Working towards a Circular Economy by innovating in Belastingdienst work clothing processes

Possible solutions for the challenges of the ambiguity of tasks and responsibilities, and a lack of ownership

The textile industry has an alarming environmental impact with resource consumption, pollution, and waste generation. The Dutch government has set the goal of becoming 100% circular by 2050 to mitigate the environmental impact of consumption and production models. As a part of the government’s commitment to circularity goals, the Belastingdienst have a significant role in enhancing the circularity of their work clothing. The Belastingdienst (Dutch Tax Authority) asked me to help them enhance the circularity of their work clothing. With a so-called doubtful situation of how I could help them, the guidance of textile specialists for the Belastingdienst, define what their challenges were regarding circularity, I decided to research the challenges in the Belastingdienst work clothing processes instead of textile products. For this research, I applied a pragmatic and design approach to uncover the challenges in the Belastingdienst. This pragmatic and design approach was adopted as the nature of the inquiry was practical and was characterized by unidentified problems and the objective of innovating in the processes through design. Pragmatism facilitates an in-depth exploration, enabling a comprehensive understanding of organizational practices. Deweyan inquiry on which pragmatism is founded emphasizes the interconnectedness of experience, knowledge, and action. Utilizing actionable knowledge and the experience of individuals in the Belastingdienst work clothing chain, the approach aims to produce relevant insights and solutions. During this thesis choices were made for inquiries through abductive reasoning which is well-fitted for a pragmatic and design approach. Abductive reasoning necessitates a creative and imaginative leap of assembling ideas and concepts, for creating possible solutions and involves creating hypotheses or explanations based on the available evidence or observations even if those explanations are not certain. Interviews and participant observations were conducted to inquire into the work clothing processes as experienced by actors within the Belastingdienst work clothing chain. Through nine in-depth interviews and participant observations over a period of several months, several challenges in the work clothing chain were established. As it was not clear which was the most crucial to the Belastingdienst it was decided to host a co-creation session. For the co-creation session to run smoothly the number of challenges were categorized into four themes: 1) communication issues, 2) stock and delivery issues, 3) quality and usability issues, and 4) sustainability and organizational challenges. The challenges that led to the most visible frustration in interviews and observations, and those most often referenced were short-listed in these categories. Five participants participated in the co-creation session: three participants from CFD Product Group Work Clothing and two participants from the Categorie Bedrijfskleding Rijk. The co-creation session was used to validate the findings, find the most important challenge, and co-create possible solutions for this challenge. The chosen challenge was a single challenge in the co-creation session, but it was later adapted to two. The challenges are: 1) the ambiguity of tasks and responsibilities, and 2) the lack of ownership. Global takeaways from the solutions developed by the participants are: 1) work together to find the best solution, 2) define tasks, responsibilities, and ownership, 3) align processes, 4) document tasks, responsibilities (chain of succession), processes, 5) make things more visual, 6) make tasks, responsibilities, and ownership reoccurring topics, 7) keep evaluating current tasks, responsibilities, and processes. The solutions are then used for ideating a possible intervention in a later chapter. To find a possible solution to the challenges of the ambiguity of tasks and responsibilities and a lack of ownership literature was consulted. From the literature consultation, no decisive solutions were presented, so I decided to find a solution in the practice of the Belastingdienst. However, it was not clear how I could start designing possible interventions as I needed to find a hook in the practice to start. Also, the findings of the interviews and observations needed to be restructured to be useful for the further development of a possible solution to the Belastingdienst challenges. The findings of previous Chapters are linked to the chosen challenges to distinguish possible causes and effects. In this way, I combine the findings to understand their interconnectedness and what needs to be considered when developing a possible solution. This resulted in the argumentation that the consequence of ambiguity of tasks and responsibilities leads to communication issues and mismanagement of resources, and that a lack of ownership is caused by a culture of blame. This facilitated a foundation on which solutions can be designed for specific challenges within the Belastingdienst work clothing processes. Recommendations: - Enhancing perceived Psychological Safety through a co-creation session. This session is designated for decision-makers in the Belastingdienst to initiate the process of steering away from a culture of blame to a culture where learning is encouraged. - Establishing clear tasks and responsibilities through a co-creation session. This session is designated for CFD Product Group Work Clothing particularly. A similar session should be used for decision-makers to ensure responsibility is established, to enhance accountability, and to ensure ownership. - Create a roadmap for Circular Economy goals, steps, and progress to visually communicate to the organization that reaching CE goals is an organization-wide effort. - Transition to a deeper learning organization by embracing pragmatism and reflection as core approaches. Continuous learning is encouraged, as knowledge is seen as an intermediary step, not a final destination. Implementation: - Initiate reflection processes - Engage an external facilitator - Establish a community of practice By implementing these recommendations and fostering a culture of collaborative learning and reflection, the Belastingdienst can utilize its actionable knowledge to create positive change toward a circular organization, which can potentially lead it to attain a system-level change and become a fully circular organization by 2050.