The Challenge
The UK’s research and innovation system supports both economic growth and the richness of our culture. Yes, but how their research is funded needs to be fair (and seen to be fair).
This government agency had a clear ministerial remit to change the way funding was allocated to universities and research institutes. For years, the bulk of the funding had gone to Russell group institutions and it was felt that taxpayers money should be disbursed more intelligently and in such a way as to promote equity in research and educational opportunity.
My role on the project
I was retained as an independent service design consultant by the integrator tasked with building the digital solution that would allow researchers to apply for funding. I joined a small team which also included interaction and content designers as well as user researchers.
What I did
As I worked though our initial discovery phase, running challenge setting exercises, creating personas, building journey maps, and understanding the emotions and constraints of the end-user applicants who would need to use our new system, it became apparent that the digital delivery unity was building tools without understanding exactly what problems they were solving.
The yellow 'Circle Line' represents the policy team. They are in a continuous iteration loop where they define problems in response to strategy imperatives. They meet twice a week, and delivery teams engage with them at various key points in the process.
Given the time previously invested on the transformation, and the complexity of the stakeholder landscape, my stakeholder had elected to push ahead while intentionally disengaging with their policy unit.
Based on what I could assess, I decided to set up a policy lab which would allow the digital delivery and policy teams to collaborate, producing both policy and digital tools as part of one, concerted effort.
The policy lab
The lab is set up to use a mix of creative techniques and traditional policy-making methods. The approach is rooted in design thinking, so always starts with a problem definition and then moves through the stages of the design process
In traditional policy making, there are tasks that are impossible to compress. Things like organising an impact assessment, the time it takes to get a Westminster window, or the logistics of a public consultation and subsequent analysis of results are always going to be significant challenges to an agile approach.
So the lab work doesn’t try to replace these, but instead creates an opportunity to clear the decks early on, removing misunderstandings and assumptions and moving much more quickly at the start of the process. In many cases, participants will have not worked together before. Many or most will not have used design workshop tools. This creates a positive disruption which is designed to unlock productive behaviours.
Labs can be fun as well as productive. Here a team at Defra uses Lego to ideate new policies around livestock registration and health data traceability. These policymakers had never used service design methods before and after some initial reluctance they embraced them and made rapid progress.
After working through gathering qualitative data; capturing the lived experiences of those affected by the policy; identifying underlying problems; ideating and prototyping; testing feasibility and gathering feedback; the teams in the lab feed back outcomes to their specialist areas to integrate the new solutions into existing systems and processes.
The tube map above illustrates a key feature of the lab. Specialist teams retain their core areas of focus and authority but come together in the lab at different points in the flow. This means the lab is not an organisational transformation, but a collaborative method, designed to overlay on existing teams and structures.
As you can see from the schedule below, the team at this agency was able to progress several complex policy challenges simultaneous over an eight week period.
Three of the above challenges had been stalled with the agency's funding policy team. In some cases, progress had all but stopped for more than a year. Once the teams were engaged with this process they made real progress in weeks.
Successful outcomes
Using service design methods in a policy context is a thing that’s gaining traction. As a result of the collaboration between policy and delivery, many policy projects are delivering better outcomes at lower cost.
Similar projects are being scaled and are achieving speed and savings. With any luck, as these policy design tool-kits and methods are shared across policy making teams, there should be positive impacts felt more widely.
Credit
In my work with policy labs I sometimes use workshop tools created by Anna Whicher, Head of Policy Design at the Centre for Design & Research at Cardiff Metropolitan University. I’ve adapted them over the years, but I thought I should give credit:-)
You can read more about her work on the PDR website.
Can I help you solve a similar problem? dug@goodlookslikethis.com