The Human Compass
A reflective framework that brings into view what can slip out of sight when systems, procedures and policy take the lead, and that makes room to weigh human experience again.
How can government keep doing justice to people, even as systems grow more complex and digitalisation accelerates?
Where it chafes
Policy is made with care. There are frameworks, assessments and evaluations to anticipate its effects. And yet it sometimes stays out of sight how a rule plays out in a person’s life. Not only on its own, but together with all the other rules that land there too.
Every organisation sees a part. The municipality sees a provision, the health insurer a reimbursement condition, the implementing agency a case file. Each piece is correct. No one sees the whole. That is how a person can disappear from view: in the space between a service granted on paper and the reality behind the front door.
Each part may add up. Together, it doesn’t.
What the Human Compass is
The Human Compass is a reflective vision for administrators, policymakers and professionals. It helps reveal where policy, implementation and systems chafe against lived experience, and brings that experience back to where decisions are made. Not as an extra layer of control, but as an invitation to pause and consider what decisions do to people.
It starts from values already embedded in public administration: human dignity, justice, autonomy, care, connectedness, trust, equality and responsiveness.
What it is and what it isn’t
It is
- A shared language for humanity in policy.
- A form of early warning, so that small frictions become visible before they grow into large problems.
- Normative in its values, not prescriptive in its outcomes.
It isn’t
- An audit, checklist, score or quality mark.
- Not a new test alongside existing policy frameworks, and not a way to justify decisions after the fact.
How it looks
The Human Compass does not start from a policy file, but from people and what policy does in their lives. One story is not proof. But when you place the experiences of different people side by side, together with what is already known from implementation and data, you see what keeps coming back. A letter that deters. A digital process that excludes. Support that falls away at a transition. Rules that work against each other.
It is not a one-off test, but a recurring movement: seeing, interpreting and adjusting. And then looking again, because every adjustment is a new assumption.
Policy proves itself in the lives where it lands.
Working with the Human Compass
Starting soonDesign exploration
I am looking for two organisations that want to explore with me what happens when people’s lives are given a permanent place in policy. Small-scale, temporary and focused on learning. Not a pilot that has to succeed, but an exploration in which failure also teaches.
Those who share their story keep control over what they tell, receive appropriate compensation and hear back what was done with their contribution.
Would you like to do one of the two explorations with your organisation? Get in touch. You’ll hear from me as soon as the first explorations begin.
Get in touchRead more
The essay Beste beleidsmaker ("Dear policymaker"), a letter to those who can help close the gap between policy and life, will appear in the November issue of the Dutch magazine Publiek Denken.
About the author
Manuela Fun has a background in journalism and worked for many years as an independent communications professional before coming to know government from the inside. She brings that double perspective, from outside and from within, together in the Human Compass.