Putting wellbeing at the heart of decision making part 3

Part Three: How do we make it happen?

In this three-part blog series, I am exploring aspects of the why, what and how of putting wellbeing at the heart of decision making.

Having detailed some of the “why” and the “what” in my first two posts, in this final blog I will be looking specifically at some of the challenges around how we make this happen.

At Carnegie UK we know well that there are many challenges to changing to how we govern, design, develop and deliver effective public policies. We have been at this for over 100 years and know that good ideas on paper rarely translate into sustainable change that endures in complex systems.

We try to make time regularly as a team to listen, learn and engage with those working in policy development to understand as much as we can about these challenges.

One recurring observation in relation to this is that it can be difficult to coherently conceptualise and communicate all the moving parts and obstacles that are inherent in effective policymaking. However – and bear with me on this – in reading a book about rockets with my 9-year-old son recently, I was struck by how similar the challenges of jet propulsion and aerodynamics were to the challenges involved in achieving social policy change.

Specifically, the book has a section on four common factors that affect a rocket’s performance. These were described as follows, and to my mind they are just as relevant to putting new approaches to decision-making in place as they are to getting a satellite into space: 

• Thrust: The greater the thrust, the faster the rocket accelerates. It needs thrust to get off the ground. You could swap out thrust for “leadership” when thinking about challenges to adopting wellbeing approaches to decision-making. New approaches will never get off the ground without the buy-in and commitment of leaders at every level. The greater and more effective the leadership support, the faster your approaches will be adopted. 
• Mass: A lighter rocket accelerates more quickly than a heavier one, which makes it easier to get off the ground. As such, the design of rockets really matters. The same is true for new approaches to decision-making. Ensuring they are designed well by people who know what they are doing, informed by the experience of the people they will affect, and don’t feel too “heavy” will help them to be adopted and to stick in place. 
• Gravity: Earth’s gravity pulls down the rocket and so it needs enough thrust to overcome gravity. I mean… This one probably writes itself for anyone working in public policy. How many pilots, good ideas or new approaches never got off the ground because the gravity of risk aversion, tradition or familiarity prevented them from taking off? Thrust/leadership is needed until you’ve cleared the gravitational pull of the old and the new processes can support themselves.
• Drag: Air resistance slows down the rocket, especially during flight. Institutional resistance to new ways of doing things can slow down the adoption of wellbeing approaches to governing, especially while they are in development or seeking to take off. To overcome this, resource and thought has to go into designing policies and approaches that will overcome the inevitable resistance new approaches will face. 

In addition to these points, I have a friend that works for a satellite company, and he told me once that their work was particularly hard because everything in space is hostile to people. He says that if you want to make things happen, you must accept this operating environment and still be excited by the challenge.

A similar mindset about being excited by the potential despite the challenges is definitely needed.

There are of course a host of additional challenges to working on public policy change that may not be quite so relatable to the science of rockets. One we hear a lot is the lack of bandwidth of those in elected office or positions of influence to engage with new ideas or new ways of working. With these challenges front of mind, at Carnegie UK we seek to fulfil three main roles in contributing to the changes we want to see:

• Generating insight and ideas: developing the research, evidence, practice insight and policy recommendations to help people live well together today and into the future.
• Convening and advocating: bringing together “unusual friends” to contribute to coalitions for change, creating space to share what we’ve learned and using our platform to promote voices that we hear from less often.
• Developing wellbeing visions: constructing and sharing compelling visions and ideas of what living well together looks like in practice, focussed on the long-term changes we need.

Putting wellbeing at the heart of decision making is not something that is just a nice to do. It increasingly feels like something that is urgent and the necessary next step forward in how we do public governance and administration well. It is undoubtedly difficult, however, and at times it probably can feel on a par with trying to get something into space in terms of complexity and resistance. But at Carnegie UK we believe in it because we believe in the power of well-designed public policy to make a positive difference to people’s lives. We are, however, not actually all that interested in rockets. Much to my son’s disappointment.