Test and Learn
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Instead of programmes, we encourage public servants and politicians to adopt an approach that deliberately and specifically acknowledges complexity and uncertainty, and mitigates for both.
This is possible where teams work iteratively, with tight feedback loops to test what works practically, and get buy-in and agreement from the most senior source possible. (As we’ll see later in this paper, that can also include ministers.) The Radical How approach starts with hypotheses—just as waterfall does—but sets out to test them immediately—starting with the riskiest.
The goal is to create feedback loops that enable rapid iteration and improvement.
That’s made possible by building a permanent and multidisciplinary team that constantly improves its service in small increments and constantly increases the scale of the service as confidence in the approach evolves and grows.
The team is equipped to learn. The Radical How provides a built-in “Undo” button to correct errors—and of course, errors happen. But with this approach, those errors are tiny, and cost very little to fix relative to the alternative. That’s a consequence of the rapid feedback loop.
Teams like this have to be truly multidisciplinary, with policy and operations experts working alongside a range of other skills and experiences: service designers, technologists, analysts, product managers, delivery managers, user researchers, content designers, and others, all working together.
It is important to clarify that this approach is not a case of simply running lots of pilots. A pilot implies starting with a phase for learning, which then ends as you move into ‘roll out’. Pilots also tend to imply testing a whole solution to see if it works, rather than specific hypotheses.
Applying the Radical How means conducting multiple small-scale experiments at the boundaries of policy and delivery—and doing this permanently, in pursuit of a policy intent or outcome. Incremental changes are scaled up, once there is good evidence they work in reality.
Responsiveness is an embedded attribute, not a phase on a timeline.