For obvious reasons, we will be going quiet on our blog over the next few weeks. Ok, so it’s hardly been noisy recently. To be honest, we’ve been busy doing stuff and we’ve got a little bit out of the habit. But it does mean we should have plenty of material for future blogs.

We will get better. The election period means some of our research and engagement work will need to be put on hold. So we should have a bit of space to collect our thoughts – to think about what’s worked best in our projects, and the things we need to improve. We know one of those things is our communications with you.

The Lab is expressly established to build capability and share learning across the civil service.We work with thousands of civil servants each year in our projects, workshops and training sessions. We know from the feedback to Vasant’s blog last month that people are using, adapting and developing the tools across government. And digging out our trusty ‘hopes and fears’ cards a few weeks ago, I was surprised by a participant remarking, ‘oh yes, I saw these in a workshop with our Minister last week’. How often would the phrase ‘a workshop with our Minister’ have been heard in government even three years ago?

We’ve probably been less successful, though, in telling you about our projects. Our introduction to the Lab tells you what we’ve worked on, and about our different techniques. But we know it can still be hard to understand what happens end-to-end. Sometimes we simply can’t say much when they’re live. But we will get better at writing up and sharing what we can afterwards. Like this summary of the homelessness project with the Department for Communities & Local Government, the ideas from which are now being picked up and tested by local authorities funded by the homelessness trailblazer programme.
So we’ll be back in a few weeks. And our silence doesn’t mean we can’t listen – we’d love to hear from you about what you’d find most useful. In the meantime, we’ll be enjoying some of our own favourites – our friend and former colleague Cat Drew at Uscreates, the endlessly thought-provoking strategic design blog Dark Matter and catching up on everything we need to know about the Future of Work. Happy reading, and see you in June!

Original source – Policy Lab

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