Government Office for Science - Cabinet Office
The Government Office for Science and the Cabinet Office wanted to provide a “Toolkit” to support Departments and others build resilience plans against a range of future systemic risk scenarios.
SAMI’s Role
Between March 2023 – June 2024, SAMI designed a series of workshops that were tested in a number of “case study” examples across Government, within Departments and within local authority resilience teams.
SAMI worked in close cooperation with GO-Science throughout. The project started with SAMI conducting extensive research to understand the UK resilience landscape. Futures thinking approaches and tools were analysed against the needs of the project, drawing on SAMI’s experience with complex scenarios; on our understanding of the unique needs of government; and on the company’s authorship of the HM Government Futures Toolkit.
The final Toolkit consists of six elements.
An introductory workshop targeted at senior leaders familiarises them with the concepts, tools and use of the Toolkit.
Two introductory one-hour sessions help teams become familiar with futures concepts and to select relevant systemic risk scenarios.
The introductory sessions are followed by two two-hour workshops. The first uses the Futures Wheels technique to examine second- and third-order implications of change and prioritise them on a Driver Mapping matrix. The second develops interventions against clusters of drivers using a structured methodology and resulted in a clear prioritisation of actions.
A third workshop is an option for further development of the actions identified in Workshop 2, and uses Roadmapping to identify key steps, roles and timelines. It concludes with an exercise to produce a key set of recommendations for action by senior leaders.
The final Toolkit is a multi-component package. The Toolkit itself is complemented by presentations and facilitation guidance for each session. While the Toolkit works as a standalone product within government, is has been designed to complement the GO-Science/SAMI Futures Toolkit, and is presented in the same format. The Toolkit is for government use and is not publicly available.
Outcomes
Tom Wells, Deputy Director - Technology Insights, Futures & Foresight Unit at the Government Office for Science said “We are very pleased that, with SAMI’s help, we have built a valuable resource that can be used widely to develop resilience plans. SAMI’s professionalism and expertise, combined with an open and flexible attitude, made them a pleasure to work with.
We anticipate the Toolkit being used widely across Government.”