5 years on: our reflections
At the end of July 2024, Telescope will have been officially running for five whole years.
It’s a huge milestone and a proud moment for us. As we worked our way through the last five years, taking on ambitious and varied projects while also juggling other commitments, I’m not sure we always thought we would make it this far. But it’s happened - we’re here!
We couldn’t have made it this far without the almost innumerable amount of supporters, cheerleaders, loyal clients, enthusiastic participants, constructive critics, and other contributors who’ve helped us along the way. You all know who you are, and we hope you know how grateful we are.
And now, at five years, in July 2024 - what a time it is to be a social enterprise in the policy space! For the first time, we’re seeing the space for real shift in policy - not only the content, but also the processes and approaches by which policy is made. Our new government is talking a lot about “working across boundaries”, which will be vital if their mission-led approach is to be successful. And we’re hoping we can play a role in supporting that collaborative policymaking work.
As we’re planning for the future, we’ve also taken the time to reflect. We thought we’d share three of our top takeaways from the last five years, in the hope they’ll show our optimism for the future. We’d just add the caveat that there are so many other lessons we’ve learned along the way, which continue to inform our strategy and our programmes - we just can’t do them all justice here. Read on, and we hope you enjoy.
We have seen progress!
In the last five years, we’ve worked with central and local government, with specific departments as well as with broader voluntary sector communities. Over that time, the language of engagement has changed, dramatically. Particularly at a local government level, but also to an extent within central government, people in positions of authority are increasingly talking about “co-production”, “citizen engagement”, “listening to seldom-heard voices”. While not all of this talk has led to meaningful action (yet), there definitely has been progress.
One way we have tried to understand this new move towards more inclusive decision-making is to think about it in terms of three levels at which local authorities and government can interact with varied stakeholders, particularly experts on the frontline, and/or residents.
Consultation
This is the tried-and-tested classic old-school approach. It’s setting up a gallery wall in a leisure centre, inviting residents in to fill in a form, and post it into a box. Often, in this approach, the questions are being asked far too late and indeed when a decision has more or less already been made. For us, “consultation” is unfortunately all too often a tick-box exercise that ostensibly allows residents or other experts the chance to give their input, but does not actually give them any power.
A combination of consultation and “co-design” workshops
This second level is the next step up. This often comes from forward-thinking, well-intentioned council teams (often service design teams), who are grappling with increasingly challenging budget constraints but also really do want to “listen to people’s voices”. This approach is miles better than a simple consultation - it gives stakeholders a chance to meet, put a face to a name, and bounce ideas off one another in a more creative way. However, examples we’ve seen do sometimes lack feedback loops, and don’t always lead to meaningful relationship-building and power-sharing over the longer-term. This can mean that expectations for change are raised among participants, only to be let down when they don’t see any evidence of where their input and ideas have got to.
“Empathy-based innovation”
This is the name of the Telescope approach, and it’s the one that we’d love all policy and strategy-makers to aim for! It’s based on a mixture of service design, systems thinking, and future planning tools, mixed in with active listening and other empathy-building approaches that can really build a strong foundation for longer-term change. This is about collaboration that is built on meaningful connection, listening to the experts, and breaking down silos so that communication can carry on. Often, it’s about providing that “aha!” moment for policymakers who haven’t had the chance to see the realities of service delivery - and giving frontline experts the chance to be really heard.
This is where I’d like to add a quick note about who we see as “experts”. There is rightly a lot of focus on resident engagement, especially at a local authority level. And creating spaces for citizens to build that connective tissue and feel part of their local area is vital (Catriona Maclay and New Local are doing some great work on this).
However, the risk with resident engagement (and often this is the pushback that policymakers might give) is that each resident’s experience is unique to themselves. If it’s going to be effective, policy and service design needs to be built on trends and patterns, taking into account individual experiences but not relying solely on them.
This is where we think frontline practitioners play SUCH a crucial role. Homeless shelter workers, social care practitioners, local GPs, community policy officers - all of these people interact daily with tens of local people, and are able to see what really works (and doesn’t work) within service delivery. They have that breadth of experience, and can spot the patterns and trends, which can be super valuable to the policy process.
So, back to the levels of engagement. We’ve seen that many local authorities and government departments are doing a lot of work at level 2 now - and some of them are at level 3 (such as HMPPS with Grand Avenues, Rebecca Towers’ place-based work in Southwark, and Andrew Knight’s work on policy design toolkits). We’re super excited about all of this!
At the same time, we still think there’s room to grow and improve. Which is why we’re taking the time this election summer to review our offering, re-invigorate our frontline network, and make sure that we’re offering a valuable USP that contributes meaningfully to the collaboration landscape, rather than over-crowding it.
The simple things can be the most powerful
Transparency
While the mechanisms of government mean that bureaucracy sometimes holds back transparency, we think there is space to do more even within current constraints. Being transparent and open was particularly vital in our Greenwich project as we worked with voluntary and community sector organisations across the borough. Many of them had had poor experiences with council engagement before, and one of the things that we found hardest was keeping people informed while not raising expectations for change too much. But we found that even the simple act of replying to someone’s email, recognising the concerns they’d shared, and being transparent about our intentions and planned outputs, was worth a surprising amount. Perhaps this is just reflective of the extent to which council staff are overstretched and in demand - and we totally get that - but it also felt like quite an easy win.
Empathy / active listening
This is the element of our approach that gets the most nods and noises of agreement when I describe our approach to partners and clients. We know that communities are fed up with “being consulted”, having engaged in processes and heard nothing back one too many times. And all too often, frontline practitioners are rarely ever asked their opinion at all! So we really lean into this element of our work - we think giving people space as human beings to actually listen to one another can be a really powerful start to a new way of thinking and working. We wrote about the power of this approach for our workshop with Apolitical, as well as when reflecting on the various strike actions that took place in early 2023.
The power of collective leadership
In several proposals we’ve worked on recently, the request has been for some kind of project based around a “leadership programme”, “training for leaders” or “systems leadership for management”. There are a lot of buzzwords in these tenders! And in many cases, the ask is for this to be “tailored according to seniority levels”, or to be provided for a subset of stakeholders in a given project.
In every case, our proposal has not included a tailoring for seniority, nor even department-specific training days either. Instead, we suggest taking a collective approach - one that brings together individuals of many different levels, from different departments, and particularly from both policy and operational roles, so they can learn from one another.
We believe there is real potential in this approach. Mixing departments, role types, and seniority levels can enable people to build leadership skills that help them be inclusive of all perspectives, listen to expertise that they may not instantly recognize, and understand how their work interacts with others’.
At the end of the day, we’re all in one system and, now more than ever, we need to learn to work as one!
