Here are the resources I’ve found that need to be facilitated so that people can use them themselves.
- Tools & methods
To help teams & individuals tackle challenges in innovative ways.
2. Levers
How organisations use levers is influenced by their personality. Looking at the values and verbs they use will give you a sense of this. At Camden, we talk about listening, challenging, standing up for and mobilising — what words does your council use?
2. Communities of practice
To help people share insights from the labs and ways of working, including from other internal & external teams working differently and between staff and residents.
3. Pop-up spaces
Where people have access to equipment & resources to experiment with new ways of coming together for mass collaboration.
4. Collective intelligence
Start with what matters to people in everyday life todevelop outcomes for the place.
Work with data analysts, frontline staff, and residents to combine big and thick data to understand behaviours and support residents in becoming citizen scientists and sense makers.
We must understand the journey and supply chain of the data we create and use to identify the most effective intervention points.
Develop scenarios of the future with people to better anticipate and respond to the organisation’s strategic challenges & opportunities
4. Skills
To think differently, we need to come out of our comfort zones and challenge ourselves to be more radical and adaptive, being able to mobilise people to tackle tough challenges and thrive. It’s about adapting to influences — methods, behaviours and beliefs — from other systems — cultures, fields & organisations.
As I mentioned in a previous post, how can we use creative methods to imagine new ways of working? If working with community organisers, entrepreneurs or data scientists is changing how we work, how might government change if we worked more closely with cartoonists, games designers, dancers…or pirates?
What the most effective innovation approaches have shown is the need to develop iterative & collaborative approaches to tackling challenges. While innovation labs will often do this through service design methodologies, some councils will benefit from having developed expertise in a broader range of tools & techniques, as a council but also local organisations.
Likewise, with the energy of a borough’s communities and partners, there’s the opportunity to bring together people & organisations who care about the challenge not just to develop & test ideas but invest in them through the different assets people have, be it money, time, space or skills. But while innovation approaches or labs can be effective in helping people work through issues and demonstrate impact in an agile & visible way, any whole systems change needs methods that help develop collective accountability and build social movements.
