Labour has carried its commitment to delivering change through a ‘mission’-led approach from opposition into government.
Less than three months since the General Election, the first Mission Board has been held, the first batch of Civil Service vacancies seeking experience in ‘mission-oriented delivery’ posted – and my expectation is that this week’s Annual Conference will lean heavily into a mission-centred framing. But in the excitement of getting missions going, let’s not forget about citizen participation.
The need to place citizen participation at the heart of mission-driven change isn’t my own opinion. I’ve collected expert writings on mission delivery (so far, 55 documents and over one million words). I’ve then applied Natural Language Processing techniques to statistically identify the skills that, according to this group of experts, are most important for the successful delivery of missions.
This approach provides an objective view, across a corpus of writings, of what are often subjective opinions based on acquired ‘know-how’.
The skills for success
The list of 16 skills that emerge through this work go deeper than vague headlines, such as ‘mission delivery’. In particular, they lay out the need for skills in:
- generating new options for delivering change – for example, through creativity, experimentation and innovation
- understanding and addressing complex problems – for example, through system mapping, foresight and effectively working across disciplines
- designing and delivering participatory methods.
The importance of participatory approaches is that they increase both legitimacy and the quality of decision-making. They achieve this by allowing the people and communities most affected to shape the mission’s success.
In the expert literature I analysed, it’s noted that these outcomes are important considerations when setting the ambitions of the mission; when identifying and validating opportunities, needs and interventions; and when delivering successful learning processes.
Two particular methods for achieving this are in the skills list; co-design and design thinking. Encouragingly, The Young Foundation can add to this catalogue of tested methods. For example, the powerful approach of peer research deserves to be listed.
Learning from communities
Tangible examples of the necessity of this approach to citizen engagement emerged in the qualitative interviews I ran with senior leaders who work in mission-driven ways. For example, a leader in a local authority described to me how working with communities to understand how best to address food insecurity led to a much better programme, saying “we could have very easily gone down the route of investing in food banks. They were a known model. They were working, what appeared to be, successfully. They were in the areas where people had been identified as experiencing food insecurity… But, actually, when we went into communities and we talked to them, what was really, really important to people was having choice and they didn’t want […] to just be given a box of food, they wanted to be able to shop themselves – but they wanted it to be affordable. And so that’s why we ended up developing the food hub model.”
When asked about the skills needed to deliver missions, another interviewee highlighted a need for skills around “[…] convening and facilitating, and so making sure that you’re listening and reflecting and learning … But I think at the core of it all, whether or not it’s from leaders or elsewhere in the organisation, is the idea of bringing people together in sense-making.”
People-powered missions
Unlike predominantly technical missions – such as getting astronauts to the moon or accelerating drug-discovery – Labour’s missions foreground the complexity of delivering social change. As such, human wants, needs, habits, preferences and social influences are immediately and prominently brought in.
One outcome of this approach must be getting much more serious about providing opportunities for those most affected by an issue to shape what missions seek to deliver – and how to go about achieving this.
It should be no surprise, then, that participatory approaches feature prominently in a statistical analysis of the expert literature. Of the sixteen skills statistically identified, they were the third most important – only the need for experimentation and creativity featured higher.
Through this week’s Annual Conference events and speeches, I look forward to hearing more about how Labour’s mission-driven approach may play out. Perhaps the government is recognising the value of building diverse, wide-reaching participation. I hope so, as we have every reason to see this as a necessary part of driving lasting and meaningful political change, one that delivers what those most affected want and need.
Mark Griffiths recently completed his MA in interdisciplinary problem solving at the London Interdisciplinary School. His work explores mission-driven government and the readiness of the UK Civil Service to deliver it.
Local government & public services Methods & Measurement Systems change Posted on: 23 September 2024