Explore the playbook

Locally delivered public services, from health and social care, planning and transport, to homebuilding and housing management, have evolved over many decades alongside changing technology and regulations. These services were not designed for the modern age, and not designed as connected systems. Rather, each organisation designs, buys or builds their own system to support their part of the service. The result is hundreds of slightly different services, underpinned by thousands of different business processes and data formats.

The resulting failures - including vendor lock-in, poor interoperability, poor commissioning, limited innovation, and insufficient choice in the market - are experienced by everyone in the market, but addressable by no single organisation. Rather, they can only be overcome at a collective or systemic level.

We have come to understand the practice of addressing systemic failure in complex local services as ‘market-shaping’. It means “designing and delivering interventions that deliberately influence how markets develop when purely commercial incentives fail to deliver socially beneficial outcomes and innovations”.

This definition of a market extends to the whole ecosystem of professional practices, skills, laws and external pressures that shape the public service in question. Interventions for market-shaping include using collective buying powers, agreeing data standards and design patterns, creating regulations for things like professional practices, reporting duties, and data-sharing protocol.

Market-shaping can be led by governments, philanthropists, or large institutions. However, without active support or leadership from central government policymakers, it rarely succeeds.

Finally, key to the practice of market-shaping is that it will rarely succeed on the back of just one intervention. Complex systems, like those in the natural world, reinforce themselves. To shift these self-perpetuating dynamics, we have to prioritise a few areas where intervention is most needed, collaborate with others in the market to drive their adoption.

Data and technology have become critical enablers for all public services. At the same time, the national policy that governs these services has traditionally steered clear of operational and technical choices, allowing local organisations the freedom to interpret laws and design their business processes to a large degree.

This approach is intended to limit overburdensome constraints set by far removed central government organisations, and to limit the risk of unintended policy outcomes. However, it increasingly reinforces existing risk (failure demand, rising bankruptcy, and people unnecessarily suffering poor care, health, housing and other outcomes, and the social unrest that follows), undermining the intended impact of new policies.

Today, policy teams need to take the initiative to work hand-in-glove with digital, data and technology professionals to understand the market they’re operating in, to diagnose what’s not working, and to actively commission or build the interventions needed to improve them.

Policymakers that approach their work as market-shaping will benefit by:

1. De-risking policy with real time feedback loops: working with the delivery community to understand how the market works offers richer insight into policy problems than traditional consultation methods
2. Better understanding policy impact: by improving the consistency and quality of the data we use to measure whether we’re achieving our policy goals
3. A more resilient supplier market, offering better value for money: After the up-front investment in getting some systemic interventions going, the returns are big and varied. They include better technology for less money, less service failure, and a more resilient market that’s much easier to penetrate for new entrants
4. Ultimately, this approach delivers better impact for public service users by addressing the causes of service failure through the policy development process.

To understand if the reason you’re struggling to deliver your mission is systemic or organisational there are 3 questions to consider:

1. Scope: Does the problem affect multiple organisations, industries, or even entire markets?
2. Persistence: Has it been a problem for a significant period, in spite of your organisation’s efforts to address it?
3. Interconnectedness: Is it an ‘interconnected’ problem? I.e. Is it hard to understand the root cause because the problem is deeply intertwined with other factors in the system?

If the answer to all 3 questions is ‘yes’, you likely have a systemic problem that cannot be solved by a single organisation or even a single corrective intervention. Rather, the market or system you’re in, with its laws, professional practices, available budgets, standards and other conventions, always pulls you in a different direction.

1. Vendor lock-in: “We’re spending lots of money for products that are really hard to adopt, and still require work arounds”

   This ‘business as usual’ scenario is the most desirable starting point, yet the hardest to build momentum from. The experience of vendor lock-in to a product or service is a classic symptom of a market failing, and is prevalent in the public sector. Here, the software that a public service depends on is limiting or dictating practice; yet, there are no viable alternatives on the market and building one in-house is too expensive and risky.

2. Change in legislation: “New laws are being developed to change how the service works and/or to achieve new policy outcomes, and we need to change our service to be compliant”

   New regulations offer a unique opportunity to address market challenges, as everyone in the system is incentivised to change their products and services at the same time. This provides a unique opportunity to move towards more standards-based approaches to data and technology and new ways of working. Here, focusing on improving standards, joining-up services and making them technologically interoperable, can lay foundations for a more open and innovative market in the future.

3. The old system breaks: “We need to do something we have no way to do“

   This is often the most effective catalyst for re-shaping a public service market. However, by the time this is felt, large scale costs are already being incurred. The Covid-19 pandemic offers many examples of this, as with the social care interoperability case study. We must find ways to instigate market-shaping before it comes to this.

• Learn more about how pilot projects and new legislation helped to identify market-shaping interventions needed in housing management.
• Learn more about how pilot projects and new legislation helped to establish the Open Digital Planning programme, which is transforming the planning system for the age of AI by listening to our interview with Service owner, Matt Wood-Hill
• Learn more about how the Covid-19 pandemic was catalysed the DHSC Digitising Social Care programme in our interview with programme SRO, Alice Ainsworth.

Problems need names and owners to be solved. This may go without saying, but it’s the first hurdle at which we frequently fail. If we are only naming symptoms, we only treat these surface level issues. Similarly, if no one assumes responsibility for diagnosing the root causes of systemic failure, it’s most likely that organisations will continue tackling symptoms rather than the their causes. There are two approaches for tackling this:

Top- down approach: For many of the market-shaping challenges we’ve addressed, a top down ownership model has proved most effective. In this model, the organisation whose mission it is to make efficiencies in your problem area will assume responsibility. In the case of UK social care, the Department for Health and Social Care is invested in better patient outcomes for lower costs; while for social housing management, it’s the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

Policy departments like these are especially attractive mission owners because they have access to more levers to deliver systemic change, and could therefore better justify investments in system interventions than smaller cohorts of organisations. Moreover, they can more easily incentivise and convene different groups together around shared challenges.

Bottom- up approach: In the absence of a policy department to name and address the failure points in each problem system, we know that cohorts of local organisations can co-invest to great effect. Combined Authorities like the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), or London’s Office for Technology and Innovation (LOTI) have had great impact in pooling the resources of members to get better value from their suppliers and shape emerging technology markets

It’s important to secure enough time and skills to diagnose the system, evidence the change possible, and test intervention ideas. A good rule of thumb is that, with the right conditions in place (especially the ability to engage widely, and the right mix of skills on your team) it should take around 3 months to understand how your market works and where you need to intervene. Then you might need a further 3 - 4 months to develop intervention plans in which you can have confidence that you can further test, adapt and scale.

As with any change project, it’s essential to understand who you’ll need to work with from the outset. In a public service market, there are too many individuals to map. Rather, we assume that by gathering experienced organisation/ team representatives in the system, we can build a strong understanding of the system at large, diagnose it well, and agree where some interventions could have the greatest impact.

When mapping stakeholders in a public service market, it’s helpful to think of these people in 6 ways:

It takes a movement to change how a system works, with people from different parts of the system motivated to change their behaviour and collaborate in some way. While some useful ‘carrots and sticks’, like funds and regulations, can be offered and imposed to force some change, there is always a need for a campaign. Widespread engagement that brings together participants across different roles, is a critical component to get widespread buy-in and bring about change in a system.

Read our collaboration and engagement starter kit

A dynamic system like a market is constantly changing. You’ll never understand it comprehensively, it will always shift and there will always be too many stakeholders with unique circumstances to develop a perfect understanding of the problem. People can feel overwhelmed by this complexity and nervous about drawing conclusions quickly.

To mitigate this challenge, market-shaping teams depend on the collective intelligence of a multidisciplinary team with a complement of technical, delivery, policy, analysis and design skills.

Read more about the 7 core skills that we recommend including in any market-shaping team

In an ideal world, top down missions will have political backing, from senior civil servants to Ministers. This is tricky to secure and to maintain, as people move roles. Systems change is also hard and slow, and therefore impossible to evidence in short political cycles. By investing storytelling, working on our benefits narratives at every opportunity, we can keep this important support group informed and motivated. We’ll discuss this in more detail in section 4 of the playbook.

Listen to Jay Saggar from London’s Office for Technology and Innovation (LOTI) talk about how they have been able to convene local authorities to shape an emerging technology market

When defining the scope of our research and the boundaries of the system we want to understand, we want to be guided by what the system should enable - for the public, for front line workers and other public sector staff. In other words, we want to be guided by outcomes. This helps us constantly check our progress and prioritise our resources.

This is commonly done by defining 2 orientating goals: a ‘north star’ goal for what the system should enable in the long term, and an ambitious ‘near star’ goal that helps gain traction and buy-in for that long term goal.

With these two ‘guiding stars agreed’, teams can align around a framing question. A good framing question gives clarity, focus, and purpose to stakeholder workshops and interviews: it defines what the teams are trying to understand or change. A good framing question should be:

• Mission-focused: Puts the purpose of the system front and centre, including the outcomes it’s trying to achieve for people and planet.
• Staff- and service-centric: Acknowledges the critical role of public and private sector staff and frontline teams.
• Systems-aware: Flags the structural blockers — legacy systems, data silos, inflexible contracts, regulation.
• Open-ended, yet directional: “How might we…” encourages exploration, but toward a clear end-state.

Read more for tips on agreeing goals and framing questions

Complex systems like markets have many interconnected forces - procurement practices, regulation, legacy constraints - causing them to behave as they do, and no individual person, profession or organisation will understand the full picture. The only way to understand the market you’re trying to influence is to learn from people who understand how it works from different perspectives.

To get started, we recommend:

1. Stakeholder mapping: identify the different types of people involved in the system or market you’re diagnosing, and make sure you have early input from representatives of each group. (More tips in section 3.3)
2. Putting together some briefing information: for those in the system you need to hear from based on the scope of your work, pull together: What are you trying to achieve, and how can people feed in?
3. Using the engagement channels you’ve set up: invite participation from the groups that understand the main parts of the system. Depending on how wide your scope or complex your service is, you’ll likely need a few of these before the patterns that define you your system start to become clear.
4. Multidisciplinary workshops: While it’s useful to hear from different categories of stakeholder separately - like local authorities, suppliers, national policy makers and regulators, third sector stakeholders and resident groups - when mapping your market, you’ll need representation from across these groups in the same conversation. This will allow you to capture the relationships between different parts of the system.

The goal of mapping your Market is to:

1. Identify all the forces in the system that affect your target outcomes (your north star and near star)
2. Visualise how these forces affect each other
3. Create a shared understanding of what needs fixing: what outcomes is the system producing now that we don’t want, and which forces in this system seem to be having the greatest impact?
4. Identify potential partners or existing interventions that could be amplified, and where there may be something missing altogether.

Importantly, the map is about the process, not the output. Trying to make a perfect map will likely mean never finishing, so remember that it’s good enough when your large and diverse group of stakeholders start agreeing that it’s capturing their experience of the system.

We’ve included some further resources on how to map complex systems at the bottom of this section. You can also Book a call with us to talk through your challenge.

Read more about how to capture and connect the forces affecting your market

Discussing the patterns with your stakeholders to validate and prioritise

Cluster the visuals you’ve generated (paper and post-its, or virtually on a Miro, Mural or similar platform), and discuss how they work together. The point of connecting these forces in the system together isn’t to make a definitive map of a dynamic system. Rather, it’s to generate a shared understanding among the system stakeholders you need to work with of the problems you most want to solve together.

The goal at this point is to describe the ‘deep structure’ that connects all of these loops, actors and forces that together surface how the system currently works. From this point, we can start thinking about where interventions might have the greatest impact.

A good narrative about how a system is working, highlights the outcomes it produces at present, and the biggest contributing factors. An example of this may be, that our system keeps homelessness numbers high or growing, by failing to offer preventative support when specific early stress indicators emerge, and by preventing people from reaching the correct service quickly.

Once we’ve agreed where the biggest challenge areas are, we dig deeper into these specific areas to understand why they are as they are, and what we can do about it.

• Acumen Academy’s Systems Practice Free Online Course offers a great step-by-step framework for comprehensive systems mapping.
• Nesta’s Policy Blueprinting template offers a useful starting point for policy teams thinking about market-shaping as an approach to delivering better outcomes.

Having mapped your stakeholders and having started your system mapping work, you’ll have a sense of what needs to be done and what kind of organisation(s) could fund it. You’ll need to develop some benefits narratives for those who give permission to:

• do the work (e.g. policy and digital team leaders)
• fund the work (e.g. spending boards, and Treasury)
• participate in the work (e.g. leaders of organisations whose knowledge you’ll need to co-design interventions on the supplier and the buyer side)

Developing a foundational narrative

To start, each kind of stakeholder needs to understand the big picture: what’s not working about your market at the moment, and what do we think should be possible with some interventions. Using these broad narratives, it’s powerful to derive some big picture benefits hypotheses - even if they are not attributable directly to the intervention.

For example, during our work at MHCLG on social housing repairs, we outlined the country-wide cost of poor housing on health outcomes: Improved efficiencies on repairs services around hazards like damp and mould will have direct efficiency benefits for the housing provider, will lead to improved health outcomes for residents, and ultimately will reduce pressure on the NHS and public health teams.

Building on this ‘big picture’ narrative, create benefits narratives for each target audience.

Read more for tips on how to address the priorities of different groups

The way we develop a baseline narrative about how things are now and how we might make them better is to collate people's accounts of the problems they face in this market: what is the impact of these problems, and who are the problems impacting? By defining and measuring the scale of the issue, it will be easier to help bring those less directly impacted ‘on the journey’ and create a call to action.

To do this well, it’s essential that your impact analyst is involved in research interviews and workshops from the beginning of the project and throughout - at least on a part time or consultant basis.

We have outlined the steps we’ve found most helpful in narrating the benefit of local service market-shaping programmes.

For locally delivered public services, here are some common problems you should expect to hear about:

National stakeholders, particularly those in Treasury and policy roles will generally require some foundational market data to ground the more speculative benefits narratives you’ll present them with.

With the help of contracts aggregation tools like Contracts Finder, Tussell or a Large Language Model that you ensure isn’t hallucinating, gather the following kinds of evidence:

• How many suppliers serve the main needs of this market (case management usually being the foundational service)?
• How many buyers are there? Can they make informed decisions?
• What's the market share of the dominant suppliers?
• How long is the average contract length, or how frequently are they renewed?
• What’s the estimated average market value per customer per year?
• What is the value range of these contracts? (We’ve seen ranges from less than £50,000 to many millions for similar services)
• How does this view compare with exemplary services, or other similar services?

It’s also useful to look into where market-shaping has helped overcome similar problems. Places to look include:

• in adjacent sectors (for example, Open Banking exemplifies the benefits of pre-competitive standards on service users and on suppliers in established and critical services)
• Or in different countries (for example, Open Referral social prescribing standard in the USA inspired the UK’s ORUK initiative).

Using these data points, look for indicators of market ill-health, like great extremes in pricing for the same service, single supplier monopolies or limited choice, or poor contract terms (e.g. too long, or hidden costs for services that shouldn’t cost a lot). This will help make your benefits case more robust and help you spot where to focus your research.

Remember: this is a work in progress. You’ll likely keep improving this data as you speak with more people. Conversations should keep informing your benefits case, and your benefits case should keep informing your conversations with people to understand the root causes of market failure.

When it’s time to put your findings together, lead with the biggest pain points for people - the risk, the pain and the money wasted by continuing with business as usual - and the multi-million pound prize for tackling them.

It’s important to remember that early benefits cases for market-shaping generally won’t be able to meet the evidence threshold set out in the Government's Green Book guidelines. However, you’ll need bold benefits assertions to secure market-shaping support and you can publish them by being transparent about the assumptions you’re making.

Read our check-list for writing a market-shaping benefits case

• The Future Councils playbook we developed with MHCLG’s Local Digital programme has some simple templates to support this process, particularly the cost impacts tool.
• Example benefits cases from published projects: The case for intervening in housing management and the case for scaling the adoption of Open Referral UK to improve social prescribing.
• The Treasury’s guidance for evaluating government interventions can be found in the Magenta Book
• 2026 Open Geospatial Consortium research on the economic value of machine-readable data, data standards and related market-shaping interventions has some great reusable impact analysis for services relating to planning, climate adaptation and flood resilience.

Leaning heavily on your engagements with your broad community of stakeholders, find out about past attempts to address your challenges, innovations that may be struggling in the current market, but show some promise. These could include financial incentives, guidance, standards, training or new tools.

Validate findings with follow-up interviews with project participants, and with your community, to see how these could be built upon, amplified or otherwise supported, if needed.

Having identified opportunity areas in our systems mapping, we also need to understand how data moves through the parts of the system we’re most interested in. This allows us to understand what’s causing poor interoperability and collaboration across systems, and to understand the policies and tendencies that perpetuate the status quo.

For many of the local authority, health, and energy services we’ve worked with, this often involves honing in on the most costly service, or the ‘new burden’ coming into force soon, requiring organisations to create or buy new systems to comply.

Data and technology mapping is a lot like user journey mapping, except that it aims to capture the diversity of ways the service in question tends to be offered, allowing trends to emerge.

Our tips for mapping the data and technology problem ecosystems with an example from housing management:

Using the outputs of your research on what’s been done and your technology mapping, you should start to see where existing solutions (including standards, guidance, training, regulation and funding) may exist and need exposure, or need some tweaks to be effective. You’ll also start to see where there are gaps.

Having identified those solutions showing promise and where there are gaps, it’s vital to do a round of research to explore why: why are the promising opportunities not taking off? Is it just a matter of time, or are there systemic barriers to their adoption? And why are there gaps?

These findings, alongside your exploration of emerging technology, systems mapping and ambitious visions for the future should form starting points for ideation.

For teams with political backing and a strong mandate for change, a comprehensive foresight exercise would be a productive asset to rally around, one in which desirable and undesirable future scenarios are mapped out in collaboration with system stakeholders.

For teams under time pressure and lacking the support for a large-scale foresight exercise, a high level ‘to be’ service mapping exercise will help to create alignment around the chosen ‘future’. It should also help to surface intended and unintended consequences of the interventions you consider, and help you to prioritise accordingly.

Tips for how to explore the art of the possible and visions for the future

Ideation is a well practiced technique in civic and public service innovation communities. There are many creative ways to get people thinking outside the box, some of which we link below.

Key to ideation around market interventions, is to focus on the changes that need to happen at a collective level, and for which there’s a strong benefits narrative.

There are always people who’ve been delivering collaborative interventions, often without enough support to address complex public service challenges. It’s important to hone on these pockets of bright lights and start by learning from approaches that have tried working in facets of the issue. This would help identify opportunities for how some of these solutions can be built upon and/ or be amplified. Taking such strength based approaches will not only save time and money, but will provide you with validated solutions to link with and to work from. This will help build critical buy-in from allies and collaborators in your market-shaping work.

An approach often used when facing more abstract, systemic issues, is to work on parallel levels by simultaneously working to understand the root causes and service pain points in detail while also shaping an art of the possible ‘to be’ vision, which takes a more radical approach in resolving some of the structural challenges.

Doing a gap analysis between these two states, and working backwards from that vision, often helps develop a multitude of ideas that sit in the ‘inbetween’ space or what is more commonly referred to as the ‘second horizon’. This helps create a pathway for change from a current reality to a more radically different future.

For common types of intervention to consider when ideating, read more

For complex, locally delivered public services, the ideas you co-create could include:

1. Standards, data models and for key data types where they’re missing or incomplete.
2. Data models, a more elaborate collection of data standards, that codify how different kinds of technology and case management systems structure their services, and file and share information.
3. Convening and knowledge-sharing channels and spaces, building on our earlier engagement infrastructure guidance.
4. Guidance, training and knowledge-sharing events to help target users adopt these standards.
5. Design patterns exemplifying best practice or expected user experience of key services.
6. Governance patterns for key data and services.
7. Other standards adoption services (e.g. ‘Upload error checkers’ or AI reformatting tools).
8. Incentives (like kite marks, certifications, discounts, money, or rankings) to drive the adoption of particular interventions and the resulting impact. These should aim to align with what organisations and individuals already care about.
9. In some cases, we’ll identify specific products or services that should be built well once, as in the case of MHCLG’s home energy performance calculator.
10. Legislation, reporting requirements and enforcement measures.
11. New funding models.
12. New procurement pathways.
13. New organisations. This is last on the list, as we advise against starting here. However, it’s likely that when interventions are successful, you should considered the benefits of entrusting a new organisation with owning and developing them.

• Ben Holliday’s quick guide to different kinds of prototyping
• Matt Wood Hill, Service Owner for MHCLG’s Digital Planning programme, has done great work to codify some of the interventions explored on that programme.
• PolicyLab co-design toolkit, focusing on early years services, but useful for any public service co-design activity
• Nesta’s Collective Intelligence Playbook
• Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizon’s framework from New Philanthropy Capital

Having come up with a high number of ideas, you’ll once again need to review where to put effort for the highest impact. A simple technique to get started is to map the ideas on your list in a matrix of effort versus impact. This helps you check whether you have the levers needed to deliver these interventions, and test how critical each is to realise your ‘near star’, ambitious market-shaping goal.

Considering how much time, political support and funding you have, you should prototype as many ‘high impact’ interventions as you can manage to have the best chance at landing on a market intervention plan that will work. The level of testing here, depends on the level of risk and confidence you have against each idea.

Agree on a theory of change that explains how each prioritised intervention could help address the problematic market dynamics you’ve identified. This tool will help you explore what solutions may address different problems, and identify and plot out different assumptions that you need to test as you work towards the outcome.

Crucially, it will also help you identify what should change in the short, medium, and long term. You can measure these changes to ensure the intervention is working.

Read more about the main questions your Theory of Change should answers

Systemic change is hard, slow and expensive. It’s worth taking time to learn as much as possible in a ‘test and learn’ phase using prototypes. These can start out to be simple rough drawings and over time, become more realistic and comprehensive as you check off your riskiest assumptions. While this approach feels that it will add a few weeks of work initially, it will end up de-risking your entire programme and make sure that you end up with a solution that is evidenced to work.

Some simple ways to start testing include:

1. Sharing 1-pager product briefs with target users for feedback for feedback
2. Presenting your proposal or prototype to focus groups of your target users to elicit feedback.
3. Creating a simple registration form to see how much demand is expressed to collaborate on your proposals
4. Role-playing a new governance idea with target adopters
5. Offer something easy to gauge demand
6. Producing a range of scenarios to stress test a new data model or design
7. Running a pilot training course or allowing target users to play with a realistic prototype and soliciting feedback.

For ideas in which you have more confidence, tests could include

1. Creating sandbox environments for users to experiment with new methods and solutions, and give feedback
2. Funding a pilot to co-design an intervention to understand how the market reacts

The key things you’ll want to establish before developing ideas further are that:

1. they don’t already exist in some capacity that you missed before
2. there is enough openness to the idea from target adopters - both those who’ll do the work and those who’ll fund adoption
3. testers agree with your expected benefits (or highlight more!)
4. there are no barriers to adoption you hadn’t previously considered
5. you’ve identified as many consequences - intended and unintended as possible
6. you’ve identified the ‘edge cases’ that need to be considered, the special circumstances that will make it harder for a minority of people to adopt the intervention

Confirm which ideas to develop fully by engaging widely with your community, using interactive show and tells and key influencer workshops to align on where there’s widespread demand and compelling benefits cases for intervention ideas.

After securing enough feedback on your ideas, some will start to emerge as more valuable than others. It’s likely that your team won’t be able to deliver all the appealing interventions concurrently. However, by working in the open and consulting with your diverse community, you may find ways to divide up ownership and development of complementary interventions between different organisations in the ecosystem, and agree the priority order in which these interventions should be developed.

As a rule of thumb, we recommend prioritising at least one idea that’s easier to deliver, helping you secure credibility and momentum, and at least one that ‘fixes the plumbing’, addressing some of the more entrenched and complex challenges in your system (usually in the high effort, high impact) quadrant.

By now, you’ve got a building movement of people aligned around some key interventions, and the hard work is just beginning. To keep your teams focused and supported by busy senior stakeholders and politicians, it’s vital to make sure you have a clear benefits narrative to meet the needs of each type of ‘key influencer’ for each market-shaping interventions you have prioritised.

You can gather this information during the testing phase. It should include benefits to an average delivery organisation, and to the nation as a whole, including:

• cumulative staff time savings this intervention is expected to deliver
• licensing, subscription and consulting costs saved when the intervention has been adopted
• likely additional benefits to staff and service users and tax payers, like reduced stress and work overload, less people falling into cycles of deprivation, greater ability to provide specific proactive rather services, and reduced costs of reactive services.
• reduced risk to services and Government due to better diversity in the supplier market, or better outcomes for people

See section 4 for more guidance on making the case for change.

• Nesta and BIT’s Test and Learn Playbook for Mission-Driven Government
• We like the intrac model for developing Theories of Change
• HM Treasury guidance on developing a theory of change in the Magenta Book, section 2.2.1
• Doteveryone’s consequence scanning kit

Programmes to re-shape local service markets frequently fail because the case for investment hasn’t been clear enough, or because they’re perceived to be too risky. It’s therefore vital to ensure benefits tracking is owned by someone who can keep it up to date with key stakeholders in mind.

A good rule of thumb is to have a plan to capture impact metrics periodically (at least annually), and to update and reflect on your benefits cases at least as often. To do this, it’s useful to create a shared measurement framework that aligns with your benefits case at the outset and to remind collaborators to send their results through at review time.

During your review, you should look out for:

• evidence of increased interest and adoption
• unintended consequences (positive and negative)
• new barriers to adoption
• impact stories and reflections from those you’re working with, which may or may not have numbers attached
• progress towards a ‘tipping point’ after which the adoption of your interventions should become inevitable (and may therefore justify you shifting your energy elsewhere).

Adoption of new business processes, standards and tools is notoriously hard and slow, due to contract cycles, staff availability and skills, and competing priorities. The sooner you understand how to make the adoption of your interventions easier, the sooner you’ll be able to achieve impact.

Guided by your ongoing impact analysis, it’s vital to nurture a culture of learning, and to act on the lessons learned. Common ways to do this include:

• identifying and supporting champions and early adopters (People often adopt because others like them are doing so)
• making adoption visible with case studies, dashboards and regular showcases
• using existing peer influencers and networks to spread practice
• emphasising lessons learned over rigid delivery targets in updates to the community
• Framing adjustments to your strategy as acting on lessons learned

It’s vital to keep your wider community up to date on progress made and lessons learned. This gives them confidence that change is possible, and helps to drive a steady shift in behaviour long before you’ll be able to measure system-wide benefits.

When properly engaged and involved, an active market-shaping community is the key to successful systemic change, providing evidence for the most important market-shaping interventions, and becoming your early adopters and champions.

Therefore, investing in engagement and community management is vital for ensuring you’re delivering the most valuable interventions, and for maintaining sector confidence that it’s worth working with you.

For many of the most impactful market interventions, like the adoption of new standards or data-sharing protocol, benefits are only realised when a critical mass of organisations has adopted them. For this reason, earning and maintaining widespread trust that you will ‘stay the course’ is essential to truly re-shaping a market.

Systems change is the hardest kind of change, as many different forces tend to reinforce the status quo. Find your peers in other services for solidarity, support and inspiration. Communities like TransformGov’s monthly meet-ups or Apolitical’s Systems’ Thinking in Government are some of the places to start.

Likewise, please Get in touch if you’d like help to think through a digital policy or a systemic public service problem.

• UK AID’s 2019 report Scaling up Social Norms Change describes 5 helpful scaling pathways
• Forum for the Future 2014 resource on scaling impact through social interventions
• Sprint Impact’s scaling model template includes useful prompts for scaling interventions
• Springer Nature’s 2025 academic literature review on scaling science discusses 13 different frameworks relevant to health and social care
• Nesta’s scaling innovation toolkit