitioners, however, cumbersome systems in public, and sometimes private, sectors are fertile ground to grow something better. They are experimenting with new kinds of bureaucracy, from crack creative teams to job swaps and tech tools.
At stake is not just taxpayers getting value for money but the survival of democracy, says Mexican-born Tatiana Muñoz, a board member of PD, a consultancy set up by the German government to streamline the country’s notorious bureaucracy.
As a volunteer mayor in the town of Mainz, Muñoz tried to bring humanity to government, through a strategy called active listening — speaking with the intention of digging deeper, rather than simply responding.
She heard from constituents disillusioned with mainstream politics after encountering obstructive bureaucracy such as delays to documents that prevented families from travelling.
“People started to complain about politics, telling me they would vote for the far-right Alternative for Germany party or not at all,” she says. “It turned out they’d had a bad experience with a public service . . . these seemingly little things have a real impact on people’s lives. The only defence tactic they have is their vote.”
One morning she was rewarded by a big Danke (thank you) chalked on the pavement outside her house. “I still get positive feedback from people on the street. Many times I wasn’t able to resolve their problems. But many still told me: ‘The feeling I’d been ‘seen’ by a politician was precious to me’.”
Active listening was also key to upgrading Peru’s waste collection when Albina Ruiz, a researcher turned environment minister, started asking the country’s waste pickers how to stop garbage piling up in Lima’s streets. The exercise ultimately led to a clean-up of corruption in waste management spending, and improved conditions for workers who became recognised as “recyclers” with legal protections.
In her previous job as a procurement lawyer, Anja Theurer was unfamiliar with agile working. But becoming the chief financial officer of the German armed forces’ cyber unit forced her to quickly learn to assemble cross-functional teams to test and assess new technology.
“We wanted to show it is possible to do procurement quickly and in a way that’s compliant with EU law,” says Theurer. Insulated from business-as-usual, the innovation unit offered a liberating framework where administrators could “freely decide what to do to make things succeed”, she says.
“You detect a cool tech, you see it’s procured, you see a unit that’s willing to test and you see your work has meaning.”
Fear of failure remains an obstacle in much of the public sector, particularly in Germany where, Theurer says, “if you fail as a civil servant, you get your head chopped off”.
Politicians’ low tolerance of risk further “limits the ability of bureaucrats to learn from, and adopt successful private sector practices,” explains Tom Burke, co-founder of environmental consultancy E3G.
Finland’s response more than a decade ago was to declare a National Day of Failure, the brainchild of student entrepreneurs who realised that to succeed, the country needed to try new things out and risk going wrong.
“We love stories of superheroes who get results with brute force and their superior excellence,” says Tommi Laitio, who worked in Finnish local government for ten years before becoming a fellow at Johns Hopkins University. “But true creative bureaucracy is a rigorous process of collaborating with others to get things right.”
Another motivation for change is competing for talented staff with the private sector.
“To recruit the best, the bureaucracy needs to shift its culture and become more open-minded and accessible,” says Landry. Purpose, he adds, can trump pay as a motivator for young people “who do not want to work in organisations that do not align with how they operate in the rest of their lives”.
In Lithuania, a government outfit is luring professionals working abroad to return home for six-month “sprints” in the state sector.
“When you look at the state from outside it feels clumsy and slow, but when you get into it . . . there are people willing to do things differently,” says Monika Merkytė, head of Create Lithuania. The programme also increases the value of existing public workers. “You start to understand how the country and the system is run.”
Artificial intelligence, with its potential to liberate officials from repetitive chores, is the final piece of the creative bureaucracy challenge, says Dutch consultant Colin Van Noordt.
“For governmental organisations, this requires strategic thinking, planning and acting on what kind of government of the future it wants to become: one still versed in old-fashioned processes or one that is future-proof, with a motivated staff with higher quality services than even the private sector?”
With the right safeguards, augmenting professional experience with data insights is an ideal combination, says Van Noordt. One example is Ott, a tool that helps the Estonian Unemployment Insurance Fund tailor recommendations for jobseekers.
For Landry, the mission is still a work in progress. But it is one that is growing. An annual Creative Bureaucracy festival, co-launched with publisher Sebastian Turner in Berlin, has been running since 2018.
“As aspiring talent looks for purpose, public service has an incredible asset — if only the structures allow imagination, change and enthusiasm,” says Turner. “This is what creative bureaucracy is all about.”
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