In local government, more often than not, we’re asked to write a strategy, get it approved, then write a delivery plan that hits the targets we’ve set and evidence the Return on Investment (ROI).

This is essentially a waterfall approach, and recent years have shown that it rarely works. What stands in the way of its success are, amongst other things, rising demand, increasingly complex – and changing – resident needs and shrinking budgets. All these different factors can mean the path ahead is paved with many obstacles preventing us from delivering our ambitions in the straight line we’d envisaged. 

Additionally, emerging technologies like Agentic AI are completely changing what’s possible faster than a strategy or delivery plan can keep up with. This is why, in this short article, I make the case for prototyping/testing before writing the strategy.

To be clear, this is not an argument against strategy. A good strategy can act as a guiding star for what an organisation is seeking to achieve. In my view, the main issue is the order of doing things. 

You see, when writing a strategy, you commit to the business case, the ROI, the budget, and the timeline before you have a clear idea of what might actually work in practice. Even when the strategy is designed on solid user research, this timeline leaves little to no room for experimentation because once the budget is signed off, delivery can feel more like proving your plan was right in the first place.

I believe things work better the other way round. Always start with the needs of the people you’re designing for first, but then invest in some small, low-cost tests that can help guide what your strategy should focus on in the first place. 

These small tests can include testing hypotheses and assumptions using low-fidelity prototypes, e.g. online ads to test if residents engage with an online offer/campaign, or a short poll on a public engagement platform. Ideas can be partially formed at this stage, that’s the point. Working in short, time-boxed sprints of building, testing and learning means each round of testing shapes the next, and by the time you write the strategy, you’re working from evidence, not assumptions.

This is the approach we’ve taken with the London Health Mission, a ten-year, cross-sector commitment to reduce health inequalities resulting from digital exclusion. 

Here’s what this looked like in practice.

Our starting assumptions

We didn’t start from scratch, because LOTI’s past 6 years of digital inclusion work had already shown that devices, data and skills are the foundations for getting online. So our working assumption was that if we got those foundations in place and improved the NHS App, access to care would also improve. Instead of writing that into a strategy, we tested it.

Over six months, we spoke to more than 80 practitioners from across the boroughs, the NHS and the voluntary sector, and worked with data colleagues and communities to understand who is being left out as health and care services increasingly move online. 

They told us that all the above are a problem, but there was a whole lot more, including, e.g. the lack of integration across the entire system, barriers such as language, literacy and many more.

How we tested our assumptions

Partnering with the Royal College of Art (RCA) allowed us to test several future scenarios using socio-economic, technology and other signals from today’s world. This divergent thinking confirmed something we already knew: that our health outcomes depend on our physical and socio-economic environment. More importantly, it showed that the way we access healthcare is on track for radical change, with medical advice becoming available in everyday places such as the supermarket. A strategy built only around today’s (more traditional) channels would have risked being out of date before it was published. 

To refine our thinking, with the RCA, we brought together around 80 Service Design Master’s students (now graduates) who spent a day turning our insights into concepts and working prototypes. These ranged from voice and AI-enabled tools that offer support on demand to mapping tools for practitioners.

If you’re thinking you don’t have that kind of support, my advice is to start building partnerships with universities in your borough. These partnerships can be mutually beneficial.

What we learned from testing our assumptions

We learned that access to data, devices and skills still matter. But the process also revealed that Londoners who are already online (or online by proxy), still may not get the care they need, because of a disability, or because of a language barrier or not having a fixed address to register with a GP. It became clear that getting people online was only part of it.

What surprised us most was that there was no shortage of solutions to these problems. But these solutions need funding, data sharing, and trusted people and spaces to connect them with the people most in need. As a result, our focus shifted from asking what solutions London needs to asking what conditions need to be in place for innovation to flourish. That’s what our strategy will be built around.

Strategy brief or prototype first?

Before you write the strategy document, simply try making something. It doesn’t need to be finished or right. It needs to be tangible enough that people can react to it, and cheap enough that you can learn from it without a huge upfront investment. 

You might find, as we did, that it changes what your strategy should be about. For us, that meant shifting the strategy away from deciding which solutions London needs and towards creating the conditions for innovation to flourish.