Let’s call it out: innovation has an authenticity problem
This article was written by Alexis Palá, research associate at Y Lab, the public services innovation lab for Wales.
I recently attended Nesta’s Government Innovation Summit 2019 and a co-design session in London to help shape the creation of The Residency.
Attending both of these events challenged me to reflect on my innovation craft — in practice and in leadership. To help make my insights tangible, observations are accompanied by suggested Liberating Structures. These are my thoughts.
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The provocation
My stomach churned as I sat in the audience of Nesta’s inaugural Government Innovation Summit in September 2019. On the stage, a panelist with a senior policy background decided to share a novel, spontaneous connection he just made during his talk. According to him, innovation is simply “information + inspiration”.
After he uttered those words, all I wanted to do was challenge the dangerous simplicity of that insight, but I couldn’t. Although it was said in good faith, it fails to capture the true essence of innovation. What does just having “information” and “inspiration” lead you to overlook?
The stark reality is this: we live in societies where innovation is principally an exclusive endeavour that occurs in spite of the system rather than because of it.
“Only certain people’s inspirations matter. Implementing change is hard, but it is significantly harder for those who lack the necessary social capital”
Only certain ideas are heard and respected. Only certain people’s inspirations matter. Implementing change is hard, but it is significantly harder for those who lack the necessary social capital, and especially for those who are not in positions of power.
I want to change this not just sporadically, but systemically. The simplistic, silver-bullet views of innovation — such as “information + inspiration” — completely overlook the messy, complicated and currently exclusive, process of innovation.
If we continue to allow these perceptions to persist, innovation will never become everyone’s responsibility.
Structure plays an enormous role
We need to question our traditional ways of doing things, such as panels that leave no time for questions or challenge — restricting control rather than distributing it.
We need to embrace the power of intentional design, requiring a clear purpose and principles — form follows function.
We need to get more creative and critical about the ways in which we convene people and who gets invited so we don’t miss opportunities to foster collective intelligence — diversity of inputs matters.
And lastly, but most importantly, we need to recognise and respect that bringing people together is a privilege. That’s true whether it’s for a meeting, a project, a conference or what-have-you — make meetings meaningful (again?).
Inspired by Ewan Hilton of Platfform to be a bit more punk, this piece is a call to action to be a part of the growing movement for social design and social change.Call yourself out, call the system out, but be agonistic, not antagonistic.
As Ewan beautifully states in his blog: “We need to start calling these things out and stop colluding with what we know is not fit for purpose… we have the opportunity to be a part of the solution, but we also have the potential to be a massive part of the problem.
Our spheres of influence go far beyond the polls. How you choose to spend your time and your money is a conscious or unconscious vote for the kind of world you want to create for yourself and future generations: leverage both to make what you believe in a reality.
Inaction tells the system that everything is “OK”. Inaction allows things like B-Agile (bad Agile) to block better value creation and real change.
It allows governments to recycle policies and promises that don’t work and continue to function in operational silos.
So, how can you change the perception and culture of innovation in your workplace and join me in making this a useful call to action? I have put together a list of key points I believe are fundamental:
1. Innovation requires vulnerability, humility and relatedness
We are really good at anticipating the expected, but not good enough with detecting the unexpected.
In an uncertain, uncontrollable world, we need to constantly be humble about what we know. What questions were asked? How were they asked? What wasn’t included? Every model/prediction/forecast is only as good as its inputs. Overlooking things leaves systems vulnerable, but innovators are vulnerable, too.
Professor Brené Brown famously describes vulnerability as uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure — all are inevitable when wandering into the unknown. And in these uncertain spaces, relationships grounded in trust matter most; people need to be supported holistically.
2. We need to confront simplicity and ensure that it’s profound
In my experience, we live in a world that favours people with ready-made answers, rather than those who ask the right questions and probe down to root causes. A world that falls for shiny and easy-to-grasp packaging, without thinking of the longer-term consequences.
During the Nesta Government Innovation Summit, Paul Bryant of the Welsh government sharply stated that if we don’t respect and face the complexity of many modern-day challenges, “we’ll continue to tinker away at the edges… just pruning a dying tree if we continue as is”.
Although we may need to act fast, we don’t need to be rash. Rather, we need to master how to uncover the blindspots in our thinking to create more resilient new ideas that address root causes and challenge our riskiest assumptions.
We need to foster cultures of curiosity — continuous testing, learning and sense-making. How we interpret information and what excites us is limited by what we know, believe in and have experienced.
In a dynamic world, solutions and understandings should always be provisional. In almost all cases, this requires going outside of the office to test insights and provisional solutions with people affected by them.
3. To make things meaningful, the backend matters more than the frontend
This mantra is as true for coders as it is for athletes, as it is for dancers, as it is for public workers: rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.
Innovation is a process – practice and preparation are key. This requires time devoted to the process, an allocated space and possibly some resources.
Someone may have an idea and they may be inspired, but, if they are drowning in endless tasks and meetings, they will be forced to learn, explore and implement new ideas in their free time. Not everyone will do that.
And, if this sounds anything like your workplace, the provocative questions become: when will people innovate and who gets to innovate?
4. Inclusion is paramount. In an unequal world, inclusion isn’t going to be easy, convenient, nor always fit neatly into predetermined timelines
People across the globe are rejecting realities imposed on them. In the public sector, we need to shift the mentality towards doing “with” instead of “to” citizens.
This extends to all political affiliations and shouldn’t be treated like a box-ticking exercise. If it is, call it out.
Box-ticking will only perpetuate vanity metrics, prevent us from taking necessary risks and keep us from transformation when its needed.
“In order to achieve real connections between the public and the public sector, we need to build better bridges. And for that, we need better bridge-builders”
In order to achieve real connections between the public and the public sector, we need to build better bridges. And for that, we need better bridge-builders.
What have people been shouting for during my recent engagements inside and outside of the public sector? Authentic relationships.
A government has a limited sphere of influence. Its legitimacy and influence can only extend so far; it needs civic participation and the support of other sectors, especially if we want complex, social change.
If we overlook the need for inclusion, we will only continue down the path of creating higher levels of economic injustice and exclusive growth. A path where innovations are the outcomes of a select few individuals or organisations brave enough to burrow through all the bureaucracy and resilient enough to do it largely alone, with sceptics pushing against them every step of the way.
We may get shiny breakthroughs like the iPhone, but those will come about in a needlessly unequal world, a world where 87 million children in Africa (larger than the population of the UK) are likely to be born into poverty each year.
Although now is objectively the best time to be alive in human history, will future generations be able to say the same thing? Feelings of exclusion have divided populations across the world. It’s time for a new, authentic approach and social designers are itching for opportunities.
So, how can you start this process?
To help make these insights tangible, I have contextualised key points in how The Residency co-design session impacted me.
At its core, The Residency seeks to meaningfully connect social designers, activists and public servants through a global, practical learning collective on change design. The creation of its platform will enable members to learn from mentors and each other.
Further, I offer some suggested Liberating Structures, which are easy to understand and apply to your journey. Liberating Structures features 33 facilitation methods that help people to plan, meet and organise differently, as well as inclusively.
To shape a meaningful purpose and build a shared understanding of that purpose, roles and responsibilities, try a Purpose to Practice exercise followed by Ecocycle Planning to see what projects need creative destruction and what projects may be stuck in a poverty trap — always remember to ask yourselves “why”.
Purpose is at the core of social design. Each activity we did at The Residency’s co-design session was curated to elevate thinking and clarify vision around their theory of change. Those activities, and the way they were delivered, weren’t just the product of a single meeting.
Fostering a curious culture cannot be wished into existence. It needs iteration: to nurture curiosity, The Residency leveraged a series of co-design sessions across the world to challenge and deepen its theory of change.
It humbly recognised that its understandings of what collective members may need and want were incomplete and that each location held another piece of the puzzle.
The TRIZ Liberating Structure may offer you a seriously playful way of testing your ideas and spotting issues with a project or with your team. It will inspire you to stop doing key things that are blocking progress.
How can you shift towards and lay the foundations for more authentic relationships? What I Need From You, part of the Liberating Structures repertoire, can help your workplace take a step towards understanding what holistic support looks like for different groups/people.
It’s also a powerful exercise to do with stakeholder groups to build empathy and understanding of the pressures each group experiences.
At The Residency’s co-design session, we did a brilliant exercise that matched people based on what they wanted to “give” and “get” from the community; I wanted real-time feedback on new frameworks and methods for my projects and was matched with someone who wanted to be a sounding board for ideas. This honesty sparked deep conversations and unveiled the network’s assets as well as its expectations.
I recognise that yes, historically, I have been part of the problem in many ways, but now I want to play a greater role in creating provisional solutions.
To experiment, embody and enact this call to action in my sphere of influence, I am co-leading the organisation of an event in Cardiff on 23 March 2020 to elevate the voices of unusual suspects in the innovation space, focusing on big ideas over big names.
To do things differently, we took the process outside of our boardroom, co-creating various elements with stakeholders through a workshop series.
Further, in my latest work with the Welsh government, we decided to flip the incentives debate on its head. Rather than thinking about how to incentivise people to innovate (which typically invites the same people to the table and assumes people won’t organically innovate given the right conditions), we are focusing on identifying what is dis-incentivising people from enacting change in their workplace.
If good ideas can and should come from anywhere, what’s holding them back? How can we rekindle their intrinsic motivation?
If you are interested in either of these projects, or in how Liberating Structures can help your workplace, please send me an email.
— Alexis Palá
Picture credit: AllGo on Unsplash
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