Never stop learning

Often it feels like innovation in government = learning. Because it is. Here’s how.
 

Do you think of yourself as a government innovation craftsman or woman? Because “we need a workforce that is learning, developing and honing their skills all the time” argues Bas Leurs. And “in order to improve the public service in general, one-off workshops and training sessions won’t cut it”. You need to think of yourself as someone practicing, honing and learning a craft - the craft of doing things differently in government. Consider what your tools are, where your support networks are and what the materials you have to work with are. When we start to think about government innovation as a craft, something ongoing, we appreciate that learning happens all the time and that the learning comes from the doing.

So tell us how you’ve been putting this to work by emailing us your examples. We’ll share the best in next month’s newsletter.

We did a pilot learning programme. This is what we learnt doing it.

On a learn by doing theme; “remember to practice your new ways of working outside of the classroom”. Nicole Barling-Luke shares the lessons she’s learnt running the pilot learning programme in Australia. One aspect that’s changed, is helping people test the real, invisible and imagined barriers to doing things differently. This is hard. They’ve built on Cassie Robinson's work on finding ‘the flex’ in the system that is so crucial to doing things differently.You can too. There’s more scope for change than people often recognise.

While on the subject of pilots it’s as good a time as any to revisit what the key differences are between Pilots, Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) and prototypes. These terms are often confused and that makes things… confusing. “Pilots should be used when you believe you have an effective solution and are looking to iron out the creases and understand how it works in reality”, thanks to Kelly Duggan and Bas Leurs for that.

There’s no use in setting up a pilot only to judge it on a pass/fail scale. It’s what’s learned and how that’s taken onboard that’s valuable. But innovation pilots often have to promise a valuable result to get the sign off needed to run it. Understand the pitfalls of innovation pilots and how to avoid the trap of useless “innovation theatre” via Javier Guillot, Jody Parra and Jesper Christiansen.

 What we've been reading 

• “Learning itself has changed, it is not first acquiring skills and then utilizing those skills at work. Post-industrial work is learning,” lessons for learning in government here too.

• Steve Messer from the UK’s Government Digital Service makes the case for why good leaders describe the outcomes they desire, not the solutions they want. Especially in a time where we don’t know what those outputs might look like, you aren’t experimenting if you know the results (and the how) in advance. HT Tom Loosemore.

• Nesta Chief Executive Geoff Mulgan describes how “if you want creative, entrepreneurial, problem-solving public servants you have to cultivate different mindsets, attitudes and behaviours as well as new ways of thinking and acting.”
   
• John Hagel on the threat and opportunity of lifelong learning and our need for a fundamentally different culture and institutional model, that shifts from our current focus on scalable efficiency to a focus on scalable learning.

• The innovation challenge of our age is no longer just to be great inventors and highly creative. Rather we need to become better detectives and careful curators of networks". Thanks Roland Harwood.