Systemic design: a hands-on session to learn how to approach complex policy challenges from different user perspectives

This workshop uses a case study approach to introduce the system design framework and tools that can be used to understand the systemic issues and barriers that influence user behaviour, enabling services to be designed to achieve policy aims.

The focus is around contextualising and understanding user behaviour, and particularly the behaviour of more challenging or hard-to-reach user groups.

A case study from a discovery phase project relating to marine accident reporting (DfT Marine Accident Investigation Branch, Discovery 2022) will be used to demonstrate how the tools can be used, alongside practical exercises to support participants in using and adapting the tools in their own work.

The first tool introduced in the workshop is the Pig Model (see Government Office for Science (2022) An Introductory Systems Thinking Toolkit for Civil Servants. Online resource). This is a stakeholder mapping tool drawn from systems thinking that explores the different perspectives within a system.

It can be centred around a policy, a service or an organisation. Mapping stakeholder perspectives to contextualise user behaviour and attitudes can help service designers to understand the wider context more comprehensively and how this influences user behaviour.

The resulting diagram can be used to manage risks and plan stakeholder or user engagement. It can also be useful in explaining the challenges related to hard-to-reach groups to stakeholders.

This session: 

• Includes interaction
• Has a session number cap: 20 participants

Themes:
Policy design, pig model, discovery, behavioural science, systems thinking, systemic design, adding value, hard to reach users, digital transformation, problem solving.