Below is a conclusion of the Danish Design Centre’s mission playbook, which focuses primarily on Mariana Mazzucato’s Mission Economic book (2021). I read it but have not yet gotten around to writing notes about it. Even though it has been on my todo list for nine months.
Why missions and design?
To achieve significant societal goals, missions must be targeted, measurable and time-bound.
Missions provide better answers to complex and often systemic challenges, and design is perfect for tackling those types of problems.
The core of design-driven methods is to challenge one’s assumptions, bring empathy into play, provide space for experiments, and last but not least, “rehearse the preferred future” through prototypes.
Missions can therefore be seen as a design exercise. They won’t emerge by themselves – they need to be crafted.
How to do it?
Missions call for a structure that balance both stability and agility:
- Create a governance structure for the mission work that leaves room for changing the project portfolio and the actor landscape as the mission progresses
- The foundation of decision making should be around loops of learning to constantly react and adapt to new learnings from both within and outside the mission ecosystem
- Stimulate several smaller innovations that point in the same direction rather than chasing the next big bang
Today’s challenges do not suggest as straightforward a direction as sending a man to the moon. Therefore to set the path, we must awaken shard imagination of what the future could be.
If you can imagine it, then you can design it
To mobilise the ecosystem towards a new, joint direction cannot be done overnight. It requires a focused and persistent effort for the whole ecosystem to start (re)acting differently.
