Futures Analysts’ Network Newsletter
November 2008
Futures Thinking in Public Policy Making
The choice at Surgeons’ Hall, Edinburgh on November 13 was a tricky one. Turn right for the FAN Club, or left for Basic Surgical Skills. 69 of us decided that Futures Thinking in Public Policy Making was more interesting than becoming an amateur appendectomist. But we enjoyed the splendid if rambling headquarters of Scottish scalpel-wielding.
Co-sponsored with the Scottish Government, the session brought in delegates from national and local government across the UK, especially Scotland, as well as academe, consultancy, think-tanks and the private sector. See the full list of participants here.
The meeting had a series of presentations on public policy futures, heard about new resources and tools from the HSC and other sources, and included two breakout sessions where their use was explored.
This newsletter takes things out of sequence, starting with the formal speakers and moving on to discuss the practical parts and the breakout sessions. It is a summary of the discussions at the event and does not represent Government policy.
New Horizon Scanning head
The first speaker was Dr Averil Horton, head of the Horizon Scanning Centre, who gave the audience her view of the challenges just three months into the job. The task for Foresight as she sees it is to spot future change for the whole of government. In its three years of life, the HSC has completed 15 projects and has six more on the go, covering vital areas such as security and aging. It has also developed the horizon scans and provided futures training and coaching for other parts of government.
Averil described her own alarm at discovering that there were only about 250 Sigma and Delta Scans, having come from a commercial background in which there might be thousands. But she changed her mind on seeing that they were really scans of scans, drawing on a vast range of evidence to illuminate everything from Chinese-Russian relations to the plight of the bumble bee.
Now, she says, the task is to make sure that the HSC’s outputs are rigorous and world-class, but also to ensure that people use them, especially in government. This means attaching them to policy processes. As she said, “All this work is a waste if it is not used to alter decisions: we want to know that the things we say are going to be applied at next week’s board meeting.”
In addition, Averil is keen for the HSC to look well beyond government’s normal comfort zone for inspiration. She identified three directions from which new thinking might come. One is the long timescale which it considers. Next is its ability to look at disciplines now on the periphery of government attention but which might produce future surprises, pleasant or not. Third and perhaps most intriguing is its broad cultural horizon. It can examine societies which are less hierarchical than we take for granted in the West, or which have different ways of looking at things. In Madagascan culture, she pointed out, people imagine the past being in front of you, where you can see it, and the future being behind you, waiting to hit you on the back of your head.
Scotland faces the future
The Club’s principal speaker of the day was Ken Thomson, Director of Constitution, Law and Courts for the Scottish Government. Ken looked back to when he became a civil servant 20 years ago when, he reminded us, apartheid in South Africa and communism in Russia were still features of the world scene and Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. Two decades on, those are things taught in history classes. Futures thinking helps us stay alive to how fast the world can change.
To help Scottish thinking on what change the future might bring, the government has set up a National Conversation - http://www.anationalconversation.com - about what follows the present era of devolution. It started in cyberspace but has recently included meetings all over Scotland, including one by and for 14-19 year olds, as well as meetings for overseas Scots in the US. The results may affect a possible 2010 referendum on full independence for Scotland, while the Conversation itself is regarded as a testbed for future public participation in Scottish government.
Ken took what he terms the Rolf Harris approach to futures thinking: sketch something and see if anyone recognises it. One driver he points to is that independence is a different thing now than it would have been when the Scottish National Party was founded in 1934. Independent nations are now more interdependent. Power has gone upwards to Brussels and downwards to more local levels of organisation, including through devolution and the creation of new small independent nations, while globalisation means that economic and financial decisions have disappeared from national capitals.
This greater local autonomy means the Scottish Government has already been able to introduce change since devolution, for example in policies for care of the elderly, smoking, and student fees. There has also been a change in approach. He now regards dealings with London as intergovernmental rather than interdepartmental business.
You can see Ken’s presentation here.
Futures in government
The first speaker of the afternoon was Jan Polley of the National School of Government, who spoke about how it uses futures thinking in training public sector personnel. Formerly the Civil Service College, the NSG delivers most of its training via associates rather than staff employees. Jan, a strategy specialist at the School, said that the Scottish Government’s emphasis on outcomes-based policy thinking was an exciting development that had created ripples across UK government.
But Jan added that not all politicians want the vision thing. Some prefer “steady as she goes” to raw courage. For these nameless individuals, “being strategic” can be code for asking for more money, or for avoiding immediate issues.
Her aim is to go beyond this approach and promote futures thinking which is inclusive and adventurous, and which can cope with challenge and uncertainty. Working with Foresight and the Cabinet Office, the NSG has set up a new Strategy Exchange (web site under construction at http://www.nationalschool.gov.uk/strategyexchange/) to push these priorities.
Jan’s presentation is here
Delta remade
Next up was Harry Woodroof of the Horizon Scanning Centre, with an update on the HSC’s Sigma and Delta scans and other HSC activities. The big news is that the scans have now merged into a single structure, the new Sigma Scan, at www.sigmascan.org.
Harry was joined by Julian Thompson of Ipsos-MORI in a demonstration of the scans. They pointed out that as well as the main site, it is possible for government users to get permission to use www.foresight.gov.uk/sigmascanpro where people can set up and edit content in a private area, or be alerted to new material on specific topics.
The new scans have fresh content and sources including implications, parallels and precedents. Harry welcomes your opinion on the whole thing. His and Julian’s presentation, which shows the site’s new functionality, is here.
Harry discussed other HSC projects and pointed out that most of HSC’s current activities are not about science or technology. Recent topics, for a range of government clients, include food, the geopolitical environment, UK futures, the future of families, and emerging technologies.
Local public services
The day’s final speakers were Tim Allen, programme director: analysis and research at the Local Government Association, and Julian Thompson of Ipsos-MORI.
Their subject was the future of local public services in England, and their talk focused on a study of the biggest opportunities, challenges and uncertainties these services face. It used secondary research, expert in-depth interviews and workshops to get the views of leading practitioners on the major challenges the sector faces over the next 10 to 15 years. It also carried out an online survey of over 100 senior local decision-makers to give a reality check by rating the likelihood and potential impact of 20 key drivers, ranging from climate change to elected mayors. Part of the intention is to create continuing debate, and there is a wiki at http://communities.ipsos-mori.com/lgawiki/index.php/Main_Page which they hope you will get involved with.
The leading lights of English government agree that money, or the lack of it, is their top future problem. They see it as the most likely issue to arise and the biggest. They also seem to envisage the gradual, undesigned dismantling of the local state set up in the 1930s and 1940s as the world gets more complex but the issues get more local.
But it is also obvious that we need new types of public service. One they mentioned might be the 21st-century rag and bone person, in charge of making sure that everything we no longer need is reused – not recycled. Services that are ingenious as well as efficient will continue to be appreciated. They will also be valued in new ways, as local government joins in the trend towards measures of well-being of which money forms only element and where empowerment might be another important part. Overall, eight big “prospect” areas had emerged as optimistic frontiers for local services in the next few years.
They pointed out that technology has a key role to play in future public services. There are now six million carers: can technology help their work? What is the nanotechnology device that might keep an old person at home and out of full-time care?
Download Tim’s and Julian’s presentations.
Time to talk
One frequent plea from FAN Club members is for more chance to talk to each other about futures issues. In Edinburgh, members were not allowed to sit and listen to speakers on the podium for too long. They were introduced to their first activity of the day by Steve Wells of Informing Choices Ltd.
Steve is working on ways to give the FAN Club more of an existence between meetings. His approach has been to develop a collaborative tool that might help turn everyone’s supposed enthusiasm for activity into a reality. Such a tool might also make it simpler for government departments to absorb controversial insights from futures work.
He is consulting on the tool and expects it to be at http://www.collaborativeworkingpracticeinfutures.blogspot.com soon. There will be further discussion at future FAN Club meetings. Steve’s presentation is here.
Harry Woodroof of HSC then introduced WIST, the Wider Implications of Science and Technology programme.
He said that WIST had grown out of the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering’s 2004 report on nanotechnology (http://www.nanotec.org.uk/finalReport.htm) which called for analysis of the issues that all emerging technologies might bring with them. Any new technology can affect any part of government and can mean opportunity as well as danger.
Harry characterised the issues involved in the WIST process as SHEERS – social, health, environmental, ethical, regulatory or safety. Deliberately missing from the list are the economic effects of innovation, on the grounds that these are bound to receive expert analysis from others at an early stage.
To get a grip on these – as Harry puts it – “bite-in-bum issues,” the WIST programme has already consulted over 300 stakeholders from government, academe, industry, NGOs, faith groups and other areas, and has also engaged with over 3100 people at 430 public events organised by Sciencewise.
This consultation has produced a virtually Linnaean classification of emerging science and technology, including eight clusters, 61 issues and 16 themes. For each, possible government responses have been considered. Should we regulate it? Invest it in? Or just consult more widely?
Harry’s presentation is here.
The final report of WIST findings will be published soon. But the initial list of possible developments was used in Edinburgh to guide our breakout sessions. Harry invited members to explore four of the themes in more detail and use a diagnostic tool he has developed to suggest how government might respond. They were:
Better modelling enhances social and environmental understanding
Enhancement of the mind and body
My robot: guide, labourer and friend
The end of privacy
The four subjects were discussed in groups from four to 15 in size. For some reason robots were especially popular.
For each of the topics, delegates were required to explain who they were and why they were interested in the subject. Then there was a plenary discussion. And then they were required to complete an eight-axis spider diagram about the subject.
Each axis represents a possible form of government reaction – from low at the centre to high at the periphery - to a new technology. Should it consult on the subject? Invest in it? Pass a law about it? Or do nothing about it? Should it offer advice? Should it take the debate international? Should it develop new policy? Or perhaps enable others to think about the issue? To these some groups added a ninth, influence, a somewhat more muscular idea, perhaps, than consultation and debate.
It is impossible to capture the full richness of these discussions. One of the crowd at the robot session agreed that robots were “cool,” while another, with a strong interest in highways, wanted to know whether they could be used to cut down weeds at the roadside. But there was general agreement that they might be arriving by stealth, via the slow increase of automation, as much as by the very visible arrival of things overtly described as robots.
But whilst they might abolish some dangerous and nasty jobs, robots in the world of Web 2.0 might also be used to take over intellectual rather than manual labour, or to help surgeons as well as tree surgeons. Ideally-suited to the 24/7 society, robots may achieve something close to human behaviour, but their spread may also make us value people and human artefacts more.
As the diagram shows, people were comparatively upbeat about the idea of more robots, calling for government to invest in them but also to consult and deliberate on them – for now, we assume, only with humans.
The group considering the death of privacy considered the knotty problem that people often don’t mind sharing personal information if the person they are sharing it with is trusted and if there is a benefit from sharing. People are happy to get special offers because Tesco knows their shopping habits.
But government does not have enough trust for people to want to tell it everything. Some anti-terror measures such as ID cards risk damaging the presumption that people are innocent until proven guilty, while people are increasingly disconnected from government. Election turnouts are falling and fewer people than in the past are actively involved in politics, while government uses the electoral register as a source of cash by selling it to marketing companies. There was also a feeling that recent high-profile cases of the authorities losing personal data had damaged its case for receiving more. On the other hand, one need only look at Facebook or Friends Reunited to see how keen people are to put personal information in the public domain via the private sector.
Perhaps on confidentiality grounds, this group did not complete the diagram. But it did make the point that privacy might be especially in danger from a well-meaning government which was producing a wealth of new policy. It might regard data which had been gathered for one purpose as a legitimate input to a completely different process for which the people concerned would not have given consent.
By contrast, the group looking at improved modelling of social and environmental processes was so big that it split. In general, the feeling of the meeting was that better models would help improve policymaking, although one participant did point out that poor models were a prime cause of the financial mess now engulfing the UK and other countries.
The enhancement of mind and body group thought that the pressures of climate change, the threat of new pandemics, and the like might well mean that humanity will soon need all the help it can get. But past examples such as drugs in sport point to severe ethical and medical issues, including people being bullied into drug use. It was also noted that some of the issues to do with drug use for enhancement are devolved in the UK and others are not. So more investment is needed here as well as more and better policy.
The upshot seems to be that the collaborative working tool does indeed produce collaboration, at least amongst this unique group. But as one participant pointed out, all the resulting diagrams have one thing in common. They universally attach low value to the idea of laissez-faire. It was suggested that this was due to the room being full of public servants. We could soon find out by repeating the process with a few dozen people from the private sector.
Futures Live!
The afternoon’s practical sessions were a little different. Called Futures Live!, they were intended to allow the people behind specific futures initiatives in the public sector to talk about their projects and get feedback.
One group heard about Scotland’s Futures Forum, a company owned by the Scottish Parliament which aims to support MSPs and others thinking about big future issues. It is also a membership organisation and has about 1800 members.
One of the reasons for its creation was the feeling that most of the evidence coming to MSPs was from the third sector, so some more diversity was needed.
The Forum deliberately carries out one big project per year. Its first was on ageing and its second is on alcohol and other drugs, where there is a national target to reduce harm by 50 per cent by 2025.
The general approach is an aspirational one which asks where we want to be and what steps might take us there, perhaps backcasting from a good future to the means of accomplishing it. The drugs study also uses a systems map – visible at http://www.scotlandfutureforum.org/assets/sff/ - which is intended to show links between (for example) Scottish drugs culture, the public health system, and law enforcement, with a total of seven domains.
In discussion, evidence on issues of drug use was praised as the antidote to policy-driven ideas such as the “War on Drugs,” and as a driver for possible attempts to build stronger communities. But it was also important, according to one participant, for futures work to emphasise risks as well as positivist messages about getting where we want to be.
In another session, Averil Horton talked about her ambitions for the Horizon Scanning Centre. She is interested in how success is measured for the HSC. Have people changed their thinking because of its outputs? Have they considered more alternatives than in the past when they consider policy options? Do they feel more prepared for the future?
And another fascinating question she raised was: in 20 years, what data might people be wishing we had gathered today? Her guess is that more on social values, culture and well-being might be on the list.
Other challenges which Averil cited included making horizon scanning and futures work in general more international, doing more on economic behaviour, connecting the scanning community better to current issues, and building its credibility in government. Possible areas of interest for future projects might include the gap between discovery and innovation, the scale and nature of successful communities, and the future of big concerns such as food, security and technology.
The third session was on land use. Here there seemed to be a dynamic between hope and despair. For the optimists, Malthus was wrong and we can look forward to it becoming more productive in the future. For others, climate change is making land less usable. Either way, we don’t seem to be very good at understanding all the ways in which we use land.
As well as supporting life and being an economic asset, land has high cultural value and shapes how we see ourselves. The group agreed that land, like water and energy, is likely to grow in scarcity and value.
The final Futures Live! session heard about the work of the Scottish Horizon Scanners’ Community, a new interest group with roots in environmental protection. It has interests in air quality, soil, water and current policy concerns such as microgeneration. Daniel Gotts, Emma Jordan (both SNH) and Andrew Staines (SEPA) led a discussion on the group’s interest in exploring ways to work together and build a joint evidence base to help their organisations understand where futures analyses come from and to demonstrate that they are based on good information. Their presentation is available here.
Back in a plenary session, Averil closed the meeting by thanking all concerned and saying that she was particularly pleased with the emphasis placed on cultural as well as technological factors by everyone at the meeting. The real lesson of the day for her, said Averil, was the use made of all this activity in day-to-day decision making around the UK.
Meanwhile, a FAN Club lunchtime seminar will be held on 21 January 2009 in London. Those who missed the Edinburgh presentation by the Local Government Association on their joint project with HSC to explore the Future of Local Public Services will have another opportunity to hear it.
This newsletter was written by Martin Ince.