This article is written by Marcus M, UK Civil Service.

  • The problem: We rely on small innovation teams to ideate, explore and implement innovative ideas while ignoring the expertise of thousands of subject matter experts within the business areas themselves.
  • Why it matters: Innovation is more important than ever in the public service, and we need to maximise our potential for successful innovation to do more with less.
  • The solution: Moving towards a culture where each civil servant has the freedom to consider, openly discuss and explore potential improvements to their roles.

Innovation is more important than ever before. In a world where public sector resources are being squeezed despite the need to deliver against demanding and complex challenges, we must ideate and implement better ways of delivering positive outcomes. If we simply continue as-is, it’s not long before we find ourselves playing catch-up.

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Despite the abundant mentions in strategy documents and intranet articles, many public sector organisations struggle to explore and implement innovative solutions at speed. This isn’t through a lack of trying, with many departments now being home to specific innovation teams. Although a positive step forward, too often we rely on these (often relatively small) teams to deliver ALL the innovation across the department. Asking a single team to implement innovation across a large organisation is a difficult task. Asking a team to do this without having the contextual information of the specific business area is almost impossible. David Marquet (Turn the Ship Around!, 2013) spoke about the need to empower those closest to the information, enabling them to use their expertise to greater effect.

We have similar challenges in innovation, where we ask central innovation teams to ideate and experiment with innovative solutions relying on a sometimes-limited understanding of the specific area. This can result in outcomes that are disconnected from the end users, lack cross-organisational scalability and neglect the opportunity for co-creation of solutions. Despite our best intentions, there really is no substitute for having someone who has “been there and done it” in the room for the whole journey.

Why not get the team together and hold a session to investigate any potential innovative opportunities in your area?

Everyone now knows the potential impacts of artificial intelligence, arriving amongst a wave of exciting emerging technologies ready to transform how we deliver public services. This is why there has never been a better time to improve how we innovate. If we are going to truly take advantage of emerging technologies in our civil service, we must make innovation everyone’s job.

Start with the problem

There is no set blueprint for successful innovation. In fact, some of the world’s most innovative companies fail everyday trying to do this. However, there are some principles that can act as good guidelines. One of these core principles is ‘starting with the problem’, and there are innovation teams across government doing a good job of this, but we need to encourage it on a larger scale. If business areas were encouraged to investigate their own challenges through an innovation lens, we would be spreading the opportunity to find seeds of inspiration away from a few and placing them into the hands of thousands.

I have worked on innovation projects across several departments and know from experience, there is a very strong correlation between the involvement of the business team and the success of the initiative. Working closely with those from within the subject area enables innovators to understand the core user needs, experience where real-life may differ from official processes and assess any solution alongside experts. Innovation teams facilitate innovation, but business areas must be the ones to drive it.

All civil servants understand how complex working across departments can be, sometimes resulting in fragmented pockets of innovation being delivered across the organisation. This is a further reason for innovation teams to become facilitators or organisers of innovation – providing their expertise in ideation and experimentation while the business provides the knowledge for problem definition and defining success criteria. This overview role of the innovation team would allow them to stitch together innovative projects across the department, enabling a more cohesive and valuable impact. Innovation teams should be the centre of the wheel, connecting the different spokes of innovation – rather than the whole wheel itself.

Key takeaways

I know what you’re thinking – how can you expect colleagues to think about innovation in their areas when they’re already so busy? However, I would argue how can we not encourage colleagues to have the freedom to consider innovation in their roles when they spend each working day building a wealth of experience in that space? It does not have to be a huge contribution, 3% of our time is a small price to pay for the potential benefits hidden away inside colleagues’ heads.

Giving our colleagues the opportunity to consider and explore how they can achieve their outcomes in a better way and then encouraging them to raise their hand when they have an idea is critical for innovation moving forward. Their idea may come to nothing, it may lead to a small enhancement, or it may lead to a significant change that improves the lives of citizens across the country. We won’t know until we explore the potential.

Innovation teams provide crucial capabilities for departments, and I think they need to stay (after all, I work in one!), but we need to reshape our focus to overseeing innovation, while it is driven by the business. We can deliver the tools and techniques to enable business areas to explore potential innovations and spread the opportunity of discovering innovative solutions to all of our dedicated colleagues.

Any civil servant reading this should remember they are the expert in their role. Nobody understands the challenges of a position better than those who experience it every week. I would encourage any colleague to consider their work and how outcomes may be improved by utilising emerging technologies or even just changes in approach (not all innovation is shiny new solutions!). Why not get the team together and hold a session to investigate any potential innovative opportunities in your area? If you do find something, get in touch with your departmental innovation team and get exploring!

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