Democratising innovation: How to help colleagues see the value of working differently

This post is written by Stephanie Nemcsok, Senior Innovation Designer, The City of Calgary.

• The problem: Getting colleagues across government to see the value of working differently can be a challenge.
• Why it matters: To maximise innovation opportunities and create better services for citizens, all stakeholders need to be on board.
• The solution: Embed innovation into work processes and cultures at scale.

The Innovation Lab at The City of Calgary supports city staff and partners to modernise government by accelerating innovation, shift mindsets and scale and sustain momentum. Our team of innovation experts is in the business of helping people work differently by using research-backed innovation tools that create safer spaces to generate opportunities, collaborate, learn, and test ideas to challenge the status quo. So how do you help colleagues see the value of working differently? Here are some things we’re trying with embedding innovation into The City of Calgary’s work processes and cultures at scale.

1. Make access to innovation easy. The Innovation Lab provides an array of supported participation in innovation methodologies to share the possibilities of working differently at varying levels of time and commitment. At the low-barrier end, city staff can join a monthly virtual ‘Mug Club’, where staff read and discuss innovation-related topics with colleagues from across the corporation in a psychologically safe environment. This offering is flexible, responsive to what is topical in the moment, and allows staff to connect informally to build their innovation network across the corporation. The Innovation Lab team also provides 30-minute quick consultations to any city staff member who is looking for a thinking partner in applying innovation methodologies in their work. These are free and available to all city staff - often leading to project intake conversations, as they provide The Lab team with an opportunity to highlight how innovation methodologies help our colleagues get even better results.

2. Integrate innovation into the organisation’s existing learning culture. To work differently, city staff need practical learning to build their skills and toolkits. As a result, The Innovation Lab offers experiential professional learning courses - ranging from 1.5 to 3 hours in length, to empower city staff to take practical innovation tools back to their work and try them out right away. Innovation Lab courses are listed with all other professional learning offerings in the corporation’s learning management system. The courses are easy to find and promoted through internal communication channels. Once a staff member completes a course, it is added to their human resources record, demonstrating their commitment to learning and innovation. Furthermore, The Innovation Lab team is working on a Community of Practice (C.O.P.) for city staff who have attended Lab professional learning. The C.O.P. will provide staff with valuable low-risk ways to practise applying the innovation mindsets, toolsets, and skill sets they have learned.

3. Understand the context and use shared language. Innovation is full of buzzwords that can feel quite alienating to the uninitiated. In strictly using languages of design and innovation, we are adding to the cognitive load of our partners trying to work differently with us. Plain language can make our efforts more palatable and accessible. Yet, as practitioners, it is helpful to problematise when we need to simplify our language and when we need to use innovation vocabulary in order to address the systemic problems we are working through.

For example, while coaching a project team wanting to try prototyping, we learned that innovation vocabulary was causing their leadership to shut down the conversation. We coached them to speak about prototyping as an opportunity to gather data about user interests through testing to make a targeted investment with their limited resources - data-driven decision making. Trying to simply apply a plain-language philosophy can be a challenge where specific words bring particular contexts and histories that may not be intended. For example, The Innovation Lab team uses ‘problem framing’ as part of our innovation methodologies, rather than ‘scoping’ as that term evokes a particular project management practice, often used for large infrastructure projects, led by our colleagues in the Corporate Project Management Centre. The language of design and innovation can be threatening or risky to the status quo, but sometimes that is helpful in a government context. Overall, it is valuable to try to communicate in a way that is familiar to our colleagues, rather than to impose the vocabulary and diagrams we were trained to use as design thinkers. The principles matter more than the words we use to describe them; The Innovation Lab team has found that working with our colleagues' existing terminology helped them try out new ways of working.

4. Demonstrate that you care. Colleagues want to know that you see them, value their work, and are proactively seeking their perspectives. The Innovation Lab has found that using facilitation techniques like check-in questions and design warm-ups, encourage colleagues to show up as themselves and foster ‘swift trust’ to enhance collaboration. Also, try using a behavioural science approach to communicate your innovation work, clearly articulating why this innovation work is needed and how, by designing _with _them, it will lead to better outcomes for all stakeholders. Make sure you measure and report back on those outcomes.

Furthermore, change fatigue is a challenge, especially in the context of an ongoing pandemic and, in my current context, a corporate realignment further adding to the feelings of uncertainty. Your message of innovation might not resonate if it feels like ‘one-more-thing’ for already tapped individuals to take on. Seek out individuals who are looking for support - maybe a project they just got handed hasn’t been solved through traditional business processes or they are working on a project that has lost momentum and needs a fresh start. City staff are much more open to working differently when they feel the pain of traditional methods no longer serving them.

5. Demonstrate impact and influence with storytelling. When I first joined The Innovation Lab the team was seeking a project with the right cross-corporate potential to demonstrate impact. The team jumped on the opportunity to redesign the report writer’s experience - a challenge that connected to every business unit in the city and had the permission space from the clerk’s office to do things differently. Internal innovation projects are a good place to start if you’re looking to demonstrate impact and build credibility among internal stakeholders. Once the team completed the project, slide decks for our professional learning courses were updated with the concrete example of how innovation methodologies were applied to help the corporation collaborate more effectively, and save the organisation money, ultimately delivering even better citizen value. To take that storytelling to the next level, The Innovation Lab has a team of information designers who help analyse results and translate the work into engaging reports with visualisations of data to make the work more accessible and impactful.

6. Coach on complex project work. Many enabling services within civic government work as consultancies, taking parts of a complex challenge to work on and handing the results back. Often this is because of resourcing challenges or historical structures/processes. Learning and applying innovation methodologies is an extra load when trying to work through a project. The Innovation Lab learned from our stakeholders that project teams need coaching support throughout a project when applying innovation methodologies - especially when it comes to launching and implementing something different. As a result, The Lab team partners with clients throughout an entire project to increase the probability of a great result, not only for the project but also for the city as a whole.

7. Advocate with senior leadership and prepare for the long game. Senior leadership unlocks permission space for project leads to take the time and resources required for an innovation approach. The Innovation Lab team has had to turn down great opportunities for impact because the project team did not have senior leadership buy-in and support needed for success. Working differently requires a high level of psychological safety to be successful and advocacy at senior levels of leadership can help build that permission space. For The Innovation Lab, that has looked like taking on projects with senior leadership and creating an innovation cheat sheet to help senior leadership have the vocabulary and concrete examples of what innovation and working differently look like in the corporation. Overall, The Innovation Lab is using a theory of change model to transparently demonstrate the vision and deliver measurable impact over the years to come.

While there is often a will to make things better for internal and external stakeholders, at times there are skill or hill challenges to making those changes a reality. Civic government staff can democratise innovation and share its value with colleagues by identifying ways to do more with less, fostering connections across the system, building capacity amongst employees, integrating with business and de-risking the change. There has never been a more pressing time to support our colleagues on their journeys to be more agile and innovative.

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