Public Sector Innovation Labs: Scaling deep and transformative learning
by Lindsay Cole + Penny Hagen
Opening
We have been in a dialogue and writing process together over the last year or so, exploring some of the ways that the two labs that we work with — the City of Vancouver Solutions Lab, and the Auckland Co-Design Lab — have been integrating the role of learning into our theory of change. Transformative learning as part of scaling deep has become a core part of how we think about our work, and we were curious about what we might be able to learn and share with the field if we tried to understand why this has become so important for us, and the role that learning plays in our work.
We found that a focus on transformative learning and scaling deep became more and more necessary for us as we moved beyond doing the surface work of discrete projects and innovation focused on solutions and into longer term initiatives, relationships and learning partnerships that had a better chance of grappling with the systemic transformation of business-as-usual paradigms and practices of government. We have gathered up our (in progress) shared insights in the form of articulating a PSI lab archetype focused on transformative learning and scaling deep, and six moves that public sector innovators and lab practitioners might consider as a pathway to deepening the impacts of lab work.
We are both deeply grateful for our colleagues and collaborators in our respective labs, organizations, and communities, and we hope that the ways that we’ve gathered up this thinking honour what we’ve learned together alongside each of you.
Article 2: Experiments in transformative learning and scaling deep.
Article 3: Implementing a scaling deep and transformative learning approach.
You may be interested in this article if…
- You’re a public sector innovator and/or lab practitioner who is interested in how a learning-oriented approach — at the individual, relational, and systems scales — might support your practice.
- You’re feeling the limitations of a project-by-project and discrete approach to public sector innovation, and are seeking to work at a deeper level that integrates across these silos and into the systems, structures, and paradigms of government.
- You enjoy reading about how other public sector innovators and labs are reflecting on their own practice.
There are three main sections in this post, so please jump around as you wish: a little bit of theory; five lab typologies; and six moves toward scaling deep and transformative learning.
A Little Bit of Theory to Ground Us
Before we dive in to the insights about scaling deep and transformative learning, we wanted to share the frameworks that we used to shape our thinking about these concepts. First — five different types of scaling in social innovation, adapted from the work of Gord Tulloch, Michele-Lee Moore, Darcy Riddell, and Dana Vocisano (Figure 1).
Scaling deep is the focus of our exploration here. Scaling deep is about impacting cultural roots, values, and mindsets and the powerful roles that culture plays in shaping and changing the ways in which complex challenges are understood and acted upon. Some of the main strategies for scaling deep include spreading big cultural ideas, reframing stories to change beliefs and norms, and to invest in transformative learning by sharing knowledge and practice through networks and communities of practice.
The concept of scaling deep corresponds to another model that we have found useful when helping to frame why scaling deep is critical to transformation work. The six conditions of systems change draws attention to conditions that hold the status quo in place, and that need to be collectively activated when seeking systems change (Figure 2). Mental models which sit underneath the more visible aspects of systems such as policies and practices, reflect the values and mindsets upon which more tangible aspects of the system are built — and align to the norms and values which are the focus of scaling deep.
Next up, transformative learning, drawing from the work of Jack Mezirow, Ron Heifetz, Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey, Aliki Nicolaides, Aftab Omer, Donald Schön, Lisa Grocott, and many many others (Figure 3).
Transformative learning transforms problematic frames of reference, habits of mind, perspectives, and assumptions that no longer serve a person or situation in order to make them more open, reflective, and able to change. Many of these models of transformative learning describe a necessary process of getting uncomfortable, or experiencing a disorienting dilemma — working in a productive zone of disequilibrium as shown in the image above. We particularly like the way that Omer et al. (2012) describe transformative learning as both an individual and collective process, as this is our experience as well. Omer et al. say that transformative learning “entails shifts in perspective, perceptual lenses, core beliefs, schemas, mental models, and mindsets” and that these “perceptual shifts enable individuals and systems to inhabit new, more complex and emergent landscapes.”
There is a clear link here between the values, mindsets, narratives, and mental models of scaling deep, systems change, and transformative learning and how they link to work toward transformative public sector innovation. In our work in labs we are seeking to support this transformative learning process at individual, organizational, and systems levels, and to embed this learning process as part of the ongoing work. This process is challenging, difficult and uncomfortable, as it often challenges our own identities, values, sense of worth, and concepts of expertise. The learning process is often about holding the space for courageous conversations and resetting expectations about what ‘good’ looks like. In our two places and contexts, this is particularly true for non-Māori and non-Indigenous public servants (such as ourselves) on a journey to understand and begin to deconstruct the colonial dimensions of government, and how much this continues to play out in everyday practice.
Lab Typologies/Archetypes
There are efforts in the field of PSI labs to describe different typologies, or archetypes, as a way to help describe and codify the field, and to differentiate approaches taken. Here we gather up previous work by Helle Vibeke Carstensen, Christian Bason, Sharon Zivkovic, and Zaid Hassan, and others, as well as Lindsay’s PhD research, and also offer a new ‘fifth archetype’ to this typology of PSI labs, based on our learning and practice.
- Creative Platform. Focused on employee-oriented ideation processes that aim to create buy-in to trying new methods.
- Innovation Unit. Focused on user-centred value creation and using a wider range of different innovation processes and methods.
- Change Partner. Centering both users and the organization, and working on transformation of core public sector organizational narratives and processes.
- Systemic Co-design. Works with complexity through systems practice and social innovation processes. Holds an orientation beyond government itself, recognizing that working with complex challenges requires collaboration and co-creation with multiple partners in ways that share power and responsibility.
- Transformative Learning and Scaling Deep. Focuses on deeper, more challenging work of transformation internally (hearts, minds, paradigms) and externally (systems, power, culture) together. Grows the capacity of individuals, relationships, and the system to hold the complexities of working deeply through transformative learning processes.
Labs in this fifth archetype stay entangled with purpose, acting, learning, inquiring, and evaluating in ongoing cycles. They move beyond working on discrete challenges in time bound ways and instead into much broader challenge framing, a more spacious sense of time, and an acknowledgement that impacts and outcomes will likely take longer to be realized and will be difficult to measure. The boundaries of what is/not the “lab” become less clear and more embedded when working toward learning and scaling deep. The next section describes what we are learning about working in and with labs focused on learning and scaling deep.
Six Moves Toward Scaling Deep and Transformative Learning
We offer six key moves that, in our experience, are essential to enact in a PSI lab focused on transformative learning and scaling deep. You’ll see here that the container of “lab” expands with this typology, making these moves to other public sector innovators/transformers working in different situations.
Move 1: Some of the attributes associated with a “lab” must become more diffuse.
When a lab is seeking to catalyze, support, or create space for transformative learning and scaling deep the boundaries of the lab will be less clear. The lab team is likely to be working in allyship with other public sector transformation work such as equity, anti-racism, reconciliation, decolonization, and sustainability. The goal will be to support and create space for innovation leadership and learning throughout the government and community so that existing practices, relationships, and power dynamics are challenged and shifted. Power and expertise will be shared and recognised as sitting with all of those involved, rather than held closely by an expert lab team. To achieve this collective approach, theories, tools, and techniques that underpin the practices and approaches of PSI labs will necessarily draw from a broader range of fields than other lab typologies.
Move 2: The paradigm, power structures, and practices embedded in dominant forms of western, colonial, New Public Management (NPM) governance become the focus of the transformation work, and are questioned, engaged with, and re-imagined in order to scale transformative innovation deeply.
Many public sector innovation labs and other initiatives shy away from engaging directly with governance paradigm as a place for innovation; however, the very fibers of NPM define evidence and value, set standards of professional practice, set policy-making and budgeting processes, define who is an ‘expert’ and whose ways of knowing and being are ‘legitimate’, determine measurement and monitoring practices, and many other core roles and responsibilities of government. Scaling deep and transformative learning will challenge these core tenets of governance, and explore them as sites of innovation in order to increase the depth, breadth, and potential impact of innovation work in ways that expand outside/beyond dominant paradigms. Scaling deep will involve surfacing, questioning, re-imagining and re-configuring the paradigms of governance.
Move 3: The work of public sector innovation and labs must be rooted and located in context, and be informed by the history and stories of people and their relationships to place.
PSI work is not generic or context-agnostic, even though innovation practitioners may really wish for helpful shortcuts and replicable pathways already traveled by others. In sharing our experiences with one another, we learned that although we have many shared views and approaches to our work, it is equally important to be in specific, deep, reciprocal, and right relationship with people, history, and place. These relational dimensions of context influence our starting point and approaches — there is specificity about what needs to be challenged and dismantled, and what needs to be built and emerge, in the everyday processes and practices of government in each unique place. The transformative learning dimension to this move includes supporting public sector practitioners who are used to working in the abstract (e.g. with aggregated population level views that can disconnect from human scales) to instead also begin to work with the specificity of people, place, and history as an active and foundational dimension of transformation.This means taking a focus on ways of being, doing, and working more than on techniques, tactics, or outcomes. A PSI lab can model/rehearse how being informed by, and in relationship to, people and place might look and feel in the day-to-day behaviours and practices of government.
Move 4: PSI labs must move more fully into the spaces and opportunities of implementation in order to scale deep, and to increase the short- and longer term impacts of their work.
PSI labs have generated a great deal of novelty, creativity, energy, and had some successes with dislodging stuck thinking and systems as an attempt to open up people, spaces, and opportunities for change.There is a risk that these shifts stay only in the prototyping space or stay on the edges of business as usual practice. The learning by doing approach of labs needs to occupy the space of ‘implementation learning’ in order to ensure it is really grappling with the surrounding systems conditions that hold the status quo in place. A key role of labs is to help public sector teams take the good intent of policy and strategy and grapple with what it takes to see transformative policy and strategy fully implemented in practice. The dominant system pushes back hardest in this move to implementation of transformative interventions, as the stakes are higher. This is when the potential for more significant shifts arises — when there is a move away from experiments, policy, and ideas and into scaling deep into infrastructure, mental models, operating models, programs, budgets, and job descriptions.
Move 5: Public sector innovators must grow into the role of learning partners to support deep process and practice.
PSI lab archetypes 1–4 tend to tackle complex issues in isolation as discrete challenge spaces, using specific innovation processes and methodologies. This approach does not result in shifting underlying structures, patterns, and mindsets that hold stuck challenges in place across a system/organization. Thus the idea of ‘innovation projects to address a complex issue’ can actually act as a distraction from really wrestling and reckoning with deeper equity or power issues. Public sector innovators, PSI labs, and the people that commission innovation work can get caught up in cycles of initiatives that look like they are attending to the issues but are only shallow in reach. This tends to be because they have agency and permission in this realm, can build confidence in their abilities and reputations as experts, and can feel like they are doing something helpful. Deep process and practice work holds space for capacity and capability development, relationship and movement building, and reflection and reckoning with the ways that power and privilege shape perspectives and approaches. This type of process work calls each other in to be vulnerable, challenge biases and assumptions, undo and unlearn that which no longer serves, have courageous conversations, and create mutual accountability, responsibility, and hope for transformation.
Move 6: Understanding, measuring, and telling stories of impact, outcomes, and transformation must include multiple ways of knowing.
The public sector is often stuck in measuring the impacts of their work using dominant evidence frameworks and practices, which connects back to dominant paradigms of governance. Measuring the impacts of innovation work (both in- and beyond the container of a PSI lab) that aims to scale deep through learning and working toward transformation will not be able to adequately tell its story through this limited lens. Relational, values-led, narrative, and place-based practices of understanding impact with intentional inclusion of multiple evidence bases, knowledges, and lived experiences are possible and necessary. Different signals of change and transformation are tracked over time, not just outputs and activities. There is a rich and robust set of qualitative and participatory research methods that can lend themselves to understanding impacts, and innovation in the public sector needs to harness these in service of telling their stories of scaling deep, learning, and transformation so that this work is more visible, understood, and acknowledged.
Closing Thoughts + Questions
The scaling deep through transformative learning lab archetype, and these six moves for public sector innovators, all point toward the need for thoughtful and intentional learning systems and structures within the public sector. This is necessary to support transformation toward different ways of working, knowing, and being at the individual, relational, and systems scales. Instead of envisioning, shaping, and investing in a lab as a discrete, protected, special place guided by the work of experts in a specific set of practices, what if the construct of “lab” was re-imagined as shared and accessible transformative learning spaces?
What if labs were recognised as spaces to reflect and go deep, and to embrace ambiguity and discomfort as important aspects of a transformative learning process?
What if labs took the form of shared practices and deep commitments to collectively work toward transformation of what it means to be of service in the public sector, in these times?
What if labs were part of an ecosystem of transformation, and in allyship with the other major forces disrupting the public sector at this time, for example reconciliation, anti-racism, equity, and climate change?
What if the ways that labs currently describe their purpose, position, practices, and processes were absorbed into innovation and transformation work throughout public sector professionals and teams?
What if these moves were enacted by public sector innovators working outside of/beyond the specific construct of an innovation lab, and working in service of transformation in a variety of different ways?
Authors
Dr. Lindsay Cole (she/her)
Lindsay is an uninvited settler on the unceded and traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ / sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) nations, and the swiya of the self-governing shíshálh Nation. Lindsay founded and leads the Solutions Lab at the City of Vancouver, where she is motivated and inspired every day by her colleagues — both in- and outside government — who are doing their very best to make Vancouver more sustainable and just. She’s worked on a variety of exciting projects with the city over her 12 year tenure, including leading the planning and public engagement process for the award-winning Greenest City Action Plan. Lindsay is also an Adjunct Professor at UBC, where she researches and teaches about transformative innovation for social and ecological justice.
Dr. Penny Hagen (she/her)
Penny is the Director Tangata Tiriti of the Auckland Co-Design Lab where she assists organisations, teams and communities to take a systems-oriented approach to wellbeing. Working across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, Penny has supported cross-sector teams and communities to respond to complex social issues by connecting policy and evidence to the lived realities and aspirations of communities. Penny has a PhD in participatory design and her work integrates approaches from wellbeing, health, design, youth development, systems, and evaluation disciplines. In addition to leading the Lab mahi on design for equity and intergenerational wellbeing, Penny is the design representative on the Ministry for Social Development Ethics committee, on the Understanding Police Delivery Independent Panel, and Ngā Aho Kaupapa Whānau. She is a strong advocate of social design and ethics practices that are of Aotearoa, supporting events and forums that develop and strengthen local practice and networks.
