Theory of change, a new dimension for public sector innovators ?
This blog post is part of the Pushing the Boundaries of Public Sector Innovation (PB PSI) community of practice (CoP). We are people working in- and alongside public sector organizations who share a curiosity and commitment to work more ambitiously, systemically, and respectfully on the biggest social and ecological challenges of our time. These posts are written from the diverse perspectives of different members of the CoP as we learn and explore together. Find out more about the project and/or join the CoP, here.
Author : Stéphane Vincent, co-founder of La 27e Région, a French think-and-do-tank launched in 2008, 100% dedicated to public sector transformation. www.la27eregion.fr
« There is nothing more practical than a good theory », Psychologist Kurt Lewin (1890–1947)
Since about two decades, like in many countries, public innovation progressively become a brand new sector here in France. A significant number of news positions have been created within national and local governments, in consultancy and small or medium design agencies. The national agency in charge of public transformation (DITP) has recently published a directory gathering 80 public innovation labs -only the visible part of it, from innovation units in hospitals to local state level innovation labs. Even if narrow, public sector innovation is now a diversified activity with plenty of players, including academic units, professional medias, communities, events, an annual festival, etc.
But years later, are we really happy with all this ? Are the transformations we see at the level we could expect when we started years ago ?
It’s difficult to give a general answer, but public innovation labs might be a good barometer when you want to make an idea. Our first experience with labs began in 2011, when we’ve launched La Transfo (1), our first action-research about labs in local governments -12 cities and regions involved in nearly 10 years. Ten years later, in January 2022, we updated this experience by launching the Labonautes (2), a 12-months collective exploration about the limits faced by public innovation labs and how to push them back.
What did we learn from this ? First, a lot about the misunderstanding between public innovators and their administration, concerning their roles and missions. But we also learned about the lack of diversified skills, knowledges and experiences : many public innovators focus on just a few practices -e.g facilitation, service design, behavioral science- but underuse the available knowledge in the the field of innovation that could help them to unlock opportunities. They ask for more ressource, founding and legitimacy -which is fair- but without clearly identifying their core vision, the kind of change they are looking for, how they expect to achieve it, and how to gain in maturity to go further and tackle more ambitious challenges.
Guess what ? We don’t blame them. Even if reflexivity has always been a top priority for our non-profit association, it took many years at the 27th Region before we were able not only to explain what we were fighting for, but to realize how deep we must dig -individually, as a team but also as a community- to be able to explicit our vision and how to get it land. Inspired by the programme Transforming cities from within (3), we have rebuilt our theory of change in 2022, unchanged since our creation in 2008. With a group of friend organisations and the help of our friends at Quadrant Conseil (4), we also learned how to be more rigorous in terms of evaluation when we build our programmes.
Actually, we discovered that theory of change was a sort of preview when you want to improve your effects, adopt systemic approach, build richer visions of the future, reinforce your cooperations, and to address more ambitious change such as domination paradigms. It’s useful to re-frame our governance, founding model and long term strategy, but it’s also a fantastic interface for improving the dialog with partners such as other non-profit associations, social entrepreneurs or public institutions.
So what’s next ? Here in France, our idea would to be build a mouvement around evaluation by theory / theory of evaluation in the public innovation sector. Beyond labs, our new targets would be the dozens of innovation programmes launched everyday by public and/or private organisations. This calls -named Défi Carte Blanche, Designers d’Intérêt Général, ExpéRENOS, Territoires d’engagement, La Transfo and plenty others- have never been evaluated and very few knowledge is available about them. By creating this collective dynamic, we could ensure that the next generation of public innovators could do better and design programmes with higher impacts, more coordinated efforts, thinking in terms of portfolio and mission approach.
Every public innovator or lab must find it’s own reason to use theory of change as a way to go further and push the boundaries of public sector innovation. We would love you to share your own motivations, needs and thoughts. Come and join us !
(1) https://transfocodesource.la27eregion.fr/english.html
(2) https://leslabonautes.la27eregion.fr
