What’s Working(ish) — Cycle 3 in our Pushing the Boundaries Community of Practice
Join us for the third (and final!) cycle of Pushing the Boundaries of Public Sector Innovation Community of Practice (registration links below).
By Dr. Francisca Rojas and Dr. Lindsay Cole
This blog post is part of the Pushing the Boundaries of Public Sector Innovation (PB PSI) community of practice (CoP). We are people working in- and alongside public sector organizations who share a curiosity and commitment to work more ambitiously, systemically, and respectfully on the biggest social and ecological challenges of our time. These posts are written from the diverse perspectives of different members of the CoP as we learn and explore together. Find out more about the project and/or join the CoP, here. You can catch up with previous sessions in this CoP here.
What’s Working(ish)?
Governments are facing increasing pressures to address complex challenges like climate change, growing inequity, reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, and many others at the scale and rate that these challenges demand. We know we need to operate differently in order for different outcomes to be possible. The public sector needs to transform the paradigms, processes, systems, structures, and the tools of our trade to better respond to the complexity of the challenges we face. So how might institutions — and people — renowned for our stability and slow rate of change ready ourselves for this kind of transformation?
Something that feels quite radical and boundary pushing in public sector innovation is to actually be successful in this transformative work. For many of us our work is counter-cultural, invisible, and difficult and moments of breakthrough can be rare. For this last cycle in our Pushing the Boundaries Community of Practice we want to gather some promising signs and signals of What’s Working(ish). We’ll host three conversations focused on: Codifying what we know to guide our strategies; Evaluating the learnings and outcomes of this work; and Mobilizing our networks to share and elevate our experiences.
Francisca Rojas and Lindsay Cole will co-host this cycle, and we will have special guests join us to be in dialogue with one another about the orienting questions for each session, described below. We will continue to update this blog post with more details about the session guests as they are confirmed.
Session 1 — Codify + Shapeshift. April 24, 4:00 — 5:30 pm (Eastern time)
How might we more rigorously and consistently gather up and share what we know, what we’ve learned, and what’s working as a field? What if we collectively made efforts to move beyond a focus on gathering toolkits, techniques, methods, and skills and instead held the idea that we are a diverse, plural, coherent, and skillful profession of public innovation? Might this help with making public sector innovation more visible, influential, and credible? More rigorous and professional? And how might we do this without losing our agility, creativity, complexity, and openness?
Session 2 — Evaluate. May 15, 4:00 — 5:30 pm (Eastern time)
How might we measure and evaluate the impacts and outcomes of transformative public innovation, and how is this different than more common/mainstream evaluation approaches in the public sector? How might we go beyond standard ways of measuring in the public sector and instead put into practice evaluation and learning approaches that enable innovation and capture its value rather than stifle it? How can the results of evaluation, and lessons about what’s working and what’s not, be shared and mobilized in order to support the field of transformative public sector innovation to be more robust, credible, and impactful?
Session 3 — Mobilize. June 12, 4:00 — 5:30 pm (Eastern time)
Why are network serving organizations important for elevating our individual and collective practice/field? What might their highest impact and evolving role be now? How might we act as “ecosystem holders” in making different approaches to public sector innovation more visible, credible, and influential? What can we learn from those networks that have sunsetted or struggled, and those that have had to shapeshift in some way? What can we learn from networks and ecosystems that have succeeded and the ingredients/elements that helped them to do that (funding, government, skills, form)?
This blog post is part of the Pushing the Boundaries of Public Sector Innovation (PB PSI) community of practice (CoP). We are people working in- and alongside public sector organizations who share a curiosity and commitment to work more ambitiously, systemically, and respectfully on the biggest social and ecological challenges of our time. These posts are written from the diverse perspectives of different members of the CoP as we learn and explore together. Find out more about the project and/or join the CoP, here. You can catch up with previous sessions in this CoP here.
