A call for user-focused policy-making in a digital era
Editor’s Note: As the Ontario Digital Service dives deeply into digital services for all Ontarians, groups across the Ontario Public Service are also looking at how other parts of government are affected by digital transformation. This post by Karl Frost of the Policy Innovation Hub is the first of a series of posts on policy-making in a digital era.
The policy challenges we face today are continuously evolving and becoming increasingly complex, but for the most part our approach to policy development has remained fairly static over the past few years.
Too often we default to a familiar approach that uses a blend of traditional policy-development tools and methods. We’ll look to see if other jurisdictions are doing something similar (often Canadian, UK, American, and Australian jurisdictions), we’ll sketch out some options (often in consultation with the immediate policy development team), we’ll engage with stakeholders (often in the form of broad, umbrella groups), and we’ll connect with other ministries for their input (often with little time for real analysis and contribution).
While this process is slowly changing, many of us still struggle with true collaboration with other ministries, and struggle even more with engaging those who will be impacted the most: Ontarians.
How do we encourage our organization to be more dynamic in the policy development process?
Doing things differently in a bureaucracy is hard. Bureaucracies crave stability. They thrive at building low-risk systems and approaches that yield consistency and equal treatment; it’s not surprising that the status quo can be an important factor in mitigating risk.
In a world of digital change, maintaining the status quo may actually be the most risky move a bureaucracy can make.
A key catalyst for change in policy-making will be the increased recognition of the importance of being user-focused in all of our work. Improving the outcomes of Ontarians should be at the heart of everything we do in the policy community. This will force us to look beyond ministry lines and embrace what works for users, and not necessarily what works for our organizational structures.
Let’s reject the acceptance of “this is how we do things in government” and instead charge forward with “how might we do things that are best for Ontarians”.
The ODS Digital Service Standard offers a wonderful set of points for the OPS policy community to consider. While the Digital Service Standard is intended to guide the development of excellent online services, the spirit of the standard is also very applicable to policy-making.
Two elements of the Standard, in particular, are critical for the policy community to take to heart: “Understand users and their needs” and “Use agile and user-centred methods.”
Applied to a policy-making context, these standards emphasize that deepening our understanding of the user, and centering that understanding through the iterative policy-development process is critical. We can’t develop policy in a linear fashion, without engaging users, and expect that policy to serve Ontarians in the best way possible.
The good news is that there are a number of areas in the Ontario Public Service that are already adopting these principles:
- The Housing Policy Branch of the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing recently used a design-thinking approach to developing policy for homeless youth;
- The Partnerships Branch of the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change is using gamification to better engage Ontarians;
- The Finance, Analysis and Systems Support Branch of the Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development is working towards using human-centred design methodologies in all aspects of its work, and the Research and Planning Branch recently undertook a human-centred design process to reshape its labour market information web resource.
These are but a few of many examples; there are bound to be many more in the weeks and months to come.
Having a laser-like focus on our users isn’t always easy. Changing a policy-development approach that is embedded in our organizational DNA is also no simple feat.
It’s critical we keep in mind that the challenges and difficulties in attempting to do things differently are outweighed by the benefits of designing good, user-centric policies for Ontarians. To that end, the Ontario Cabinet Office’s Policy Innovation Hub wants to help the Ontario policy community — inside and outside government — adopt new, iterative, and collaborative approaches that put users at the centre of everything we do.
Please reach out to us to see how we can work with you; like the ODS team, we’ve got a relentlessly aspirational group that is ready and willing to help drive change.
If you’re in the public service and would like to continue exploring these ideas, join us at the annual Policy+ conference on November 2, 2017 where we will be focussing on the policy shop of the future. (There is still lots of availability to join via webcast.)
Karl Frost is the Manager of the Policy Innovation Hub and spends far too much time reading about baseball and looking at weather forecasts.
Thanks to Rajesh Sankat and Lauren Bodnar for their contributions to this piece and our general thinking around the future of policy-making at the Policy Innovation Hub.
