3 Things I learned during an Innovation Secondment with WaterAid Australia
Today is the last day of my secondment with WaterAid Australia.
Ok, that’s a lie.
My last day was actually on the 23rd of December, but I knew if I announced it then nobody would see it because they’d already be knee-deep in mince-pies, gluhwein, and terrible Christmas films.
I didn’t want this blog to end up in the abyss where all poorly-timed internet content goes to die, so I thought I’d hold off until January to share the news that I’d be going back to my fundraising role.
Over the last 18 months, I’ve been fortunate enough to report directly to the inspirational Chief Executive of WaterAid Australia, Rosie Wheen, working with her and other innovation-obsessed folks to coordinate projects funded by our partner company Who Gives a Crap.
One of those projects was The Impact Accelerator, which trialed new approaches to creating sanitation solutions in WaterAid’s programs across the globe. We focussed on innovative and scalable approaches to familiar problems and neglected areas within sanitation; including improved access and standards for women and girls using public toilets and dignity for Sanitation Workers.
A sibling project to this was the Innovation Champion network, which was a group of 40+ WaterAid staff from around the world, trained in science-based tools to help them deliver innovation across the organization.
It was a fantastic experience — not only did it bring me closer to some of my colleagues in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Nepal, and Nigeria but I genuinely looked forward to going to work every day. This role gave me the permission to be creative, try new things and (most importantly) mess up a little bit and learn from it along the way.
To celebrate this closing chapter, I’m sharing the top 3 lessons I learned about Innovation on the job.
Let’s do it. 👇
Lesson#1: Innovation in the workplace rarely just ‘happens’. Organisations need a clear Innovation Process that staff can be taught to use and apply to their work.
Let’s face it — Innovation has become something of a buzzword. It’s something that often lacks tangible definition and meaning in the day-to-day lives of many employees. More so, it’s thought of as something that happens all by itself, organically, and without planning.
However, having an intentional innovation process is critical to ensuring that innovation ‘happens’ effectively. If employees don’t know what workplace challenges they should be solving, how to develop their ideas, and how to test them cost-effectively… then the innovation process probably needs some work.
By creating a shared understanding of what innovation means for your organisation and how to be innovative at work, you can equip staff with the tools they need to achieve bolder and more transformative behaviour.
I saw the value firsthand of teaching innovation in the workplace via the Innovation Champion network.
I witnessed Innovation Champions actually use the ideation tools and session plans they learned in the training provided by Innovation Consultancy Inventium. They took advantage of their learning and used it to spark new ideas, and different approaches; working together in a bolder, more dynamic way.
By taking social risks and using methods that can feel a little silly at first like Fat Chance, or techniques that push you out of your comfort zone like Crazy Eights or Newsflash, greater ways of communicating and collaborating together can be unlocked in all kinds of contexts, across countries and roles.
We can see this with Cambodia, (one of the first Country Programmes to take part in the Impact Accelerator) which had their Innovation Champions disseminate their learnings with the rest of the Programme through monthly listen-and-learn sessions solely focused on innovation topics. Recently they became one of the first Country Programmes at WaterAid to have a specific innovation objective within their country strategy.
Was the process of developing and teaching an innovation process at WaterAid perfect?
Absolutely not.
Having a deliberate training course with appropriate tools and examples did help to increase baseline understanding of innovation methodologies (particularly in human-centered design and design thinking) but there’s certainly further work to be done to ensure all the learning is transferable and relevant to a global WaterAid context.
What matters is — we tried it anyway, to see what we and others could learn.
And what I learned is that when innovation is defined and staff trained in the methodology, alongside enthusiastic support from leadership… then their hearts and minds will be opened to take risks, try new things and see what happens.
And to me at least, that’s what it’s all about.
Lesson #2: Prototyping requires the same amount of creativity, tenacity, and bravery (if not more) as idea generation does.
Ah, prototyping.
Experimentation.
Tests.
Analysing all those things.
Making a decision about what to do with the results.
No matter who I spoke to and no matter their role or pay grade, prototyping was always the part of the innovation process that people found the most daunting.
And that makes sense to me.
Within innovation Ideation tends to steal the show — it’s fun, often fuelled by coffee, and overstimulated by sticky notes. Ideation is all about trying to find The Super Solution to all your problems.
Then, riding the high of an idea that got everyone buzzing with excitement, your team suddenly gets told that “No you can’t just jump to implementing your idea. You need to test it to see if it works.”
And for that… they need to create a prototype.
Prototyping is an approach to developing, testing, and improving ideas at an early stage before large-scale resources are committed to implementation. It is a way of project and team working which allows you to experiment, evaluate, learn, refine and adapt. Ensuring that ideas are fully explored before any conclusions are drawn.
Your prototype could be anything from a scrappy cardboard prop you test out on a colleague, to a full-on dress rehearsal of an event with senior stakeholders. You just don’t know what it’s going to be… until you have developed a testing plan, that is.
Without a prototype, you’re gambling with high stakes on untested ideas, crossing your fingers everyone reacts the way you expected.
So, it was one of my proudest moments in this role to see the teams in the Impact Accelerator spend four months just developing their prototypes.
This didn’t just happen because the teams were amazing at innovating. I mean they were, but there was some groundwork that came before this via leadership and prioritization of the test-and-learn phase.
The decision was made that all teams in The Impact Accelerator would be given four months, alongside the appropriate financial resource, support, and most importantly the permission they needed to go through prototyping.
We could see the trepidation that comes with the territory of testing out a beloved idea with your target audience, and we knew teams needed the time to really get to grips with it.
The team in Nepal were one of the most open groups about being uncertain about prototyping when it was first introduced. They didn’t know where to start until we had a learning session on prototyping and looked at examples from other sectors together.
Following this, the team got to work in a 2-day prototyping workshop, which was fun and dynamic. They mapped out the context of what a live prototype would be — their idea was a Campaigning Bus Tour across the Katmandu Valley.
Visualisation during this workshop really helped them to understand what the challenges could be of prototyping, and pitching their prototypes to a panel of ‘sharks’ (For my fellow Brits — a Dragons Den-type panel) allowed them to make a more informed decision around their prototype.
They settled on a one-day campaign to test out the success of the prototype, They’re really hopeful that by bringing the policy makers along with them on this tour and demonstrating the challenges women face in terms of mobility and development by not having any safe, usable public toilets will allow Nepal to develop its public toilet guidelines at a federal level.
Lesson #3: If you can get people excited (not scared) about change, great things can happen.
New ideas are rarely accepted easily.
It’s ok. It’s not our fault. It’s not even our organisation's fault. Human brains are simply hardwired to resist change — the amygdala interprets change as a threat and releases the hormone for fear, fight, or flight. And that includes when the change is a good change, one which adds value to your organisation and gets you closer to your organisational goals.
So we end up in a situation where influencing internal change requires patience, bravery, and endless demonstrations of “wait look how good this thing actually is!” before change can be internalised.
This meant that the steepest learning curve for me was figuring out how to influence internal stakeholders when it comes to innovation. Here’s how I tackled it:
- Took every opportunity to facilitate workshops about Innovation internally — I wanted to make people aware of the Impact Accelerator and share our learnings.
- Feelings are contagious — I noticed it paid off to demonstrate my own enthusiasm and joy when it came to talking about innovation.
- I wanted to give people a sense of agency when it came to how they innovate by bringing them on the journey with me, asking them to weigh in on decisions, and helping them understand the positive impact. I did this with a few different stakeholders — one was the Impact Accelerator Partner ‘Who Gives a Crap’, who came along to several workshops and helped the teams develop their ideas during the Impact Accelerator.
By reframing my approach from the more clinical “securing stakeholder buy-in” to the infinitely more enjoyable “getting people excited about solving problems”, innovation became a much easier sell.
I hope you enjoyed reading about my top 3 learnings. Want to hear what I get up to next?
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