Continuous Improvement keynote speaker John Tizard stresses the strong leadership required for organisations seeking to embed innovation and collaboration.
Many modern public policy challenges are complex. Many are long standing, and traditional approaches to address them have failed. Indeed, often no single agency and/or profession can solely address these challenges, especially against a background ofausterity and reduced resources and an unhelpful institutional or protection of budgets.
Yet, there is growing recognition amongst policy makers, politicians and practitioners – and service users – that there is an urgent need for: innovation; collaboration between agencies and professional groups, and between them and citizens as service users and members of communities; and for the pooling of agencies’ resources.
It follows that innovation and collaboration must mesh together if significant social, economic and environmental issues are to be effectively addressed.
Whilst innovation and collaboration may appear to be different, actually they have much in common.
Both require inspired leadership, focused on outcomes for people rather than institutions. They require empowerment of staff and others to facilitate flexibility and exploration of solutions. Rather than processes, procedures and manuals – they depend on people at all levels (politicians and professionals, and senior executives and frontline staff) having the right mind-sets and behaviours, as well as the space and time to explore, experiment and simply to ‘talk’ to others, particularly citizens and service users.
The all too rare, far-sighted modern public sector leader recognises that they must personally champion innovation and collaboration, underpinned by real commitment rather than slogans, project and job titles, and vague ideas. Innovation and collaboration must be incentivised and resourced, and seen as ‘core’ in public, business, social, and voluntary and community sectors – not some ‘add-on’ or delegated as the responsibility of the ‘innovation’ or the ‘collaboration/partnership’ team. Much too often, I hear people at the head of organisations across all sectors claiming to be in favour of innovation and/or collaboration. On speaking to them, however, it is clear that the initial right words and platitudes are covering up a lack of any real understanding, dysfunctional behaviours, and a wholesale failure to embed the concepts in their organisations.
The losers are the public – and this has to change.
Collaboration and innovation are not ends in themselves. They are enablers but increasingly, very important enablers.
Political leaders and senior executives must not only ‘talk the talk’ about these concepts – they must ‘walk the walk’. They must invest in training and support for their staff and partners. They must remove restrictive rules, regulations and procedures that get in the way of effective collaboration and innovation. They must be ready to accept some failure as part of the natural learning process, and they must be quick to learn rather than to blame.
Over the next five and more years, we will need more innovation and collaboration, or else many critical challenges will remain festering and unresolved. There is an urgent and immediate need for innovative collaboration within all the sectors and between them, and a collaborative mind-set that enables innovation.
John Tizard is speaking at the Continuous Improvement: Inspiring Better Public Services conference, to be hosted by Open Forum Events at Manchester Conference Centre on 28 May 2014.