Why bother with innovation?

Innovation is absolutely critical within local government and contributes to Monmouthshire’s mission to deliver 21st century services in the most challenging time in my work life memory.

Essentially all our teams are businesses in their own right and have to balance demand for services with the available resources. It’s obvious that resources are a huge problem in the way that they are ever stretched and the demand to receive services continues to increase across the world.

Innovation is about problem solving. We have a big problem that we are trying to solve in local authorities and in Monmouthshire we’re serious in our intention to innovate.

Yes, it’s quite scary this innovation stuff. It’s quite scary putting yourself out there and trying things out for the very first time. It’s important to have a clear outcome and be clear about what difference it will make to people, so that if it doesn’t work out immediately, you have a pretty good measure of why. And I’ve learned that you also have to accept that people want to criticise what they first don’t understand.

It’s fair to say I’ve not experienced that many fuzzy or fluffy feelings when putting myself out there to define what’s important to people and how we can experiment and create new models for delivery.  What I have found is a growing number of people who care enough to engage with their own community to do stuff, fix stuff and try different things. Being out and about in Monmouthshire I know how new media and technology are changing the way people behave and some of it is really quite positive. I love the openness of being able to connect with people from all over and share ideas and practices.

We in the county council are beginning to learn how we need to behave differently so that we’re in sync with people and able to keep up with what they care about.

We are beginning to create an innovation lab, as we call it. It’s nothing more than quite a large room in a building we are sharing with a number of services and business partners. The room is very much a work room. A room for ideas, problem solving, learning, and focusing on issues for the people of Monmouthshire.

The room is a place for everyone to access. The space is great, and thanks to donations of chairs, tables and some basic equipment, we’ve commenced a full scale project to teach colleagues, local business people and citizens all about innovation, what it means, and to learn to use new creative tools and techniques to solve real community challenges/ problems.

In the corner of the room we’re building a ‘coaching space’, which will be a partitioned area (once we acquire some more materials for nothing!) for people to learn all about business coaching and how to have brilliantly successful meetings with colleagues and citizens which are focused on real outcomes.

We’ve even developed our own method for coaching which we are prototyping now, and hope to publish and make available more widely really soon. We’ll offer this to business people in the county if it helps them too. I think it will, because it has sustainability and ecology at its heart, something that we all need to focus more on as resources in many ways become more scarce.

Other more unusual learning aids include the use of Lego, which is a fantastic tool to represent finance and can be used to generate options for designing budgets in effective ways. We used this many years ago as part of an exercise to identify where to allocate ‘chunks’ of resources linked to our priorities.

As time goes on and more people use the space it will evolve and grow and people will get used to it as they see the benefits and understand what we are doing there. After all this is a new area we are developing.

The ‘lab’ is home to our intrapreneurship school- a training programme that has already been tested by 36 colleagues in Monmouthshire. We’re bringing and building a programme of learning to colleagues that encompasses entrepreneurial spirit and attitude, bolstered with system thinking techniques, ideation, problem solving and communication skills. It’s quite a heavy programme of learning that is beginning to produce entrepreneurs who are employed within our own organisation. Yes, they do this as well as the day job.

Our new intrapreneurs are picking up world renowned theories and models in order to generate new ideas, identify real solutions and bring them to life and already have produced some sophisticated business plans. These plans are not to justify shutting or cutting services like leisure centres and libraries in what promises to be the most challenging financial years in living memory – they are to invest in them, to grow and advance them.

We’re starting to ask communities about their ideas and how we can help them invest in building their own resilience in future. Instead of cutting our losses now, we’re actively promoting ‘invest to redesign’ approaches that we believe can make best use of public resources so that we don’t have to resort to service closures, so we can still operate generous community schemes, so we can have 0% council tax increase, and provide optional models for services like green waste collection.

When you begin to consider that we are reducing our costs by around £14m over the next four years – ‘running core services efficiently’ – is just not good enough. It will not solve the problem.

We know we have more work to do to make the links between innovation, core services, budgets and delivering more of what communities want to see.

In short we need to and will get better at demonstrating these real life outcomes. This is crucial, because I believe people should be asking why we’re not doing more to support innovation, rather than question why we’re doing it at all.