Public services are traditionally risk averse[1], which stifles innovation and creativity. PCL attempted to create a de-risked space where innovative design approaches could flourish.
PCL was a prototype public social innovation lab developed and tested via a collaborative action research partnership between a London council and an art and design university. The project explored this novel cross-sector collaboration as a means of bringing capacity in design to public service innovation at the same time as granting the redundancy of resources necessary for the experimentation, reflection and learning that leads to innovation, in a context of financial austerity.
Fiscal and political imperatives can mean that “[local government] does the wrong things really well.”[2] Efficiency can be an enemy of innovation in that efficiency drives out redundancy – removing space for experimentation and increasing the risks of uncertainties associated with doing things differently.
Within the context of the PCL project ‘typical’ public service risks were identified:
- Raising and managing expectations amongst residents and public servants about what could be achieved.
- Perception that design led innovation might be seen as a waste of resources, at a time of austerity.
- Anxiety that design led approaches may be incompatible with statutory approaches
- Students without sector knowledge re-designing public services
PCL created a de-risked space in which innovation could thrive by:
- Leveraging synergies between student learning opportunities and Council objectives to create a cost neutral model for experimentation and innovation.
- Creating redundancy of resources so experimentation and innovation could operate alongside traditional Council approaches and processes.
- Keeping activity under the radar and not exposing innovation to powers that could crush it. Involving senior leaders and politicians on a need to know basis until good news stories or outcomes warranted their attention.
- Being transparent with participants about the context of experimentation and innovation to negotiate expectations rather than manage them – sharing the responsibility for outcomes and the risk of disappointment.
- No complex ‘process’ or project plan but a robust design methodology to afford agency to participants – to make it feel ‘fun’ and different from the day job – learning new approaches through practice.
- Acknowledging innovation as an open-ended process with fluid outcomes that are not overly predefined.
- Identified and focused on challenges where no specific answer or outcome was required.
- Posed different questions – moved the conversation from the narrative of cuts to collective visioning of future scenarios that could deliver better outcomes for residents within contextual constraints.
- Created ‘difference’ by involving design students, who brought the ambiguous quality of ‘creativity’ to the projects.
Learning from this public social innovation lab offers a significant contribution to the design-led approaches to value creation panel.
[1] Daglio, M.; Gerson D.; Kitchen H. ‘Building Organisational Capacity for Public Sector Innovation’, Background Paper prepared for the OECD Conference “Innovating the Public Sector: from Ideas to Impact”, Paris, November 2014.
[2] LGO, PCL workshop comment, 2016.
Design-led approaches to value creation in public administration
