Converging and Colliding, Together
Reflections on Converge: a Canadian Social Innovation Labs Gathering
Two weeks ago I attended Converge in Vancouver together with colleagues from the B.C. Government. Our small delegation included members from the Service Design Team, Behavioural Insights, Innovation Hub and the (Continuous Service Improvement) Lab. The event brought together over 130 Canadian ‘social innovation lab practitioners’ for 2 days to discuss all things ‘lab’. Before the event I reflected on the social innovation lab concept and asked: what is a lab, and what shall we converge on at Converge? And where would or should we diverge? (read pre-event blog here) This follow-up blog summarizes my experience, insights, and ideas after attending the event.
What’s in a Lab’s name?
Given the vast size of Canada, families often travel far distances to attend celebrations. Converge kind of resembled a big Canadian family gathering. As I entered the beautiful, old Segal School of Business building in downtown Vancouver I heard people say things like: ‘heeey, how are you!! So nice to see you again!’, and “oh so nice to finally meet you, I heard so much about you’!”, or “It feels so good to be with ‘my people’!”.
Over the two days the ‘lab family’ shared good food, titles from the latest books, publications and reports they read (check #labsCONVERGE @Twitter), and stories about their work. Some stories came from established family ‘elders’, like the MaRS Solutions Lab, InWithForward, Alberta CoLab and LED Lab. But big families expand easily, so there were many new(er) family members to meet, like Shift Collaborative, the Winnipeg Boldness Project, BC Family Justice Innovation Lab and reFRESH waterlab.
Compared to 4 years ago, when this ‘family’ first gathered at the Labs for Systems Change and the Vancouver Social Innovation Exchange, this community has not only expanded in size, but also in depth, width, and cultural diversity. Back in 2014 the lab community had a strong focus on social entrepreneurship and technological innovation, while in 2018 labs have permeated much more into the public and social realm. Labs have started to ask deeper questions (‘how to change systems’?), and include more diverse voices, like those from Indigenous and First Nations peoples. They have also made deeper connections with the societal context they are embedded in: Canada’s complex challenges like the housing crisis, decolonization issues, and climate change. What was especially striking is that this family has developed a common ‘lab lingo’: words, theories, frameworks that everyone seemed to understand while coming from different backgrounds, and sometimes even speaking different languages.
However not everyone in this family felt that their last name was ‘Lab’. Some only recently found meaning in the social innovation lab concept but don’t (and won’t) call themselves a ‘Lab’. Some deliberately or reluctantly distance themselves from it and choose different names, like ‘social design agency’ or ‘human-centred changemaker’. What holds the lab family together is their will and drive to make the world a better place. Plus a roughly similar belief on how to get there: labs work in multi-disciplinary teams through tough problems, with and for people who are affected by them.
Converging lab patterns
So what did we converge on at Converge? Our gathering revealed some patterns, patterns we seem to unanimously want to commit to in our future lab work. Here I will present 3 patterns I was able to unravel. I’m sure others who attended Converge will reveal more.
Pattern 1: Labs need to de-expertize, de-eliticize and de-colonize the lab language
Having a common ‘lab lingo’ with words like ‘prototype’, ‘social innovation’, ‘design thinking’ and ‘complexity theory’ is comforting and convenient in our own family gatherings. It helps to set us aside in the ‘innovation family tree’ to get recognition and funding, and makes it easy to exchange experiences and methodologies. No doubt it makes our family look smart and handsome! But it also alienates us. Lab language, with its firm roots in science, business thinking and technological innovation tends to set us aside from the environments we work in (government, non-profit public sector), and more so from the people we are trying to support on the ground. Diane Roussin who works with indigenous communities across neighbourhoods in Winnipeg gave a great example.
“The lab process is very conducive to our indigenous way of thinking: it’s iterative and inclusive, and highly respectful of contextual differences and community wisdom. So before even knowing about labs or calling ourselves a ‘lab’, we already were a lab, if you know what I mean. We knew working with families was a good thing, we knew that intuitively. But the expert language used in labs, like prototype, experimentation, and even the word ‘lab’ really poses us with translation issues in our communities. So we became creative. The community recognized the word ‘prototype’ as ‘proof of possibility’. So that’s what we use now. But we still use the word prototype in more formal settings. As a lab you are constantly breaking rules to forge change, and you try to work under a bit of a blanket of darkness. Some would call it ‘corrupt’ or ‘mismanagement’, but no, that’s when I call it prototyping, because that’s permitted when you experiment!’.
Setting a lab aside from its context does not often work out in the lab’s favour, as Ed Bernacki recently wrote in his blog ‘Saving Your Innovation Lab’. This gathering underscored this insight and showed commitment to de-expertize, de-eliticize , and de-colonize our language and knowledge building practices where needed. Ultimately we find it important to enable others than ourselves to think/do/be a labber themselves, even without having to call themselves a ‘lab’. Therefore, lab practitioners are committed to be more conscious on where and when to use its ‘lab jargon’ and when to make an effort to ‘plain language’ its practices.
Pattern 2: labs increasingly aspire to create discontinuous change
“Culture eats strategy and labs for breakfast”, said someone who works in a Federal government context. Natalie LeClerc (Canada School of Public Service) added: “Social Labs risk to be just a nice carwash for government. You drive the dirty car into the lab, and you get a nice, shiny, clean car. But it’s still a car”. So true! Especially in strong institutional contexts (eg. governments), contexts dominated by a profit-driven, corporate culture or contexts with a predominantly white-Western presence social labs can become easy-to-hijack, flashy innovation vehicles for leaders to execute plans that are driven by business or organizational needs, instead of human or societal needs. Labs then end up producing small, incremental changes and become mere extensions of systems that fail people from the start.
The lab community is increasingly aware of the power and dominance of politics and culture. Labs aspire to create discontinuous change, instead of incremental change and don’t want to be another ‘gimmicky technique’. They are committed to shift large paradigms, and to find ways to leverage systems with counteracting methodologies and practices. Systems mapping is recognized as one of the key methodologies. “Seeing the unseen and hearing the unheard is the main function of the systems map”, said Melanie Goodchild (Waterloo Institute).
Another tactic is to include external stakeholders (operating outside of the institutional context the lab is embedded in) from the start. External stakeholders stick around to push for outcomes on the ground and hopefully see the end of a lab’s purpose. The lab’s business model could reflect this multi-stakeholder collaboration, where different (public and private) organisations pitch in to pay for the lab’s (temporary) staff and maintenance. A good example is LED Lab, which is funded by SFU Radius and Ecotrust Canada with support and involvement from a broad range of community stakeholders in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Another tactic is involving people-human-citizens with lived experience on the lab’s topic as paid peer researchers in the core lab team. Our Service Design Team in the B.C. Public Service recently worked on a project that aimed to better understand the ongoing opioid crisis in B.C.. The team worked alongside a peer researcher who has lived experience in using substances. This practice brought tremendous knowledge to the team and it continuously validated or discredited the path the team was on as the project unfolded. It also created a direct ‘knowledge-on-demand’ channel for any question the design team had regarding this complex and contentious topic (I hope to write another blog on this practice!).
Pattern 3: labs acknowledge their roots in place, time, and value their connection to other social movements
At Converge I noticed there was an increased understanding and respect for the fact that the lab family is part of a larger family: a global movement of citizens who strive for just and equal societies, accessible and circular economies, and a more sustainable environment. Labs see value in connecting to this movement and learn from each other’s methodologies and strategies. For example one of the Converge sessions was centred around the question: how can campaigning methodologies and mindsets strengthen lab practices?
At the same time labs increasingly acknowledge their roots and origins in civil society action groups, social corporate responsibility, and university-driven community engagement research practices. In that sense labs are moving away from a more narrow understanding of its own history, which in some cases seems to be solely ascribed to large design and consultancy businesses like IDEO and REOS Partners.
At Converge there was also community support for linking the work of labs to more visible mainstream narratives (and metrics) like the UN’s “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDG’s). Becoming more mainstream was generally perceived as a good thing, as converging towards common goals, and more mainstream language could strengthen the recognition of labs as powerful vehicles for change.
A family adrift?
The attending lab practitioners converged and found common patterns. But what did they diverge on? We didn’t diverge on a whole lot, I’d say. This partially had to do with that we only had invited our own family, the ‘lab family’ to this event (for good reasons). Our extended families (eg. Living Labs, Fab Labs) or other families in the Innovation Family Tree (eg. change management consultants, leadership experts, policy analysts, big data folks) weren’t there to challenge our thinking or practices.
But maybe we were also afraid to diverge too much off the beaten path, the path we have so patiently carved out for ourselves in the past years? Andrea Reimer (Councillor, City of Vancouver) kicked off our gathering with a nice motto that echoed throughout the conference. “When we’re not converging, we are colliding”. To collide means to clash, to conflict, to hit. Colliding therefore felt like something the lab community shouldn’t do. But the origin of the word, comes from the Latin word ‘collidere’, which means ‘to strike together’. And as Andrea added: “Innovation is contextual, not context neutral. Innovation is not value neutral — not a cut and paste exercise, and the opposite of that crushes innovation.” So could we also interpret the motto this way: “When we’re not converging, we are colliding, together.”? I think divergence can be a good thing, to an extent. We shouldn’t be afraid of it. Divergence creates friction, and usually friction means we learn, we grow, we empathize. And how to do that elegantly, boldly, and productively is something lab practitioners are still exploring.
One thing we did (silently) diverge on is whether this maturing Canadian lab community should diverge and branch out, or work to unify and fortify its practices. Should it improve and strengthen the lab field, or focus more on improving outcomes for people on the ground? Or do both at the same time? Some felt labs should become more unified (hence a session on how to support ‘communities of lab practice’ across Canada), while others thought labs should focus on becoming more mainstream by connecting better to communities that work on the same social issues (hence a session on the idea to identify ourselves more with the Sustainable Development Goals). Yet others actively advocated for opening up the lab community to create more openness and awareness around how exclusive and excluding the lab community can (still) be (hence a morning Caucus Space for-with Black, Indigenous, People of Colour and a conference closing session to create general awareness on this topic).
As usual the answer will lie somewhere in the middle. Labs can improve, widen and deepen their practices and improve outcomes for vulnerable communities at the same time. I can conclude this lab family is in general a ‘nice family’ that works endlessly to make the world a better place. And in doing so it is willing to invite more voices to the dinner table, others that might not look like us, speak like us, or act like us.
Bringing Converge home to the B.C. Public Service
The hardest part is yet to come. How to implement recent learnings and insights in our work to improve and enhance our practices? How do we make sure we are actually working on supporting citizens to live their best lives? Here at the B.C. Public Service we gathered as colleagues post-Converge. These were some of our thoughts:
- Truth and Reconciliation on Indigenous issues remain a gap in our government (lab) practice. How to better address this?
- Within the B.C. government there are many innovation collectives and innovators. How to connect them better?
- Our Continuous Service Improvement Lab is focussed on delivering good digital services to citizens. How to better connect its work to policy design and policy change?
- Innovation work within government is driven by Ministerial needs. How do we make sure these Ministerial needs actively reflect citizen needs, and stay connected to actual societal challenges?
- Innovation work within Ministries tends to look inward, and to other Ministries. How can this work better connect to government outsiders, like civil society, universities, businesses and other labs?
- ‘Systems thinking’ as a practice, capacity or skill is not yet established within Government, nor is ‘developmental evaluation’. How can we contribute to growing these skills and mindsets?
- Innovation gatherings that focus on methodologies (like Lean, Behavioural Insights, Service Design, Agile) can quickly become in-crowd gatherings and are hard to engage with for an outsider. Should we focus more on convening gatherings that bring together people from different disciplines that work on similar societal issues?
These are all big questions that we won’t find immediate answers to, as we figure out what is and isn’t the role of Government, and what is or isn’t the role of labs and innovators in it. However, as a group we have committed to two things. One was to publish this blog (tadaah!) and two was to research deeper into how we can convene a local group of labbers and ‘Convergers’ in Victoria B.C. without adding to a growing group of innovation collectives (like SCIPS and the B.C. Design Thinking Collective) that are already gathering on the Southern Rock of our neat little Vancouver Island.
Thank you Converge, thanks for convening us, and please keep converging and diverging, patterning and unpatterning. Together we strike again. Till next time!
Thank you Kelsey Singbeil, Irene Guglielmi and Ori Nevares for reviewing my blog before publishing.
