Futures Academy 3: Time to think, space to create
Futures Academy returned with a new format and lots of new ideas. Julie talks us through the highs and lows of 10 weeks of inspiration, innovation and iteration.
futures academy
Back to the futures: cohort two of Futures Academy
Futures Academy is back! This time our nine brave Essex staff have just five days to tackle the process of registering a birth using new ways of working. Find out how they got on.
Older workers: the next Futures Academy research project
Over the last 2 decades changes to the pension age has meant the group of people leaving the labour market has got older. People are having to stay in work for longer. For manual workers especially, this presents problems. Many …
Introducing risk: a way of finding new fixes for old problems
I recently took part in design activity around the Essex website alpha and Futures Academy. This work has made me reflect about how the purposeful introduction of risk within the design process can help create better solutions in a way that established ways of working do not.
Day 5, Futures Academy: Telling the story
We made it to day five! After our final stand up the team shared their experiences from yesterday of prototyping with Essex residents and thought about what they’d want to do next to further test their ideas. We spent the …
Day 4, Futures Academy: Ideas to prototypes
We had our biggest turn out at this morning’s stand up. There is a growing interest in what we’re doing and conversations are already starting about how this would work for other teams, which is really exciting. After the stand …
Day 3, Futures Academy: Using research to inspire ideas
Great to see new faces at this morning’s stand up. The team are looking forward to seeing more members of Corporate Development and the wider organisation at tomorrow’s stand up and Friday’s show and tell. Our first activity was to …
Day 2, Futures Academy: Understanding the user need
Today was all about user research. We started the morning with a ‘stand up’ with the team and senior managers from corporate development. This 15 minute conversation is one of the daily tools of agile working, the idea being that …
Day 1, Futures Academy: Understanding the problem
Today we started the one-week design sprint. We learnt about framing problems, mapping services from a user perspective and identifying pain points and opportunities. It's been a great first day. We also shared the brief that the team are going …
Introducing the Futures Academy
If we want to create public services fit for the 21st century, we have to give our staff the tools to make it happen. That’s why we’re trialling an initiative called the Futures Academy, a learning experience that gives staff …