The Government That Unlearns Fastest Wins: Bootstrapping Public Innovation and the Strategic Value of Labs
By Nick Scott, ShiftFlow CEO & Principal Consultant
“OMG I’m so glad this position exists!”
“Your job is to change government? Good luck with that!”
These are examples of the polarizing comments I heard when accepting a position in the Government of New Brunswick (GNB) as the Executive Director of Open Government and Innovation. My mission was to catalyze open government, grow our innovation capacity, and cultivate culture change. For anyone who may find themselves with a similarly daunting mission, I want to share some of my thinking, the progress we made as a team between 2017 and 2020 and how we did it through a blend of executive backing, a prototype-driven ethos, grassroots momentum, and an emergent strategy.
The transition from traditional governance to a culture of openness and innovation isn't just a matter of policy change; it's a paradigm shift. One of my favourite adages to come out of entrepreneurship in the last decade is that in a rapidly changing world, “the company that learns fastest wins” (Eric Ries). It’s one of those perspectives that strikes you as evident when you hear it but are not widely subscribed to in practice. The ability of an organization to learn quickly is fundamental to success. This is more critical to success for the government than it is for the private sector. As I am sure you have heard before, “Governments cannot afford to operate like a Blockbuster in a Netflix world.”
In charting our course at GNB, we drew inspiration and practical lessons from the CityMakers initiative in Dubai, MindLab in Denmark, and The Natural Step and CoLab in Alberta, to name a few. These examples demonstrated the power of placing citizens at the heart of service design, utilizing human-centred design principles, and preparing government services for future challenges through agility and adaptability.
So, at GNB, we saw an opportunity to achieve a step change. But to succeed, we needed to create the conditions for success. To do that, we had to figure out how to:
Attract, retain, and refresh innovation talent, problem solvers and public leaders.
Change how we view government services and challenges.
Source more, better, and uncommon ideas to solve public problems.
Develop the ability to test ideas for desirability, feasibility, viability, and impact.
Find new approaches to develop, scale, and accelerate what works.
Foster an engaged, networked, and boundaryless public service.
Build a greater capacity to use new tools and techniques with an awareness of selecting the right tool for the job.
Here are my reflections on how we went about figuring this out.
Year One: Exploring the strategic context and forming a community of interest
The first year was largely about exploration. We sought opportunities for change, started developing a common language for innovation, and connected with long-time public servants committed to change. We aimed to begin developing a network of interest in public innovation - identifying those public servants already working differently or with a desire to work differently. We also provided opportunities for around 300 public servants to apply new tools through various activities, including:
Using Innovation Week to highlight and connect innovators across the province.
Making Opportunities Summits more participatory and transparent.
Testing a Public Innovation 101 workshop to develop a common innovation language.
Offering Executive Training to help senior staff make better decisions when presented with problems requiring innovation.
Launching a Public Innovation Challenge for staff to work differently and solve public problems collectively.
Demonstrating the value of co-creation and a collaborative space through the Craft Alcohol Policy Lab.
Year Two: Starting up and forming a community of practice
We quickly learned that the government had A LOT of untapped innovation potential. Despite its reputation, innovation in the public sector isn’t always a supply problem. The organization’s executive level needs to create the demand to pull on the supply. In January 2018, inspired by the Governments of Canada and British Columbia, we created an ad hoc Deputy Minister Public Innovation Council (DMPIC) consisting of deputies who proactively reached out for support in building innovation capacity in their departments. This council identified priorities requiring innovation, learned about innovation practices, removed barriers and allocated resources needed, and oversaw progress on our activities. The Council aimed to create demand for innovation and signal its importance. Alongside DMPIC, we designed several mutually reinforcing initiatives to spread, support, and sustain innovation in the New Brunswick government.
The Public Innovation Challenge showcased the innovation capabilities within our public service and strengthened them through networking, training and experiential learning. It helped us better support ‘everyday innovation’ and leverage the collective intelligence of existing public servants. In many ways, this initiative served as a prototype for an incubation program and had the potential to evolve into what Christian Bason calls “a common political-administrative platform” for addressing strategic innovation needs.
The Public Innovation Internship Program was launched in 2018 to grow GNB's innovation talent pool. We reimagined the staffing lifecycle from finding to growing talent, drawing inspiration from the GC Free Agent Program, GC Entrepreneurs, Talent Cloud, and the NESTA Innovation competency framework. Finally, working with Alongside we developed a novel job ad and agile social media campaign to recruit recent graduates into the public service. The end result was a multidisciplinary group of 10 new staff; five of which were placed in departments while the other five made up the complement for an innovation team (the i-Team).
The i-Team consisted of systems thinkers, engagement architects, designers, facilitators and data scientists. Collectively this team developed its capacity and that of other public servants in a variety of fields such as citizen engagement, systems mapping, behavioural insights, strategic foresight, human-centred design, prototyping and data science. The i-Team also developed a means of supporting strategic innovation projects.
The Innovation Lab was a combination of developing innovation practice and a physical collaboration space (without beanbag chairs). In 2018 the DMPIC selected three strategic innovation challenges and assigned cross-departmental teams to explore the problems and test solutions. Support was provided by the i-Team, including a five-day design sprint facilitated by NouLab, to produce three innovation proposals based on the challenges.
Year Three: Realized Strategy and testing a platform for strategic innovation
Perhaps our most potent tool was the strategic utilization of labs—dedicated spaces for experimentation and innovation. These labs weren't just physical spaces but incubators for ideas, collaboration, and rapid learning. They provided the infrastructure for what I consider 'bootstrapping public innovation'—leveraging minimal resources for maximum innovation impact.
The lab came into its stride in year three and lived through an election. The unit was moved from the Executive Council Office to Corporate Services at Finance and Treasury Board and renamed Innovation and Design Services. That year, we reached hundreds of GNB staff and contributed to initiatives addressing mobility, literacy, second language acquisition, natural resource development, municipal reform, and child protection. The team led a research project through the pandemic to capture lessons from the novel ways the public service responded to the pandemic.
To be continued?
In 2021 I accepted an assignment with the Digital Academy at the Government of Canada and soon after the Innovation Lab closed. Sadly, it wasn’t the only innovation lab that was shuttered. The Helsinki Design Lab, Alberta’s CoLab, The Aotearoa New Zealand Service Innovation Lab, and the MArS Solution Lab have all ceased operations in recent years. Many such initiatives do not survive political or executive leadership changes, and NB is not immune to this dynamic. Consequently, these types of initiatives have fairly predictable ebbs and flows. That is not to say we’ve seen the last of innovation labs.
The success of any government in the 21st century hinges on its ability to foster an environment where rapid learning, strategic innovation, and cultural transformation are encouraged and embedded in its operations. The evolution of public sector innovation labs, from their inception to rebirth, highlights the continued need for spaces that foster safe-to-fail experimentation and multi-sectoral, multi-disciplinary collaboration. Large enterprises need an environment and methodology for facilitating medium—and long-term collaboration, networking, and testing new ideas and ways of working. Lab-like initiatives serve as a mechanism for organizations to safely explore the world beyond their dependent path, unlearn behaviours that no longer service and chart a new course.
If you are someone who is getting a “kick” at the proverbial innovation “can” in government, I recommend planning for three annual cycles and incorporating what we learned in the NB example. Take inspiration from the Berkana two loops: identify the innovators in the system, build a network and community of practice, facilitate the demonstration of alternatives, share successes and lessons widely, grow in influence, and celebrate the behaviours you wish to see more of through an annual awards ceremony.
Riffing on Eric Ries’ quote, in the context of changing organizational behaviour, you could say: The government that unlearns fastest wins. The government needs to unlearn the outdated modes of New Public Management and accelerate learning the necessary capabilities for the Networked age. This must happen at the individual, departmental and system levels to address today’s challenges. The strategic-systemic approach to innovation labs is a powerful way to break free from path dependence and start blazing a new trail.
How have you fostered innovation within government? Have any of these initiatives worked in your context?
