The future of innovation labs: accelerating social movements or convening solutions ecosystems?

by Nick Charney

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At the Global Labworks conference in London a few weeks ago, Charles Leadbeater and Bill Eggers put forward two very different views on how innovation labs ought to position themselves in the future. Leadbeater argued that innovation labs ought to graft onto / align themselves with a social movement and use that movement / help that movement to scale. Eggers on the other hand argued that innovation labs ought to position themselves as the conveners of the solutions ecosystems. Both talks are embedded below.

 
The difference in theory is slight albeit important.

First, I have difficulty imagining a world where government run innovation labs could align themselves publicly with a particular movement while maintaining their public service neutrality. Neutrality is key and while in practice their is always a brokering of ideas within the civil service, directly espousing a particular position would risk politicizing the civil service and turning an internal innovation lab into a lobby group (think regulatory capture). Now it is very much worth pointing out that this is not a concern for privately run labs that operate outside traditional government controls where neutrality isn't an issue.

Second, if you are sympathetic to the idea that governments are losing their traditional monopolies, incumbents are struggling to remain relevant, and innovative upstarts are growing exponentially in both numbers and impact then you are also likely sympathetic to the idea that the emerging role for governments is to use their convening power to help influence a larger ecosystem in favour of their citizens.

The difference in practice is more apparent.

If labs were to join movements than in the field of transportation the may decide to champion public transportation as their movement (there are plenty of pro-public transit voices out there). In so doing they would likely position themselves as a trusted and vocal champion and marshal resources towards making the public transit system more efficient for transit users. As such, their efforts are likely to be aimed at the system itself and its supporting assets.

On the other hand, if labs were to act as conveners of solutions for the broader transportation ecosystem then the public transportation system would be one input of many being considered by the lab; others could include regulated taxis, unregulated taxis ride shares, bike shares, long-haul commercial transportation providers, automotive manufacturers, technology companies, etc. As a result the lab could be looking at things like social transport, automated driving, shared transportation models, real-time traffic management, tax incentives, employer matches, road pricing, etc. All of which means of course that the scope for innovation is much broader than improvements to the public transit system.

In fairness, I doubt very much that Leadbeater's was thinking about public transportation when he advised lab practitioners to "link to a social movement" but my fear is that that narrow scoping of the issue (from ecosystems approach to the myopia singular input) is the reflex in most public institutions.

If nothing else the two presentations, when coupled together, should highlight that there are is distinct choice in front of lab leaders to decide where to intervene and how. In my experience it is generally a choice that we often speed right through in the interests of innovation but ultimately that decision set informs, underpins and/or undermines those downstream efforts. I may not agree with Leadbeater's advice to link to a social movement, at least in the context of in house government labs, but I whole heartedly agree with his affirmation that having a clear expectation of what your lab does from where is paramount (See: Quick Thoughts From Nesta's Labworks 2015).

Why Governments Would Never Deploy Adobe's Kickbox and Why Maybe They Should

by Nick Charney

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Earlier this week Adobe's employee innovation program Kickbox got a lot of attention online when the company announced they were open sourcing the entire thing. Given that this just hit the ecosystem this month I'm still poking around on the site. That said, I'm impressed by the overview and dig that they have a separate section for senior folks looking to deploy Kickbox in their organizations and another featuring the core contents of the program (in fact, it reminds me a lot of the approach to public sector mutuals in the UK).


Kickbox tl;dr 

Kickbox is a two-day innovation workshop built around a starter-kit for would-be innovators. The workshop is designed to remove typical barriers to innovation: money, a process, innovation tools, and energy (caffeine and sugar); short (PR) video below:

Kickbox explained

For a more complete overview of the Kickbox program (which has been operating for the last 18 months) I suggest watching Mark Randall's presentation at the Lean Startup Conference embedded below.

Deflecting your early skepticism

Yes, you are right, Kickbox is likely as much about good PR for Adobe as it is about innovation. However, the fact that they open sourced it in its entirety should be taken as evidence that it has paid dividends for the company, that Adobe thinks its content can stand up to scrutiny on the web, and that it will attract talent that shares its values and commitments. I, for one, plan on having a closer look in the weeks ahead.


Why Governments Won't Use Kickbox

Because it would never work here.

Because our accountability culture makes it easier to approve $24,500 on a sole source contract than to approve 25 individual spends of $1,000.

Because not every $1,000 expenditure could be directly tied to a demonstrable 'innovation'.

Because every failed attempt will be met by the ruthless faux outrage that dominates our public discourse.

Because the relative safety of the status quo is easier for people to bear than the uncertainty of experimentation and failure.

Because backing such an experimental approach in spite of the lack of incentives to do so would require courage and constitute a heroic act.

Because once we've committed to a particular course of action, pursuing multiple and possibly competing strategies would likely be considered by many poor form rather than healthy experimentation, or more plainly A/B testing.

Why not A/B Test Innovation Labs and Kickbox?

Kickbox is built around the idea that innovation can happen anywhere — that if you lower barriers to participation and equip people with the right tools and resources, they can ideate quickly, lever their networks, and experiment at extremely low costs. As a result, Kickbox is a 'fail fast' approach to innovation and focuses more on building the innovative capacity of people (e.g. how they approach problems and the networks they have to solve them) rather than delivering a particular innovation or series of innovations. In short, it moves the organization as a whole towards thinking about problems and how to solve them differently today (and tomorrow) than it did yesterday.

Labs are fundamentally different. They centralize rather than diffuse the innovation function, create new institutional costs, situate those costs firmly within a subsection of the hierarchy, and reinforce the status quo of situational power structures where access and information are the ultimate sources of influence. As a result, labs are vulnerable to the same bureaucratic pressures that slow innovative forces in the rest of the organization. They are inherently exclusive (not everyone can work in the lab — that would after all undermine its very essence), which means that they are more focused on building and diffusing innovation rather than building widespread capacity for innovation.

Caveat #1: Yes, I'm an innovation lab skeptic and I understand that I'm swimming against the current on this one; and while I've written about them numerous times (See: On Dragon's Dens, Hackathons and Innovation Labs and/or The Future of Policy Work) I also know a lot of smart people who have been assigned to them. These are capable and committed people, many of whom I would consider friends, and all of whom I wish success because we need all the success we can get on this front.

Caveat #2: I had a conversation recently where I came to the conclusion that innovation labs may in fact just be our response to policy shops turning into issues management shops and that innovation labs are really just our way of re-introducing that function back into our organizations. It's not well thought out, but worth thinking about later when we are done celebrating their launch and evaluating their results.

Caveat #3: One of my biggest fears on the lab front is how likely I think it is that their walls become analogous to the organizational boundaries they were established to help circumvent — that their exclusivity and prestige actually increase the barriers to innovation rather than drop them. One of my earliest lessons in collaboration came from Clay Shirky's Institutions vs Collaboration (circa 2005) which convinced me that there is always more cognitive surplus and capacity outside an organization than within it. If labs are to be successful, those who work in them need to have a very specific skill set, a mandate to reach out to anyone with expertise, and the humility to consistently put themselves second.

My point isn't that one is right and one is wrong but rather we don't know what will work, why and under what circumstances; so why not A/B test these two different types of approaches?

Why maybe they should

Demonstrable results. Short lead times. Low cost (watch the video).

It's a free methodology for experimentation (look, its right here).

Desperate need (look around).

Blueprint 2020, Renewal, and the Trough of Disillusionment

by Kent Aitken

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Recently one of my colleagues pointed out a perceived lull in Government of Canada chatter. On Twitter, blogs, and GCconnex, they felt a noticeable absence of conversations about public administration, innovation, and change. I’m inclined to agree. We bandied theories back and forth about why that might be, and last Friday landed on this possibility:

The current wave of public service renewal, launched by Blueprint 2020, is hitting its trough of disillusionment. If you’re not familiar, that term refers to the Gartner Hype Cycle for new technologies: people start talking about them, then everyone’s expectations get unrealistically high, and when they can’t possibly deliver, the technology slides into the trough. People start questioning its value. Eventually, things level out and people find the genuinely useful applications for the technology, and it enters a plateau of productivity.

If the hype cycle can apply to public service renewal - that is, if the current wave is entering a trough of disillusionment, and can be mapped like a technology in this way - it means a few things.

For starters, it would mean that Nick (and others) may have solid grounds to question the promise of Dragon's Dens, Hackathons, and Innovation Labs. That it is time to question our expectations and ensure that we are pursuing the right ideas, and that they make sense for our organizations. And that John Kenney may be right about the tension between innovation and ongoing operations (see his review of Beyond the Idea: How to Execute Innovation in Any Organization).

(For the record, I still think highly of hackathons, but I agree with Clay Shirky about their actual sustainably productive application.)

"The product of a hackathon isn't running code. It's the social capital people created among the people in the room." @cshirky #cfasummit

— Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly) October 15, 2013

It would mean that some of the ideas that have surfaced since Blueprint 2020 launched in June won’t see the light of day, at least not in their current form, or applied to the problems proposed. Which is okay. Some of them shouldn’t.

Most importantly, it would mean that we, as an organization, are becoming more mature about innovation and the prospects for renewal. That we are questioning our assumptions, and moving towards those ideas that will actually create value in the long run. It would mean that we are actually on track towards implementing these ideas and reaching the plateau of productivity - which has always been the goal, whether we've known it or not.

That said, it would not mean that the champions and advocates for ideas can stop championing and advocating. These people are present in every stage of the hype cycle. That’s how it works.

The goal, now, is to focus on the problems that our organizations are persistently facing, and to find opportunities for alignment between problems and solutions.

People Act, Technology Helps

by Kent Aitken

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This quote from South by Southwest was making the rounds yesterday:

Which dovetails with Nick's post last week (see: Dragon's Dens, Hackathons, and Innovation Labs. Nick questioned whether such approaches are being used as innovation band-aids, plastered over more fundamental problems:

If pressed to offer a TL;DR of the problem I would say that the core challenge facing public sector institutions right now is that industrial age organizational models don't jive with digital age cultures and technologies.

I don't know if I can fully back the idea that it's the core challenge, but I'd agree that it's a major one (see: We Don't Make Widgets Any More or Healthcare.gov as a Case Study in the Digital Analog Divide).

We mistake the use of digital technology as evidence that we know how to use digital technology. Really, we're still very much so learning this world and discovering its potential and limits. We absolutely should continue to push the boundaries, but it strikes me that we're undervaluing reflection on what our recent history has meant.

And, for that matter, what it has not meant.

Humans are still human, if not more human than ever. Mid-century economic models assuming rational actors with perfect information have given way to the understanding that humans are not just irrational, but predictably irrational. Face-to-face canvassing impacts voter turnout at 5-8 times the rate that mail or phone calls do. Humans respond to what is meaningful to them, particularly connections to other humans.

With that in mind, here's a heuristic I've been considering. As government representatives and as employees of large organizations, we're faced with many situations in which we want to get feedback from stakeholders and colleagues. When thinking about how to design that interaction, consider how you'd ask a good friend the same question. If the answer is sitting down for coffee, email probably isn't the best approach. It might be the practical approach all things considered, but make sure you're aware of what you're losing in going a particular route.

As Nick asked, it's "What does governance look like in a digital era?" Not, "How do we use digital in governance?" Governance is still the key element of the idea. Some fundamental assumptions about governance have changed; many haven't. In the end, it's still about what people do.

Consider the Sandy Carter quote. Similarly, technology has helped people unearth many, many problems that always existed, but were hard to see. And the inadequacies of many of our solutions.

Technology will not revolutionize government, society, or democracy. But people might. Technology might help them realize that they have to, or help them find the people and tools they need to do it.

On Dragon's Dens, Hackathons and Innovation Labs

by Nick Charney

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I was asked recently to give a talk on injecting creativity in the civil service. The timing of the request is somewhat ironic given that I just left on an interchange and that one of the reasons I left was because I wanted more opportunities for creativity in the workplace.

Irony aside (and in fairness the invitation was issued a long time ago), the more I thought about the metaphor of injecting creativity, the more compelling I thought it was as a frame for discussion. As a metaphor, it speaks not only to the core challenge of creativity in the civil service but also to the underlying problem of how we think about solving it: We don't treat the underlying cause, we treat the symptom.

But the lack of creativity in the civil service - if you agree such a thing exists - isn't a structural problem per se but rather is the result of a myriad of other structural problems: hierarchy, risk aversion, group think and all the other usual suspects that round out the gamut.

There are surely creative people working for governments. I have met many, but the environment within which they work simply doesn't foster their creativity.

What's the solution?

The short answer is simple: fix the underlying problems.

The long answer — how to actually fix those problems — is much more complicated. If pressed to offer a TL;DR of the problem I would say that the core challenge facing public sector institutions right now is that industrial age organizational models don't jive with digital age cultures and technologies.

I would say that things are breaking.

Everyone kind of understands this, even if only implicitly

Leadership knows it. It's implied in their discussions about how the civil service is losing its monopoly on policy advice and evidenced whenever they turn a wilful blind eye to the established hierarchy or the machinery to better accomplish their goals.

Grunts know it. They exploit it whenever they use flattening technologies to reach across reporting structures, jurisdictions, geographies, languages, and ideologies.

Citizens know it. They are solving building solutions faster, better and cheaper than governments ever thought possible, let alone have the capacity to deliver (See: The Solution Revolution by William Eggers and Paul Macmillan)

Things are breaking and governments are struggling.

We're on our heels when we need to be leaning in

Despite these immense pressures, the cultural bias of bureaucracy is to subjugate new ideas to old principles (and processes) while thoughtful re-examination is anathema. That said, the former leads to press release by Twitter and extends industrial age thinking to digital technologies. The latter leads to a discussion about how democracy changes in the wake of communications technologies like Twitter, and in so doing it asks: "What does governance look like in a digital era?"

Where's the vein that runs through all of that?

How can any one individual reasonably expect to navigate such a complex system?

Distributed governance. Overlapping institutions. Supercharged technology. Agile citizenry.

Leaning in takes courage. Who among us is ready to stand up and take decisive action when the court of public opinions sees its public service as an ignoble profession (See: When did the Public Service Become an Ignoble Profession)? When the predominate discourse is about eliminating rather than creating (See: One Man's Trash is Another Man's Treasure)? When pundits and politicos jump on every miscue, and citizens are quick to scream "not in my back yard"?

Perhaps we need a different metaphor.

How do you eat the elephant?

There is an emergent patchwork of solutions that leadership seems increasingly interested in. It seems like you can't even have a conversation in this town without someone mentioning Dragon's Dens, Hackathons, or Innovation Labs. The patchwork is interesting, promising and even problematic.

It is interesting because it's evidence of my earlier claim that leadership knows something is amiss; it is promising because it demonstrates their willingness to try something different; and it is problematic because it's born of the same thinking that asks "how does one inject creativity into the civil service". It's additive, it doesn't address the underlying issues and if done in isolation is little more than another check mark in the column of innovation rhetoric.

However, if strung together under a larger plan the patchwork becomes something very different, and while I'm hopeful that those embarking down the path of dens, 'thons and labs have a vision of how these pieces fit together now and how they will be integrated into the larger whole (and what needs to change in order for that to happen AND how they plan on changing those things), I haven't heard anyone articulate it yet.

But maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself. After all, the answer to the question is one bite at a time.