Why public sector innovation matters

And how a community of practice can help.

Presentation to (0.11).lab São Paulo 10 December 2019

Just over twenty years ago, I began my public service career in Canberra, Australia, as a wide-eyed graduate in the Prime Minister’s department. There I got to see the inner workings of government up close, working on foreign policy, industry policy and the national budget process. I was only an arm-length away from one of the most important conversations Australia has held in the last century, namely whether we should become a republic and break our ties with the British Monarchy.

I also got to see the downsides of Canberra: the disconnect and distance between policymakers and the people. The lack of engagement with real people when deciding major policy shifts. Australia’s Parliament House is built into the side of a hill, looking like a bunker safe from the zombie apocalypse of citizens wanting change.

In 2001, I moved to the UK to see whether the New Labour government of Tony Blair held any clues as to how to do it better. Huge investments were being made in health, in criminal justice. But the reform agenda in the UK became obsessed with targets and KPIs — deliverology — which meant that people in the system spent more time getting the numbers right and less time doing the right thing.

Ten years ago, I returned to Australia and was asked to establish a new organisation, the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, or TACSI, which had been a recommendation of Geoff Mulgan to the South Australia Government. Here was a chance to create a lab that could be truly radical and experimental in addressing the big social issues of our time.

At TACSI, we took on a range of social issues, from child protection and vulnerable families, to an ageing society, and improving the lives of people with disabilities. We had some amazing successes, like Family by Family, a family mentoring program to help struggling families to achieve their developmental goals — the only program that I’m aware of that won both social policy and industry design awards.

And I’m pleased to say that ten years later, TACSI is still going strong.

Looking around at that time, there were very few institutions that we could look to for inspiration, guidance and support. MindLab in Denmark was an early mentor, as was Kennisland in the Netherlands, La 27 Region in France and of course Nesta in the UK. Setting up a lab was a perilous business: there was little guidance on how to succeed and many people in the system wanting to see it fail.

My experience at TACSI, and the support that I received from around the world, led me to Nesta, where I was able to pay forward the support and guidance I received to a new generation of innovation teams and labs around the world. Chile, Portugal, Dubai, Sri Lanka, Serbia — it is clear that this was becoming a global movement.

In order to better support this movement, we created States of Change, a global learning network for public innovation. Over the last few years, we have run learning programs all over the world and we have worked with our partners to continue to deepen and share our practice.

So this is my story of how I came into this space.

What’s interesting to me is how similar the stories are of other people who have come into this space. They share similar views on why public sector innovation is so important and why we do what we do.

Why public sector innovation?

The American journalist H.L. Mencken once wrote that:

“there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible and wrong”.

We are living in a world characterised by increasing volatility, uncertainty and complexity. We need leadership that embraces this uncertainty, is responsive to change and willing to try new ideas.

Unfortunately, our institutions of government are rarely designed to deal with this uncertainty. The pace of change inside our institutions does not keep pace with the rate of change outside. Technology, demographics, climate effects — it is clear that the way of doing government in ten or twenty years time will need to respond to very different challenges to those we face today.

We have 19th-century institutions dealing with 21st-century challenges. We need a different way of doing government that is fit for purpose and delivers better outcomes for citizens.

The need to be experimental

There are an increasing number of governments around the world that are embracing this uncertainty with a new spirit of experimentation and they are bringing the public along with them.

Upon winning government, the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, instructed his ministers to dedicate a fixed percentage of program funds to experiment with new approaches to existing problems and to measure the impact. The goal is to foster environments “conducive to experimentation, innovation and intelligent risk-taking” while not punishing ministers or public servants for well-managed risks that fail to produce improvements. They are, however, expected to share the results of their experiments — positive, negative or neutral — with a default position of releasing the results publicly.

The Finnish Government has gone a step further and established an Office of Experimentation in their Prime Minister’s Department. It focuses on three areas of activity: to lead strategic government-wide experiments (such as their Universal Basic Income experiment), to support departmental experimentation, and to fund and support experiments among civil society and community groups.

Working with partners across the globe, Nesta established the Innovation Growth Lab to better understand how policy interventions actually support innovation and entrepreneurship. Just as researchers do in medicine, it uses rigorous experimentation methods, such as randomised controlled trials, rather than guesswork and anecdote.

And of course, we are seeing the rapid adoption of many innovation labs and teams in governments all over the world.

The need to be legitimate

We are also operating in the shadow of decreasing trust in public institutions in most countries and even the belief that democracy as a governing model seems to be fading.

It is only timely to ask: How do we recreate the legitimacy of government interventions and connect better with people in the process? How do governments best deal with the cross-cutting problems we are facing? And what does it actually look like to “serve the public” effectively and meaningfully, as public servants are mandated to do?

We know that governments around the world already are already committed to discover better answers to these questions. Many aspire to become more:

• Citizen-centric. Bringing citizens (and their needs and experiences) into the heart of government policies and problem-solving activities.
• Inclusive. To use an expanded portfolio of approaches and methods to create an open, effective and inclusive government.
• Legitimate. Increasing the trust in and legitimacy of government interventions and improve the possibilities for people to engage in public decision-making.

Failure to maintain or reinvigorate the legitimacy of government means that no change becomes possible. So the ‘how’ of change is as important as the ‘what’.

The need to be learning

And finally, we need to build systems of learning to continuously improve and evolve our institutions and our policies. We need to use existing evidence better and, where there are gaps, to generate new evidence through experimentation.

Why a community of practice?

I think it was Rudyard Kipling who once wrote: “He who travels fastest travels alone”, but I believe that they who travel furthest, travel with others.

Changing the institutions of government to be more experimental, more legitimate and more learning, is a marathon, not a sprint. It requires not just the inspired actions of a few brave individuals, but for their actions to inspire a much larger movement of change.

By working together as a global community of practice, we can help each other. We can point to each other’s successes as examples of the kind of impact we can have at home. We can learn from each others success, and more importantly, our failures. We can share ideas on what works, and what doesn’t, and we can share our practices, our methodologies, and even our people.

There will be plenty of people who stand ready to criticise, to mock, or to doubt the value of our efforts. A community of practice is a network of people who stands ready to support you through the difficult times, who understand the journey that you are on because they too have walked those steps.

There is a world of people out there who understand what you are trying to do, and want to see you succeed. And we look forward to supporting you in any way that we can.

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