9. Don't start with creating an innovation culture - culture only comes from practice

Laura Bunt - 04.11.2010

An important challenge now for chief executives and service leaders is how to create the right environment for radical innovation across the organisation, supported with the right balance of risk and reward. But this doesn’t mean creating an innovative culture for its own sake, but a culture where staff feel empowered and supported to affect change and adapt their own practice.

Blackboard and post it notes [original]

I was recently part of a workshop with local government chief executives and leaders discussing innovation in the context of spending cuts. What struck me was the ambition and appetite for a more radical shift in how services are delivered, not incremental change. Despite recognising that this kind of change is a tough sell – even when resources are more flexible – it is clear that streamlining and efficiency improvements won’t achieve savings of this scale (as today’s headlines illustrate). Making sustainable savings means transforming services to make them more effective at preventing and solving problems for citizens.

Necessarily then, radical innovation has to be a more distributed effort, led by those with a close understanding of the lives and aspirations of service users. It will be difficult to envisage new solutions centrally, when issues are so contingent on local behaviours and circumstance. This in itself will be a shift for many organisations, as innovation feels far from day to day practice and management. There isn’t the time to get the day job done, let alone think about new approaches. An important challenge for chief executives and service leaders is how to create the right environment for radical innovation across the organisation, supported with the right balance of risk and reward.

Often we’ve been asked how organisations can develop an ‘innovative culture’, a phrase that conjures up unhelpful images of post-it notes, toolkits and ‘think-in’ sessions on beanbags. But I think this is the wrong question. It’s not about creating an innovative culture for its own sake, but a culture where staff feel empowered and supported to affect change and adapt their own practice. Just as services need to engage more meaningfully with users to design and deliver better services, so public service organisations need to develop a culture of co-production amongst their staff.

As we’ve found in our work both in the private and public sector, innovation needs to be embedded in staff attitude and encouraged through clear and supportive management. In attitude, it’s about having the wherewithal to think differently about the challenges you’re facing and to consider new perspectives on the solution. In management, it’s about providing the scaffolding to surface and support new approaches without crushing or curtailing their development.

This same challenge is faced in the private sector, despite the common perception that it’s more innovative than its public counterpart. Managers still make the common mistake of strangling innovation efforts with rigid planning, budgeting and reviewing approaches that they use in their existing businesses – thereby discouraging people from developing or adapting innovation to circumstance.

The opportunity exists now for senior leaders to change the way in which teams are involved in innovation. As is reflected in how government should engage with communities and citizens, so efforts should be made to facilitate and support new relationships internally. This in itself will start to build capacity to operate and engage with the public in different, more effective ways.