Stepping outside the day job – the start of something different

So why am I doing this? A life-long civil servant, I have had many roles in the Department for Work and Pensions – from frontline operations to policy delivery and strategy development. I have seen excellent service delivery – and bad! I have seen policy developed with great thought and insight and I have seen policies not deliver as expected because crucial factors were overlooked or not thought through. But above all, I have worked with – and still do – people who want to make a difference to the lives of citizens who need support and who get frustrated when the system just doesn’t work properly.

I am currently working on Social Justice – the part of government that is helping the most disadvantaged people turn their lives around.

The day of the first workshop. The prospect of time out of the office to focus on something in depth was exhilarating and there was a real buzz among people arriving at IfG’s offices in Carlton Gardens. Everyone I spoke to was keen to be there and seemed really committed to the agenda. Chatting over coffee was a great way to mix informally and I could see people making connections and exchanging ideas from the off.

Over the day we had a mix of input sessions with thoughts and ideas from people inside government, from the voluntary and community sector, from local authorities and from citizens who have experienced the good, the bad and the downright ugly! And we had time out to reflect among ourselves, to digest what we had heard and think about how we might take some of those insights on to the next stage of the programme.

I was really struck by a session we had with Jennie Winhall from Participle who described their experience of developing service design through insight and prototyping. Working very closely with service users, they evolve services based on an understanding of the decisions that people make. We policy makers are often told to ‘put customers at the heart of our thinking’ and I know we try hard to do that – through consultation, stakeholder engagement, field visits and the like. But Jennie showed us an approach to customer insight that got below the surface of what public service users often say about their wants and needs, to what the real underlying issues are. Definitely food for thought!

At the end of the day, we spent time in our ‘research pairs’ planning what aspect of the ‘policy to practice’ journey we wanted to delve into more deeply.

I’m working with Andy Crossland from the Humber Learning Consortium and we are both really interested in how partnership working on the ground plays a part in this whole story. During the day – from speakers and participants – we’d heard how organisations in local communities often had to create new strategies to make policies work in practice. So what happens in-between the development of policy – usually in Whitehall if we are honest – and what actually gets delivered? Does the policy intent remain true? Does something get ‘lost in translation’? And if so where? And why?

We decided to use the experience of Andy’s own organisation as a case study. We are examining their involvement in a local partnership and in particular how stakeholders’ motivation to be involved, their experiences and their actions are informed and shaped by specific policies.

I’m really looking forward to the next stage. We are planning to interview as many of the stakeholders as we can. In the first instance, this will mean a couple of days out of the office for me meeting people in Hull. Can’t wait.