Design thinking

IDEO, a prominent global design and innovation company, defines design thinking as “a process for creative problem-solving.” “It encourages organizations to focus on the people they’re creating for, which leads to better products, services, and internal processes.” Design thinking has three watchwords — desirability (customer perspective), viability (financial perspective), and feasibility (technical perspective). Being responsive to the needs of the “customer” requires active participation in the codiagnosis of the problem, the codesign of the solution, and codeployment of the programmatic action.

Sad to say, the Duterte midnight chats are a prime visual that there is no design thinking in the top echelons of the Duterte administration. Instead of confidence-building, President Duterte himself has shown, in a series of midnight conversations with his people, that he is at times heartbroken, humbled, frantic, and other times pugnacious, nitpicking, and out of focus. While there are a lot of unsolicited offerings of alternative solutions and innovations, there has been no evident systematic integration of these disparate elements into a comprehensive strategic design.

A worrisome gap in COVID-19 design thinking on pandemic governance is deciding the relationship of the police and local government units. The flagship case at the moment is the stand-off between the Philippine National Police and the City of Marikina. The police arrested 10 individuals for holding a “lightning rally.” Police Brig. Gen. Bernard Banac said the group should have coordinated in advance with the local government unit (Marikina City). But Mayor Marcy Teodoro of Marikina City, in calling for the release of the group, said it sought and received his permission, and that the police over-reacted in arresting the group. He said the group consisted of volunteers who were distributing food packs in the Industrial Valley portion of Marikina. While the group had placards, these were placards calling for mass testing through the Marikina molecular diagnostic laboratory that the mayor has initiated.

The police, apparently, has not taken Mayor Teodoro at his word. Police Maj. Gen. Debold Sinas said he would go to Marikina to check the situation and decide if the volunteers will be released. So, we have a serious problem, and Mr. Duterte needs to solve this and future impasses. The two most important players in the enforcement of the quarantine are the police and local government units.

Here we have a design confusion. While the police and local government officials are all under the control and supervision of the President, apparently at the ground level, their mandates, philosophies, and operational procedures are at loggerheads. At the moment, using the principle of subsidiarity (“matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest, or least centralized competent authority”), design thinking should say local governments have greater authority than the police in the implementation of enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) and general community quarantine (GCQ) in local communities.

However, Mr. Duterte has apparently been more partial to the police than to local governments. This is evident in the way the police have gotten away with serious transgressions at checkpoints and in enforcing the ECQ in local communities. The dynamic tension between the national police and local governments cannot be a beneficial condition for effective response to the COVID-19 crisis. Will Mr. Duterte continue this cross-grain ambivalence or will he resolve it?

There are design thinking initiatives that can be done at the level of the DILG. I would have wanted the DILG to come up with an online sharing session by selected local governments of what lessons they have learned, and the good practices that they have developed over the past six weeks of the ECQ. The DILG could also have come up with a joint PNP-local government ECQ/GCQ strategy and operations planning for each city or province. Or more comprehensively, there could have been a joint LGU-PNP-DOH-DOT-DOTr-DOLE strategy and operations consultative team for each city and province. Design thinking is most evident if, in the public realm, we have in addition to COVID-19 geo and conceptual maps, local community maps also showing the situation in education and enforcement, livelihood and income, mobility and access, and social services. Imagine the people understanding the big picture depicted in the maps through legends—“black” (deaths and sickness), “red” (risks and dangers), “green” (accomplishments and untapped potential), “blue” (intersectoral cooperation), “white” (ethics and rule of law). This way, people begin to own the diagnosis and the strategies. After all, the best laws are those that do not need to be enforced. At the moment, the COVID-19 community behavior change strategy we have is “education through enforcement.”

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