Designing public governance. A facilitator’s notes from the One Team Gov Finland unconference.
This article is written by Hannasofia Hardwick and was originally published in Finnish in LinkedIn. English version edited by Esko Reinikainen and Janne Mattila
What do you get when you put together people interested in developing public governance, add global best practices and a toolbox of inclusive methods for an action-packed day? The answer: Finland’s first One Team Gov unconference! What did it look like from a facilitator’s point of view, and what were the takeaways?
OneTeamGov unconference — what now?
On a Friday morning in June attendees were trickling into the Ministry of Finance’s building on Mariankatu 9. What was about to begin in the conference room was something that hadn’t been seen in Finland before, but whose effectiveness had been recognised around the world in the past few years in countries from Canada to Wales, and including Finland’s neighbours Sweden and Norway.
Finland’s inaugural OneTeamGov unconference was at hand — an event intended to bring together people interested in fundamentally renewing public governance and, using inclusive methods, to get them to “collide” their ideas together.
A principle of unconferences is that the topics aren’t set in stone, the agenda for the day was set by the attendees on the day of the event. Although the attendees couldn’t know exactly what the day held in store, tickets had gone quickly and the room for the event was full.
But wait a minute, what was that OneTeamGov thing? One Team Government, OneTeamGov for short, and OTG shortest of all, is a community originally started in the United Kingdom, which has quickly spread all over the world. It’s:
“…a global community of innovators focused on radical public sector reform through practical action. United and guided by a set of principles, we want to improve public services and change the way we work.”
Bringing new ways of doing things into public governance is done both in smaller scale meetings and in larger unconferences. If One Team Gov is new to you, you can read more about it using the link below:
And find out about our seven principles:
Alongside the global community there are several local communities. OneTeamGov Finland has its own subsection on the global community’s website.
The spark for our unconference had come from the first global OneTeamGov unconference held in May 2018 in London. Finnish attendees, impressed by the event, decided that something similar should be done or at least experimented on in Finland.
You can read all about what people thought of the day here:
What exactly happened in the OneTeamGov Finland unconference?
Although the agenda was to be settled on the day, as per unconference principles, the attendees had been given as a homework assignment the prompt to think about some problem or challenge involving public governance.
This helped in formulating the agenda: in the kick-off session, everyone wrote down a challenge, briefly presented it to someone else, received feedback, and in turn heard someone else’s challenge and gave them feedback. Short rounds of discussion followed, after which everyone refined the challenge they had in mind into its final form.
There followed an intense pitching round, in which the fastest to put their hands up got to present their challenges to an appreciative crowd(the challenges that didn’t get to go through this were collected at the end and may be used in future events).
Each pitched challenge ended up on a grid on the wall as a topic for one session. The 45-minute sessions were held simultaneously in eight meeting rooms in three rounds of sessions. In other words, a total of 24 sessions were held on the topics suggested by the attendees.
The session topics had to do with the following themes, many of which have relevance outside the public sector as well:
- The challenges, benefits and demands involved in the digital transformation and artificial intelligence
- Developing customer experience and customer service
- Bringing agile practices to projects and decision-making processes traditionally using the waterfall model
- Advancing a culture of experimentation and citizen involvement
The person who had come up with the challenge was encouraged to participate in “their own” session. Everyone else was free to choose which session to attend. Participants were also free to move between sessions while they were in progress.
As well as participating in sessions, attendees could build the public governance of their dreams out of lego or take some time out to relax in a comfy chair if they felt like it.
The sessions were mainly run by teams of three facilitators. In the afternoon the outcomes of the sessions were presented in a feedback round, either by a facilitator or the person who proposed the challenge. At this point the challenges from the morning had been developed into practical actions that individuals and organisations in public governance were encouraged to undertake.
The actions reflect the main purpose of the unconference: trying to find concrete ways to transform slow, bureaucratic processes and siloed thinking in public governance.
The pitching round, which was pretty intense, gave us numerous suggestions for actions that could benefit both public servants and the citizens who use public services.
Among the pitched grassroots-level actions were:
- I will activate my personal social circle at work to push for change.
- I will be appreciative of customer service and people who work in customer service, and work to improve its status. I will ask customers for their opinions on our processes and services.
- I will acquaint myself with previous, agile projects in this space and use their results in my own process for change.
- I will surround myself with others interested in agile methods and, together, put forward proposals using inclusive methods in future projects.
Although some of these actions may seem obvious and simple, presenting them in front of an appreciative audience gave the presenters confidence and encouragement that change comes from individuals and that change is possible.
At the end of the day, the crowd leaving the event was excited, inspired and pumped about new ideas and contacts.
How was it for you?
I took part in the OneTeamGov Finland unconference in the role of a facilitator. We were given a free hand in running the sessions. This was a source of both anxiety and a sense of freedom!
On one hand, I was worried about the facilitation methods: how and when we would manage to decide how to run the sessions, and what would we do if the person who proposed to topic for the session has their own clear plan for the session, or didn’t like the facilitators’ idea. On the other hand, I was hopeful that the relaxed and uninhibited ethos of the unconference would seep into the sessions and their structuring.
An additional help in orienting myself was that I got to participate in the first session of the day as a “regular” attendee, without the responsibility of facilitating. After that I was more confident about running my own sessions.
After my two sessions facilitating with Eeva Salonen and Taru Hillamo, I was feeling pretty positive. Before the first session, we had drafted a framework for how it would go, but it was tricky to tell how well suited it was; although we knew at this point what the topics were going to be for each session, we didn’t know how many people would decide to attend a particular one.
The free-form nature of the unconference showed in that our first session was attended by just four people, and consequently we decided to allocate more time to one-on-one discussions over more rapid group work. Whereas the first session was more intimate and featured long and thoughtful discussions, the second one had four times the headcount, some of which joined the group after we had already started the session!
This way of working demands of the facilitator a sensitivity and readiness to change plans, schedules and methods on the fly.
In our case it went swimmingly, and our main facilitator Eeva’s idea to use the “three apples” method worked surprisingly well in a large group. Each participant wrote on apple-shaped post-its of different colours, which ways of doing things they want to keep (red apples), which they want to improve (green apples), and which they would like to get rid of (brown apples). Then they brought their notes to a common wall, and briefly explained their meaning.
The apples were grouped on the wall by colour and subject, and clear themes became apparent. Finally, we focused on the green apples, the ones we wanted to improve, and everyone got two voting stickers to vote on the most important one.
If we would have had enough time, we would have had everyone scrunch up the brown ones and throw them in the rubbish bin!
Although the crowd was undoubtedly self-selected to comprise a motivated and change-oriented group of public officials, I hadn’t expected how passionately they presented their thoughts and ideas across different parts of the sessions. Judging by the discussions I heard, there’s considerable demand for change and new ways of doing and thinking in the public sector.
How could the OTG unconference concept be further developed?
After the unconference was over I went to the afterparty to talk with other participants and to gauge their thoughts on the whole thing. Overall, the unconference was considered to have been a success. Some suggestions for improvement did, however, come up.
Having facilitated some sessions, I came up with some myself — both about the concept and the practical arrangements. Here are some key ones.
Be concrete from the start. Although the informality and deferred decision-making concerning the agenda were refreshing compared to traditional conference posturing, a more concrete starting point could have lead to discovering more change-promoting actions. As it was, many sessions were about abstract, top-level concepts and 45 minutes was just not enough time to build a roadmap for concrete action.
So the homework before the event should make it clear that the challenge the attendees come up with should have to do with some concrete, everyday process in public governance. Such a challenge is much more tractable in a practical session. I would further suggest that only the challenges satisfying that requirement be accepted as session topics, and the overly abstract ones be passed by.
Clear and uniform instructions for the facilitators. The facilitators were given a number of files to read before the event, but the information was partly contradictory and/or inadequate. One clear file, with all the relevant information on facilitating — schedules, a checklist for the sessions, a broader list of recommended methods — would have helped me in preparing for the day.
More time for the feedback round. Considering that each 45-minute session resulted in concrete suggestions for tackling the topic challenge, there was really not a lot of time for presenting these suggestions to the rest of the group. Although the feedback in itself is a great way to present the main findings, there could have been, say, a minute rather than just half a minute for presenting the central practical actions.
Distribute a list of actions to all participants. As well as more time for pitching, it would be useful to have a list of all the actions selected in the sessions sent as an email to everyone. People could select the ones most relevant for their work and make their own list. Ideally this could be worked into a public board in the workplace for others to see and use.
What’s next?
The future wasn’t discussed during the event, but it would be great if Finland’s OTG activity became an ongoing, regular thing.
Peer support, building networks across organisational boundaries, sharing successes and hearing about them is important in really kickstarting reform in public governance.
A note from the editors
You can find out what’s happening in One Team Government Finland by following our Twitter account:
Or you can join the One Team Gov Slack workspace (oneteamgovernment.slack.com) where you will find a channel dedicated to activities in Finland, and all the global channels as well.
There are regular sessions (every three weeks, or so) coming up where we get to know and practice together some of the Liberating Structures tools and methods.
We are also planning a Nordic event for 2020. We’ll do it by working across borders, positively and in the open (this Doodle poll is open until 10.10.2019) — and you are welcome to join!
