2017 municipal innovators community conference...culture within municipal governance, emphasizing...
TRANSCRIPT
© 2017 PSD ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
2017 Municipal
Innovators Community
Conference In Review
September 27-28, 2017 | Guelph, Ontario
Pre-Conference Workshop
Session Insights
Presented by,
Presented by the Public Sector Digest
Tyler Sutton & Sloane Sweazey
rom September 27-28th, 2017, municipal employees and public servants from
across Canada gathered in Guelph, Ontario for the third annual Municipal
Innovators Community conference. The conference allowed for participants to
share and celebrate their innovative municipal work, and most importantly, learn
from other municipalities to ensure the future growth and prosperity of their own
communities. Municipalities are faced with emerging challenges, such as those linked to climate
change and a growing and changing demographic, while also tackling old struggles, most notably
financial restraints. The Municipal Innovators Community conference offers municipalities the
ability to learn from one another and gain valuable resources, strengthening their capacity to
provide sustainable, effective and efficient public services.
PRE-CONFERENCE: September 26, 2017
PSD Presents: A Workshop in Municipal Innovation
To kick off the conference, PSD held the pre-conference “Workshop on Municipal Innovation.”
The workshop began with TED Talk-style presentations from five municipal innovators, providing
examples of innovative solutions implemented in their respective communities. The following
duration of the workshop involved two group sessions. In the first group session, participants
shared their own municipal issues and challenges with fellow attendees and innovators, and in
the second group session, brainstormed and offered possible solutions to overcome them. The
following sections provide summaries of the challenges and innovative solutions discussed.
Asset Management (AM) Participants shared the lack of priority dedicated to AM initiatives by municipal management as a
core challenge. As such, municipal assets risk being improperly maintained. Central to this issue
is the challenge of receiving management buy-in to support AM activities. Another major
associated challenge was data collection. A suggested solution to the former challenge was a
bottom-up approach: exemplifying the benefit of asset management and then presenting
findings to senior leadership for more support.
AM software is a solution to the latter data collection challenge. Even more, making
management aware of funding opportunities to lever asset management initiatives, such as for
purchasing AM software, is another practical solution. FCM’s Municipal Asset Management
Program offers funding opportunities specifically for asset management activities, offering a
practical solution to communities whose management’s resistance is simply due to lack of
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available funds. For Ontario communities, it is also worth noting Bill 6 regulations to encourage
management to be proactive about fulfilling future AM requirements.1
Funding Challenges One of the most pressing challenges facing municipalities is ensuring adequate funding for
projects and services. This challenge was discussed at length in the group discussions.
Participants noted that the fear of funding cuts discourages departments to share their project
ideas with other departments. The lack of engagement may result in departments being
unaware of relevant projects that they can collaborate on, which in turn risks inefficiencies in
service delivery – exacerbating the negative effects of departmental silos. This particular issue
illuminates the lack of communication between departments in municipal government, another
problem highlighted. A solution to overcome lack of communication between departments is
employing an internal software system that enables employees to converse with each other,
sharing work activities and material. More open dialogue can hopefully allow for greater
collaboration between departments and in effect, provide more funding and resources for
projects. Of course, it is always important to be proactive about grant opportunities available to
municipalities as well.
Government Culture An overarching issue highlighted by participants was the overwhelming need for a change in
culture within municipal governance, emphasizing the slow pace of culture change in municipal
government. As noted by participants, it takes a long time to “get things done” due to
departmental silos and that the current municipal culture is risk averse. A sub issue to this
1 Further information on asset management best practices: https://publicsectordigest.com/article/building-asset-
management-team-survey-canadian-models-best-practices.
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challenge is the effort by many municipalities of going paperless. Some departments may be less
willing to transition to ‘paperless’, as one of the host innovators, Julien Patel, acknowledged in
his case study about the Magic Pen. Likewise, a change in culture also requires the
implementation of “savvy” technology, which an older mentality may be reluctant to introduce.
The major downfall of falling behind on technology is a lack of efficiency.
Core to overcoming the challenge of culture change is proving to management that a change in
culture, such as introducing innovative technology, will make operations more efficient and
effective. For example, Julien Patel’s case study explores how the Magic Pen pilot project
increased administration efficiency by 1200% in Newmarket’s fleet division. Similarly, as
reported by Brandon Currie, the City of Waterloo’s employee advocacy pilot program increased
social media click through by 10 times. Providing proof that new technology and innovative
solutions are more efficient and effective, offering a legitimate rationale for culture change.
Julien Patel discusses the implementation of the “Magic Pen” and transitional technology
Communication Participants reported that they wanted to have a better social media strategy, such as one that
Brandon Currie described (municipal employees share municipal content on their personal social
media platforms). The main concern surrounding social media challenges was ensuring that
employees relay messages correctly and accurately. Brandon Currie explained that municipalities
need not worry about how the message is communicated to the public (if management is
reluctant no matter what, Bambu can write the messages for employees instead). Instead, he
suggested that the messages that are relayed to the public via social media are not ones that
warrant the risk of inaccuracy. In other words, municipalities should resist posting topics related
to tax due dates and overarching municipal goals on their social media accounts. This makes
municipal governments’ social media accounts seem annoying and hinders the reach of their
social media platforms.
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Brandon Currie presents on the City of Waterloo's employee advocacy program
Growth Management One of the main issues recognized by large municipalities was growth management. A key
challenge noted was the rural/urban divide – ensuring that services are provided to all residents.
Similarly, managing traffic congestion was another noted concern, especially by municipalities
facing significant growth.2 One solution for traffic congestion is to encourage local businesses
and organizations to implement flex hours in an effort to diminish “rush hours”. Another
solution posed was the option to implement new parking technology that allows for drivers to
use their cellular device to pay for parking, as opposed to using change.
The need for a comprehensive parking strategy was a challenge that garnered a lot of discussion
in one group session. Limited budget, staff and technology were noted as the core impediments
to creating more parking spaces. A suggested solution was to reach out to local businesses,
explaining how better parking would help their businesses, and in turn increase support (and
possibly, funding) for parking infrastructure. As explained by Jeff Loney regarding the Town of
Gravenhurst’s Downtown Revitalization program, as well as Susan Stolarchuck’s experience
implementing a transit system in the small town of Deseronto, building strong and positive
relationships with business owners and municipal stakeholders can prove to be very beneficial in
advancing community projects. Another solution proposed was to strengthen the internal
capacity to propagate greater commitment – building a team committed to bringing the strategy
to life.
2 A case study of challenges related to traffic congestion can be read here: “An Analysis of Traffic Congestion and Policy Solutions for Canadian Municipalities.”
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An aging population is another issue confronting municipalities. Indeed, succession planning is a
critical concern, in which municipal governments are faced with the challenge of encouraging a
diverse population of students to consider a career in the municipal sector. The lack of culture
change within municipal government certainly has an effect on the recruitment of young
professionals who seek to work in fast-paced and impactful careers. Therefore, solutions to
succession planning challenges are also those of culture change solutions. Nonetheless,
municipal governments can be proactive in their succession planning activities. For a more
thorough review and tips on both retaining and recruiting the most talented, PSD’s webinar,
“Building Skills for Leadership in Municipal Government” is a great resource.
To conclude, there were several solutions that were common across all categories of municipal
challenge. These included learning from other communities and their best practices, engaging
and building relationships with relevant stakeholders for additional support, and connecting with
local post-secondary institutions and community organizations for additional resources and
knowledge. John Ariyo was a particular advocate for community partnerships, noting that
community organizations were champions of the City of Hamilton’s Resettlement of Syrian
refugees project. On a final note, it is also worth taking the time to consider what innovation
means to one’s own community. Working towards conceptualizing and defining the notion is a
strategic first step when trying to achieve innovative solutions and making innovation a priority
in your municipality.
Special thanks to our sponsor,
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Day One: September 27th, 2017
Session 1: Leading in Innovative Environments with Dr. Martha Lenio
In her presentation, “Leading the Way Through
Uncharted Territory”, Dr. Martha Lenio reflected on her
time at the NASA Mars Probe simulation mission. The
goal of the mission was to learn how best to pick a team
for long duration missions – a psychological experiment
of sorts. The mission lasted eight months and from it,
Martha learned insightful lessons about team-building
and what it takes to work together – applicable to most
work environments. One of the first lessons she noted
was to recognize different leadership styles,
understanding and being conscious that different
personalities, and possibly more importantly, different
projects and goals, require different leadership styles in
order to excel. Earning the command position herself,
Martha determined that a strong leadership style was not necessary with the skilled team she
had, and rather, a passive leadership position was better suited. The majority of her presentation
was dedicated to her team, however, reflecting on the social challenges they faced together. She
stated, “You’re never going to pick a crew that is perfect, who is never going to have conflict,
people who are never going to get depressed. These are just normal things and they happen in
just about every team.” Her fellow seven team members all had varying personalities, to which
she attributed as a strength. Commenting little on the actual conflict that was had, Martha
stressed the importance of conflict management, deeming that one person’s priorities can
impact everyone else and as conflict naturally heightened at the end of the mission, weekly
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meetings changed to daily meetings to maintain communication and trust. Martha attributed the
seldom conflict to dedicated time to bond. During the eight-month duration of the mission, the
team members spent all major holidays together. In addition to conflict management, Martha
notes the importance of being self-aware when working shoulder-to-shoulder with co-workers.
Martha’s lessons are valuable lessons not just for those looking to endeavor on a trip to Mars,
but to most work environments; appropriate leadership styles, conflict management, self-
awareness, and staff-bonding are all crucial to healthy staff relationships and work settings.
Session 2: Dealing with Failure in Government with Ashley Good
This session surrounded the topic of failure, and more importantly, how to understand failure in
a different way. That is – and in reference to the title of the session – in order to deal with
failure, one must recognize failure not as a lack of success, but as a teachable moment. Leading
the session was Ashley Good from Fail Forward, and as she contended, failure is not always due
to incompetency, but more often due to complexity of situations and challenges. Relating this to
municipal governance, public sector practitioners work on complex projects and failure is
inevitable. This is especially true in an environment when innovation, an overarching theme of
the conference, is encouraged. When failure is inevitable whilst trying new things, managing the
risk is of utmost importance. Ashley posed this challenge to Hillary Hartley, Ontario’s Chief Digital
Officer, asking, “How do we protect the room to take new risks in the fear of failure?” Hartley’s
answer was to ensure that the organization is agile, which to her meant recognizing and
expecting failures to happen. By acknowledging the inevitably of failure, the impact of failure will
have a smaller impact and the organization will be better prepared to quickly move on from
them. Dr. Gavin Armstrong offered a business perspective to failure, extending Hartley’s slogan
“fail small and fail fast” to “fail small, fail fast, and fail cheaply”. Additionally, Gavin added that it
is important to admit failure to your customers; if you articulate why you fail and not just admit
that you failed, customers will appreciate your transparency and accountability, strengthening
your legitimacy.
Session 3: Accelerator Jam with Rick Boersma
Rick Boersma from Juice Inc. led a World Café session to introduce a new methodology to
facilitate innovative conversations. The concept behind World Café is cooperation, resting in the
belief that we are wiser together than we are alone. Rick had attendees break into groups,
answering three questions:
1. How might we find alternative funding sources?2. How might we risk-manage disruptive innovation?3. How might we manage public engagement?
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The objective of the group work was not to necessarily answer the questions, but to test how
well World Café works as a methodology in producing innovative ideas. In other words, whether
conversations conducted through a World Café process led to better and more useful ideas.
There was an overwhelming response from the room that the World Café methodology
stimulated greater discussion and even more, offered validation from colleagues and peers. As a
useful suggestion, one attendee recommended that participants be able to have a take-away
“place-mat” that summarizes the ideas proposed during the group work. In doing so in the
future, participants will be able to share their ideas with colleagues, and the positive aspects of
the World Café will benefit not only attendees, but a larger group as well.
Audience partakes in a World Café activity led by Rick Boersma
Session 4: Behavioural Insights with Sami El-Sibaey
Sami El-Sibaey, a behavioural scientist for the Ontario Public Service, introduced his audience to
the relationship between behavioural science and municipal governance. He shared insight into
how behavioural science can be applied to policy and program design, and as he contended, “a
tool to add to our toolbox.” Learnings from behavioural science allow policy makers to better
understand the human decision maker that the policy or program is directed at. Expanding our
perspective of the decision maker involves understanding and recognizing the complexity of the
decision-maker's life based on context and context impacts choice.
As Sami stated, the difficultly for policy makers is overcoming automatic intuitions of how
something or someone is perceived. Simply put, the brain expects the world to work in a certain
way. Yet, by employing a different perspective and understanding why a decision was made (or
not made), policy-makers are able to change the policy or program in a way that is more
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effective. This change often comes in the form of a frame, or a different approach. An example
that Sami provided was the effort by government to encourage citizens to use less electricity.
Enumerating kilowatts usage to residents does not decrease their incentive to use electricity,
most simply because the unit of measurement is unclear to them. Instead, the amount of
electricity used must be conceptualized in a way they understand in order to change their
behaviour, such as a visualization of an electricity amount in comparison to their neighbours.
Sami contended that by applying behavioural insights to policy and program design,
understanding the environments that the information in presented in, government is better at
interacting with citizens and their policies and programs will be more effective.
Session 5: Digital Transformation Panel
Moderator: Barbara Swartzentruber Panelists:
• Hillary Hartley, Ontario’s Chief Digital Officer
• Ryan Androsoff, Deputy Director and Product Lead for the Canadian Digital Service
• Gabe Sawhney, Executive Director of Code for Canada
When asked what “digital transformation” meant to them, all panelists offered different
perspectives of its meaning and importance. Hillary Hartley stated that technology has the
potential to make government simpler, faster and better. She also contended that the heart of
digital transformation is a changing culture. Likewise, Ryan Adrosoff submitted that the
importance of digital transformation rests in the reality that the modern citizen has an
expectation of government, especially in regard to public services, to be digital and by embarking
on a digital transformation, government has the opportunity to strengthen its legitimacy by
enhancing quality of public services and government’s capacity to make lives better. Likewise,
Gabe Sawhney submitted that a digital transformation is one that closes the gap between using
technology not only in just our personal and professional lives, but also introducing it to civic life
as well.
A key takeaway from the session, and one that was referenced by sessions that followed, was
one of capacity. Hillary stressed that a digital transformation need not require a dramatic change
in inputs. Rather, many staff in a municipal organization likely already have the tools, skills, and
capacity to help the organization digitally transform and have not been given the power or
authority to do so. Another piece of advice that Hillary offered, and again one that was
referenced in future sessions, was to experiment with digital right away – dedicating time and
resources to creating a framework or policy is redundant, and rather, the organization should
build policy only when they begin embarking on a digital transformation.
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Digital Transformation Panel: Gabe Sawhney, Ryan Androsoff, and Hillary Hartley
Day Two: September 28th, 2017
Session 6: Thinking like a Designer with Helen Kerr, Marco Romano, and Amy Stevens
Helen Kerr, Co-President at KerrSmith Design, discussed how designers approach policy-making
differently. She described this as an adaptive and purpose driven approach, and compared it to
reactive decisions and strategic solutions. The problem with reactive decisions is that immediate
decisions are not ideal, although sometimes necessary, for addressing complex problems that
have long-term consequences. Likewise, strategic solutions can often become conveyer belt
solutions (input determine an objective develop a plan of action outputs). If the
conveyer belt ever were to break, an organization may not be equipped to continue solving
problems moving forward.
Being adaptive and purpose driven is what Kerr recommended as being the most valuable and
beneficial for municipalities. To begin, inputs are much greater in number and instead of an
objective, a purpose must be determined. Guiding principles offer a solution when the conveyer
belt breaks down – or something does not go as planned – and in the process entirety,
organizations are left with outcomes and not outputs. In this way, directions and plans can
change, but the underlying purpose remains the same.
Marco Romano and Amy Stevens from the Region of Peel reflected on how the city embraced
adaptive and purpose driven design to community planning. One of the main changes that was
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made was creating a 20-year plan, “Peel in 2035”, as opposed to the traditional 4 year cycles. In
regards to increasing the amount of inputs, the Region embarked on an ambitious public
engagement campaign, employing different engagement methods to understand how the
community envisions the Region in 2035.
Session 7: Civic Innovation Labs with Calgary, Guelph, Kitchener,
and Vancouver
Moderator: Stewart McDonough Panelists:
• Jonathan Veale, Innovation lead with Calgary Civic Innovation YYC Lab
• Lindsay Cole, Solutions Lab at the City of Vancouver
• Karl Allen-Muncey, Lab Director of the City of Kitchener Civic Innovation Lab
• Sam Laban, Guelph Innovation Lab
Panelists discussed the challenges and opportunities of civic innovation labs. Stressed by Sam,
the biggest challenge to innovation labs is the pressure to succeed. This is especially true for a
new lab. But as discussed in Session 2: “Dealing with Failure in Government”, failure is inevitable.
Labs are faced with an overarching challenge of innovating while finding opportunity in the
learnings that come with failure. One strength of innovation labs, however, is their ability to
collaborate with other labs, creating a culture of innovation. Such a culture allows for new ideas
to blossom, and as all panelists contend, make them better equipped to deal with the
permeability of high frequency and uncertain change, exposing people of the possibility of what
could be. It is in this way that civic innovation labs offer a unique opportunity and resource to
municipal organizations facing complex challenges and limited resources. And to be certain, as
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Hillary and Ryan stated earlier in the conference, there are no shortage of ideas from employees.
Rather, it is bringing the ideas to life. As Jonathan stated, “a huge part of our roles is not just to
expose ideas, but to bring [them] into execution.”
Session 8: Innovation Impact
Moderator: Helaina Gaspard, Ph.D. Panelists:
• Helen Kerr, KerrSmith
• Kristofer Kelly-Frere, City of Calgary
• Joseph Bou-Younes, Canada’s Open Data Exchange
Helaina began the discussion by offering 3 key frames:
1. The importance in measuring the impact of innovation is to ensure that whatever we are doing with our money is being done well and effectively2. By evaluating and monitoring, we can help correct issues that arise3. When you are a public servant, you are to give advice to elected officials, and because of this, we should care about results
The three panelists provide varying perspectives on the importance of measuring innovation.
From the City of Calgary, Kristofer discussed how to define goals. He shared the City of Calgary’s
planning project, which adopted a similar design that Helen Kerr described in the “Thinking Like a
Designer” session. Calgary crafted guiding principles, such as “adaptive” and “future focused” to
shape the city’s goal to spark the interest of stakeholders.
Discussing the data that is needed to measure results, Joseph submitted that it is important for
organizations to be agile in how innovation is measured as technology and projects change
rapidly. Importantly, he also stressed the need for governments to always keep inclusion, equity
and access at the forefront of innovation measurements.
Finally, Helen offered insight into how to communicate those measurements. As a designer, she
stressed the importance of qualitative story-telling, in addition to providing quantitative
measures. Qualitative story-telling, she stated, highlights the emotional content of issues in a
different way.
Session 9: Lawrence Hill and the Power of Storytelling
In a special closing session, author Lawrence Hill shared his insights on the power of storytelling. In his words, “one of the things that I love about story is imagination, is the possibility to
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introduce real but forgotten events.” Through his writing career, Lawrence has shared multiple stories, illuminating the misfortune and mistreatment of minorities. He noted that his objective through storytelling is to personalize stories in an effort to engage Canadians and Americans of social injustices. Lawrence stresses the power of story, explaining how stories are how people understand issues, those both personal and collective. It is in this way that story is powerful; that stories of innovation need be shared for change to happen.
Lawrence left conference attendees with a strong and inspiring message:
“I believe that Canada has some of the best and most livable cities in the world, but I also hope and believe that we all can do much, much better especially in addressing the areas of public transit, urban poverty, low-cost housing and the need for more of it, providing safe spaces for vulnerable and disenfranchised people and responding to crises and pressing need, such as the arrival and integration of refugees and new Canadians, and the desperate need of the growing number of people succumbing to the opioid crisis. Municipal leaders are in the best place to identify and spearhead meaningful social change and improvement.”
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