Chelsea Mauldin and Natalia Radywyl
Public-sector innovation teams are increasingly tasked with addressing complex systemic challenges—including climate adaptation, ageing populations, migration, digital inequity, and democratic trust—within political environments dominated by short-term delivery pressures and election cycles. While futures-oriented approaches are gaining traction in policymaking, many government innovation efforts remain constrained to incremental improvements within immediate administrative timeframes. This workshop introduces a systemic design framework for “dual-timeframe” policy innovation: an approach that enables policymakers and civic designers to simultaneously address present operational needs while laying foundations for longer-term systems transformation.
Drawing on nearly fifteen years of work by the Public Policy Lab with federal, state, and municipal governments in the United States, the session explores the concept of the “next administration future”—a medium-term horizon of approximately 5—12 years that sits between short-term political cycles and abstract “future generations” thinking. The workshop argues that this neglected middle horizon represents a politically feasible and operationally actionable space for systemic innovation.
Participants will be introduced to a five-phase policy innovation model integrating participatory design, human-centred research, experiential futures, and systems-oriented policy development. Through a facilitated card-based activity adapted from the Public Policy Lab’s Public Service Design Kit, participants will collaboratively prototype dual-timeframe approaches to contemporary policy challenges across areas such as climate, migration, housing, education, and digital services.
The workshop contributes to emerging conversations in systemic design about governance, temporality, and transition capacity. Rather than treating futures thinking as speculative work disconnected from implementation realities, the session demonstrates how futures-oriented methods can be embedded directly into operational policymaking processes. Participants will leave with practical tools, conceptual frameworks, and collaborative methods for designing interventions that respond to immediate public needs while building capacity for more regenerative and just futures.
Keywords: policy futures, systemic design, public sector innovation, participatory futures, civic design, dual timeframe innovation