Leading Public Design: Discovering Human-Centred Governance

Leading Public Design offers compelling insights into what it takes to lead public and social organizations to create better public futures. Drawing on more than a decade of work in public sector innovation—as director of an influential governmental innovation lab, as an academic and lecturer, and as a former management consultant—Christian Bason combines his rich contextual understanding of public service outcomes and design methods to provide lessons for those in public work.

Leading Public Design develops a clear framework for understanding and mastering an emerging management practice: the ability to redesign public organizations from the outside-in, shaping policies and services so that they are truly useful and meaningful, while leveraging all of society’s resources to produce better outcomes. Incorporating his own extensive practical experience with new research conducted from 2010 to 2014 among public managers in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Finland, and Denmark, Bason demonstrates how this new practice could be catalyzed using approaches from ethnographic field work, pattern recognition, visualization, scenarios, and prototyping.