After reading Radical Visions of Government by Tom Symons from NESTA and blogging about what inspired me, I invited Tom to share his reflections at the London Policy & Strategy Network on what this meant in the new pandemic environment. At the session, we broke out into groups to explore what lesson, methods or ideas we took away from the presentation and what challenges we wanted to work on with others as a result
What lessons, methods or ideas could you take into your team or organisation?
While we acknowledged that local government struggles with creating and working with alternatives, we could learn from:
1. Who we work with:
- Listen, listen, listen: Co-designing and testing with the local community. This can be about specific issues (universal basic services)
- Opens up the field: Allow a more diverse range of contributions — we often rely on the general public but are less likely to reach out to outside experts, artists. Can use insight, ideas and skills from a diverse range of people and sectors in local places to inform strategy
- Use an open call for ideas — with bias about background, profession removed
2. How we work
- Use creativity in imagining the future and what would be better than other methods, such as craft or writing, or games to test the impact of different policies on the future
- Telling stories: Storytelling is a powerful tool and can help vision a future for the council and partners, as well as imagine different possibilities
- Speculative fictions is interesting to build out narratives that makes the future more specific, i.e. sacrosanctuary which is a new country w/the approach of a startup. What other systems can we recreate with a startup approach?
3. What we focus on
- Past, present and future: Make a connection between the past, but enabling people to think about the future (who’s past)
- Scenarios can help stress-test policies to make sure your service or offering is future proof
- Preferred futures… help to direct what we want to achieve and how we envisage our work in 5–10 years
- Taking a long term view: Still a place for scenario planning, especially in light of Covid19. Think about how long into the future you want to look
What challenges would you want to work on with others on the issues discussed?
- Economic shocks due to come due to Covid and Brexit and its practical impacts on people, like debt
- Future of high streets and the 15 minute neighbourhood, as well as other place and environmental issues which lend themselves to scenarios
- Youth unemployment and the impacts of Covid19 on younger people in the labour market
- Future of work and what will it look like in 15 years time
- Self-organising teams and strengths-based approaches
- Planning and foresight amid fundamental uncertainties — especially financial for local authorities
- Diversity and cohesion, particularly in schools — consider the sensitive areas that people may not currently be prepared to look at
- How to genuinely engage communities in having a say on policy
We also need to consider the unknown challenges that have yet to emerge and how to make outcomes concrete and tangible and make sure we’re cognisant of the power structures that shape the future right now and how we might be influenced or biased.
