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NICW’s ways of working

As a body that receives all its funding from the people of Wales, NICW is committed to embodying the Future Generations Act in all that we do.

In order to understand how closely aligned our activity is with the Ways of Working defined within the Act, we have undertaken a self-analysis of how we operate.

The Ways of Working are defined as:

  • Long term
  • Integrated
  • Involving
  • Collaborative
  • Preventative

It’s difficult to objectively measure these aspects of an organisation’s performance, but the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner has produced a handy tool that provides a framework for a qualitative assessment. 

This framework is called the ‘Ways of Working Progress Checker’. It’s an online tool that asks people within an organisation to rate how the processes, people and culture align with good practice for a number of elements of each Way of Working.

Two of our Commissioners have undertaken the assessment, and it has produced some useful insights for us as a whole. Granted, some of the questions are difficult to answer, as NICW is not a ‘typical’ organisation; we are small, with the Commissioners all having a part-time role, supported by a small full-time secretariat team. However, overall the experience has proved interesting and beneficial. Here’s what we found.

Process

The process aspect relates to the way in which NICW applies each of the five  Ways of Working in how we ‘operate’. Our scores vary from 2.6 (Collaboration and Involvement) to 3.5 (Long-term). 

Graph showing how NICW scores against each of the Ways of Working for Process. The scores are 3.5 for Long-term, 3 for Prevention, 3.1 for Integration, and 2.6 for Collaboration and for Involvement

The journey checker suggests steps to move from each level to the next. For example, our suggested steps to improve our Long-term working are:

  • Continuous communication strategy reinforces futures training and highlights new opportunities to staff
  • Embed future trends and scenarios in policy and decision-making
  • Collaborate with others on horizon-scanning
  • Future thinking and long-term awareness included in induction training, and training available for a wide range of futures
  • Processes drive and ensure consistent use of bold and innovative futures techniques, of current and future needs, trends and pressures
  • Success measures stretching longer term, beyond one generation ahead.

Some of these are simply impractical for NICW. For example, we have one induction every time there is a new Commission; and due to the very part-time nature of our appointments, we will struggle to deliver internal training for a wide range of futures.

Nonetheless, there are some suggestions that we will be considering across each of the Ways of Working. These include more collaborative work with others on horizon-scanning, such as participating in the UK Government ‘Heads of Horizon Scanning’ network; and using the Welsh Government’s Future Trends more consistently in our internal policy considerations as well as the work programmes that we deliver.

People and culture

Our scores in this aspect were a bit higher, demonstrating that NICW is applying most of the Ways of Working to our ‘people and culture’, the clear exception being ‘Prevention’ .

Graph showing how NICW scores against each of the Ways of Working for People and Culture. The scores are 3.25 for Long-term, 2 for Prevention, 3.3 for Integration, 3.4 for Collaboration and 3.6 for Involvement
Graph showing how NICW scores against each of the Ways of Working for People and Culture. The scores are 3.25 for Long-term, 2 for Prevention, 3.3 for Integration, 3.4 for Collaboration and 3.6 for Involvement

This highlights the need for flexibility in the use of the tool and understanding its limitations for smaller public bodies; with our current resource, it is very difficult to imagine how we might score much more highly in the Prevention aspect. For example, one of the questions is:

“Are the techniques of preventative work and preventative spend being fostered and mastered in order to break negative cycles and address intergenerational challenges?”

Our score against this question is 1, because the higher scores require significant resource dedicated to training Commissioners on different types and levels of prevention.

Next steps

This first attempt at using the Journey Checker has highlighted a number of areas where we could improve our Ways of Working. We will now have to consider internally how to balance our time and resources with the objectives of improving against each of the Ways of Working. It may be that we amend the scoring system to ‘cap’ different aspects against a maximum ambition score that takes into account our own limited resources. 

This has been a worthwhile exercise, and one that we will likely revisit in the future to check progress. We are grateful to the Office for the Future Generations Commissioner for producing the journey checker platform and we look forward to learning from other organisations who are also seeking to improve their Ways of Working.

Photo by Damien Walmsley, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0