acti-ivate
The Office of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales needed a train-the-trainer resource that could reach the 330,000 people working across the Welsh public sector, far beyond what their small team could deliver directly. They wanted something trainers could pick up and use with confidence, not another generic compliance module gathering dust on an intranet.
Client: Office of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales
learning design
facilitation
strategic development
environmental communications
What we did
We started by listening. A stakeholder survey and a series of conversations with public body staff revealed the real problem: it wasn't that people didn't know the Act existed, it was that 75% of organisations couldn't help staff connect it to their actual jobs. We used a human-centred design process (empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test) to build from that gap outward, producing Act-ivate: a card-based facilitation toolkit that treats trainers as practitioners with their own expertise, not delivery vehicles for someone else's content.
The research phase surfaced something important: qualitative feedback consistently showed the Act being treated as a tick-box compliance exercise, and people felt overwhelmed and exposed when asked to deliver training on it. That told us the resource had to work differently to everything that had come before. Rather than a single scripted programme, we designed a modular card deck: the cards needed to be flexible enough for a half-day away-day in Powys and a lunch-hour slot in a Cardiff procurement team meeting. A digital diagnostic tool sorts trainers into their own pathway before, making the experience specific to each trainer’s needs.
The difference it made
Act-ivate gives Welsh public sector trainers a resource that respects what they already know and works with the constraints they actually face. The longer game is scale: a self-sustaining network of confident trainers who no longer need the Commissioner's office in the room to make the Act real in their organisations.
