3. What ways of working, skills and partners do you use to meet those needs?
In my previous post, I talked about how you develop a mission statement. You can understand what needs & opportunities you can help the people serve with, but that doesn’t yet describe what impact you’re creating for and with them. You could be any strategy/finance/human resources/engineering/frontline team.
The principles underpin how you work and the experience that the people you serve will get — this is what will excite them or at least gain their confidence.
Take Snook’s: “Human-centred, Live & agile, Open & inviting, Contextualised and Designed for impact”. Policy Lab sums up how it supports government to develop policy, which shows how it works and the impact it creates at each stage.
The ways of working you put into practice show how you will build and maintain the relationship you have with the key groups of people you serve, and the type of service they will get.
What dedicated support will you provide and on what basis? What tools will you provide that enable them to solve issues themselves so they don’t need to come to you systematically for your help? What skills development will you help them with so they can do work that previously you would have done for them?
How will you maintain those relationships? What will you dedicate for 121s with your key stakeholders so they can feedback on how well your team is doing and what needs to be improved, i.e. 360s, what will instead be facilitated in more of a group-based way where you can share what the team is doing and get feedback that way — like show & tells
Once you’ve developed this, you can focus on what are the skills your team needs to develop and who are the partners — internal and external — you should collaborate with to create that impact for the groups of people you serve.
They may be partners who provide the infrastructure you need — be it data, technology or spaces — or provide complementary skills — organisational development, finance, service design, etc. In which case your next step is to develop collaborative value propositions or service offers to the organisation on what a set of teams can provide.
You may also want to state what challenges/missions you will focus on. If your a team focused on a particular issue like the environment, then stating what organisational mission you’re supporting will help. The Innovation Unit states how it focuses on creating impact, reducing inequalities and transforming systems — that must influence not just how it works but what work it actually chooses to do. If you’re a corporate support team, then you might be supporting more than one of the organisation’s missions and instead focusing on how it delivers them.
5. What impact you have on the groups of people as a result of the above
When you’ve brought the above insights together, you can describe the impact you will create on each of these audiences. The impact should show how you meet people’s needs in a way that brings the best out of your skills and reflects the values they want your work to reflect. It should mix the functional, measurable and emotional impact you have.
If you’re doing it at an organisational level, then you might instead describe it as a social contract. It might be you’re more of a support team in which case example impacts could be:
- You might enable senior leaders to work well together to develop strategic solutions that help increase the impact on cross-cutting issues from your organisational strategy in a way that visibly improves the lives of residents
- You might enable the organisation to understand the needs & strengths of its communities in a way that helps better work with them to solve problems
- You might help the organisation and its anchor institutions increase the level of investment they secure to increase the impact on the key borough outcomes
In my previous team, this was the value proposition
If you’re an agency like the Innovation Unit, you would outline what you do best which is “We grow and scale the boldest and best innovations that deliver long-term impact for people, address persistent inequalities, and transform the systems that surround them”. Compare that to Future Gov’s which is “We support organisations with digital transformation, service design and community development, building on the best of places to organise for change and radically improve outcomes for communities in the 21st century”. It’s also important to describe the context in which you’re creating that impact so people can understand your theory of change. Policy Lab’s slide deck is a powerful impact showing how it creates impact.
