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Skills, tools and techniques

There are a multitude of skills, tools and techniques you can use to implement open and better policy making. We're always looking for new and innovative ways to design better policy - here's where you can find out all the latest on tools to help you deliver better, more open policy.

Launching the Healthy System Indicators: A new way of relational working across local and national systems

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How do we know if we are healthy? What do we look out for? We have a regular temperature, we know our energy levels, our body doesn't ache. These are indicators of good health.   Much like the body, we can …

An independent review of children's social care: Appreciating the wider family context

Photo of a young child sitting carpeted floor playing with toys, taken from the eye level of the child. Child's face isn't shown.

For the independent review of children’s social care, we were asked to scratch beneath the surface, by looking at wider family contexts, to understand the impact of the system on the families who navigate it.

Launching our experimental policy design methods

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Picture showing a set of virtual cards which describe 11 experimental methods and approaches which Policy Lab think have the potential to shift how policy is developed, in radically different ways. The 11 cards are: superforcasting, serious games, legislative theatre, engaging through the metaverse, digital twins, bodystorming, moral imaginings, decentralised autonomous organisations, art in policy, citizen assemblies, regenerative design.

Design thinking continues to permeate our work, but over the last year, we have been scanning the horizon to identify the next wave of innovative methods that could improve the way policy is made, tested and delivered in order to de-risk interventions and make processes more effective.

Tools for climate policy: 2) systems mapping

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This is the second blog in a short series on methods that Policy Lab has experimented with in the context of addressing climate change. It focuses on systems mapping as featured in a collaboration between Policy Lab, UCL and stakeholders in the UK’s industry and building sectors.

Tools for climate policy: 1) co-design in parallel to COP26

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Photo of Policy Lab team preparing for their workshop at the Design Council's Design for Planet conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum in Dundee.

We are sharing a short blog series on different methodologies that Policy Lab has experimented with in the context of action to address climate change. This, the first blog, describes a policy co-design process we ran last month at the Design Council’s Design for Planet conference coinciding with COP26.

Crowdsourcing policy: how can collective intelligence improve policymaking?

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Improving outcomes through diversity of thought and experience

Today we launch a new Collective Intelligence Lab (CILab), a collaboration with the Policy Profession which has the potential to transform how policy is made. The CILab will be hosted by Policy Lab and sit alongside our other innovative approaches …

Seeing it, feeling it, video-conferencing it: what policy can learn from participatory art and design in a time of social distancing

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This is an image of workshop participants looking at a wall of crowd-sourced photos at a Policy Lab event on street design at the Chartered Institute of Highways and Transportation in 2019.

We reflect on presenting information in ways which access different senses, how we might adapt this during a time of social distancing, how we can use this to radically innovate our practice in the future and ask: how are you doing it?

Introducing a 'Government as a System' toolkit

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This is the framework for Policy Lab's new Government as a System toolkit.

In late February I tested Policy Lab’s new ‘Government as a System’ toolkit at the UK Policy Profession’s annual Policy Excellence Group.  It was our first opportunity to expose Policy Lab’s latest tool for systems change with some of the most senior UK policy officials. 

Lab Long Read: Human-centred policy? Blending ‘big data’ and ‘thick data’ in national policy

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This is a diagram of Policy Lab's model for combining big data and thick data.

Around the world, in order to remain relevant, organisations have undertaken significant transformation to become more ‘human-centred’. But what does this mean for policy-making?