Demonstrating the Value of an Innovation Team — Part 1
We are an innovation team embedded in a policy and program branch within a government line department. That positioning matters. It influences our mandate and how we approach our work with and for others. We’re really inside government.
Our work is part of a broader program evaluation currently underway and we’re eager to learn from it. We’ll learn how our value propositions hold up informed by project case studies, interviews with implicated partners and stakeholders, and related results. For example:
- OEE Social Innovation UnLab;
- Rewarding Energy Efficiency: Getting Canadians into the Game;
- Citizen-centred Collaboration for Energy Efficiency;
- Experimentation Works for Energy Efficiency in the Home, Energy Label Experimentation using Carrot Rewards; and No Sticks Just Carrots (our final Experimentation Works post on our results and learning coming soon).
Time has passed (we’re approaching the end of our third year), things change, and we have new team members so it’s a good time to revisit how we approach and demonstrate the value of what we do. I’m interested in ways our team and others in our organization might see themselves better in what we’re doing together. That will require meaningful engagement and an openness by all to change. Including us. We need to consider where we are creating value, what’s shifting, and where and how to adapt.
Emergence
Our team’s intention all along has been to apply a developmental evaluation approach, which makes sense given the emergent nature of what we do. We’re not a team that is attempting to implement one particular, defined intervention over time and measure what happens. We gravitate towards where the problems and opportunities to innovate and experiment are. We work with colleagues, stakeholders, and partners to do what’s ‘fit for purpose’ in the time and context we all find ourselves in. We also support others who do that.
So, we’re not a start-up aiming to scale a solution. We have more in common with what Javier Guillot of Equipo de Innovación Pública (EiP) calls a ‘government search-up’ in his States of Change interview:
We play different roles in an innovation and experimentation process with others depending on the context and needs. Part of our work involves co-creating the conditions for innovation and experimentation. For example, we’re leading digital and data strategy initiatives that involve engaging colleagues to map and understand our organization’s current properties (the channels where we play), assets (what creates value), and users (who we’re trying to reach and create value with and for). The aim is to raise our digital awareness, generate understanding of our organization’s current digital and data states, and surface policy and service opportunities and challenges where we can apply open, digital, and social principles in practice to create and/or amplify value.
We’re keen to embed our evaluation and learning approach into our delivery more systematically, including beyond the project scale. We want to demonstrate what that looks and feels like in practice and engage our colleagues and senior management more regularly on learning and progress, and where we might need to pivot.
‘Value’ can be in the eye of the beholder
If you’ve spent any time trying to measure and report on the results of public sector-related initiatives, you know that subjectivity and attribution can be tricky considerations. Even trickier when the contexts we’re operating in are complex. If we perceive the systems and behaviours we’re attempting to influence as orderly and predictable, or even complicated, it will influence what we do, how we do it, and how we approach and demonstrate value. For example, advancing or enabling energy efficiency in a building or an entire buildings sector isn’t just a technical (or complicated) challenge. When you consider the systemic, financial, policy, technological, situational, and behavioural dynamics at play it’s a complex domain to be operating in and attempting to influence.
“Complexity, to quote Michael Quinn Patton, IS a theory of change. Understanding that reality has radical implications for doing change work.” — Chris Corrigan in Towards the idea that complexity IS a theory of change
What might it look and feel like in government to approach complexity as a theory of change? We’re well-positioned to introduce and try new ways of understanding and demonstrating value in our context.
In doing so though, we might come up against situations where our perception of value differs from others. For example, will a senior executive, who’s under pressure to provide policy proposals now, share the perspective that learning what works and why via action research and experimentation is of value? Or, what if an experiment’s findings suggest the assumptions underpinning an existing service might not hold in context and practice? Or, what if user research and scanning suggests that the new idea a manager has fallen in love with may not actually be needed, it already exists, or that others are better placed and capable of delivering it?
For an innovation team, those situations may be exciting opportunities to explore and create. From a service owner or senior executive perspective, they may be concerning and perceived as going against the value that they are actively trying to create, not only in the immediate term, but possibly over years of prior investment and effort.
So positioning our team and demonstrating value is challenging terrain. We need to be responsive and adaptive. It requires some give and take. How can we work together to make things better?
We’re grateful to other public and social innovation hubs, teams, and labs (#psilabs) who are sharing their stories on this front, like Alberta CoLab and EiP, and initiatives like the States of Change #LabLegacies for amplifying them.
Are you a government search-up?
Does a ‘government search-up' resonate with you or reflect your work? Our assumption is that digital, research, and science-based teams are naturally disposed to work in a search-up way— do we need other government functional areas and teams adopting and valuing search-up behaviours and practices in order to accelerate, deepen, and institutionalize public sector innovation and experimentation?
How about collaborative and multi-disciplinary search-ups? For example, our department supports “action learning teams" for cross-cutting and emerging priorities that benefit from science-policy integration. We also have an internal innovation fund supporting novel ideas and projects. What if those teams approached action learning and innovation in more systematic ways through experimentation? I feel we’re on the cusp of breaking free from the slippery slope of one-off pilot projects at our department, but we have to set action learning teams and search-ups, like ours, up for success.
Learning and leadership initiatives, like Canada Beyond 150, GC Entrepreneurs (States of Change), and the Policy Community’s direction and events are developing people and teams with ‘search-up’ mindsets and skills. If or when participants in those programs and events return to their home departments or teams, what conditions do we need to enable them and others who want to work in this way to create public value?
And we can’t forget about starting up and designing policies and services for scale, including for complex problems that cross-cut organizational, jurisdictional, and sectoral boundaries. Who’s naturally disposed to play a role in this kind of work, what do they need, and how do we need to work across research-policy-service innovation life-cycles to learn, create, and amplify public value?
Our next post will include a look into our team’s work and how we’re setting ourselves up to approach learning and demonstrating value with others.
