How can we use our understanding of need, lessons learned about what we need to recover, review, or reinvent, and future scenarios to prioritise how we transition our services out of lockdown and adapt our ways of working and policies to the new environment?
We want to use the insights to identify which areas require further analysis of the implications or decisions. We also want to bring together our dedicated staff to test out ways to recover, reinvent, and renew, as their role is crucial in this process.
1. Using insights to prioritise adapting services to the new normal
To do the above, we have focused on:
- The impact we’re seeking to have: Prioritising the services/strategies where radical change is most needed to adapt to the new environment
- What we know about the issue: Analysing future trends, lessons learnt, need and government policy.
- What levers we need to use: Prioritising what levers & resources we need to mobilise internally and externally
- Actions needed to drive impact: Prioritising what activities are required to help adapt services/strategies to the new normal
As a result, we have unwaveringly supported services to surface what lessons they have learned:
- How they work with residents
- How they work together
- How they deliver services
- How they work with partners
- How they work with the government
In parallel, we supported services in carrying out scenario planning to anticipate different scenarios from a pandemic response, Brexit, and economic perspective.
- We have diligently mapped the drivers shaping the future policy environment to ensure we are prepared for what’s to come.
- Identified the critical uncertainties
- Developed scenarios
- Developed a methodology to stress test policies & services against the scenarios
https://www2.slideshare.net/localinnovation/future-trends-scenarios
By identifying priority themes that emerged from the lessons learned, like disproportionality, food poverty or the digital divide, we then carried out workshops with staff to test/embed opportunities for innovation on each of these themes. We provided support for services to test innovative ways of working with needs & services/policies.
Insights for Renewal
The lessons learned also helped us develop a needs framework and a service transition matrix. This matrix, a tool that outlines the steps and decisions involved in transitioning a service to a new environment, was subsequently used to workshop with staff how we tackle current & emerging needs in a specific area and support services to help them anticipate & respond to new demand and adapt service design to new environments. It also helped service critical decisions needed, which helped us prioritise further analysis or business cases, sequence activities required to deliver change and resource & manage the delivery of change.
The scenario planning work helped us produce a scenarios & trends analysis, which we then used to run workshops with staff to help them adapt & flex services to scenarios — such as anticipating exit/s from lockdown, future local outbreaks and different Brexit deals, and support to stress test policies to scenarios & changes in government direction, like around community support at a neighbourhood level to tackle the pandemic, food provision over the holidays for people in need or how to work with our supply chains to tackle provision issues arising from Brexit.
2. Use the collective levers we have as a council and our partners have to deliver change
One key lesson we learned and tested is that we have different levers. In the context of policy development, ‘levers’ refer to the tools or methods we can use to influence or bring about change. Some levers are more interventionist (like regulations), while others are more influencing (like place-shaping).
Different activities to transition services to the new normal will be at various stages, so the tools we use must be different. For instance, in the early stages of adaptation, research and analysis tools might be more useful, while in later stages, implementation and monitoring tools might be more appropriate. By having multidisciplinary teams supporting services, you can identify the best levers to help a service or policy adapt to the new environment.
If you want to find out more about what we’ve done, check out this blog post, but I’d recommend reading this blog by
you can work out what levers you use across different change layers.
3. Prioritising what role we’re best placed to play in different situations
We implement guidance from the Government, London Councils and other professional bodies.
We influence those bodies based on our priorities and insight from staff, partners & residents.
We collaborate with councils on areas where the resource is best shared and with other sectors.
We assess the impact of our actions and of government guidance on our communities & places to identify where best to collaborate or influence
The lessons learned have helped us identify our best roles in different situations.
