Spies like us
This post is a reflection on the latest mission from The Intelligence Service — a collaborative design concept run by Pretty Neat and Code for Australia — by the Managing Director of Pretty Neat, Warren Davies. We’re sharing what we learnt from our latest engagement — helping a government team working to improve service delivery to people experiencing homelessness.
The Intelligence Service was inspired by the science-fiction trilogy The Southern Reach. An other-wordly atmosphere descends onto our coastline and exhibits its own laws of space and time. A government agency is charged with discovering its meaning and intent. In book two a door opens up between our world and this new world. Discussing the challenges of government and small innovative teams working together, we wondered: what would happen if you could build an easy doorway between government and innovative teams? We suspected government procurement and the approach to public private partnerships was already a problem for many, but we decided to find out ourselves.
Fast forward twelve months and The Intelligence Service is helping government and startups come together to work on some of our biggest civic challenges. Pretty Neat, a Melbourne creative agency, and Code for Australia have combined to help passionate citizens conspire for social good. We bring people in blind, remove their identity and throw them in the deep end to solve their way out of a corner with others — and people step up.
With over 100 members — both active and sleeper agents — we’ve hand-picked people to look at technology and democracy, social inclusion and resilience, access to technology for the disenfranchised and now as part of our first formal engagement — the twenty year problem of complex homelessness in Victoria.
A state government department has recently tabled a report on the context of complex homelessness in Victoria and plans to make recommendations on comprehensive changes to the sector. Among the findings were the discoveries that Victoria lacks a ‘design sensibility’ when dealing with the lived reality of homelessness, dangerous cracks at transitions for people between services and low levels of collaboration by some of our most important human services. Our task was to bring together a multi-disciplinary working group, drawn from experts and sector stakeholders, nurture a collaborative environment and build confidence in system design by the group. Mission accepted.
It’s worth noting up front what makes The Intelligence Service compelling from feedback on missions to date.
- A little bit of mystery helps. In the era of the open hack and design sprints for dozens of people, we’ve found people appreciate being hand-picked and wooed a little. We send things in the mail. We use nice paper. And people turn up.
- People are there because they want to be. If you turn up to an after hours gathering run by a secret organisation on a pet topic of yours there’s a good chance you’ll contribute.
- It’s what you know, not who you are. Going in blind with your identity concealed and no knowledge of the other participants provides a certain freedom to say what’s on your mind and be influential beyond your job title.
The engagement by state government called for a slightly different approach from us. It was to be a daytime session, the agents were to be provided by ‘the client’ and while some diversity of experience was to be expected the demarcation of government and innovator was to be absent in the mix of people.
We got procured.
The first challenge was we were to experience the very thing we are looking to solve: government procurement. While missions by The Intelligence Service can run on modest budgets it’s the care and attention to detail that make the missions what they are. Once you start cutting costs the participants can feel the difference. To the credit of state government they were able to identify what mattered most and what was negotiable. A painful sticking point was a comment by a procurement officer (not in our project team) that this was “a very expensive meeting.” Our point of view was that it was a very cost effective month-long engagement with people crucial to making progress on a 20-year problem.
Innovation with no risk.
While a member of the project team at the state government departent was already an agent with The Intelligence Service (a double agent!) and had participated in an earlier mission, the rest of the team took some convincing. The intent was to run the project management lean, however we invested 2–3 times as much time as anticipated upfront to design for the specific elements of this project. A feature of the format of missions to date has been concise but relevant information to orient agents in the challenge. On this occasion there were votes for ‘more is more’ as well as ‘less is more’. It took some time to agree on the length of the session with agents, the depth and frequency of briefing information and stimulus on the day. It’s still our view that as early as possible we need to step back and let others create in this way of working.
More agents than ASIO.
In the same way that it’s important to step back and let others carry the ideas forward on the day we don’t want to be too conspicuous at the session once things get going. By design we muscle in on people a little at the start so they feel they are somewhere different. But good facilitation sometimes means blending into the background. It was very hard to tell anybody on the project team they couldn’t be in the thick of it. And then some people had others to bring along. The feedback at the retro was that some people felt like a third wheel. In hindsight it would have been good to ask a few people to step back on the day and only fill roles on the day that were absolutely essential.
People dropped in.
We had some misgivings about a daytime session with all previous missions to date being after dark. There’s something about dark Fitzroy laneways and secret passwords that makes people smile. We were wrong. Despite some grumbles about coffee right away agents suspended disbelief and took on their role for the majority of the session (it’s quite hard to suppress peoples’ identity when there is no actual sinister intent). Collaboration was good across the two groups and despite a few agendas coming up there was respect, interest and ultimately a willingness to work together on something this group have struggled with in the past, outside this mission.
Truth serum in the coffee.
With many senior experts in the room free from office politics, we captured a lot of honest reflections on the nature of the homelessness crisis in Victoria. A lack of support for the frontline staff, challenging political environment and a lack of empathy from the community were all raised as contributors to the current malaise. This did lead to some challenging ideas making it onto the wall and into consideration by state government for their evaluation. While some cynicism was apparent, our survey of attitudes before and after the session showed a big shift toward confidence in the approach and the group assembled.
What’s next?
The multi-disciplinary working group will meet in the near future, perhaps as agents but perhaps not. Now that they are familiar with each other, a more conventional approach to design might suit.
For future engagements on specific government challenges, we suggest:
- Less structure and some free space to design without supervision by us (or anyone).
- An allowance for some messiness and detours in the process. The design process is not linear so allowances for both slow and steady movement and quick progress is needed.
- Letting everyone play their part — even if that’s somewhere else. Just because it’s important doesn’t mean everyone has to be there.
- Different results call for different approaches. The format does encourage fast relationships and collaboration so minimal changes are best.
- A mix of volunteers and people who ‘need’ to be there.
If you’re in government and working on a problem you don’t know how to frame or how to procure for it — we’d love to hear from you. We have the intelligence on what works. Literally. It’s in manilla folders in a locker over there.
