Innovation and the learning organisation
In the last few years of my working life I've repeatedly heard public services being asked to deliver more for less.
I was interviewed about management and wellbeing for a colleague’s masters, and we reflected on what things might look like in a perfect world. I walked away thinking that framing things in this way isn’t always helpful because we can easily avoid the really difficult question about what we need to do to change things in our own imperfect world.
The decision to keep things as they are is a deliberate choice, but it doesn’t always feel like that when you’re sticking with the status quo. This hit home when a colleague said my lack of communication when we were busy had meant that they hadn’t felt involved in our work. It was not a conscious decision, but nevertheless I prioritised getting my head down over taking the time for a quick chat.
People have often said to me that they would love to blog, but that they don’t have the time. Like I said above, this is a conscious choice and that’s ok. I’m the same with playing my guitar. Adding that on to my current day is tremendously difficult. If I truly want to play my guitar more then I’ll need to re-think my day in its entirety. It could be worse - I could be working a 120 hour week like Elon Musk, who seems unable to prioritise tasks, delegate anything or trust anyone.
Working differently is a choice we can make. Chris Bolton (aka whatsthepont) nailed this in his post on getting the organisations we deserve, and this also hit home in my recent post on Deming where he says that:
“Your system is perfectly designed to give you the results you’re getting”
We prioritise the status quo and to be honest with you, I don’t blame us given the amount of reorganisations and restructures public services go through.
I’ve begun thinking about how I might design my working life so that this becomes more routine. By that I mean going beyond continuous improvement (which is something that we do really well as a team and is very much embedded) into testing new approaches as per this Bromford Lab post.
I recently worked from home for a day where I tested some new approaches to data on a non-networked computer. It allowed me to fail safely. Working on a non-networked computer meant that I could download and test new programmes without spending a vast amount of cash or jumping through IT hoops. That cheap approach reminded me of Paul Taylor’s post on Jugaad, even if I’m nowhere near as imaginative as the people in his post. The whole exercise highlighted the expertise we need to make better use of our data and helped me to examine the digital tools we have at our disposal. This shifted innovation away from being a flashy, glamorous thing into a practical task that’s directly related to our day to day work.
Doing this on a one-off basis is all well and good. But what does this look like across a whole organisation?
Peter Senge's Fifth Discipline
In his book 'The Fifth Discipline', Peter Senge looks at how we can kick-start change:
- There must be a compelling case for change.
- There must be time to change.
- There must be help during the change process.
- As the perceived barriers to change are removed, it is important that some new problem, not before considered important or perhaps not even recognised, doesn’t become a critical barrier.
This is helpful when thinking about how learning from new approaches and testing is built upon, and how we can bring people with us on a change journey.
I also really like Senge’s thinking around what it means to be a learning organisation "where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together." Sounds good to me!
Senge says that a learning organisation must have two conditions present at all times:
- They must have the ability to design the organisation to match the intended or desired outcomes
- They must have the ability to recognise when the initial direction of the organisation is different from the desired outcome and follow the necessary steps to correct this mismatch
Enabling staff to make the right call is key when we’re working in complex environments, which is directly related to the first point. If there isn’t one right way of doing things, then staff need to be able to act when things go wrong.
This is also important around bringing people with us. This is made difficult by the cultural habits of the prevailing system (it’s worth checking out Ben Proctor’s posts on culture here and here. He’s on fire). Senge believes that too often we search for a saviour to impart expert advice. He instead encourages us to learn from what we do through reflection and inquiry, something that the best organisations do well in the field of social care.
The second point strikes a chord for me around how we create the conditions for innovation to bed in, and our attitude to failure is key to this. Punish failure and all you hear is the good stuff, and it becomes very difficult to learn from what went wrong.
This has made me consider how we learn from our own work. Yes, there’s loads we can learn from others and we shouldn’t stop looking at new ways of working. But too often this can result in looking for a silver bullet approach (another great post by Chris Bolton) or what Senge sees as a heroic leader who can inspire people to change. If we invested more time looking for evidence and knowledge within our own organisations, we would have a much better idea of the real issues and we would make evidence-informed decisions to deal with them. Life’s a constant learning journey, and I look forward to applying this further in my own work.
