Better Solutions to the Hardest Problems

My hopes for the Government’s test-and-learn initiative.

On Monday 9^th December, Cabinet Office Minister Pat McFadden announced a new £100 million Innovation Fund. It will pay for teams to use test-and-learn approaches to tackle some of the trickiest challenges facing the public sector.

As an ex-digital Civil Servant, there was much in the speech to be positive about. While the ideas in it weren’t new, it was the first time in a long time that we’d heard a senior minister espousing them. And, more importantly, backing them up with funding.

But we can’t breathe a sigh of relief for the new dawn of policy-making just yet. There are many obstacles that could hinder the test-and-learn initiative before it has a chance to make an impact. Here I set out my hopes for its implementation, so it can really drive the lasting change that is so desperately needed.

But first, what's so exciting about this announcement?

The problems that the public sector faces are sticky and complex. Let’s take temporary accommodation as an example, which is one of the areas selected as a first test-and-learn challenge.

People in need of temporary accommodation are often suffering from a range of issues that result in them facing homelessness. These issues may cut across the lines of different government departments. And while funding rules are set in Westminster, temporary accommodation services are delivered by hundreds of different local councils up and down the country, each facing unique contextual constraints.

Sticky problems are best solved with flexible, iterative approaches. Tackling them well means involving the people that will use the service and deeply understanding their needs. Rather than assuming there’s a one-size-fits-all solution that you can define up front, you need to use the insight you’re gathering to refine your approach as you learn what does and doesn’t work.

The test-and-learn announcement is exciting because it sees the Government acknowledge that they need a new approach to tackling sticky problems, and that they are committed to giving it a go.

Now, on to my hopes.

Hope 1: The brilliant digital people in the Civil Service get to be involved

In his speech, the Minister set out intentions to hire technology experts from the private sector for the test-and-learn teams. This is an exciting prospect: there are always benefits to bringing new talent into an organisation, who have new ideas and diverse expertise. As the recent report The Radical How points out, the Civil Service has fewer digital, technology and data specialists than equivalently sized organisations. But it does have some. And they are talented, dedicated digital practitioners who have been waiting a long time for the chance to influence policy with these kinds of techniques.

It will be a real missed opportunity if existing digital specialists don’t get the opportunity to take part alongside the seconded experts. They have the skills, and the context, and they’re owed it. It’s also key to long-term reform: the only route to a more effective public sector is wide-scale change in culture, process and ways of working. To realise this change, the Government needs to prioritise the permanent workforce, as well as short-term secondments for external experts.

Hope 2: The test-and-learn teams get to ‘solve the whole problem’

‘Solve the whole problem’ and ‘focus on outcomes over outputs’ are core principles of a product-led approach. The first test-and-learn teams have clear outcomes to achieve, such as ‘Reduce the cost of temporary accommodation’. I hope they have the freedom to highlight and tackle the fundamental problems that need to be solved to achieve these outcomes.

Too often in government, test-and-learn style approaches are applied to build a digital service that delivers an existing policy. The service team can optimise the user experience and service efficiency to the nth degree, but if there is a fundamental flaw in the core policy, or in a related policy owned by another department, the impact on outcomes will be limited.

The Government needs to give the test-and-learn teams full backing to design and test solutions that cross departmental boundaries, that will require new funding, and perhaps new legislation. And then create new, faster processes and special exceptions so that new approaches can be developed and tested quickly. Which brings me to my third hope...

Hope 3: The test-and-learn teams will be empowered, not hindered, by process

It was an early Government Digital Service (GDS) adage that ‘the unit of delivery is the team’, referring to the value that can be created by an empowered group of multidisciplinary individuals working together. In the 15 years since the birth of digital government, we’ve learnt the phrase should really be ‘the unit of delivery is the team and its surrounding structures and processes’. Clunky, but more accurate.

No matter how brilliant a team is, it’s extremely difficult for it to succeed if it relies on procurement processes that take months, funding rules that require you to know the solution up front, or departmental IT security processes that make collaboration impossible.

GDS, Universal Credit, and the like were successful by setting themselves up as mini separate organisations within the Civil Service, protectected from wasteful processes. I hope Ministers are willing to do this for the test-and-learn teams, so they have an environment that gives them the best chance of success.

Hope 4: The commitment to failure is real

Most of all, I hope that this new way of working is given enough of a chance. In his speech, the Minister said, “Some things won’t work properly first time. But if we are terrified of failure, we will never innovate and we’ll carry on doing what we’ve always done.” In a time when the Government is under intense scrutiny, the fiscal position is challenging, and poll ratings are ever-dropping, I hope he’s able to stay true to this.

It’s likely it will take more than a few attempts to get the test-and-learn approach to policy design working. The Government will need to tolerate failure and the resulting headlines. They will need to invest money and effort into giving the test-and-learn teams the space and resources to be effective. It will require belief, focus, and persistence.

But if they do fully commit, this announcement has the potential to be a real, tangible step towards the public sector reform that successive governments have called for. And, more importantly, it could be our best shot at delivering better outcomes for the people that need them most.

Read more about different approaches to policy development here, here, and here.