Six Keys to Public Innovation
Lessons I learned from Dubai The Model Centre
The low-hanging fruit of efficiency and improvement have been picked. Deeper changes to the way the public service operates are required to achieve performance excellence in government.
In the past three years I have had the privilege of being part of the Hamdan bin Mohammed Award for Smart Government in Dubai. Each year a group of experts in public innovation and digital government assemble in Dubai to evaluate 30–40 of the government’s service improvement initiatives. Last week DTMC and CityMaker wrapped another innovation cycle.
This year my team engaged directly with eleven innovation teams across Dubai Government entities. As with previous years, I am struck by their imagination, sophistication, creativity, dedication, and inspiration. I am reminded of many of my colleagues back in Canada who share many of these same traits.
Imagination
These public servants are capable of imagining how the world could be better, of aligning with the vision of leadership, and not taking the status quo as a given. Imagination is the first key to innovation. If you cannot imagine a better way, then you cannot find a path to get there. The Dubai public service are imaginative in a way that breaks the mould and counters the preconceptions most people have about public servants. They see the future they wish to emerge and they take action to get there; creating value and opening up new possibilities every step of the way.
Sophistication
These public servants are thoughtful in their plans for change. The level of sophistication is impressive. The government entities have demonstrated an understanding of the problems they are trying to solve from many angles, often prioritizing the customer and empathizing with their life journeys, without ignoring the many other elements of the system that would be considered “out of scope” in traditional ways of working. This sophistication has opened up many paths to service improvement and it shows.
Creativity
These public servants are creative in their approaches. They have applied impressive creativity in developing their solutions. This is to say they have been able to break free from legacy patterns of service delivery and try new approaches. The combination of imagination, sophistication and creativity has manifested in multi-pronged solutions that yield unprecedented results and often real step change.
Dedication
The public servants we have engaged with are truly dedicated to their work and to the people they serve. Finding new ways of delivering value is no easy task. The status quo is powerful and can appear as immovable to most. It takes dedication, perseverance, and a strong will to venture into the uncomfortable and unfamiliar land of innovation. The Dubai public servants we engaged with model this dedication, with some taking steps to have legislation changed in order to create space for new ways of working, and others negotiating temporary exemptions in order to explore and validate the effectiveness of their initiatives before initiating legislative change.
Inspirational
They are inspirational. Each year I leave more impressed than the last. While this has sometimes contributed to feeling dissatisfied with elements of public service back home, it also gives me hope. When I talk to colleagues about how innovative the Dubai public service is they often respond by staying “of course, they have larger budgets”. I find great comfort in the fact that most of the initiatives we see do not begin with large injections of money.
Resourcefulness
The examples we have seen do not show that the public service simply throws money at their problems. Resourcefulness, not resources, is why the Dubai public service is so innovative. Imagination, thoughtfulness, creativity and dedication are the key ingredients to Dubai’s success.
How did they get here?
Dubai the Model Centre (DTMC) is the essential enabler to this work. Over the years DTMC has led and accelerated culture change in the government and its entities. DTMC has created space, built capacity, and rewarded the behaviours required for public service transformation. Because of these efforts, the conditions have been set to allow for a more collaborative approach to public service. This was evident in the entities we reviewed; in the number of initiatives that took a holistic view of the customer journey, focusing on collaboration and integration to achieve improved service delivery.
