Governance at your service: Trusted, innovative and participatory
A big question driving me is ‘the great climate challenge’ of how to stimulate and accelerate the shift to a low carbon world. I took this question with me nearly five years ago when I started work as a policy advisor for Wellington City Council. I’m now shifting to central government, and taking the opportunity to reflect on my experience with this post.
My adventures in public policy followed a research project to advise local government on water security under long-term climate change. My research highlighted unexpected leverage points for increasing climate resilience, such as building trust and creating opportunities for experimentation, learning and innovation across sectors and scales.
Implementing such advice requires new approaches, and first-hand experience has given me ‘soul in the game’ and some great exemplars. For example, inspired by the potential of methods developed by digital and social entrepreneurs to enable rapid innovation, I co-created a series of innovation challenges with Enspiral, a rapidly growing social enterprise collective based in Wellington, New Zealand.
The Smart Energy Challenge (2014 and 2015), Wellington Climathon (2015) and the Low Carbon Challenge (2016) connect a community of researchers, businesses, government and entrepreneurs. These challenges provide opportunities for people passionate about tackling climate change to experience and learn entrepreneurial methods, while bringing a fresh context for policy development.
Shifting to a people-centered approach
My concern with much of the policy development work I see around me is that it is disconnected from the real world and real people. It lacks imagination and empathy and is ‘done to’ people and communities, not with and in service of them; it often produces division, disillusion and disengagement within communities; and is wasteful of finite time and resources.
People are generally the most dynamic part of a situation — as any human who has experienced relationships with other humans can attest. Experimentation, co-learning and transformative innovation are enabled by involving people from all parts of a system and engaging their creativity. Under such conditions new realities that couldn’t be imagined at the start of a project become not only possible, but emerge as common sense.
We can’t navigate the huge challenges we face and move towards the futures we desire without putting people at the centre of the process. If we put people at the centre of the process, we need to get really good at working with each other, especially when we disagree. A great starting point is to see difference as a ‘magic sauce’ for creative problem solving.
Systems thinking and transformation
The complete package of emergent ideas and innovations needed to tackle complex problems cannot be found within established practices and institutions. As Einstein said, you can’t solve a problem with the thinking that created it. Likewise, a system is perfectly designed to produce what it is currently producing: If we want the system to produce something different, we need to shift the thinking that creates and sustains the system. We are all part of these systems. Successful interventions come when interveners also adapt and transform.
An initial human response is to react to something different and new. People need time and space to process and reflect, so the earlier they are engaged in the process the better. We each need an experience that deepens and transforms our understanding, so we can contribute to the solution and adapt our behavior to help shift the system. Given a compelling vision and a piece of the action we’ll quickly think up how to get there and generate inspiring stories to motivate others.
The systems entrepreneur
A defining characteristic at the start of a policy project is having an objective or target in mind but not knowing how to get there. This is an opportunity to engage participants and co-design a solution grounded in the real world. The core team needs to define the purpose and scope for a given project and set the strategic direction. They must also align the work of the participants and the appetite of project governance and sponsors for change. This is the work of system entrepreneurs.
-Frances Westley, Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience.
System entrepreneurs can apply start-up methods, starting small, testing early, and adapting quickly based on real-world information. Such methods enable founders to build companies, starting with as little as a laptop and a friend’s couch to call home.
A tech or social entrepreneur uses their drive and initiative to attract people and resources to their project. An entrepreneur has a wealth of creative freedom but scarce resources. Like a new baby, a startup needs a nurturing environment and is hungry for the resources it needs to grow and thrive.
Thriving requires experiencing and mastering challenges. The entrepreneur must continuously adapt and often transform their idea based on real-world feedback — no startup survives first contact with the customer. Likewise, a system entrepreneur must be antifragile and see every challenge and shift as a new opportunity to grow toward a desired future state. The system will always change and adapt, bringing fresh constraints, challenges and opportunities.
Service leadership, participatory democracy and a compelling vision
Local government is the front line for many social and environmental issues and a great way to experience multiple project cycles quickly. My work over the last few years is great proof of concept and gives me plenty of confidence for future projects. But being entrepreneurial within a hierarchical organisation is extremely challenging work.
A big part of my success as a system entrepreneur is my ability to draw on the human creativity around me. I have been very lucky to work with Enspiral where powerful ideas such as service leadership drive the vision of ‘more people working on stuff that matters’. Enspiral applies entrepreneurial methods, digital technology and social processes to big challenges. After a few iterations scalable solutions can emerge from rudimentary prototypes.
Enspiral’s solutions empower similar organisations around the world to thrive, and to develop and share their ideas, tools and experience. For example, Enspiral’s Loomio and Cobudget tools enable organisational decision-making and budgeting to be highly democratic, participatory and transparent. Success is driven through experimentation, using a repeatable yet continuously evolving practice, in a high-trust environment that fosters learning and innovation.
How do we stimulate a shift to a low carbon world?
Working in local government was a fantastic opportunity to connect and collaborate with Wellington’s growing community of social entrepreneurs. Enspiral is creating and living the practices I identified as leverage points in my research. I was able to draw on the resulting energy and creativity to deliver exciting projects, and Enspiral has leveraged this success to deliver bigger and bolder projects for Wellington and the world such as OS//OS.
Over the last 4.5 years I have watched Enspiral grow, turning challenges into opportunities, and supporting more and more people to thrive. In contrast, the culture in which I spent my days felt stifling and stuck. I had to intentionally develop strategies to stay creative and experimental despite this difficult environment. The work of pioneers is never easy and I was lucky to have external support to lean on.
Tipping points can be reached and systems transformed when people are activated and aligned across sectors and scales. This requires lots of people to be supported to creatively solve difficult problems together, across quite different organisations. What excites me about Enspiral is that it is mastering the ability to grow and support people, and their capacity for creative problem solving and collective learning within an organisation. I think the challenge now is how to get broad uptake of these developing cultural tools and practices within Government.
