This article is written by Lisa Sierra, Manager - Innovation, Data & External Access (IDEA) at The City of Calgary.

In a world that is constantly changing, finding new and innovative ways of doing things is critical to keep pace and stay relevant. This is no different for the public service.

Striving for innovation in any organisation can bring challenges, especially when things have been done a certain way for a long time. But the efforts to bring innovation to the table are well worth it and the positives far outweigh the challenges.

To help build a culture of innovation at The City of Calgary, we created and opened the Innovation Lab in 2016. The Lab aims to help City departments transform their programs, services and people through best practices in innovation rooted in human centred design and a collaborative approach to critical problems facing the City and citizens.

Professional development is a key component of the Lab’s mandate. Since its inception, the Lab has provided professional learning opportunities to support City of Calgary employees in exploring new mindsets and building skills in collaboration, creativity and innovation.

The Lab’s professional learning sessions focus on key innovation concepts and methodologies such as Design Thinking, systems thinking, visual communication, collaboration, co-creation and leading for innovative teams. Some of the learning sessions are specifically tailored and scheduled for leaders and business unit teams, others are one to three-hour experiential learning sessions or quick 50-minute lunchtime brown bag sessions open to all employees. The goal is to offer different types of professional learning sessions to meet various needs across the organisation.

Hosting Innovation summer camps

One of the challenges we face in running a professional learning program in innovation is staying adaptable, so we can pivot along with the innovation field, which, inherently, is always changing.

To meet this challenge, we spend the summer months running one-time experimental professional development sessions, dubbed “innovation summer camps”, where we explore and experiment with new formats and topics.

The summer camps are a way for us to explore the signals we’ve heard from staff throughout the year, focusing on the support they’ve told us they need in innovation and creativity, as well as new developments and tools that have emerged in the field, and then test some new learning experiences for each topic or signal.

Within the two-month summer camp window, we typically host one or two sessions per week ranging from one and a half to three and a half hours, and maxing out at 20 participants. Some folks sign up for one or two sessions that interest them, some sign up for the whole series.

In the spirit of prototyping, the summer camps are put together with as little investment as possible, while still providing an authentic learning experience. We pick a suite of topics for the summer, write quick descriptions, send them to our existing professional learning mailing list and manage sign-ups with calendar invites. Then we develop learning experiences for each topic week by week, and try them out with the folks who signed up. This quick and scrappy experiment format unlocks permission space to try some of our wilder ideas and push at the edges of what is possible in a corporate environment, in ways that more formalised corporate learning does not allow.

It also gives us a chance to try things with a small group to learn more about what we can scale up.  In a previous summer camp we had a growth mindset session, where we created a real-time learning experiment to help people reflect on how they learn. We had participants choose new skills to learn such as painting, origami, or even that trick where you pull a tablecloth out from under a place setting of dishes. These were all activities we could try using office supplies or dishes pilfered from the break room. The summer camps allow us to literally break a few plates, to see what the appetite for experiential learning was in our staff.

There are many positive outcomes from the summer camps. Participants get to experience a tangible example of courageous experimentation that differs from more formalised training; we’re able to learn which offerings resonated with a smaller group of participants to help inform our regular line-up of professional learning and allow the organisation to level up; and, we’re able to reuse the materials developed for the camp experiments and apply lessons learned into our year-round Innovation Lab programs. This approach also ensures that our innovation designers keep their skills fresh and continue to take risks. It’s built into their work!

The innovation summer camps were the brainchild of our Innovation Designer, Erin Dumenko, a highly skilled facilitator and relationship builder who comes to us with a Zoology degree and a background in both design thinking and science centre summer camp programs. This unique perspective and approach means that we continue to create engaging content, that we push at the formal edges of the organisation and that we create raving fans of our work.

Bringing summer camps to your organisation

For anyone considering setting up a similar program to the innovation summer camps, we recommend the following tips based on what we’ve learned since we first began the summer camps in 2018:

  • Learn everything you can: Approach these types of learnings as experiments. Take notes as you experiment, including what worked and what didn’t, which pieces are worth saving and which ones aren’t. Keeping the summer camps scrappy and low investment takes courage, but remember it’s good modelling for people to see prototyping in action in a government context. Ask people what they thought through paper surveys directly following the session so everyone has to provide their feedback. Then follow up with people who loved or hated the sessions for a 10-minute conversation to learn more.
  • Be brave: Prototypes are meant to push the edge of what might work, so try to not shy away from trying something that you genuinely aren’t sure about, as long as it’s well thought out. The worst-case scenario is that the experiment might fail, but staff will get to see you modelling taking a risk, failing and learning from that failure. You’ll learn the most from trying a learning experience instead of only running safe activities that you already know will be well received
  • Listen widely: Always keep your ears open for opportunities to help support people in their learning. What questions are coming up in your project work? What are the innovation tools you’re always sharing? Having a collection of summer camp topics is key.

Due to the Covid-19 situation this year, we had to put our regularly scheduled summer programming on hold and have been shifting towards a series of virtual pilot experiments to see what the next generation of innovation professional learning might look like. As with everything that comes out of the Innovation Lab, participants can expect the unexpected as we try some new ideas for the first time and dive into some uncharted waters of what we can learn together virtually about innovation and creativity. — Lisa Sierra

(Picture credit: Unsplash)

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