Wellcome Policy Lab
We’re experimenting with more creative ways to develop policy and engage decision-makers to help Wellcome deliver its mission across climate and health, discovery research, infectious disease and mental health.
What is Wellcome Policy Lab?
Led by the Policy Team, Policy Lab provides a space to experiment with new approaches to policy to drive greater creativity and impact in the way that we do policy work.
What we want to achieve
We want to be more creative in both the policy processes we use and the products we create.
By using creative tools and methods for policy development alongside more traditional approaches, we aim to generate better policy insights and recommendations that reflect the complexities, nuances and political realities of the policy areas in which we work. Taking imaginative approaches may also help to pique the interest of decision-makers.
We’re working with organisations who share our enthusiasm for doing things differently – from academic organisations and charities to communication and design agencies – to experiment with new approaches and find ways to embed these approaches in Wellcome’s policy work.
Overall, we hope that expanding the range of tools and approaches in Wellcome’s policy ‘toolkit’ will encourage new ways of working within our team and increase the impact of Wellcome’s policy work.
What we’ve done so far
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Martin Smith, Head of Policy Lab and our partners share what they set out to do and what they learned along on the way.
Just over a year ago we kicked off a search for partners to help make our policy work more creative. We were amazed by the response.
We received more than a 100 ideas from organisations based all over the world and from a huge range of disciplines. There was so much variety that we had our work cut out for us when it came to choosing what to explore.
After careful consideration we chose four exciting experiments to expand our thinking of what is possible in this area.
The four projects we funded each took a different approach but what they shared was creativity and a willingness to try something new.
The projects included collective mosaic-making to help visualize connections and share perspectives on complex policy areas, new storytelling methods to help bring to life people's lived experiences, a 'Tomorrow Party' to help facilitate imaginative discussions about the future and using humour and even circus art to confront difficult problems and spark new ways of
thinking.
Our partners tested these approaches in a variety of policy topics. These ranged from the mental health system in India to climate resilience in Australia. This work has taken us to some unexpected places and turn familiar spaces or formats for policy discussions on their head; sometimes literally.
In each pilot we saw how using creative methods can create a more level playing field for policy discussions and help build connections between people more quickly.
This is so important for our work as we know that the benefits of science can increase when diverse perspectives and experiences inform policy decisions.
The Tomorrow Party is a co-creative method that brings groups of people together to imagine the future they long for. What happens at the Tomorrow Party is that the different stakeholders come together but they share that future that they imagined through their firsthand experiences of the world. What we found surprising in a sort of delightful way was people's affection for the Tomorrow Party and what they kept telling us was that the lack of opportunities they have to use their imagination seemed to be playing a really inhabiting role and their capacity to imagine different futures. So what we experienced was that people kept describing that the opportunity to engage with their imagination felt like it would help people in general prepare for addressing the kind of meta crises we're facing.
So our method involves bringing diverse groups in the policy arena around the table and then they work together to try and answer a policy question in a very collaborative way using mosaics. So they start from a individual mosaic and then work up to a collective view that incorporates everybody's ideas. So the big surprise was that we thought that the project would be all about helping people um work through complex systems through the process of mosaic-making with all the bits but actually the big surprise was how it really encouraged active listening and people spent more time listening to each other's ideas and remembering them and then integrating them into a collective view rather than pushing forward their own ideas.
So we had the storytelling game uh where the community participated in sharing with each other their experiences related to mental health care services and then that data was put into a digital game where the policy makers played as a caregiver or a person with lived experience to understand the challenges that people face on ground, then followed by a workshop where they also ideated on what kind of pathways they can leverage to address these challenges. Well it was exciting as well as challenging uh because you're going on ground and testing lot of these different methods uh I think the room for failure helped a lot because we could go on testing it with different groups and learn from that testing as to what aspects of the tool we need to change and what processes we need to change as well which will complement the tool.
We have innovated in policy dialogues by working with professional humorists and professional acrobats. Humour is a method that allows us to enrich how we see, how we notice, how we perceive what is absurd and improvable and and it brings us the courage through bonding, through laughter, through creativity to do things in a different way. Acrobatics is fantastic at helping us notice risk management with new eyes. It's uplifting, it creates awe, it inspires the desire to step into the unknown. Through our road testing of the innovations proposed, humor and acrobatics enriched policy dialogues by bringing a serious fun that that brought the joy, made people more luminous, more inspired, more more stepping into the courage of coming up with new ideas, of offering how to support each other and seeing possibilities with new eyes from the outset.
We were keen to share what we were learning and why do this in the traditional way. In the spirit of collaboration and celebration we hosted a festival to bring all the projects together. Here partners were able to demonstrate the methods that have inspired our thinking and connect with others interested in creative policy. The whole process has opened our minds to what's possible. We're now really excited and inspired about how we can innovate and experiment further in Wellcome's approach to policy work.
Policy Lab pilot in 2023
In 2023, we launched Wellcome Policy Lab with a global search for partners to pilot imaginative, experimental and ambitious tools that push the boundaries of how policy is usually done. We wanted to learn from their work and use it to inspire creativity in Wellcome’s policy work in the future.
Since then, we’ve worked with four partners to experiment with a range of creative policy approaches.
1. Collaborative mosaic-making to visualise and explore complex policy issues
Scientia Scripta led a coalition of partners to trial collaborative mosaic-making to help visualise policy challenges and problems in more creative ways.
Watch a video to learn more about mosaic-making in policy
2. A ‘Tomorrow Party’ to imagine new futures to unlock new policy solutions
Monash University researchers developed a futures method called the Tomorrow Party. Using innovative props and ‘party’ inspired accessories, participants co-created an experience that invited them to picture and describe different futures.
3. Serious games and simulation to understand people’s lived experiences of health policy and systems
Thumbi Labs and the Centre for Mental Health Law & Policy have piloted the use of a storytelling game and simulation to inform policy discussions on local governance and mental health in India.
4. Humour and circus arts to explore how ‘serious fun’ can foster new thinking within policy dialogues
Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre led an interdisciplinary team to evaluate different ways to harness humour and circus arts to help reshape policy dialogues relating to climate change and mental health.
In early 2024, we hosted a Policy Lab Festival at the Design Museum in London to share learning from the pilots and bring together a community of organisations that are championing creative approaches to policy.
