This post is written by Nicky Dunlop, Research & Marketing Lead at Telescope.

  • **The problem: **When creating new policies and services, a disconnect exists between decision-makers and those who work in frontline services, who lack the opportunities and structures to collaborate on a level playing field.
  • **Why it matters: **Creating better policies for our society requires better collaboration between those with different perspectives from across the system.
  • **The solution: By **harnessing creative tools and approaches, we can build empathy and connection between individuals to imagine a better future and empower them to effectively collaborate with all actors in the system.

Tackling complex social challenges requires input across the spectrum of public services, from policy through to frontline sectors, to bring about meaningful change with better policies and services. However, we know that this kind of collaboration is sadly not the default, and can sometimes require innovative tools and techniques to work effectively.

At Telescope, our research has highlighted a disconnect between the decision-makers at a policy level, who have real power to drive policies forward, and those who are in frontline services, who see on a daily basis how the direct impact of these policies translates to people’s lives. We too often see a disjointed approach, siloed ways of working both between and within services, and limited opportunities for different voices to be heard.

Telescope exists to change this narrative and bring humanity to the policymaking process. Our solution is to connect real people with expertise from across the system to generate ideas for more impactful policy. We facilitate safe spaces for experts across the policy, public and frontline sectors, giving them the tools and networks to tackle their common challenges and work together to build better policies and services.

We have outlined below some tools and techniques we use, which we have found to be valuable jumping-off points to spark connections across these sectors and support the design of transformation projects.

Building connection through empathy

Although building connections may not appear revolutionary, often it can move to the bottom of the priority list when there is a high stakes transformation project on the line. This can be to the detriment of the outcomes for service users, as well as those designing policies and holding the purse strings, who run the risk of wasted time and public spending. We strongly believe that having a representative group of people (from lived experience to policymakers) in the room is the starting point - only then can transformative change truly happen.

After bringing a diverse group of participants together, the most important step is to build empathy between them. We encourage participants to practise active listening with each other, and support them to map the network of stakeholders in the system they operate in. This can help participants think more deeply about the power and influence within the system and helps them to connect on a human level with those different actors. It sets the tone for true collaboration and an environment where all voices and experiences are heard and valued.

telescope

[Closed captions: Image shows a wheel of the five stages of the active listening process: pay attention, withhold judgement, summarise, clarify and reflect.] CC image, Telescope 2022

As Dr Claire Yorke, writer and researcher specialising in empathy in politics, said during an interview: “Empathy is integral to fostering connection between people. And politics is fundamentally about people. But we’ve lost sight of that fact. If we tie these two together, we see that to make better policy we have to be able to better understand the diverse experiences of people across our society.”

Future backwards - visioning

When approaching any change project, it is easy to focus immediately on the strategy and implementation and lose sight of the vision for what change we want to create. For more complex projects involving different departments, or in our case across different sectors, it is important to align the direction, language and values before digging deeper into the strategic approach.

The Future Backwards tool involves the group working together to define the current state of the project or service, then imagining the best possible future scenario (utopia/heaven), and the worst possible future scenario (dystopia/hell) and mapping this out collectively. The pathways to reach these different scenarios are plotted out as probable (or improbable!) events or actions along the way. Our adaptation to this exercise then includes encouraging the group to decide which values should be prioritised to reach ‘utopia’ and which need to be reined in to mitigate a worse outcome.

We too often see a disjointed approach, siloed ways of working both between and within services, and limited opportunities for different voices to be heard.

With our participants we have seen how effective this open discussion in a facilitated safe space can be in fostering collaboration, not only to align visions, goals and even terminology, but also to be creative with the possible scenarios. For example, in 2021 we worked with a group made up of an MP, central government policymaker, voluntary sector charities, local authorities and those with lived experience of homelessness. After developing a shared vision for the society they wanted to create in relation to housing and homelessness, they developed an innovative idea to create a ‘navigator’ support worker - someone to be the one point of contact to liaise with different services (housing, social services etc) to make it easier for those experiencing homelessness.

Systems Mapping

Systems mapping is an effective tool to think beyond the specific transformation project or service in question and analyse the system at play. While building a comprehensive systems map can be time consuming and overwhelming, we use a simplified approach of mapping all the upstream causes and downstream effects of a particular problem to gain insights into the interplay of different factors involved.

Working more holistically in this way shows the possibilities of tackling the underlying causes to make lasting change as well as immediate interventions that can help in the here and now. It also encourages collaboration as participants start to understand the intricate ways in which their work is interlinked and realise that there is never one specific person or factor that causes any given problem. As the great systems thinker Donella Meadows said, “_Thinking in systems makes you stop pointing the finger and looking at who to blame. Instead you’ll start asking: what’s the system?”. _

It is important to align the direction, language and values before digging deeper into the strategic approach.

In our work with a programme to redesign probation at a local level, participants shared these upstream and downstream challenges and identified simple interventions to prototype, for example trialling different locations to engage with service users and running a simple needs/strengths exercise to identify what matters to each individual. These simple prototypes can be quickly tested out and fed back to see the effect they have had overall.

Building these practical approaches into any transformation project within the public sector can be an effective and straightforward way to embed collaboration. We believe that introducing these tools to the design of policies and services could help UK public services and structures become more agile, responsive and effective in building better policies and outcomes.

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(Image Credit: Unsplash)