I was lucky enough to spend 90 minutes visiting Christian Bason, Director of Innovation, at MindLab on a frosty day in Copenhagen last week.

Through the Sauder d.studio, Professor Moura Quayle and I have been invited to help shape a proposal for a new social innovation “change lab” in British Columbia with the B.C. Advisory Council on Social Entrepreneurship.  So I had a million questions for Christian, about governance, funding, scope, evaluation, ROI and citizen-centred design practice.  Christian literally wrote the book on innovation in the public sector (which, in Canada, seems an oxymoron).  He is, without a doubt, the most passionate (and interesting) civil servant I’ve ever met.

Photo: MindLab

He hosted me in the famous MindLab “dome”, a circular white ball lined from floor to ceiling with white-boards.  Our conversation soared from thirty thousand feet to ground level and back into the stratosphere as we explored the logistics, policy and pitfalls of managing such an enterprise in government.  To complicate things, MindLab actually serves three Danish ministries simultaneously.

I’ll continue to share insights and ideas from our discussion here over the next few weeks.  In the short term, these are my top take-aways for us to consider:

• Invest serious time up front in strategic planning to define and scope the initiative. The MindLab team spent several days crafting their “theory of change” model, which serves as the foundation for all their work.
• Start with the end in mind.  Don’t position this as a prototype or test.  Such an approach weakens commitment from both sponsors and participants.
• Ensure that the sponsors are ready for and open to change – and are committed to the endeavour.  Change is hard and you don’t want them to panic at the first signs of resistance.
• Develop a robust model to measure performance and impact early on.  Such metrics will inform and improve future operations and outcomes.

I just spent a snowy day in a workshop on Service Excellence at the business school.  It was (apparently) the first time in recent memory that all staff have participated in a cross-departmental training initiative.  Except that it wasn’t training, really.  Nor was it planning, or team-building.  In fact, upon discussion, it became clear that no one was sure what it was.  Yet we were all told to give up a valuable day of our work time to be there – at a significant cost to the organization.

It seemed that the sponsors of the initiative wanted us to to come up with some ideas to improve customer service.  And while we did generate some tactical suggestions, mostly what we did was to ask questions.

• Who are our clients?  Are students clients?  Public taxpayers? Other business units?
• What are our corporate values and goals?  Until we know these, it’s difficult to deliver service that meets them.
• How is service performance measured?  Rewarded?
• Why aren’t faculty participating in this initiative? As the “face” of the School and front-line service providers, they need to lead and own customer service along with staff and the executive.
• Customer service is notably absent from our newly-minted strategic plan.  What is the connection?
• Where does customer service end and corporate culture begin?  Do we just try harder for “clients” and lower our standards for everyone else?
• And finally, what’s the process for all this?  Where will these ideas go?

In response to the last question, we were told that there will be a debrief in which our ideas will be summarized and presented to the executive.  At that point, the sponsors of the session may choose to implement some of our suggestions, making incremental improvements in a few spots.

Rather, I hope that they will pause to reflect on the tremendous opportunity they’ve just created.

They have unintentionally engaged a cross-functional community in exploring a wicked problem space that runs much deeper than customer service.  Instead of coming to an end as a brief service tune-up, this initiative could be transformed into the beginning of a journey into a powerful design process, through which the School’s community members co-create a corporate culture that fosters and celebrates service excellence.

This is a great example of how organizations will rush to invest (significantly) in trying to generate solutions, when really, they don’t yet know what the problem or opportunity is.  I hope the business school’s leaders will have the courage and vision to recognize the value that could be added by supporting this as a design project to tackle one or more of the wicked problems that emerged during the session.  It could become a nice case study in design innovation in public sector management.

Photo credit: UBC

We ran a design session the other day with a senior faculty member to explore options for making his course more active and engaging for students, while improving their higher order learning.  The process and outcomes reminded me that perceived risk (un-managed) can be a massive barrier to innovation and change.

The environment for the session, the design activities and most of the ideas generated were well beyond the faculty member’s comfort zone.  We suspected this would be the case going in, but somehow thought it would be okay.  It wasn’t.

He sat uncomfortably (arms crossed) for two hours in the open, glass and leather studio space.  During brainstorming, he tried his best to avoid having to stand up to put his sticky notes on the wall and share his thoughts out loud with the group.  When we sorted the ideas from the brainstorm, suggestions of doing anything that might resemble “play” in his class (such as building a model of a financial system with lego) fell off the table first.

Design processes, tools and techniques are familiar to many who come from creative industries and the like.  But they can be terrifically intimidating to those from more analytical or traditional backgrounds.  Before we invite “newbies” to deep dive into the design pool, we need to spend time with them to map our their comfort zones.  Knowing what is at stake for them – what their risk tolerance is – will enrich both the design process and potential outcomes.