27 Apr Can fun lead to better policy?

Creative and participatory approaches are becoming increasingly valued in policy research. But can fun lead to better policy? Our recent futures literacy role-playing boardgame for Arts Council England (ACE) suggests it can.

At Shared Intelligence, we often seek to bring these approaches into our research and facilitation work as we believe creativity stimulates thinking and unlocks different perspectives.

Creating space for senior, time-pressured policy professionals to lift their heads out of the day-to-day pressures and to bring new perspectives is vital to organisational development and strategy. Doing so helps to challenge assumptions and surface concerns, while also opening up new ways of thinking and innovative solutions.

There is no better example of this than our recent project for ACE, “Futures Literacy in Practice”. This project used the discipline of futures thinking and foresight to develop a role-playing boardgame to help them think through what their evolving relationship with the culture sector should look like over the next 20 years. One key message from our engagement with ACE directors stood out clearly: the value of creativity and fun in the policy development progress.

What is futures literacy?

UNESCO defines futures literacy is:

“a capability to help people understand how and why we use the future to prepare, plan and interact with complexity and novelty in our societies.”

Futures literacy methods have been increasing in popularity across the UK public sector – with growing applications in Government Office for Science, DCMS and now ACE.

Futures Literacy in Practice

Grounded in futures literacy, the principal output of our project with ACE was a bespoke design of the European Joint Research Centre’s Scenario Exploration System, a future-focused, participatory ‘serious board game’ designed to support futures thinking and exploration. Futures literacy promotes better decision-making today by considering different, but equally plausible, versions of the future. Alongside this, we also delivered four workshops to senior ACE staff introducing futures literacy concepts and testing the prototype board game.

What were the other outcomes of the process?

Beyond the value of fun and creativity, there were additional benefits to the ACE team including:

• Confronting versions of the next 10-20 years that run counter to organisational or personal aims and values
• Provoking more critical discussions and more radical idea-generation
• Thinking about the next strategy beyond Let’s Create
• Placing ACE colleagues in the shoes of local and national stakeholders
• Bringing new energy to difficult, complex discussions

Overall, this project reinforced something we have been thinking recently at Shared Intelligence: when people are given permission and time to play with ideas, they can think more deeply and innovatively about the future.

We’ve led lots of other creative and participatory approaches that have created value for our clients. We’ve offered our thoughts on several of these approaches, including Action Learning Sets, co-production in service design, and digital badges to demonstrate progression in young people.

If you would like to learn more, please contact owen.morris@sharedintelligence.net