Policymaking - the agile way
Policymaking is not a fast or streamlined affair. A new law or regulation can take years from inception to entry into force. And then, significantly more time can pass before the new rules have an impact on society, citizens or businesses.
Good policymaking requires consultations and stakeholder input, discussions between ministers, interagency or interdepartmental meetings and working groups … and only then can the parliamentary process start, with hearings, committee debates, amendments, plenary votes, passages from the Lower to Upper House and back.
In an epoch where innovation can hit the market fast and spread faster through new technologies, large sectors of the economy or society can be fundamentally transformed in a matter of months. Leaving governments and policymakers to react to a fait accompli.
Disruptive innovation: asking for forgiveness rather than permission
When Uber crossed the Atlantic with its car service, uptake by citizens - and drivers - was fast. In what seems like overnight, traditional taxi services were threatened, an army of undeclared and unlicensed drivers hit the streets with their - wrongly insured and serviced - vehicles.
Rules and laws governing employer-employee contracts, social security, working hours and conditions, taxes and standards, insurance liabilities were made irrelevant. Policies made and remade, shaped and remodelled over decades of painstaking negotiations between governments, administrations, workers, trade unions, employer organisations, parliaments and other policy makers were swept aside. It became rapidly clear that simply banning the app was not possible, viable or acceptable. Unlike the laws governing the “hired chauffeur-driven vehicles” sector, it was here to stay.
In fact, Uber applied a simple strategy - whether by naïveté or cynicism - summarised by l’ADN, a French web media specialised in innovative business: “It is easier to ask forgiveness than permission”.
Arguably, had Uber contacted city administrations in London, Brussels, Paris or elsewhere in Europe before setting up their business, they would have run into a significant amount of policy obstacles. Some easily overcome, some requiring long iterative processes and some - seemingly - insurmountable, like squaring paying drivers’ social security on a peer-to-peer business model designed to ensure no-one is anyone’s (formal) employer.
It was much easier to launch the service, reach critical mass and let local administrations and politicians scramble to find air tight legal solutions and negotiate with the taxi sector and other stakeholders.
In fact, Uber’s POP service was legally banned in Spain (2014), Belgium and France (2015), was granted a license in London and subsequently lost it, and the list goes on.
And yet Uber continues to operate, making certain changes to its modus operandi, but still not quite in line with national and local laws and with numerous cases still in front of courts. So does this mean that government and policy making are no longer relevant and that governments can no longer shape society or channel activities and economic sectors?
Agility, from software to policy
In 2001, 17 software developers published the Agile Manifesto. Their interest was in new ways of developing software centred around the individuals that were going to use it. They put forward the need to collaborate with customers and the need to respond to change. The ideal in the manifesto is to produce a working version of a software quickly and make it responsive to change and usage feedback.
The manifesto is called “agile” because it puts more value on interactions with customers, users, and adaptivity to change rather than the development process. The fundamental idea is to deliver working software to the customer quickly, then make changes where necessary.
Since the manifesto was published, policy makers and administrations have looked at how to apply similar principles to policy making. The World Economic Forum (WEF) produced a white paper in 2017 looking at how to develop agile governance to meet the needs and challenges of this day-and-age that they refer to as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”.
The WEF considers that new policies, protocols and rules are necessary to accelerate the positive impacts of new technologies while minimising their negative consequences. Institutions that traditionally had the responsibility of shaping the societal changes of innovation, like governments, civil society organisations or even companies, are not keeping up with the current rapidity of change. The white paper argues that “the pace of technological development and the characteristics of technologies render previous policy-making cycles and processes inadequate.”
From theory to practice?
Lisa Ollerhead was a civil servant in the UK’s Cabinet Office. She became very involved in a Policy Lab, a programme aiming at bringing new policy techniques to the British government. She adapts the original software agile manifesto’s principles to policy making and asks whether it can be applied to policy making and how.
For her, the key is to set up teams across government departments and agencies that cover all possible impacted groups and sectors, the “policy landscape” as Professor Graham Room of Bath University called it back in 2011. The teams need to understand the policy objectives that need to be met and get deliverables for a new policy out quickly, in a matter of months. These deliverables would be the policy equivalent of a working version of a software. The big challenge, for Lisa Ollerhead, is understanding what these deliverables actually are.
Once these deliverables are determined, it is necessary to consider a number of variables. Literature on agile policy making may frame these in different ways and use different terms to identify them. However, there is consensus on the issues.
Sticking to Prof. Room’s terminology, agile policy makers need to consider the “policy landscape”: who are the actors or protagonists - the people, groups, or sectors affected and how they will react or try to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the innovation. The fundamental element here is that the “landscape” may not be stable, it may evolve following the rapid changes and disruptions brought in by the innovation.
Traditional policy making is generally built on the assumption of a stable landscape. For instance negotiating a wage deal between employer organisations and trade unions. Two stakeholders that may oppose each other but that also accommodate each other in negotiation.
Returning to the Uber POP situation, the arrival of the innovative platform disrupted this traditional policy negotiating ground. A number of people - Uber drivers - entered the landscape as individuals. Taxi companies were no longer in a dichotomous negotiating position with their contracted drivers. Some traditional taxi drivers, while feeling threatened by the arrival of all the new unlicensed actors, also took advantage of Uber’s opportunity to gain extra fares or shifts.
To find effective ways of regulating and channelling a sector, instead of being left behind, it may be necessary for policy makers themselves to disrupt the “protagonists” in the traditional “policy landscape” to determine new rules or find a new way of working before the innovation runs off, leaving everyone - policy makers and protagonists - running after it.
The WEF stresses, moreover, that to apply agile policy making, it is necessary to embrace the complexity of the landscape. They suggest that stakeholders or protagonists whose needs are supposed to be tackled by the policy be integrated in the process. This should help policy makers focus on solutions to real problems rather than assumed ones.
Whereas the theory of agile policy making can be discussed in great depth over hundreds of pages of academic and dense methodology, it can seem harder to apply in practice. To avoid endless discussions on the how and why and help its policy makers take concrete steps towards adopting agile principles, Australian Government published an “Agile Policy Playbook”.
The playbook lays out four principles for teams when they tackle problems:
concentrate on concepts rather than details,
prioritise work based on outcomes,
foster transparency to empower the team, and
review issues on a regular basis.
The way of operating within the team follows the values and principles of “Scrums”. Scrums are regular team meetings where assignments are identified and delegated to the members of the team. Team members then go into “sprints”, which are time-defined periods for the tasks to be completed. Regular meetings are held to ensure transparency on the work being carried out and, finally, “retro” meetings to determine what went well and what needs to be improved.
Even after policies are produced, it is important for the team to meet and see if and what needs to be modified or refined based on feedback from stakeholders or how the sector is actually evolving. These are called feedback loops. Agile policy making requires regular observation of the “landscape” and information to be fed back to the policy making process to ensure rules remain pertinent and are still meeting citizens’ or the sector’s needs.
When reading up on agile policy making, a first reaction might well be that it is easier said than done, especially in organisations that have strict rules, procedures and rely on parliamentary assemblies, coalitions and so forth, like governments.
Nevertheless, being mindful of agile policy making principles can help move government business along and produce concrete results through leaner, more citizen-oriented processes..
Three tips to make your policymaking more agile:
Consider the entire policy landscape and how innovation may disrupt its protagonists.
Concentrate on the policy objectives and concepts to determine deliverables.
Review issues regularly using feedback from all affected sectors.
- written by Jacopo Moccia, jacopo[at]thedandeliongroup.eu
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