How It Got Fixed

Report Out from a GovMaker Workshop

So, you’ve got more than a hundred cross-sector changemakers in a room — what do you do?

In November 2024, I had the opportunity to design and facilitate a one-hour workshop at the GovMaker Conference. This session followed an inspiring keynote by Kelly Lamrock, New Brunswick’s Child, Youth, and Seniors Advocate and the author of the How It All Broke report. Lamrock’s report didn’t just highlight the cracks in our systems; it laid out bold recommendations for a Reinventing Government Initiative (ReGo). After publishing this thought piece in October 2024, I was thrilled to bring some of those ideas to life, even in a small way.

The Challenge

Our guiding question for the workshop was simple but huge:
How might we implement or support the ReGo recommendations from the How It All Broke report?

With just an hour, I wanted a format that would maximize creativity, participation, and tangible outcomes. I opted for a combination of liberating structures and one of my favourite ideation exercises. Liberating Structures can be designed to allow large groups to get a lot done in a short period, providing the perfect framework. You can download the slides and instructions here.

The Activity

For this session, I combined Brainwriting with 1–2–4-All. Here’s how it worked:

Step 1: Brainwriting

Participants began with a sheet divided into three rows, each representing a key question:

1. What bold step could we take to transform services for people?
2. What barriers might we face, and how might we overcome them?
3. What outcome metrics could measure success?

Each person wrote one idea per row, then passed their sheet to their neighbour. The next participant reviewed the ideas and either built on them or added a new idea. This process repeated until the sheets returned to their original owners.

Step 2: Reflection and Synthesis

After reflecting on their sheets, participants formed small groups (diads or triads) to synthesize their ideas into strategies using a structured mad-lib template:

“Our bold step is to [insert bold step], which aims to [insert intended impact or outcome].
We recognize that a key barrier to success is [insert barrier]. However, we propose overcoming this by [insert solution], leveraging [insert resources, partnerships, or strategies].
To measure our progress, we’ll use [insert key metric], which will help us track [insert what the metric evaluates or ensures].”

Step 3: Plenary Sharing

Each table then presented their synthesized strategies to the larger group, sharing their creative approaches and solutions.

The Results

In just one hour, our group of ~150 participants generated:

• 934 ideas (322 bold steps, 308 barriers/solutions, and 304 metrics)
• 39 synthesized strategies shared during the plenary session

Using Miro’s Stickies Capture feature, I transcribed and organized the ideas by colour-coded categories and exported the data into a CSV file. With the help of ChatGPT, I conducted a thematic analysis and refined the results. While some categories still need further cleaning, this first pass revealed was a great start. You can download the file here.

Highlights

We generated an overwhelming amount of content, but several themes stood out. Here are some of my favourite takeaways and bold ideas:

• Align government departments, branches, and units around citizen service journeys rather than bureaucratic silos. For example, life-events-based service delivery could transform reactive, fragmented systems into integrated, user-focused experiences.
• Establish citizen-led task forces and co-design services with those directly impacted by policies. Increase engagement with non-profits to report and address systemic gaps.
• Innovation isn’t just about technology — it’s about culture. Create spaces for innovative thinking in social services, adopt design-thinking approaches, and build civic data literacy through iterative, problem-based learning.
• Enable social service agencies and frontline workers to participate in decision-making while ensuring strategic oversight. Empower local expertise to drive both immediate practicality and long-term impact.

What’s Next?

We generated so much content that it is difficult to sift through it all, even with the help of AI. I invite anyone interested to dig into the files I have shared here to mine and combine and refine other strategies GNB might explore—there’s no shortage of inspiration here. You can download the transcript of the concepts here and the GPT-generated thematic analysis here.

What are your favourite takeaways from this workshop? Do you have new perspectives or remixes of the workshop outputs? Let me know in the comments!