Change that sticks
Innovation, experimentation and
adaptation
What’s embedded in the word?
invention
change
innovation
progress
improvement
An Innovation in public services
(NB not the same as public sector)
•needs to be more than a policy idea…….
• about implementation and does not need to be successful
•more than continuous improvement - a step change
•durable enough to affect the operations or character of an organisation
•service innovations are intangible because they are not based on
products but on changes in relationships e.g patients and clinicians
• may be invisible except to those directly engaged in the activities
• is only recognised as an innovation if it perceived as new
by a several of key stakeholders
From
Innovation and its contribution to improvement. A review for policy makers,
Advisors, Managers and Researchers Jean Hartley May 2006
Dept of Communities and Local Government www.communities.gov.uk
Dimensions of innovation (Jean Hartley)
Product innovation e.g. new instrumentation/equipment
Service innovation - e.g. Assertive outreach in mental health services,
Hospices, intermediate care, patients booking hospital appointments
on line
Process innovation – e.g. admin reorganisation, mapping leading to
new approaches e.g. pre-op assessments, computer links
Position/location innovation – e.g. new contexts or customers e.g. own
homes, independent treatment centres, polyclinics
Strategic innovation - new goals or purposes e.g. new social contract with
citizens, co-production, pluralism in providers
Governance innovation - e.g. Community Panels, Board of governors
in Foundation Trusts, City Academies
Rhetorical innovation - new language or concepts e.g. carbon tax, food
miles, contestability, WCC, leading place.
Lots of new and radical ideas, what makes them unsticky?
‘I’ve been working with a client trying to radically change itself.
There is no shortage of good, new, radical ideas. People say, “Yes!”
and grab them and put them back into old processes old relationships
old information flows. They take up the new and put it into the
formats, processes and systems of the current culture,
turning it back into the very thing it’s trying to change!’.
Myron Rogers 2008
Implications- we have to innovate relationships or social relations
A rough-and-ready framework for thinking
and action on innovation in public services
an iterative,
not linear
process
Incubating &
prototyping
Generating
possibilities
Replication &
scaling up
Analysing &
learning
Albury & Mulgan, October 2003
Generating possibilities
conditions and circumstances
which foster the production of innovative ideas
(more later in ‘self-improving organisations’)
Incubating and prototyping
Pilots, pathfinders, beacons, demonstration sites
modelling and simulations
Analysing and learning
routine evaluation of policies, programmes and initiatives
generally not enough on why and in what circumstances
something works (or doesn’t)
Replication still slower diffusion in the public sector
•obsession with ‘best practice’
when diversity fertilises innovation
•over-focus on top performers
though innovation more common among strivers
and under-performers
Albury and Mulgan 2003
Mayo clinic: SPARC Lab
last 10 years
Mayo Clinic SPARK lab
Cumulative value creation
Some questions we are asking at CIHM
(giving attention to both wholes and parts)
‘What makes it possible for people to find solutions
that stick ?’
‘ What supports the capacity of systems to innovate?’
(‘What supports self organisation?’)
In living systems Evolution is the
process within which adaptation occurs.
It involves
1. the generation of diversity, possibilities
2. Selection forces applied to these
3. Amplification or reward
Fields
Biological
Evolution
Science
Innovation
in markets
Agents
Organisms
Theories
Products
Generating
possibilities
Self-organisation
Mutation
Recombination
Collaboration
Generation of
disprovable
theories
Invention
Prototypes
Amplification
Reproduction
Experimentation
(Fit of theory to
data)
Citation
Personal
reputation with
peers
Selection
pressures
Death/failure to
thrive
Competition
Reproductive
failure
Peer Review
Publication
Paradigm shift
Financial reward
e.g. Price
growth
market share
‘Markets forces’
Organisational exit
Shareholder exit
What about complex social systems which
do not operate as markets (or maybe
quasi markets?
In your table groups work on the following questions
1. How do possibilities get generated?
What about complex social systems which
do not operate as markets (or maybe
quasi markets?
2. What are our distinctive ways of
amplifying in the public sector?
What about complex social systems which
do not operate as markets (or maybe
quasi markets?
3. What are the selection forces in the
public sector if organisational exit (death)
is inappropriate as a selection force?
Self-improving system: required characteristics for a
system which fosters innovation and its diffusion
•
leadership: clarity of vision and desired outcomes (and relaxed on process)
•
funding regime which rewards improvement in (not absolute levels of)
performance
•
source of venture capital (loans not grants)
•
users and providers have easy access to robust, comparative performance
information
•
contestable: enables replacement of under-performing or failing
organisations by more successful
•
sufficient diversity for adaptability and experimentation
•
sufficient concentration to exploit economies and benefits of scale
Albury and Mulgan 2003
Our working assumptions from a complex system perspective.
1. You can trust resourcefulness of the system - the problem is not the
shortage of ideas and innovation can arise anywhere in the system
2. There may be a problem of learned helplessness in systems. The
attribution of cause to individual rather than systemic factors)
’they won’t let me’ or ‘I do it in spite of the system’
3. Finding solutions to service users problems never ends.- It is not a signal
of having got things wrong but of the constant adaptation needed to get
personal services ‘to work’
4. Requisite variety is necessary for evolution/adaptation or innovation.
5. We use conversations to work with both tacit and implicit knowledge
-face to face engagement and relationship building
6. It is unlikely to stick if one part of the system tries to innovate alone.
Multiple perspectives are always in operation and can increase
possibilities at both the invention and the implementation levels.
7. It is not a linear process so how do we work with non-linear dynamic
processes
8. You can’t predict which offerings/efforts will succeed - you may not know
till the end of the process
What busy managers could pay
attention to:
• Way tell stories
• Clarify constaints
• Generate possibilities: create space,
multiple perspectives, recombination, time
to explore
• Amplify/ Select: pattern recognition, new
relationships, new roles (anthropologists, T
people), access to info, reward adopters
Most happens at the front line
- the top of the organisation can
give space for experimentation.
(Albury)
30-80% of innovations fail (private sector data)
and that is an under recording
Think of an example of something
you tried to innovate but failed to get
the outcome you wanted
The problem of ‘failure’
Innovating?
What fails- the event
not the process?
Experimenting?
bad experiments but
not bad results
Evolving
‘Failure’ is essential
Thinking about experimentation…….
The scientific community is self organising.
There is no ‘corporate structure nor one boss.
Act as if your theory is right only in as much as it
hasn’t been found to be wrong yet.
Good experiments are not failures
Behavioural Rules
• formulate testable hypotheses
• design reproducible experiments
• make findings available to public examination
Experimenting to find things that stick
Some key findings about what is missing:
Innovations abound but what is lacking is the focus and
no co-ordinated capacity to evaluate which innovations are worthwhile
More networks and face-to-face exchange (formalised informality)
will build inter organisational and interpersonal relational capacity to
grease the wheels of innovation dissemination
The adoption of proven innovation depends on the local application of
effective change management processes
Formalised informality: an action plan to spread health innovations
A position paper prepared for the Ministry of Health New Zealand
by Jonathan Lomas 2008