This Event Turns Bureaucrats Into Creatives -

Attendees at the latest Creative Bureaucracy Festival in Berlin moving between stages outdoors had to pass through a passageway lined by fences that kept a messy construction area out of view.

Creative Bureaucracy Festival: The name is an oxymoron, one that Johanna Sieben told Convene, “we really like.” While you might think creativity and bureaucracy are opposites, she said, “in reality, what we find out is, they are not.” Sieben, the director of cluster public sector and engagement/deputy managing director for the Berlin-based Falling Walls Foundation, the host institution for the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, said the event’s name came from its founder, Charles Landry. He authored a book published in 2017, The Creative Bureaucracy and Its Radical Common Sense, based on the premise that a lot of creativity exists in the public sector “but it’s often the structures of bureaucracy that do not allow bureaucrats to be creative,” she said.

Event: 8th Creative Bureaucracy Festival, June 5, 2025
Location: Festsaal Kreuzberg, an event venue in Berlin, Germany
Participants: 2,100+ on site and 2,000+ viewers via livestream, from government, politics, civil society, and other public administration organizations — the highest participation numbers in the festival’s history
Languages: Half of the sessions presented in German; half in English; all wayfinding signage in English

Johanna Sieben

When an event was conceived to convene civil servants around this idea, “festival” was added to the mix, going even more against the grain of typical “government innovation conferences” attended by “a lot of suits,” Sieben said. “I think it was a really great idea to say, ‘Okay, especially for a bit more conservative audience, and where things don’t move super quickly, [let’s put] “creative” “bureaucracy” “festival” all together.’ This was a great opener for us to put it into the whole experience design of the event — we have a lot to play with there.”

But isn’t it counterintuitive to name an event in a way that could make it more difficult to get buy-in from a conservative audience — and for an employer to support attendance? Sieben said they “are always working pretty early on against that,” including publishing a program well in advance so potential registrants can see the high-level content that will be offered — alongside its “playful design” (think a biergarten, music performers, artists, and food trucks). The nature of the event may be “very colorful and fun,” she said, but “the topics of the panel discussions are as — if not more — serious compared to any other conference that is happening in the field.”

In addition, even if an employer doesn’t want to fund someone’s attendance, the tickets for the one-day program are only 30-40 euros, Sieben said, making it affordable for most people to pay out of their own pocket. “That was very important for us — to keep it accessible.” Creative Bureaucracy Festival works with public institutions, foundations, ministries, and government bodies for funding and for content for sessions — no private sector sponsors, Sieben said, “which really makes this very much content-driven.” The sponsors, therefore, aren’t promoting products or services in the event’s small exhibition area, they are demonstrating how they are using AI or sharing in a session how a new communication initiative worked out.

Festivalization

A guiding principle of the festival — which is comprised of three main indoor stages and one outdoors, four workshop spaces (one of which is a boat), and a meetup space — is what Sieben calls “‘beyond the desk.’ We want to create a festival space that is very, very different from the offices that bureaucrats experience day by day, so that when they enter the festival area, they enter a different physical space. That allows them to think differently — that’s our philosophy.”

The Festsaal Kreuzberg venue is a popular spot for concerts, reinforcing that experience — it’s more a part of the “Berlin underground scene than you would imagine would be a conference setting,” she said. “We really create different areas and spaces where people can move through.”

Sieben said the team has gotten “braver” over the years about embracing nontraditional session formats like fishbowls and networking spaces. After the pandemic, “when we went back to the real world in 2021,” she said, “our guiding sentence was, ‘This is a festival, not a conference.’ We had this alert where if something felt too much like a conference, someone from the team would be like, ‘No, stop. We need to redesign this.’”

A festival is less prescriptive than a conference, she said. “We don’t have a lot of influence [over] what’s happening. The media space, for example, is not a panel. It’s not guided by us, but by a partner. There’s a light introduction, but what comes out of that is out of our hands and really in the hands of the participants. I think that’s a big part of the festival idea. It’s what people make out of it, what they take out of it, who they get to know at the festival. While the content is super important, you can design your own day very much, because in a conference, you’re very much guided through by [session] topics. With us, you can float around and see what happens and just see what the day brings for you.”

Michelle Russell is editor in chief of Convene.