5 Insights for Policy Innovators

by Nick Charney

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A couple of weeks ago I traveled down to Washington DC with Jason to discuss policy innovation with a number of different US thought leaders / organizations (e.g. Partnership for Public Service, 18F, the OPM Innovation Lab, US Digital Service, GovLoop/GovDelivery, NASA, Deloitte, IBM, etc.). We thought it would be good to share some of the key findings from our discussions.

Spurring innovation can be as simple as turning an intentional blind eye

John Kamensky from the IBM Centre for the Business of Government regaled us with stories of government reinvention labs under Vice-President Gore. The principle was simple enough, central authorities articulate a small set of goals -- e.g. be more client centric, cut red tape, improve client satisfaction -- and then turn an intentional blind eye to any activities that might bump against corporate policies in trying to achieve those goals. Not everyone had to do it, “reinventing labs” were simply teams that self selected, invoked the shield they were offered, and went about doing good better. He called it “using fairy dust to break bureaucratic mythologies” because it didn’t rely on any structural changes. Now he did say that this approach can ruffle feathers because it can undermine the hierarchy and/or the gatekeepers but it's also an incredibly simple way to facilitate greater innovation within the enterprise at relatively low cost, it's replicable within and across organizations, and boils down to giving civil servants license, a sense of agency, and a stronger connection to outcomes and organizational priorities.

Innovation teams need partnership playbooks that articulate their terms

Many of the US innovation teams have developed playbooks that clearly articulate what they do and don’t do, who they work with, and how others can access their services. This gives everyone a clear sense of what is in and out of scope as well as the cost of doing business with the team. My observation is that many of the Canadian innovation teams lack this sort of specificity. Being able to develope and then clearly articulate your value proposition and the service(s) you can provide to the department (and for that matter the management teams that allocate its scarce resources) is of the utmost importance for innovation teams, while the inability to do so is their achilles heel.

If you want to attract projects to a department or agency’s innovation team, give it a budget that it can use to match funds

One of the biggest differences we found was that many of the US innovation teams (and fellowship programs) have a budget that allows them to match the funds of the project proponent. This makes working with the lab (or bringing on a fellow) more attractive to the proponents. This seems to have resulted in some interesting optics whereby some see innovation teams as a subsidy to core business (access to warm bodies) while others see the prospects of successful collaborations that produce results much greater than the status quo (supercharge your ROI). Regardless of the opinions on the ground, these teams continue to be supported by senior civil servants and politicians..This approach does require that innovation teams have a strong management approach and a process through which they vet incoming projects -- meaning it’s very much linked to the notion of playbooks mentioned above.

Storytelling

All of our visits reinforced the importance of documenting the impact that innovation teams are having. Some teams had sent a team member across the country to visit collaborators on ground in order to document and celebrate their stories, some teams used their playbooks to ensure collaborators’ objectives were documented and outcomes recorded, other teams benefited from reporting requirements enshrined in legislation, and some teams adopted a culture of reporting out for its inherent value of sharing lessons learned and demonstrating what’s possible.

Without this data, it’s difficult for a team to surface what they do exceptionally well and the conditions that need to be in play to do their best work (see playbooks, above), and it’s difficult to create a narrative that points, in real terms, to the impact.

If you want to use money to drive innovation, active budget hold backs are always better than passive asks to carve out funds.

Basically it’s really hard to force someone’s hand once you’ve already put the money it. Asking people to direct their money to innovative projects is always going to be less effective than making their receipt of that money contingent on innovation in the first place. By far one of our favorite conversations was with John Kamensky, he walked us through the history of public sector innovation from Clinton to Obama which was fascinating. He also provided a stellar policy innovation reading list that we wanted to share with all of you as well.

Cheers

The Many Challenges of Convening the Policy Innovation and Experimentation Ecosystem

by Nick Charney

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To be fair, I'm not sure such a thing really exists. Sure there's a lot of chatter about all the interconnect moving pieces but I'm not sure its quite as tangible or coherent a thing as perhaps many of us make it out to be.

First, there's lots people inside the innovation bubble (the "us" I referred to above): dedicated hubs and labbers, reverse mentors to bodies like the Deputy Minister's Committee on Policy Innovation (DMCPI), folks working in central agencies on the experimentation file, folks in line departments working on advancing a particular innovative instrument or approach (e.g. social finance), or anyone else with 'innovation' (however defined) as a core responsibility. Generally speaking those inside the bubble speak their own language, enjoy the privilege of proximity to decision makers, and are well connected across the system to other folks inside the bubble. In many ways its not much different than any other functional area of expertise. What we are witnessing is simply the formation of a network of 'public sector innovators' as the vocation of 'public sector innovation' goes through some sort of piecemeal and un-managed professionalization. This is apparent when one looks at the inherent definitional challenges within the ecosystem. There's not a shared vision of what policy (and program?) innovation and experimentation is. So much of the conversation around these issues is either non-existent, conceptual, or conflictual. Moreover, experimentation -- while appearing in a mandate letter -- remains loosely defined and as a result could run the gamut from trying something new to running a randomized control trial. More importantly, the term itself is problematic, one wouldn't want to conduct a policy experiment on a vulnerable population and/or indigenous community for obvious reasons. The term is sticky because -- like I said -- its in a mandate letter and was likely included to encourage the development of evidence based policy but its problematic in some very important contexts (e.g. reconciliation with Canada's indigenous peoples). Personally, I parse it as 'policy and program innovation' (which includes regulation) and think it manifests in two ways: (1) how we design policies and/or programs and/or (2) how we deliver policy and programs. Innovation then is about improving our policy inputs and/or our policy outcomes. Whereas I see experimentation as gathering an evidence base that can be measured against a counterfactual to determine which of the two options generates greater public value. (Caveat: I don't see much room for policy innovation and/or experimentation to occur at the point of the decision to enact (or not) a particular policy. That nexus is largely the purview of elected officials, and short of electoral reform -- which is obviously highly politicized -- there's little public servants can be doing to innovate around the decision making nexus (See: To govern is to choose).)

Second, while the innovation bubble is incredibly important to those working inside or beside it, it remains largely unknown to those working outside it in the regulatory and/or programmatic spaces of government. Perhaps my evidence is anecdotal but my overwhelming experience has been that whenever I speak about what is going on inside the bubble with those outside it that its the "first they've heard of any of it" and that it is either "fascinating" or "completely irrelevant". The truth is likely that a more concerted effort needs to be made by both those inside and outside the bubble to meet somewhere in the middle and grow the linkages between the two. However both sides face tremendous pressure to deliver within their own spheres and if the incentives for more purposeful communication and collaboration aren't in place then we'd be foolish to expect them to do so of their own volition. We need more connectors. People's whose job it is to build bridges between the players, ensure alignment, new create opportunities, and scale existing ones. I doubt we will see the necessary investment in these types of people/roles because there's a lack of understanding of their value. This lack of understanding is embedded in the general consensus that these types of connections will form spontaneously in the network because of the proliferation of communications channels, the availability of information, the wisdom of the crowd to elevate that which needs elevating, and everything else taken for granted under the larger rubric of the ethos of the internet age. However, if there is something I've learned in my current position it is that there is still a very strong role for connection and curation in this environment. The proliferation of communications technologies has shifted the friction, but make no mistake, it surely still exists.

Third, there's a self-selection problem -- and not in the way you'd think. It's not so much about people falsely self-selecting into the 'innovators' category but rather that innovative folks are self-selecting out of it completely. Few people doing innovative work actually self-describe their work as such. They are simply trying to do better. They weren't given an innovation mandate or draw resouces from a centralized or dedicated innovation fund, they simply chose to use their resources differently within their own particular context. This means that they might not even know the value of what they are doing to the rest of the ecosystem. Or, they may be actively hiding, staying below the radar, because with greater attention comes greater scrutiny, and with greater scrutiny comes the loss of flexibility that allowed them to be innovative in the first place (See: Asymmetric Scrutiny, Superforecasting, and Public Policy). This was in fact one of the findings of an innovation survey conducted by DMCPI.

Fourth, like any ecosystem it is both collaborative and combative -- there are things that work well together, but there is also competition for scarce resources (e.g. money, talent, the attention of senior management, etc.) and there are (implicit and/or cultural) established food chains (e.g. Central Agencies > Line Departments, Strategic Policy > Program Policy, Ottawa > Regions, etc.). Often when we use the word ecosystem we invoke it in such a way that emphasizes the collaborative elements and de-emphasizes the competitive ones, but we all know that ecosystems are highly competitive environments. For example, there are currently 18 instruments/approaches covered off in the policy innovation portal my team stood up, the fact that these approaches are innovative brings them together under the portal's banner of 'policy innovation', however we can't expect them (or more importantly their champions) to always work in complimentary ways. Open data and pay-for-performance may be two innovative approaches but they may also not have all that much to do with one another at an operational level; this leaves little room for collaboration and creates room for competition over scarce resources. This is where the emerging literature in public administration on the rise of instrument constituencies is particularly compelling (See: On the Rise of Instrument Constituencies).

I don't want to belabour the point but did want to say that all of these interconnected factors -- and their obvious exceptions, caveats, counter-examples, and side-steps and twists -- make up but a handful of the many challenges we are facing as an organization whenever we try to convene the players, increase alignment, and identify opportunities for collaboration and scale. Finally, we need to carve out more time for coordination, thoughtful deliberation, and purposeful conversation within and around the ecosystem as a whole if we are to rely on it to deliver our organization into the 21st century.

On Somewhat Simpler Taxonomies

by Nick Charney

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A few weeks ago I shared some of the thinking I was doing with my team about new policy instrument taxonomies (See: On Possible Taxonomies of New Policy Instruments and Approaches); since then I've come up with a more plain language version that I wanted to share.

I've already had a couple of conversations with folks about it and while it's closer to being about outcomes it still doesn't quite crack the nut:


I want to use government's ...

	Nodality	Authority	Treasure	Organization
Substantive	convening power to create public value E.g. social networks, information networks, coordinating bodies, etc.	legal authorities to create public value E.g. law, regulations, standards, taxation, etc.	financial resources to create public value E.g. grants, contributions, transfer payments, etc.	non-financial resources to create public value E.g. people, skills, land, buildings, technologies, etc.
Procedural	convening power to explore how public value is defined and/or created E.g. social networks, information networks, coordinating bodies, etc.	legal authorities to explore how public value is defined and/or created E.g. law, regulations, standards, taxation, etc.	financial resources to explore how public value is defined and/or created E.g. grants, contributions, transfer payments, etc.	non-financial resources to explore how public value is defined and/or created E.g. people, skills, land, buildings, technologies, etc.

Essentially it breaks down the approach vector into wanting to innovate within the current confines of the system (substantive) and innovating on the system itself, which in my mind is an important distinction. That said, upon reflection, this is akin to the policy innovator's dilemma I've articulated previously (See: Policy Innovator's Dilemma).

It needs another iteration, but like I said, I wanted to share and solicit additional feedback. So, your thoughts?

Sharing my work ... my actual work

by Nick Charney

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I've been blogging here for the better part of the last 8 years, sharing my thoughts here at cpsrenewal about the confluence of people, public policy and technology. During that time I've held a number of different positions across the federal family and my rule of thumb has generally been -- perhaps with the exception of when I went on interchange -- don't write about work, like my actual work. Sure, allude to it, test ideas here that I may be testing elsewhere (e.g. See: On Possible Taxonomies for New Policy Instruments and Approaches) but never, link directly to my work.

That distance -- call it plausible deniability -- has always been important. However, I get the sense that is is slowly becoming less important. There's more public servants online, many of whom are identifying whom they work for and/or linking back to specific departmental websites in their online profiles. It's easy -- even tempting -- to pin this on the change in government but the trend surely precedes it (See: Trust is the only thing that scales). 

The deluge of public servants openly declaring such online (See: #LeadersGC for example) is a clear signal that times are changing; however, these changes likely here to stay but the future (as they say) is unevenly distributed and what's 'safe' in one place might be 'unsafe' in another. But perhaps that's besides the point I want to get across in this post. I simply wanted to share my work with you and ask you if you are interested in being a part of it going forward. 

Long story short, I'm part of a small policy innovation team working on the challenge of instrument choice where my core responsibilities including the design and delivery of an online portal on new policy instruments and approaches (on GCPedia) that harvests the collective knowledge of different parts of our vast organization and tries to bring them into alignment with one another in a way that can support the broader policy innovation and experimentation agenda. The Portal (which boasts a fun Star Wars theme) was recently featured in the Clerk`s 23rd Report to the Prime Minister (scroll down to the "Reinforcing the Policy Community" subheading) but the portal is really just one of the jumping off points for our team's work, which focuses on building capacity (and community!) for policy innovation and experimentation in the Government of Canada.

So I suppose what I'm asking you is this:

• Check out the New Policy Instruments and Approaches Portal;
• Send us any feedback you might have;
• Let us know if this is a project you want to get behind; and/or
• Share this project with others you think might be interested.

Thanks -- as always -- for taking the time.

Cheers

On Possible Taxonomies of New Policy Instruments and Approaches

by Nick Charney

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I've spent some time time looking into policy instrument taxonomies (wonky I know) trying to figure out how to best classify different instruments and approaches. My preliminary research (which I cribbed from colleague Jason Pearman) seems to suggest that instruments can be either substantive or procedural in nature and fall into four broad categories (i.e. nodality, authority, treasure, and organizational capacity).

First, Some Definitions

• Substantive policy instruments alter some aspect of the production, distribution and delivery of goods and services in society
• Procedural policy instruments alter the political or policy behavior in the process of the articulation of implementation goals and means
• Nodality refers to the property of being at the centre of social and/or information networks
• Authority refers to the legitimate legal or official power to command or prohibit
• Treasure refers to the possession of money or fungible chattels which may be exchanged
• Organizational capacity refers to the possession of a stock of people, skills, land, buildings and/or technologies

(Caveat: See On-Tri Sector Athletes for more on 'nodality')

Second, Some Cross Referencing

	Nodality	Authority	Treasure	Organization
Substantive	Being at the centre of a social and/or information network that alters some aspect of the production, distribution and delivery of goods and services in society	The legitimate legal or official power to command or prohibit that alters some aspect of the production, distribution and delivery of goods and services in society	The possession of money or fungible chattels which may be exchanged that alters some aspect of the production, distribution and delivery of goods and services in society	The possession of a stock of people, skills, land, buildings and/or technologies that alters some aspect of the production, distribution and delivery of goods and services in society
Procedural	Being at the centre of a social and/or information network that alters the political or policy behaviour in the process of the articulation of implementation goals and means	The legitimate legal or official power to command or prohibit that alters the political or policy behaviour in the process of the articulation of implementation goals and means	The possession of money or fungible chattels which may be exchanged that alters the political or policy behaviour in the process of the articulation of implementation goals and means	The possession of a stock of people, skills, land, buildings and/or technologies that alters the political or policy behaviour in the process of the articulation of implementation goals and means

Third, Some Observations

Regulatory and law making agencies tend to default to the authority vertical, granting agencies tend toward the treasure vertical, and departments with neither authority nor treasure tend to gravitate towards the organization/nodality verticals. This shouldn't come as a surprise and is otherwise known as the Law of the instrument (or the when you only have a hammer problem). Moreover most of what government departments and agencies -- either by way of mandate or culture -- tend to focus on the substantive horizontal, cutting into societal problems by somehow altering some aspect of production, distribution and delivery of goods and services in society. Again no surprise here, policies to close market gaps, improve market performance, and prevent market failure are commonplace.

However, what's missing perhaps is a more focused attention on the procedural side of the horizontal divide which speaks more directly to the mechanics of governance writ large, this is where question like who has power, who makes decisions, how other players make their voice heard and how account is rendered are answered. That said I think that there is substantial and growing appetite for more discussion about those higher order questions (See: Ask Higher Order Questions).

For example, Open Policy Making and Crowdsourcing are two approaches that seem to sit more naturally on the procedural side of the divide; both of which have garnered and will continue to garner more interest since the change in government. However increased interest in these approaches must at some point be met with increased capacity to wield them. In other words, ambition and appetite must at some point be reconciled with resources and capabilities. This is likely what the Clerk was driving at when he called the Public Service "a bit of a fixer upper" in a (now not so) recent interview.

One of the things that I think we are learning as we walk further down the policy innovation road is that the practice of policy instrument choice needs to be more robust -- that the solutions we seek aren't anchored in the thinking that let them loose but rather somewhere just beyond the reach of it -- and as a result we need to systematically dismantle the cultural tendency to reach for the tool that's most familiar rather than the one that might be best suited for the job (i.e. break the law of the instrument).

Yes this type of cultural shift requires us to start to better define problems and articulate preferred outcomes but it also requires us to pause and discuss precisely where we want to cut into those problems as we have defined them. In other words we need to decide -- based on the evidence -- whether or not substantive or procedural instruments are most likely to lead (more likely 'to contribute') to the preferred societal outcome (i.e. the public good) because that decision ultimately informs what instruments to choose.

I recently asked researcher and former colleague -- Todd Julie -- to rapidly categorize a set of new policy instruments and approaches within the cross tabulation above; here's his break down:

	Nodality	Authority	Treasure	Organization
Substantive	- Innovation Hubs/labs - Smart Regulation - Open data - Foresight	- Smart regulation - Open data - Pay for performance - Crowdsourcing - Social Innovation	- Pay for performance - Big data - Gamification - Smart Regulation - Prize Challenges	- Open data - Big data - Design Thinking - Behavioural Insights - Gamification - Social Innovation
Procedural	- Social Innovation - Hackathon - Crowdsourcing - Smart Regulation - Open data	- Smart Regulation - Open Policy making - Citizen science - Open data - Crowdsourcing	- Prize challenges - Gamification - Smart Regulation	- Open Data - Gamification - Social Innovation

While this is but one view of many it falls roughly in line with my own thinking (that said, I'm open to feedback). As you can see these new instruments and approaches do not necessarily fall neatly into buckets but rather can be deployed differently within them and/or mixed and matched across depending on the problem set and outcome being sought. What the breakdown does however is make clear the idea that instrument choice within the context of policy innovation is complicated and requires a substantial amount of thought up front.

In other words, throwing new approaches at old problems and hoping for the best may produce different outcomes but if you want to get to the right outcomes you need to select the right tool and cut in at the right place. Again this is not an inherently new idea but it is one we need to bring more discipline to.

Paving the policy innovation cowpaths?

by Nick Charney

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If you aren't familiar with the idiom paving the cowpaths it essentially means looking to the paths that are already being formed by behaviours and then formalizing them rather than creating some arbitrary or artificial structure that ignores how people actually behave inside organizations.

Cowpaths are akin to the problem of design versus user experience highlighted in the image to the left. People are supposed to be walking the path but the path curves away from destination so they forge a more direct route to their destination. The cowpath metaphor also accurately describes much of the policy innovation ecosystem. People are out forging their own paths -- for example, with successful pilots -- and leaving trails behind them that others can follow. The very existence of the cowpath gives rise to the question: should or should we not simply pave them?

Within the policy innovation ecosystem the question of paving the cowpaths is one that seems to invoke a wide range of responses (See also: On Scaling Innovation). Some prefer to continue to quietly walk the path, and find success for themselves and their initiatives. Others choose to try to be a champion for change at the organization or systems level and take on the burden of rolling that boulder up the hill. Most of the people I've spoken to about this tend to land on the idea that actively paving the cowpaths is the right thing to do but tend to shy away from it when it comes time to lean into the problem. Its not a criticism so much as an observation. There's a myriad of different factors at play -- incentives, zones of control, social capital, degree of difficulty, scale of the change, and interdependent and/or cascading processes, to name but a few -- and its hard to fault individuals for doing the mental math and deciding its best to keep walking the path rather than paving it. Especially since its not a one sided problem; there needs to be both push (i.e. someone rolling the boulder up the hill) and pull (i.e. someone at the top demanding that people do so); in other words supply needs demand. Finally, if we assume that policy innovation cowpaths have natural tipping points (cow tipping pun!) then actually paving them doesn't seem to make sense because at that point the path is so well traveled that they are no longer risky. Investing scarce resources in paving an established cowpath could be a hard sell.

I can offer only one defence for paving them: eliminating the possibility of the backslide. After all, "[Change] requires sealing off the way backwards, not simply pointing the way forwards" (See: The Fine Art of Burning Your Ships).

Ten Enabling Conditions for Innovation Labs

by Nick Charney

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We've written a lot about innovation and innovation labs in the past (See: The Future of Innovation Labs: Accelerating Social Movements of Convening Solutions Ecosystems,Innovation Strategies: Centralized and Dedicated or Distributed and Open, On Prioritizing Policy Innovation: Wicked or Tame Problems?, Why Governments Would Never Deploy Adobe's Kickbox and Why Maybe They Should, etc.) but now having worked inside one for the last month I can say with a degree of certainty that the biggest differentiating factor between a lab environment and a traditional government office (at least in my experience) is the underlying ethos of hope and experimentation. Both of which have been sadly absent from most of the places I've worked previously.

Now, that's not to say I haven't worked with good people (I have) or done good work (I have) but even in environments where I've been able to do good work with good people I haven't felt the same sense of hope or willingness to experiment that I have in my current role. Maybe I've drunk the kool-aid but the energy is nothing short of contagious. 

Surely there are a number of factors that help enable this kind of environment, and I doubt all labs are the same. That said, I'll try to name a few of the enabling conditions that I've observed thus far (in no particular order):

1. People who are curiously optimistic, outcome focused and willing to fail in the pursuit of creating new public value streams
2. Leadership that is willing (mindset) and able (skillset) to act as first line of defence against the "no-machine"
3. Senior Management that is accessible, audibly champions experimentation, and puts their weight behind it through their actions
4. Just enough hierarchy to get things through the system but not so much as to weigh any person or project down
5. Direct ownership over projects / files (and all that comes with it)
6. No duplication of work
7. Trust as proxy for formal checks and balances
8. Rigorous time management and firm commitment to deadlines
9. Open and honest communication among team members
10. Flexible working arrangements for everyone at all levels

I'm sure there's more, but that's as good a place as any to start.