What role could AI play in tackling complex issues?

AI offers a powerful and fast way to filter global best practice. Here we look at how local authorities could use the technology to make agile process on complex issues.

A Welsh local authority and housing association have been working together with a company called Pivot Projects, together with Dr Jonathan Huish, iESE Associate, to seek new ways to tackle homelessness with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Pivot Projects, set up at the start of the pandemic, brought together more than 400 thought leaders across the world with the aim of finding solutions to social, economic and environmental problems. Kevin Bygate, who works with Pivot Projects, said the organisation was conceived to make faster progress with world issues. One of the tools behind it is an AI engine, Spark Beyond, which allows users to ask big problems and seek potential pivot points based on data available worldwide.

To work well, engagement and change management is needed in conjunction with the AI tool. For this reason, Pivot Projects approached Dr Jonathan Huish and Dr Amanda Milliner, iESE Associates, who introduced the concept to Welsh Government. “We went to the Welsh Government to say we have this amazing technology linked to mind maps created from the collective minds of more than 400 thought leaders that looks at system change and the notion that we can’t keep tweaking things, we need to make bold strides and find key pivot points to make that change happen properly,” said Dr Huish.

“Kevin and the team introduced the platform and the director from Welsh Government was so impressed that she called another meeting quickly so that we could show her in more depth how that would work. There was a drive in Wales to tackle homelessness during Covid, so we jointly posed the question of how we might tackle homelessness in Wales, creating the need to find a Local Authority and Housing Association to work with and explore this in a grounded way. Within a week we were all sat down in a virtual room and they were all signed up at various levels to support working through this as a process,” he explained.

The two organisations, Trivallis Housing Association and Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council, were asked to commit to six sessions in a short time frame because the idea is that the work is done quickly, some recommendations are made, ideas are implemented in a small way and then these are learnt from and iterated. All sessions took place online. At the first session attendees were asked to come up with 50 words which defined the problem of homelessness. A facilitator inputs the words and the mind map captures the human collective intelligence. The words, which are referred to as nodes, are linked to Wikipedia to provide a defined meaning which can be checked, agreed or altered, if necessary, by participants.

Dr Huish said the tool was useful to build consensus on the issues involved, especially when more than one organisation is present: “In a partnership meeting everyone produces evidence that supports their own perceptions of challenges and approach. What the AI platform will do is give you a neutral evidence base for what you are looking at. It gives you a more non-contested starting point for dialogue,” he explains.

It can also widen the viewpoint beyond the experts sat in the room. “Using the technology, you can gather experts from around the world to work on a problem and capture their thoughts on a visual map and it gets you a definition consensus which is already very revealing in itself,” explains Kevin Bygate. “From there is we start plugging it into the bigger maps that we created with our 400 experts. The human brain can’t comprehend that but an AI interrogation machine can.”

In addition to linking to already embedded mind maps from the thought leaders and other Spark Beyond users, the AI machine searches the internet globally for results, including videos, references, press articles, case studies and peer-reviewed academic research from around the world. In the case of homelessness, a google search returns 176m results. Reading them at rate of one page per minute would take six years.

“Using the AI is a bit like having a large cohort of PHD students all working in parallel,” explains Bygate from Pivot Projects. “You don’t have to start from zero, there is lots of stuff out there and this allows you to find it.”

In this case, for example, Spark Beyond found a complete map of a model from Canada where they had been working on the problem of homelessness for more than a decade. In this way it can allow users to reach out and make links worldwide. Using the AI, the participants can see the virtuous and vicious circles and come up with proposed interventions. In this case, one thing highlighted was that there were more than 30 third-sector organisations situated geographically close together working on homelessness. A recommendation that came from that was to get the individual to own their own data stored in the cloud and start to join up the efforts of the organisations. “There are distinct things that are starting to be done between the two organisations, separately and jointly as a result of the engagement,” said Dr Huish.

“We got to the point where we had three pivots. What we left them thinking about was maybe finding some graduates to write an app, pick a small area and try it,” Bygate added. “It is highly likely to be an iterative process. If it is a simple problem, you don’t use this method because it would be like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, you use this to solve wicked complex problems that are multicausal and therefore you are never going to have one, two, three steps and you solve the problem. The approach is work to quickly, get some momentum, come up with some recommendations, implement them quickly, in the first instance in a small way, see what happens to the system, learn from it and iterate. The speed and the momentum are important.”

Ian Thomas, CEO at Trivallis Housing Association, said the experience of working with the AI platform was unique for the organisation: “With a group of others, including innovators, local authority representatives and data analysts, we set out to look at how homelessness could be understood and how we could potentially develop new solutions locally by understanding global data and the effectiveness of already existing solutions and services.

“The experience was rewarding, and the results surprising in many aspects. Artificial Intelligence tools with such powerful capability to capture and analyse high data are clearly going to have a place in how organisations, communities and societies will develop both understanding and solutions to problems in the future. The outcomes shed light upon the complexities and complications inherent in contemporary approaches to homelessness. The outcomes were clear in many areas around how services should be organised earlier to attempt prevention, but also shed light on the most effective interventions. This means that our role as a largescale social housing provider working in conjunction with the local authority homeless team will change to look at solutions to homelessness prevention and provision in the future.”

Amanda Milliner heralded this new and agile way of working, describing this agile approach as wonderful to see in local government and public service organisations. “It has introduced a new or adapted way of working for local authorities, which is at pace. The commitment we ask for at the beginning of a project is for weekly sessions with engagement and activity in between to input into and build the mind maps, which feels a different way of working for local authorities.”

One thing future projects will look to include is input from people with lived experience of the situation. “Every organisation says they do community engagement but the number who do it well are few and far between so it is about instructing a real community engagement piece that fits around this where the community can see when they are being interviewed that the mind maps are dynamically changing,” Dr Milliner added.

Impressed by the results, the Welsh Government has asked to look at the problem of decarbonisation in the same way. “The feedback that we have had is that looking at a similar issue took the same local authority two-and-a-half years to get where we have with homelessness in five weeks. The model gives strength to process and will have impact on the ground by allowing organisations to be cognisant for the first time of the vicious and virtual circles,” Dr Huish added.

•To find out more about how iESE and Pivot Projects are partnering to use AI as part of a community enablement tool, see the news piece on page 2: https://issuu.com/ksagency.co.uk/docs/iese_transform_027_design_principles_online_issue_