A design-led approach to London’s recovery missions

Design Council in partnership with the Greater London Authority, London Office of Technology & Innovation and CUSSH

Cat Drew, Melissa Bowden, Sandy Tung, Catherine Glossop & Ahmad Bismillah

Back in April 2020, Design Council sent a short document to national and local Government setting out how design could help create a pathway out of the pandemic. We didn’t quite know what a long haul we were in for. Design was playing its part instantly to deal with the immediate crisis (excellently captured by Alice Rawthorne and Paola Antonelli’s Design Emergency). Meanwhile, the Mayor of London had set out ambitious plans to take a mission-based approach to supporting the capital’s recovery. The Greater London Authority (GLA) team picked up the letter, and together the Designing London’s Recovery partnership was formed. Designing London’s Recovery applies an open, collaborative, systemic and design-led approach to four of the nine recovery missions. It supports innovators from a wide range of sectors to set in motion positive change and demonstrate a new way of working between London’s public, private and third sectors.

Missions, open innovation and systemic design are all relatively new approaches within the public sector. The GLA and Design Council partnered with academic experts at UCL, through the project Complex Urban Systems for Sustainability and Health (CUSSH), which helped to guide the partnership in complex systems thinking to ensure the work had a more transformational impact on the wider system. Given the innovative and sometimes experimental nature of the work, UCL academics have also provided their expertise to enable real time evaluation and feedback loops.

We work out in the open, sharing our reflections and learning as we go to help build this new practice.

Missions

The Mayor of London, in partnership with London Councils, used his convening power to bring together leaders of London’s anchor institutions to form the London Recovery Board. Together with London’s communities they set a grand challenge: to restore confidence in the city, minimise the impact on communities and build back better the city’s economy and society. This challenge was broken down into nine recovery missions, which bring together organisations from different sectors across the city to help drive forward London’s recovery.

Open innovation

Open innovation comes from the belief that the best ideas come from everywhere. But these need to be embraced, supported and funded. As Chief Digital Officer Theo Blackwell states in the Mayor of London’s Smarter London Together Roadmap report, ‘working with experts in open innovation (such as Design Council) enables challenges to be set by City Hall to be opened up to London’s innovators, and to support them to develop their ideas in a design-led, iterative way, which is often beyond the current capabilities of the public sector.’

Systemic design

Systemic design is a growing practice which is about how design can radically shift us to fairer, greener and just futures. It understands the wider system and root causes of issues, it brings different innovations together as an ecosystem and designs relationships between them, working at different ‘levels’ of the system — such as the design of things (places, services, products), policy and regulations, mindsets and beliefs. This is set out in the Design Council’s Systemic Design Framework.

A mission orientated innovation programme is a departure from typical open innovation competitions, which whittle many ideas down to a few that will scale. We wanted to do something more radical, that would shift mindsets, from competition to collaboration with each other and the wider system. Our reflections on setting up the programme through its first phase follow.

Developing the programme

Eager to get started, we delved into the work of national and international pioneers. Jennie Winhall and Charlie Leadbetter had worked with the RSA on a programme to create an ecosystem of new innovations for the future of work. Dan Hill, previously a Mayor of London Design Advocate, has been creating a playbook of systemic approaches to innovation, starting from the street and stretching up to policy, in Sweden. Amy Chester from Rebuild by Design has been creating a portfolio of initiatives and policy advocacy to create neighbourhoods which are more resilient to climate change in New York. Ryan Bellinson has been starting at the strategic level of policy and governance in Manchester. We convened all these experts together and used their wisdom to design our programme.

We wanted to work in a design-led, collaborative and cross-cutting way — sharing our learnings in the open and evolving our thinking. Using Jennie and Charlie’s systemic innovation model, we agreed that our ambition was to fund as many good ideas as possible, shifting efforts from competition to collaboration. We encouraged our innovation teams to come out of their silos and place themselves in the ecosystem, illustrating how ideas can have wider impact and lead to better outcomes for the missions.

Inspired by Building Better Systems: A Green Paper on System Innovation by Charles Leadbeater & Jennie Winhall, October 2020

In order to assess impact, we needed to measure it and herein lay our problem. We knew that we could measure impact easily through scalability if this was a traditional open innovation programme. But because we wanted to capture the miniature, the idea within an ecosystem, we needed a starting point which we found in Donella Meadows’ leverage points. This provides a great set of ways in which interventions can shift the system, but the language was academic. People like Adam Groves have made attempts to simplify this and the Canadian ‘In With Forward’ team have drawn on Riddell and Moore’s model to challenge traditional notions of scale. We needed measures that could be codified, translated and made inclusive and accessible to and for all innovators. We came up with the following as a starting point for the Designing London’s Recovery Programme cohort:

• Scaling the idea, and creating a sustainable business model which means it can reach more people (this is the usual route for creating impact)
• Using the idea to shift a policy or regulation that makes it easier or unlocks something for everyone else
• Amplifying a new or undervalued logic, mindset or way of working, that can inspire others, for example a new power dynamic, a circular or regenerative mindset, a new way of thinking about an issue
• Making new connections between organisations, including unusual ones, and creating more interdependence, from which further ideas and innovation can emerge

We have brilliant organisations working to progress mission objectives and create wider impact through systems thinking, visualisation and rapid prototyping — do check them out and get involved here.

Using the idea to shift a policy or regulation

In Finland, a fairly old but good example of this is Low-to-No, which was an innovation led by Sitra to create a low-carbon housing estate. They were trying to build homes out of wood, which is great for carbon sequestration and plentiful in Finland, but an old fire regulation meant this was restricted. Through prototyping the new development, and showing that it was safe, they managed to change the regulation, unlocking the possibility for house building across the country.

Through the DLR Programme, the Community Brain aimed to change the way event processes, licences and permissions are granted across London. Giving greater agency to individuals and groups to create and hold events will lead to a stronger sense of belonging. Their idea is for a digital, location-based technology which allows individuals and community organisations to identify spaces on our high streets, explore potential activities, check existing licences and contact relevant persons to bring activity and animation to London. A successful pilot will result in policy and regulation changes to be more democratic and citizen-led. There is the very real possibility that this approach could be adopted across London’s 32 boroughs (and City of London), bringing alignment to a disjointed process.

Amplifying a new or undervalued logic, mindset or way of working

In the US, Design Studio for Social Intervention questioned our individual household eating arrangements and prototyped what a public, shared kitchen looks like — similar to a library. The underlying logic is sharing across neighbourhoods. This then could have a powerful effect on other household activities, like childcare or living arrangements. They write about it in their publication ‘Ideas, Arrangements, Effects’. Other underlying logics could be: being regenerative or circular, being open and sharing, working with what exists.

Through the DLR programme the Pattern Project had a vision to create a network of sustainable neighbourhood micro-factories where clothes can be produced on demand, reducing negative environmental consequences for fast fashion. Patterns will be digital and these shared spaces will encourage Londoners to connect and creatively engage through repair workshops, clothes swaps and community events in the evenings. The idea is sharing sustainable practice with inventory made on demand. An idea which could be adopted by other industries, leading to more factories at a human scale.

Making new connections between organisations, including unusual ones, and creating more interdependence

Innovation happens when sectors or ideas combine, and binding them together can make them both stronger and create something new. For BBC The Fix, the RSA and Design Council worked with Barking & Dagenham Council on debt prevention, and brought together a Repairs Cafe with the local Credit Union, so that when people paid a small amount for their washing machine to be fixed, it went straight into a new credit account, encouraging saving for a rainy day.

Building interdependence between teams is key to enabling change and creating wider impact. Through the DLR programme, City & Guilds (with The Crown Estate) and Breakthrough identified opportunities to collaborate on their ideas to help Londoners into Good Work. By increasing provision for prison-leavers and rethinking how job skills profiles are defined and matched to work opportunities, both teams make progress in bringing forward an opportunity to test a skills portal for prison leavers, making their own ideas inclusive to Londoners and sparking further innovations to create wider impact.

How we have adapted our normal approach

As well as thinking about impact, our approach has evolved significantly and will continue to do so as we support teams with the tools, functionality and systems thinking to co-design solutions. From the outset, we have looked to:

• Create a portfolio of initiatives that can be radical demonstrators of a new system around ‘good work’, ‘green high streets’ and ‘thriving communities’. We wanted the best and brightest ideas and opted for a widely publicised open call. We set out clear criteria for innovations, held two engagement sessions where we shared some transformative examples of shifts and interventions to demonstrate our ambitions. Our panel of experts advised a more curatorial approach, filled identified gaps across the system, and added more as we explored the challenges.

• Bring innovation teams together as an ecosystem within mission areas but also as a group — expanding the brief to create multiple sustainable benefits (e.g. for people and planet), rather than isolating down on one single element of a problem. Teams have their 1–2–1 coaching with design experts where we explore collaboration with unusual suspects, creating new possibilities and ripple effects through beneficial partnerships. As Design Council Expert Nat Hunter observed, these potential partnerships made her ‘realise how important collaboration is, how much it opens things out and multiplies impact.’

A connection exercise, from Stage 1 workshop.

• Partnering with a team of inter-disciplinary researchers. CUSSH have provided experience and expertise on systems thinking, mission-oriented innovation, evaluation and behaviour change. Bringing in evidence based approaches, the programme delivery team have translated and applied theoretical and empirical knowledge to everyone through hands-on activities with the innovation teams, as well as expert masterclasses for those who want to learn in more detail.
• Partnering with experts in systems thinking. CUSSH have provided expertise around systems mapping and behavioural economics. As this is drawn from academic theory, we have both translated this into a language and activities that everyone can understand, as well as providing expert masterclasses for those who want to learn in more detail.
• Creating a theory of change that works at multiple levels. We are interested not just in how the teams scale, but also critically how the teams’ work progress the mission goals, and how effective this new type of innovation model is at supporting it.
• Equitable funding to support as diverse teams as possible based on what they need, rather than stating a set amount they would be awarded. We also explored ways to fund collaborations between teams or things that many teams need (for example a different data set that can measure a different value-set they are creating, or a platform for influencing stakeholders that they all need to get on board). We have taken a co-design approach with participants, which while unexpected and unusual at first, has been appreciated and created a different power dynamic in the relationship with participants.

• Connecting the teams to the mission leads, so their amazing work can — in real time — inform mission development, influence policy and regulation, and be seen as demonstrators of new ways of working. As well as the mission leads coming to the cohort workshops, we created monthly ‘system sessions’ where design experts come together with the mission leads and CUSHH to share insights and learning for the wider system.

This is a new way of working, and challenges remain:

• Procurement: public sector procurement models are not designed as flexible or agile. The GLA team has been working hard to find ways of working through this, and great leaps have been made. We will use this experience to develop more innovative funding arrangements for the future.
• Expectations:

● Participants expecting a traditional innovation programme have found they have been asked to work in a very different way. We have asked them to not just think about their idea, but how their innovation can support the wider mission, how they can use their idea to influence others who can make it easier for other innovators like them, and how they can build connections with their wider cohort.

● For teams coming in with the expectation that the programme is all about them getting funding for their idea, it has taken a few workshops to explain this new way of working. The diversity of the teams has made it more difficult for some teams to concentrate on their project at the same time as the bigger mission they are part of. Zooming in and out is a key part of working systemically and a skill that needs practice. Language can also be a challenge. There are some great examples of how to talk about systemic change with communities that we can learn from (for example this from The Workshop in New Zealand). We need to ensure these concepts are accessible to a more diverse range of people.

● We have not wanted to set out exact funding amounts available, but instead invited innovation teams to say what they needed and co-design this together. Although not as clear cut, the teams have welcomed this as it has given them a greater say in designing the programme. This evolution has allowed us to be more responsive to the needs of the participants and aims of the mission. It has fostered greater collaboration and lowered competition.

• The mission leads involvement has been crucial to provide the bigger context, to amplify the participants’ work as signals of the future, to connect them into wider schemes and understand what policies and regulations need to shift. This requires an enormous time commitment, dedication, intellectual engagement and strong stakeholder relationships. Through the length of this programme, we have seen this deepen. The mission leads work on multiple projects across the Recovery programme, so we have learnt the importance of making the case that their time is worth it, and we are effective with the valuable time they give us.

Conclusion

We’re happy that we’re being challenged as all of this is incredibly important learning — we are showing how to bridge the gap between traditional open innovation approaches and mission led innovation approaches using a structured design process and bringing system and evaluation experts together. Much like the innovation support we have been providing to the cohort on the programme, we also need that time to think, reflect and iterate to move away from off-the-shelf programme models which do not work with the grain of existing systems. We are now looking forward to commencing stage two of the programme, which will focus on supporting prototyping and testing of these ideas with Londoners, supporting the innovation teams to measure impact across the recovery missions, and influence the wider system. Please look out for an invitation to our Show and Tell in November this year (2022) where we will showcase our impact to date and further learnings.