Civil servants generate ideas all the time, but may not have considered using the wide range of techniques available to support them, many of which are at no or low cost.
These techniques are useful all the way through the policy cycle, but are especially important at the early stage of developing policy, when an issue is ill-defined, there are many possible solutions and the cost of changing your mind is low. They are part of an approach called ‘design thinking’ which applies the techniques and innovation processes used in design to improve policy making and implementation.
Research about how organisations go about generating ideas has shown that:
people associated with creativity, like artists and designers, don’t come up with an idea and then draw it – the act of sketching or making helps them generate ideas
creativity is as much about how things are organised, and how people are empowered to be creative, as their individual cognitive styles
good ideas that work can come from outside organisations, so it’s crucial to involve a wide range of people to access new thinking and generate novel concepts
new ideas that don’t fit with how things are at the moment can reveal hidden assumptions and framings
generating solutions often involves revealing new aspects of a problem or reframing the issue
Best practice examples
Civil servants regularly use creativity techniques to involve people in generating ideas to bring together different perspectives to create solutions to:
Generate new ideas and engagement from the public
For example an ‘ideas day’ convenes people at a time and place, gives them a challenge and a short amount of time and inspiration to come up with a solution.
Open ideas days can be as structured or unstructured as you like, but they usually start with a challenge, get people into teams, give them creative activities and get them to present their results.
The Deputy Prime Minister’s office ran open ideas days in October 2014 across 8 cities in the north to come up with ideas for how to create an economic hub in the north of England. Watch a video of how to run your own open ideas:
Watch a video about open ideas days
Solve difficult problems
Department of Health policy advisors used these techniques to find new ways to get people who are obese to recognise they have a problem and help them to do something about it.
Reframe a policy problem
The Policy Lab worked with policy makers in Department of Work and Pensions to suggest new ways to get absent parents to take responsibility for supporting their families.
You can also see more detailed examples of how to use these tools in the tools section below.
When to use or not use idea generation
You should use this technique when:
you want to get a broader range of inputs to your policy area
you want to generate unexpected, novel solutions
you want to generate many ideas that are shaped by perspectives of people who are involved in an issue
you have limited time and budgets
If done well, this approach can:
put end users or those using services at the centre of new policies
practically support cross-government or cross-team collaboration
build momentum in a project by getting people engaged creatively, even if they don’t think of themselves as creative
You should not use this technique:
when you have a clearly defined idea and you are clear how to implement or deliver it
when you don’t have sponsorship to be creative and try out new things
Issues to be aware of:
involving people in the design process doesn’t automatically make a project more democratic or valid – engaging and involving the right people is vital to making this approach work
it helps to provide stimulae or use tools that get people to think beyond their usual frame of reference or comfort zone – sometimes all they need is permission and encouragement
How to generate ideas
give people implicit permission to work differently and try things out
hold the space for ambiguity
get people to draw or make things
recognise your understanding of the problem will change
ensure you’ve got the right mix of people involved
Tools
This is a small list of the many tools you can use at the early stage of exploring a policy problem that are of use to policy makers.
| Tool | Cost | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Exploring hopes and fears | £0 | 1 hour |
| Challenge setting | £0 | 1 hour |
| Change cards | £0 | 1 hour |
| Sketching | £0 | 1 hour |
Exploring hopes and fears
This exercise is a way for a group of people to quickly understand each other’s ways of thinking about the problem or challenge. It is a good way to start a discussion and make it clear that everyone’s view is valid. It also helps a group of people from different specialisms or government departments begin to form a team. By revealing their own hopes and fears about the issue, it helps people get to know one another and acknowledge different perspectives.
When to use the exploring hope and fears tool
This is a technique that works well in any setting. You don’t need any materials other than paper and pen, but using photo cards like those in the photographs can make the activity more thought provoking and get people engaged quickly. The images act as metaphors for people’s hopes and fears – both helping them articulate what they think already, and potentially encouraging them to think differently.
You can create your own cards or use those in the attachment, created by Policy Lab. If you also insert a small text box into your cards, this encourages people to use a word or phrase to describe their hope and fear. Leaving too much space risks people writing long sentences, when we actually want the image to do the talking.
The tool is a good way of opening a workshop. It can be used with teams who know each other well or who have only just met and is quite a popular ice-breaker. Ideally, you should be trying to create the conditions for people to respond instinctively to the images, which might take them in a different direction than if you simply asked them to write down a hope.
Example
The Policy Lab in the Cabinet Office uses this tool frequently at the start of workshops. It was used at the start of a project with the Ministry of Justice to improve the takeup of family mediation services. The policy team picked out the cards that corresponded to their hopes and fears for the future of people settling disputes after divorce or separation.
Some of the fears were:
one size fits all – worry that it wouldn’t be flexible enough to accommodate different types of people
no action – how does a radical new approach get communicated and turned into something good for the end user?
amount of paperwork – too much; worry about communication
the outcomes don’t last - how do we know that the agreements made in mediation won’t break down afterwards, compared to court (or general)
rules of thumb – public are lost so they resort to rules of thumb and the crowd voice rules rather than sanity
user-friendliness – what if we create a system that isn’t user friendly, and people don’t access it in the way they should
Some of the hopes were:
a bird’s eye view of what’s going on, providing a sense of support (if things go wrong)
positive co-parenting relationship, providing separated parenting
a successful sustainable solution, better for everyone involved
flexibility, allowing for the complexity of individuals and family breakdown
a service that is easy to use, transparent and mobile through the whole process
fairness – that the best outcome for both parties would be achieved, using a simple system with no other parties involved
How to use hopes and fears cards in a 1-hour workshop
Beforehand:
print out Policy Lab’s hopes and fears cards or design your own
if you design your own, you don’t need to over-think it; you’ll find that even the most banal of images can spark interesting thoughts
get hold of bluetack and coloured pens
During the workshop:
lay the cards out on the table – try and spread them out so that each picture is visible
provide coloured pens for writing: these work better than biros as they stop people writing too much and are much easier for everyone to read
decide whether you want to tackle hopes or fears first
explain briefly what you are going to do
give participants a set period of time (say 5 minutes) to pick the card that speaks to a hope/fear they have for the project/issue/challenge
ask them to write 1 or 2 words in the space on the card that summarises their hope or fear
depending on the size of the group, bring everyone together to share their hopes/fears, or ask people to get into groups and share among themselves
display the cards on a wall or table where participants can return during the day
repeat the process for fears/hopes
reflect on the 2 sets of cards: is there anything interesting or surprising, any particular clusters, or vastly differing views (eg one person’s hope being another’s fear)
encourage participants to revisit the hopes and fears throughout and at the end of the workshop to add to, remove or change what is there
After the workshop:
summarise the hopes and fears and share them with others involved
reflect on them in the context of what has happened during the day
Additional resources
Challenge setting
This exercise enables a group of people to define challenges they think are important in relation to a larger policy area. Doing this at the early stage of a project helps a group of people look at a policy problem from different perspectives. It’s a very practical way to engage people and get them working together on a policy issue. It also supports cross-departmental and cross-team working as the exercise equalises the perspectives of all the participants taking part.
The key idea is to shift people to ask “how can we…” turning their individual concerns or questions into a collective issue that others may agree is worth addressing.
You don’t need any materials other than paper and pens, but using cards such as those shown in the photographs can make the activity more thought provoking and get people engaged quickly.
When should you use challenge setting?
You should use this tool when:
you want people to connect their own concerns and current issues they are working on with those of others
you want to involve people with different perspectives on an issue in exploring different aspects of it
How to use challenge setting in a short workshop
Beforehand:
- create some challenge cards on A5 paper, such as the ones shown in the picture, which say at the top “How can we….”
During the workshop:
give people permission to be creative and work differently with an icebreaker
distribute the challenge cards
ask people to define a challenge that matters by writing it down on a card
get people to present their challenges one by one, with other people giving constructive feedback
you can invite participants to choose which challenge to take forward
Often challenge setting is followed immediately by sketching - getting people to quickly generate possible solutions to the challenge.
Additional resources
Frog Design collective action toolkit
Change cards
Once you have identified a challenge, and brainstormed some ideas, take them one step further by changing the situation. What would happen if you did the opposite? What would an entrepreneur do? What would you do if you had no money or people were your only resource? It might provoke seemingly unrealistic ideas - but that is the point: to push your thinking to the limits to inspire you and help you think about the problem in a new light. You can then bring it back to something practical and achievable with the resources available.
Example
The Home Office wanted to come up with new ways to support victims of crime. They invited 40 people from different background - service users, design students, Neighbourhood Watch, chief constables - to come together and generate ideas. They looked at the ethnographic evidence from victims, used Policy Lab ‘discovery’ cards to identify the key insights, and then turned these problems into challenge questions. They then used sketching techniques to visualise their ideas, and ‘change’ cards to push their thinking further.
Watch this short video to see how to use change cards.
When to use change cards
Change cards are great to use when you have gone through all the usual ideas and need some prompts to think differently. You might be having difficulty in approaching the problem from a different mindset, or you might be facing the same obvious solutions that haven’t worked in the past.
They often work well as part of a creative ideas generation session, combined with other tools like adopting different roles to generate ideas (eg service user, service provider, policy maker etc) and sketching.
How to use change cards in a 1-hour workshop
Beforehand:
create some change cards on A5 pieces of card – they can be whatever you want, but some good examples are:
what if we had no money? / what if we had an unlimited budget?
what if people were our only resource?
what if we did the opposite?
what if we exaggerated the idea?
what would we do in 2040? / what would we have done in 1920?
what would we do if there were no computers? / what would we do it we had to deliver it all online?
how would a child design it?
what if we merged 2 ideas?
what would an entrepreneur do?
what would they do in the USA?
what would the public want us to do?
what would we do if we couldn’t legislate? / what would we do if we could only nudge people?
gather together some sticky notes, pens and A3 paper for sketching
find a space to work where you can stick things on the wall if you need to, ideally with several tables and chairs that people can work at in groups of about 4-6 people
At the workshop:
give people permission to be creative and work differently with an icebreaker exercise
set a challenge or ask people to define their own challenge
get people to self-organise into teams, ideally with people from different backgrounds to enable creative collisions
give people a clear timeframe to work within and set expectations about what kinds of things they can make
invite them to respond to the challenge by brainstorming ideas either together or alone.
once they have spent a bit of time developing an idea, ask them to pick up a change card to help them push their thinking in a different direction – they can pick as many or as few as they like
get teams to present their ideas one by one, with other people giving constructive feedback and explaining the criteria they are using
you might invite participants to vote about which ideas work best
discuss together what ideas seem to work and what you want to take forward
After the workshop:
summarise the ideas generated
share the photos and videos
Sketching ideas
This shows how to use sketching to generate ideas quickly at the early stage of developing policy. You can do this individually or support people to do sketching within workshops.
Asking policy makers to sketch their ideas disrupts conventional ways of working such as idea generation via brainstorming in which people typically rely on words. Civil servants are expert at crafting documents based on words, which comes with particular ways of framing and constructing arguments. Asking them to sketch things instead engages them in a different way. Research into how designers go about their work shows that it is through the act of sketching or making that ideas emerge.
Example
Policy Lab has enabled civil servants to do sketching in relation to these kinds of challenges:
- coming up with new solutions to the lack of new homes being built
- involving end users in generating ideas for engaging with government – for example HMRC organised collaborative workshops to involve young people in redesigning the letters that give them their National Insurance number, as well as generating ideas for other parts of their lives such as school where they could learn about the importance of National Insurance
When should you use the sketching ideas tool?
The main reasons to do sketching are:
to generate lots of ideas fast
to create a broader range of ideas, including some unlikely ones that may help you reframe current understandings of the issue
to create a shared understanding of the opportunities quickly
to get and keep people engaged in a project
to broaden the range of participants able to contribute to solution finding
People could sketch touchpoints – points at which users, frontline staff, or other people involved such as family members or volunteers, interact in relation to the issue you are considering. They don’t have to just be from government or public services.
These touchpoints could be:
- web pages, leaflets, smartphone apps, emails, text messages, signage, products, packaging
- media, eg websites, TV programmes or adverts
- environments and places such as homes, offices, clinics, cafes, schools or shops
- public spaces such as parks, sports or community centres, bus stops or trains
- mundane things in the built environment such as posters, signs or bins
Probably many or most of the participants in a workshop will not be that good at drawing, which helps to break down hierarchies. Keep the focus more on what people draw, rather than the quality of the drawing and there’s more room for surprise.
How to use sketching in a 1-hour workshop
What you’ll need:
flipchart or A3 blank paper
coloured pens
During the workshop:
give people permission to be creative and work differently with an icebreaker exercise
set a challenge or ask people to define their own challenge (see the challenge setting tool
you could also start with a persona-creating exercise to help people think about the issue from the perspective of a person involved in the issue
ask people to draw a solution to the challenge that shows how people will be affected by their policy idea
encourage wild ideas
people’s ideas need a title or name, and can also have a few lines or phrases that help communicate what it is
invite people to share their sketches and then steal ideas they’ve heard from other people
get people to another iteration of their sketch that combine ideas
discuss ideas to take forward and any themes emerging across all the ideas people have generated
Additional resources
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