Dick Cheney has yet another memorable quotation - no, not that one - this one:
'I learned early on that if you don't want your memos to get you in trouble someday, just don't write any.'
The Government is keen on transparency - especially if it's about what money is spent on or how much public servants are paid. Increasingly data is being published on-line in usable formats, Council meetings are on YouTube, and politicians blog and tweet.
Everyone is talking about it. Businesses need it. The public sector needs it. Google has a lot of it. People are blogging about it (the irony isn’t lost on me here). It’s really big and disruptive, it’s iterative and small. Only some people can do it, while everyone can contribute to it. We all need more of it.
Apparently.
Over the past year I’ve studied innovation, read about how social enterprise/high-tech business/Apple/Samsung/GDS all bring innovation, been told to be more innovative, and written about innovation. It’s a huge subject, a lot of money is thrown at it, and it risks becoming perceived as the domain of the few.
Over the past weeks I’ve read a few things and had a few exchanges on Twitter that, for me, capture the essence of innovation. It’s not to say this is everything, but just that at its heart, innovation can be brought down to a few simple things and supported by a very simple process.
But what is innovation?
Its applied creativity. Its more than just an idea – an idea without implementation is just that – an idea. It usually comes from an idea that stems from a problem or a belief there is just a better way of doing something.
So where do these ideas come from – its hard to start innovating unless you have them?
In May the Guardian published an article by Rachel Burstein a research associate at the New America Foundation California Civic Innovation Project. She found that in local government strong personal networks help promote and develop ideas into innovations. This shouldn’t be a surprise to us. You only need to look at Silicon Valley. Yes there were skills, from Stanford Industrial Park, and yes there was money, from the defence industry. But critically there were social roots that fed the information technology revolution and allowed it to take hold. People knew each other, shared and pinched ideas.
So how do you apply those ideas and implement them?
After #ccbt @pdbrewer @reformattday @Heavy_Load @demsoc discussed how innovation is hard. Not the ideas part but the implementation bit. Recently Kirsty Elderton posted on the FutureGov blog her experience of working as a Prince2 practitioner and then also working with an Agile approach to developing a project. At its heart the development and implementation process can be simple. You have your idea, you kick it around with people, you prototype (and keep prototyping), then implement and continue to iterate. Makes sense doesn’t it?
But of it makes sense why can it be hard to do? As Kirsty says, there are ‘tensions’ especially in a world where often your commodity at work has been your professional background. The challenge is often that we have a lot invested in how we’ve always done things – some call it path dependency and I’ve posted about this before.
What’s changing, and arguably has been for some time, is that in a highly connected world needing new approaches to old problems, it’s not your professional background that matters – it’s knowledge and how this connects with others’ knowledge and creativity to promote and share ideas. That’s not scary – it’s common sense – and that’s innovation.
There are a lot of articles about savings in local government about how much has been delivered and just how much more can be done? Has local government really been innovative in redesigning services or is local government reflecting its journey along the experience curve and there just isn’t much more room to save more.
The other common topic today, economic development, might hold some clues. National and Local Government often measure the success of their economic development strategies on the numbers of startups that are created. If we build a new business park they will come. If we fund startups more employment will result. This will be good, this means more confidence in the economy. The presumption is that more startups means more entrepreneurs seeing opportunity, which means more jobs, which means the economy is growing. Or does it?
Research suggests that his approach mainly produces market churn and it is only a small number of businesses that create most of the jobs. New companies set up and create jobs and these displace jobs in other companies who are less competitive. Churn is a mechanism by which labour markets reallocate workers towards more efficient ends. In this way, the churning of the labour market contributes to growth in the potential output of the economy. Or at least it would if those businesses were in a growing market. It doesn’t mean there a more jobs, or even that disruptive innovation is happening and new models of business or services are being found. When the market is maturing, or even reducing, businesses learn to do things more efficiently. That generally begins with making successively larger improvements and then successively smaller ones.
The exception to market churn, those businesses that create more net jobs, are those that are innovative and disrupt exising markets. They do something radically new that is significantly more efficient and/or meets the market’s needs more effectively, or even creates a new market. Interestingly evidence suggests these businesses are also more resilient though a downturn.
But how does this apply to local government and the impact of austerity? Have we seen a similar journey in how local government has delivered savings. A lot initially and then they get harder to find. The experience curve begins to flatten. What we may be seeing isn’t the creation of anything really different, we are just seeing market churn that pushes public services along the experience curve. Its just getting cheaper to do what has always been done. Costs are going down, salaries below inflation, jobs are being deskilled though the introduction of technology and changing practice, systems and processes are getting leaner. Simply, people doing fairly similar things for less and probably for a different employer. Will this improve services? If improvement means cheaper then probably. If it means reducing demands, finding better ways of doing things then maybe not, or at least maybe not quickly enough.
This isn’t to lay the blame on anyone. NESTA, in their study on innovation in Whitehall found, for many valid reasons, public services have typically not been subject to the same kind of creative destruction seen in some private markets. The risks are high, decommissioning services isn’t cheap, writing off sunk costs is hard politically, and considerable social harm would result from the breakdown of the public services. Service closures could push demand elsewhere, undermining the actual efficiency and legitimacy of any cuts.
A lot is stacked against radical innovation, and so transformation, in public services. Is it just too much?
This week I went to Brighton CityCamp #ccbt to hear about the progress the winning entries have made. I was also there to get valuable help and advice on how we can develop Gig Buddies so it becomes the obvious thing to do.
We got talking about how things change in organisations or, more accurately, why they don’t. And often, despite what people think are the levers for change being pulled, still nothing happens. Sometimes they just don’t appear to connect to anything despite what even those pulling them think. All this often when the reasons to change and do differently feel overwhelming. It feels like inertia, even obstructiveness, or that we’ve failed to convince people of the case for change and our ability to deliver it.
Today, as is often the case, serendipity stepped in, and I had a conversation with Dr Josh Siepel about Path Dependence and imprinting effects. I wont cover the latter (yet) but the former explains how a set of decisions faced for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant. Often its applied to a phenomenon where an economic outcome is the result of a historical path or series of accidents rather than current market conditions. It helps explain VHS verses Betamax, the Qwerty verses the Dvorak keyboard, and Britain’s small coal wagons. It helped me to understand why doing something very differently, despite the obvious benefits, can be hard for organisations to do. It explains why we can all be uncomfortable with even doing, what others may perceive as, small things differently.
On a basic level its why I still have discussions about why putting a link on the Home Page of a website today doesn’t really mean more people will see it as it would in the past. Despite the evidence (thanks Google Analytics) they will still argue it needs to happen. The circumstances of the web and therefore SEO tactics have changed. Things that worked brilliantly years or even months ago don’t work as well now. Search engines know how to weed out the obvious SEO tactics to get at the meat of a site’s content. Because of this, old SEO tactics are becoming less and less effective. But nonetheless that link needs to be on the Home Page because that’s what we used to do.
But knowing this – how does it help? A strategy is to find new combinations of existing ideas and work through how to present them as solutions – all the time resisting the temptation to revert back to a previous behaviour or solution because of the security and relative surety that offers. This may feel safer for those who have investment in how things have been done and see a very different way of doing things as just a step too far. Its an incremental strategy. However, the risk is also that an incremental approach takes too long to get to the rewards. What is true, whatever strategy is taken, is that finding new ideas requires a range of voices to exist, a pluralism that can be absent when the risk of doing something differently feels so alien and threatening. Pluralism comes with the potential benefit of making organisations, markets, and sectors more secure and innovative, more able to find an appropriate answer to changing demands (that begs the question – does this exist sufficiently in the public sector, or really are we just seeing market churn?).
This is the sort of pluralism that City Camp brings by putting together, businesses, community organisations and academia to reimagine the ways in which collaboration and web technologies will shape the future. Its the sort of pluralism that helps to do things differently.
There are a few things I’m working on at the moment. They are erm, interesting and challenging.
The value of the social networks I’m involved in is coming to the fore. The range of knowledge, expertise and experience is remarkable. But the real quality of those people is their willingness to share their knowledge – actively. But it doesn’t stop there. I’ve been looking for opportunities for people across my organisation to gain different skills and perspectives – and share their own but in a different context. It’s partly to build interest and motivation – but also so that those staff can improve what we do, and look outward more to benefit the communities and people we work with. So it’s not just about connecting virtually – it’s about just talking, shadowing opportunities, placements, mentoring – all stuff that takes time and investment. Those networks? The people in them? Still up for it. These are people across business, the public and voluntary sectors – who see sharing knowledge and experience as a mutual benefit.
I’ve a draft post I’ve been working on – I left it for a while and now I’m going to finish it – it looks at trying to shift organisational culture to a more networked one – where we have a better chance of connecting what we do, the people doing it and the communities we work alongside. Why? Lots of reasons and because isn’t it better to use all the skills and knowledge at hand? Isn’t that just a better place to work?
So if you are reading this and are helping – thanks it’s much appreciated – a lot more than I’ve probably let you know.
Resilience.
Its often used by Senior Managers in times of change – or more accurately when jobs are being lost. ‘How can we help our workforce cope with the impact of all this? Lets help them be more resilient.’ It’s easy to dismiss this as just something to settle the conscience of senior managers – ‘lets give people a bat so they have a chance of hitting the stuff we throw at them.’ So you run a resilience workshop – that’ll do the trick, or you give people ‘Who moved my cheese?’ - ‘That will help people cope with the change. But it won’t work – not as much as it could anyway.
If resilience is the ability to adapt well in the face of adversity, threats, and from sources of stress such as work pressures, health, family or relationship problems, then a resilient person is not only able to handle the crisis more effectively, but they are also able to recover and get back on their feet more quickly. It’s at times of significant change when any organisation needs resilient people to contribute and shape those changes. Lovely words, but lets be honest – it’s just not how people feel at those times. If your job is on the line then you feel ‘done to’ – you certainly don’t feel empowered to challenge and shape. So how can organisations or managers pull off this trick? Clearly many don’t. Some are either so set on the change, or nervous of showing perceived weakness, that they drive through changes at all costs. Others pull back and get into trouble delivering nothing and ultimately putting that service or organisation at risk. They are not resilient.
Obviously, it would be great to ‘not start here’ – ideally we want organisations and therefore people to develop and innovate – to keep relevant to what needs to be done and then big structural changes wouldn’t necessarily be needed. But sometimes things come at you that you just have to respond to and they are not incremental. If you have to take 25% out of a budget and it pays for people, how do you work with those people so that the remaining 75% can still deliver what’s needed – or ideally lead on what might be needed? How much better for those who remain to be a team proposing the next change or development rather than waiting for it. You probably can’t convince everyone this is a more positive way to go. But you can increase your chances the more resilient people you have – but critically that includes those who are ultimately accountable for the changes.
To gain organisational resilience you need the capability to respond rapidly to change. It is the ability to bounce back — and, in fact, to bounce forward — with speed, grace, determination and precision. It’s no different from personal resilience. It’s why managers have to encourage and support resilience in their teams. To actively ensure they encourage challenge, listen to it, and act on it especially in times of change. Not to shut it down. Some preferred options will change – suggestions will be taken adopted . Some things won’t change. Deftly managing this is hard and obviously not everyone will recognise it might help in the long run. To come through the other side with some people more resilient than before will help the organisation and those people significantly in the long run.
It would be great if those people were managers too.
I’m one of those people who invests a lot in work – not like Boxer in Animal Farm – not just time and energy, but also in working relationships. I’d like to think I have friends at work. Friends who I admire because of their skills, knowledge – because of the people they are. So when you move jobs it’s not just the challenge of a new job, the inevitable insecurities like wondering if I over egged it at interview, but also coping with some loss. Loss of the contact you had with people you admired and enjoyed working with.
Years ago keeping in contact as you moved work was difficult, or at least I found it hard. Now those I’d love to keep in contact with are largely using social media. It might be as a result of my evil plan where i cunningly spent part of my notice period along side the excellent @MichaelNewbury, delivering social media workshops. Whatever the reason, it means contact is far easier, I can keep my network close to me for support, advice, and humour. But will this experience help me in more than my social relationships?
Lately I’ve worked in organisations that have, as Minzberg calls it, a divisional structure. That structure has influenced my behaviour. Being composed of semi-autonomous units – or departments – doesn’t necessarily facilitate skills and knowledge sharing. The Divisional form is a structural derivative of a ‘Machine Bureaucracy’, an operational solution to co-ordinate and control a large range of organisational activities. It delivers horizontally diversified products and services. It produces horizontally diversified people as well.
In trying to introduce social media as a means of helping people develop networks that could help them get a job quickly I realised that what we were doing was helping to socialise the organisation. Connecting people not just through functional roles but critically through interests. To be honest it was a bit too late – but what did develop was a range of networks that added real value. They connected people with different and complementary skills and experiences together in way the organisational structure just hadn’t before. Most importantly those people could see the value in those connections and invested in them. As we developed the social media workshop I found a whole load of people in my 2000 strong organisation that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t come across before. People who if I knew earlier could have challenged and supported me to do a better job. Ultimately a better job for the organisation.
So now, in my new job, I’m wrestling with how to really capitalise on the immense experience and skills the organisation has. Those skills are partly locked away in each of the departments – keen to work together but struggling with a means of doing it. Understanding why it would be good for what we do – but for some reason lacking the catalyst to do it. Years ago I would have thought that catalyst should be a large change initiative. Now, I wonder if its simply doing something that allows people to connect on their own terms. Letting people build their own networks – but with a critical difference. Making those networks open so others who are watching and listening can see value in them and, in time, use them – perhaps that’s where the catalyst really is.
