Why innovation is (still) failing in the public sector

A story from two perspectives

This is one of those stories where I wonder if my peers in design circles will consider me a heretic. I see people waving the flag of innovation, unperturbed, “storytelling” their way with that uncanny-valley air of self-assurance unique to our social-media world. And as I feel my insides grumble, I don’t want to descent into the kind of curmudgeons’ Debby-Downer-dom that I’ve pitied in older generations when I was younger and full of optimism myself. Why should anyone rain on someone’s parade when they believe in something positive, such as the public service’s ability to innovate? Someone needs to.

As long as I’ve been a designer, I’ve always been more keen than others in my field to speak about the barriers that we seem to keep running into. And while I still don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, I’ve come to trust my judgement more over time and believe that as much as we need to keep believing and seeing the bright spots in the fog – we do need to name the systemic issues we face. So today is another one of those for me. I want to write about why innovation tends to fail in public service contexts – and I’ll do that from two perspectives: the one of the administrative system, and from the side of the innovators themselves.

The systems perspective: Why innovation fails

No matter how often political leaders (of any party-affiliation) yell at the public service to be more bold, take more risks and to innovate – the system is set up to do the opposite. It’s as simple as that. And in the language that these leaders use, it’s utterly evident that they have no real grasp of what innovation actually means. Their expectation seems to be rooted in the same blue-skies-obsessed belief that the answers to our issues are out there - public servants are just too stuck in their ways, lazy, or blinkered to see them. And if only they pulled their head out of the sand for a moment, they’d see a new way of doing something – and BAUM – the iPhone of public service is invented.

I have posited before that ideas are cheap, but their realisation is difficult. That’s because innovation is not “a thing” you do, it’s a characteristic of your working environment. Just like our current reflections of “privilege” are less about something that a person has more over another, but about the absence of barriers for one person that others have to overcome.

To me, innovation happens when you get to match your way of working and your solution to what the issue, idea, or goal in front of you demands. That is heavily determined by the adaptablity, openness and flexibility in your environment, because not all innovations come in the same shape:

A simple fix in the back-office can be done quickly and without much fuss, a big but clear-cut issue can be project-managed, and a complex issue with loads of uncertainty can be worked through iteratively.

But in effect, the only way in which non-BAU work can happen in New Zealand’s public sector is through projects and programmes – following formulaic waterfall phases with business cases which need to predict what the outcome of a piece of work will be before it has begun. Where uncertainty increasingly gets scoped-out and buried in risk-registers, so that the performative habits of accountability that we settled into can be met. We have developed these rituals to meet public sector accountability, transparency and fiscal responsibility in a way that leaves very little room to manoeuvre for decision-makers at the top.

If that sounds to philosophical, let’s break it down: I’m a senior- or executive manager in the public service – my team members bring a concept to me that sounds unusual, a bit left-field, but could do some good for the public if it works. But it’s not certain that it will work – because, if it was the BAU we always do, then it wouldn’t really be innovation, right?

Let’s say I feel emboldened, and I want to give it a go. The team needs to spend some of their own time, which means they won’t be available to other work – fine. That’s up to me. And they need some funds to buy some licenses or get the odd specialist on. I have some discretionary budget – that’s a good use for it. Off we go.

But as the work goes underway, turns out to get the idea done they also need to work with three other teams across the department, because they need access to data, they need to connect to the frontline, plus they need a policy looked at. And so the kraken starts stretching out its tentacles, and our little innovation project becomes a but more unwieldly. The team looks to me now to throw my weight around and open some doors for them. So I need to “beg, borrow and steal” budget, time and resources (something I recently heard an executive leader describe) – because none of this is part of the “normal” work that me and my team are expected to deliver. Now we’re leaning out the window, tilting.

As soon as something unexpected happens, the minister comes knocking with a new idea, budget changes, or the Dompost has published a few lines in my accounts that make it look like I’m wasting money on this uncertain idea that might not work – BAM. Party’s over. It’s the same logic that, to me, explains the self-fulfilling prophesy of the risk-averse public service.

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

I’ve seen this once when a Service Designer in my team agreed to run an innovation process with the local contact center team. They all loved it – the designers did a great job with enjoyable sessions, making people feel heard and seen, and some important lessons being learned. Shortly after they wrote up a report with recommended actions, and the team’s manager came to me, aghast, asking me what the heck they were supposed to do with it: every action was smart and necessary, but would take time, money, technology and people’s time that they didn’t have. So what was the point of it all? It made me see my field of work completely different, that moment. Leading me to…

The innovators perspective: Withdrawal into oblivion

Given these circumstances, I would characterise the adaptation of most innovators and designers (including yours truly, back in the days), as going underground. Designers have plenty of words for this: guerilla, grassroots – whatever you want to call it. Because, all you can do is to find the tiny little cracks in the concrete jungle where there’s a little opportunity for a tiny seed to set some roots: Where some generous leader(s) manage to hold their hand over a piece of work successfully for a while, or where – once in a blue moon – all forces come together and suspend the rules of engagement.

I’ve recently read this described as “magic circles” in this excellent paper by Salmi & Mattelmäki on participatory methods in organisational change:

“A realm of play characterized by impermanence and negotiated limits of time and place. They are ‘temporary worlds within the ordinary world’ which have their own settled rules for action as well as logics for the progression of time”

That’s what innovation labs tended to be. Acknowledging that change was difficult in public sector, some leaders (both political and administrative) set up these spaces so that innovative pieces of work would – for once – have a chance to prove themselves.

It’s here where I might be scolded by some of my peers, but I’ll say it: I don’t recall any of them having much success, on the whole. And that’s not their shortcoming, or failure, but a flaw in the concept:

If something can only exist in a sealed-off bubble, removed from the rules that exist otherwise – then what chance does it stand when it’s supposed to enter “reality”?

I remember visiting the local Innovation Lab. It was a grand ol’ time, such nice people! They told us about a system they were developing that was going to be open-source, could be applied by any government agency and would have a built-in standard that many of us were wrestling with. So it would solve a real issue we had – yay!

When we asked about how it would be applied, my work mates raised: “Ok, that’s great, but we can’t do that in our in-house system. It’s not set up to connect to anything open-source.” Awkward silence set in, as they responded: “yeah, so if you change your in-house system, then you can use it…”. We all left deflated.

Again, I must stress that this is NOT the fault of innovators. They push the boundaries where they can, but those boundaries are really, really low. And those examples – that DO exist – where an innovative initiative has managed to enter the atmosphere un-harmed and live, that’s ever more of an achievement. I know it happens, but as far as I can see, it’s the exception to the rule, wrestled into existence by its creators at a high personal investment.

Here’s why I find this situation extra troubling:

It has set up the entire idea of innovation and design methods in public sector to fail on a much more fundamental level: because to many public servants who don’t work in these spheres, the only contact they’ve ever had with these ways of working was in the context of such doomed-to-fail bubbles. From their seats, they’ve given their time to mess with some post-its, draw some maps, have lots of kōrero – and whether they enjoyed it or not, they ultimately witness that the whole affair lead to nothing.

So one by one, they learned that these methods are vapid, aloof and unrelated to practical work. By now I wonder if innovation has already got such a bad rap, that more doors are closing and people are divesting their trust, because they attributed their disappointment to failures of “the player”, not “the game”.

And that’s what makes me mad. Innovation and design methods can help chew through complex, nasty issues – humbly and patiently – and make something better than it was before, in smaller or bigger steps, conditions permitting.

They cannot do that when the practices by which they are planned, funded and accounted for are strictly engineered for a different understanding of progress, accountability and risk. So when people point at the public sector and demand that it be more innovative, that’s like giving someone only access to one pantry stuffed with high-processed food, and asking them to eat healthier.

As many, I’m waiting with (somewhat) bated breath for what the new public service act is going to be. There are ways to open up the system and let innovation live, but for now, I won’t hold my breath for long.