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Towards An Innovation Lab for Leeds?

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The Vision for an Innovation Lab in Leeds – What If….?

Context

The city is facing real challenges.  Increasing demands on services and reduced budgets for their delivery.  Making the transition to a low carbon, sustainable economy.  Creating meaningful work in a modern economy.  Delivering the possibility of healthy and fulfilling lives for all.  Facilitating communities where people choose to stay and develop.

Such profound challenges bring the possibility of a step change in service design and delivery.

Better integration between service providers, increased use of volunteers, social enterprise and more efficient use of the private sector.  Increased flexibility to respond to the emerging needs, aspirations and goals of individuals and communities.  To shift the agenda from the amelioration of symptoms to the facilitation of hope and opportunity.  Leveraging the potential of new technologies and emerging ideas of the Big Society.  Encouraging more people to engage in ‘good work’ and be active citizens rather than passive consumers of public services.

Having initially floated the idea of an innovation lab and got some very warm interest I was asked to put some more flesh on the bones of the idea.  Please help in this process by adding your thoughts and ideas.

And if you might be interested in sponsoring such a process then please get in touch.

But How Do We Get There?

It is clear that service reviews in traditional departmental and sectoral silos are unlikely to deliver more efficient and integrated services.  Nor is a mindset that encourages us to ‘hold what we have’ – to advocate for our narrow self interest and the maintenance of the status quo.  Public, private and third sector need to collaborate on service design and delivery rather than to advocate for their own self interest.

We need to create a space for thinking and imagining where the realists and pragmatists can take a back seat while the idealists and the imagineers can develop ideas about how things might be.  To build a consensus and commitment to move towards a very different but eminently possible future.

Such a space can be created through an Innovation Lab.

What is an Innovation Lab?

An innovation lab is a process – not a place.  It usually culminates in an intense workshop to allow key thinkers, influencers, technologists and service users to come together to work intensely and constructively on developing a vision for how things could be;  To ‘fish for ideas’ that might lead us forward to radically lower cost but higher value service delivery; To shape the agenda to enable quick wins but also to provide a vision to inform longer term development.

In an Innovation Lab nothing is sacrosanct, everything is possible.  It is a chance to get beyond ‘the paltry limits of conventional wisdom’ to explore the art and science of the possible.  And to develop a pathway for getting there.

Innovation Labs are led by skilled and experienced facilitators – who are able to recognise and challenge pragmatism and defensiveness while encouraging idealism and imagination.  They usually include keynotes and other interventions to encourage forward thinking and the art of the possible as well as whole and small group work to develop and hone important ideas.  Innovation Labs shape and are shaped by those who take part and their ideas.

Innovation Labs can take a multitude of formats.  There maybe several events and processes throughout the Lab all of which are designed to develop:

  • A mindset that seeks radical innovation by drawing in diverse pools of talent and knowhow
  • Skills in the processes of innovation, scenario development, vision building, collaboration and joint venturing
  • Understanding and awareness of the challenges and opportunities facing the city and the talent and resources available to tackle them
  • Relationships across traditional boundaries to allow new partnerships and programmes to emerge
  • Commitment to practical action – developing a big vision that can be pursued through little steps

Who Would Be Involved?

Participation in the Innovation Lab would need to be a carefully considered.  It would need to include individuals with the influence and power to lead real change.  But also people with practical hands-on experience of service delivery.

It would need to include:

  • Technologists and service design experts
  • Private, public and third sectors stakeholders
  • Housing, health, education, policing, welfare, politicians, investors, philanthropists, community development practitioners, architects and planners, transformational project managers, futurists, environmentalists and cultural stakeholders and, of course, residents.

What Could Be Achieved?

  • A new shared understanding of the challenges of service design and delivery and the need for cross sectoral collaboration
  • The identification of ‘big ideas’ and opportunities that hold the key to radically more effective and efficient services
  • The identification of work streams that seem to hold the greatest potential for progress and the commitment to contribute to them.
  • Potential structural and systemic changes that might support progress.
  • Shifts in mindsets from defensive to innovative
  • The development of scenarios that transcend departmental and budgetary silos
  • Priorities and Tasks for action.

Here You can find out much more about the Leeds Innovation Lab.

Mike Chitty – Realise Development – June 2010

@mikechitty

Community, economic and social development…

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While Pittsburgh’s government and business leaders pressed for big-government solutions – new stadiums and convention centers – the city’s real turn- around was driven by community groups and citizen-led initiatives. Community groups, local foundations, and nonprofits – not city hall or business-led economic development groups – drove its transformation, playing a key role in stabilizing and strengthening neighborhoods, building green, and spurring the development of the waterfront and re- development around the universities. Many of Pittsburgh’s best neighborhoods, such as its South Side, are ones that were somehow spared from the wrath of urban renewal. Others, such as East Liberty, have benefited from community initiatives designed to remedy the damage done by large-scale urban renewal efforts that left vacant lots in place of functioning neighborhoods and built soulless public housing high-rise towers. That neighborhood is now home to several new community development projects, including a Whole Foods Market, which provides local jobs as well as serving as an anchor for the surrounding community. This kind of bottom-up process takes considerable time and perseverance. In Pittsburgh’s case, it took the better part of a generation to achieve stability and the potential for longer-term revival.

The Great Reset copyright © 2010 Richard Florida (emphases are mine)

Read more

If this IS true, and could also be true of Leeds, then what does it mean for the focus of community development workers in the city?

Cameron as PM on Community…

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Some extracts from David Cameron’s first speech that seem relevant to the community development sector.  There is much here to hold him to.  Emphases are mine!

One of the tasks that we clearly have is to rebuild trust in our political system…it’s about making sure people are in control and that the politicians are always their servants and never their masters.

Real change is not what government can do on its own. Real change is when everyone pulls together, comes together, works together, when we all exercise our responsibilities to ourselves, to our families, to our communities and to others.

And I want to help build a more responsible society here in Britain, one where we don’t just ask ‘what are my entitlements?’ but ‘what are my responsibilities?’. One where we don’t just ask ‘what am I owed?’ but more ‘what can I give?’.   And a guide for that society, that those who can, should, and those who can’t, we will always help.

I want to make sure that my government always looks after the elderly, the frail, the poorest in our country.

Above all it will be a government that will be built on some clear values — values of freedom, values of fairness, and values of responsibility.

I want us to build an economy that rewards work, I want us to build a society with stronger families and stronger communities, and I want a political system that people can trust and look up to once again.

“About making sure the people are in control and that politicians are always their servants.”  Perhaps time for a serious consideration of person centred and responsive methodologies instead of policy centred and strategic.  Be interesting to see what happens to Communities and Local Government under the new coalition.

Cameron’s full speech is reported here.

Community Engagement – Getting to the Heart of the Matter

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This site from Australia shows how a council is using online forums to engage with at least some of their constituents on a range of matters including:

  • plans for varying local rates
  • council strategy for trees and
  • the development of community and cultural facilities

This particular council has a resident population of around 74 000 and participation on the forums is relatively low.  Unsurprisingly perhaps, rate variations has got by far the most traffic almost certainly because of its direct impact on the self interest of local people.

There is no doubt that the forums have surfaced a wide range of opinions that may not otherwise have been heard – and some clearly offer clues to the council on areas where its own performance may benefit from a review.  The forums provide an interesting case study in the potential and limitations of such online engagement tools for informing decision making and policy.

However the point I wish to make is not about the medium of engagement (in this case online) but on the content of engagement.  In this case we have rates, trees, community and cultural facilities, a planning application and integrated planning strategy as the topics for engagement.

My question is this.

Of the 74 000 residents of this council, how many have their own progress genuinely held in check by any of these issues?

How many people cannot make progress in their own lives until the council sorts out its strategy on trees? Or integrated planning?  Or even business rates?

The answer is very few.  In most cases perhaps none.  These are examples of what I call lowest common denominator issues.  Most people will agree that they matter and need thinking about.   They are also impersonal enough to be safe topics for discussion.  But for next to nobody will they be the really critical issues that hold back individual talent or community potential.

Many of those 74 000 people will have ideas about how they could make a better life for themselves, their families and the community.  And most of them will have a pretty good idea about what is stopping them.  Instead of engaging local people in the somewhat ‘removed’ priorities of the council, the council could design engagement processes that enable people to engage with each other, the council and other stakeholders, in their real priorities for making a better life.  To uncover the real issues that act as barriers to real people making progress in real lives.

If people are to be open and honest about what is stopping them from making progress we need to have a relationship with them that is trusted, confidential, competent and compassionate.  I suspect that such relationships cannot generally develop entirely online.  That they still demand an element of face to face conversation.  That they will need real people working in the community with good engagement and development skills.  They may also need additional reserves of social capital, community networks and ‘brains trusts’ that can be accessed to provide support and expertise as and when it is needed.

Until we start to engage large numbers of individuals and groups on the real issues that they feel are preventing them from pursuing their aspirations then we will not get to heart of the matter.

Perhaps we should stop seeking to engage the people in our strategies and plans, but instead seek to engage ourselves in theirs?