UXA2023 Claudette Yazbek - A New Policy Paradigm

Discover how design can bridge the gap between young Australians and policymakers to reimagine policy-making for urgent issues like climate change, access to mental health services, and housing affordability. With the Policy Canvas framework, a make-first mindset, and a shareable narrative, you'll learn how to broker better conversations, re-engage young Australians, and achieve better outcomes for the community

Transcript

1. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. www.captionslive.au | captionslive@outlook.com | 0447 904 255 UX Australia UX Australia 2023 Thursday, 24 August 2023 Captioned by: Bernadette McGoldrick & Kasey Allen
2. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 65 It is a nice segue, because Claudette is talking next about how we engage young people in public policy, so please join me in welcoming Claudette to the stage. (APPLAUSE)
3. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 66 CLAUDETTE YAZBEK: A beautiful set-up. Thank you. I am excited to be standing here and continuing to build on what has actually been shared. There are a lot of through lines to pour through. Firstly, a little bit about what I will be talking about and who I am. I am Claudette and this is my first time using a clicker. Bear with me. I am a product manager over at Future Friendly and for those of you who don't know, Future Friendly is a design studio and we work across sectors like Government, finance and education, the long and the short we care deeply about how we can make the every day products and services that we use just a little bit better. A bit about me and why I care so passionately about this, my path into product was actually unusual and windy. I am a lawyer by training and then I cut my teeth working at a start-up after I moved to Sydney from Adelaide and then I did a short stint in Washington DC as a congressional fellow and, upon relocating back to Australia, I worked in the Federal Government, where I was focusing primarily on tech policy and programs. It was really here in these contexts that I started to work alongside folks who were deeply passionate and committed to just delivering great outcomes for the community every single day. But it is also where I started to see some of the short comings of our current process, that doesn't always involve or equally value the voices of its citizens, especially its younger citizens. Today I am going to share with you, in the first instance, why we should seek to challenge this norm, a vision for how it could be different and also three plays to help you get started, cocreating, policies and programs with young Australians. Just before I set this up, I will acknowledge that it is a bit of a cliche for someone like me to be standing in front of a slide like this, it shows some pretty confronting statistics but it also really is important to set up
4. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 67 the fact that young people in Australia are disengaged. They are feeling disempowered and we have heard time and time again that they are disgusted with the political institutions and processes that they have to engage with right now. As I mentioned, I know these numbers are confronting but they are only telling part of the story. We know that they are overwhelmingly engaged and active in the community. We have seen that from nation-wide climate protests, we have seen them participating in the women's marches. They want to make a difference, they want to be involved. Their voices aren't being heard and they aren't being actively brought into the policy-making process. When they are, it is typically via consultation and consultation is usually where a decision has been made for someone and they don't always have the opportunity to meaningfully challenge or input feedback into that decision. It can always feel a little less effective for the person who is being consulted and certainly for young folks. Or if it is not consultation, another really common way to bring people into the fold is via maybe an ad hoc workshop. What you actually see happening there is that Government workers are then left trying to make sense of a pile of sticky notes and some steps of of user flows which is terrific but you are trying to think how do I turn this into a policy or a program or an initiative? That was something that I was quite familiar with myself. I think we have heard a few times today that I know that this isn't really new, we have been talking about how we can better codesign with citizens for the better part of a decade. The needle hasn't really moved too much in a meaningful way. I wanted to go out and I wanted to ask why? I conducted just a short survey to better understand what was actually stopping our work from taking root in Government? What started to emerge was we have a translation gap at the moment. When Government workers are participating or facilitating in these sessions, it is
5. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 68 really hard for them to turn these big ambitious, divergent ideas into a policy. What happens is it gets put in the too hard basket and codesigning with citizens is sometimes deprioritised in favour of things like reading reports or setting up round tables with industry representatives, or a pretty classic favourite, a literature review. These are all really important but if we maintain the status quo and if we don't start to bring folks in who are most impacted by these policies, we will risk alienating a generation of young Australians who are most impacted by the issues like housing affordability, access to mental health and like climate action. I wanted to set up and share with you a bit of a vision that I want to help contextualise the plays that I will share with you in a moment. We know that Government policy needs buy-in from the citizens to be effective and what that really means is that the needs are identified by the citizens themselves through processes like codesign but there is a raft of tools at our disposal and not just by SMEs who are often times removed from the community. All the designers and makers in this room, we have a really important role to play to help our work have that lasting impact. That role is helping Government make it easier, or making it easier for Government to regularly engage with and also translate the concerns and ideas of young people into policies, programs, services and initiatives. The shift that we are trying to make right now is we want to move away from a state where it is co-minus design. We want to move away from just community consultation, where we are speaking with folks but we are not actually then turning that into ideas to test with them. I want to reiterate that consultation is absolutely vital. It is an important first step but if consultation is all we are doing with young Australians, it can feel a bit passive and also disempowering for the reasons I shared earlier.
6. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 69 Your input is not always able to move the dial there and you aren't always able to make change. We want to take care that we are not just designing - I think a few of our speakers this morning have highlighted the risks when we just ship things and we are not actually considering the needs of our citizens here. This means that our policies are going to be less effective, our services aren't actually going to be solving a real problem. The shift, and some of the plays that I will speak about in just a moment, we want to have both. We want to have community involvement, we want to have that conversation and we want to be able to translate that into things that we are going to make and test with folks so we are bringing in that lived experience and delivering on that better outcome. What can we actually do about it and how can we get started? I will share three plays this afternoon. These are ones I have adapted and used in my own practice, working in Government and now in product with Government clients. Each one will look at addressing a very specific challenge that we also heard both when we were speaking with folks who are working in Government but also as part of that survey I mentioned as well, when it comes to progressing more citizen-centric design. I will talk about a policy canvass, firstly, and how that can be a tool that we might use to feed in those inputs from those workshops and help people refer back to them when they are creating programs and policies back in the machine. I will then move onto the second play which is all about experimentation and making it real, which we have heard a bit about today but focusing on the mindset and helping people to take that first step. Finally, sharing it back out with the community, so making sure that we are creating that shareable narrative so we can relay back, get buy-in from young Australians but also making sure we are sharing it up to decision-makers as well.
7. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 70 Let's get into it. The first one that I have called out is the policy canvass. This is a tool that I have used as part of codesign workshops. I liked how Erin framed at the top of the morning this being something that can just help have a high - frame up a high level understanding. This is adapted from the business canvass which is why that resonated when she pulled that image up on screen. This policy canvass works in a similar way to things like a business canvass or opportunity trees. It is really a framework to think through the major elements of a policy, so you can see there that it is just about capturing what is the outcome that we are working towards? What are the benefits for the citizen? What are the benefits for the system? As well as what are the road blocks and constraints and risks? It is a tool that is best used in the earlier part of the policy making process, usually when we look at defining the problem as part of discovery to use a more common parlance. It is also a great springboard when it comes to developing future solutions. When I was creating these slides I found myself doing a lot of reflection of some of the challenges that I was experiencing when I was in the public service and too often I found I was walking away from workshops and I was so energised but ultimately confused, I wasn't sure what to do with the sea of stickies in the mural that had been shared with me. I thought this was an outlier but as I moved into product and started to work with Government clients and as part of product coaching, we started to see that this was a shared sentiment. Sometimes designing value propositions as well as sketching the user flows, although it was fun, it didn't fit their contact. They weren't able to make the leap about how they would use this ongoing. About this time last year we were approached to design a workshop series which was all about youth justice. I was inspired to adapt the policy canvass for the Federal Government and the State Government we have
8. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 71 in Australia. You can see here some steps, just about how it works, but I wanted to overlay the example and what we actually did. We broke up the session, where in the morning we were focused on surfacing those pain points, we focused on surfacing those gaps and it was an in person workshop, so folks actually had them stuck around the room and were able to refer back to them as we moved through the activities. We then invited them to a pretty classic discovery, flipped the pain points into how might we questions or opportunity statements? We wanted them to start stretching how we might actually solve for them and not to get too bogged down in the constraints and some of the risks. As the facilitators in the second part of the session, we challenged participants to apply more of a realist lens and to unpack what would you actually need for the initiative that you have been discussing in your small groups to succeed? For example, what budget might you need and over what time frame? Then we invited them to capture their responses in their groups just on a work sheet and then we asked them to essentially share it back with the entire room, similarly to how anyone in the public service, if they wanted to share an idea, might have to do, so encouraging them to apply that more realistic mindset. I just wanted to show a filled out version. We had these printed out on tables and you can see a lot of similarities between a couple of the canvasses that you have perhaps used in your own process but this one is slightly adapted to get folks to think about what are the types of questions that Government workers themselves are actually asking as they are putting forward a program or an initiative? Something that makes this especially useful when thinking about the types of citizens that we really want to start bringing into the fold is that it can act almost as a knowledge sharing exchange, where we are helping people to understand what are the pieces, what are the questions that are being considered
9. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 72 when we are about to develop an initiative or develop a new service? Often times that process is really opaque. I didn't know too much until I actually started working and seeing the sausage get made and so this is actually a vital tool when we think about how we might further develop civic-mindedness and civic engagement. It is using things like this to compliment those other discovery tools that we have in our toolkit. When I first started talking about the policy canvass, one of my colleagues actually asked when something like this might be used? I found myself recounting a story when I had joined the Federal Government and my division had hosted a pitch competition. It was close to budget time and we needed to generate some new policy ideas and so I found myself in telling her that saying that this play, this canvass would have been ideal. What we actually did instead was very extensive desktop research. We looked abroad to other jurisdictions for inspiration. We looked at Estonia, the UK, Canada, America and then we asked ourselves these questions and we essentially captured this information in a word table to keep as like a policy log. Looking back, I can't help but think that had we had ideas that we had co-designed with the community, that perhaps even we were able to test with some folks after the fact and that was in a format that was easy for public servants and folks who are actually needing to come up with those ideas to come back to, to refine and its rate upon and to just use as a conversation starter when around those times when we are thinking about policy, this would have been a much stronger evidence-base. This is a nice segue into the second play that I wanted to share this afternoon. A make first mindset. Once we have started the conversation with the community, we want to keep it going. It isn't just about those ad hoc workshops. It is about continuing to engage with young Australians by trying out small experiments. Really learning at speed if a service or a
10. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 73 policy or an initiative might work in the real world, its impact on citizens as well as surfacing those road blocks and risks really early in the piece. I know all of us have probably really brought into the idea of experimentation and a few of the other sessions have acknowledged this challenge that you can see there. There is a perception around the organisational time and effort, whenever folks are thinking about experimenting and especially prototyping and that can be a little bit of a barrier for folks to actually engage with this. When we do actually start testing, it is usually towards the tale end of the policy making process, when we think about implementation and service delivery but the thing I wanted to share and the example you can see here on screen is encouraging those who are working in Government to really test early concepts with citizens, rather than waiting for perhaps a pilot, because even that can be still a long time, a year or two from when an actual piece is funded. The key here that I wanted to bring out was we need to make bringing ideas to life, feel approachable and achievable. It is not about organising really large focus groups. It is not about catered round tables. It can be something very lean and still effective and it is about communicating that, which is why I wanted to focus on the mindset aspect and building that muscle and having some easy tools to help folks do that, so they are encouraged to go out and test ideas with young Australians. The example you can see here was one where we mocked up the landing page that described how a new web site was going to work. It was about climate resilience, it was for a State Government in NSW. Something that I did actually want to seed was the idea of using a make first mindset on artefacts of influence within Government. This is not really being done as yet on scale but we are seeing a little bit in legal
11. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 74 circles. It is the idea of taking a proposed new rule, perhaps it is around tenants' rights, which is highly topical and something that is really important when we are thinking of the right to access housing and actually testing for comprehension and starting to actually interrogate, do people understand the language of the rules that are governing them day in and day out? That is still a really valid way to be approaching a test but it is sometimes - it is not always as glamourous, it is not always as sexy as testing prototypes or something that you can see here but it is something I would urge and encourage everyone to think about how we can do because that is incredibly important and even just with five people we can get some really great learnings. Just building on the example I was sharing, I wanted to give a bit more context because that was one in which we had quite significant constraints. We had four weeks to really validate one of our biggest unknowns which was do people see value in a digital experience that was going to help them find and plant seeds that were ultimately going to be more resilient to all of the changes in the climate, as well as all of the other factors that are considered as part of revegetation. The current tools and frameworks were PDFs, online tools as well as essentially just having institutional knowledge that perhaps had just been shared with you and we also wanted to make sure that we were setting it up as an achievable test. We did internal recruitment, we spoke with 10 citizens who were out in the field and who were doing this and we also made sure that we were accommodating and a bit more flexible in our approach as well. We wanted to make sure we were meeting people where they were to ensure that we could still test with this particular cohort here. The last two things I wanted to share with you on a make first mindset that is unique to Government is that often times I think we are all really brought into the idea that if we test with five users, that is just
12. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 75 enough to get those learnings and it really is all about understanding the why. It is about complimenting the what with those human stories but that is not always something that is immediately known, it is something we take for granted quite a lot, especially when you think of the types of datasets that we are used to dealing with, particularly in larger institutions like the Government. Day in day out, they are working with economists and data scientists and folks who have access to quite large datasets, who are more comfortable with quantitative data. Taking time to really explain why we are doing something and the results that we are expecting to see and the learnings that we are expecting to see, even just by testing with five people, can be powerful and to help them continue that ongoing engagement. The last thing we were able to do, even though we were doing this remotely because we were testing with different kinds of folks and the client was distributed as well, we made sure we were able to even have a virtual one-sided mirror. We had our teams calls and we invited program managers, policy officers, decision-makers to come and observe and it is not just observing the session silently, it is encouraging them to stay 15 minutes after the fact and joining us for a short retrospective so they could tell us what were the blocks that young people raised when they were interacting with this? What are the opportunities? What do we want to carry forward and its rate on and prioritise, given we only had two testing rounds to do it? How we often captured all of this, this is just a filled out version of one of the templates. Our team used this in FigJam because we wanted to have a shared space. This is something that I found that I had been sharing with some of the people I know who work in Government, just to build that muscle. It is all about encouraging taking all of this information even from desktop research and capturing there, you can see what is the
13. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 76 learning objective? What assumption are we trying to test? Also making sure that there is space for people to capture what is the insight, what is the observation that I am seeing here? Maybe some verbatim. The human stories that will be crucial when sharing this back to folks in different teams as well. This is just an example to show how something can be lean, it doesn't need to be necessarily very complicated. You don't need virtual white board tools. It can just be something where we encourage people to have that hypothesis-first mindset and to start testing some of the assumptions, no matter where the assumptions spring from, including SME interviews and desktop research if that is the first port of call for a lot of people working in the public service. That kind of feeds into the final play that I wanted to share this afternoon. It is all about creating a narrative. This is emphasising the importance of story telling. We started by codesigning with young citizens through our workshops. We have now gone and perhaps even done some really scrappy, lean testing, with five or 10 or 15 citizens to start to validate some of our risky assumptions and we want to now start telling that story. We want to share that widely so we can start to build advocacy and rally people around the really important issues. I don't think it would surprise anybody that lengthy reports are the preferred language of Government. I feel confident to say that because I am guilty of preparing a lot of them. Buried within those pages and pages of information is somewhere a description of the problem, a footnote linking you to other reports as well as a raft of policy initiatives for you to consider kind of woven through and if you don't actually get all of that, don't worry, there is usually a mini report ahead of the report which is the executive summary. We love reports. This is something that I was reflecting on because there is a
14. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 77 misconception that these are things intended for people to use and digest within the actual public service, perhaps there is somebody who is reading it and summarising it and therefore it's a laugh but it is not our problem. Actually, citizens are also engaging with these reports. What I mean by that is we have public consultations that are frequently on foot. We have issues papers that are being prepared and shared and citizens are invited to actually put forward their views in quite an unfamiliar format at times and then those views are summarised and shared back in a report that is published on a web site. These are intended as a way to be communicating with the population and with the community and inviting input. I think a lot of people don't even know that that is what is happening and certainly it is not actually from everything we know now, the best way to be engaging with young citizens who perhaps don't even know again that these consultations are on foot. I certainly had to Google a few very recently. From what I have just shared with you, you can glean that the focus is about gathering information, synthesising it and sharing back out. It is hard to recall the key messages or the key data, or the actions that we need to take because it is just very information-dense. This is something that compounds over time when we think about that call back to creating advocacy through story telling. We can't create that advocacy and rally people if we don't know what is the key message? What are the human stories underpinning it? How we get there without needing to read something that is lengthy? The other thing I wanted to call out is we have, much like I said at the top, an important role and we are in a lucky position where we can actually work and help to support creating a narrative that is easy to digest and easy to get across in minutes, rather than hours. We do it every day, designers are very effective and compelling at story telling because we understand the value of bringing in that human aspect. This
15. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 78 is also not just important for when we want to share information up with our decision-makers and with other executives, but encouraging sharing back out, so we are closing that loop, so we are keeping the community informed, we are keeping the community engaged and we are not just stopping, often times after testing or after we have briefed up to a head of division or a branch manager or somebody in the minister's office. This is how we can really help to create that meaningful change, by creating more transparency and creating more conversations and letting people know how their input is being used because that is also how we can build trust. The last framework that I just wanted to share for this afternoon, before we break for lunch is a story canvass. This is just a framework. We typically use this in FigJam but I wanted to show this because it is essential ly a one pager that has all of the questions that we ourselves work through, both as a project team but also with our client. When we work with Government clients and with any clients, where we start is with these questions. You can see there that the first is what is the key message that somebody needs to hear? What is the one thing that they need to remember? This forces all of us to be very disciplined because I think we all care a lot and we have the tendency to think that everyone needs to know everything, every story that we heard from testing, every piece of data that informed our work but it is really about being cognisant of your reader here which is why we always start with that. We then have a box for our problem. What is the citizen problem that we are solving for? After we have thought deeply about the key message, we want to make sure we are setting up the problem, so we can then nicely articulate that vision for a better future. Where are we actually heading? You can see that we have just got the approach. What are the proposed steps in which we are going to take to get there? How
16. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 79 will we know if we are succeeding? That is the outcomes and indicators that you can see. Really, importantly, what informed our approach? That is about bringing back into the story who we spoke with, what were the pieces of information that we built upon as well, so we are not starting from scratch? The example you can see on screen is a one pager that I used when I was working in the public service. Was looking at an initiative that was specifically focused on how we might increase the number of female identifying folks in the technology sector within Australia. I wanted to share this specifically because I was able to have the good fortune of, since joining Future Friendly, its rate upon this and learn from my colleagues about how we might have that one pager to really tell that compelling story and to have that strategic narrative. This is something that, as I mentioned, while we use it in FigJam, if I am absent any fancy tools, I will still force myself to fill out the boxes, they are great, they mean I can't go outside of it and I have to be very concise and this is why it is a really great tool to start your strategic story telling. Especially if you are using this in an important moment where are you presenting to people. We will share this back with our clients and we will use this framework to help them actually copresent alongside of us. This is one of the last things I wanted to leave you with, which is that whenever we think about storytelling and we are thinking about creating that shareable narrative, it is really important for those who are tasked with needing to carry this forward, to have that ownership, to feel like they can tell the story too. If there are opportunities in which they are able to practice and build confidence and share the story alongside of you, having them do it is a really great way, not just to have that capability and skills sharing within a project, but also so that they know if they have to go and present it to their leaders, or if they have to go and speak
17. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 80 about it, that they have already been able to share it with a little bit more broadly as well. That just brings me to the last thing that I wanted to share. I know I am standing between everyone here and lunch. I wanted to call out that the three things I have shared this afternoon are the policy canvass and using that as part of codesign, an experiment mindset, making it real and making things tangible, even if it is something as simple as a short rule. Taking all of that information and thinking about what is the story that you want to tell so you can create that advocacy, not just up with executives who you might need to get onside but also sharing that out with the community. These might be things that are already in your toolkit but adapting them and tweaking them a little bit for this unique context is what is going to help our work take root and really support that shift from young Australians who are currently just passive participants in the policy making process, that idea of designing for and not with is really relevant here. We want to shift towards them being active partners and active collaborators in the policy-making process. That is all from me. Thank you so much. If you wanted to chat, let me know. (APPLAUSE)