GILD: Government Innovation, Leadership, and Design
What is GILD?
Drawing on inspiration from the origins of traditional guilds consisting of groups of craftsmen in pursuit of a common goal, the Federation of American Scientists’ (FAS) Government Innovation, Leadership and Design (GILD) offers a suite of innovation trainings aimed at radically improving policy design and service delivery across government.
Our mission is to activate government and policy change makers through training, community, and tools. We envision a future where innovation is embedded into the culture of government and public policy to radically improve services and build public trust.
Why GILD?
Are you a public servant who has good ideas that never seem to see the light of day? Do you lead a team of great public servants who want to improve programs but don’t know where to start? If this sounds like you—a passionate public servant with a burning desire to make a difference—you’ve come to the right place.
We offer open classes several times a year, tailored classes for agencies or teams who want to learn by tackling their organization’s issues, and other solutions right for you. Join our vibrant community of government change makers and be a part of a dynamic network of individuals who are driving innovation, improving services, and transforming the public sector.
GILD’s Virginia Hamilton leading a Innovation and Design in the Public Sector workshop.
Our Craft
Our team of experts bring over five decades of experience designing, building and executing programs in and with the government. GILD trainings center on building capacities across innovation, leadership and design to support and build a connected network of change makers in government.
Experiential training delivering best practices grounded in the public sector — we deliver impactful experiential workshops aimed at diverse civil servants spanning concepts across innovation, design and leadership grounded in the practice of delivering work in government.
Access to interactive online training, resources, and toolkits — through an online platform that provides consistent access to resources and people that support change makers on their journey to transform services within government.
Knitting together a network of public sector change makers — what makes the entire suite of GILD trainings truly unique among other innovation training is that it is designed with government to teach within the context of the constraints, regulations, and cultures of federal, state, and local government.
Course Offerings
Innovation and Design in the Public Sector
State government is full of civil servants at all levels who care deeply about their mission and implementing changes—big and small—that make a difference in policies, programs, and services for Americans. The key is having a toolkit of innovative approaches to address challenges, respond to opportunities, and take people on the change journey in an inclusive manner.
The foundational GILD course, “Innovation and Design in the Public Sector,” is experiential, engaging, and extremely practical for participants to immediately apply the learning to their jobs. It is also accessible and tailor-made to meet the needs of each audience, whether they need the full curriculum or just specific components in either live, hybrid, or online formats.
The 6 day in-person class (which is typically divided into separate 2 or 3 day sessions over 6 to 8 weeks) equips participants with foundational skills and tools, including problem framing, design thinking, stakeholder and empathy interviews, personas, and journey mapping. Programmatic elements of the course include:
- Learning the craft of designing and facilitating great meetings and events;
- Gaining skill and practice in understanding how to influence large agencies to improve policies and programs;
- Instruction and modeling of innovation, design, and leadership tools in practice;
- Exercises to utilize behavioral science and data to improve programs and policies;
- Interactive speaker sessions from a diverse array of experts across government;
- Opportunities to workshop innovative solutions for current challenges in the workplace
HCDX: Human Centered Design Experiential Training
The White House issued an Executive Order focused on customer experience across all agencies receiving federal funding, creating an imperative for government programs to be infused with customer engagement and feedback systems that include customers in the design of policies, programs, and processes. Yet agencies and civil servants lack the training, mindsets and access to resources to best support the execution of their mandate.
At its core, Human Centered Design (HCD), also known as Design Thinking, is a method to solve problems that puts people at the center and aims to design solutions that address the needs of those end users. It creates a better chance of designing solutions in innovative, unexpected, and creative ways. Since the public is at the core of what government does, especially in local and state agencies, considering customer needs is crucial to delivering good government services.
The Human Centered Design Exchange (HCDX) is an immersive program with training and coaching to create customer-focused services to meet the needs of government customers. This 7 day (remote) or 5 day (in-person) class, which is delivered in 2 or 3 day sessions over 6 to 10 weeks, allows participants to master HCD by tackling real world problems. This can entail a change your agency would like to make in its interactions with customers (e.g., improve take up rates in government programs), or an internal project that forwards an agency agenda (e.g., increase collaboration between siloed departments). Divided into smaller teams, participants learn to frame problems, do customer research, reframe problems based on insights from real customers, and develop ideas to prototype and test.
Participants in HCDX will:
- Learn about and practice the method and processes in design thinking and other innovation strategies;
- Work to improve customer experience and outcomes for their own staff and the end customer;
- Connect with and learn from other participants; and
- Learn by working on a real problem resulting in a prototype that can be tested at the end of the program.
Other programmatic elements of the course include:
- Comprehensive design work and coaching on innovation to improve processes, functions, structure and outcomes;
- Participatory facilitation training as an innovation tool;
- 5 Community of Practice (CoP) sessions for participants to learn from each other and stay connected as they move into implementation;
- Project evaluation to assess investments;
- Documentation and capturing of stories throughout the process including challenges and successes through implementation.
Outcomes
Government change makers who have participated in the full suite of GILD training offerings will be able to:
- Design with the customer in mind to strategize and solve problems;
- Understand implementation models to improve program design and operations;
- Understand how to use Behavioral Insights for change;
- Diffuse and use innovation tools to do better and act faster;
- Assume the role of a policy entrepreneur;
- Apply new mindsets and methodologies to their work to create a culture of learning that encourages enthusiasm;
- Learn how to recognize psychological safety and how to encourage it;
- Learn how to design and facilitate effective meetings;
- Increase the potential of getting ideas into action in bureaucracies;
- Use storytelling for influence;
- Develop a mindset of continuous improvement, and learn how adapting to new circumstances can be an important habit; and
- Forge deeper and more trusted relationships with a like-minded set of change makers.
This training is set up to be experiential—learning by doing. Participants will be actively iterating, learning, and practicing design thinking and other approaches to innovation.