Making better policies and services
This is the second of three posts about how government can function better.
- The first explains how we often apply the wrong solutions because we don’t understand the difference between issues that are ‘complex’ and those that are merely ‘complicated’.
- The second (this one) talks about how we can make better policy and services by linking policy and delivery together in multi-disciplinary teams.
- And the third talks about what I think good leadership looks like. Because without good leadership, none of the rest matters.
So let’s talk about how we can make better policy and services. Four things I want to dig into:
- Government policy and services are inextricably linked, and so people who make policy decisions should join up with those who design and deliver services for people
- Government policy makers should see themselves as stewards of the systems they’ve been assigned to improve — not as discrete problem solvers
- Policy makers (and people who design services) need to ‘get out of the building’ on a regular basis in order to design systems (and services) that work in the real world
- Government institutions should bring together teams of policy makers, service designers, and researchers to work across the spectrum from policy design to service design and delivery
1. Government policy and services are inextricably linked, and so people who make policy decisions should join up with those who design and deliver services for people
A policy is a set of prescriptions for what should be done to achieve a goal. For example, the recently published Prisons White Paper is a policy document that describes what the current Government wants to achieve and how it plans to do that over the next 2–10 years.
But what is a service, how are services related to policies, and how do both of those matter in the everyday lives of ordinary people?
People interact with services all the time in their day-to-day lives in order to achieve some short-term goal. For example, if I want to visit my friend in prison, I’ll probably search Google to find out how to book a visit. Coming across the GOV.UK page for High Down prison, I’ll discover that I can now book a video call instead, if I want to. If I still want to visit in person, I’ll call the prison phone number and talk to someone to book my visit.
When the day of my visit comes, I might travel to the prison and engage with several different prison officers to check in, see my friend, and check out. Or I’ll use the app I’ve downloaded to access the video call, while my friend will be escorted by a prison officer to a special room in the prison where they will chat with me over a computer.
These are all aspects of a service that have been designed to function in a certain way. I can interact with aspects of that service online, over the phone, and in person. I may or may not pay a fee, or incur other costs to use them. The components of the service are operated by various prison staff. All of that should be thought through and thoroughly tested, to make sure the whole service works and everyone is able to visit someone in prison as easily and cost-effectively as possible. And this service, like all others, is dependent on countless other services to function. (An in-person visit can’t happen if the transport networks around the prison aren’t functioning and affordable. Video calls can’t happen without working internet infrastructure.)
Ultimately, the outcome of that service is that my friend and I maintain and deepen our relationship. Maybe one of our discussions encourages my friend to learn a new skill, or causes me to get back in touch with an old acquaintance of ours. Maybe that leads to a better job or a more stable family life for me or for my friend. All of this can have cascading positive effects for both of us and for wider society. Those are the objectives that policy makers are trying to achieve. Ultimately, government achieves its objectives through the medium of services.
To be more precise, government policy objectives are achieved when complex and continuously changing networks of people, organisations, and services all function effectively.
So while we might think of a service like this…
From an individual’s perspective, that service is jumbled up with hundreds of other things — people, institutions, obligations, goals, relationships — that they’re navigating in their day-to-day life. To them, completing that task probably looks much more like this…
And so policy makers tasked with achieving important outcomes for society must understand how services function and be able to understand how systems of services and individuals and organisations function if they are going to make meaningful progress toward achieving those objectives. They should work closely with the people who are designing and implementing those services. But they should not expect to design those services themselves.
Rather…
2. Government policy makers should see themselves as stewards of the systems they’ve been assigned to improve — not as discrete problem solvers
A policy maker’s job is not to design or deliver any individual service that people will use — those jobs are done by all kinds of specialists across and beyond government. The policy maker’s role is to design and oversee the entire ecosystem of services that people engage with, in order to achieve the objectives government sets.
This is important because a system steward will think longer-term than a specific problem-solver would. They will aim to create changes that make the system healthier over time. They will understand about system dynamics, network thinking, self-organisation, emergence, and game theory. They’ll think about leverage points and the different places to intervene in a system.
Above all, they will look for opportunities to make changes that are longer-lasting, that improve the overall health of the whole system, that outlive their own brief roles in the system.
And to do all that well…
3. Policy makers (and people who design services) need to ‘get out of the building’ on a regular basis in order to design systems (and services) that work in the real world
Reality is very different from our perception of reality. The only way to understand what people want and how they will interact with services is to ask them — and ideally to test out aspects of those services in real-world situations.
A colleague of mine is working on an idea for a service that would streamline activities and appointments people leaving prison must attend in the days just before and after they’re released. After dozens of interviews with people in prison, people who had left prison, and people who work in the detainment and rehabilitation system, a conversation with a peer mentor in prison led her to completely rethink what was possible and how the service could work. You never know when those lightbulb moments will come, or what will spark them.
Effective teams are regularly talking to people who will use and deliver the services relevant to the systems they’re trying to improve. They’re asking ‘why’ — why things work this way, why they don’t work that way. And they’re thinking about ‘how’ — how might we do things differently? How might we do things better?
In Digital service development we say that every person on a team should be engaging with people involved in their service for a bare minimum of 2 hours every 6 weeks.
In fact, there’s a whole set of professions that know how to design and deliver services together with the people who use those services — these are the service designers, user researchers, content designers, product managers, delivery managers, and others who tend to work in Digital directorates in government.
Across government, teams have been experimenting with different models for how these User-Centred Design professionals can work more closely with policy makers. There are institutional reasons why different government organisations have taken different approaches, but ultimately, I believe that…
4. Government institutions should bring together teams of policy makers, service designers, and researchers to work across the spectrum from policy design to service design and delivery
In the Ministry of Justice, our User-Centred Policy Design teams often acted like an internal consultancy, agreeing a problem statement and project brief with a policy team, then conducting the research and design activities needed to better understand how to improve the situation, and returning with a series of insights and recommendations. That is powerful, valuable work that helps policy makers better understand the problem spaces they’re working in, and make better decisions about how to improve things.
But I think it’s even more powerful when the policy makers engage directly with our teams, observing research activities, synthesising insights, designing improvement ideas, talking to ordinary people and justice system staff about how those ideas might function in the real world.
In the cross-government Prison Leavers project, we have embedded service designers and user researchers and delivery managers in teams with policy makers. Our teams are called ‘service communities’, but they’re focused across the whole system, not any single service.
It’s a powerful combination, transforming our approach to policy making to be more agile, person-centred, and community-centred. Our service community teams are thinking about how they can steward the whole system to provide better outcomes for people leaving prison and for society as a whole. They know they need to work not just across central government agencies but also with the health sector, local government authorities, accommodation providers, social enterprises, local businesses, community groups, and more… because none of these institutions can achieve their goals alone, and government can’t achieve its goals without all of them.
These multi-disciplinary teams have the skills to see and improve the whole system (policy design), while also identifying and improving various parts of the system (service design). If they’re constantly working to improve specific parts of the system, while keeping an eye on how the overall system reacts and evolves after each new change, we’ll slowly but surely improve the state of our national detention and rehabilitation system. We’re still at the early stages of this work, but this feels to me like what ‘policy design’ should look like.
I can’t emphasise enough, however, that this approach is not the norm — our teams are currently functioning as an experiment, working outside the structure of government’s normal policy-making teams and processes.
Over the long term, I think we’d all be better served by government if the gaps between institutions were eliminated, with policy and service design teams organised not only by ministerial priority or agency, but according to the needs of people in society, in this kind of ‘policy and service community’.
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Apologies for the extra-long post, but, unfortunately, changing the way government functions is not the most straightforward thing to do. Please do share any thoughts about any of these points, or additions of your own, in the comments below. Or tweet to me @jallen300.
If you haven’t read the first post in this series, about how we often apply the wrong solutions to problems because we don’t understand the difference between issues that are ‘complex’ and those that are merely ‘complicated’, you can find that here.
And if, after all that, you’re still interested in hearing my thoughts about how to be an effective leader in government (or elsewhere), that post is here.
