Unit 7 & 8
How Ines Mergel teaches Unit 7 & 8
What is this page?
This is a detailed breakdown of how Professor Ines Mergel from the University of Konstanz teaches a class that covers the contents of Unit 7 of the open access syllabus developed by Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age.
The official designation of the course Professor Mergel is teaching here is "MA Seminar: Digital Governance".
We believe it is helpful to see how professors in different contexts teach the same concepts, so to see how Harvard Kennedy School's David Eaves teaches the same unit, see here.
Who is this page for?
This page has been developed for use by university faculty who are teaching Master's levels students in Public Policy and Public Administration. It has been published to help them design their own approaches to teaching the digital era skills covered in Unit 7 of our syllabus.
Class Overview
The barriers to applying and implementing new practices in digital service delivery are now well understood. These barriers stem from the fact that bureaucracies have strong cultural norms and traditions that involve protecting confidential information (often by law), have concerns about security and privacy issues, aim for high degrees of accountability through coordination and control. However, not all government problems require this degree of secrecy and the quality of service delivery may actually suffer from being designed and delivered by governments that are overly closed and secretive. In this class breakdown, we talk about how to overcome these barriers and discuss ways to work in the open.
This Class' Learning Objectives
By the end of this class students should be able to:
Describe how change happens in organizations generally
Describe how change usually happens in governments
Enumerate the barriers that tend to exist in governments
Describe the phases of a real transition
Understand how to encourage buy-in from key stakeholders
How this class relates to the Digital Era Competencies
💡 This class has a specific focus on Competency 5 - Change and Competency 6 - Openness.
See all eight competencies here.
Assigned Reading
Clarke, A. (2020). Digital government units: what are they, and what do they mean for digital era public management renewal?. International Public Management Journal, 23(3), 358-379.
McGuinness, T., Slaughter, A. (2019). The New Practice of Public Problem Solving. Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Mergel, I. (2016). The Social Intranet: Insights on Managing and Sharing Knowledge Internally.
Mergel, I. (2016). Agile innovation management in government: A research agenda. Government Information Quarterly, 33(3), 516-523.
Detailed Class Breakdown
Class plan: 90 minutes
The sections below describe the dynamics of each part of the class:
Segment 1 - Short intro lecture on the definition of change - 10'
In a short intro lecture, Professor Mergel discusses the components of the following definition of organizational change:
"Organizational change refers to the actions in which an organization alters a major component of its organization, such as its culture, the underlying technologies or infrastructure it uses to operate, or its internal processes. Organizational change management is the method of leveraging change to bring about a successful resolution, and it typically includes three major phases: Preparation, implementation, and follow-through."
Segment 2 - Exercise 1 & Debriefing - 20'
Following the lecture, students are given the following question to debate: "Discuss in groups what the barriers of change are in government, especially when it comes to digital transformation."
The debriefing of the exercise then focuses on the following categories:
During the debrief phase the instructor should listen to the students, pulling out their ideas. These ideas should then be situated within a framework to help students see how they fit together:
(Active/passive) Resistance
Theory of planned behavior (cognitive, emotional, intentional) (Pederit 2000)
Guerilla government (O’Leary 2019)
Inertia & stability
Persistence of rules, regulations, routines (Feldman & Pentland 2003)
No incentive to overcome persistence or act in innovative ways
No ownership
Top-down hierarchy
Command-and-control structures
Line organization
Professionalism
Expert status
Assumed competence & expertise
Segment 3 - Exercise 2 & Debriefing - 20'
In this second exercise, students are given the following challenge:
"Discuss in groups what the drivers or causes of organizational change are, especially when it comes to digital transformation."
The debriefing after these group sessions then focuses specifically on drivers that are specific to the context of the German digital transformation:
New leadership at the helm of the organization or within its departments (new federal CIO)
Shifts in the organizational team structure (Project team digital innovation in the Ministry of Interior, DigitalService4Germany, IT Laboratory Ministry of Migration)
Adoption of new business models (Online Access Law)
Implementation of new technology (analog -> digital) & technology change
Change in the expectations of stakeholders about government, particularly on behalf of the public (Expectations → change in routines and processes)
Backlog in implementing initiatives or technologies (”Reformstau“, NPM)
Emergence of new work practices (agile, scrum, design thinking, etc.)
Segment 4 - Lecture on change - 20´
The following lecture then aims to pull together the results of the previous two exercises with the theoretical literature on change.
Two contrasting types of organizational change:
Adaptive changes: small, incremental changes organizations adopt to address needs that evolve over time. Move a form online (e.g., make a PDF version of a paper form that is online but looks identical to the original) Allow users to email a scanned form, instead of sending it via fax or paper
Transformational changes: a larger scale and scope than adaptive changes (e.g a shift in mission and strategy, organizational or team structure, people and organizational performance, or processes) Deeply rethinking a policy and its implementation Change the full process, flow, responsibilities, modes of delivery
To show how organizational members might be reacting to changes that are introduced, professor Mergel uses different types of theoretical frameworks.
(1) Lewin's framework of change (1947):
Lewin's framework shows how organizations and their routines need to be "unfrozen" first in order to prepare the organization for the coming changes. During this phase, their might be restraining forces that are contradicting the change process and work against the driving forces for change. In the last phase, after the change process has been moved through the organization, the new routines and procedures are frozen again.
(2) Implementation of organizational change
The second change framework refers to the three phases of change (prepare, manage and reinforce change). This framework is closely aligned with the previous framework and is oftentimes used in practice:
Implementing organizational change: preparing, managing, and reinforcing change
Segment 5 - Working in the open as a form of change - 20´
This segment starts with a brief exercise:
"When you hear that a government "works in the open", what do you think they do?
After briefly reviewing some of the experiences the students can report, the class then looks at a few examples of governments working in the open. Here are several types of government openness (traditional, most of the time now also mandatory openness)
Freedom of information laws
Official statistics
Open public meetings and parliaments.
Open legal information court judgements and laws.
Open data
Mandatory public consultations
Voting and elections
Other ways of openness include:
Digital Service Teams as intrapreneurs (Schumpeter 1934) to support learning organizations (Argyris 1978)
OpenOpportunities platform to gain experiences across government
Social Intranets, such as Intellipedia, Techipedia and others
Hackney Council's online weeknotes & How we work blogposts
Prof Mergel then includes a final lecture segment on the most common reasons that governments choose to continue to operate largely in secret:
This resistance can come from routines and standard operating procedures that aren’t open;
We may need a new reform approach to shift both routines and standard operating procedures in a new direction.
Show and tell by individuals with digital backgrounds bringing ‘working in the open practices’ with them to new government employers.
Segment 6 - Outlook and preparation for next week - 10'
To round off the unit the students are given the task to prepare a short presentation for the final week of the semester. Picking one of the work practices that were discussed throughout the semester, explain why it is necessary to update the way that government can be digitally transformed with one of the work practice discussed throughout the semester. They have to discuss how this practice can be introduced and how potential legal, financial, or organizational barriers can be overcome.
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Acknowledgements
David Eaves would like to note that this material was made possible by numerous practitioners and other faculty who have generously shared stories, pedagogy and their practices. David is also grateful to the students of DPI 662 at the Harvard Kennedy School for enriching the course and providing consent to have the material and questions shared. Finally, an enormous thank you must be given to Beatriz Vasconcellos, who helped assemble and organize the content on this page.