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Building an innovation culture

One of the best blogs I read regularly on innovation is 100% Open. The latest post there is a pretty interesting one on building an innovation culture.

The tips are:

  1. Focus on fostering a viral innovation culture one person/team at a time
  2. Build innovation habits
  3. Institutionalise what innovation looks like
  4. Give mavericks & their networks permission to innovate
  5. Celebrate benefits of creative-thinking, risk-taking & mistake making in personal and professional lives
  6. Incentivise inner motivation as much as financial or professional rewards
  7. Give innovation (a) space & bring it to life

Read the whole post for a description of each one.

Not sure I would agree with them all – number 3 gives me the willies – but certainly food for thought!

Any you would add, or question?

We need more councillors, not less

The MJ reports on Buckinghamshire County Council’s successful bid to reduce the number of members elected to it, from 57 to 49, in the name of cost cutting.

County deputy leader Bill Chapple said: ‘I’m delighted the commission is taking our proposals forward. We are living in a time of austerity when tough decisions have to be taken, and in making these proposals members are supporting the cost saving process.’

Drawing up new divisional boundaries will take account of an average 7,750 voters to each member, 1,050 below the national average. Mr Chapple said the revised ratio would maintain a ‘good democratic representation for the electorate, and save £100,000 a year.

Not commenting specifically on this example, but I think that, in general, we need more councillors, not less.

I mentioned my reasons in an earlier post. Basically, we have too few people doing too much, and a rethink about the role of the elected member is needed if we are to attract more people to get involved.

Cllr James Cousins argued persuasively on Twitter that if councillors took a more strategic view on issues, rather than getting bogged down in operational stuff, they would then be able to do better with fewer numbers.

It’s certainly a view I have sympathy with. Having been a member services officer in a previous life, I have far too many memories of trying to coax from councillors their views on a strategic report, rather than just having typos pointed out to me.

However, I think the thought of spending hour upon hour in town hall meetings and reading countless numbers of reports is still going to put off a large number of people getting involved.

As well as more councillors, we need better councillors. People with drive and ambition, people passionate about issues with fresh perspectives and different attitudes and cultures. Not only will this make council chambers more representative but it ought to make them better at what they do.

But these people – dynamic types with ideas and enthusiasm – are generally pretty busy being successful at other things. They don’t have a lot of time. Being a councillor right now – even if you take the strategic outlook Cllr Cousins encourages – takes up a lot of time, especially if you want to do it properly.

So rather than just having one or two representatives per ward, let’s have have a few more. Many as many as five or even ten for the bigger ones. These councillors split the work between them, taking on as much as they have time for and preferably the bits they are good at, or at least knowledgeable about.

They work together collaboratively – which would bring in the most culture change, especially where more than one political party is represented. Elections would certainly be very different affairs – but then I would argue that local elections are dominated by either local personality or national politics and policy – rather than specific local policy. In fact it might be that the party system loses its relevance in the local context.

This is, as always from me, half baked thinking. I’ve no doubt that there are stacks of reasons why this is a dumb idea. But I’ve never one been tempted to stand as a councillor, having seen the stresses and workloads it brings. Given the option to be involved, but sharing the effort with others, I might change my mind.

What would a local government skunk works look like?

So my post about whether local government needs skunk works got quite a reaction both in the comments and on Twitter, so it’s obviously something people are interested in discussing.

How can we move the debate forward?

Let me sketch some ideas on how it might work – feel free to comment, criticise, abuse me in the comments. I’m genuinely making this up as I go along.

1. A local government skunkworks would best operate on a networked basis – a loose central organisation of more localised groups. That way you keep small groups concentrating on local issues but sharing is still possible.

2. Due to the nature of local service delivery and related issues, it would need to be run on open innovation lines, so that people who aren;t local government officers can still get involved, eg other public services, those in the civil sector, universities (thanks Rupert in the comments) and the private sector.

3. Skunkworks operate best with specific projects to work on. Some method of identifying projects would be needed.

4. Is there a need for some kind of ownership by the local council, or at least a body responsible for service delivery? No point having an active skunk works if nothing ever actually happens!

5. Depending on the project, financing is going to be needed at some point. Where would that come from in this model?

6. Involvement of local residents will be vital – they ought to be able to join teams where they have value to add, and be kept up to date with progress and be able to comment (added thanks to Harry in the comments).

7. This isn’t just about IT or the web – it’s about any kind of innovation. Though tech likely to play a role in many innovations (added thanks to Harry in the comments).

8. Skunkworks is probably a terrible name and something friendlier is undoubtably needed (from comments on the Twitters by @anthonyzach and @dominiccampbell).

Have I got anything badly wrong? What have I missed out?

Do we need skunkworks in local government?

Simon Dickson has been doing his best to keep us up to date with the government skunkworks, the project to form a tight group of innovators in central government to work on new ideas.

If you’re new to the idea of a skunkworks, here’s the Wikipedia page. Basically, a skunkworks

is widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organisation given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.

Steph also recently posted a couple of interviews with two public sector skunkworks style outfits, which is well worth a read.

This got me thinking: does local government need something similar? If it does, should it be a central body, or perhaps something that individual councils should have? Maybe it could be a shared service between groups of councils.

I’d be really interested in what people think.

I do wonder where innovation fits in to local government this year. After all, theoretically, it ought to be a time when organisations try new things and new ways of working to improve efficiency and reduce costs. However as Ingrid alluded to in her recent post, retrenchment might be more likely.

A quick reminder about the brilliant Little Innovation Book by James Gardner that you can read for free online and is a great primer on innovation matters.

Whither open government in 2011?

Ingrid has published a set of five rather grim predictions for next year. Go and take a look, and make one of your new year resolutions to stop them from happening.

Here are some thoughts from me on what might happen next year. These certainly aren’t predictions, and are more hopes really.

1. Collaboration grows up

Big changes within organisations, lots of layoffs, knowledge retention becoming a big issue, a growth in partnership working and shared services, greater involvement of the civil sector in service delivery and a focus on making the most of existing talent should all point government organisations towards making better use of social technology as part of operations, through social intranets, collaborative extranets and the like.

It’s certainly something we at Learning Pool are hoping to support people with in the new year. We’re working with the Improvement Service in Scotland, supporting a project to promote agile and flexible working in councils north of the border and will be contributing to a knowledge management seminar in Scotland in February, amongst other events.

I’m also in the process of writing a guide to the use of social technology within the organisation, which I am hoping to have finished in early January!

2. Online communities are taken seriously

I’m increasingly convinced by the arguments put forward by Catherine Howe on her blog about the idea of online civic spaces. There needs to be some structure around online conversations in democracy and public service delivery – albeit not too much.

Where a number of government organisations in an area want to engage with people on a reasonably regular basis, I’d like to see them either getting involved with an existing online communities, or developing one platform for all such interactions to take place. Keep it informal, barriers to entry low, but enable a community to be built up, relationships to be formed and a body of evidence to be developed.

Rather like Let’s Talk Central, the project we worked on this year with Central Bedfordshire Council. I’d love to work on one of these on a local or regional basis, with councils, health, police, fire and rescue and other organisations on board and contributing.

3. Technology and innovation works its way up the food chain

I’m getting more requests to talk about social media and related technology to groups of senior managers and chief executives. It seems like if Ingrid’s fear that this stuff is going to get siloed into communications departments is to be prevented, it is by ensuring interest at the top of the organisation.

Language is a vital thing here. People at the top are going to be less interested in means and far more engaged by the talk of ends. Focus on benefits rather than operational details. It’s easy (but wrong) to label this activity as a frippery that’s inappropriate for these austere times – convince those at the top that it is necessary and hopefully stuff will get done.

4. A much needed focus on public sector employees

There’s much that one can disagree with Andrew DiMaio about, but one thing he has consistently got right is the need for those with an interest in reforming government to focus on the role and needs of the people who work for government, or at least those that will be left after the cuts.

A much maligned group, especially in certain sections of the media, public servants do an incredible job in increasingly difficult circumstances. They aren’t perfect, and it’s fair to say that some are much more able than others, but nonetheless they all require support and credit.

5. A revolution in local democracy

A real one from the left field from me here. This isn’t going to happen next year, or any year soon, but it’s something I have been increasingly thinking about during the last few years. The way our local leaders are selected and operate is broken and I don’t think real change can be effected until a new way of running democracy at this level is found.

It strikes me that the way things are currently done is profoundly exclusionary both in terms of the requirements of the role of councillor and the way that they do business.

Firstly, the workload of a councillor is far too great, and means that the only people with the time to do it justice are those who are retired or who for some other reason do not have to work. In other words, people are getting elected because they have the time to do the job, not because they would be good at doing it.

Another aspect of this is that councillors are expected to have an interest and knowledge across a huge range of different policy areas, which is, I think, somewhat unrealistic.

So, right now we have too few people doing too much. We need more people doing less each. So, more councillors please, who each cover fewer issues, concentrating on the stuff they are good at.

Whilst we’re at it, let’s change the way the whole thing works, with fewer meetings, more online decision making and conferencing. Fine, there are gazillions of points of process and procedure that would need working out, but it strikes me at the moment that local democracy and governance isn’t terribly strong, nor interesting, and it could do with a thorough overhaul.

OK, so this really isn’t going to happen in 2011. But I can dream…

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