TLDR
A full-day workshop for groups who have agreed a direction and now need to turn it into a policy or delivery plan that works. Your group learns to shape the options, understand who each choice affects and how they will respond, structure a route to delivery and build in the safeguards that protect it. Practical throughout, working one direction from start to finish.
policy design
An agreed direction becomes policy when someone designs what changes, for whom and how it reaches them. This programme gives your group a shared method for that step: building a range of options, understanding who each choice affects, structuring the route to delivery and anticipating what could go wrong.
Every policy carries assumptions about how people and organisations will respond. Your group learns to surface those assumptions, test them against several plausible futures and design around them, so the plan holds up when circumstances change.
Your group works one agreed direction through the whole day and leaves with a one-page plan: an options shortlist, a map of who is affected and how they are likely to respond, an implementation route and a risk register with safeguards.
The programme is adapted to the type of policy and delivery work most relevant to your group now and delivered in line with your team’s and organisation’s values, code of ethics and tone guide.
-
Turn an agreed direction into a range of policy or delivery options and choose between them
Assess who a policy or delivery choice affects and how they are likely to respond
Structure an implementation route with clear sequencing, ownership and delivery
Anticipate implementation risk, build in the safeguards to manage it and defend the plan under challenge
-
Agreed directions that reach delivery with a plan behind them
Policy choices that take account of the people and organisations they depend on
Implementation plans with clear owners, sequencing and review points
Risks identified and managed early, with safeguards already in place
A shared approach to policy and delivery design across your group
-
Discovery: A conversation with you and a short pre-workshop questionnaire. It covers the directions your group has agreed or is working towards, the policy and delivery plans it is responsible for, who they affect and the constraints that apply. The results shape the briefs and case studies used on the day, and your group can bring a live direction to work on.
Full-day core workshop: In person or virtual. Every session is built around practice, role play and habit building.
-
09:30 - 10:00 | Welcome: who does this policy reach?
Introductions and aims for the day. Each table receives a one-page brief setting out an agreed direction, which it carries through the day. Taking the role of the people and organisations the resulting policy would reach, tables say what they would welcome, what they would question and what they would work around. The themes go on the wall, and groups agree the habit to practise all day: asking how each choice will be received.10:00 - 11:00 | From direction to options
Groups turn the direction into the problem it asks them to solve and the outcome they want. They generate a range of options from light-touch to structural, including doing less, and sketch each on a single card. In a quick-fire role play, half the table argues for an option while the other half introduces a changed circumstance, testing each option against several plausible futures. Groups shortlist the options that hold up and note the assumptions each depends on.11:00 - 11:15 | Break
11:15 - 12:30 | Who it affects and how
Groups map who will act on the policy, who influences them and who may challenge it. For each, they note what changes and how they are likely to respond, given the incentives, constraints and routines they work within. Delivery partners and the people who live with the policy are mapped separately because they respond differently. In a stakeholder role play, one participant speaks as a stakeholder while the group practises the questions that test its shortlist, then adjusts its options in light of what it hears.12:30 - 13:15 | Lunch
13:15 - 14:15 | Building the implementation route
Groups choose a preferred option and structure how it gets delivered: the order of steps, the dependencies on other bodies and who owns each one. Every action is written to the same standard: what changes, who owns it, by when, how it is measured and when it is reviewed. Pairs swap routes, review each other’s against that standard in “I like / I wish / What if” rounds and refine them.14:15 - 15:15 | Risks, assumptions and safeguards
Groups build an assumptions and uncertainty register for their plan and a risk and incentive map showing where risk formally sits and where it is likely to arise. In a pre-mortem, they imagine the plan has failed twelve months on and work back to the causes. For each cause they agree a safeguard, a trigger that shows when it is needed and a review point, and each group sets the habit of revisiting its register at a fixed interval.15:15 - 15:30 | Break
15:30 - 16:10 | Standing behind the plan
Each group condenses its work into a one-page plan and presents it to a panel of colleagues playing the affected parties and a sceptical decision maker. Groups respond to the challenge, note what strengthens the plan and revise it. Panellists swap roles so every participant practises both defending a plan and challenging one.16:10 - 16:30 | Commitments and close
Each participant writes a pledge card with one change they will make to a live piece of policy or delivery work in the next month and agrees a peer check-in date. The group revisits the themes on the wall and closes with questions.
