Public Innovation Labs - The New Brunswick Experience
This post contains key lessons for anyone pursuing a public innovation agenda, adapted from a presentation that ShiftFlow team member Nick Scott gave at an IPAC conference on his experience of launching a public innovation lab in New Brunswick.
This story starts with visionary leadership. The Late Honourable Andy Scott had a vision for good governance, for connected government in the 21st century. Andy recognized the public sector's ability to research and design policy was getting weaker, at a time when problems were becoming more complex at a faster pace of change. To deal with these challenges, leaders and practitioners need to be flexible, think about systems, and be open to new ideas - characteristics not usually part of government DNA.
So, in 2009, Andy Scott created the New Brunswick Social Policy Research Network (NBSPRN). The Network was based on a partnership between the Government of New Brunswick, post-secondary institutions, and civil society organizations. The goal was to use a networked governance approach to develop policies based on evidence and citizen engagement.
Networked governance is an approach to problem-solving that seeks to integrate the capacities of external organizations and actors with government.
At first, the Network focused on facilitating cross-sector connections and convening stakeholders. Yet big questions remained:
How do we enable the government to work with its external environment, and collaborate with non-governmental actors to innovate and deliver services?
What are the specific mechanisms and activities to do so effectively?
This is where the notion of innovation labs came in. Like most public and social innovation labs, the methods involve convening multi-stakeholders, applying systems thinking and design thinking, and iteratively prototyping and testing solutions. This is an approach that is best suited for problems that are unclear, where there is uncertainty, solutions are unknown and you need to explore new ideas.
Despite the popular belief that innovation starts with an idea (we believe it starts with the problem), The Network’s process to understand and teach innovation followed these steps:
Problem identification and framing
Critical discussion and reflection
Strategic focus and system thinking
Human-centred design
Methodological and iterative
The first lab - NouLAB - started its journey as a 1st generation lab by facilitating The Academy. The Academy’s purpose was to help public sector staff and stakeholders learn to work together. For a few years, NouLAB Academy worked with cross-sector teams addressing complex challenges such as affordable housing; food security; adult literacy; gender equality; wellness; immigration; and aging.
The initiative then developed into a 2nd generation lab - the Economic Immigration Lab - involving a multi-year effort with a variety of stakeholders aimed at solving a complex challenge linked to immigration.
Some lessons from the Nou Lab process worth sharing:
It’s everyone’s job.
Making innovation work requires everyone to be on board throughout an organization. During a panel discussion at the same conference, David Hume said something to the effect of ‘You can’t scale change without the lawyers and accountants on board’. Our capacity and innovation efforts should not simply reside in a unit or be the cool kids’ club with cool furniture. Everyone is needed to move from chance moments to a culture of innovation.
Labs are primarily about learning.
Christian Bason says that innovation is an iterative learning process — both at systems, organizational, project and individual levels. Labs provide the parallel learning structure bureaucracies can use to continuously improve and adapt to changes in the environment. Crucially, we should be open to sharing those learnings too.
Fiddleheads are significant here as a metaphor for successful innovation labs.
The Scented Path
The spiral shape of fiddleheads represents security, akin to the story of the scented path. You may have noticed that when a dog goes to lay down to sleep it will spiral into their place of rest. This is something that mammals in the wild will do. In the wilderness at night before laying to rest one would walk in a circle to rest, leaving a scented trail around them. When a predator follows this smell in a spiral, it warns the prey and gives them time to escape.
Labs should provide a safe space for its participants to take risks, share ideas and even make mistakes. People should feel in a comfortable environment, and shouldn’t have to worry about their reputation, relationships or career based on what they say in the space.
The Natural Fractal
The fiddlehead is a naturally occurring fractal, which means it contains “self-similar patterns” that repeat in a certain way. It’s like a picture made up of smaller pictures that look the same. As Wired Mag explains:
Ferns are a common example of a self-similar set, meaning that their pattern can be mathematically generated and reproduced at any magnification or reduction. The mathematical formula that describes ferns, named after Michael Barnsley, was one of the first to show that chaos is inherently unpredictable yet generally follows deterministic rules based on nonlinear iterative equations.
Patterns! Iterative! Unpredictable! Nonlinear! Math! The point is this: we need to organize our collaborative projects in a way that reflects the behaviour, patterns and future state of the system that needs to emerge. Labs provide a space and practice to discover and experiment with new ways of working, as well as come up with solutions to public challenges.
Be the change you wish to see in your organization.
(Thanks to Nicefutures for the fiddlehead inspiration back when we were developing NouLAB!)