Client
A mid-sized local government organisation responsible for community services, infrastructure planning, and long-term regional development.
Challenge
The organisation was facing increasing pressure to make faster, more defensible decisions on complex community issues. These included:
- Conflicting stakeholder priorities
- Budget constraints
- Long-term infrastructure trade-offs
- Public trust and consultation fatigue
Traditional consultation and planning methods were slow, expensive, and often reactive. Leaders were concerned that decisions were being made with incomplete visibility of second and third-order impacts.
They needed a way to safely test policy and investment options before committing real-world resources.
Approach
The organisation partnered with Ministry of Insights to pilot Civic Lab, a simulation-based decision environment designed to model realistic community, economic, and behavioural outcomes.
Working with internal subject matter experts, Ministry of Insights:
- Built a digital “civic twin” to reflect the region’s demographics, economic settings, and service pressures
- Created scenario models for policy, funding, and infrastructure options
- Simulated stakeholder behaviours, public sentiment shifts, and operational strain
- Stress-tested decisions across time horizons ranging from 1 to 10 years
Rather than predicting a single future, Civic Lab generated multiple plausible futures and risk profiles.
Outcomes
Within the pilot, the organisation was able to:
- Identify high-risk decisions before implementation
- See unintended consequences earlier in the policy lifecycle
- Prioritise investments with stronger long-term value
- Improve internal alignment between strategy, finance, and operational teams
- Strengthen the confidence of elected members and executives
One significant insight was how small policy design changes dramatically altered public trust and service uptake over time. These insights would have been invisible through traditional planning methods.
Value Delivered
The Civic Lab approach delivered:
- Faster decision cycles without sacrificing rigour
- Reduced rework and policy reversals
- Greater transparency in how decisions were tested and validated
- A safer environment to explore politically or socially sensitive scenarios
The pilot demonstrated that simulation-based governance can significantly reduce risk while improving the quality of public outcomes.
Why It Worked
This pilot was successful because:
- Human expertise remained central to all decisions
- AI was used as a testing and insight engine, not a replacement for judgment
- The focus stayed on decision confidence, not automation
