I’m trying out taking a live note and publishing quickly to share what we’ve been talking about rather than writing it up in my blog at the end of the week. Let me know what you think and if its useful to you!
How do we foster a culture of innovation?
- Came up because ‘should we centralise innovation’ was said in conversation
- the word itself is a bit wanky…its supposedly imbued with sort of mystical properties and cult of a person — Ogilvy ‘innovation happens when you take domain expertise out of its subject area’
- Innovation comes with risk — encourage risk taking to a certain point
- you can foster a culture of understanding why innovation is a good thing and some enabling structures — linking different areas and accessing different expertise
- needs to be the whole business — including management- thats open to things and enabling ideas to be instigated. What’s going to happen with those ideas when they come about?
- GCHQ have a side organisation to foster a culture of innovation — they enabled all teams in the dept to have a set of credits (sort of fake money) that had budget attached to them to vote for ideas and so things happened that people thought were valuable. It produced interesting outcomes — a new cover for a walkway and votes for a tesla! But its essentially an accelerator programme.
- Ministry Of Defence have a similar kind of innovation scheme — and when people comes up with something effective they get a proportionate reward to the savings made
- Toyota have a two week trying things out period — like the firebreak at GDS?
How do you get people to change?
How do you build sustainable change? Is it about going back to the idea repeatedly?
- Leadership — the importance of showing a behaviour as a parent; children copy. Similar parallels with a team behaviour. Change takes brain power and will power to shift a pattern or behaviour.
- Need a groundswell of people for something to become normalised — its not a flash in the pan
- It takes time. But also it does happen and the Civil Service has changed massively.
- We all know changing the self is hard — look at new year resolutions!
- Nudge is really good https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happiness/dp/0141040017
- You have to have a good idea about what you’re trying to move to
One Team Gov Principles? How did they come about? Will they get changed?
At an away day people were debating them…
The principles are:
1. WORK IN THE OPEN AND POSITIVELY
2. TAKE PRACTICAL ACTION
3. EXPERIMENT AND ITERATE
4. BE DIVERSE AND INCLUSIVE
5. CARE DEEPLY ABOUT CITIZENS
6. WORK ACROSS BORDERS
7. EMBRACE TECHNOLOGY
https://www.oneteamgov.uk/principles/
- Is Citizens the right word? People may be easier?
- Some things like the technology one and diversity should be across everything. Maybe we don’t need to spell out all these things, but maybe we do.
- We cant stop banging on about technology and diversity yet.
- Its a set of things that people are drawn to and helps to people to explain how they want to work and how they want to be
- A statement of principles that sets the tone for a meeting and focusses the mind
- Key idea is: Take them and do what you want with it
[personally Itend to describe the importance of breaking siloes and thinking about people and find we refer back to the principles rather less]
How can we get people to invest time in their own development?
When people are very focussed on delivery and the urgent
- Take frequent breaks. Attention spans are 45 mins and beyond that you’re just wearing yourself out
- Speak to other people — share ideas — and then come back to your work and you’re more focussed
- Software carpentry movement — drop in sessions to work on a problem, which becomes about learning about the wider tool. People who have passions enjoying helping other people.
- It comes from management — explicit time to learn and invest in yourself. Protected time mandated rather than a diary filled to 100%
- Beware places that don’t give you explicit time to invest in yourself, or at least to reflect
- It doesn’t always look like a course — reflection, youtube, shadowing etc
- Find what is the highest irritation factor for people and focus on those? rather than intangible things of ‘the future’
- 15 minute chunks of learning — online service. Like Duolingo!
controversially 