Digital approaches to solving Policy problems

*First published by Wellcome’s Head of Policy Beth Thompson MBE on LinkedIn on the 10th September 2020

There’s growing appetite for using digital approaches to help different types teams work effectively and deliver tangible impact. I’ve been exploring these techniques in our policy work and have been able to learn from colleagues in Digital along the way. Here, Alasdair Cowie-Fraser, Head of Digital at Wellcome, and I share how to make this work for you by comparing our approach for both Wellcome’s Reimagine Research campaign to reform research culture and the multi-award winning primary teaching product Explorify.

Getting your head around the problem

To develop ambitious but practical solutions you need to take the time to fully understand the audience, the problem you’re trying to fix, and aspects of the wider context that will help or hinder you getting there. It’s also important to keep on learning to inform the work as it progresses.

In Digital we do a lot of research before we build anything. Explorify is a product designed to improve the confidence of primary school teachers to teach science. The team began the project with user research with teachers. The team spent lots of time in classrooms, interviewing and surveying teachers, as well as reading literature. The research has never stopped and the team are still learning and testing assumptions.

In our research culture programme, we used a similar approach to gain essential insights: online conversation analysis, interviews and a survey of our key audience — the research community — to understand more about the scale and nature of the problem we’d identified. This meant we could articulate the problem in a clear and relatable way. We’re still learning by testing what we found and exploring solutions through townhall meetings and our Café Culture kits.

Keeping eyes on the prize

Both products have started out with a clear idea of what success looks like, and, have found ways to keep the intended outcome at front of mind as they progress.

Our first goal for Reimagine Research has been to make the case and set the agenda for change. But the longer term task is to convert this to action. We realised that previous efforts to improve research culture haven’t clearly set out what a positive culture would look like. So we’ve started by co-creating goals for how the system should look in the future. These goals may not appear revolutionary in themselves, but together provide a north star to guide and focus our work, and we hope they’ll be useful to galvanise the work of others too.

Explorify is part of a wider campaign with the goal of improving the quantity and quality of Science teaching in primary schools. After research, we identified low confidence in primary teachers in teaching Science as key problem. This led to two clear, measurable goals: increasing the weekly average time spent teaching Science; and increased confidence in primary teachers teaching Science.

Interim goals and iterative planning

Ambitious overarching goals can be hard to measure in the short term so interim goals and proxy measures of success can bring important focus. Bite-size interim goals also support continuous, iterative planning rather than defining everything up front. Starting without a perfect plan, but with regular checkpoints to course correct, has helped both these products get off the ground quickly.

Instead of committing to a multi-year digital investment, Explorify had checkpoints during the first 18 months where we checked that we were building something useful. We focused on testing:

• Adoption & engagement: how many teachers who sign up use the product with their class, and what does their on-going use look like
• Impact: qualitative research to check that it was increasing teachers’ confidence in teaching Science

When we committed to developing the product, the team planned in quarters, setting Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to iteratively improve the product.

In our research culture programme we’d never have started if we’d waited until we had a clear solution and action set, because the problem was too big and thorny. Instead, we broke it into bite size chunks, with one phase informing the next. As well as keeping tabs on this as a team, check-ins with go / no go decisions from our Executive have been essential to ensure we have their trust and support to deliver a flexible approach on a high-profile issue. Finally, a clear sense of direction has allowed us to adapt our programme to outside events and as we learn, without going off course.

Maxing out on a multi-disciplined team

For both products we created teams that were just big enough to have all the experience and skills needed and to get the job done, reaping benefits in keeping focused and efficient.

Reimagine Research has a small core team drawn from our Policy & Advocacy, Communications, Diversity & Inclusion and People teams and with the breadth of skills and expertise needed to deliver day to day. We’ve also borrowed additional skills at different times, such as writers, designers and media professionals. The input and insight of a much broader range of people across Wellcome, for example in our Science and Grants teams, have been essential and we’ve maximised their impact by seeking their advice in a focused way.

In Digital we work in multi-disciplinary teams, mixing engineering, design, content and research. The team for Explorify has changed depending on the skills required to deliver the product at the particular point of time. At least twenty-five individuals have contributed to its success, but we’ve focussed on always having the minimum viable team, making sure the group is never larger than it needs to be.

Culture of success?

Delegation with clear responsibilities is critical to enable a multi-disciplinary team deliver to their strengths. But working in this model needs the right culture and high levels of trust so that team members are empowered to try new things, take risks and learn from mistakes.

The success of Explorify is based on hard work from lots of people but the product wouldn’t be the success it is without strong product management. A good product manager is a strategist, a planner and a coach, and sometimes social secretary. We were lucky to have two excellent product managers in Louise Brown and Danielle Barnetche. The Explorify team has changed but we’ve always maintained an inclusive, empowering culture, with everyone focussed on the product goals.

In the research culture programme, each team member has put in a brilliant individual performance alongside taking part in activities led by others. I’ve tried to find the sweet spot between giving space and support to allow this to flourish, while collegiately has created consistency and cemented our shared vision. A sense of fun and mutual respect has created constructive challenge and seen us through some intense times. It’s been absolutely humbling to see our ideas and outputs grow in ways I could never have imagined.

Conclusion

In one sense our approach with research culture work has been to treat the policy change we wanted to create as a product, with a laser focus on what we needed to deliver in the short and long term to bring it to life. Wellcome’s Digital team gave us good examples of success in breaking down a complex challenge to solve it. Learning from them helped us find a different model of working needed to tackle a problem so large and complex — and we’ll use what we’ve found in taking on other policy challenges.

We’d love to hear from people interested in these approaches. Please tell us about your experiences of trying anything similar.