Helping public institutions look beyond the curve
We spoke to Jason Pearman in April about how he and his team are keeping an eye on the long-term and helping public institutions think about ‘the curve beyond the curve’. He’s been busy with charts and frameworks to give himself some useful mental models to make some sense of quite extraordinary times. Let’s jump in.
Hey Jason! First off, how are you feeling, are you ok?
Hi! Like most of us, the first few weeks of this pandemic were a struggle. After making sure my family and team were safe, I did spin my wheels a bit trying to find ways for our team to contribute to the immediate COVID response.
What’s got your immediate attention?
Young people. As part of a team with a mandate to support young people along their journey into the labour market, the COVID crisis has really forced us to think deeply about how we’re able to help them; not just right now (though that’s important) but through the duration of this crisis and into a period of recovery.
In the midst of this crisis, governments are being asked to respond to… just about everything. With so much to get your head around, how have you framed your thinking? Where did you start?
I’m sure I’m not the only one who was unsure where to start! But I have come to lean heavily on the International Futures Forum’s Three Horizons framework. Obviously, no framework or mental model is 100% accurate, but they can be useful and the Three Horizons Framework has given me a way to consider the continuum of this crisis.
If you’re not familiar with the Three Horizons Framework I’d check out this great video explainer by Kate Raworth.
From the immediate challenge of stretching the social safety net as wide as possible to protect people’s health and livelihoods; to the longer-term challenge of lowering the barrier many young people face when joining the workforce. It’s thinking about those longer-term problems that’s keeping me awake at night. We’re doing our best not to take our eye off of the long game.
We’re also seeing huge amounts of money from both funders and governments. Where that money goes will have a huge effect on whether we have a future we’re happy with. We need to make sure we structure this massive ‘portfolio of investment’ — because that’s what it is — well.
Practically, this means casting our attention and investments beyond what’s immediately in front of us at all times.
I like that the Three Horizon Framework helps us see three interconnected systems that are at play during any transition. The first system, Horizon 1, is the dominant system that we all recognize and rely on. Sometimes referred to as “Business as Usual” or the system that “keeps the lights on”, when conditions change this system loses its effectiveness. The third system, Horizon 3, is a new end state that is a better fit for the new realities on the ground. The second system, Horizon 2, is the collection of new innovations and new infrastructure that helps Horizon 3 emerge.
To successfully navigate a transition, it’s important to act effectively across these three horizons.
Can you get a bit more granular on what kinds of activities or investment that you’d want to see? What kind of portfolio is needed to lay foundations for a viable future?
I tend to obsess about how to operationalize innovation frameworks and strategy, so I recently ran a thought experiment to A) map the Three Horizons over the phases of a crisis response, and B) map some decision and innovation operational models like Cynefin, Innovation Portfolio Sensemaking/Management, Mission Oriented Innovation, Boring Revolution, Delivery-Driven Policy, and IAP2 over the Three Horizons.
Ok, that’s a lot of frameworks…
Yeah, it is. So I made it a table to make sense of when these ways of thinking are most helpful to us (or helpful to me and the team) over the duration of the crisis. This is where I got to:
Worth noting that H1, H2, and H3 systems act in parallel (not one after the other). I only included the dominant Horizon during a given phase of the crisis response.
So, how is this table useful?
It helps me (and hopefully others!) look beyond the now, and gives me inspiration for practical things that I can do to work on the recovery, today. That’s not easy when our instincts are to ‘fix the thing’ directly in front of us.
As brutal as the first phase of this global crisis was, the immediate steps that most governments took were based on proven tools and authorities aka business as usual.
This made a tonne of sense given the immediate threats to health and safety, and livelihoods, and the need to adjust the delivery of essential services so that they could function during this time of crisis. But it’s just not going to cut it.
What’s after business as usual?
This next phase of the crisis brings many of us into unknown territory: public institutions will be called to generate new ideas and solutions for a post-crisis world, to scale up novel solutions that emerged during the crisis, to engage citizens to help inform strategic direction of policies/programs/services that have lost their fit.
This is all H2 and H3 territory. We need to get better at working in this space.
This exercise was helpful for me to start thinking about the kinds of activities and social investment portfolios that public institutions (and the broader social impact community) will need to design and manage so that we can exit this crisis better than we entered it.
How do you think innovation teams can lay the foundations for a more viable future?
First off, we could be in the mix to help our organizations learn which of the H1 measures seem to be working. As Gabrielle Gomez Mont said, “we need to capture the lessons while they’re hot”. Teams could think of themselves as a parallel learning team for crisis response and also shine a light on ‘bottom-up’ H2 and H3 activity.
I’m really looking forward to seeing how the Parallel Learning Structure that the Government of New Brunswick has launched plays out.
That sounds great, what else could public innovation teams do?
I think public innovation or transformation teams are well placed to support their organizations to transition towards more H2 and H3 oriented activities.
This could look like advising leadership teams, helping policy centres do some early sensemaking and foresight, working with procurement and evaluation divisions to set-up portfolios of experiments, engaging in conversations with civil society organizations on the ground to uncover emerging practices, doing some ethnographic work to deepen understanding of how the pandemic is affecting the needs and aspirations of citizens.
Sounds like something from the landscape of innovation approaches… What are your next steps?
Yeah, there’s more than enough work for teams like ours at the moment.
The table with all those decisions and operating models was an early thought experiment to help me start thinking about the kinds of activities and investments that would be needed over the short-term to support the emergence of a more viable future post-COVID crisis.
The next step is to explore how public institutions like ours can thoughtfully implement a Three Horizons-kind of an approach. Practically this means seeing where there is overlap and tension across these decision and learning models and see if there are any models that are a better fit for H2 and H3 activities/investments (thank you to Sasha Haschemayer and Nick Scott for the feedback on Learning Systems and Public Engagement).
We’ll also start to map our pre-COVID portfolio of activities and investments, and the portfolios of other actors across the youth employment ecosystem to see where there are gaps and synergies. Where it makes sense, we’ll make the case for our organization to step in and plug the gaps.
So thinking around the problem as a system?
That’s it. Of course, there’ll be blindspots, and logic gaps will no doubt emerge, so we’ll try to stay on top of these as well. How best to connect to philanthropy, navigating power dynamics, path dependency, what network and complexity sciences tell us about how best to engage as a few examples.
Any parting thoughts?
This whole time we’re living in feels very much ‘work in progress’; so is the work of our team. Definitely keen to hear how others in the public innovation world are thinking about how best to act during this crisis. It’s going to take all of our creative juices to get us out of this better than we entered.
Thanks for speaking with us Jason! Here are a few other links and resources that Jason wanted to share.
We’ve been looking into how other sectors frame crisis responses to uncover some helpful proxies that can complement our use of the Three Horizons. Some examples of how other sectors describe the various levels of attention needed to successfully navigate a crisis: IFRC’s Future of Livelihoods framework, WHO global influenza pandemic plan), McKinsey’s COVID response plan for enterprises, and Transition Psychology.
The International Future Forum has more precise definitions of the horizons, which is worth studying. Daniel Wahl also has a great blog of the Three Horizons Framework.
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