Dynamic policy impacting: whats possible?

Exploring what mission-orientated policy means for policy-making

The need for policy-makers capable of creating new directions and ways of doing things, while having a long-term focus and stability, has never been greater. Yet, mission-orientated and responsible approaches to policy-making struggle within the civil service. It hasn’t been enough to simply adopt new ways of working and introduce new professions of skills – the capabilities within the layers of bureaucracy needed to adopt them effectively are simply missing.

Problem > there isn’t enough strategic thinking in the civil service (link report).

As a service designer within HMRC’s Policy Lab, I’m exposed to some of the earliest forms of policy ideas. My team and I have the opportunity to work directly with policy makers to co-create, evaluate and shape these ideas from a user-centred design perspective – leveraging strategy, design and research to do so.

We work across defining new policies, adjusting existing one and connecting this thinking with the delivery of the services that administer them to the public. It’s an interesting role. One that is equal parts rewarding and mind-bendingly frustrating but essentially, what this role gives me is an opportunity to navigate the ecosystem of policy-making to better understand the potential for change from the inside – to better understand the capabilities needed for mission-orientated policy-making.

To understand what these capabilities might be, where and how to even start exploring opportunities to embed them within the civil service its worth first attempting to create an understanding of the policy-making ecosystem as it is today.

Policy-makers are typically very good at:

• Working within certain, stable policies where change is infrequent and optimising the policy is the objective

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• Adding policy-layers to adjust existing policy

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Not very good at:

• Understanding the un-rationale behaviour of citizens (understanding that people don’t behave how like they do in economic models, they are un-rationale and almost uncodable)
• Not very good at understanding how accruing more policy layers, rather than reduce existing ones, will interact with the layers that are already cluttering the delivery environment.

But to put the blame on a profession existing within a broader context would be unfair. Policy-makers are severely constrained by the environment they are operating in.