Change that sticks

Innovation, experimentation and adaptation

change

innovation

progress

improvement

What’s embedded in the word?

invention

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

FromInnovation 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/equipmentService 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 linksPosition/location innovation – e.g. new contexts or customers e.g. own homes, independent treatment centres, polyclinicsStrategic innovation - new goals or purposes e.g. new social contract with citizens, co-production, pluralism in providersGovernance innovation - e.g. Community Panels, Board of governors in Foundation Trusts, City AcademiesRhetorical 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

Incubating & prototyping

Replication &scaling up

Analysing & learning

Generatingpossibilities

Albury & Mulgan, October 2003

an iterative, not linear process

Generating possibilitiesconditions and circumstances which foster the production of innovative ideas (more later in ‘self-improving organisations’)

Incubating and prototypingPilots, pathfinders, beacons, demonstration sitesmodelling and simulations

Analysing and learningroutine evaluation of policies, programmes and initiativesgenerally 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 Lablast 10 years

Mayo Clinic SPARK labCumulative 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, possibilities2. Selection forces applied to these3.Amplification or reward

Fields BiologicalEvolution

Science Innovationin markets

Agents Organisms Theories Products

Generating possibilities

Self-organisationMutation

RecombinationCollaboration

Generation of disprovable

theories

InventionPrototypes

Amplification Reproduction Experimentation(Fit of theory to

data)Citation

Personal reputation with

peers

Financial rewarde.g. Price growth market share

Selectionpressures

Death/failure to thrive

CompetitionReproductive

failure

Peer ReviewPublicationParadigm shift

‘Markets forces’Organisational exitShareholder exit

1. How do possibilities get generated?

In your table groups work on the following questions

What about complex social systems which do not operate as markets (or maybe quasi markets?

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?

3. What are the selection forces in the public sector if organisational exit (death) is inappropriate as a selection force?

What about complex social systems which do not operate as markets (or maybe quasi markets?

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 building6. 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 processes8. 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 getthe outcome you wanted

Innovating?What fails- the event

not the process?

Experimenting?bad experiments but not bad results

Evolving‘Failure’ is essential

The problem of ‘failure’

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 innovationsA position paper prepared for the Ministry of Health New Zealand by Jonathan Lomas 2008