Donna Ward, Director of Strategic Policy in the Department for Education, launches Policy Lab's new prospectus. From catalytic interventions to ambitious system change, read on to find out about Policy Lab's methods, offer and impact.
As a child, my mum used to tell me that I always learnt the ‘hard way’. By that she meant I learnt by doing - sometimes in spite of what I might have been told. It follows that I ended up studying 3D design, using tangible objects and experiences to develop and communicate ideas. But back then I don’t think I ever imagined this could be relevant to government.
Last week Policy Lab facilitated three workshops (in London, York and Bristol) for the Innovation in Democracy programme. Run by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), this …
By Camilla Buchanan, Senior Policy Advisor, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. Prototyping for Policy is the name of a conference that was held by The Legal Design Lab at the d.School at Stanford University in November 2018. It …
In my view one of the most exciting things about Policy Lab has been its ability to work both in and outside the Whitehall system at the same time. When people asked me about the reasons for its success, I’d …
The Policy Lab was created to bring experimental thinking into the UK Government. This has included using design techniques to think about the future, such as in our recent project with the Department for Transport on maritime autonomy. We have …
This is the last in a series of three blogs looking at how Policy Lab methods can help address some of the common biases of policy-makers. It is based on the Behavioural Insight Team’s (BIT) latest report, Behavioural Government, which …
Policy makers are as subject to behavioural biases as everyone else according to the Behavioural Insight Team’s (BIT) latest report, Behavioural Government (P7). In fact, when making decisions we may be more biased given that the subject of our work …
The Behavioural Insight Team’s latest report, Behavioural Government, argues that decisions of policy-makers are affected by cognitive bias (p.7). BIT identify eight of the most common cognitive biases in government which they categorise into three areas: noticing, deliberating, and executing. …
By Harsha Palmar, Disability Employment and Support Strategy, Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)
The Open Policy Making Toolkit was first posted in 2015 to help civil servants incorporate open policy practices into their work. Today, whilst it’s arguably not yet the ‘default,’ open policy making is certainly more widely practised and better understood. …