The programme needed to be delivered before the end of the financial year. Although we were working to tight timeframes, we were able to draw on our existing course material to get started quickly. 

Using user-centred and agile approaches to tackle messy problems in the public sector is our bread and butter so we also had a wealth of real-life examples to draw on when building the training. 

In our User Research training for example we were able to demonstrate how the output of user interviews had directly influenced the design of a new service for victims of gender-based violence in an inner-London borough. This gave participants the chance to ask questions about this work and consider what kinds of decisions they would have made in this challenging context. 

In addition to learning the theory, the Digital team wanted participants to feel ready to apply these approaches immediately after training, ensuring that citizens benefited directly from the programme.  

To ensure we met this requirement, we used a range of participative facilitation structures (such as Liberating Structures) to ensure participants understood the theory and could apply it in practice. These approaches included everyone in the process of wrestling with the topics and created space for people with different learning styles to explore the content in depth. 

In our Service Design training, participants went through an end to end design project working on a simulated challenge. They worked in small groups to understand the challenge faced by a fictitious council (they’re recycling rates were the worst in the country), to prototype solutions and to test them with residents. 

At the end of each day small teams held ‘show and tells’ to demonstrate their progress and to consolidate their learning. As Rick Torseth said, “It’s easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting.” Our approach to training gives participants the chance to act themselves into new ways of thinking from the off.