Lived experience refers to knowledge acquired through direct, first-hand and personal experience. In policymaking this usually involves people who experience a particular policy or issue in their daily lives.
Today, we are launching a short 'Lived Experience in Policymaking Guide’. The guide is not another toolkit. Instead, it aims to make explicit some of the underlying principles policymakers might consider in order to carry out effective and empathetic lived experience work. What does it take for policymakers to do good lived experience work? Why is it so important? What are some of the behaviours and mindsets that underpin it?
This is our fourth blog based on our project for the pioneering Changing Futures programme in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC). Lived experience involvement is a core principle of the wider Changing Futures initiative and is integrated into Changing Futures service delivery. Our project for this programme focussed on addressing the following challenge question: How can we ensure that central government enables flexible and person-centred frontline delivery models on an ongoing basis for people facing multiple disadvantage?
The Changing Futures programme defines people facing multiple disadvantage as those experiencing combinations of homelessness, substance misuse, mental health issues, domestic abuse and contact with the criminal justice system. They are likely to interact with multiple services and professionals at the same time. Changing Futures partnered with Policy Lab to co-design interventions for improving multiple disadvantage services. You can read more about the wider Policy Lab project in the first blog of this series.
Our new 'Lived Experience in Policymaking Guide’ is based on Policy Lab’s work for the Changing Futures programme and our wider work. You can download the guide as a PDF here.
In Policy Lab, we generate lived experience insights through a wide range of methods including film ethnography, co-design, and serious games. Over the past 10 years, we have seen that lived experience can improve policy development in numerous ways, including by:
Reflections in our lived experience guide come from Policy Lab’s 10-year history undertaking lived experience work in partnership with policy teams across government. We also take specific lessons from the Changing Futures project, particularly our work with the National Expert Citizen Group (NECG), a group of people with lived experience of multiple disadvantage from across England. You can also read more about the NECG here.
This lived experience group played a vital role in our work on behalf of the Changing Futures programme, adding their personal insights to our policy development work. Their involvement was facilitated by charity Revolving Doors, who have over 30 years' experience improving systems for people experiencing crisis.
You can listen to audio clips in this blog and in the guide, to hear from members of Revolving Doors and our lived experience group directly.
Listen to Sean, Involvement Manager at Revolving Doors charity, talk about the value of lived experience (Opening the link in a new tab works best)
While lived experience is a core component of Policy Lab’s projects, our work for the Changing Futures Programme provided the opportunity to work very deeply with people with lived experience. During our Changing Futures work, Policy Lab worked with around 10 people with lived experience from the NECG. They joined co-design workshops and met regularly with Policy Lab to shape the ethnography and systems change work we did. This process meant our understanding of the current system, and our ideas for change, were rooted in real life experiences and needs. Over 9 months, we invited the group ‘behind the scenes’ to help us shape our sessions and project thinking, rather than only interacting through workshops.
The involvement of the lived experience group was reported as one of the greatest strengths of the work we carried out for Changing Futures. In project evaluations, many policymakers cited the importance of including people with lived experience in the room, and how this shifted their understanding of the problems and possible solutions. One Changing Futures policymaker reflects, "I particularly appreciated the sense of contributions in the room... It feels like this should be the business-as-usual policy development process." As individuals, we felt a deeper empathy, connection and a powerful motivation, for the challenges that we worked on together. The approach, including being involved in decision-making, was also valued by those with lived experience.
Usually we're not invited, so well done for inviting us... I was scared but everything turned out great.
- Participant with lived experience
I've felt included and valued. I've learned and I've had fun. I've developed through the sessions.
- Participant with lived experience
Listen to Robin, an NECG member, describe shared decision-making (Opening the link in a new tab works best)
Including people with lived experience is important to make policy that serves people’s needs. Despite this, policymakers face certain barriers to carrying out lived experience work in government.
Our ‘Lived Experience in Policymaking Guide’ aims to make explicit some of the invisible principles and behaviours that characterised our work with people with lived experience in the Changing Futures programme. We’ve combined reflections from this specific initiative alongside Policy Lab’s wider experience running lived experience work with policymakers across government. The guide acknowledges that it is not just what we do, but how we do it, that shapes the quality of our lived experience work and the potential benefits for everyone taking part.
We hope that the reflections we share in the guide will continue helping us as a policymaking community to work with people outside of government. We know that there are also many other civil servants and policy teams carrying out this work, and we’d love to hear any stories of how you’ve found doing this work as part of your policymaking processes.
To get in touch, or commission our work please contact: team@policylab.gov.uk
]]>Last year, we worked with Defra Futures to explore what decision-making in relation to the freshwater system could look like post 2043, if transformed. This meant significantly reimagining who might be involved in managing our waterways, and the alternative ways decisions could be made twenty years from now and beyond.
Our task was not to predict the future but to spark new conversations and provoke thinking by bringing different possibilities to life. Looking ahead to a 20-year horizon gave us the space to step away from the current day and consider unconventional ideas that could be applied in the future (see figure below). Whilst we have allowed ourselves to expand and shift the Overton Window for this investigation, these ideas may or may not help shape decision making processes in the long term.
We drew upon varied methods including, collective intelligence, moral imaginings and speculative design to invite new ideas and provide a taste of what these imagined futures could look like.
Below we introduce each method and explain why using it was so important to achieving the project’s objectives.
The first step in widening the lens was to draw on the collective wisdom of policymakers, academics, industry stakeholders, creatives, and the public. To do this, we ran a Collective Intelligence debate over the course of a week using the open source Pol.is platform, which enables large numbers of people to come together and comment on a specific issue. This approach brings in voices from different viewpoints, increases the likelihood of unexpected ideas emerging and can provide weak signals of activities and attitudes that may become more established in the future. Policy Lab has run about a dozen Collective Intelligence debates and this one had high engagement with nearly 200 participants. The Pol.is platform enabled participants to vote on whether they agreed or disagreed with statements spanning a range of ideas that explored how, what, who for and by whom decisions could be made in the future. Participants were also able to suggest their own statements, adding potential ideas and perspectives to the mix.
The results surfaced areas of divergence and convergence around themes such as the impact of decisions on future generations or the role of technology to support the use of evidence. The approach helped us to gauge appetite for different concepts amongst our stakeholders.
Experimentation is another vital ingredient when exploring new possibilities and for this project, we looked to experiment with one of our most valuable tools: our imagination.
We asked ourselves, what if, in the future, we used our imaginations to represent more-than-human perspectives in decision-making?
To explore this question, we worked with Phoebe Tickell, founder of Moral Imaginations, who has developed an approach that seeks to embed three pillars into decision-making: nature and the more-than-human world, future unborn generations and ancestors and the past. These three pillars are known collectively as Moral Imagining and is an approach that is gathering momentum among social innovators and in local government.
In the Water Post 2043 project, we considered the more-than-human perspective by running the UK’s government’s first ever Interspecies Council. This is a practice, developed by Phoebe Tickell, Joanna Macy and the team at Moral Imaginations, which uses semi-improvisational, participatory techniques to bring the voice of nature into organisational decision-making. It is an adaptation of the Council of All Beings, an exercise created by Joanna Macy.
The River Roding Interspecies Council took place in a location next to the River Roding in Barking. We brought together 24 participants, including stakeholders with a professional or community interest in the local area, to imagine and empathise with the needs of some of the species living in and around the river Roding. We asked questions such as: What concerns does the bee have? Or a local reed warbler?
While we can’t truly know the answers to these questions, the process of stepping out of our own shoes can help to deepen empathy and create new perspectives. More-than-human thinking asks us to engage with the needs of both humans and other species in decision-making, recognising that our actions often have an impact beyond people-centred considerations.
The shift we are making is from seeing nature as separate from human beings, to seeing that non-humans and humans are all a part of nature. It takes a leap of imagination, but many of the participants reflected that once they made the jump, it became quite easy, and they discovered a whole different perspective. By using radical imagination, we can start to bring a voice of non-human species into our meetings, boards, and design processes.
Phoebe Tickell, founder of Moral Imaginations
You can watch this short overview of the River Roding Interspecies Council, including reflections from some of the participants.
Using such a novel form of engagement can feel daunting but experimentation allows us to learn lessons, see what works and identify what can be explored further. This is particularly valuable for policy issues that require thinking far into the future. Experiencing the Interspecies Council approach for the first time, we observed how the format acted as a levelling tool, bringing people with different roles and experiences together and allowing them to find common goals. Rather than achieving an easy consensus, however, the discussions amongst the group highlighted areas of tension which then prompted reflection about potential solutions and compromises. Whilst tracking the impact of this work, we saw an appetite for people to keep engaging, both with each other and the river Roding, weeks after the Council had taken place. Feedback also suggests that a legacy effect of more-than-human empathy has developed for some; almost all participants reported a noticeable, lasting change within their perception or feelings towards nature, the world or themselves in the week after the Council.
I think taking part has given me a new appreciation / awareness of nature and the other species we exist with.
Interspecies Council participant
The third way in which we looked to reimagine what is possible was by using speculative design. This practice allows us to imagine new possibilities by creating fictions and scenarios of possible futures, manifested through the design of artefacts and stories to provoke discussion.
Towards the end of the project, Policy Lab and the Catchment Based Approach (CaBA) co-hosted a specially designed exhibition at Somerset House called the Changing Course Forum. The exhibit curated newly commissioned and existing works that portrayed possible ways in which future decision-making for the water system might be transformed.
Over two days 80 stakeholders, including academics, policymakers, and social innovators, viewed and experienced a range of physical and digital speculations that presented different versions of what the future could look like. We partnered with award-winning studio Superflux, who created the Ecological Intelligence Agency, an installation that invited the audience to experience the role AI might have in future policy decision-making. See their website for a deep dive into their work developing this speculation. Policy Lab’s designers also created two speculations. One, led by Ben Peppiatt, imagines a future with a ‘national civic service’ which encourages members of the community to take part in local river stewardship to build long-term resilience of the water system. The other Policy Lab speculation, led by Nina Cutler, presents a fictional scenario in which communities gather at a local festival to participate in decision-making, aided by combining citizen science and the arts.
Watch this short film of the Changing Course forum to learn more about the event, including hearing from some of the stakeholders on their experiences of engaging with speculative design.
Participants at the Changing Course Forum were also able to contribute their own future visions of their local waterways, with narratives woven together in an immersive soundtrack created by Uninvited Guests and Duncan Speakman. You can listen to the piece here.
The concepts presented during the event have roots in activities occurring today as well as some technological promises that have yet to be realised. By combining physical artefacts with rich narratives, stakeholders were able to see, hear and feel possible transformations. Speculations act as probes to provoke conversation, sharing visions for futures that may or may not be desirable rather than providing predictions or solutions.
Phil Tovey, Head of Defra Futures, reflected:
Analytic forms of foresight only take you so far. Often, with little organisational capacity to pursue ideas that push way beyond the accepted (and expected) possibility space, transformative innovations (and threats) are spotted but left undeveloped. With the help of Policy Lab, and the elective range of contributors to the project - from academia to artists - Water Post 2043, for the first time, took our foresight findings out of 'the future' and made them tangible, made them present. Despite seeming radical and distant, these prototypes and speculations now represent options for the future of freshwater decision making and are already sparking new forms of thinking and action.
The post 2043 horizon set for this project invited us to take a long-term perspective. Whilst the combination of methods used may seem beyond the realm of conventional policymaking, these creative, tactile and imaginative approaches enabled us to engage wider audiences more readily and offer policy colleagues an expanded set of concepts to inform their existing data and analysis. Together, these three methods allowed us to stretch thinking and bring new ideas into the fold. Although the concepts may or may not develop further, using collective intelligence, moral imaginings and speculative design played a vital role in inspiring new conversations and activities to inform and expand future thinking.
If you are interested in using these experimental methods in your work, contact the team at team@policylab.gov.uk.
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Much like the body, we can understand the environment within which a policy or services is being delivered as a system and we can assess how well that system is functioning.
In our recent project with the Changing Futures team in Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), we created and tested Healthy System Indicators. We learnt that the Indicators can help policymakers and stakeholders assess a policy/ delivery system together, and diagnose where interventions can be made to ensure the system can improve, ultimately resulting in better outcomes for citizens.
This blog is the third in a four-part series sharing what we learnt about systems change in policymaking. You can read our first and second blogs here.
The Changing Futures project focused on services delivering support for people facing multiple disadvantage. Our challenge question was: “How can we ensure that central government enables flexible and person-centred frontline delivery models on an ongoing basis for people facing multiple disadvantage?”
We worked with 126 people, including people with lived experience of multiple disadvantage, sector experts, and local and national policymakers, to understand multiple disadvantage systems.
The conception and development of the Indicators is deeply rooted in a sense of place. They were designed by people with lived experience, policymakers and sector experts from across England, living and working at multiple levels and across regional systems.
The Healthy Systems Indicators provide a potential framework for strategy and present a different way of delivering policy at a national and local level. Many policy professionals and stakeholders increasingly see their domains as complex policy systems, where single interventions may have limited or even unintended effects. The Indicators articulate a shared understanding and common language of system health. They provide a novel and innovative way of aiding policy development and delivery, not because they materialise new policy ideas, but because they interrogate – and ultimately could improve - the very structures by which policy relates to delivery and citizens.
The indicators are intended to be used both locally and nationally. They aim to unify actors across geographical and policy silos, build stronger relationships, and create higher levels of trust and flexibility in service delivery. We think that creating healthier systems will lead to better service delivery, which ultimately will lead to better outcomes for people facing challenges nested in complex policy systems, such as multiple disadvantage.
Whilst the Indicators were developed for our work on multiple disadvantage, our hypothesis is that they are transferable across different policy areas. From our vantage point as a cross-government Lab, we hear similar systemic challenges faced by different teams in different departments. We think that the Indicators provide a practical response to some of these systemic challenges which often include lack of join up, strong silos, short term thinking and top heavy accountability metrics. The next stage is to adapt them to other policy areas, and test them in local and national policy areas.
Test, iterate, test, iterate. This is a beta product. Please feel free to adapt and iterate the product – and let us know how you get on.
Resources
We have developed a freely available PDF guide which introduces you to the Healthy System indicators, explains when, why and how to use the indicators and provides guidance on first steps to take.
We are interested in your thoughts and reflections on the Indicators and we are keen to identify further projects to test this way of working. If you are interested in using the Healthy System Indicators and would like some help to get started, Policy Lab is able to help advise and run a ‘Half Day Workshop in a Box’ to diagnose your system, identify system stakeholders and use the Healthy System Indicators to improve the health of your system. Please get in touch if you would like to work with us.
Note: The Healthy Systems Indicators are still at the prototyping stage and do not represent government policy.
With thanks to:
The Changing Futures team
Nigel Ball, former Director of GO Lab, Blavatnik School of Government
]]>This investigation, supported by the Policy Profession Unit, has given us time to research an opportunity that we think could add value to policy making practice, the application of serious games in regulatory development across central government and regulatory authorities.
Policy Lab has worked on a range of projects that intersect with regulation and we’ve noticed a growing demand for more anticipatory and participatory approaches in this area. Regulators are having to respond to emerging technologies which are disrupting markets and posing new risks to individuals and institutions. Additionally, the government has just launched the Smarter Regulation programme, which is encouraging officials to use regulations only where necessary, and ensure their use is proportionate and future-proof. Because a change in regulation can have significant effects on businesses, organisations, and individuals it is important to understand the potential effects before deciding. We hypothesise that serious games can be used to understand regulatory challenges and stress-test solutions at pace.
Over the past five years, Policy Lab has gravitated towards using serious games in several regulatory projects because the approach lends itself to developing and testing rules in participatory ways.
Games have rules and mechanisms that govern how players interact with each other. Policies are rules that shape the behaviour of businesses, organisations, and people. Therefore, we can use games to model different rules and understand the resulting changes in behaviour. This is why we identified serious games as one of our 11 experimental methods which could have a high potential for next practice in policy making.
Across several projects, we’ve observed that serious games can help by:
Many of these benefits can occur simultaneously when using a serious game in policy development. The serious games we’ve created so far have been a part of wider projects, mainly used in co-design workshops as research tools. Here are three examples to illustrate the applications and benefits listed above:
Interestingly the MCA modified the game we provided, enabling it to continue designing regulations in participatory ways. In autumn 2023 the MCA delivered a session at the International Maritime Organization attended by international regulatory experts focusing on technological innovation, alternative fuels, and inspection best practice.
Policy Lab wants to enable regulators to follow the MCA's example, by sharing our experience and tools for developing serious games in a policy context.
Our hypothesis is that by codifying game patterns for different use cases and by providing accessible guidance we can support more regulators grappling with knotty challenges to take a participatory approach.
We believe the best way to increase the adoption of serious games in regulatory development is to connect with innovative practitioners inside and outside of government. This will help to inform the development of tools, build an evidence base to demonstrate impact and hopefully find opportunities to test and learn. If you are interested, you can engage with RegBox by:
We are delighted to be launching the new National Security Policy and Research CoLab (NSPARC or N*), sponsored by the Office of the Chief Scientific Advisor for National Security and hosted by the Policy Lab.
N* was born out of a partnership between Policy Lab and the National Security Secretariat (NSS) to increase diverse thinking and innovation in policy making. That partnership has, amongst other things, already led to the founding of the Collective Intelligence Lab, which uses digital tools to crowdsource insight and ideas.
N* takes the National Security Secretariat partnership to a whole new level. As a vehicle for next practice, N* will apply novel and creative methods to real-life policy problems. It will partner with and support colleagues working in National Security through a project-based model. The N* approach will include established and more experimental, aspirational future methods.
N* will also seek to provide National Security policymakers with the tools and knowledge needed to experiment with these approaches themselves. It will seek to drive better informed policy, take advantage of policymaking opportunities emerging from new technologies to help ensure the UK remains competitive, and secure optimum citizen outcomes and champion liberal democracy, in line with the Integrated Review Refresh.
Paul Killworth, the Deputy Chief Scientific Advisor for National Security and the National Security Innovation Champion, defines innovation as “the discovery, development and deployment of novel solutions that add value to the mission and business of the organisations that make up the UK’s National Security system.” Paul said: “N* is a crucial part in our national security innovation strategy. When we think about innovation, we often think about new technology or equipment. But N* is about making the end-user central to our decision-making process, achieving results more quickly and efficiently, and securing better policy outcomes for our citizens.”
Sign up to the N* mailing list or contact N* to find out more.
NSPARC Mailing List Information Sheet
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The problems we face today, such as climate change, aging populations and inequality, cannot be fixed by one team or department alone. They require a systems approach. Through our nine-month project for the Changing Futures programme in Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (introduced in our first blog in this series) we learnt policymakers don't often have the time or space to consider the current policy system, and test possible deep-rooted changes. “Systemic” offers a space for reflecting on the current policy system works, and then play-testing changes that might lead to better policy outcomes.
Having the space to take a systems approach is key for policymakers working on some of today's deep-rooted societal challenges. It is particularly useful to understand complexity and intractable problems. Jennie Winhall and Charles Leadbeater suggest that that the following requires a systemic approach: an issue that appears deep rooted, so that the problem returns even despite attempts to fix them, produces persistent patterns of failure, connects to other issues across components and systems, and reflects fundamental values, purposes and organisational approaches in society.
You might want to consider trying “Systemic” if the following resonates:
If this resonates with you, “Systemic” is one way to explore simulating systems change in your policy area. “Systemic” gives you an opportunity to uncover the current rules of policy systems, considering how power, purpose, relationships and resource flows operate within your current system. You’ll then be supported to create a future shared vision and explore aspects of the system which might need to change.
At the end of this blog, you’ll find an option to download a beta version of Systemic. The game can be played independently or facilitated by Policy Lab in away-days or longer team sessions.
A policymaker described an early version of the game, “I considered afresh the importance of not taking constraints (I.e. rules or policies) for granted or leaving them untouched - the game pointed towards amending the rules to achieve better outcomes, so I was reminded how policymakers should be bold in re-casting policies.”
If this resonates and you are interested in exploring what more effective systems could look like with your team or networks, get in touch. You can facilitate a session of Systemic using our downloadable resources or ask us to facilitate “Systemic” at your next awayday or extended team meeting. We’ll take you through the stages of creating systems change and draw out the frameworks we used to help you explore your policy problem.
A beta version of “Systemic” is also downloadable. If you’d like to take a go at playing independently, you can print and play with the following materials:
Credits:
Lead games designer: Matteo Menapace
Lead researcher: Vanessa Lefton
Lead designer: Alex Fleming
Assistant visual designer: Suzie McMurtry
Kindly supported by the Policy Profession Unit
[Amended 15th November 2023]
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Policy Lab has previously written about systems mapping as a useful process for understanding the interconnected nature of factors and actors that make up policy ecosystems. Here, we share our latest experimentation on how we can generate practical ideas for long-lasting and systemic change.
This blog includes:
Multiple disadvantage - a policy area that requires a systemic approach
There are over 363,000 adults across England experiencing multiple disadvantage – including combinations of homelessness, substance misuse, mental health issues, domestic abuse and contact with the criminal justice system.
People facing multiple disadvantage are likely to interact with multiple services and professionals at the same time: probation, the drugs service, charities, the housing office, the job centre, local health centre and so on. Without better coordination around the person, there is a risk that the third sector and different tiers of government deliver overlapping, and sometimes diverging, policies and services to the same individual.
My case is complicated because there's so many things happening in one go... I've been through a lot but it kind of interlinks
– Sophie, Greater London
In 2019 the Shared Outcomes Fund (SOF) announced £200 million to fund pilot projects testing innovative ways of working across the public sector. One focus of the SOF was to take steps to break down silos. The SOF funded the Changing Futures Programme team in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) to improve outcomes for people facing multiple disadvantage. To approach this complex policy area, the programme partnered with Policy Lab, creating a multi-disciplinary team including ethnographers, designers and systems thinkers, which focussed on addressing the following challenge question: How can we ensure that central government enables flexible and person-centred frontline delivery models on an ongoing basis for people facing multiple disadvantage?
A network of 126 people worked towards shifting the system and codesign interventions for change. Participants included people with lived experience of multiple disadvantage, policymakers from across DLUHC, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Home Office, Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC), NHS, local government, third sector, and academics.
It was genuinely collaborative and provided new perspectives that can lead to real and positive change. Rather than simply challenge my department's position, there was a collegiate atmosphere focussed on providing solutions.
– National government policymaker
A mixed method approach
We combined several methodologies to address the systemic policy challenges relating to multiple disadvantage. The project included co-design, systems change, ethnography and art in policy, all playing different roles at different points through the 9-month project.
For our systems change practice, we largely drew on two frameworks: Building Better Systems by Jennie Winhall and Charles Leadbeater and the Three Horizons framework created by Bill Sharpe. The former, provides a way to understand the systems that we operate within, and why and how they might need to change. The latter offers an approach for understanding the current landscape (Horizon One), the future desired landscape (Horizon Three), and steps towards that future over time (Horizon Two).
The project went through three phases. Below we set out how we applied our mix of tools and methods during each phase:
1. Understanding the current system
Our first phase was to learn about the current policy system. We took a systemic lens by listening to people facing multiple disadvantage, their support networks, and local and national policymakers working on related services. We created a participatory evidence discovery to bring together information about multiple disadvantage - including the existing policy infrastructure - by engaging people with lived experience, academics, and sector professionals. We carried out film ethnography, involving 29 participants in three areas across England (Greater London, East Midlands and the Northeast). We analysed our research insights around the ‘four keys’: exploring how power, purpose, resource flows and relationships are currently operating.
There has been so much more meaningful input from lived experience which has been a huge benefit.
– Head of Public Health, Local Authority
2. Creating a future vision
In our second phase, we drew on people’s lived experience to co-design a future vision and future values. During five workshops with our cross-system group of 126 people, we used design methodology and collective imagining tools to think about the future. Our methods were informed by frameworks from a global movement of systems change experts and future thinkers, calling for a creative re-imagining of current social infrastructures. This co-created future vision enabled the group to articulate future values and draw on the four keys: power, purpose, relationships and resource flows, to articulate what the future system should look and feel like.
I just want to be living a normal life and hopefully have a relationship back with my kids.
– Jane, North East England
3. Building steps towards that vision
In our third phase of work, we identified ideas to move towards our co-created vision. This involved extensive design research with around 50 policymakers and sector experts. We then brought together the cross-system group to generate hundreds of ideas for change. Together we prioritised five ideas to develop into ‘interventions’. We iterated the interventions through one off interviews, roundtable discussions and regular co-design with the Changing Futures team at DLUHC. We tested them through workshops and in local areas, mapped them together and facilitated the Changing Futures team to roadmap possible next steps.
I think the whole process has been useful - a logical journey that progresses.
– Deputy CEO, multiple disadvantage charity
Early signs of change
This project aimed to shift systems around multiple disadvantage. Rather than short term fixes, we focused on fundamental structures and relationships in local and national government work. This quote is an indication of the impact on the DLUHC Changing Futures policy team’s long-term thinking:
Working with Policy Lab has transformed our approach to our policy work. Their ability to convene cross-sector audiences and facilitate open, challenging discussions about complex cross-cutting issues has provided a foundation for change that we could not have created on our own. The expertise in design methodology has opened up our policy questions and brought us so much closer to solutions.
– Commissioning team, DLUHC
Systemic values enrich systemic methods
So far, we have described a very practical, chronological, methodology for applying systems change frameworks to a real-life policy challenge. From our work in the multiple disadvantage policy system, we have learnt that it is not just what you do, but how you do it. Our approach was underpinned by these ‘hows’:
Start by modelling in your work the new system values and the ways of working that you would expect to see in the ideal long term. This will reveal the constraints and circumstances that need to change to enable new ways of being. Putting in place the new system values will also help to influence culture norms, giving others confidence to do the same. In systems innovation, this is called moving from ‘“system now” to “system next”, or the system as it is, to the system as it could be.’ (Charles Leadbeater, Systems Innovation Initiative, 2023).
There is no silver bullet, model, pilot or innovation that can fix systemic challenges. Shifting systems requires multiple transformative innovations at different times and levels in the system – many of which can only be maximised by being interdependent. It requires continuous observing, learning, investing-in and enabling of the things that are working. Work with people in your system to co-design a set of future values. These can be used as a lens to measure if the interventions are working. Invest in and enable interventions that move towards your collective vision.
People across your systems will play crucial roles in moving forward towards your shared vision. Build a coalition of changemakers, who are open, and hold some power to influence others and make change. Diverse and strong relationships are also crucial to the quality of ideas that emerge. Relationships with people across the system will keep you on course towards a shared goal and purpose. The importance of facilitation or convening this coalition of changemakers cannot be underestimated to maintain momentum. From the outset of the multiple disadvantage project, we launched a large cross-system group of experts, centring people with lived experience, to share their insights with us through five workshops involving 126 number of participants over nine months. We built close relationships with the National Expert Citizen Group (NECG) to understand a range of lived experiences and sought advice from sector experts through the Expert Stakeholder Group (ESG).
The community we have built has exceeded my expectations.
– Commissioning team, DLUHC
A matrix for practical policy change
Based on our own journey, we have created a practical guide for taking a multi-disciplinary approach to systems change in policy.
From services to systems - how to improve policy
This work reflects a transition from co-designing services to co-designing shifts in systems. There is a deepening movement of change makers who are using creativity and the imagination as practical tools for systems change. We’ve been inspired by the global community of organisations and individuals carrying out this work.
In our next blog, we launch “Systemic”; a game designed to build capacity in the systems change frameworks and support critical reflection. If you’d like to discuss working with Policy Lab on your own systemic issue, get in touch.
]]>Policy Lab and the Policy Profession have launched a new, free five-part course called People-Centred Policy Design, on FutureLearn. The course will help policy makers apply innovative, people-centred tools and methods.
This course is for policy makers interested in integrating people’s lived experience into policy design and who would like to learn about how film ethnography, co-design or speculative design and serious games can help improve policy outcomes.
From next practice towards best practice
As part of Policy Lab’s mission to radically improve policy, we have collaborated with teams across government and the wider public sector, to put diverse voices and perspectives at the heart of policy.
Through more than 200 projects across nine years, Policy Lab has explored ‘next practice,’ introducing a range of tools and methods into the policy making system.
The People-Centred Policy Design course was developed in partnership with the Policy Profession, in order to share what it is like for civil servants, methods experts, and members of the public to explore next practice in policy making. As stewards of the Policy Profession Standards, the profession supports more than 30,000 policy makers across the UK Civil Service to continuously improve how policy is developed and delivered. This includes involving those affected by policies in their design and those whose voices may have been marginalised.
This new free course is aimed at all public servants who contribute to policy, whether as a formal part of the profession or in other ways through its design, delivery and evaluation. Completing the course and applying the featured tools, methods and mindsets will help policy makers bring diverse voices and perspectives into policy development, which is a vital skill for everyone who contributes to policy as the standards highlight (see standards 1.3, 3.1 and 3.2 in particular).
Learning from Policy Lab’s experience
This new course sets out stories from Policy Lab’s long-standing experience of working with teams across government. It features four projects in detail, showing how you can:
The course has weekly modules and takes 10 hours over five weeks to complete. It features short films, that capture the reflections and experiences of past Policy Lab projects. Learners will also find written content explaining the methods, demonstrating how they can improve policy outcomes.
Practical steps are also included each week for how to start applying the method in your own work. These draw on case studies where Policy Lab applied the featured methods across a range of tricky policy design challenges, from understanding the drivers of engagement with JobCentre Plus services, to fisheries management and English language learning provision for refugees.
Each module links out to resources and expertise from across the public sector and beyond that will help deepen your understanding of the methods involved and facilitates reflection on how to start implementing them.
Start your learning journey
If you are a UK Civil Servant or work in the public sector you can access the course via the Policy Profession's website. There you will see how the material links to a wider learning offer from the profession that will include induction resources, learning linked to the Policy Profession Standards, Knowledge Series and a Policy Festival, helping to share good practice across the policy making system. Others can access the course directly via FutureLearn.
When signing up, please note that you will have free access to the course for five weeks after you enrol.
This blog post was amended on 9 October 2023 to give up to date information on how to access the course for civil servants and the general public.
]]>Policy Lab has been at the forefront of bringing different approaches including a wide range of digital tools and methods into policymaking. Off the back of the 2021 launch of the Collective Intelligence Lab within Policy Lab, there was a clear need to adapt the ‘pol.is’ collective intelligence tool to government requirements. Beyond delivering a specific digital product, Policy Lab also wanted to explore other opportunities which needed technical expertise against a backdrop of policy development.
One way to do this could be to hire a ‘full-stack’ developer, who could develop digital products from start to finish. However this is typically a well defined, specialised role and it may not be appropriate to expect a developer, who might work with a focussed delivery mindset, to adapt to doing design-led policy. The new ‘Creative Technologist’ role was created to bridge design thinking, technical knowhow and policy work.
I’ve been able to shape the new role through past experiences as a physicist, shopkeeper, maker and artist. For example, my physics background meant I could help Policy Lab bring data analysis in-house and has helped the team’s understanding of highly technical pol.is outputs. My experience as a shopkeeper and an artist has enabled me to present work more effectively and engagingly, for instance by curating a ‘market stall’ at a recent Evidence House event organised by the No.10 Data Science team. I hope to discuss more on the creative and making aspects of the role in a future blog post but will focus first on the technological side of the role.
Part of Policy Lab’s approach is to create spaces for innovation to happen. This can be through interactive events and by making use of ‘maker’ spaces such as Makerversity where we develop physical artefacts to support policy development - or through digital ‘spaces’. Although they do not require physical space, digital products, especially in government, need to fit in a complex landscape of governance.
When I first arrived, there was a clear challenge of how to reconcile rapid digital prototyping with the high bar of compliance that comes with government software. In order to address this challenge, I worked with the security professionals from our department to build a digital space for innovation to happen - a virtual sandbox. This provides blanket technical, operational and security governance to ad-hoc prototype digital projects that fit a set of agreed constraints alongside streamlined privacy, accessibility and data governance. We also have expertise in this area from our lived experience research which helped when extending safeguards into the digital space.
Our sandbox environment, which we call the Gallery, allows us to incubate experimental digital products in a secure environment with the right kind of protections for government. Although we have some constraints, we can still present information in novel data visualisations, micro-sites, browser-based games and other interesting web-based prototypes. For example, not long after the Gallery was built we used it to present lived experience research to understand land management in England through a project-specific micro-site (see image below). We rendered audio clips, stories and animations in an attractive magazine layout rather than a static report to bring to life and make engaging, complex case studies. This approach is adaptable and extensible and has generated significant interest from policymakers across government and was well received when demonstrated at the ministerial level. Through this approach we can bring the literal voices of stakeholders to decision makers in government.
Whilst I spend a lot of my time on policy projects, I have also developed the Collective Intelligence Lab’s pol.is tool which allows large groups of people to engage with each other on a given policy topic. Much of this work was adapting pol.is to work on our government cloud computing environment, writing scripts to interpret results as well as work on the pol.is codebase to bring it more in line with government standards.
One way we have been able to bolster our efforts is through aligning our work with external civic tech groups who already work on the open-source pol.is project. We created the `polis-whitelabel fork’ - a pared down, simplified, copy of the original pol.is codebase. We have incorporated the community’s changes and we in turn have added similar simplifying changes which have been shared back. The goal of the ‘whitelabel’ fork is to make it easier for organisations to add their own customisations. Since creating it we have seen renewed interest in development not just on our fork but also the wider pol.is project which benefited us as well as the extended pol.is open-source community.
Now that I’ve spent time in a policy context and seen how Policy Lab works, I can see so many possible policy challenges and opportunities that could be tackled with software. This could range from tools to track policy progress, policy outcomes and policy evaluation in an easily digestible way, through to applying technology to explore our experimental methods. Some ideas we have already discussed with commissioners or are looking to explore include building an online serious game, prototyping a digital twin and conducting lived experience research in the metaverse.
Some of the best digital tools available cater to software developers, chiefly because the builders of that software understand their own challenges the best. Similarly the Policy Lab open-policy making approach has influenced the tools that I’ve focussed on, such as the Gallery sandbox which enables rapid iteration on prototypes as well as scripts that create better digital outputs for policymakers. I hope to build on these foundations to experiment with more digital tools that could improve the way policy is made in the future.
If you are a policy team and want to talk to us about projects where a creative technologist can play a role, you can read our Prospectus and get in touch at team@policylab.gov.uk.
]]>Our expertise in innovative methods, including ethnography, collective intelligence and scenario testing, enabled us to bring together diverse and often conflicting views from individuals and interest groups to address some of the knotty regulatory challenges relating to fisheries management. We had feedback that our approach inspired trust, dialogue and consensus across fragmented stakeholder landscapes - something critical to maintaining sustainable management of natural resources, such as our seas.
Listening to and acknowledging what people have to say about their lives and understanding the challenges they face at the receiving end of government policies is at the heart of effective policymaking. In Policy Lab, we often do this through ethnography. Put simply, an ethnographic approach is about spending time with people to understand their lived experiences, in our case with fishing for Seabass.
We immersed ourselves in the lives of fishers, enforcement officers and fishmongers to understand Seabass fisheries from their perspective. Joining a fishing trip with recreational fishers, spending a day in a commercial port, attending an angling competition and visiting fish markets helped us gain rich perspectives on the importance of Seabass fishing for people who build their lives or livelihoods around it.
We spoke to more than 90 individuals across seven different locations in England and Wales, with our interactions ranging from full-day immersions to shorter interviews at pop-up events in fishing cafes and other locations frequented by recreational and commercial fishers. Regardless of the length and nature of our engagement, the effect was equally powerful - we started to unpick some of the common, as well as more specific, issues, barriers and opportunities experienced by different individuals and interest groups. You can see our lived experience report here (p. 260) and watch our summary film below.
Having in-depth insights into barriers and opportunities from our field research helped us determine key emerging themes, but it is important to sense-check these with a wider stakeholder group and start identifying areas of high importance and agreement for the subsequent co-design process. In order to do that, we launched a week-long online ‘collective intelligence’ debate using Pol.is - a tool which Policy Lab has been experimenting with since 2021.
Each day, participants logged onto a website where they were presented with a series of statements on Seabass topics, identified in the initial ethnographic research. For each statement, participants could vote to agree, disagree or pass. They could also submit their own opinions or ideas for the new Fisheries Management Plan (FMP), which were moderated before being incorporated into the debate for other participants to vote on.
The debate presented a unique opportunity for an unprecedented number of people with an interest in Seabass to come together at once and have a “conversation” about the future of the fishery. Across the debate week over 270 participants from a wide variety of stakeholder types, gear types and regions of England and Wales cast almost 140,000 votes and contributed over 670 statements. The conversation evolved and moved through over 100 Seabass topics ranging from bycatch to Seabass nursery areas.
In our analysis we focused on identifying areas of possible consensus and possible divergence between commercial and recreational fishers, as well as the spread of opinion between different regions of England and Wales. You can see our full collective intelligence report here (p. 309).
The collective intelligence debate yielded a high volume of thought-provoking ideas. It was then important to prioritise, test and refine them with different stakeholder groups in order to identify the most consensual and effective solutions.
We invited representatives of different fishing sectors, science, environmental agencies and enforcement bodies to face-to-face and remote co-design workshops. We ran nine sessions overall, keeping the groups small but diverse and helped encourage constructive discussions in a respectful and safe environment. We further promoted an inclusive dialogue through an innovative engagement tool to reveal preferred options drawing inspiration from our 11 new experimental methods.
Partnering with a playable systems expert Matteo Menapace, co-creator of the board game Daybreak, we designed a practical scenario and idea testing method. This approach enabled us to identify areas of agreement and disagreement between stakeholders, as well as additional ideas for improving potential solutions. Participants were presented with different scenarios and asked to vote on their favourite solutions. They then engaged in a discussion, after which they had a chance to change their votes.
In order to reach a wider group of key stakeholders, we replicated the same scenarios in a survey which attracted over 470 participants. Rich discussions from workshops, married with a high volume of responses via the survey, gave us a great sense of what solutions would work (or not work) in practice. To make sure that we got it right, we further tested our findings in an expert workshop as well as a wider co-refine survey. You can see the full co-design report here (p. 397).
The aim of the project was to work collaboratively across the Seabass system to design a set of potential solutions for managing Sea bass within the Fisheries Management Plan. The driver was to ensure this valuable natural resource can benefit a diverse range of commercial, personal and political interests whilst ensuring stocks remain sustainable and in the process foster empathy and trust between those involved.
Throughout the project we used a number of methodologies to engage stakeholders and invite participation. Adopting a mixed methods approach meant that each phase of the project informed the next phase in an iterative and collaborative co-design process, and that qualitative and quantitative insights complemented each other towards the production of a solid evidence base.
The inclusive nature of the process, based on bringing stakeholders together, invited negotiation and collaboration and provided participants with the opportunity to engage with and shape the bigger picture - something which will hopefully underpin the final Seabass FMP when it is published later this year.
The consultation on the proposed Seabass FMP is now live.
According to Defra’s consultation site, “this FMP now sets out a roadmap for future domestic management of Seabass in English and Welsh waters to ensure Seabass stocks are maintained at sustainable levels and the benefits of Seabass fishing can be realised by the communities that depend on them.”
The consultation closes on the 1st of October 2023.
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