No Lab? No Worries.
Things you can do to promote innovation without a “lab”
Public servants are rising to the need to redesign public organizations that meet the demands of the 21st century. No big deal, right? Trying to change bureaucratic organizations can seem like a Sisyphean mission, especially when you’re starting from scratch. But it isn’t. I feel privileged to have the opportunity to be part of this effort and support passionate people motivated by a higher calling to do good work. Simply accepting the way things are is not an option… “Not in this economy” 😝
Ok, where was I?
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 the innovation capabilities of our public organizations. And we need to do so with humility and reverence to our public institutions. I do not advocate a “fail fast and break things” approach to public innovation.
I also want to note that, despite the rhetoric, innovation DOES happen in government. The trick 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. Nobody is truly starting from scratch.
This post is about ways you can innovate in government without a lab, but first, let me share how I got here.
In 2019 I became the first Executive Director of Open Government and Innovation with the Government of New Brunswick. At the time, I would often joke 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.” Bootstrapping it is!
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 (it worked!). This workshop led to some innovation projects with borrowed staff. We demonstrated novel approaches to collaboration, the value of citizen engagement, executive leadership, and what we could do in a “lab” space with an old board room.
Then we established the Public Innovation Challenge, which led to the Deputy Minister Public Innovation Council, followed by the Public Innovation Internship Program that produced the I-Team and a dedicated Innovation Lab where we expanded our offerings to include Public Innovation 201, design sprints as-a-service, advisory services, co-facilitation of large complex projects with departments, and an Innovation “train-the-trainer.”
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.
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.
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… Maybe 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 I 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 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.
Let’s make peace with all that right now.
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I recommend the Rob Bell podcast episode “Hymn for the Curve” anytime you find yourself feeling lonely and anxious in this journey.
