Exploring ‘Service Recipes’ as a way to harness, share and amplify good practice within The Children’s Society
With support of The National Lottery Community Fund’s ‘Digital Fund’, The Children’s Society has been exploring opportunities to embed digital and design principles across all of our work. The aim is to achieve what we’ve been calling a ‘blended service offer’.
This blog is about one of the ideas that emerged from this process: to create a space where teams can connect over common solutions to common problems — much like the ‘service recipes’ hosted by Catalyst.
How did the idea come about?
Teams across our Children and Young People’s Directorate have something in common: we all want to design effective services that support young people. Yet, while joining up the dots on what we know works well, ideas in the process of being tested and which good practices are transferable across contexts, is not straightforward. Insight is generated and held across multiple teams, and is continuously refreshed with new learning and experience. How to make sure good practices are shared is essential — so we’re not unnecessarily reinventing the wheel, and so they can be incorporated into new service designs whilst enabling flexibility for local innovation and adaptation.
To address this challenge we pulled together a small group with representatives from our service design, monitoring and evaluation, youth engagement and safeguarding quality and practice teams. Through a series of open conversations, we began asking ourselves the following question:
‘How might we ensure our service designs are evidence informed but also flexible and adaptive to local contexts?’
Our hypothesis was that describing common solutions, which have been established through experience, research and evaluations over time, could help us retain and develop our collective knowledge, as services close and new services are developed.
We were also encouraged and inspired as we learned about similar initiatives, such as the Mental Health Pattern Library by Snook, the Core Components approach by the Youth Endowment Fund and the Service Recipes website by The Catalyst.
What did we do?
In order to test this hypothesis, we first needed to develop the concept of a service recipe library. This involved:
· Identifying common components across our services where ‘recipes’ would be helpful
· Describing recipes in a way which meets the user needs of key teams
· Agreeing on a framework for including recipes.
In order to understand where recipes would be helpful, we identified 11 service components that are part of a common service pathway within which various routes are possible.
We decided that for each ‘component’ of the service journey, we would need dynamic solutions that unpick what a good user experience would look like for different channels as part of a blended service offer. This means that regardless of whether a young person receives a letter about the service, or is contacted by a worker over the phone, or walks through the door: we wanted to have an approach at hand that we know would work best based on evidence and experience, while recognising these can be different depending on context.
To understand how we could we find a way of describing recipes in a way which meets the user needs of key teams, we decided to zoom in on the ‘arrange first meeting’ pattern and developed example recipes for different scenarios. For example: a recipe that examines an approach one of our services has developed in response to Covid19 which involved sending introduction videos from staff to young people that are new to the service. As we developed these test recipes, we were able to decide on a template, which is largely inspired by examples from The Catalyst which we tested and tweaked.
We also played with some ideas to stretch our mind a little about the possibilities. Could we link recipes back to the ‘success mechanisms’ in the form of labels or ‘tags’ that could be added to a recipe depending on which mechanisms they help realise? Could there be a status depending on how many mechanisms are accounted for in a recipe? What if services could create profiles which would help users of the Service Recipe Library track how many recipes a service has contributed with? Could this turn them into super-users to help services that pioneer good practices stand out?
This is only a suggestion of ideas we could explore as part of future iterations. One thing that slightly irritated us about the prototype we had so far, is that we felt it seemed too ‘perfect’ — and we felt a need to capture how in reality, every approach comes with its pros and cons, and a good practice solution for one can be a poor practice solution for another. For this reason, we are also exploring ways in which we might capture ongoing lessons, as recipes are tested over time in different services and with different users. Something that enables services to say they tried something and share the result.
Finally, we needed to define what ‘good’ looks like. What standards do service recipes have to achieve to be included in a service recipe library and why? To understand this, we drew on the work of our Evidence and Impact team to identify 16 mechanisms of success. Through evaluations of The Children’s Society’s services, we’ve found these mechanisms drive change and impact for young people. Together, they form a framework that describes the kinds of practices we would want to amplify through ‘service recipes’.
What is next?
What we have done so far is develop the concept from something rather intangible that vaguely existed in our heads and in our conversations that felt relevant and needed but also abstract and hard to grasp, and slowly molded it into something that can be communicated. This is where the conversation about service recipes really begins, and where we can start engaging with others internally about what its use could be and how it could work, or perhaps whether it will help us realise that what we really want and need is something completely different.
If the next phase reveals that Service Recipes would indeed provide a shared solution to common problems our heads are buzzing with ideas and possibilities. There is one big win we have already gained from this process regardless, and that is that is has brought together different people from different teams to reflect together on how we can collaborate more in helping each other realise better support for young people. We managed to create a space that seemed to exist outside of everyday tasks that focused on finding and creating meaning and value. By dissecting the ordinary it became quite extraordinary, and the process increased our confidence that everything we seek in some way already exists — and that is exciting. In many ways, this is exactly what we hope a Service Recipe library will help us achieve.
