These are all the questions that are central to our neighbourhood-based project We Walworth. Funded through Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities’ Partnerships for People and Place Programme, the project has been enabled through a partnership between Pembroke House (a local voluntary and community sector anchor organisation) and Southwark Council, and brings together a wide range of local people and organisations to collaborate on issues of food and inequality that matter to local people.
Since 1st April 2022, we have been working in partnership to develop a methodology to better understand local issues, and then work together as cross-sector teams to take forward the ideas that emerge.
We work together in person, in place as a group of residents, practitioners and professionals, including representatives of local and national government, bringing different skills, perspectives, connections and experience into the work. In six months, this is what we did:
We’re already demonstrating the potential and power of cross-sector collaboration, and we are developing the skills that will be needed to meet the challenges of the future. We’re modelling the council and central government as enablers, and a different kind of partner.
We’ve made a good start but we’ve still got work to do to persuade the wider system of the value of building relationships in place, and to unlock the capacity to work in a different way.
The presence of public sector workers in neighbourhoods and their commitment to building relationships play a crucial role in fostering positive change. Evidence has shown that when public sector workers are physically present in communities, they demonstrate their dedication to understanding local challenges and engaging with residents on a personal level. This commitment builds trust, credibility, and a sense of genuine engagement, which in turn encourages open dialogue and the generation of new insights.
By actively listening to the concerns and aspirations of community members, public sector workers can gain valuable firsthand knowledge that leads to informed decision-making and targeted actions. This authentic engagement and relationship-building contribute to a deeper understanding of local needs and empower both residents and public sector workers to collaboratively address pressing issues and drive meaningful change.
Social entrepreneur Hilary Cottam OBE insists that we need to start outside our institutions if we want to find new answers and new insight: “changing systems to address the needs first requires asking the right questions of the right people, not top-down ‘service improvement’ within outdated constraints.”
How can senior policy shapers and makers, and those leaders who shape organisational culture embrace this new way of working? How can we unlock public senior leadership capacity into the neighbourhood in order to affect change? These are the tricky questions. Strong, genuine, public sector learning cultures are a good start. A greater risk appetite, an understanding of the benefits of experimentation and a more empowered workforce, with new metrics used to measure success will all help.
Imagine if one of the ways we measured the success of a public sector worker was through the answers to the following questions:
Ultimately, our goal is to move from insufficient understanding to a more authentic truth. This requires un-learning and re-learning on an individual level and collaborating for system-wide change. The "in person, in place" approach allows us to notice differently, stand in relationships differently, and take action that contributes to a transformative journey for ourselves and our community.
We use this blog to talk about the work of the multidisciplinary policy design community. We share stories about our work, the thinking behind it and what policymaking might look like in the future. If you would like to read more, then please subscribe to this blog. If you work for the UK's government, then you can you join the policy design community. If you don't work for the UK government, then join our AHRC Design and Policy Network.
Perhaps you have been assigned a key role in a transformation programme; or to develop a new policy; or you might be a budding Public Entrepreneur keen to innovate.
This is the second of four blog posts describing my experiences in establishing and running the Innovation Lab (iLab) in the Department of Finance in Northern Ireland. In this post I discuss your role in the Enabling Ecosystem as one who aspires to public entrepreneurship and I suggest some of the qualities needed for success.
The first stop on this analysis is to look at yourself as the one who sees the need for innovation, has the motivation and ambition to innovate and who needs to operate successfully in the system.
First, some basic questions;
I have suggested that it is in the DNA of many public servants to be Public Entrepreneurs. On the other hand, many see their role as maintaining the status quo, as system stewards, which is a legitimate role and major part of what government does – keeping the lights on, so to speak, meeting targets, running business as usual. Self- awareness is vital here, but chances are that if you are reading this article then you have the ambition to be a Public Entrepreneur!
But, is it as simple as just having that ambition? Of course it isn’t. Here are some more things that you might consider in this context.
First, do you have the mandate, status, authority and budget to drive innovation in your area? And if you don’t, do you know how to build these foundational enablers?
Other considerations are:
In the iLab we have learned that passion is a major component of just keeping good ideas alive, and that protecting innovation from the inclination of the system with a low appetite for change to stifle change requires a lot of determination. In From Design Thinking to System Change, Rowan Conway puts language to this phenomenon, referring to it as the “immune response” of the system to innovation. Our bodies are programmed to kill off rogue cells, viruses and diseases, so too are large bureaucracies. Legitimately, these are systems geared specifically to ensure compliance and to protect the interests of Accounting Officers, to prevent, detect and destroy what is illegal or fraudulent or at variance from agreed procedures. But the prevailing culture, coupled with these systems, will also act to prevent innovation.
Innovators need to work ‘against’ this tide. Being alert for this will help you understand that what is happening is neither new, nor personal - it is just how large bureaucratic entities react to change. Forewarned is forearmed!
Will you be easily satisfied with the tactical, short term, or do you aspire to make strategic, and even system level change? Do you realise that achieving a system level or step change – one that will become deeply embedded and permeate the whole system - is a long game? There really are no quick fixes. Complex problems will take time to work through – some of the most pressing issues that need to be addressed in our public services have existed for years, and despite the best intentions of many who have preceded us, and the investment of public money, these remain entrenched, even intractable and apparently unsolvable.
Equally important, are you prepared to look for solutions elsewhere and to be prepared to adopt them, or do you suffer from NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome? We waste a lot of time and resources by not looking for an already existing solution that can be easily adapted to meet local need. And we have all heard the common reasons for not doing so: our system is different, our population has slightly different characteristics etc. But successful Public Entrepreneurs will just as readily, and successfully, go with an existing, proven solution, rather than waste time and resource on building new. It is a most credit-worthy thing to do, and we need more of it! In this regard are you prepared to invest the time in researching what is ‘out there’, embarking on a literature review, visits to other jurisdictions, forming alliances, to find the already existing and proven solution to your problem?
It is also worth asking if you are able to let go when something isn’t working. Are you prepared to experiment, test, iterate, modify and generally take calculated risks to ensure the innovation is shaped and altered in the light of learning from experimentation? And are you really going to cut loose things that aren’t working, and hold out for the next iteration? And are you prepared to terminate decrepit, creaking systems and process that are in the way of your innovation.
And finally, are you a lone voice in your ecosystem, or are there kindred spirits with whom you can collaborate for mutual encouragement and support? Is there a support network of people with whom you can exchange ideas and gain help? The ecosystem can be a lonely place and mutual encouragement is important.
In my next blog post, I will look at the social and political parts of the Enabling Ecosystem.
We use this blog to talk about the work of the multidisciplinary policy design community. We share stories about our work, the thinking behind it and what policymaking might look like in the future. If you would like to read more, then please subscribe to this blog. If you work for the UK's government, then you can you join the policy design community. If you don't work for the UK government, then join our AHRC Design and Policy Network.
Sitting in a beautiful Victorian church hall, amongst a large group of people – many of whom were experts in community engagement and rooted in their local place – was a pretty daunting experience.
This was made even more daunting when I was told that within the hour, I would be out on the streets of Southwark with a clipboard, attempting to strike up conversations with residents and business owners about the issues affecting their lives… !
Joined–up, place–based working between Whitehall, local authorities and communities has always been a central feature of the way that the Civil Service works with local places.
Recently, we’ve seen good examples of this in national efforts to tackle Covid-19, through our country’s support for people arriving from Hong Kong, Afghanistan and Ukraine, and during the celebrations around the recent Coronation Weekend – all of which were developed and delivered by central and local teams, working closely together.
Clearly, we are at our best when we collaborate.
But, while there are many things to celebrate about the strong central-local partnership working which is underway across a range of policy areas and Whitehall departments, there is always room for improvement.
DLUHC’s Partnerships for People and Place (PfPP) programme, emerged from an understanding that many Civil Service departments’ programmes can overlap - in both their reach and outcomes.
This can happen both during the development phase, when ideas are being worked up, and the delivery phase, when work is being rolled out on the ground.
This can sometimes cause issues for local people and places. On occasions, central government might be working on different priorities, or different timelines to local government and communities.
For central government departments, this can mean objectives get repeated across multiple programmes in the same area. For local areas, it can mean that a complex web of centralised funding pots and programmes often doesn’t align with their needs or timescales.
PfPP was created to tackle issues like this. To show the benefits on offer when we join up across central and local teams.
We wanted to unblock barriers to partnership working and bring place to the centre of our policy – aiming to deliver better outcomes for local people.
To do this, we brought together 11 central government departments, all working in the same places, delivering work to improve the lives of residents who live there.
The work we were delivering was different, but our overall departmental objectives were all closely aligned.
We then selected 13 of these ‘cross-over’ places and funded them to trial projects to tackle the hyper-local, thorny policy issues that they felt held their places back - issues that mattered most to local people.
In Hastings, East Sussex, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero joined a local council pilot to tackle fuel poverty and poor energy efficiency in the private rental sector.
In Luton, the Home Office and local partners combined to tackle anti-social behaviour in the town centre.
In Bradford, we brought together Health Department colleagues with the local authority and NHS partners, to show how community hubs can support young people and families facing mental health challenges.
A big part of the programme involved getting out and about, to see the issues on the ground.
Local meetings and site visits attended by both central departments and local officials have offered a chance to challenge misconceptions, grapple with local issues together and build a shared understanding of what effective delivery in person, in place looks like.
I visited the We Walworth programme in Southwark.
Attending as part of mass engagement exercise being undertaken as part of Southwark’s pilot which aimed to have conversations with 80% of the neighbourhood, and I took part in face-to-face interviews and meetings with local businesses and residents.
While I was certainly nervous as I knocked on the door of a local phone shop, the rich conversation and deep insights that I gained from my 15-minute chat with the owner were utterly invaluable. I learned about his fears for his own business, as well as the opportunities he could see for his children in the local area.
This experience was replicated as we visited a range of supermarkets, hairdressers and food shops throughout the afternoon. Suggestions, criticism, ideas, challenges. I left that day with my head spinning, full of new perspectives.
As a group, we managed to conduct almost a hundred interviews in a single afternoon. The comments, energy and insight that I took away from the people I met have stayed with me.
Even now, more than a year on, I regularly draw on the experience of that day when thinking about how decisions made in Whitehall and town halls play out on the ground, and how we should always strive to make policy that supports people and places, and removes obstacles in their way.
As our Partnerships for People and Place team programme ramps up to its final report, the team are busy creating policy recommendations to support policymakers and delivery bodies at central and local levels. These are likely to cover:
The Partnerships for People and Place Ipsos UK and Grant Thornton evaluation is due in the coming months.
Contact partnershipsforpeopleandplace@levellingup.gov.uk for more information on the programme.
We use this blog to talk about the work of the multidisciplinary policy design community. We share stories about our work, the thinking behind it and what policymaking might look like in the future. If you would like to read more, then please subscribe to this blog. If you work for the UK's government, then you can you join the policy design community. If you don't work for the UK government, then join our AHRC Design and Policy Network.
I recently spoke to pupils at my local high school, as part of the Cabinet Office schools outreach programme, to inspire them to consider a career in the Civil Service.
To bring my presentation to life, rather than talk through my Civil Service career history interspersed with key highlights and challenges over the last 27 years or so, I decided to focus on my current Policy Adviser role. I did this because my team and I have achieved so much within a relatively short time working on an important review – against a backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This helped demonstrate to the students how varied and interesting Civil Service work can be, and how by working in policy you can help make a positive difference to the lives of our citizens!
When the UK left the European Union (EU), it had the opportunity to re-imagine how it manages its borders. My team, called the Presence at the Border review team, was established to work on one of the many commitments in the UK Border Strategy.
My team was tasked to help the government by creating an efficient and effective border to serve not only the needs of the people and businesses who use it, but also benefit the frontline border staff at ports by improving outdated paper-based processes and procedures in relation to goods movements (not passengers) and recommending new innovations and practices - without compromising border security.
We know from prior research that border industry stakeholders want us to improve checks, ensure consistency between location and increase the flow of goods. And from day one we were clear, our focus was to ensure we took a user centric approach to developing improvements – to help better deliver smarter checks, ensure traders experience an improved coherent government presence and overall customer service experience - while also ensuring we deliver the government's objectives.
We undertook extensive engagement with border users and industry, researched international best practice, undertook various visits to ports (across Great Britain and in the Netherlands), spoke with all departments and agencies with a border role and responsibility and we embedded staff at Heathrow Airport and the maritime ports of Immigham and Southampton for 10 weeks.
As part of the research stage, I was initially tasked with agreeing our definition of the border as well as determining how many departments, agencies and public bodies have a role at the border. This involved me researching who might be involved – aided by old National Audit Office reports - and contacting numerous departments, agencies, public bodies and devolved administrations. Once I identified the right contacts, I was able to use a combination of persuasion and influence to help them to understand why this review was so important and their engagement was essential - to help gather the required information and inform next steps.
With guidance from a tech-savvy colleague, I was able to illustrate all the different government departments, agencies and public bodies who have a presence or an interest at the border in a Venn diagram – which helps to show the complex system at the UK border.
The research evidence obtained enabled us to identify that our existing border processes, structure and culture currently prevent us from becoming the most effective border in the world, highlighting the following challenges:
We made the following key recommendations to address these challenges:
As well as progressing these key recommendations we are working on a number of interesting activities including:
We are confident from our analysis of the options that once the recommendations and activities are realised, frontline government border staff, traders, hauliers - and indirectly members of the public - will notice a positive difference thanks to our review (as well as other initiatives) and they will agree that our border is one of the most effective in the world. However, we are not complacent, and as part of our continuous improvement approach we are looking to develop mechanisms to help ensure that our review is a success and it sustains improvements - but only time will tell…
We developed a Reform Toolkit – which is designed to help colleagues across the Civil Service discover how we used the principles behind phase one of the Modernisation and Reform programme to inspire us to use a number of innovative policy techniques to underpin our review. For example, our use of port partnership leads in three ports, our steering group chaired by our Minister with responsibility for borders, and the use of the Policy School to develop and test some innovative new ideas.
To find out more about the work of the Presence at the Border review team or the Reform Toolkit, you can contact:
We use this blog to talk about the work of the multidisciplinary policy design community. We share stories about our work, the thinking behind it and what policymaking might look like in the future. If you would like to read more, then please subscribe to this blog. If you work for the UK's government, then you can you join the policy design community. If you don't work for the UK government, then join our AHRC Design and Policy Network.
In early 2014 I happened to be in the right place at the right time when the then Minister for Finance in Northern Ireland, Simon Hamilton, commissioned the Public Sector Innovation Lab (iLab).
I have learned many lessons from this immersive experience - lessons covering the reality of starting, building and constantly reshaping the iLab – it has been a great journey with some dead-ends, but many highs. All driven by a team of passionate and skilled innovators of which I am proud to be a part.
This is the first of four blog posts around the idea of an Enabling Ecosystem, illustrating what it takes to create the right conditions for success as an innovator in the public sector. I don’t cover innovative methods and techniques, rather the focus on the conditions for innovation to begin, be sustained and delivered.
My views are personal and reflect my real experience, I believe they will resonate with other innovators as they travel the same journey as me.
In essence, successful innovation in the public sector requires more than just skills in innovative techniques. Innovators must have a lot of self-awareness, as well as situational and contextual alertness, and a clear view of the ecosystem in which they are operating. This will help them draw on the supportive people and forces in the system and counteract the inherent immune response designed for continuity and stewardship, that predictably opposes creativity, change and innovation.
As public servants we are often busy improving the public services that we oversee: sometimes policy makers need to rejuvenate or replace a policy because it is not delivering the anticipated or required outcomes; sometimes it will be to develop a new policy to address an emerging public need or in response to political direction. At a service delivery level, engaged operational managers are always looking for ways to improve services, reduce costs, correct failings in current services or to meet spikes in demand.
And I have a strong sense this is in the DNA of many of us and that throughout the public sector there are many dedicated public servants who are innovating in their own areas to improve the policies and services for which they have responsibility. Some of this will be within formal initiatives, but often it will be on their own initiative. In fact, I believe that every public servant has a duty to the citizens we serve to act in this way and should always be looking for ways to improve things.
Rowan Conway (writing for the Royal Society for Art in the paper Move fast and fix things: How to be a Public Entrepreneur) fully encapsulates the essence of this, giving it language and legitimacy, calling for more of us to be Public Entrepreneurs, and for the systems in which we operate to recognise us as such!
In no other sector is there a greater need for innovation, and in no other sector is it as hard to do! Just think of how complex it is. Consider the myriad of stakeholders. Consider the fact that much of what we do is because of market failure (we provide services to address needs that the market simply does not respond to because it is either too hard or not economically viable). Also consider that we are often trying to get people to do things they don’t want to do, like paying taxes! Layer on top of that the unrelenting scrutiny and criticism of what we do. Public Service is not simple, it is challenging, it is difficult; and innovating within it is even more so! Framing innovation through the lens of the Enabling Ecosystem provides a solid basis upon which to innovate.
Before I go any further it would be useful to look at what I think we mean by innovation in the public sector, and a helpful definition is:
Successful innovation is the creation and implementation of new policies, processes, products, services and methods of delivery which result in significant improvements in outcomes efficiency, effectiveness or quality. (Mulgan & Albery, 2003).
I like this definition because it shows that innovation is not predominantly about the invention of revolutionary products or services that radically changes things, like the iPad or the Dyson; rather, and for the most part, it is grounded in what is attainable by individuals within the span of their control, while working within a larger system.
In any problem solving context, the vital place to begin is to have a full understanding of the problem (‘problem definition’ is the term we use), and to be sure that you are not simply focused on what is a symptom of a bigger problem – consider how much time, effort and money is wasted on knee-jerk reactions to what are merely symptoms of a greater problem – all that effort, and the problem still exists! And then we wonder why our solution isn’t working! In the iLab we always start with ‘problem definition’ to ensure effort is correctly targeted on the problem itself.
The next step is to build an understanding of the system where the problem exists, from which you will need to derive the authority and the insights to innovate, and within which any innovation must flourish. This is what I mean by the Enabling Ecosystem. In short, it is the combination of the components of the setting in which you are innovating; and it will have variations depending on the organisation itself and your position and authority within it.
You need to think of yourself as a significant component of that ecosystem and then review the rest of the Enabling Ecosystem from that vantage point. This will act as a reality check, akin to a project readiness/ gateway review, to help you see and then prepare for and manage the challenges ahead - challenges that will need to be overcome if you are to be a successful Public Entrepreneur in your ecosystem.
As I see it, it is made up of six interactive and interdependent components:
To borrow a definition from ecology, an ecosystem is a community of living organisms in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment, interacting as a system. Just as these living organisms need all the other parts of the ecosystem to function as a system, for innovation to flourish the components of the Enabling Ecosystem must also function as a system.
In my next post, I will discuss each segment and propose some key questions to be considered if you want to successfully innovate in your ecosystem and become a successful public entrepreneur.
We use this blog to talk about the work of the multidisciplinary policy design community. We share stories about our work, the thinking behind it and what policymaking might look like in the future. If you would like to read more, then please subscribe to this blog. If you work for the UK's government, then you can you join the policy design community. If you don't work for the UK government, then join our AHRC Design and Policy Network.
Policymakers want to supplement their existing methods of gaining insight with quicker ways to test ideas.
Traditional feedback methods such as consultations and programme evaluations can take a long time to produce, whereas user-centred design methods can quickly provide insight into how people might react or interact with either a policy idea or service.
I set up the new schools technology user-centred design (UCD) policy lab within the Department for Education that brings user-centred design and policy decision making together.
The team and I have tried different ways of working and tested new approaches, such as co-design, speculative design, and concept testing.
Relationships between policy and digital colleagues have flourished during this time. The researchers and designers on the team have developed their understanding about political and ministerial pressures. Policy advisors are learning about user centred design - including defining and understanding the problem space before moving to solution ideation.
We’ve had some positive feedback from policy colleagues:
"I would be worried going into the next year without policy lab" [Annie Maciver, Schools Technology Policy lead]
"Being on the policy lab team provided me with a great opportunity to learn more on digital delivery and agile methods" [Cath Farrugia, Senior Policy Advisor]
There are a few things that are different from the practices of a traditional digital delivery team. The projects we work on are quite short, and so there’s lots of context switching. Within the area of digital strategy and schools' use of technology, we have covered lots of different topics, and spoken to different users within schools. Between May and July 2023, we spoke to senior school leaders, 6th form students, and assistive technology leads in special schools.
How I prioritise and plan work into the team’s schedule has been a learning curve. Policy leads make suggestions on what problem area they would like the team to work on based on upcoming priorities. I then have lots of conversations to get us to a clear problem statement that the team can work on within the time we have. The team and I have done lots to support these conversations and developed various methods that help us get to a clear problem statement. More time to plan an approach for the project is always beneficial.
Linked to that is how fast paced the work has been. We have been able to produce outputs within a 4-week period, but this isn't ideal for team health and longer-term productivity. I built in some mitigations to try and address this. Another researcher joined the team, and I planned breaks between projects. I focus more on strategic backlog refinement and prioritisation with policy colleagues so that the team can focus on one project at a time.
As the team and I have worked on various projects, I iterated how we scoped projects to ensure that the work we produce leads to concrete next steps with clear owners and dates. For a project looking into assistive technology in special schools, we worked with the policy lead to support her work to develop guidance and training to the sector. It was great to see her take our insights and turn these into actions.
I’ve loved building the UCD policy lab team. We have worked on prioritised problem areas, and we have been able to respond to ministerial requests, such as the maths to 18 policy area. Through our project outputs, we have showed that this is a model worth investing in.
I am focussed now on how to scale up our existing offer to be able to support more policy areas across the portfolio. We will need to manage a backlog across more than one area, but this will enable us to deliver more joined-up work and get more value from UCD approaches.
I’ve also been advising colleagues across the department on how they might set up their own UCD lab embedded in their local policy areas. I want to talk to others who lead similar teams to learn from them. Let's connect if you're interested.
By producing service design artefacts and user insights to relevant policy areas, we are exposing our methods to an increasing number of policy colleagues. This helps us move toward a future where UCD techniques are embraced department wide - including operational delivery colleagues, policy makers, and Ministers.
We use this blog to talk about the work of the multidisciplinary policy design community. We share stories about our work, the thinking behind it and what policymaking might look like in the future. If you would like to read more, then please subscribe to this blog. If you work for the UK's government, then you can you join the policy design community. If you don't work for the UK government, then join our AHRC Design and Policy Network.
What a fantastic year we have had for publishing thought leadership, case studies and research about public policy design.
What was your favourite blog post this year?
Here's our top 10 most popular posts of 2023!...
Alyx Slater from Food Standards Agency reflects on why systems thinking is an essential component of policy design. Read more...
Alice Whitehead from Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities writes about how to design public services that eliminate distress. Read more...
Permanent Secretary Susan Acland-Hood writes about Department for Education's succesful new multidisciplinary course. Read more...
Policy designer Andrew Knight writes about why governments need more queer designers. Read more...
Four leading professors who specialise in political science and design research set out their vision for future policy design. Read more...
Andrew Knight, Head of UK Policy Design Community, invites designers to participate in the Public Design Review. Read more...
Department for Education's policy design team write about their innovative move into a delivery unit. Read more...
Serena Nϋsing from Civil Service's Policy Profession invites people who work in design in the UK public sector to participate in a national survey. Read more...
Jonathan Slater, former education Permanent Secretary, writes about the role of design in making policies and services that deliver meaningful outcomes for citizens. Read more...
Professor Paul Cairney from University of Stirling writes about different ways to visualise the policymaking process. Read more...
We use this blog to talk about the work of the multidisciplinary policy design community. We share stories about our work, the thinking behind it and what policymaking might look like in the future. If you would like to read more, then please subscribe to this blog. If you work for the UK's government, then you can you join the policy design community. If you don't work for the UK government, then join our AHRC Design and Policy Network.
A significant new report has just been launched: Design & Policy – Current Debates and Future Directions for Research in the UK.
Co-authored by myself with Professors Lucy Kimbell, Ramia Mazé and Liz Richardson, the report is endorsed by the cross-government Policy Design Community (who are sponsored by Policy Profession) and is the culmination of the work of the AHRC-funded Design|Policy network. The activities of the network have brought together over 700 designers, researchers and policymakers to debate the future directions for research at the intersection of design and policymaking in the UK, which have been well-documented in this blog.
We found that there is a growing field in practice and research dedicated to discovering, developing and investigating the distinctive contribution of design to policymaking. Whilst the UK is a leader in the use of design in government and policy, this leading position could be enhanced through a more effective, cross-disciplinary evidence base about the use of design expertise in policymaking. We propose a research agenda that deepens understanding of: (1) the extent of design in policymaking, (2) how design’s distinctiveness can be applied through different types of design, (3) its impact, and (4) different relationships between design and policy. This research agenda demands different types of research, including cross-disciplinary research integrating design and policy studies and to mobilise UK central, city-regional and local government as collaborators and sites of co-produced research.
In our two launch events, the University of Manchester’s Professor Liz Richardson shared that the recommendations and call for action made in the report were grounded on two primary aims: first, to articulate the distinctive contribution that design can make to policy; and second, to set the agenda for how the evidence-base on public design needs to develop in order to clarify its value, allow others to see themselves in it, and to provide a means to mobilise action and change across policymaking.
The events provided an opportunity for key stakeholders to reflect upon and respond to the recommendations of the report. In the initial closed event for the UK civil service, Andrew Knight, Head of the cross-government Policy Design Community highlighted the value of this intervention in ‘raising the waterline’ by enhancing the credibility and providing external validation of the significant potential of design within policymaking. Professor Christopher Smith, Executive Chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council also strongly welcomed the report and emphasised AHRC’s clear commitment to design. He reflected on the crucial contribution that design could make to address the fundamental tension within government between the need for long-term responses to wicked challenges such as AI and climate change, and the short-term necessities of governing; this could range from embedding creativity in policymaking to upskilling future public servants.
Our second open launch event involved over 90 researchers, designers and policymakers who work with UK central, devolved and local government. Our first speaker, Lady Rachel Cooper OBE, Distinguished Professor of Design Management and Policy at Lancaster University and a Director of ImaginationLancaster, reflected on the trajectory of design within policymaking, arguing that the challenges in consolidating the role of design across policymaking are different than those encountered in initially establishing it, and need to recognised as such. Coca Rivas, Director of Design at design and digital agency DXW, reflected on her extensive close collaboration with government, and highlighted the critical role of design in closing the gap between making policy and implementing, and doing so in an effective, incremental and inclusive way. Dr Jonathan Carr-West, Chief Executive of the Local Government Information Unit reflected that it has never been so important but also never been so challenging to absorb innovation. He offered a powerful reflection on the challenges facing local government including rising costs and rising demand. Carr-West argued that design has a critical role to play in meeting the significant challenges of service delivery, but needs to be able do so in a way that recognises the hard realities of funding and focus on delivering statutory services.
Both events involved a rich and vibrant discussion, with some key themes:
Design was recognised as an innovative approach to policymaking which now has established a presence within policymaking, and to be particularly crucial in a context of radical uncertainty which has strained the capacity of existing policy design tools. However, whilst inspiring, in many ways recognition the potential contribution of design to policy remains marginal and not always well understood amongst policymakers. A number of contributors reflected on the continued need to make the case for design in ways that closes the gap between design practitioners and other professionals in government, and is able to cogently answer questions or scepticism from policymakers.
A crucial contribution can be made by establishing an evidence-base for design in policy which addresses: the distinctiveness of design, its ability to help generate solutions to the challenges faced by policymakers, and the outcomes it can deliver.
Lack of such an evidence-base – and of the conceptual tools to make sense of it - was seen to pose risks, particularly that design as an approach could be undermined or stretched, or that policymakers would struggle to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ design, which could threaten rather than consolidating its credibility.
It was recognised that efforts to mobilise design within policymaking needs to happen not just in central government, but at devolved and local-level, in ways that are place sensitive.
The role of research on the strategic value and impact of design in policy, conducted with but independent from government, was perceived to be crucial in building this credibility and momentum. Several calls were made for establishing different opportunities for exchange and collaboration between universities and government to address real-world challenges.
Many contributors identified with Dr. Jocelyn Bailey’s reflection on her AHRC-funded doctoral research in our report on ensuring that the use of design in policymaking is focused on bringing about real-world change in both the quality and outcomes of governing. To do this effectively, those practicing and promoting design needs to engage with the crucial insights and experiences of those across the policy environment, including the front-line of public services.
Our report both establishes the nature of the challenge, and provides a basis for those keen to advance the scope of design within policymaking to move forward.
We use this blog to talk about the work of the multidisciplinary policy design community. We share stories about our work, the thinking behind it and what policymaking might look like in the future. If you would like to read more, then please subscribe to this blog. If you work for the UK's government, then you can you join the policy design community. If you don't work for the UK government, then join our AHRC Design and Policy Network.
The UK Civil Service is undertaking a once-in-a-generation review of design in the public sector – an opportunity for all public designers to make their voice heard. We need you to complete the survey.
In a recent blog post we introduced public design and made a call for all public designers in government and public organisations in the UK to come together and participate in the Public Design Review. Public design is a term used to describe all types of design practices in the public sector that intend to deliver public value. The review brings together a diverse mix of people from the areas of policy, public spending, design, digital and academia. The aim is to unite designers from all different disciplines around what we all have in common - driving public value through design.
Design is needed as part of a multidisciplinary approach to better policy making and delivery. The review is taking stock and looking into how design has developed over the last 10 years in the public sector and how it might evolve in future. The review can only be credible and powerful if it amplifies the voice of all designers in the public sector, so it is very important that you take the time to complete the survey.
To give you some inspiration, this post aims to give you a taste of some of the conversation we had so far.
A key milestone of the review to this point has been a retreat day for all co-authors of the review to come together and discuss, challenge, and explore the current and future state of public design in the UK.
At the retreat day in October, we asked our 30 participants, design leaders and practitioners from government and academia: What might public design look like in 10 years’ time?
This is a question about how we want to grow as a community and practice, about our values, motivations, and visions. At the day we saw that what motivates people to explore this question is a great passion for making positive impact through design, and a hope that public design will be well understood and respected in the future.
Participants described public design as a process that helps you to get “from ministerial intent into the delivery of services leading into outcomes”. This is a complex process involving many actors with different needs interacting in different ways. Public design can “help you navigate that fog and do it safely”, as one workshop attendee framed it. It’s about avoiding assumption and providing certainty.
Facilitating and engaging people were listed as a key activity of public design, bringing together multiple and sometimes conflicting actors to co-design. This also includes unlocking domain expertise in different contexts and turning experience and knowledge into insights and ideas. But designers cannot do this alone. Participants highlighted the importance of multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary teams, involving people inside and outside government, in central and local government, as well as collaborating with people in communities and academia - with the aim of all working together to co-design across services, systems, and sectors.
The future of public design needs to “span boundaries” to build evidence, foster change and deliver better public outcomes. There are opportunities for designers of different types to influence the end-to-end journey. “The designer fills in the white space between the other teams” one attendee said.
Discussions at the retreat day also revealed some of the desired outcomes that public designers are currently working towards. Participants talked about greater inclusion in all aspects of our work from more inclusive communication to more inclusive outcomes to having more inclusive management structures. Public design should facilitate all of those as well as should be facilitated by all of those. A retreat day attendee said:
We might need to refine the problem owners and problem investments…. rethinking of the governance model
One important step to get us there, is a better integration of policy and delivery as mentioned by many participants. Therefore, we need better understanding and trust from both sides.
But if we want public services and policies to be inclusive, we must fairly understand the needs of the people that will use them and be affected by them. At the retreat day participants highlighted the need for better representation – breaking down national and social barriers so design reflects everyone. One idea that was mentioned was about having open living spaces or ‘hubs’ to be able to interact and design with citizens in an open, shared physical space.
Finally, people also talked about developing a planet-centred mindset and coherent long-term thinking to help us deliver more inclusive outcomes.
In order to achieve these things, public designers need to be supported and enabled through better infrastructure, strong design leadership and a richer understanding of design across the sector. A good infrastructure as outlined by participants includes access to data, tools, and resources as well as clear progression paths. What does a career path for a public designer look like? Is there a future for more designers in public leadership positions? Participants described strong design leadership as having more design awareness from the top, and public design being championed and embedded as an organisational strategy.
Design is about reframing and rethinking the problem to allow discovery of new possibilities. Given that our world is becoming increasingly complex, participants wish for leaders and decision makers with imagination. Imagination is what enables us to look beyond the world as it is and to imagine a better, more equal, and inclusive future. Participants talked about how public design can help making that bridge with democracy and helping make democracy better. So, one participant asked at the end: do we need a minister for design?
There is much more to say about the role of public design and many more question about its value yet to be answered. To generate a comprehensive picture of the state of public design in the UK public sector we are launching a survey as part of the Public Design Review. If you are designing services, spaces, policies, or systems, we want to hear from you. What are the current capabilities, roles, and values of public design? Share your thoughts by completing this survey on the state of public design the UK public sector and help us better understand our current community and practice.
We use this blog to talk about the work of the multidisciplinary policy design community. We share stories about our work, the thinking behind it and what policymaking might look like in the future. If you would like to read more, then please subscribe to this blog. If you work for the UK's government, then you can you join the policy design community. If you don't work for the UK government, then join our AHRC Design and Policy Network.
I got an invitation to connect with somebody the other day, and it turned out we used to work together in the Department for Education. She's working as a designer who started in digital delivery and is now in policy design.
She thinks it's getting harder and harder to place the user at the centre of what we do, which was the theme that I was most interested in when I was Permanent Secretary. She wonders if she is too idealistic (she's too polite to say that maybe I'm too idealistic as well).
This blog post provides an opportunity to offer a response about whether it’s possible to take a more user-centred approach to policymaking.
This is difficult stuff, after all it's a democracy and we work for politicians. They're the ones who decide on the policies that we develop. But it is our job, nevertheless, to understand system and the users of policies and services as best we possibly can – whether they are children, teachers, social workers or others – and to think about what they need in the context of the overall political direction that ministers are setting for us.
I don't think we do that as well as we might. Even within the constraints that we face, I do think there are a couple of things we could do across the Civil Service to get significantly better: external challenge (because policymakers currently operate in a closed world), and training (because this way of working is a skill).
My life as a policymaker in local government was very different from my life as a policymaker in central government. In local government, my advice was typically offered in public. I was expected to go along to meetings with council tenants and ask them what they thought of the housing repair service, for example - or I was expected to go along and talk to pupils and parents and teachers in schools - and then advise the elected local politicians accordingly. And so I did, and that was seen as part of the job.
Then I joined the Civil Service and suddenly discover that it wasn’t part of the job. It wasn't what I was expected to do.
The trouble with the world of Whitehall is that our policymaking takes place behind closed doors.
I worked with colleagues during the pandemic crisis who felt unsure about talking directly to carers in children’s homes because they thought their seniors or their ministers probably wouldn’t want them to.
Officials often feel it is not safe to speak to users of policies or services and feel nervous about doing so, not least as they might find it uncomfortable to be defending the government’s position on something. Of course, there are occasions where ministers want to engage the public and ask for a sort of consultation process. But without this explicit instruction, officials feel like they are taking a risk.
So meetings do literally take place behind closed doors and then official advice is kept secret for 20 years. It's a completely opaque system and it's a problem because it invites the view that policy is of no concern to the public …and it can't be of any concern to them because they're not in the room.
Consequently, officials don’t really understand the needs of our users and certainly do not prioritise them. This is a cause of a lot of poor advice.
The government is no more than a collective decision-making machine. It's done so on behalf of the public. The purpose of government is to enable citizens to collectively get a better deal.
So we should ask what the public think… What do they want? What do they know?
To take a straight-forward example from the world of education: very large numbers of young people have not gone back to school since COVID. Government can issue all the directives it wants, and it can hold schools accountable in whatever ways it wants. But if you're going to do anything, as opposed to just announce something, then you need to understand what's actually going on. The most interesting questions are: why aren’t children going to school and which ones? What do their parents or carers think? What's the context? Yes, there's lots of existing data, but nothing that beats an actual conversation.
Design practice offers Civil Service a systematic way of making sense of the world as it really is, and responding to it in a meaningful way.
There are lots of skills involved in research and design like the methods of enquiry for engaging with the public to understand what specific groups of citizens need. We should invest in the capability of those technical experts.
But for others in government, I would say that the mindset is most important. Is the first question you ask yourself, ‘I wonder what users think?’ Or is your first question, ‘I wonder what the Minister wants?’
The Policy Profession standards are pretty good. I don't think we need a new approach to the standards in principle. But I do think there is a big gap between the standards and what people do in practice.
The theory is that policymakers should be gathering evidence and considering outcomes, and all the other good things in the standards. But in my experience, the work of the policy professional is far too weighted to just one dimension of the standards: what they think the minister wants to hear.
There should be far more emphasis on subject matter and technical expertise. This would benefit ministers too because they would get much more well-informed advice.
The Secretary of State and ministers spend more time talking to members of the public about their responsibilities than civil servants do. But that doesn't seem to me to be a reason for us not to do so as well.
If you become the Secretary of State for education (for example), you typically don't know anything about education other than your own experience, and suddenly you're responsible for, well, everyone’s education. The only way for such a system to work is if the civil servants working for you have got a lot of expertise in the subject. As a new minister you can triangulate this official advice with the conversations with the public in your constituency surgery, for example.
But in my experience, ministers are normally rather disappointed when they ask to have a conversation with the relevant policy team and find the officials don't actually know nearly as much as they might have imagined: particularly the more senior ones.
You wonder, what it is that got these people promoted? You know it is clearly not their expertise in the subject matter. It’s not necessarily even their managerial experience. What's got them promoted, more than anything else, is their ability to sound convincing. This is a very odd notion indeed, and it doesn't serve the minister well at all.
Tackling any complicated challenge requires a combination of skills and it's very unlikely that you'll find all those in one person. Therefore, you'll need to gather a team of people that bring different things to the party. That's the notion of multidisciplinary team, and it's uncontroversial.
However, if you're not careful, it reinforces the notion of policymakers as generalists who don’t know anything about the issue. They are simply convening the experts (e.g. the programme manager, data analyst, commercial manager, lawyer) and reporting upwards. Some might argue there's nothing wrong with that, or you might instead argue ‘why don't we cut out the middleman? What's wrong with the team of people that doesn't involve a generalist? It’s simply a team of people with relevant skills and knowledge. Between them they work out how best it to report it up to ministers; and maybe the best person to speak to the minister is the person with the actual delivery experience. Why do you need a separate spokesperson for them?
I remember inheriting an apprenticeship policy team and an apprenticeship delivery team when the education department took responsibility for apprenticeships from the business department. I thought, why don’t I just have one team of people rather than a having to deal with a policymaker who doesn't have any background in the subject? Why not make the head of the team, the person who's got a lifetime experience in apprenticeships?
Of course, such a person has got to learn and develop the ability to report to ministers and seek decisions from them and understand things from the minister's perspective. But that's not that hard.
It’s a good challenge from the from the design community to policymakers to think about the policy as a service. It doesn't always apply of course, but often in the world of education, certainly it does.
The design of that service requires a conversation about the role of the user in it.
My experience, and I suppose this is experience of the designer who reached out to me on through social media the other day, was that it can be frustrating for people advocating for this way of thinking. You come up against the world that I've described.
And so the reform to policymaking that I'm keen on, is one which opens policymaking up. One that includes much more public engagement, in the way that local government already does. That would help put design more front and centre.
We use this blog to talk about the work of the multidisciplinary policy design community. We share stories about our work, the thinking behind it and what policymaking might look like in the future. If you would like to read more, then please subscribe to this blog. If you work for the UK's government, then you can you join the policy design community. If you don't work for the UK government, then join our AHRC Design and Policy Network.
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