Change Papers: A shared effort to change North Carolina's climate for innovation.

In previous papers, we’ve looked at why it is essential that government become dramatically more innovative in its own internal operations and programs delivery, to better “translate new ideas and technologies into new systems, products and services.” We’ve looked at some areas where businesses have been innovating, with the idea that government might look to similar areas for operating efficiencies and programmatic innovation.

But how can government put its innovation efforts on steroids and start getting some eye-popping (but legal) results? What has to change if it is going to be “legal” to innovate in government?

Moving from Inertia.gov to Innovation.gov can go a long way toward building a climate for innovation, but it will require at least three commitments by government leaders on a state or local level: to Leadership, to Communication, and to Persistence.

Leadership in innovation.gov

Create and Protect the climate

Innovation climates are complex, with multiple conditions and players intertwined and affecting the next. A partnership between all members is necessary.

Traditionally, top-down leaders determine goals and direct their workers through command and control. A climate for innovation, one where good ideas can (and do) and must come from anywhere, WILL NOT WORK under this kind of autocracy. Instead, leaders must become protectors — guardians — of a sensitive and dynamic climate that expects, permits and protects innovative thinking. Their job is make certain their partners on the ground, both forward-thinking employees and citizens, have the connections, understanding and pathways to generate, transform and scale new ideas into innovations that work for real people and meet real needs.

No innovation effort — especially one in government — can succeed without the support of leadership. Leaders — Governors, agency heads and shift supervisors — have to champion the notion, not just get out of the way! Machiavelli was right lo those many (496, so far) years ago:

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries … and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.

In other words, if you don’t have a leader who supports your innovation efforts, watch your back.

Communication in innovation.gov

You can get a little ways down the road to innovation with the quiet support of your boss. But if you are really pushing new ideas around — it’s tough operating as a skunkworks — others in your agency or department will need to know what’s going on. Yes, they have the potential to throw bombs at your new effort, and yes, there are times when it makes more sense to seek forgiveness rather than permission, but Lyndon Johnson had it right when he said, in his own inimitable own way, that it’s better to have naysayers close than far away.

The same goes for the general public outside of your agency. And if you keep the effort totally internal, you’ll be parking 99% of your brainpower on the sidelines. Drawing upon your stakeholders’ collective wisdom makes you smarter (and prevents them from their temptation to hurl their stakes at you). The examples of the value of crowdsourcing solutions are starting to pile up, but the big concept is the one we all know: two heads are better than one and 2000 heads are better than two.

For compelling examples of telling a story and empowering others to pass it on, read Chris Grams’s blog on moving past command and control to being in command and out of control.

It’s a virtuous cycle: Government communications that focus on meaning, relevance and clarification — help citizens and governments to get into dialogue, and to understand and build empathy for each other. Clear words and engaging visual design produce more meaningful discourse.

When we build trust, when we ASK people for specific help, getting them to participate is much easier. And as Demos associates Paul Skidmore and Kirsten Bound suggest:

A collaborative democracy requires interrelated conditions that make participation inviting, not just easy.

Persistence in innovation.gov

Inertia and tradition can be enemies of change — and progress — everywhere. New and radical thinking takes a while to be accepted and practiced. To improve government service and create a climate of innovation, you’ve got to be willing to gore sacred cows and to connect and reconfigure dots in different ways.

For leaders, that means not giving up if the first month (or the first month of Sundays) doesn’t yield stunning breakthroughs. Changing culture is hard. It takes time. It takes commitment. And persistence.

Creating the conditions

What conditions should leaders create if they want this innovation thing to happen? Here are a few possible ways of structuring the process of blowing up (or rebuilding) structures.

Lead innovation officer

Task someone with the responsibility for driving innovation. On some level, you’ll just know when it is working. But people will want proof that innovation is happening. It’ll take some work to get the metrics to determine progress right, but it is not impossible. While innovating is everyone’s role, at least one person must play chief protector and cheerleader — officially charged with waking up every morning thinking about how to make the place more innovation-friendly.

Formal and informal innovation sessions

The ultimate goal may be a complete culture change in your organization where everyone feels a responsibility to continuously create and recreate programs and systems and processes to make your place work better, but getting there will almost certainly involve practice sessions. No need to start big: define a couple of problems you are trying to solve and set aside time to work on them. Empower people to come up with crazy ideas — prove it by coming up with a couple yourself.

Give crowdsourcing a try. It’s okay to start small with a very particular problem, asking taxpayers — your customers — for their ideas about how to do it better. If you’re scared or funding is scarce, try it online first.  But be serious about asking and let them know you are serious by responding and letting people know how you have responded to their ideas.

If you build it, will anybody come? We think they might surprise you, but enlist all relevant media (the blogosphere, traditional, etc.). Anything under the slugline of government looking for innovative ideas has the potential to go viral.

Don’t believe it will work? Give it a shot. And even if it doesn’t the first time, you will probably change the way a few people think about their government. Imagine if a large group of people thought that government listened, and thought that they could have some input into how government worked.

Getting creative about rewards

What happens if you innovate, save money or create a great new service? Yes, it creates some problems for you (what do we do with our savings? how do we meet demand?), but those are good problems! Here are two ideas:

Recognition: Recognize and reward the patooties out of innovative state and local government employees. Start an Innovator of the Year award or the Governor’s/County Manager/Town Council/Water and Sewer Innovation Awards. Keep track of how much the innovation saves or how effective it is, using anecodotes, numbers/statistics if possible. Alert the media (not just your paper, but the cable channel, town bloggers — media is more versatile now). Take pictures. Give out plaques. Place them and photos up on your shop wall. Write letters to the editor — or invite the people who benefited from the innovation to write letters — about the individuals or departments or members of the public and how much they saved the town or county or state or what cool new programs they created.

More tangible stuff: Give the equivalent of 10% of the innovation’s savings to the innovating employee in the form of vacation time (or allow them to donate it to the sick leave of a colleague who is running out of leave time). That won’t cost out-of-pocket tax dollars and will show employees you are serious. Get agreements up front that 50% of the budget line-item savings will be carried forward into the next tax year for cost of living salary increases for your agency’s employees (that’ll save taxpayer dollars). And get an agreement that the other 40% of the savings will go into a program development fund to help pay for the startup costs of new innovation programs or services or for the innovation itself.

Will these three-steps get you to the promised land of innovation.gov? Heck no. Will leadership, communication and persistence make you the first local or state agency recognized through the somebody-needs-to-develop-them-and-it-could-be-you Innovation Awards? Probably not.  But it will get you started. And right now THAT’s all we need.

So who’s tried something like this in their company? Their agency? What are the pitfalls and opportunities? Who wants to be a pioneer? Email or twitter us, or comment below.

Tags: Chris Grams, communication, crowdsourcing, Demos, innovation climate, innovation.gov, Kirsten Bound, leadership, Lyndon Johnson, Machiavelli, Paul Skidmore, persistence