How to use ‘design thinking’ to create better policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Public Admin Explainer: “Public policies and programs are intended to improve the lives of citizens, so how can we ensure that they are as well-designed as possible?

In a recent article in Policy Design and Practice, ANZSOG’s Professor Michael Mintrom and Madeline Thomas explore the neglected connection between design thinking and the successful commissioning of public services. 

Prof. Mintrom and Ms Thomas outline how design thinking can be used to contribute to more effective commissioning, concluding that paying greater attention to local collaboration and service enhancement through the application of design thinking can improve commissioning and contribute significantly to the pursuit of desired social and economic outcomes….

Design thinking encourages end-users, policy designers, central departments, and line agencies to work in a collaborative and iterative manner. 

The most important skill for a design thinker is to “imagine the world from multiple perspectives – those of colleagues, clients, end-users, and customers”. This is where greater empathy for different perspectives emerges.

Design thinking does not start with a presumption of a known answer or even a well-defined problem. Through iterative ethnographic methods, design thinking can reduce gaps between the goals of policymaking and the experiences of citizens as they interact with government-funded services.

This kind of design thinking can be pursued through a range of techniques:

  • Environment Scanning: This strategy explores present behaviours of individuals and groups in given localities and the outcomes resulting from those behaviours. It also seeks to identify trends that may influence future outcomes. Used appropriately, it creates an evidence-based method of gathering, synthesising, and interpreting information, which can shift the attention of an organisation towards new opportunities, threats, and potential blind spots.
  • Participant Observation: While environment scanning facilitates the broad exploration of an issue, observation requires engaging with people encountering specific problems. Participant observation can access tacit, otherwise, difficult-to-capture knowledge from subjects. This gives policy makers the ability to notice significant and seemingly insignificant details to gather information.
  • Open-to-Learning Conversation: There is a common tendency, not limited to the public sector, for service-producing organisations to limit choices for clients and make incremental adjustments. Problems are addressed using standard operating procedures that attempt to maintain predefined notions of order. Rather than just trying to find alternate strategies within an existing set of choices, policy makers should try and question the existing choice set. To achieve divergent thinking, it is important to have a diverse group of people involved in the process. Diverging thinking is less about analysing existing options and more about the creation of new options and questioning the fundamental basis of existing structures.
  • Mapping: Mapping has long been used in policymaking to explore the links between mechanism design and implementation. A concept map can be used to develop a conceptual framework to guide evaluation or planning. Mapping allows the designer to visualise how things connect and spot emerging patterns. This can be done by putting one idea, or user, at the centre and then mapping how the other ideas and insights play off it. Journey mapping communicates the user experience from beginning to end and offers broader, sophisticated, and holistic knowledge of that experience. This can be a very powerful antidote to complacency and a good way to challenge conventional thinking.
  • Sensemaking: The sensemaking perspective suggests that in organisational settings, much latitude exists in the interpretation of situations and events. Sensemaking requires connections to be forged between seemingly unrelated issues through a process of selective pruning and visual organisation. Dialogue is critical to sensemaking. Once data and insights have been externalised – for example, in the form of post-it notes on the wall – designers can begin the more intellectual task of identifying explicit and implicit relationships….(More)”.


Privacy concerns collide with the public interest in data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gillian Tett in the Financial Times: “Late last year Statistics Canada — the agency that collects government figures — launched an innovation: it asked the country’s banks to supply “individual-level financial transactions data” for 500,000 customers to allow it to track economic trends. The agency argued this was designed to gather better figures for the public interest. However, it tipped the banks into a legal quandary. Under Canadian law (as in most western countries) companies are required to help StatsCan by supplying operating information. But data privacy laws in Canada also say that individual bank records are confidential. When the StatsCan request leaked out, it sparked an outcry — forcing the agency to freeze its plans. “It’s a mess,” a senior Canadian banker says, adding that the laws “seem contradictory”.

Corporate boards around the world should take note. In the past year, executive angst has exploded about the legal and reputational risks created when private customer data leak out, either by accident or in a cyber hack. Last year’s Facebook scandals have been a hot debating topic among chief executives at this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, as has the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. However, there is another important side to this Big Data debate: must companies provide private digital data to public bodies for statistical and policy purposes? Or to put it another way, it is time to widen the debate beyond emotive privacy issues to include the public interest and policy needs. The issue has received little public debate thus far, except in Canada. But it is becoming increasingly important.

Companies are sitting on a treasure trove of digital data that offers valuable real-time signals about economic activity. This information could be even more significant than existing statistics, because they struggle to capture how the economy is changing. Take Canada. StatsCan has hitherto tracked household consumption by following retail sales statistics, supplemented by telephone surveys. But consumers are becoming less willing to answer their phones, which undermines the accuracy of surveys, and consumption of digital services cannot be easily pursued. ...

But the biggest data collections sit inside private companies. Big groups know this, and some are trying to respond. Google has created its own measures to track inflation, which it makes publicly available. JPMorgan and other banks crunch customer data and publish reports about general economic and financial trends. Some tech groups are even starting to volunteer data to government bodies. LinkedIn has offered to provide anonymised data on education and employment to municipal and city bodies in America and beyond, to help them track local trends; the group says this is in the public interest for policy purposes, as “it offers a different perspective” than official data sources. But it is one thing for LinkedIn to offer anonymised data when customers have signed consent forms permitting the transfer of data; it is quite another for banks (or other companies) who have operated with strict privacy rules. If nothing else, the CanStat saga shows there urgently needs to be more public debate, and more clarity, around these rules. Consumer privacy issues matter (a lot). But as corporate data mountains grow, we will need to ask whether we want to live in a world where Amazon and Google — and Mastercard and JPMorgan — know more about economic trends than central banks or finance ministries. Personally, I would say “no”. But sooner or later politicians will need to decide on their priorities in this brave new Big Data world; the issue cannot be simply left to the half-hidden statisticians….(More)”.

MIT Sloan study finds crowdsourcing an effective tool to fight spread of fake news

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MIT Sloan Press Release: “Fake news isn’t a new problem, but it’s becoming a greater concern because of social media, where it is easily created and rapidly distributed. A recent study by MIT Sloan School of Management Prof. David Rand and Prof. Gordon Pennycook of the University of Regina finds there is a possible solution: crowdsourcing. As their research shows that laypeople trust reputable news outlets more than outlets that create misinformation, social media platforms could use trust ratings to inform how they promote content.

(PRNewsfoto/MIT Sloan School of Management)
(PRNewsfoto/MIT Sloan School of Management)

“There has been a lot of research examining fake news and how it spreads, but this study is among the first to suggest a potential long-term solution, which is cause for measured optimism. If we can decrease the amount of misinformation spreading on social media, we can increase agreement on basic facts across political parties, which will hopefully lead to less political polarization and a greater ability to compromise on how to run the country,” says Rand. “It may also make it harder for individuals to win elections based on false claims.”

He notes that current solutions for fighting misinformation deployed by social media companies haven’t been that effective. For example, partnering with fact-checkers isn’t scalable because they can’t keep up with the rapid creation of false stories. Further, putting warnings on content found to be false can be counterproductive, because it makes misleading stories that didn’t get checked seem more accurate – the “implied truth” effect.

“Our study is good news because we find a scalable solution to this problem, based on the surprisingly good judgment of everyday Americans. Things may not be as hopeless as most coverage of fake news makes you think,” says Rand.

In their study, Rand and Pennycook examined whether crowdsourcing could work as an effective tool in fighting the spread of misinformation. They asked laypeople to rate familiarity with and trust in news sources across three categories: mainstream media outlets, hyper-partisan websites, and websites that produce blatantly false content (“fake news”). The pool of people surveyed was nationally representative across age, gender, ethnicity, and political affiliations. They also asked professional fact-checkers the same questions to compare responses.

They found that laypeople trust reputable news outlets more than those that create misinformation and that the trust ratings of the laypeople surveyed closely matched the trust ratings of professional fact-checkers. “Our results show that laypeople are much better than many would have expected at knowing which outlets to trust,” says Rand. “Although there were clear partisan differences, with Republicans distrusting all mainstream outlets (except for Fox News) relative to Democrats, there was a remarkable consensus regarding non-mainstream outlets being untrustworthy.”…(More)”.

This website can tell what kind of person you are based on where you live. See for yourself what your ZIP code says about you

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Meira Geibel at Business Insider:

  • “Esri’s Tapestry technology includes a ZIP code look-up feature where you can see the top demographics, culture, and lifestyle choices in your area.
  • Each ZIP code shows a percentage breakdown of Esri’s 67 unique market-segment classifications with kitschy labels like “Trendsetters” and “Savvy Suburbanites.”
  • The data can be altered to show median age, population density, people with graduate and professional degrees, and the percentage of those who charge more than $1,000 to their credit cards monthly.

Where you live says a lot about you. While you’re not totally defined by where you go to sleep at night, you may have more in common with your neighbors than you think.

That’s according to Esri, a geographic-information firm based in California, which offers a “ZIP Lookup” feature. The tool breaks down the characteristics of the individuals in a given neighborhood by culture, lifestyle, and demographics based on data collected from the area.

The data is then sorted into 67 unique market-segment classifications that have rather kitschy titles like “Trendsetters” and “Savvy Suburbanites.”

You can try it for yourself: Just head to the website, type in your ZIP code, and you’ll be greeted with a breakdown of your ZIP code’s demographic characteristics….(More)”.

What Sustains Individuals’ Participation in Crowdsourcing Contests?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Xuan Wang et al: Crowdsourcing contests have become widely adopted for idea generation and problem-solving in various companies in different industries. The success of crowdsourcing depends on the sustained participation and quality-submissions of the individuals. Yet, little is known about the factors that influence individuals’ continued participation in these contests. We address this issue, by conducting an empirical study using data from an online crowdsourcing contest platform, Kaggle, which delivers data science and machine learning solutions and models to its clients.

The findings show that the community activities and team activities do not contribute to motivating the continued participation, but tenure does significantly affect the continued participation. We also found statistically significant effects of amount of prize, number of competitions, previous team performance, and competition duration on individuals sustained participation in crowdsourcing contests. This research contributes to the literature by identifying the factors influencing individuals’ sustained participation in crowdsourcing contests…(More)”.

“Giving something back”: A systematic review and ethical enquiry into public views on the use of patient data for research in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jessica Stockdale, Jackie Cassell and Elizabeth Ford: “The use of patients’ medical data for secondary purposes such as health research, audit, and service planning is well established in the UK, and technological innovation in analytical methods for new discoveries using these data resources is developing quickly. Data scientists have developed, and are improving, many ways to extract and process information in medical records. This continues to lead to an exciting range of health related discoveries, improving population health and saving lives. Nevertheless, as the development of analytic technologies accelerates, the decision-making and governance environment as well as public views and understanding about this work, has been lagging behind1.

Public opinion and data use

A range of small studies canvassing patient views, mainly in the USA, have found an overall positive orientation to the use of patient data for societal benefit2–7. However, recent case studies, like NHS England’s ill-fated Care.data scheme, indicate that certain schemes for secondary data use can prove unpopular in the UK. Launched in 2013, Care.data aimed to extract and upload the whole population’s general practice patient records to a central database for prevalence studies and service planning8. Despite the stated intention of Care.data to “make major advances in quality and patient safety”8, this programme was met with a widely reported public outcry leading to its suspension and eventual closure in 2016. Several factors may have been involved in this failure, from the poor public communication about the project, lack of social licence9, or as pressure group MedConfidential suggests, dislike of selling data to profit-making companies10. However, beyond these specific explanations for the project’s failure, what ignited public controversy was a concern with the impact that its aim to collect and share data on a large scale might have on patient privacy. The case of Care.data indicates a reluctance on behalf of the public to share their patient data, and it is still not wholly clear whether the public are willing to accept future attempts at extracting and linking large datasets of medical information. The picture of mixed opinion makes taking an evidence-based position, drawing on social consensus, difficult for legislators, regulators, and data custodians who may respond to personal or media generated perceptions of public views. However, despite differing results of studies canvassing public views, we hypothesise that there may be underlying ethical principles that could be extracted from the literature on public views, which may provide guidance to policy-makers for future data-sharing….(More)”.

The Concept of the Corporation

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John Kay: “For the past fifty years or so, the economic theory of the firm has been based on the paradigmatic model of corporate activity which perceives the firm as a nexus of contracts, its boundaries defined by the relative transaction costs of market-based and hierarchical organisation.  Issues of both corporate governance and corporate management are seen as principal-agent problems, to be resolved by the establishment of appropriate incentives.  This approach has had considerable influence on corporate behaviour and on public policy.  Business has placed ever-greater emphasis on ‘shareholder value’ and incentive-based schemes of executive remuneration have become widespread.

            In this paper, I describe the origins, development and effect of the ‘markets and hierarchies’ approach.  I argue that this reductionist account fails at a political level, giving no coherent account of the legitimacy of such corporate activity – that is, no answer to the question ‘what gives them the right to do that?’ – and additionally that the model bears little relation to the reality of successful corporations.  I describe an alternative tradition in the understanding of business, owing more to organisation theory, corporate strategy and business history, which treats the concept of corporate personality as more than a legal doctrine.  In this view, corporations are social organisations: their competitive advantage is based on distinctive capabilities which are the product of their history, their internal architecture and organisational design, and the relationships with employers, customers, suppliers and commentators at large which arise from them.  This is not just a more plausible account of what firms actually do: by recognising the social foundations of corporations, we are better placed to understand how and why corporations and their varied stakeholders succeed…(More)”

Does good governance foster trust in government? A panel data analysis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jonathan Spiteri and Marie Briguglio: “This study examines the relationship between good governance and trust in government. It sets out to test which aspects of good governance, if any, foster strong trust in government. We construct a panel data set drawn from 29 European countries over the period 2004 to 2015. The data set includes measures of government trust, six different dimensions of good governance, as well as variables on GDP growth and income inequality.

We find that freedom of expression and citizen involvement in the democratic process, to be the good governance dimension that has the strongest relationship with government trust, across all specifications of our regression models. We also find that real GDP growth rates have a significant (albeit weaker) relationship with trust in government. Our results suggest that certain elements of good governance foster trust in government over and above that generated by economic success. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of declining levels of public trust in government around the world….(More)”.

The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer

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Press Release: “The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals that trust has changed profoundly in the past year—people have shifted their trust to the relationships within their control, most notably their employers. Globally, 75 percent of people trust “my employer” to do what is right, significantly more than NGOs (57 percent), business (56 percent) and media (47 percent).

Divided by Trust

There is a 16-point gap between the more trusting informed public and the far-more-skeptical mass population, marking a return to record highs of trust inequality. The phenomenon fueling this divide was a pronounced rise in trust among the informed public. Markets such as the U.S., UK, Canada, South Korea and Hong Kong saw trust gains of 12 points or more among the informed public. In 18 markets, there is now a double-digit trust gap between the informed public and the mass population.

2019 Edelman Trust Barometer - Trust Inequality

An Urgent Desire for Change

Despite the divergence in trust between the informed public and mass population the world is united on one front—all share an urgent desire for change. Only one in five feels that the system is working for them, with nearly half of the mass population believing that the system is failing them.

In conjunction with pessimism and worry, there is a growing move toward engagement and action. In 2019, engagement with the news surged by 22 points; 40 percent not only consume news once a week or more, but they also routinely amplify it. But people are encountering roadblocks in their quest for facts, with 73 percent worried about fake news being used as a weapon.

Trust Barometer - News Engagement

The New Employer-Employee Contract

Despite a high lack of faith in the system, there is one relationship that remains strong: “my employer.” Fifty-eight percent of general population employees say they look to their employer to be a trustworthy source of information about contentious societal issues.

Employees are ready and willing to trust their employers, but the trust must be earned through more than “business as usual.” Employees’ expectation that prospective employers will join them in taking action on societal issues (67 percent) is nearly as high as their expectations of personal empowerment (74 percent) and job opportunity (80 percent)….(More)”.

Looking after and using data for public benefit

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Heather Savory at the Office for National Statistics (UK): “Official Statistics are for the benefit of society and the economy and help Britain to make better decisions. They allow the formulation of better public policy and the effective measurement of those policies. They inform the direction of economic and commercial activities. They provide valuable information for analysts, researchers, public and voluntary bodies. They enable the public to hold organisations that spend public money to account, thus informing democratic debate.

The ability to harness the power of data is critical in enabling official statistics to support the most important decisions facing the country.

Under the new powers in the Digital Economy Act , ONS can now gain access to new and different sources of data including ‘administrative’ data from government departments and commercial data. Alongside the availability of these new data sources ONS is experiencing a strong demand for ad hoc insights alongside our traditional statistics.

We need to deliver more, faster, finer-grained insights into the economy and society. We need to deliver high quality, trustworthy information, on a faster timescale, to help decision-making. We will increasingly develop innovative data analysis methods, for example using images to gain insight from the work we’ve recently announced on Urban Forests….

I should explain here that our data is not held in one big linked database; we’re architecting our Data Access Platform so that data can be linked in different ways for different purposes. This is designed to preserve data confidentiality, so only the necessary subset of data is accessible by authorised people, for a certain purpose. To avoid compromising their effectiveness, we do not make public the specific details of the security measures we have in place, but our recently tightened security regime, which is independently assured by trusted external bodies, includes:

  • physical measures to restrict who can access places where data is stored;
  • protective measures for all data-related IT services;
  • measures to restrict who can access systems and data held by ONS;
  • controls to guard against staff or contractors misusing their legitimate access to data; including vetting to an appropriate level for the sensitivity of data to which they might have access.

One of the things I love about working in the public sector is that our work can be shared openly.

We live in a rapidly changing and developing digital world and we will continue to monitor and assess the data standards and security measures in place to ensure they remain strong and effective. So, as well as sharing this work openly to reassure all our data suppliers that we’re taking good care of their data, we’re also seeking feedback on our revised data policies.

The same data can provide different insights when viewed through different lenses or in different combinations. The more data is shared – with the appropriate safeguards of course – the more it has to give.

If you work with data, you’ll know that collaborating with others in this space is key and that we need to be able to share data more easily when it makes sense to do so. So, the second reason for sharing this work openly is that, if you’re in the technical space, we’d value your feedback on our approach and if you’re in the data space and would like to adopt the same approach, we’d love to support you with that – so that we can all share data more easily in the future….(More)

ONS’s revised policies on the use, management and security of data can befound here.