The creatives trying to fix Germany's bureaucracy

Most nights, the Festsaal Kreuzberg is a concert venue in one of Berlin's cooler districts, but this week it was taken over by bureaucrats. But not just any bureaucrats — these were "creative bureaucrats," a term that sounds like more of a paradox than it should, since the public sector has seen much innovation in recent years.

That at least is the view of the attendees of the Berlin's Creative Bureaucracy Festival, now in its ninth year, which claims to be the world's largest festival for public service innovation. Some might say there's an irony to the fact that the event has found a home in Berlin, whose creaky and underfunded bureaucracy has become a hoary joke.

But the home feels natural, as the venue was filled young people with an optimistic attitude: The Creative Bureaucracy Festival had a sunny garden where an acoustic guitar duo was playing summery hits, there were workshops about how to make bureaucracy more empathetic, and special "Creative Bureaucrat" pins for festival-goers to wear.

"Here at this festival you'll find people who want to do administration 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 the people here could be working in business and probably make more money, but they consciously chose to make a contribution in public administration."

Not only that, Twachtmann was one of many participants pointing 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 trust in democracy is, of course a functioning bureaucracy is the be-all and end-all," she told DW. "Roads that you can drive on, bridges you can cross, the building of a new school, the simple digital application form."

Can bureaucracy be creative?

Accordingly, the festival's many stages were filled with keynotes and panel discussions demonstrating examples of public servants getting things right (for a change): Florian Kling, Social Democrat mayor of the southern German town of Calw, was celebrated for his apparently successful efforts at digitalizing bureaucratic decision-making, with the result that other local authorities have been calling him for advice. Amongst other things, he got rid of his own personal office, opened up new multifunctional "creative" work spaces, so that the Calw town hall began to resemble what local newspapers called a co-working space.

His talk began with a well-honed anecdote about how one of Calw's old town halls almost literally collapsed under the weight of paper files it had to hold. Now, he said, almost process is paperless.

"I'm always very concerned about our democracy when the perception increases that our state isn't functioning anymore," he told DW. Some of the innovations that Kling introduced were forced on him by demographic changes, as a 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 the employees I still could perform better quality work for the citizens, and are not occupied with serving envelopes and boxes of files."

Bureaucratic frustration equals political frustration

But scaling the Calw model up to fit a country of 83.5 million people is obviously a different challenge. When Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced an "autumn of reforms" last year, he was effectively promising to blow a fresh wind through all of Germany's public systems: From health care to unemployment benefits to pensions to taxes, everything was going to made more efficient, more "digital," and save the state more money.

There followed a number of expert commission reports and some new draft laws, but when the big announcements failed to bring immediate noticeable benefits to people's lives, and in some cases simply amounted to budget cuts, Germany ended up stuck in what Twachtmann calls a "reform jam" — in other words, governments at every level are trying to do a lot of things at once: Modernize the state, digitalize processes, build new infrastructures. And while the public gets more impatient, the main challenge at the moment, she said, was "expectation management."

Not only that, she added, there's a certain fatigue that sets in when people hear words like "reform," "sustainability," or "digitalization." Reform has become a kind of negative buzzword, she explained: "When they hear it, there's a certain negative perception."

But despite everything, Twachtmann was keen to underline that "there is a lot more happening than people see." Bureaucratic systems in Germany, for example, had already become more digital in the past few years, thanks to the necessity created by the COVID pandemic. "I really do feel a spirit of optimism among colleagues in administrations eager to use this momentum," she said.

What works: More empathy, less judgment

The festival offered examples from abroad: Ott Velsberg, chief data officer for the Estonian government, gave a speech highlighting the many efficiency benefits of introducing AI-driven bureaucracy. But, as Twachtmann pointed out, digitalization, however cutting edge, does not automatically make everything better. "A bad digital process is still a bad process," she said. That can be especially true when citizens feel alienated by digitalized processes that leave them without any human contact.

Perhaps one of the simplest innovations came from Harry Kruiter, whose Netherlands-based Institute for Public Values (IPW) has created what it calls the "Breakthrough Method," which has been adopted in 100 of the Netherlands' 300 municipalities and helped, by his estimate, 10,000 vulnerable people negotiate state bureaucracy. The "breakthrough" he made? Listening to the people in question.

Kruiter's research into vulnerable individuals in society — homeless people, addicts, school leavers — found that such people could cost the state up to €100,000 ($115,000) a year in benefits and other expenses without "really helping them." "It's an insane amount," he told DW.

Having found that their academic studies were being ignored, Kruiter and his colleagues decided to get practical: "Basically we went to these families, knocked on the doors, and said, 'you know, we've spent €100,000 a year on you — what would you do with that money?" he said. "And mostly the answer came: 'Nobody ever asked us before,' and within moments they would sketch out their entire set of problems. Mostly, they then pivoted to one provision, and say, 'this is what we really need'."

Then Kruiter and his team would go back to the authorities, he often found that there were simple solutions that required no new rules or digitalized solutions — just a different interpretation of the old rules and an open-minded, non-moralizing attitude from the bureaucrat in question. And the 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," said Kruiter, and laughed.

Edited by Kyra Levine