Feb 19, 2020
The public innovation community is important
“If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, travel together.”
When I wrote about why public sector innovation matters the quote above felt like a fair truism (even as its origin is debated!). Crucial to public sector innovation is our need to organise and connect. It’s why we set up States of Change in the first place, to convene a global network of people changing how government works. We’re not the only ones doing exciting things with learning communities. Here are five that have caught my eye recently:
1. One Team Gov are a self-organising movement of public servants that started in the UK and is now dotted across the globe. 🌍 Often mistaken for a ‘grassroots’ organisation. They started with support from those in some of the most senior posts in the UK government. This is ‘new power’ and self-organising movements in action.
2. The Policy Community for Canada’s public service and the Free Agents are both building a mass of interesting public servants across the Government of Canada. Both inspired by the attitudes in Nesta’s competency framework (below).
3. Innovadores Publicos in Chile is “More than a Network, a citizen-focused movement of civil servants”. They’re one of the most impressive and well-connected support groups we’ve come across. They wrote up their lessons from this movement-building (pdf).
4. A different set-up entirely but one that taps into the same adaptive, bottom-up improvisation is the massive UNDP Accelerator Labs initiative. It’s on a scale like nothing else I’ve seen.
5. And the Social Innovation Exchange exists to facilitate purposeful cross-sector conversations that challenge and inspire people to use innovation to increase social impact. It has been doing so successfully for more than a decade.
Say hello to… (011.Lab)
They are the public innovation lab of the city of São Paulo. Part of the Innovation and Technology Secretariat, they aim to engage public servants in practices that shift their minds and hands towards more human-centered and effective service delivery. You can find them on twitter @011labsp or say hi to Caio Werneck!
What’s (actually) caught my eye
There’s a lot of hot air in public innovation but the CPI’s Public Impact Fundamentals are a great example of making it easy to grapple with.
“There are great tools and methods emerging to support the innovation process… approaches that take practice, reflection and years to master… that must be lived and breathed — not simply pulled out of a toolkit and applied in a random context.” Thea Snow and Abe Greenspoon on what’s needed in governments for them to really change.
Apolitical’s Public Service Manifesto captures the public service I’d like to help build.
Check out the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative for a bold approach to build a different kind of public leadership in cities around the world.
🤓 The full evaluation of our 2019 Australia and New Zealand learning program is yours to read in full. Thanks, Papergiant.
And Nicole has been mulling over it to figure out ‘how we can make our learning programs (even) better?’💯I’m proud of the candidness of this.
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