Government-as-a-Platform: Three mindsets for the Reglab

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Government is often the largest employer, funder, and influencer in any society. As such, we should be questioning and experimenting with the idea that:

“The government’s role, whereby government entities are no longer mere operational units, but rather centers for planning the future and catalyzing global innovation” - H.H. Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum. 

The purpose of this new series is to explore the possible answers to how we make the shift from government-as-a-provider to government-as-a-platform. This includes the existing and ideal future functions of government as well as the creation of practical support, models, solutions, programmes, and entities to enable these new functions.

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In the previous post, I talked about how Reglab is an example of turning governments’ problems into a platform. I also talked about how you cannot truly disrupt an industry without disrupting the regulation at some point. In this post, I outline three mindsets that are at the core of the Reglab’s design. Namely, #speed, #co-creation, and #scale.

Before examining each of the three mindsets in detail, it’s important to talk about their interplay. One could argue that you may often find two of these without the third. You can have speed (move fast) and co-creation (with lots of partners), but your idea won’t be scalable. It won’t be scalable because you made too many compromises along the way. You can also have scale (go big) and speed (go fast), but this won’t be through co-creation as it’s easier done alone. Finally, you can have co-creation and scale, but this will be much slower.

The reality is that there needs to be a common-sense approach when deciding on the balance between each new regulation along these three dimensions. Too often we see regulation take many years to develop, lost in ‘what-ifs’, rather than learning by doing, and when it is launched it’s out of date very quickly. Or, we see regulation patchworks where regulations from different regulators contradict each other, because they were developed in a bubble. 

Now, let’s look at how each of these mindsets solves a specific problem.

#Speed: One problem that the Reglab is seeking to address is that government regulations can take years to change. With disruption taking hold in every industry, the rate of change is exponentially higher, and governments are always playing catch up. Alternatively, the speed of regulation can be incredibly fast, without a full understanding of the implications. The consequences of this can be as dire as moving too slowly.

What is required is to focus not just on the content of the regulation, but also on the speed of the regulation change. 

Of course, a Reglab is not a place where entire swathes of regulation would be changed overnight. When you think of autonomous mobility, it touches on a thousand-and-one regulations, from insurance and justice to car licences, and more. Reglab’s end goal is to change all these regulations,  by first giving ‘regulation-breaks’ to specific-use cases, creating the potential of greater momentum to shift other regulations.

Without a ‘regulation-break’ we would expect to see too much speed of change in the machinery of government.

The goal is to create stories, fast. Stories that show, not tell, what is possible. Stories of what actually happens when innovation and real-world context meet.  

#Co-creation: If you’re developing an app, it can be tested in the market relatively quickly, and the market will tell you if you’re on the right path. However, there are many technologies within autonomous mobility, space, commercial flights and similar fields, where you can only test in isolation. Unfortunately, this is far removed from testing it within the real-world market.

To address these concerns, the Reglab allows organisations a closer, but still limited, engagement with the real-world market. This is best achieved through co-creation.

The term co-creation is now well established in everyday business language. Yet, all too often, we see that co-creation is something that is just tagged on at the end. That’s why it’s important for co-creation to be a central design pillar, which is integrated into every stage of the Reglab operating model.

It involves inviting others to be involved in the decision making at all stages, from creating demand, designing, developing, testing, and iterating on.

But, co-creation can slow you down. The phrase ‘too many cooks’ comes to mind. To fight against this, each stage of the Reglab process has been set specific timeline criteria in order to ensure things are moving along the funnel.

#Scale:  The Reglab is not necessarily a place where technologies are scaled. It’s a place to answer the question of what happens when technology meets the real world, and to scale the potential impact of those technologies.

The aim is not scale regulations themselves (make them bigger), but scale the innovation they enable.  

There are at least three different views of how Reglab enables scale:

●      Scaling learning: Co-creation, as outlined above, enables us to scale learning. The purpose of this learning is that we can start to regulate more for the times that things don’t go right rather than the times when they do. As Spotify’s CEO neatly summarises, their job is to scale mistakes. Or, as Jeff Bezos says, “failure needs to scale too”. Traditional processes and structures are too frequently designed to avoid all failures altogether, rather than to minimise them.

●      Scaling risks: In lieu of risk avoidance, management, reduction, and perseverance, the Reglab is a place for scaling risks in a manageable way.

●      Scaling access:  While a regulation break initially applies to just a handful of entities, the goal of the ‘Democratise’ phase of the Reglab is to foster scaling to many more entities across the ecosystem. 

In summary, these three mindsets ensure that the Reglab proactively anticipates and develops future legislation to govern the application of emerging technologies with the potential to add profound value to humanity.