Beyond Technomagic: What Military Design Teaches Public Sector Transformation
Throughout this series, I have developed a framework - state spaces, the planning/design distinction, grammars, constraints - and applied it to the conceptual infrastructure of service design. This post turns the framework critically upon the orthodoxies that dominate public sector digital transformation. The argument is that much of what passes for transformation is what Wastell (2011) terms "technomagic": the belief that technology solutions can be procured and deployed without doing the design work that would make them viable. I first explored how metaphors shape what we think technology can do earlier in my fieldwork; here, I want to show how those metaphorical framings become embedded in institutional logics, sustained by governance structures, and reproduced even - perhaps especially - when they repeatedly fail in practice.
What is Technomagic?
Wastell's (2011) concept of technomagic describes a persistent pattern in public sector technology programmes: the belief that technology can solve problems that are not, fundamentally, technical. It manifests in several characteristic ways. There is solution-first thinking, in which the organisation commits to "an AI system" or "a digital platform" before the problem the technology is intended to address has been adequately understood. There is the treatment of procurement as transformation, in which vendor selection substitutes for problem analysis and the contract becomes the strategy. There is the assumption that infrastructure generates capacity - that if the platform is built, capability will follow; that the technology is the bottleneck, and removing it will cause transformation to happen. And there is, perhaps most insidiously, the belief that visibility causes change - that dashboards, data lakes, and analytics platforms will, by making data visible, produce better decisions and improved outcomes.
A precondition for this pattern is that, despite the public sector's long and frequently painful history with technology, it continues to be discussed in the language of innovation, transformation, and modernisation rather than as the operational infrastructure it is. Cooper (2019) documents the persistent gap between the rhetoric and the operational reality of digital government, distinguishing between what they call "fake digital" - adding a veneer of technology to existing ways of working - and the more substantive, and considerably more difficult, forms of organisational transformation that technology might enable if the design work were done first. The aspirational framing makes technomagic possible; it permits the attribution of transformative qualities to what are, in practice, infrastructure investments. Technomagic is appealing precisely because it offers concrete, demonstrable action: one can procure something, deploy something, point to something and say "we are doing transformation". The alternative - doing the slow, uncertain design work of understanding problems, surfacing constraints, building organisational capacity - is harder to demonstrate and harder to govern.
But technomagic fails. Even in situations where the technology gets deployed, the capability does not emerge, and the transformation does not happen. Herbert (2023), reviewing UK government digital transformation programmes, documents the pattern in detail: over-reliance on suppliers, digital projects staffed and often led by specialists from outside the organisation, and persistent shortages of the internal skills needed to make technology investments productive. The appeal of technomagic is that it permits the performance of transformation without requiring substantive transformation - procurement, deployment, and reporting create the appearance of progress, what Meyer and Rowan (1977) would recognise as rationalised myths, while the difficult work of building genuine capability remains undone.
The Planning/Design Confusion
Technomagic is, within the framework developed across this series, a specific form of the planning/design confusion. The military design literature, from which the distinction is drawn, is precise about what separates the two activities: planning applies established procedures to solve a largely understood problem within an accepted framework, whereas design inquires into the nature of a problem to conceive a framework for solving it (US Army and Marine Corps, 2006). Zweibelson (2023) traces this distinction to a deeper epistemological commitment, arguing that modern militaries fixate toward a particular logic of framing problems - the problem-solution paradigm that Russell Ackoff identified as only one of several possible orientations - and that design thinking in the military context emerged as a deliberate attempt to escape that fixation.
Technomagic assumes the framework. It assumes that the problem is known - efficiency, data integration, digital access - and that the solution is identifiable - platforms, algorithms, dashboards. It proceeds directly to planning: timelines, deliverables, milestones. But for most transformation problems, the framework is exactly what is contested. What, precisely, is the problem? Whose problem is it? What would solving it look like, and what trade-offs would be acceptable? These are design questions, and skipping them does not make them disappear; it means they get answered implicitly, often by whoever controls the technology procurement process. Wrigley and Mosely (2021) identify problem framing as the foundational concept in military design thinking, tracing it to Naveh's Systemic Operational Design and its insistence that planners who operate without an adequate problem frame will default to doctrinal norms, developing plans based on the familiar rather than on an understanding of the actual situation.
New Public Management's Role
Technomagic does not emerge from nowhere; it is enabled and sustained by institutional logics, particularly those associated with New Public Management. NPM, the dominant paradigm for public sector reform since the 1980s (Hood, 1991), rests on three interlocking principles: the introduction of competition and the separation of purchaser from provider; the application of professional management techniques, performance metrics, and accountability frameworks; and the relentless pursuit of efficiency. Each of these principles shapes how transformation is conceived and governed in ways that make technomagic not merely possible but, within the logic of the paradigm, natural.
The marketisation logic means that capability is something one buys; transformation becomes procurement; success is successful contracting. Holliday (2022) observes that much of the value realised from public sector spending is determined far in advance of the point of delivery, locked into contracts and business cases before the design work that might have identified different, more achievable forms of value has been done. The managerialist logic means that transformation requires plans, milestones, and deliverables; governance expects planning artefacts, and design work - exploratory, uncertain, producing understanding rather than outputs - does not fit the accountability framework within which programme managers must operate. The efficiency logic means there is no time for design: design is slow, design might conclude that the original proposal is misconceived, and it is better, within the incentive structure, to start delivering and show progress than to invest in understanding.
The mechanisms through which these logics operate are specific and well-documented. A business case requires quantified benefits before the design work that would identify real benefits has been done, so benefits are invented to justify predetermined solutions. Stage gates demand evidence of progress at fixed intervals, but design produces understanding rather than deliverables, and understanding does not map onto a Gantt chart. Outcome targets, as Lowe and Plimmer (2020) document, pre-define what success looks like before the design work that would reveal what success could look like, and in doing so make it harder to do the work that is important in complex environments. Benefits realisation frameworks assume linear causation from intervention to outcome, when the reality in complex services is that outcomes emerge from interactions the framework cannot specify. Parker and Heapy (2006) noted that targets are consistently criticised for creating unintended consequences, but within NPM logic the response to target failure is better targets, not different governance.
The result is institutional pressure toward technomagic. Even when individuals recognise that design is needed, the governance structures pull toward premature planning, procurement-as-strategy, and technology-as-solution. Hay et al (2023) make the structural point that the problem is not that individual designers lack reflexivity about power dynamics - it is that contextual factors impede them from acting on whatever reflexivity they possess. Clarke and Craft (2018) argue, relatedly, that design thinking in public sector contexts falls short by failing to account for the institutional and governance structures within which policy is made. The governance apparatus does not merely fail to support design; it actively selects against it.
The State Space Problem
The series' framework allows us to identify a specific failure mode underlying technomagic: attempting to plan without a reflexive account of the state space. As the earlier post argued, a state space requires the enumeration of possible states, the specification of transitions between them, the definition of initial and goal states, and knowledge of what actions are available. For most public sector transformation problems, none of these conditions are met. The possible states of "health system integration" or "citizen-centred services" have not been enumerated; there is no agreed vocabulary, no exhaustive taxonomy. The transitions between states have not been specified; what interventions produce what effects is contested or unknown. The goals have not been genuinely defined; different stakeholders hold different conceptions of success, and the apparent consensus around phrases like "better outcomes" frequently masks fundamental disagreement. The actions available to the organisation - what levers it actually has, what changes are within its control - have not been mapped.
Without mapping the state space, planning in any meaningful sense is impossible. One can, of course, produce plans - Gantt charts, milestone tables, deliverable schedules - but these are not planning in the computational sense explored earlier in the series; they are, rather, rituals of planning, forms without the substance that a defined problem space would provide. Technomagic fills this void: if the state space is unknown, one can still buy technology; technology is concrete, specifiable, procurable; it provides the appearance of progress in the absence of the understanding that genuine progress would require.
What Military Design Would Suggest
If military design thinking, as developed by Zweibelson (2023), and the doctrinal tradition from which both draw, were applied to public sector transformation, the approach would differ in several consequential respects. The starting point would be problem inquiry rather than solution specification: before procuring anything, the work would be to understand the problem - to ask whose problem it is, what solving it would look like, what the actual constraints are. This is the kind of exploratory, uncertain, understanding-producing work that in the UK the GDS approach expects from a discovery phase, but which in practice is frequently short-circuited by procurement pressures, platform-first thinking, or provider-driven design.
Equally, military design thinking would insist on the recognition that some problems are wicked in Rittel and Webber's (1973) sense - contested, shifting, entangled with other problems - and that for such problems the response is not better planning but different methods: adaptive management, continuous learning, governance structures that accommodate uncertainty rather than penalising it. Boyle and Harris (2009) documented how decades of UK public sector IT investment had displaced rather than developed the human skills needed to use it effectively; the technology became a substitute for capability rather than a vehicle for it. Herbert (2023) finds the same pattern persisting over a decade later. A military design approach would insist on building community capacity alongside platform infrastructure - on investing in the people, communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), and organisational structures that enable technology to produce genuine capability, rather than assuming that deployment and capability are the same thing.
Fundamentally, military design thinking would demand honesty about constraints: what data actually exists, what can legally be shared, what capacity is available, what the real situation is rather than the idealised one. It would expect adaptation - the recognition that no plan survives contact with reality, and that governance should include mechanisms for learning, feedback, and course correction, not merely accountability for predetermined outcomes.
The Limits of Making Visible
There is a specific technomagic belief that deserves closer examination: the assumption that visibility, in itself, causes change. The logic is straightforward - if we can see the data, in dashboards and analytics and reports, we will make better decisions; data visibility enables improvement - and it drives much of the investment in data platforms, data lakes, and business intelligence infrastructure across the public sector.
My work at SCÖ demonstrated, however, that visibility alone does not produce corrective action. Concept maps and diagnostic frameworks made problems visible within the organisation, but the organisation absorbed the information without responding to it. This pattern has several dimensions, each of which reveals something about why the technomagic beliefs persist despite its limitations. Making problems visible can threaten institutional interests, exposing failures and gaps that the organisation would prefer to leave unnamed; this creates resistance to the very visibility that the investment is supposed to produce. Visibility also requires interpretive capacity - seeing data is not the same as understanding it, and understanding requires analytical skill, domain knowledge, and the kind of situated judgement that Malmberg (2017) argues does not transfer through documentation or training alone but develops through sustained practice within communities. Even where problems are seen and understood, action requires power, resources, and political will that visibility alone does not generate. And organisations are accomplished at absorbing information without acting on it: problems get acknowledged, reported, filed, and nothing changes.
The technomagic belief in visibility assumes that the bottleneck is informational - that the constraint on improvement is not knowing. Börner (2015) states the general principle: understanding a problem does not necessarily produce changes in behaviour. Malmberg (2017) demonstrates the same in her study of public sector design capability building: knowledge acquisition without organisational capacity for assimilation leaves the organisation functionally unchanged. The bottleneck, more often, lies elsewhere - in incentive structures, in power relations, in the capacity to act, in the political will to disturb arrangements that serve incumbent interests. More information does not address these constraints; it merely makes their presence more visible, which is a different and considerably less useful thing than resolving them.
Beyond Technomagic
The alternative to technomagic is not anti-technology; technology matters, and platforms can enable genuine capability when they are designed into - rather than substituted for - the organisational capacity needed to make them productive. The alternative is technology in service of design rather than as substitute for it: investment in understanding problems before buying solutions, even where this means smaller initial investments, longer timelines, and less certain outcomes; the building of communities of practice alongside platform infrastructure, so that organisational capacity develops in parallel with technical capability; governance structures designed for learning rather than merely for delivery, incorporating evaluation, feedback, and adaptation rather than simply holding programmes accountable for predetermined outcomes; honesty about constraints, including the willingness to say that the data does not exist, the capacity is not there, or the original ambition is not achievable given the real situation.
This is, by any measure, harder than technomagic. It requires more patience, more tolerance for ambiguity, more institutional willingness to say "we do not know yet" and to govern accordingly. It does not produce the satisfying certainty of a signed contract and a delivery timeline. But the evidence, from the SCÖ case, from the military design literature, from the UK government's own reviews of digital transformation (Herbert, 2023; Kattel and Takala, n.d.), suggests that it has a considerably better chance of producing transformation that is genuine rather than performed.
The final post draws practical lessons from the framework: what owning the problem space requires, why it rarely happens, and where the framework itself runs out.
Next: "Owning the Problem Space: Lessons for Practice" - what the framework suggests for how to actually do this work, and where it breaks down.
References
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