A welcome is in order this week...
You might have seen our advertisement for a new Policy Designer earlier in the year. We had an amazing response and were privileged to meet many talented and interesting people.
Today, we’re delighted to welcome Sanjan Sabherwal to the team. Sanjan comes with a pretty unique CV: a First class honours in Industrial Design from Northumbria University, and a Masters in PPE from the University of York. He has a long-term interest in youth participation - one which he took to his most recent role at the polling company Populus. He’s also worked in innovation teams for Mars and Wrigley.
Sanjan is a keen photographer and filmmaker and we’re looking forward to him bringing both his design skills and policy knowledge to our projects.
One Team Government...
We'll be back shortly with another blog entry. For now, here's a blog we like from Kit Collingwood-Richardson with some micro-actions which support public sector reform. Along with Kit, Beatrice and the wider Policy Lab team are part of One Team Government, bringing together UK policymakers, service designers, digital professionals and cross-sector experts to talk openly and creatively about making government in the UK more effective by working together. I've certainly taken Kit's micro-actions and put them into my to-do list!
We are still interested to hear from you...
On 20 March we asked how we measure Lab’s ripple effect. A big 'thank you' for the responses so far. I haven’t yet been able to update you on what we’ve learnt. We’ve been delivering quickly on a few big projects and out-and-about sharing our work at Civil Service Live. In the meantime, we're keen to share some early feedback.
At this stage it feels like there are four themes emerging:
- Some policy-makers welcome the flexibility of the tools on the Open Policy Making Toolkit. This is great and we encourage you to adapt them to whoever you are using them with. If you do use or adapt them, please let us know - we’re always interested to hear about what does, and doesn't work!
- We should do a little more to highlight that iteration is necessary throughout policy delivery. I hope my recent blog on prototyping went some way to explaining how early-stage tools don't end up with the perfect policy - and that ideas need to be tested and refined throughout delivery.
- The Open Policy Making Toolkit is really valuable when taking people on a policy development journey. We’ve been asked what we can do to provide some more explanations of how to run sessions (like a facilitator guide). We’ll have a think about this.
- Though not needed in every case, some of our readers would welcome more on the theory behind some of the tools and techniques. Andrea has uploaded a few new slides to our Slideshare here. I encourage you to particularly check out two new slides on being evidence-based and future-focused. They are embedded in her recent blog.
We still welcome views!
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