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Preparing for innovation…

For those who have missed this, the National School of Government and the Civil Service Core Learning Programme joined forces in a research project on ‘Scaling Up Innovation in the Public Sector’. Their final report was published in April, and is well worth a read.

Although there is nothing groundbreaking in their work (does their have to be?), it does collate current thinking and innovative approaches across different players in the system.

The full report can be found here - http://blogs.bis.gov.uk/publicsectorinnovation/files/2011/07/Scaling-Up-Innovation-in-the-Public-Sector-Full-Report.pdf , and the exec summary here – http://blogs.bis.gov.uk/publicsectorinnovation/files/2011/07/Scaling-Up-Innovation-in-the-Public-Sector-Executive-Summary.pdf

I should, at this point, add a thanks to Dave Briggs, from Kind of Digital for his initial blog post which put me onto this.

I hope this work continues into further research, evaluation and planning. However, at the moment, for me there are a few deeper issues which also need to be addressed, which the report misses, ‘simplistic dualisms’ and ‘safety culture’.

Dualisms -There remains in my experience an unpleasant and misinformed discourse around the arenas of the public and private sectors. These go along the lines of ‘Public Service = Good – Private Investment = Bad’ and conversely ‘Private Sector = Lean and Efficient – Public Sector = Fat and Lazy’. Admittedly this is a popular dualism among tabloid journals and sensationalist writers, but it’s an untrue dualism which needs to be challenged if all stakeholders across all sectors are to embrace a more creative and nuanced approach to their work.

Safety Culture -In addition to changing the external discourse, there is a need to work with the internal, and personal, discourse of those in leadership positions. Clearly this report has been written to address a perceived or real problem within the public sector. An initial reading would say the ‘problem’ is that innovation is happening but it’s not being scaled-up or given the chance to thrive. From my reading the report seems to tip-toe around one of the problems that sits below this, cultures of fear.

There is, I believe, a fear within many Public Sector leaders that if they take a risk and fail, their current projects, department, team and/or career will be jeopardised in some way. One senior Civil Servant put it this way to me once “Fundamentally we are being trained not to take risk, we are primarily rewarded for keeping our heads down and doing the task that has always been done.” In turn this has many anti-innovation effects, among them has been the promotion of non-risk takers (and I acknowledge that all organisations need people who are wary of risk). The public sector needs to find mechanisms to embed the acceptance of BIG risk, the mechanisms for the communication and management of risk are well embedded. These mechanisms are as much psychodynamic as they are systemic.

It has to be said that for all I know the authors may have explored these and decided, among all data they had, to exclude them. Either way, I for one will wait to see how this stream of inquiry develops and moves forward.