On most nights, the Festsaal Kreuzberg is a concert venue in one of Berlin’s cooler districts, but this week it has been taken over by bureaucrats. But not just any bureaucrats – these were “creative bureaucrats”, a term more contradictory than it sounds, as the public sector has seen so much innovation in recent years.
At least that’s what attendees of Berlin’s Creative Bureaucracy Festival, now in its ninth year, claim to be the world’s largest festival for public service innovation. Some might say it is an irony that the event has taken place in Berlin, whose creaking and underfunded bureaucracy has become a sick joke.
But the home felt natural, because the venue was packed with young people with optimistic attitudes: The Creative Bureaucracy Festival had a sunny garden where an acoustic guitar duo played summer hits, workshops about how to make bureaucracy more empathetic, and special “Creative Bureaucrat” pins for festival-goers to wear.
“Here at the festival you will find people who want to govern better,” said Theresa Twachtmann, CEO of PD, a German in-house consultancy for the public sector serving the federal government, states, municipalities and institutions. “It’s an intrinsic motivation. A lot of people here could work in business and maybe make more money, but they deliberately chose to contribute to public administration.”
What’s more, Twachtmann was one of several participants who pointed out how important a functioning bureaucracy is for a democratic state: “Against the background of Germany’s competitiveness and the question of how big people’s faith in democracy is, of course a functioning bureaucracy is everything,” he told DW. “Roads you can drive on, bridges you can cross, a new school building, simple digital application forms.”
Can bureaucracy be creative?
Accordingly, several of the festival’s stages were filled with keynote speeches and panel discussions showcasing examples of civil servants doing things right (for a change): Florian Kling, the Social Democrat mayor of the southern German city of Calw, was celebrated for his apparently successful efforts in digitalizing bureaucratic decision making, which have resulted in other local officials calling him for advice. Among other things, he got rid of his private office, opening new multifunctional “creative” work spaces, so that Calv Town Hall began to resemble what local newspapers call co-working spaces.
Their conversation began with a telling anecdote about how one of Calve’s old town halls almost collapsed under the weight of paper files. Now the process is almost paperless, he said.
“I’m always very concerned about our democracy when the perception grows that our state is no longer working,” he told DW. Some of the innovations introduced by Kling were forced upon him by demographic changes, as one third of his staff went into retirement during his first term in office. “I had to create new processes, I had to digitalize, so that staff could still do better quality work for citizens, and not be busy serving up envelopes and boxes of files.”
Bureaucratic frustration equals political frustration
But scaling up the Calw model to fit a country of 83.5 million people is clearly a different challenge. When Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced an “autumn of reforms” last year, he was effectively promising a new wind blowing through all of Germany’s public systems: everything from health care to unemployment benefits to pensions to taxes, to make everything more efficient, more “digital,” and save the state more money.
Several expert commission reports and some new draft laws followed, but when big announcements failed to bring immediately noticeable benefits to people’s lives, and in some cases simply resulted in budget cuts, Germany became stuck in what Twachtman calls a “reform jam” – in other words, governments at every level trying to do too many things at once: modernize the state, digitalize processes, build new infrastructure. And while the public tends to be more impatient, the main challenge this time, he said, was “expectation management”.
What’s more, he added, there is a certain fatigue felt when people hear words like “reform,” “sustainability,” or “digitalization.” He explained that reform has become a kind of negative word: “When they hear it, it creates a certain negative connotation in their mind.”
But despite everything, Twatchman was keen to highlight that “there’s a lot more going on than people see.” For example, bureaucratic systems in Germany had already become more digital over the past few years, thanks to the necessity created by the COVID pandemic. “I really feel a sense of optimism among colleagues in the administration eager to harness this momentum,” she said.
What Works: More Empathy, Less Judgment
The festival offered examples from abroad: Ott Velsberg, Chief Data Officer of the Estonian Government, gave a speech highlighting the many efficient benefits of introducing an AI-powered bureaucracy. But, as Twachtman points out, digitalization, no matter how cutting-edge, doesn’t automatically make everything better. “A bad digital process is still a bad process,” he said. This may be especially true when citizens feel alienated from digitalized processes that leave them without any human interaction.
Perhaps one of the most ingenious innovations came from Harry Kruiter, whose Netherlands-based Institute for Public Values (IPW) has created a “breakthrough method” that has been adopted in 100 of the Netherlands’ 300 municipalities and, by his estimation, has helped 10,000 vulnerable people negotiate state bureaucracy. The “success” he achieved? Listening to the people concerned.
Kruiter’s research on vulnerable individuals in society – homeless people, drug addicts, school dropouts – found that such people could be losing up to €100,000 ($115,000) per year to the state in benefits and other expenses “without actually helping them”. “It’s a huge amount of money,” he told DW.
After seeing that their academic studies were being ignored, Kruiter and her colleagues decided to be practical: “Basically we went to these families, knocked on doors, and said, ‘You know, we spent €100,000 a year on you – what are you going to do with that money?’ He said. “And most of the time the answer was: ‘No one ever asked us before,’ and within a few moments they would outline their entire problem. Most often, then they would point to a provision, and say, ‘This is what we really need’.”
Then Kruiter and his team went back to officials, often finding that there were simple solutions that didn’t require any new rules or digital solutions — just a different interpretation of the old rules and an open-minded, nonchalant attitude from the bureaucrat. And political leaders were happy, too: not just because it saved them money, but because it didn’t require any major “reforms.” “They loved it when we said that,” Kruiter said.
Edited by Kyra Levin