# Phase 2: Navigation–Policy design, delivery and management

The goal of this phase is to start implementing and realising the policy intention, starting with the options and authority established in preparation, with a proactive and continuously evolving approach to the design, development, implementation and optimisation of policy instruments and interventions. The policy team should be authorised and capable of taking a “portfolio” approach to policy management, which enables the ability to scale up and down different policy interventions over time based on what is effective. The portfolio approach is complemented by adaptive policy management, to continuously innovate and explore new potential interventions, and to confidently and measurably drive the intended policy outcome.
2.1 Establish
Now that we are into policy navigation, we need to ensure we have a suitably skilled, motivated and multi-disciplinary policy team with an expanded advisory group to help review, oversee and govern how the policy is implemented in the real world. A good policy team would purposefully incorporate the “design and delivery” capabilities critical for adaptive and innovative policy navigation, because the original intent and aspects of the policy are never fully tested until implementation begins.
Thus, the delivery of the policy provides an opportunity to test the policy design and approach in a real world context, and begin adapting as the inevitable unexpected consequences emerge.
The policy team also needs to establish a regular reporting and showcase cadence (to demonstrate progress, share insights and test ideas with stakeholders), and to establish a baseline and monitoring of policy success measures. This is also a good time to establish feedback loops (staff, public, partners, stakeholders) so that any expertise and experience can be leveraged, and unintended impacts have a chance of being identified and mitigated in a timely manner.

Finally, the policy team need to establish a programmatic approach that maintains proportionality in resourcing and capacity for:
1. implementing policy interventions/solutions
2. monitoring, measuring and continual evaluation of policy efficacy
(see the Continual Policy Evaluation chapter)
3. continuous exploration, engagement and experimentation with new policy interventions that keep pace with change, and adapt to new threats and opportunities.
If the policy team is unable to maintain all three of these activities, they run the risk of policy stagnation, decreasing policy efficacy and the inability to identify, manage or mitigate any positive or negative unintended impacts
2.2 Policy management: Continuous monitoring, testing, design and iteration
When thinking about adaptive policy management, we need to shift from the idea that what you’re aiming to do is apply the policy positions developed in Phase 1 with absolute blind fidelity. Instead, you should treat
Phase 1 as a starting point, which will necessarily need to be adapted and updated as the policy design and interventions interact with the real world.
You should begin by implementing the best evidenced policy intervention(s) identified in your policy preparation.
Implementation should be supported by a process which involves regular engagement with policy authorities, stakeholders and affected parties to guide and prioritise improvements throughout the policy lifecycle. This process should also monitor for performance, user satisfaction, policy intent and any unintended impacts (human, environmental, societal, etc).
The feedback that emerges should drive continuous improvement of all policy interventions, and could perhaps be further supported by regular review with advisory group(s), stakeholders and policy actors, with a cadence suitable to the policy, for example annually.

The policy team should proactively measure and regularly review the effectiveness of different policy interventions, and how effectively the policy purpose is being met, with options to scale different or new policy interventions up and down as needed over the life of the policy. New options for policy interventions will emerge over time, so the policy team need enough authority and delegated decision making to pursue, implement and adapt policy interventions as required.
For new regulation or legislation, involve people who are likely to have to implement the legislation or regulations in their organisations and business systems. A digital economy needs digital rules, and if public institutions don’t provide a digital reference implementation of those rules, then public servants are asking and expecting those who need to implement the rules to figure it out for themselves. This creates inefficiency, inconsistency, a “minimum viable compliance” approach, and an inequity issue, where large organisations can better afford to comply than small to medium sized organisations. If you take an approach that simultaneously drafts in both human and machine readable
(computer code) formats, you can produce better rules that are actionable and more effective by ensuring clarity where consistency is important
(prescriptive rules) and judgement where it is actually useful (principles based rules). This process should result in an authoritative human readable draft of the legislation/regulation to take to the Parliament, as well as a reasonably reliable reference implementation for testing and for ease of adoption by relevant entities, resulting in streamlined compliance by policy consumers. For more information on digital drafting, please see the “Better Rules: rules as code” chapter.
2.3 Finalisation: Policy change or closure
The policy team should have a regular cadence of reviewing the policy effectiveness with policy authorities, stakeholders and those affected, and where significant changes to purpose or authority are identified, the policy may need to return to phase 1 policy definition and decision making. Where individual policy interventions are found to be no longer effective or to have unacceptable consequences, they should be scaled down or stopped.