Walking in Citizens’ Shoes: Experiential Design Thinking in Public Sector Training

Public administration has recognized that citizen-centric service delivery is the heart of public service. This requires public officials to understand services from the perspective of those who use them. The capacity building initiatives are required to focus on enhancing practical capabilities to understand the needs of the service user and design services accordingly. This paper examines the Public Service Innovation (PSI) module of the Advanced Course on Management and Development (ACMD) at the Nepal Administrative Staff College (NASC) and reflects on how immersive field learning complements classroom teaching to build officials’ capacity to redesign services from citizens’ perspectives. My experience in redesigning and facilitating the ACMD course across multiple cohorts indicates that field immersion helped trainees better understand public service delivery by exposing them to the real experiences, frustrations, and expectations of service users. I argue that experiential learning offers a transferable pedagogical model for embedding design thinking in public sector capacity building and strengthening citizen-centric governance.