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Nav 2030
A launch film for the ten-year strategy of the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration
The brief
The brief was five words: HC would like a film. HC is Hans Christian Holte, at the time Labour and Welfare Director, the head of Nav.
A new business strategy was about to launch. Its ambitions for 2030 were clear:
- better support for people on the margins of the labour market
- benefits paid out automatically
- closer cooperation between Nav and the public services around it
The first decision
Strategy documents describe an organisation as it intends to be.
We decided that the film would show what the strategy would mean if we delivered on the ambitions, not for the organisation, but for the people it is for. In Norway that is everyone: nobody gets through life without needing Nav at some point.
That sounds obvious, but it is not. The default for a strategy film is to explain the strategy: the organisation, the people who work there, the scale of the operation, where it is heading. Such a film describes the institution and asks the viewer to imagine the rest. We wanted it the other way round, to show the result and let the strategy be understood from it.
“I’m not very good with books and stuff… Luckily, my supervisor understood right away” Photo: Pernille Sandberg
The device
We let people talk about it in the past tense, as though it had already happened.
Nobody predicts, promises or explains, they recount. A young man says he was never much good with books, and that luckily his adviser understood that straight away. A woman was told she would be getting work assessment allowance, and was so happy when money just turned up in her account.
“I was so happy, when all of a sudden money came into my account” Photo: Pernille Sandberg
The grammar does the work. A promise has to be kept, a memory only has to be told. This way, the 2030 ambitions are not targets, they become things that happened to somebody, and the viewer is placed after them rather than in front of them.
The same logic sets the frame. There is no counter in the film, no queue, no logo on a wall. Nav appears only as something people talk about, which is the correct scale: for the people in the film, Nav is not a building or an institution, but a person who understood, and money that arrived. Two of the accounts come from inside, an adviser describing what he likes about his job, a meeting seen from the doorway. This way the picture is not only of being helped, but of the work that makes the help possible.
“When we all sit down together and make a plan, things start to happen” Photo: Pernille Sandberg
Making it
The film was made with Try. Susanne Falkum Løvik directed and Andreas Lisberg produced. Hanne Røvig Schjold led the project from Nav’s communication department, I was responsible for the concept and creative direction, and we developed the script and ideas with colleagues across the organisation.
Slides from concept description and mood boards
Four years on
The film was first shown when the strategy was launched internally.
Four years on it has not dated. A film that explains a strategy expires with it: the moment the wording changes or the timeline moves, the story is no longer valid. A film made of recollections has nothing to expire. The experiences it describes stay true for as long as the ambitions behind them do. Nav’s ambitions have not changed.
