Demonstrating the Value of an Innovation Team — Part 3
This is part three of a series on demonstrating the value of an innovation team that is embedded in a government department. The first and second posts can be found here and here.
Some time has passed since we last shared a post on our Learning and Impacts framework and we’re gearing up to test elements of it over the coming weeks.
To recap…
Via our learning and impacts work, we’re aiming to embed a principles-based and developmental evaluation approach into the delivery of what we do.
We want to:
- Engage our partners more intentionally on how we’ll work together and why;
- Guide project progress and inform course corrections as we deliver; and,
- Capture and communicate the value of what we do and create together at different scales.
As mentioned in our second post, when it comes to policy and service innovation (i.e. implementing something novel that creates value with and for the users of our policies, services, tools, data, content, etc), our experience is that how public servants work can be overlooked compared to the focus we put on what we want to create. We think ‘the how’ is relevant, particularly when aiming to do innovative things in new ways and when the intention is to do so in a manner that takes root and grows to create value in context and at the intended scale. Existing mindsets, practices, and the conditions within which we work affect what we do.
Each project we work on typically introduces a new or evolving context with new people, intentions, needs, capacities, and resources to consider and inform what we do together. Along with other relevant info, our Learning and Impacts Framework forms a service-level theory of change of sorts that can be adapted and applied in whatever contexts we find ourselves working in. It includes three interrelated outcomes that, if/when realized, collectively advance the potential impacts of our work with others.
So what’s new?
We’ve developed a set of principles to guide our delivery and help us advance our intended outcomes. Taken together, the following principles describe how we work, and increasingly want to work, with others to innovate in policy and service contexts:
Outcome 1: Improving capacity for policy and service innovation
- Be curious and explore
- Embrace diversity and inclusion
- Empower cross-functional and multi-disciplinary teams
- Empathize with users’ experiences and contexts
Outcome 2: Enabling action learning to understand and advance what works
- Work in the open
- Use quantitative and qualitative data to generate insights (zoom out, zoom in)
- Iterate and experiment towards ‘better’
- Consider and use new and emerging technologies, tools, and models (but don’t be driven by them)
Outcome 3: Implementing policy and service change for desired impacts
- Design for the appropriate scale
- Design for resiliency and responsiveness to disruption (in the near and longer terms)
- Amplify what works. Dampen or let go of what doesn’t
- Monitor, adapt and repeat
We’re curious if and how the above principles might resonate (or not) with our project partners, so we’re testing them via a short pre-launch survey and an accompanying workshop to enable reflection and discussion. The initial survey will ask team members to reflect on and relate each principle to their current experience and practice. The subsequent workshop will provide us with an opportunity to discuss and share practical actions that we can take, individually and as a team, to put the principles into practice as we work together over time.
Why are we doing this?
We’re interested in what it takes to move from transactional relationships to more transformative ways of working that are arguably required to enable policy and service innovation. Our aim is to more deliberately engage project partners and clients and discuss how we want to work, and what that might look and feel like given where people are at and tasks at hand.
We expect that being curious and exploratory, for example, will look and feel differently in each context, and that the people and teams we work with will have varying degrees of experience in putting the principles into practice.
We see this as worthwhile to test because, as mentioned in our first post, we’re an innovation team embedded in a branch within a sector that is situated in a federal line department. We don’t work at Spotify or in a digital org with a working culture that models the above principles in practice at scale.
Based on our experiences, we can’t assume that our partners and stakeholders have the same values, intentions, and understandings as we do when it comes to how we want to work and how that might relate to what we want to do together. Readers who are familiar with social innovation or digital government approaches and practices might recognize some of the above principles, but a lot of our partners and clients may not. They have their hands full keeping up with their evolving policy, research, and program contexts, not necessarily the public sector innovation or #GCDigital spaces.
There are also histories and existing ways of working to consider as we go about our mission as well. We can’t assume that our colleagues and partners have the same understanding as us when we say “let’s empathize with users’ experiences and contexts”. How they engage their stakeholders may be different than how we might consider approaching it depending on the context and purpose.
And our team can’t assume that we know best. Our proposed principles may need to be adapted or take on more contextually relevant meanings that we’re currently not expecting. We’re approaching our principles as testable hypotheses, not rigid, one-size-fits-all recipes for success.
We think this will help us navigate complexity and reflect on ‘new ways of working’ directly related to something we want to do together. It could help surface assumptions and expectations with regards to intentions, roles and responsibilities, and what happens during and after our work together. It will also allow us to establish a “baseline” of where each project team and team member is at along with the means to do pre- and post-project engagement, sense-making, and comparison in relation to both what we did, how we worked together to make it happen, and the impact(s) created as a result.
Ultimately, principles without meaningful reflection and practical action in relation to ourselves, the contexts we’re working in, and what we are trying to do with others risk being dismissed as buzzwords or simply ignored.
Conventional indicators and measurement are required too
In addition, each project, of course, will have its own set of relevant indicators that will enable us to monitor, analyse, and report on the results of the policy or service experiment that was delivered and to inform subsequent action.
Take our recent Experimentation Works projects, for example, where we and our partners ran two experiments related to engaging and informing homeowners on home energy efficiency. The (1) home energy labelling and (2) message framing experiments were different in that they each required us to design and test unique interventions given the purpose and context of what we were aiming to do and learn. In both experiments, ‘treatments’ were introduced, data was collected and analyzed, and findings were reported.
The results and findings of both experiments are relevant to the potential value that a team like ours creates with others, but we don’t experiment for the sake of experimenting. We engage, research, and experiment to influence policy and service change that leads to positive impacts, like improving relevant outcomes and experiences. How we approach and attempt to do that matters. It’s not simply about the thing we tested and measured. And it’s not solely about us and our team.
How we put each experiment into practice was not identical, but through our practice, we’ve learned that there a number of things we can keep in mind and consider when researching, designing, and delivering what we do in ways that can create value — the above principles are our attempt to surface those things so we can engage people and test them in a more deliberate way. Through continued practice we expect that they will evolve to reflect changing dynamics, contexts, and how we ourselves need to adapt to deliver value in complex and shifting terrains.
Do the above principles resonate with you? How are you and your team approaching and demonstrating the value of what you do with others? We’d love to hear from you.
