Some of the toughest challenges facing governments seem intractable. They go beyond the capacity of any one organisation to understand and respond to; and, there is often disagreement about the causes of the problems and the best way to tackle them.
The obvious solution is greater collaboration between those with a material interest in the problem. This is so easy to say but really hard in practice.
The Irish Government created a pathfinder team to find new ways of working together to increase the impact of government efforts to improve the mental wellbeing of young people. The success of the pathfinder depended on the 10 problem solving tools and 8 collaboration tools it used.
We produced a report aimed at practitioners setting out how we did this in practice step by step.
We have just published a toolkit to explain in more detail each of the problem solving tools and collaboration methods. These tools helped our team in a number of ways.
Structured problem solving helps you focus on what matters most
Without an explicit and appropriate scope for the project, it is very hard to make progress: either because the scope is so wide you are only scratching the surface with generalities, or because it is so narrow that you are miss critical issues.
Helped by our ground clearing analysis, we made system and customer journey maps, and created issue trees to help us focus our efforts. We found some of these tools tricky initially - but afterwards reflected on how helpful they had been:
"I hadn’t worked this way before – it forced us to focus on important things without long winded explanations – you can see the scope at a glance"
"The problem structure imposed a discipline and rigour on to our rationale for moving to areas for action... it helped us think through and spot logic difficulties and sharpened goals. Broke down problems into key components."
You need careful planning and design to enable productive team working
Most of the team hadn't worked together before. They came from very different places, and only had 15 days over 6 months to devote to the project.
We carefully designed whole group days and used proven collaboration tools including pinpoint, take a panel, rating, voting, temperature tests, tradeshows and templates. This ensured every individual made a significant contribution and had strong ownership of the recommendations. We achieved a huge amount in just 15 days of the team's time.
The team loved this novel way of working:
"The way of working especially collaboration tools ensured everyone in the room was involved, we had no drop outs, it kept us all interested.
"So much fun, so productive! Always looking forward to them. Hard work but useful…"
“Loved all the tools and techniques used especially temperature testing and trade show.”
“Excellent facilitation... would not have achieved result without this.”
To come up with better solutions you need to look at the issue from different angles
We did this by mapping customer journeys, mapping the system – and listening carefully to people from different parts of the system. The 4 days of field work in the middle of the project was an energising and often inspiring experience, that changed our view of our world:
"[the fieldwork was] brilliant and scary – face to face works best… Informative, inspiring. Brought it to life…"
"[the] most enjoyable and informative aspect… Insightful and balanced perspectives... Impact of these perspectives very profound."
"I have new perspectives: I now see it as a system not just a civil service centre of government challenge."
You need to work hard to really engage senior leaders and earn their commitment
We used visualization, trade shows and structured story telling tools to get our findings across. We got senior leaders to stand up, split up and move around as they listened, discussed and rated our findings and recommendations. This felt risky to our team - but it made sure our sessions were two way conversations rather than the usual passive presentation or drab prose reports that dominate government business.
This blog was originally published by the Centre for Effective Services, Dublin in November 2018.