No Lab? No worries.

By Nicholas Scott

Public servants are actively responding to the challenge of transforming public organizations to meet the needs of the 21st century. Throughout my experiences across various levels of government and in numerous jurisdictions, I've observed dedicated individuals delivering their utmost effort within outdated, failing systems. Changing bureaucratic organizations can seem like a Sisyphean mission, especially when it feels like we are starting from scratch. But it isn’t. I have had the unique privilege to contribute to these efforts and to support passionate people across many public organizations. Thank goodness for that! Because simply accepting the way things are is not an option.

To seize the opportunities and address the challenges of today’s world, we need to reduce the barriers and blockers of innovation in our public organizations. We need to accelerate the adoption of new tools and practices that increase their innovation capabilities. And we need to do so with humility and reverence for our public institutions. For this reason, I do not advocate a “fail fast and break things” approach to public innovation.

Nobody is truly starting from scratch. Despite the rhetoric, innovation DOES happen in government. It happens against all odds, in pockets and small ways, as public servants find ways to “scheme virtuously.” The goal is for us to move from moments of innovation to a culture of innovation, where public servants and citizens can put new ideas into practice with relative ease and speed.

My Journey

In 2017 I became the first Executive Director of Open Government and Innovation with the Government of New Brunswick. I often joked that I was the leader of the Cubicle of Innovation because, at first, I had no team and no budget but a mandate to “change the culture of government.” I had to bootstrap.

So what is the smallest, cheapest, fastest thing I can do?

The first thing I did was create a half-day workshop called Public Innovation 101. I used this to test the waters and see if I could create demand for innovation, and it worked! Long story short, this workshop kicked off a network of public innovators/designers and led to some innovation projects with borrowed staff. One thing we did to demonstrate the value was to wheel trojan mice into our project. The idea of this approach is to introduce novel approaches to collaboration, citizen engagement, and executive leadership in small, low-risk and inexpensive ways. In one of our first priority projects, we modelled the benefits of an innovation lab by booking an under-utilized boardroom for a 3 month period of co-creating policy solutions with citizens. You might call this scaling deep.

Our scaling-out strategy leveraged challenges. With the support and encouragement of the Premier’s Office, we established the Public Innovation Challenge inspired by our counterparts in PEI and NS. This allowed us to prototype what it looked like for Deputies and ADMs to create demand for innovation. Subsequently, I took a trip to Ottawa with our Clerk to tour various innovative teams, programs and spaces and to see a Deputy Minister’s Innovation Council in practice. Ultimately, this led to the Deputy Minister Public Innovation Council, followed by the Public Innovation Internship Program, which produced the I-Team and a dedicated Innovation Lab. Huzzah! This allowed us to expand our offerings to include Public Innovation 201, design sprints as-a-service, advisory services, co-facilitating large complex projects with departments, and an Innovation “train-the-trainer” known as “301.” My point is that you don’t need a lab or a program budget to create the conditions for innovation in your organization. Heck, you don’t even need a formal strategy!

We did not start with an innovation strategy, program or lab.

Innovation is fundamentally about people. I learned that an innovative mindset and culture can innovate without a strategy. However, an innovation strategy cannot be successfully formulated or implemented without innovative capability, mindset and culture. For this reason, our primary focus was on developing capacity and culture. Later, a strategy would be about scaling what works.

You don't necessarily need a fully equipped lab or a formalized strategy to foster innovation within your organization.

My point is that you don’t need a lab or even a formulated strategy to create the conditions for innovation in your organization. Here are some things you can do to get started.

Organize a unicorn or one-team gov meet-up.

Connection and mutual support are key. Most innovations are the result of networks of people whose ideas come together in ways that combine to form something larger than what they could have produced individually. As innovators in government, we long for how great public service could be. With that longing comes the difficulty of breaking new ground, loneliness and resistance. Something inside of us, a calling to service, won’t allow us to settle because there is a betrayal in “going back.” So we need to support one another. We need to connect and grow networks of other government and non-government innovators. Creating stronger networks between people, ideas, and opportunities is the number one thing we can do to support innovation. Join or organize UNICORN meet-ups or a OneTeamGov community.

Find the Executive Sponsors

So building networks is the bottom-up approach, but what about the top-down? I admit that mobilizing executive support is easier said than done. Interaction with the C-Suite can be rare for most of us, but it happens, and you can make it happen. Perhaps via email, social media DM, at an event or in the elevator. The executive population in your organization has innovators and early adopters just like any other layer. Find out who among them fit the bill and make a connection.

Find the advocates and the supportives in your executive ranks

Experiment with new approaches in scrappy ways.

Find opportunities at the project level to practice and demonstrate the value of innovation, design and collaboration in small, nimble, scrappy ways. This is related to what Jackie Mahendra calls Trojan Mice. These are “tests not built to win wars, but rather to quickly infiltrate new territory, attack new problems, and inform future tactics.”

As Alex Ryan says, “culture change happens faster through collaborative project work than through a culture change initiative.”
What we practise, we become. Organize our collaborative projects in a way that reflects the behaviour and future dynamic of the organization/system we wish to emerge. This is not just about experimenting with solutions that are products, programs, policies or services. This is mostly about experimenting with new ways of acting, organizing and working together. Introducing these little experiments is like planting seeds for a future orchard. To riff off the Greek proverb: If you are starting from scratch in your organization, be prepared to play the long game and plant seeds for trees whose shade you may never sit in.

Engage in and promote opportunities to develop innovation skills.

We build capacity by wielding it. Register for sessions provided by GovLab, InnovateUS, the Canada School for Public Service, the OECD Observatory for Public Sector Innovation, apolitical, States of Change, etc. Better yet, now that you have a growing UNICORN community, invite your colleagues to join you and spend some time reflecting on what you learn together and how you might apply it. Organize your own skill-share, lunch and learn, or show and tell… Perhaps HR wants to help?

Document and share stories of innovation.

Finally, now that you have a growing network of public servants learning, trying and sharing new things - you can begin harvesting some early fruit. Document show-and-tells. Capture these stories and find ways to share them across your organization (and even outside when appropriate). Offer to present what you are learning to colleagues across your organization or even at the management table.

Transformation is also an inward journey.

As mentioned before, this can be a very lonely experience. But as advocates for transformation in government, we have a longing for how great public service could be. Our inner voice says: “The system we inherited, the system I am a part of, I don’t think it’s going to survive in the new world,” and we recognize that we need to re-think how we do things.

We can’t expect that everybody will understand what we are trying to do. If everybody got it, it wouldn’t be new, it wouldn’t be innovation, and it wouldn’t be needed. This also means that we cannot rely on positive reinforcement from the system that we are trying to change. We need to look for other sources of inspiration and other ways of filling our cups, often outside our field.

We don’t have the answers, but we know that there’s a better way, a way that connects more deeply with our humanity. There is anxiety in not knowing the answers. We’re experimenting. We’re exploring. We’re finding our way. Not everybody is going to get it, and it will be lonely from time to time. And you are planting seeds for trees whose shade you may never sit in.

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Lonely and anxious in your innovation journey? I recommend the Rob Bell podcast episode “Hymn for the Curve” anytime you find yourself feeling discouraged.