Turnover in the civil service – including both moves between departments and exits from the civil service entirely – has hovered between 8% and 14% a year over the last decade. Over that same period, the policy profession has more than doubled in size. The growing challenge: how to build policy capability quickly. Could a board game be the answer?
Dr Melissa Jogie, a UK Research and Innovation policy fellow and director for research, culture, impact and early career development at Roehampton University, and Katie Thorpe, head of learning and development at the Institute for Government, have co-designed Churn, a board-based simulation that drops players into the unpredictable world of policymaking.
Players come up with a policy idea and then try to develop successful, long-lasting policy by building a team, marshalling political capital and allocating resources, while responding to sudden events such as ministerial resignations, elections, funding cuts or crises. Using real-world scenarios to recreate the unpredictable environment in which policy is made, Churn aims to equip players with a practical understanding of how to confront the messy realities that civil servants and policymakers face daily. Each game lasts about an hour, and no two outcomes are the same.
Initially created to help academics understand the policymaking process, Churn has attracted interest from departments, including the Home Office, as a training and development tool for new policy staff. CSW attended the launch of the game and had a go at it – working in a team to successfully deliver a policy for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero to subsidise all energy bills (not this author’s idea). Afterwards, CSW spoke to Jogie to find out more about the game.
“Churn captures my lived experience in a really uncannily accurate way. Losing half your team in the blink of an eye can be really problematic” Nick Dean, Policy Profession Unit
What was the inspiration for the game?
As part of my UK Research and Innovation policy fellowship, I attended training at the Institute for Government on how successful policy is made [delivered by Thorpe]. Even though Katie put together a nice training pack, there was a lot of PowerPoint and it was very difficult for someone from a non-policy mindset to step into a crash course on how successful policy is made. It was like seeing a whole new world for the first time without really spending any time to go through the steps in detail. So I thought: is there a proactive way? And then I picked up this conversation with Katie and quite coincidentally had started designing a version of this game in theory. And I said to her: “Why don’t we collaborate and really bring it to the table?” So it went from being an idea in her head to suddenly having a team, us working on it together, piloting it with different audiences, and then launching it.
What problem is it trying to resolve?
It’s trying to demystify the policymaking process, because there are so many elements within the dynamics of how policy can be made. You’re under pressure with government changes; public demand; understanding evidence, how it’s applied; who the right audience is; how it’s communicated. This is what the game is hoping to flex: our muscle of strategising, thinking, optimising when you don’t have all the options before you and you’re hedging yourself against the risk that this may not be the government priority tomorrow, or it may be needed yesterday. The game is trying to get you in the mindset of getting comfortable with that level of discomfort.
Why is it called Churn?
The name was entirely Katie’s idea. I think because it was the arresting moment of when everything is going really well, but everything could suddenly go wrong. In government, a prime minister can be replaced overnight. When that happens you lose staff, relationships and momentum. We all know from our own workplaces how disruptive a change in leadership can be – and in government, there is often no time for proper induction or handover. High turnover and shifting priorities mean that new people constantly reshape the direction of work. That instability is at the heart of the game’s message: can you survive the churn?
Feedback on Churn! at the game’s launch
Nick Dean, co-head of the civil service’s Policy Profession Unit: “I run education for policy professionals in government – there are 38,000 of them. It’s been bags of fun. It’s been really bold and innovative to come and play an immersive game that captures my lived experience as a policy professional in a really uncannily accurate way. I recognise the problems Churn throws up… losing half your team in the blink of an eye can be really problematic. I recognise also that the political process has many ups and downs.”
Prof Rosie Meek, UKRI policy fellow (Ministry of Justice), Royal Holloway University: “I’ve loved it. To be able to have the crossover of the day job with the gamification has been really fun. It sparked a bit of a debate and discussion, and that’s always a good thing. I think it would be quite interesting to my undergraduate students, because I work with them in terms of translating research into policy and practice, and I think it gives them a better idea of the reality of what we’re doing when we’re trying to develop policy. But I also think the team I work with at the Ministry of Justice would quite enjoy it at one of the team away days, to get a better sense of how they’re working alongside different colleagues across government and how different events that happen in the world will impact our policymaking efforts.”
Huw Morris, UCL Institute of Education, on secondment from the Welsh Government: “I’m working with a team to evaluate the policy fellowship scheme that Melissa was on when she developed this policy game. I’ve been incredibly impressed by everyone’s engagement, the sophistication and realism of the game, and the way in which it held everyone’s attention. What I find is that in universities, there’s not a particularly good understanding of how policy is developed. And that is slightly a problem because many areas of university education are very practical, and it’s important if people are going to work in social work, teaching, healthcare settings, police, that they understand how the rules and regulations governing what they do are developed and how they can influence them. Because frontline staff or staff in senior positions have got valuable insight that policymakers and politicians need to know about.”
Do you think it could help the wider public to understand how government works and how difficult the job of being a civil servant is?
Yes, [we saw it] when churn happened in games. Because they may have just got an analyst on their team or an expert and then to just lose those people through churn, I think it did build empathy.
What sort of interest has there been from the civil service? I understand the Home Office has enquired about it.
The Home Office’s enquiries were about trying to understand: “What is this new thing? Can it help with problem solving? Could we bespoke the game to help talk about specific strategies? Can it be used for an induction for staff into new teams?” It can be a team-building agenda, but it can also be bespoke for a specific policy. Certain rounds of the game can be paused to have a conversation around the particular policy that they have in mind. So we’re experimenting with: can it actually be used to help teams as a sounding board? But we’re working that through because we need to do the experiment with a couple of teams and see how that goes.
What stage is the development of the game at now?
I’d say we’re 40-45% there. We have a tangible board. Some of the parts still need to be finessed a little bit. The cards in the game are based on real life examples of things that happened in government in the past. So there’s an option to put a QR code in and make it into trivia: which minister did that? Which team did this? We would also like to make an expansion pack where we do particular ministries with extra decks of cards. And then there was a conversation around digitising it. Some people recommended virtual reality. I have no idea how VR in a game like this might work. But we’re not turning down the possibilities of: how far can you push this gameplay?
What’s your end goal for the game?
I think the end goal would be finding a way to teach the fundamentals of policymaking in a really efficient and engaging way. It would be great to use this as a tool to help researchers who are awarded funding. So many of them gave us testimonials of having worked for many years as a researcher and not knowing the policies that they’re working against. For early-career researchers, for students studying policy, I see this as a really good educational tool to get the conversation and engagement going around policy because, while you can still be in a group setting, the learning is still autonomous so you get to have this dialogue with your peers as you play through the game. So I think it’s a really healthy way to bring everyone to the table. And running this as a training programme for all of these audiences would be really wonderful, if it took off.
“You’re under pressure with government changes, public demand, understanding evidence... The game is trying to get you in the mindset of getting comfortable with that level of discomfort” Melissa Jogie
Do you imagine going into a department for a couple of hours to play the game and having someone who comes in and chairs it?
Yes, because you can take breaks between the six rounds and do something else in between, or do a reflection activity afterwards. There are different ways for us to transform it into what we’d call a pedagogical means of delivering this. We do think delivering it is a lot more engaging. But if it took off and it became the next Monopoly? We may not inherit any of those riches; it might take centuries for people to buy it every Christmas. But we are open to both ideas.