Key takeaways

  • Policymakers need historical context and a critical eye to understand and improve policymaking processes
  • Policymaking needs to be less narrow and static and become more multidisciplinary and adaptive
  • The ‘adaptive policy cycle’ is an exciting new approach which teams can experiment with

Australia has emerged as a cradle of deep thinking and bold innovation for understanding and reimagining policymaking.

The recent Robodebt inquiry has heightened public scrutiny of government policy but the ideas, institutions and networks driving the reform work pre-date this. So for July’s instalment of Design&Delivery, we were delighted to welcome Professor Cathy Althaus and Pia Andrews — leading researchers and practitioners — to share their recent work on how to make policy management more adaptive.

It was a thrilling discussion, bringing in voices from Australia, UK, India, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, South Africa and beyond. We’ve summarised their presentation below but you can also watch a full recording.

Policy and delivery: a "conscious decoupling"

If we want to understand the way responsibilities for policy design and delivery are structured within modern government, we have to understand their history. Althaus opened by describing what she calls the “conscious decoupling” of policy and delivery over the last four decades.

Perhaps the most important chapter in this story of “radical transformation” is the Next Steps reforms to the UK civil service in the 1980s. This reform programme intentionally split the responsibility for setting and designing policy from the responsibility for delivering it. The screenshot below shows a key passage from the original 1988 UK report, calling for the creation of new agencies which would be responsible for carrying out the ‘executive functions of government.’

Design&Delivery 0.1 takeaways

In Althaus’ view, these changes have left a legacy of serious challenges in our systems of public policy and administration.

“We're still struggling with coordination and horizontal governance issues. There is no magic bullet that is going to solve these challenges that we face to provide the seamless, end-to-end services and experiences that citizens across the world are seeking in their interactions with government.”

These challenges are more systemic and adaptive than technical; to tackle them, Althaus said, we need to “blow up” the ideas that have driven the thinking behind the system in recent decades. As she put it: we need a “deeper diagnosis” of the “persistent” problems which “dog the systems we operate in”.

So what is that analysis and where are the new ideas?

Evolving policy design and delivery

Building on Althaus’ analysis of the systemic issues with policy delivery, Pia Andrews joined the discussion and shared her assessment of how policymaking currently functions and how it could be improved. You can see her ideas presented in the graphic below.

how might we evolve policy design&delivery

Some of the important challenges which Andrews highlighted include:

  • Narrowly-informed policymaking, usually within quite a homogenous group working separately to everyone else and under pressure to just get “something out the door very quickly”.
  • Static policymaking: once the policy is out the door, it usually doesn’t come back for improvement. Government is increasingly familiar with the concept of iterative improvement in service design and management, but it’s still very hard to “feedback iterations into the overarching policy”. The change which does happen is often reactive, for example due to a political crisis or ministerial imperative.
  • And to the extent there is community engagement, it’s often “consultative but not collaborative”. It’s the difference between asking citizens "what do you think about what we’ve done" versus "what do you think we should do?"

These challenges create what Andrews called a series of “black holes” in the policymaking process.

Black hole of policy intent

The ‘set and forget’ approach to policymaking means that “the actual intent” behind the policies isn’t always obvious, accessible or easily measurable.

Black hole of policy purpose

The black hole of intent leaves delivery teams grappling with uncertainty; they’re left trying to interpret what the policy team — who will move on to work on different issues — intended.

Black hole of policy impact

There’s also a black hole of impact. This is where policy evaluation is often “too little, too late” — well after the fact of people’s lives being upended. Moreover, Andrews added, that evaluation only looks for “intended” impact and lacks the “mechanisms to measure, monitor and mitigate unintended impacts”.

Design&Delivery 0.1 takeaways (2)

The adaptive policy cycle

In Andrews’ view, one of the key features of traditional models of policymaking is that they are designed as a kind of “waterfall” process, where everything is linear.

But the problem with waterfalls, Andrews noted, is that they have cliff edges.

“With a lot of those early frameworks, it’s like a waterfall, which, by definition, ends up running off a cliff… even if you see it coming.”

So how do we change this? How do we “blow up” the traditional models of management and thinking that shape policymaking?

For Andrews, the inspiration for a new approach lies in agile, end-to-end service design and management. This approach embeds processes for continuous improvement and development that enable policymaking to be less static and more adaptive.

Watch Andrews and Althaus describe their adaptive policy cycle in the short video below.

New next steps

Andrews and Althaus ended the presentation by outlining a series of practical steps which leaders and teams can take to start applying some of the big ideas driving their work:

  • Bridge the gap: It cuts both ways — policymakers need to reach out to their colleagues in service delivery, and vice versa.
  • Document intended policy outcomes and build policy measures into delivery: Make the policy intent clear for stakeholders and build it into your measurement systems, so that you have a continuous approach to evaluation, rather than just waiting weeks, months or years for a formal review process.
  • Engage with others: Part of building a multidisciplinary approach to policy involves individuals breaking out of their professional boundaries and engaging with others.

“Getting outside of your discipline is key to actually creating multidisciplinary approaches to policy management.”

More resources

Read about our June event on the UK approach to policy delivery. Or sign-up to receive updates about our next event.