Why it’s hard to co-design public policies ?

On Monday Sept 25th 2017 I participated as an “innovator” to the Innovation G7 organised under the Italian presidency in the splendid Reggia di Venaria in Turin.
This is the second part of an article I wrote after that experience. The first part about AI and the future of work can be found here

During the G7 we were working in parallel groups to come up with recommendations and practical actions to solve complex issues as the rising of Artificial Intelligence and the future of work.

While the discussions were inspiring, the outcomes were rarely actionable: by trying to be too comprehensive we were loosing grip on reality. The reason is that Co-designing public policies is not an easy task. Especially if that implies policies that should be implemented across multiple countries and cultures.

Some of the key principles of co-design are particularly hard to follow in this context.

Design principles and public policies: why it doesn’t work

• Focus on specific problems and users. Creativity needs constraints and being too broad is never a good idea. Policy design is often focus on high-level decisions that impact “everyone”. As entrepreneurs know, building a product for “everyone” is the best way to loose focus and speed.
• Prototype, test and learn: can we prototype a policy and test it with citizens ? Governments have a limited space for test and failure. They are expected to roll out error-free policies that will live on forever, or at least until the next reform. The quest for consensus also prevent politicians from being experimental and accepting failure.
• Don’t be afraid about brand reputation and be ready to broken things: that’s easy said if you are breaking HTML or stylesheets but going quick and dirty on policies and regulations is less recommended.
• Involve your users: when we think about public services we don’t want to let anyone out so we think of citizens as the end users. The problem with the “citizen” category is that it is too broad and makes it impossible to address a specific user group. By fear of discrimination we often end up in the exceptions game: “This service is good but wouldn’t work for this very specific population”. Creating something that adapts to all the contexts and all the users profiles can be an end goal but is never a good idea to start.

This doesn’t mean we should stop co-designing public policies. On the contrary we need it more then ever if we are to create an inclusive society.

Ideas on how to improve co-design for public policies

• Adopt an inductive approach: start from solving specific problems that concern a subset of the population. Learn from what works and what doesn’t and then apply the solution to a wider group;
• Involve decision makers and beneficiaries from the beginning. Co-design should be a participative process from start to end. Starting with freestyle creativity and then bringing in validation steps is a waste of time and effort;
• Have countries to pilot specific policies. In the case where multiple countries (or cities) are involved each part could experiment a policy and bring back result to the group. What works can be deployed at a larger scale. This could be the new challenge of international cooperations;
• Go in beta mode: governments can try new services in beta mode and be very clear about the “experimental” part of it. That’s what the french government does with https://beta.gouv.fr/ : a platform to host new public services under development. With the right communication and the right user group initiatives like this can allow for experimenting new ways of delivering services to citizens.

I will keep enriching this article with thoughts and cases I find. If you want to contribute you can find me on twitter as vandicla or email me myname.v@numa.co