Brave leaders can create great innovation

Friday, July 11, 2008

Dr Su Maddock, Director of the Public Innovation Hub at the National School of Government, explains the importance of good leadership in nurturing innovation.

According to a survey by McKinsey (2007), executives say innovation is their top priority – but only 27% of those surveyed said it was integral to their corporate strategy. Few in government are clear what it means to be a leader of innovation, although the majority of executives agree that the most important drivers of innovation are culture and people. A critical question for all organisations is whether they employ the right people, whether leaders support and reward the innovative in their company and how they can create the conditions for innovation. In the public sector, where more innovative approaches are needed to address the challenge of ever changing social problems, there are varied versions of how to drive or incentivise innovation.

Public service innovation is not about products but relationships and organisational design that encourages communication rather than hampers it. Innovation is not the same as creativity; it requires collaborative practice between those who adopt and adapt the original idea or practice – innovation is not about a one size fits all model; practices change in each new situation. The starting point is not a disconnected 'out of the blue' idea, but responses to a particular problem. Start with the challenges and engage in an exploration of possible solutions. For instance, as the baby boomers grow older, they will demand services that sustain life rather than provide standardised care and medical intervention. They will play a part in public innovation in relation to social care for older people, developing a demanding community of users.

Research shows that leaders play a critical role in encouraging or in stifling innovation. There is a critical difference between those that think they will drive innovation through the new technology solutions and those who focus on the people and encourage front line staff close to service users, motivating them to make improvements. For instance, Alexis Cleveland, previously Director General for Pensions, saw that the department staff needed to connect to pensioners to motivate them to change their practice. She sent all staff out to interview five pensioners. Irene Lucas did the same; she gave all bin men a Blackberry to record comments and ideas for improvements.

The message of getting closer to the front line has been heard across government departments, but putting this into practice is not so straightforward in Whitehall, which is unsurprising, given that central departments have many clients, including politicians, and are extremely risk-averse. However, there are a number of senior civil servants interested in transforming practice and who are looking for tools and techniques that will help them support more innovative practice.

It is no surprise that so much social innovation is generated by younger people committed to social change like front line staff, those in the third sector and independent consultants who are close to the ground and have first-hand knowledge of social problems or bureaucratic cock-ups; they are in a position to see the problem and the solutions. They have the energy for new services and projects, and their collaboration with others is usually unpredictable, messy and chaotic and sits uneasily with more formal institutional procedures and practices. Problems occur when innovators bump into standard institutional procedures. Creative people need a great deal of space and freedom to come up with new responses; everyone needs some degree of freedom to follow their noses and explore possibilities. Leading innovation usually involves not necessarily initiating it, but providing the space and opportunity for staff who are responding imaginatively to social problems and poor organisation. The challenge for leaders is to have the courage to support creative people and give space to the non-conformist and the outsider. Creating the conditions for innovation is not easy, especially in public bodies where there is a culture of disincentives and innovative people are either ignored or seen as mavericks.

A senior manager who tells rather than asks is unlikely to generate innovative practice, given that it is often front line staff and those on the margins who generate new ways of working and innovative ideas. Those leading innovative practice need to be adaptive, agile, tactical, open and collaborative but, most importantly, brave and able to defend those experimenting and taking risks.

The question for policy-makers and corporate teams is how to achieve the transfer or spread innovation within their own workplaces. The leadership challenge in government is to go beyond supporting isolated innovations and innovators to transforming business models and management systems, and putting in place new corporate functions that value innovation. This involves a regime shift. The performance regime for lifting failing services is very different from the conditions needed for public service innovation because the current accountabilities framework stops staff trying out new responses and keeps them to task.

In the USA, there are a multitude of change agents exploring new ways of working but less strategic policy infrastructure, whereas in the UK the opposite is true; the policy infrastructure is dense and multi-layered and change agents are trapped within policy and performance regimes. The disjunctive of worlds between national policy-makers and local innovators is hampering innovation know-how and the policy world needs a frame that incentivises innovation. The leadership challenge in the policy world is no longer to champion innovators but to start to generate new corporate and governance arrangements that build the conditions for innovation across the public sector.

Innovation is not easy within institutions where risk taking is rare, but brave leaders can make a big difference especially when they direct less and ask more. There is a need to redefine the sort of leadership that will support public innovation and develop the agile and adaptive responses that leading innovation demands.

Tips from those leaders embracing innovation include:
• Define the kind of innovation you want;
• Use foresight as part of this process with intelligence as a change driver;
• Build innovation network connections;
• Support the innovators in your organisation;
• Provide space for innovators and for hearings from staff;
• Place innovation on departmental agendas;
• Secure time and funding for risk taking and experimentation;
• Define what works and why for innovation metrics;
• Dismantle disincentives;
• Lead systemic change to support innovation flow.