FGX Goals — What does ‘valuable’ mean?
In the summer, I took on a new role as Experience Director at FutureGov. This means that I focus on what the experience of working with us is like as a client, employee or a partner.
The first question I asked was what does good experience look like and how does it feel? We created the FGX Goals to help us articulate and align around what the FutureGov experience could and should be. This is the last in a series of 5 blog posts which describe each FGX goal in more depth. Read this in combination with energising, positively different, bold, and confidently incomplete.
Introducing FGX Valuable
Valuable is probably the hardest FGX Goals to write about. It was one of the most contentious when creating the goals together as a company. Some felt that value was so intrinsic to what we do and how we work that we didn’t need to call it out. Others felt it was important to be explicit about the value of what we do to ensure we’re always focused on delivering against that.
Making change happen
FutureGov is brought in to make change happen. With this focus, we know we’re delivering value when we’re helping deliver change. Ultimately, this is how we provide the most value to clients and to the sector. Not to be confused with impact (the difference that’s made), value is what that difference is worth.
Working with FutureGov should always feel valuable. This is tricky because we all value different things and value comes in different forms. Social value, financial value, environmental value, value now, in the future, value here or more widely? Of course, there’s value for money. Especially when the money that pays FutureGov often comes from the public purse. But it’s also about the value we create for people and organisations. And how that feels depends on what’s valued by the people we work with.
We seek to understand and align with the values of our client organisations to deliver experiences that feel valuable. This isn’t about telling people what they want to hear. Rather, it’s about deeply understanding where people or organisations are coming from and where they’re aiming to go. Where one organisation values engagement and collaboration, the way that we work together will need to differ from an organisation focused on immediacy and scale of impact. It’s a tricky balance to strike, but we aim to quickly orientate around the organisation or team and their values in order to shape, respond and work in a way that feels valuable to them with the ultimate, unfaltering goal of delivering change.
What does valuable look like?
Here are some of the ways that our team delivers valuable experiences:
Taking personal responsibility for delivering value
- ensuring we’re sharing learnings from one project or team to the next and avoiding repetition of similar challenges or mistakes
- taking ownership of our roles and skills, really considering how they add value to work and meetings (there’s nothing worse than too many people all sitting in a meeting and not really knowing why)
Providing helpful knowledge and expertise
- running activities to ensure everyone understands the change we’re seeking to make
- drawing on expertise and experience for clear advice around how and where to affect positive change
Creating something that helps
- building or creating a new product, tool or intervention that helps users benefit from a service. (Some we’ve made recently include Get Adoption Ready, Find Support Near You and Family Story)
- producing artefacts that help tell the story of change so we can rally around something together, such as storyboards or prototypes
Tangible value
We created FGX Value because we want everyone we work with to understand and be able to talk about the value created. It can’t just feel like the right thing to do, we need to be able to show it’s the right thing to do.
It’s not about going through the motions of a design or change process, but focusing acutely on making the change that’s going to have the biggest and most valuable impact to people, organisations, sectors, systems and our world.
And to go full circle, an important way for us to understand the impact of what we’ve worked on and the value of that impact is through FGX conversations with our clients. Listening and understanding what has worked, what hasn’t, what’s valued and what needs to be improved.
We’ve had 15 FGX conversations in 2019 and plan to have many more in 2020. If you’re a client or partner, we’d love to speak to you and listen more about what the experience of working with us is like.
