UK GovCamp 2025: ‘Test and Learn’, Missions, AI and more…

A reminder from one of the GovCamp organisers: ‘You can only get so far without a tribe’

GovCamp is an annual ‘unconference’ where people working in and around government get together to talk about what’s on their mind. Held on a Saturday every year in early January, I always find it an inspiring day among like-minded colleagues who are all aiming to make government work as effectively as possible on behalf of the UK public.

Here are some of the thoughts racing around my head a week on from this year’s GovCamp… Would love to hear others’ thoughts about all of this…

On how Service Design(ers) can help ‘modernise’ Policy work

• We expect policymakers to innovate with technologies and methods. But that doesn’t feel like a natural thing to do for most people in policymaking teams. Many have been trained and conditioned to analyse things as they are and work within constraints.
• Service designers, however, are trained in engaging with the public, running experiments, and challenging constraints. They are often predisposed to using new tools and technologies. They bring capabilities and a mindset that the policy profession needs, as it aims to expand the methods of policymaking to meet the challenges of the modern era.
• We should really be looking at embedding service designers more within policy directorates.
• Side thought: If a role of an ‘outcome manager’ existed in a government Policy directorate, what would that job entail? Might it be a mash-up of a policy advisor and a service designer? After all, one can’t achieve outcomes without establishing the rules and the ecosystems and also designing and delivering the services people use, right? Or is a G6 Policy Lead actually an ‘outcome manager’, and they therefore need both policy advisors and service designers in their teams bringing the complementary skills and doing the complementary work to drive those outcomes? 🤔

On government’s new ‘Test and Learn’ mandate

• ‘Test and learn’ is a tried and tested methodology for driving change effectively. It’s been used in medicine for 40+ years. It’s been used in digital service design for 20+ years. The Cynefin Framework explains why it is the best methodology for driving change in complex ecosystems. This is what most policy challenges are aiming to do.
• The new ‘test-and-learn’ mandate provides a huge opportunity to bring user-centred design and agile methodologies into the core business of government.
• But deploying the ‘startup’ approach isn’t as simple as just injecting a new methodology here and there. It’s going to require change across many aspects of how government functions, from team and organisational structures to funding models and governance mechanisms.
• What’s going to happen when the learnings from the ’Test-and-Learn’ work question the status quo of how government functions? Will senior leaders be willing to make changes in the very fabric of government, or will they jettison the ’test-and-learn’ approach and go back to the ‘decide and deliver’ approach that’s been used in government for the past 100+ years?
• Creating a brand (and some hype?) around the concept of ‘Test and Learn’ may be an attempt to create a movement for this kind of work, the way the branding (and hype) around ‘Digital’ created a movement back in the early 2010s. This can be extremely important in gaining traction for these approaches. But many policy teams are seeing it as a fad that will eventually fade away.
• For ‘test and learn’ to take root, we public servants must harness the current energy around it and channel that into changes in the fabric of our public institutions, so that iterative user-centred design becomes the core methodology government uses to drive change.
• If we want our organisations to be continuously learning, we need to incentivise senior leaders (and others!) to build knowledge and share learnings. For example, Google determines bonuses based on how much impact your team’s experiment has had on the knowledge base of the wider organisation. What might this look like in government? 🤔
• We need to be careful when launching ‘test-and-learn’ work to make sure it is outcome-led, not solution-led.
• Side thought: Indy Johar’s point that government itself needs to be continuously learning and adapting how it functions keeps ringing in my ears.

On mission-led government

• Missions could really change how government drives change in society, doing things in a much more joined-up way across government agencies and departments. This would mean shifting to a networked way of working, which is very different from the siloed way of working that predominates across government (and society) currently — and has for a century or more. Being explicit about that — and demonstrating what it means to work in a networked way — will be really important to the eventual success (or failure) of the missions.
• But for that to happen, leaders need to stand up and create the space and permissions for teams to do things differently. Who’s out there blogging about it? Explaining what’s different about this way of working and why that matters?
• Where are the senior leaders standing at the podium giving the country an update on what’s happening on Mission X, or Mission Y? The storytelling aspect of missions really matters. It enables people to see themselves and their situations reflected in the missions — both the public and the civil servants working on the missions.
• For the missions to gain traction and acceptance across society, they need to both deliver real change to people soon (the top of the iceberg) and be changing the fundamental systems (the bottom of the iceberg) so positive change persists and cascades across society. The strategy is not just delivery, it’s got to be delivery and systemic change.
• Many senior appointments have only just been made, so hopefully these aspects of the missions will start to emerge in the coming months.
• What aspects of the mission approach can be brought into all the work government does to drive change in society — not just the things that are directly included in the 6 (‘capital M’) Missions?
• Side thought: How might we create the infrastructure in government that makes it easy and beneficial for teams and senior leaders to collaborate on shared outcomes?
  — The right incentives for senior leaders.
  — Shared evaluation frameworks / platforms for teams to feed in to… but frameworks that are evaluating the right things (knowledge generation and spread at the team level, outcomes at the organisation / mission level, etc).
  — Fund services in addition to programmes. Fund teams, not projects.

On the public sector’s role in AI

• Like social media, the benefits of AI can be seen immediately, but it takes a bit longer for the negative consequences to become clear. We need to be more alive to that dynamic now than we were 20 years ago as social media was emerging.
• If we’re going to be successful in efforts to use AI effectively and ethically, the public service needs to go into the emerging AI world with a ‘Yes, and…’ mentality. If we go in with an 🙄 and prevarication, we’ll end up having very little influence on the change that’s happening around us.
• The ‘Digital’ people came into government 10 years ago and railed against all the rules. We’ve done the hard work, demonstrated the value of a new way of working, and changed many of those rules so that government is indeed more responsive now and is making better (and ethical) use of technology. But to some extent, those rules have ossified around us over the years, and now others are coming in and railing against them. If we believe that government itself should always be learning and adapting, we should be open to challenge and continue adapting our own rules.
• Side thought: In general terms, the public sector is tired and overstretched. The Silicon Valley world has energy and money behind it. In that context, how will the public sector compete in this very fast-paced arena of ideas?

A few other random thoughts

• Someone quoted a senior civil servant reflecting back on their 40+ year career who estimated that 90% of their work was just building and overseeing a team to ‘keep the machine running’, about 5% was making impactful change, and about 1% was being on the lookout for the opportunities to make really big changes. (Yes, I’m keenly aware that doesn’t add up to 100%. 😂) But ensuring the right people were in place, doing the day-to-day, and being ready to pounce on those rare opportunities when they happened, was really important. This feels like a key insight about the unheralded work happening every day deep within the civil service. All the work matters — building the teams, building the structures, building the cultures. It all contributes to those changes society benefits from. I hope everybody feels proud at the end of the day, regardless of how fancy and shiny their role is or isn’t perceived to be.
  - Could we encourage the use of some Liberated Structures or other creative idea-sharing techniques to diversify the ways we share and engage at #GovCamp in the future?
  - #OneTeamGov (re)assemble!!