4 2014
Trialling Public Policy: 9 Steps
Muscat, Sultanate of Oman
Embracing the entrepreneurial spirit This Forum was a conversation catalyst, it was an event designed to give public sector workers the opportunity to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit that’s sweeping Oman and re-assess how we can best meet the needs of our communities, improve public sector efficiency and national competitiveness.
1. Identify two or more policy interventions to compare (e.g. old vs new policy).
6. Introduce the policy interventions to the assigned groups.
2. Determine the outcome the policy is intended to influence and how it will be measured in the trial.
7. Measure the results and determine the impact of the policy interventions.
3. Decide on the randomization unit: individuals, institutions (e.g. schools), or geographical areas.
8. Adapt the policy intervention to reflect the findings.
4. Determine how many units (people, institutions, or areas) are required for solid results.
9. Return to Step 1 to continually improve your understanding of what works1.
The Fight Club Rule
Share the Problem & Solution
If we want to transform Oman’s public services, let’s start with the people, place and economy we want to be part of in the future. Ask what kind of public sector could enable us to have a real stake in creating it, sustaining it and making it globally competitive. Work backwards from there.
International competitiveness is not something that can be ‘fixed’ by business and government leaders – it’s about how well state, business and society are set up as a whole - sharing the problem and thinking about whole-systems to address it. Interdependence is key.
The Future Public Servant is to be determined! Let’s not make the mistake of projecting today’s needs, wants and demands onto tomorrow. Tomorrow’s youth won’t be the same as today’s. So, the skills and aptitudes and relationships that public servants will need are likely to be different too. We need to be aiming for a 'mosaic'.
Pick our Virtues Carefully We need to stop assuming that the public sector needs to find all of the answers, and start worrying about how we define the right questions. This means that humility, empathy and adaptiveness will be important values - especially in the face of a public increasingly equipped with their own data.
5. Assign each unit to one of the policy interventions, using a robust randomization method.
Challenge 1 Changing the School Day The school day generally starts between 8:00am and 9:00am, and many teachers believe that pupils do their best work early in the morning. But research has suggested that this may not be the case for teenagers. The body clocks of teenagers run several hours behind those of adults and younger children, perhaps explaining their propensity for late nights and lie-ins. This raised a possibility: could it be that starting school a little later might actually improve learning naturally when they are more alert?
Experiment 1 Better Exam Results In 2010, Monkseaton High School in Tyneside, UK, thought it worth investigating, and pushed back the start of the school day from 9:00am to 10:00am. The experiment was under way. In August 2011, after the first full school year using the new timetable, year-11 pupils recorded the best GCSE results in the school's history. The proportion of pupils achieving five GCSEs at grades A* to C rose by 19% on the previous year. Results were especially impressive in science and information and communications technology. Persistent absenteeism fell by 27%.
Challenge 2 Funding Education Projects In the 1990s, the Dutch development charity, International Christelijk Steunfonds (ICS), decided to fund a program to support education in Kenya. Providing African children with textbooks that they could not normally afford might improve their exam results, so the charity paid for 25-schools to receive sets of English, Science and Mathematics books.
Experiment 2 Provide Medication Not Books The exam results at the 25 intervention schools were compared with those from the 75 schools without the extra teaching resources. The textbooks, it turned out, made very little difference. They then tried another intervention – illustrated teaching flip-charts – in a similar randomized trial. Again, there was no significant effect. So they tried a third approach, funding treatment for intestinal worms. This time 25 random schools received the treatment immediately, 25 after two years, and another 25 two years after that. This time, there was clear evidence: de-worming children had unequivocally improved their learning, probably thanks to improved nutrition.
1 Reasons to Trial Public Policy
Create a Shallow End
1. Experiment
2. Implement
3. Demonstrate
4. Learn
An opportunity to test whether a policy is generally cost effective in meeting specific objectives.
An opportunity for initiating and investing in, local change through implementing policy in pilot projects, as a first step towards national roll-out.
An opportunity to show others how a policy can be implemented successfully.
An opportunity to learn how to operationalize a policy, how to overcome implementation barriers and how to improve processes and outcomes.
Re-think Leadership Our future public leaders are already within our organizations at the lower and mid-rungs, often stifled or misdirected by an inward looking culture that doesn't value creativity and citizen-responsiveness. Unless we start to create ‘safe space’ for these future leaders to develop, we’ll be incubating the same things as ever. If the future public servant has a diverse career pathway and experience, then let’s start looking outwards and encouraging this.
It’s vital to test, prototype and find ways of creating a shallow end for stakeholders to address the biggest public issues. So much of this is about risk - and our ability to create momentum through enabling momentum, creativity and failure in a way that feels possible for people today. It’s about engendering a new way of thinking about public policy and understanding human needs and demands.
Who Cares about the Baby? “Will you take care of my baby the same way I would, knowing our shared goal is to get this kid to a good college?” When the “baby” or in this case, business performance isn’t co-owned by everyone, things can easily fall through the cracks. How we get things done drives performance. These issues of trust, conflict resolution and co-ownership are foundational for how a team gets work done. Culture is the set of habits that allows a group of people to co-operate by assumption rather than by negotiation. Culture is not what we say, but what we do without asking. A healthy culture allows us to produce something with each other, not in spite of each other.
2 Public Sector Culture: Things to Think About
1. Public sector organizations are having to reinvent themselves in partnership with organizations from other sectors: social enterprise and the business community.
Technology Can Build New Relationships
Disagreeing Means What?
Building Trust
How we handle disagreements and dissent are also part of culture. When teams don’t know how to handle disagreement, molehill issues can become do-or-die mountains, or, conversely, passive-aggressiveness insinuates itself as a mechanism to avoid overt disagreements at all costs.
Where every team member simply surrounds the issue much like a team of kids surrounds the ball. They then travel en masse, afraid to move away from the “ball.” In this culture, no one owns a position on the field. When they’re huddling, what they’re signalling is that they don’t know how to trust one another to do their unique part. They don’t know how to “let go” and trust others, thus risking their ability to scale results.
The potential of technology to change the public sector is massive. OCF14 demonstrated this with international examples from hotspot policing through to online portals for citizen engagement. Society is changing anyway, and if we don’t embrace the opportunity to create more responsive and innovative services in this moment, then disconnect between state and society will only increase.
Culture will Trump Strategy
Making Innovation Happen
Culture will trump strategy, every time. The best strategic idea means nothing in isolation. If the strategy conflicts with how a group of people already believe, behave or make decisions it will fail. Conversely, a culturally robust team can turn a so-so strategy into a winner. The “how” matters in how we get performance.
So, how do we make innovation happen in the public sector in the 21st century? 1. Begin with honesty. 2. Reduce risk aversion. 3. Eliminate silo working.
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2 Making the Most of Open Data
Citizen Engagement 2. Changes in identity require changes in culture.
Open data engagement tends to come from specialized actors developers, entrepreneurs and other tech-savvy agents. But if public sector data is the people’s data, then evidently there should be a desire to widen this engagement. It’s about talking to people locally to involve them in the process. It’s not about government being in charge any more, but citizen responsibility.
3. Changes in culture come about through changes in thinking about partnership.
Public Sector Competitiveness 1
Session 1 Trialling Public Policy
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Session 2 Changing Public Sector Culture
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Session 3 Public Services & Citizen Engagement
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Session 4 The 21st Century Civil Servant Competitiveness Connection
Open Data is Just an Enabler Open data is simply an enabler to create new ways of doing things to improve transparency, support social change and empower Oman’s economy. However, public participation in the use of open public sector data is limited, specialized and low.
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Create the Right Incentives Are civil servants rewarded for doing the right things? There’s little consensus on this, are civil servants held to account by the wrong things - upward looking, about inputs and activities, rather than outcomes and impact? This is a crucial part of encouraging innovation and should be tested - create a shallow end, work with the departments and agencies who are already leading edge.
Simple Stuff Often it’s the simple things that people want to know and it doesn't have to involve 'contentious' data – as simple as a list of public toilets in Sohar shopping malls, WiFi hot spots in Salalah, Muscat museum opening times and traffic conditions on November 18 Street. With user generated content added in this becomes so much more useful. For example, how clean are the toilets, how reliable is the WiFi hot spot, how interesting is the museum and how jammed is the road? The data is now live and dynamic and more useful to the Omani public. The challenge is keeping the data up-to-date - or tell people data is refreshed every 6 months so expectations are managed.
• There needs to be a big vision and a political mandate, ensuring top level engagement - the public sector has to buy into this agenda and mandate public data to be opened up. Without this, it can still happen, but at a much slower pace. • Find local champions and give them space to innovate - provide open public data competitions, a pipeline of opportunities to have work developed through hacks/collaboration events and follow through with support and commissions. • Reach out to the community and involve them - check in with end-users to make sure you’re developing with and for them, not just for yourself. • Make innovation part of the strategy and allow people to take risks, allowing ‘failure’ as well as success. • Collaborate with, and learn from, others worldwide - Apps for Europe and Code for Europe - app ideas which are open source and can be copied. With regards the big picture, McKinsey & Company estimates that open data can help generate more than US3$ trillion a year in key sectors of the global economy. Open data can help Oman find efficiencies and create better public policies. With the power of the Omani people, they can make it happen in 2015.
4. Ensure the interests of the citizen are put first.
Persevere Thomas Edison is said to have observed that
“strategy without execution is hallucination”. None of what was discussed at OCF14 will happen overnight - so perseverance, shared responsibility and a commitment to making improvements collectively will be vital components in our journey to success.
Connect with us Call +968 2462 3300
Do it On Purpose None of this will happen by accident, and to make the changes suggested at OCF14 will require the creation of a ‘safe’ and ‘shared’ space where disagreement can be aired and implementation plans can be created. This needs to be a deliberate and well brokered act.
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The truth is, people talk about innovation a lot in the good times, but it’s only when times get tough that real change happens. Something that grips every public sector employee from the very top to the very bottom. More recently, and in many parts of the world that’s been the global economic crisis and austerity.
@ithraaoman events.ithraa.om www.ithraa.om
Talent Pipeline Supporting smart developers to innovate with data for social and economic impact should be encouraged, there’s a role for Oman’s education system to support this vision, with a skills pipeline of developers, data analysts and designers. This starts at school and works its way up through to University and start-up incubators - there needs to be a joined-up ecosystem to support innovators. The mark it makes on Oman’s cities and communities could be just as significant in the years to come.
This data has been compiled and produced by the Public Authority for Investment Promotion & Export Development Ithraa thanks: HH Dr. Sayyid Adham Al Said; Jackie McKenzie; Dr. Mohammed Al Mugheiry; Dr. Nick Owen MBE; Dr. Henry Kippin; Richard Harries; Dr. Abdullah Al Mahrouqi; Sarah Drummond; and Karsten Schmidt for their invaluable input in the preparation of this Report. Footnote: 1 - Test, Learn, Adapt: Developing Public Policy with Randomised Controlled Tests. Behavioural Insights Team.