Basis in Wales: Building a team
You can read this in Welsh, if you’d prefer.
A distinct landscape
Public services in Wales face their own unique challenges — whether this is in meeting Welsh language requirements, adapting to the competing interests of Welsh Parliament and Westminster, or responding to the needs of Wales’ large rural and post-industrial communities, to name but a few examples.
Some of the challenges public services in Wales are facing must feel like mountains to climb. For instance, almost a third of Wales’ children are in poverty, the highest rate of child poverty of any nation in the UK, but sadly a statistic taken before the current cost of living crisis. In Wales’ socio-political landscape, this sort of challenge would be the equivalent of yr Wyddfa.
The solutions to many of the challenges faced by public services in Wales are not immediately clear. There is no ‘one right answer’ for solving child poverty. If there was, this long-standing problem would have already been resolved.
The traditional approach to developing and implementing solutions to problems like this is to make a plan, do some analysis, design a solution and implement it. Although this linear approach looks good on paper, it fails to recognise that complex systems are unpredictable. While Wales’ physical geography might take a millenia to change, its socio-political landscape is quickly and constantly changing: since 2015 alone we have had two different First Ministers in Wales, three general elections in the UK, Brexit, a pandemic, and we are currently facing a cost of living crisis. Changes like this means that the long-term planning associated with the ‘Waterfall’ approach can quickly become outdated and unfit for purpose.
Basis has pioneered the use of a more agile approach to implementing change in public services. Agile is an iterative approach to delivering change that values human communication and feedback, adapting to change, and producing working results. It serves as the foundation of our approach to improving services.
As an organisation, Basis is committed to helping public services tackle messy problems using a more Agile approach. In the last three years we’ve had some success in embedding this way of working in a broad range of areas ranging from health and social care to digital exclusion. This year we want to do more of this work and increase our impact in Wales.
Team Wales
In the same way that Wales’ actual geography differs to its flatter neighbour past Offa’s dyke,
Wales’ socio-political terrain is just as distinct — and public services in Wales need support that appreciates that fact.
We want to be an organisation that respects Wales’ unique context — that provides services in the Welsh language, that adjusts our training so that it is relevant to the Welsh context, and that ultimately has an impact on the distinct challenges that public services in Wales are facing. Put simply, we want to be an organisation that really ‘gets’ Wales.
To do this, Basis has been building a dedicated team for Wales. Joe, Basis’ managing director, a Welsh speaker born and bred in Cwmbran, has been driving this effort to build Basis’ team in Wales. Over a year ago, Joe shared about Basis’ work in Wales, and talked of his ambition to hire Welsh language speakers to support further work in Wales. There has already been a lot of progress.
The last two interns hired by Basis, Alys and Scott, were both Welsh speakers — Alys is now a permanent employee. The most recent permanent hire was myself, a Cardiff-born Welsh speaker. Importantly, because of Basis’ remote working culture, we have all been able to live and work in Wales.
Over the last few months, Welsh has been ringing throughout Basis’ virtual office. Joe has even introduced his school’s old merit system (‘tocyn iaith’), which is given when somebody uses exemplary Welsh (although he only ever seems to award himself this merit for some reason). For me, it’s been a pleasure to speak and work in Welsh on a daily basis, something I am aware isn’t the case in most private organisations (even in Wales).
We know that being from Wales or being Welsh speakers doesn’t necessarily make us better at supporting public services in Wales. What it does mean, however, is that we understand the unique challenges that public services in Wales are facing, and want to see them deliver meaningful change — because it also means something to us.
We’ll be writing more about Wales, and the work we are doing here. If you want to follow this conversation, you can find a variety of ways of doing that here.
