If you are trying to solve a problem you’ve identified within your council, you should test your idea to get evidence before you commit to a solution.

Creating a hypothesis around a possible solution helps to make improvements, small or large, by providing a way to test an assumption. This way, you’ll know if your hypothesis is true, meaning you can make informed decisions on your next steps.

When to make a hypothesis

You can make a hypothesis to explore solutions for a simple or moderate problem within your services.

If you’ve not looked into the reasons why something is happening, get to the root cause of a problem. You can do this before you think of possible ideas to fix it.

This approach also helps to make a case for experimenting with new ideas, showing decision makers the benefits of testing small-scale changes before full implementation.

How to make a hypothesis

It’s best to make your hypothesis in a group setting, like a workshop. This way you can gather diverse insights and agree on next steps.

Follow these steps:

  1. Make a hypothesis to test your idea – define your ideas for a possible solution.
  2. Decide how you’re going to test it – this is where you plan how to test your idea before you commit to the change.

Start by discussing the root cause of a problem and potential fixes.

For example, residents might be unable to get their single person discount after someone moves out of their home on the website. This may be because the reporting form doesn’t allow changes online. A possible idea to test may be to use a more flexible platform.

A hypothesis and testing statement could be:

‘We want to trial rebuilding our single person discount form using a low code platform. We think this will enable us to make changes more easily because we’ll have open source code.

We’ll test our idea by prototyping the service and trialling it with service users. We’ll measure how easily they can complete the task. Our hypothesis will be true if the service works.’

Repeat if you need to explore several hypotheses.

Focus on the users

Consider how the ideas you’d like to test meet the needs of the people experiencing the problems you’re trying to fix.

You can find out about your users through research. If you don’t have access to a researcher, you may be able to get information on your users by:

  • looking at any feedback gathered through surveys and focus groups ​​
  • listening to calls with users
  • looking at existing website data or using search tools, such as Google Trends​​, to see what users are looking for
  • in-person observations of frontline staff, such as customer services​​

What you can do next

Once you have identified your hypothesis that you want to start testing, think of ways to keep everyone engaged and accountable.

You can recreate this resource in a format that suits you.

Part 1 – make a hypothesis to test your idea

  1. Create a table or a list of three questions to answer during the workshop.
  2. Start by asking ‘What action might help the root cause of the problem?’
  3. Then ask ‘What will the actions achieve?’
  4. Continue and ask ‘Why will it do that?’
  5. Take the answers to write a hypothesis. Use the format ‘By doing…We think that…Because…’

Part 2 – decide how you’re going to test it

  1. Create another table or list for three questions to answer during the workshop.
  2. Start by asking ‘How can you test your hypothesis?’
  3. Then ask ‘What can you measure?’
  4. Continue and ask ‘What will the results mean?’
  5. Take the answers from part 2 to define how you could test your hypothesis. Follow the format ‘We’ll test our idea by…We’ll measure…Our hypothesis will be true if…’