1. As governments move closer towards a culture of experimentation, the orthodoxy of rigid, linear planning will be challenged by “portfolios of experiments”. Being adaptive and dynamic means they can respond best to the complex challenges governments face. For now, this practice of designing and managing portfolios in the public sector is still nascent. In a recent workshop hosted by Finish foundation Sitra we took stock of current experiences: from Climate KIC’s “deep demonstrations” to the UNDP’s sensemaking and acceleration protocol. I am no doubt biased, but I suspect we will see the practice of managing portfolios grow as a core competence for adaptive governance.

2. Organisations that realise hoarding more and more data doesn’t make for smarter decisions will place a greater emphasis on representing, visualising and experiencing what the system they operate in feels like, rather than rely on the numbers alone. The Synthesis Center at Arizona University is developing environments to convey the experience of “being” in a complex system, tapping into all our senses. Generative design will increasingly make its way from manufacturing into policy making (imagine a health or education policy equivalent of Sidewalk Labs' urban planning tool), further enhancing the ability to imagine new possibilities.

3. Governments will increasingly compete on their speed of learning. The Finnish government is the first I have come across to have a “continuous learning” pledge to its citizens. Nice to see that honesty directly from government. The trick, of course, is how best to accomplish that. Perhaps time to see government as a human learning system.
 

4. A series of (mind blowing) lectures with Pia Andrews has persuaded me that rules as code - writing rules and regulations so that they are consumable by machines - will not only lead to better written policies, but could also reshape the way we model or simulate the impact of them. Opening the door to trialing and testing before putting them out, and into the world. The NSW lab primer on rules as code is well worth a read and I’d keep an eye on the OpenFisca community too.

5. Serendipity studies will become a thing, and planning for serendipity (an apparent paradox) will be an attribute of innovation labs and funding in the public sector. This will increasingly challenge the default mindset in civil service training that accurately defining problems is the only way to solve them.
 

6. Another word that has traditionally been shunned by public sector bureaucracies, namely, imagination is making a comeback (not surprisingly given the current state of affairs). Cassie Robinson’s recent talk at the Service Design in Government event focused on social dreaming and mass social imagination. In Finland, Demos is inviting the public sector innovation community to “a decade long process of social imagination”. I expect more institutional “homes” for imagination inside government like the UAE Ministry of Possibilities and Bologna’s Office of Civic Imagination.
 

7. Frustrated by the pressure to ‘go to scale’? You are not alone. “I pin my hopes to quiet processes and small circles, in which vital and transforming events take place”: a gem of an article that puts value on our relationships over ‘going to scale’. It adds to the growing chorus of voices questioning our obsession with scale in social innovation, where we should look more to nurture the conditions that might allow good ideas to flourish.

8. New sources of data will allow us to visualise and understand the complexity of bureaucracies in completely new ways. See these mesmerising organograms (above) of UK Government departments or this functional analysis of US state governments based on data scraped from their websites. 

9. Measuring public sector innovation will no longer be a chimera, as the Scandinavian countries and Colombia are proving. Next generation indexes will harness data science methods to provide new, more timely insights on public sector innovation trends.
 

10. Perhaps under the influence of Rem Koolhaas’s exhibition at the Guggenheim I think we will question our urban bias in innovation policy. This article makes a compelling case. Worth also reflecting on experiences from China such as Taobao villages, Pinduoduo’s poverty alleviation programme, and the farmer ecommerce celebrities phenomenon.

11. More organisations will stop funding specific projects and will shift to funding ‘system transformation’, injecting money into deep transitions and building field(s). Early signs include Climate KIC’s transformation capital initiative, co-impact system change grants  and Dark Matter Labs work on civic assets. Ashoka and TACSI also produced good reports on this recently.