Recipes for Systemic Change - Helsinki Design Lab

138 Chapteras a result, suggesting that government may need to strategicallyredesign itself. In the case of Finland, the success of theso-called ‘Nordic Model’ is now facing a kind of inertia ofits own, due not least to the challenges posed to the Studiosdescribed in this book.Yet government is not the mobile phone business nor isit Facebook. The Nordic Model will not continue to thriveby simply installing a web front-end while outsourcing itsback-end.For government is more complex than business. Sometimesthis complexity can feel like a particularly frustratinginertia to all of us, yet perhaps the consequence of introducinggreater agility is that there is a simultaneous need for‘slow government’ too, particularly at times of great change.This, in the spirit of the slow food movement, which valuesthe richness and care of craft, responsibility, sustainable localsolutions and human-centred practices.Either way, it’s this ability to shift scale and pace—tobring agility to the public sector, whilst engaging in the richnessand depth of public representation—that makes strategicdesign necessary and valuable.The various characteristics of design articulated in thisbook—including its ability to quickly develop multipleperspectives, to understand people, communities and societies,and to blend strategic intent with a focus on the qualityof execution, for example—presents us with a potentiallyvaluable tool for addressing the future with sensitivity andambition. It allows us to identify the punainen lanka, or redthread, that connects the critical dimensions to redesign oursystems of delivery.Finally, as a leader of an organisation oriented towardsthe future, perhaps the thing that speaks to me most clearlyand most personally here is that strategic design is a practicepredicated on optimism—on a firm belief that current conditionsare changeable for the better, that the present can betransformed into multiple positive futures. Like Sitra, designis also necessarily oriented towards the future, and we hopeto learn much from its inherent ability to pull off the artfulbalancing acts intrinsic to good design.Whilst strategic design is pragmatically groundedthrough its focus on generating plausible prototypes of newapproaches, systems and services, it is also offers an alternativeto the common kind of decision making based onanalytics—that today’s living conditions are necessarily thedeterminant of tomorrow’s.