The feng shui of innovation

Many organisations have begun integrating words from the language of innovation into their vocabularies.

It's increasingly common to hear terms like 'fail fast', 'lean', 'agile', 'prototype', 'user-centric design', 'discovery phase' and 'startup' used by both senior leaders and line staff when discussing the design of their services and development of IT solutions.

More organisations are announcing roles specifically focused on cultivating innovative ideas, and implementing systems and technology solutions to support innovation processes.

All of these steps, to a greater or lessor degree, help surface the innovative thinking already within these organisations. I've seen a number of cases where managers were positively surprised at the number and variety of innovative ideas they managed to uncover with a simple idea crowdsourcing process.

I find it predictable that organisations experience an initial flood of ideas once language, systems and permissions conducive to innovating are introduced into an organisation.
In many cases these were pre-existing ideas which had been bubbling away in the minds of people across various organisational nooks and crannies, laying dormant until there was an opportunity to be heard.

However once this initial surge of pent-up ideas has been spent, organisations will need to think carefully about how to foster and sustain a deeper ongoing innovation culture.


While permanently adapting the language, approvals and systems is a good start towards fostering long-term innovative behaviour, organisations should also closely consider the physical environments they create for their workers, and how their staff are equipped and organised to achieve business goals.

I call this the feng-shui of innovation.

Feng shui is a Chinese philosophical system for organising objects and spaces to generate positive flows of energy.

Good feng shui in a room or building supposedly leads to good fortune - making people more productive and energised, feeds money in (rather than out) and leads to greater success. Bad feng shui does the opposite - supposedly leading to ill fortune.

While people have varying views of the value and spiritual aspects of feng shui, the 3,000 year philosophy includes practical approaches that inform the architectural design of buildings and the arrangement of objects and spaces within them. The use of feng shui to create positive spaces remains widely applied throughout China and popular to some degree across the western world.

Regardless of the virtues or otherwise of feng shui practice, it is widely understood that how spaces are designed influences how people feel and interact within them. A space that is confined and crowded, with little natural light, tends to create a feeling of oppression, where as spacious, well lit environments can have people feeling that a weight has lifted off them.

This understanding has been widely applied in the fields of architecture and interior design to design spaces that create certain impressions. Churches have high ceilings deliberately to create a sense of reverence and respect, and supermarkets choose cluttered corridors to create an impression of being bargain priced and place impulse purchases at checkouts and the front of the store and staples at the back to increase sales.

Equally offices and other workplaces can be deliberately, or accidentally, designed and configured to support or discourage certain types of moods and behaviours. Research has found that people are less likely to collaborate if office partitions are high and around every desk, whereas having large common areas painted in relaxing colours with amenities like coffee machines encourages people to associate and share information.

Certain types of office environments are also likely to encourage or discourage innovative behaviours and organisations serious about innovation often create specific innovation spaces within their offices where staff can interact differently to at their regular desk.

I've seen some great examples of these types of spaces in co-working offices, in organisations like Google, Telstra, DFAT, the Digital Transformation Office and elsewhere, as well as in the premises of innovation specialists like EdgeLabs and ThinkSpace.

However in many cases these spaces sit on the 'edge' of the organisation. Only specific teams regularly access these spaces, with most staff spending the majority of their time in cubicle city and only occasionally being invited into these innovation spaces for a specific training or innovation session.

For organisations who wish to transform how all their staff behave, promoting top-to-bottom and end-to-end innovative thinking, having a discrete space people can go to is likely to have limited impact on the overall transformation effort.

While people spend most of their time in a specific space, they will adopt the thinking patterns best suited to that space - which may stymie innovation thinking.

So promoting innovative thinking can't end with language and systems, it has to take in the environments in which people are expected to work - how they are organised and the objects placed within them.

The opportunity for larger organisations is that they have a level of capability to test different office configurations to determine which layouts and approaches best support the organisation's innovation and other goals.

Rather than making every office space identical, they have the ability to AB test office spaces, iterating the design as they see the impact of different environments on the workday behaviour of staff.

This should be done in an above-board manner, with staff aware that the organisation is testing different layouts to determine which helps them be most effective and happy.

Taking this approach, treating the office environment as an ongoing experiment for improving productivity, would thereby allow larger organisations to apply and demonstrate their innovative thinking by applying it to improving innovative thinking.

Only by performing this form of 'feng shui of innovation' across their work environments, will large organisations embed the innovative thinking they wish to cultivate, right across their organisational structure.

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Without risk there can be no innovation. But without innovation there is not no risk

It is fairly well understood - even embraced - in government today that without taking some risk there can be no innovation.

However it's important to keep in mind that the reverse of that statement is not true: without innovation there can be no risk.

Increasingly we're seeing government agencies take at least baby steps into supporting innovation processes and, to a lesser extent, behaviours among their staff - albeit within existing frameworks and constraints that were designed for stability rather than rapid change.

However there' still large and widespread pockets in government where innovation is seen as the enemy of good government. Where change is seen as an imposition on the 'natural order' and an external disruptive force that must be contested (actively or passively), rejected or endured until things return to normal.

What I don't see really grasped in government as yet is that rapid change is the new norm, that in a world where knowledge doubles every seven months and more data is collected each year than in the entire 20th century, that stability is now the riskiest proposition of all.

Yes change can be hard, uncomfortable and exhausting - but is this due to the process or actual change, or the deep-rooted culture, training and beliefs of those public servants who feel challenged, disempowered and exhausted?

We have selected and trained public servants for decades to love consistency and oppose rapid change, so even when they embrace change their subconscious impulses are to reject and resist - no wonder they find change confronting and tiring!

To change the relationship between the public service and innovation - paying lip service will not lead to the deep adaptations necessary to remake agencies as agile, change-ready innovative organisations.

Putting in place rigid (or even semi-elastic) processes and frameworks for innovation will deliver some peripheral benefits, particularly in non-core areas of agencies, but do not rapidly address the root issues agencies face with cultural resistance and inbuilt attitudes and behaviours that make change difficult to introduce, embed and retain.

Many senior public servants now speak about innovation, but their behaviours and attitudes do not match their words, and in many cases 'innovation' is now parroted as the mantra for the year, rather than being embedded in their hearts and minds.

I don't blame them for this, it is standard survival practice in any group for those in status positions to  retain their status by more enthusiastically adopting new fads and trends than those below them. The history of fashion - clothes, cars and toys - demonstrates that being a 'leader' (aka an early and enthusiastic adopter) brings status benefits in any group.

Even counter-cultural trends, think hipsters and contrarians, build status from the fashions of the day, by being the most enthusiastic at adopting the strongest anti-fashion position. In effect they are exalted for being 'an individual', defined as doing the reverse of whatever a fashion entails.

For innovation to become truly embedded in the public sector, for our government agencies to truly become agencies of change, agile and adaptable to a fast-paced world, we require far deeper culture change than the lip service and prototyping we see today.

Future public servants will need to find change a positive force, energizing and exciting - something they choose to engage with every day in order to continually improve how they serve governments and the public.

This cannot be achieved rapidly through a cautious, graduated process of slowly adopting innovative approaches, running a few ideas challenges or creating pockets of innovation (which I have previously called 'ghettos' which are carefully kept at armslength from the majority of agency staff and operations while agencies simultaneously hope they will infect the rest of the agency with their attitudes.

It can't be achieved while the public service retains and preserves the character, attitudes, culture and behaviours it expresses today. To me this also means it cannot be achieved with the majority of today's public sector leadership, who simply don't have the interest or capability to change themselves to embrace innovation and continual change as their core philosophy, in their hearts and minds.

Thus to achieve the real change necessary in the public sector, from 'change' being part of controlled, monitored, bounded projects to being core, business as usual, practice, behaviour and thinking,  there will need to be conflict, controversy, even 'blood in the corridors', where the old guard are largely replaced, rather than 'converted', taking stability mindsets with them.

Many public servants won't find this comfortable. Like most people they see themselves as capable of weathering any change, being adaptable and open to new ideas. Like most people (and I include myself in this), we are limited. We can only bend so far before we break or spring back to the core values we have embraced.

Change, at an individual or organisational level feels hard whenever it contradicts our beliefs, even when it is supported by evidence. The hardness reflect our subconscious fighting back, our mental defenses against a perspective or approach that is contrary to the beliefs we have constructed. We also have blind spots where we cannot see how our behaviour is limited - we see this regularly today in passive sexist and racism, in businesses that fail or are failing but can't see why (like Kodak and Australia Post). These blind spots are how our subconscious keeps us feeling safe, blinkers that hide unpleasant events or options from ourselves, warm safe bubbles got our minds, like offshore asylum seeker centres that allow us to place the pain and plight of unfortunate people out of our sight and thus out of our minds.

We will need public sector leaders who find innovative change less hard, maybe even easy, if we are to truly change agencies to better service a fast changing society. We need staff who have been normalized into an environment where continually change is the norm.

How we get there will involve tough decisions and risk - for without risk we cannot have real innovation.

However if you believe the reverse, that you can avoid risk by not innovating, you are, in my humble opinion, delusional. Stability within a fast changing society exposes organisations to even greater risks than does change.

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Guest blog: Can open data really form the basis of a social good startup in Australia?

This is a guest post written by Rosie Williams, a leading Australian Open Data Developer and Citizen Journalist, who created and manages infoAus.net and writes for NoFibs.com.au. It's republished with her permission.

Can open data really form the basis of a social good startup in Australia?

I've come round to the realisation that doing open data as a business product/service (unless you are an already established business with established customer base ie not a startup) is not a realistic way to be doing open data anymore than expecting to start organisations on alternative bases such as cooperatives or charities and achieve things within a short timeframe.

After all just look how long it took for the OKFNAu to get incorporated, much less set up a sustainable financial model to fund new open knowledge projects. Now apply that level of challenge to a team of maybe one or more open knowledge advocates trying to establish similar organisations.
Trying to establish an organisation to accomplish goals whether it is under an ABN or ACN is a difficult process which is why there are so few open data projects for financial and political transparency other than my own and so few open data projects generally.

Even the OpenAustralia Foundation gets income from selling some of their services/products so the line between what is a 'startup' and any other type of organisation trying to make open data projects survive is pretty slim.

This is why so few gov hacks go on to form the basis of future projects- because of the challenges inherent in creating financial sustainability for those creating and implementing them.

If they require very little in the way of upkeep (and therefore not require full time labour) that might be plausible to continue them but most things that have value have value for the reason that they do require significant investment of labour and expertise.

When people only ever spend a weekend mocking up apps, I'm not sure that gives the true picture of the ongoing labour, expertise and lobbying required to make projects an ongoing success. For example issues in the data may not be noticeable in hack events and only come to light when more serious/ongoing engagement with the data occurs.

A better example is to compare your average hacker's daily work which requires full time commitment, a multidisciplinary team, management, contracts etc - all of which are deemed necessary in order to create and maintain successful projects. That open data projects are so often considered not to need these things to achieve the same level of stability and success is something I've always found quite interesting.

From my own experience, requiring one person to lobby to release data- wait for that release which may be months or years into the future, collect data (perhaps from multiple agency sites, clean it, design and write database backed websites, promote it etc) puts everything on the shoulders of one person or at best a very small team.

Open source projects hope to encourage volunteers to do the actual coding for free but those I know of struggle to recruit people willing to do that.  I certainly went down that road when I first launched some months ago now, but found it untenable given the short time frame put on me to prove my success.

Much open data needs tweaking in order to be made serious use of which can only take place in consultation with agencies publishing the data. It is not just a matter of agencies saying here is the data and that's that, but of a process of engagement where those working with the data can give feedback as to how the data can be improved.

This goes right into the way of making submissions to inquiries into agency annual reports or budget data sets (for example) where you are actually changing the information that eventually ends up as open data.

This sort of approach requires serious ongoing commitment and a decent level of expertise in the matters at hand.

Very few people in Australia actually run ongoing open data projects to know what it involves. Most people work day jobs doing other things (which may or may not be related to open data).

I do have a plan for going forward so that the accumulated expertise (not to mention technological output) I have created in InfoAus is not lost at such a crucial stage as the lead-up to Australia's Open Government Partnership National Action Plan.

However it is only in considering a different role to maintaining finished and regularly updated commercial grade open data projects that I have realised what a burden I was placing upon myself.
Having said that, without having done what I have over the past six months I doubt I'd be in a position to carry on in the way I intend. I'll post more about that another time.

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DataStart announces eight shortlisted open data startups

Late last week the shortlisted start-ups for the DataStart program were released - here's why it's significant and what happens next.

In November 2015 the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, in parternship with Pollenizer Ventures, announced Australia's first open data commercialisation competition, DataStart.

Designed as a pilot to test the approach, entrepreneurs, data scientists and open data enthusiasms were invited to apply for a program that would see up to 20 founders shortlisted, trained and one winner receive start-up coaching and potentially up to $200,000 in funding (via Right Click Capital) towards becoming a commercially viable company.

DataStart Incubator Webinar Information Slides from Pollenizer

The program attracted mixed reviews. While some applauded the efforts to link open data competitions with actual commercially viable ongoing outcomes (which has been an ongoing criticism of data competitions in Australia), others saw it as a 'winner takes all' process with little value to the community.

My view was in-between - we need programs like this to be piloted, with the best becoming part of the startup and open data ecosystem. However we also need governments to fund their open data programs such that datasets are released at a sufficient quality level and reliable frequency to be a commercialisable resource.

The DataStart program attracted over 200 entrants and late last Friday Pollenizer released the eight shortlisted start-ups, consisting of 20 founders.

These founders begin a five-day program this week in Sydney to test and work-up their start-ups to evaluate whether there's truly a commercial basis for the ideas.

Following this, based on the competition guidelines, a single start-up will be selected to go into a 9-month incubation process at Pollenizer in Sydney, with the potential to also secure $200,000 in funding from Right Click Capital on commercial terms (aka in return for equity or other consideration).

It's great to see the level of interest in this program, and the next step begin.

What would be really good to see is a higher level of transparency around the start-ups and founders, featured interviews, examples of what data they are using and how.

This is the challenge in public-partner arrangements, where often the partners have a different set of values and expectations, as well as different obligations under law and policy.

I'm hopeful that efforts are underway to align these expectations and values and ensure that these startups become role models and examples of how open data can be used commercially, rather than get hidden away under commercial-in-confidence arrangements.

Of course their IP needs protection, but there's a lot that could be promoted without breaching commercial confidentially.

Who are these founders and start-ups, why are they using open data, what problems are they solving?

Hopefully we'll learn more than their names and vague details of their project area over coming weeks and months.

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Improvement in governance is the goal, innovation and transformation are simply techniques to help it along

Over the last year in Australian government there's been increasing rhetoric around transformation (primarily digital) and innovation.

This has come both from the political level, particularly since Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister, and from the administrative level, as the Secretary's Board and an increasing number of senior public servants have internalised these terms within their approach to gain funding and support for their activities.

I'm a big support of innovation within government. Where government seeks to improve internal efficiency and external effectiveness, innovation - as a technique for exploring, testing and trialing new approaches - is a key strategy for achieving improvement.

In my view digital transformation is part of this innovation track, with a particular focus on using digital technologies, and the strategies and tactics they enable, to help improve governance and operations across the public sector.

As such both innovation and digital transformation are important techniques that should form part of the 'toolkit' of every public sector employee.

However, in all this rush to secure innovation rushing and transform service delivery via digital tools, public servants and politicians alike must ensure they focus on the goals they are seeking to achieve, not simply the (shiny new) tools they are using to achieve them.

The goal - as it has been for hundreds of years - is to improve the operations of government and ensure that, within the budgets available, governments deliver the best possible experience and, particularly, outcomes, for their 'owners' - citizens.

Innovation is not the goal, it is a method used to achieve the goal, whatever that might be.

Similarly digital transformation is a technique for shifting services between delivery or processing channels in order to deliver more convenient and effective outcomes for the service recipient, potentially with the secondary goal of a more cost-effective, reduced-error service delivery approach for the provider.

Within all the rhetoric abut innovation and digital transformation we've heard from governments, and with the large amount I expect we'll continue to hear this year, keep in mind the end goal - improving government efficiency and effectiveness.

Innovation and transformations do not, by themselves, improve government. They are simply techniques and can be implemented both well and badly, depending on the people, culture and environment they are employed within.

Indeed in certain cases innovation can make things worse - harder, slower, less reliable - or have unforeseen consequences that end up costing government more, and reducing its effectiveness overall.

So look for the outcomes of innovation and digital transformation.

Does an agency's innovation approach reduce costs, reduce error rates, increase satisfaction or improve outcomes for the services and systems to which it is applied?

Last year we heard the talk about innovation and digital transformation. This year we'll start seeing the first outcomes from some of the most highly funded agencies and offices tasked with these techniques.

This year, 2016, will be the test of whether government agencies in Australia are effectively implementing innovation, shifting their culture and administrative biases to facilitate successful innovation and resulting in real improvements in citizen welfare and government operations.

I hope we hear the successes shouted from the rooftops.

Silence can only mean that this has been a failed experiment, with senior public servants using innovation as a way to buffer declining budgets rather than make measureable improvements in how Australian government operations.

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Fostering Entrepreneurship and innovation in Australian universities

Last week I was privileged to be invited to speak at the Canberra Startup Showcase, run by the UC Advertising and Marketing Society and EntrepreneurshipUC Society at the University of Canberra.

Together with three other entrepreneurs, Mitchell Harmer of Sign On Site, Dawn Hayter of Urban Providore and Joe Mammolita of iCognition, we discussed our journeys and experience in entrepreneurship and answered the questions of the gathered students.

It was an awesome experience. Each of the entrepreneurs had a very different background, and were at different stages in their company development, providing a broad cross-sectional view of what it's like to found and build a business in Australia.

Fostering entrepreneurship at Australian universities is critical for Australia to build future businesses and grow the economic opportunities for all Australians. The level of interest from attendees, including several who were already seasoned entrepreneurs while still in their early twenties, demonstrated that passion for entrepreneurship was alive among young Australians.

All they needed was the knowledge and tools to realise their passions, avenues to learn from more experienced business owners and access systems that can leapfrog their learning and avoid at least some of the pitfalls.

While I was expecting some interest from the students in Social Media Planner as a tool to support an aspect of business planning, I didn't anticipate how popular it would be - several students bought decks on the spot and more have followed up after the event.

This suggests to me that tools like Social Media Planner have a valuable place in helping our future entrepreneurs to define, refine and test their ideas, preparing them for the business landscape of the future.

I'm glad I could provide some knowledge and support to the students of the University of Canberra, and hope I can continue to support younger people in their journey towards entrepreneurship for years to come.

I hope governments, corporations and universities also recognise where and when our education system needs to be supported by relevant business experience and appropriate business tools.

Without appropriate support many potential Australian enterprises will fail, or not achieve their potential success, restricting Australia's economic development and success.

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Innovation, the International Space Station and horses arses

The International Space Station (ISS) orbits Earth about 15 times a day. As the largest human-built structure in orbit, it is visible to the naked eye when it passes over, only 330-430 kilometres overhead.

The ISS serves an important purpose as a microgravity and space environment research laboratory in which crew members conduct experiments in biology, physics, astronomy, meteorology and other scientific fields. It also is crucial in exploring the technologies needed to take humans back to the moon, to Mars and, eventually, the stars.

The ISS was built from a number of parts carried into orbit on different space missions, including a number of components carried on US Space Shuttles while they were in operation.

When the Space Shuttle was being constructed a number of its parts were contracted out to various companies across the US and other nations.

In particular the large booster rockets, which carry the shuttle to orbit and fall away for reuse, were contracted to a company in Utah, which built them onsite and transported them by rail to the launch site.

The engineers that built these boosters wanted to ensure they were as large and powerful as possible, but had to keep in mind that they had to be transported through a train tunnel, which was built to US rail specifications.

The US rail gauge is 4 foot 8.5 inches and was defined by the manufacturers of steam trains, who reused the standard they'd used in their previous work developing horse-drawn trams in the 19th century. The standard used for these trams was, in turn, based on the standard for building horse-drawn wagons, which was the former occupation of tram-makers.

The width of wagon wheelbases was, in turn, based on US road widths, which had been imported to the New World by the English, drawing from UK road standards.

The reason it was important for wagons to have standard width wheelbases in the UK was because of the ruts cut into the roads by hundreds of years of use. Make a wheelbase too wide or narrow and wheels would break more easily and often.

This was because the UK road standard had originally been defined by the Roman Empire, which built the first continent-spanning road network in Europe. The Romans built these roads both for trade and for easier passage by their armies, which included war-chariots drawn by two horses.

As a result, the gateway to humans exploring the solar system, the International Space Station, was designed on a thousand-year old standard from the Roman Empire, the width of two horses' arses.

Now what does this have to do with innovation?

Clearly there's been a long process to get from two-horses arses to the International Space Station, but at every stage many of the core technologies have been designed iteratively on those that came before them.

All the innovations that have occurred in that process occurred within a set framework, which both enabled and limited progress.

When thinking about innovation it is important to be conscious of the frameworks we operate within, personally and institutionally.

Our capacity to innovate is often shaped by our education, experience and environment. Often what we may call innovation is actually iteration - taking an existing model and improving it in some way.

Innovation in the purest sense occurs when there's a break from a past framework. These breaks are often highly disruptive as they force people to rethink all their assumptions and reframe their experiences in light of new ways of seeing the world, or a given problem or situation.

Some of these major innovative breaks include such things as the Theory of Evolution, the Industrial Revolution, the invention of the printing press (with movable type) and the creation of the Internet.

It's true that each was built on knowledge that came before it. Dinosaur skeletons were discovered long before Darwin and his peers conceived of evolution and books existed for thousands of years before movable type.

However in each of these, and similar, innovations, the way people saw the world shifted. Industries rose and fell, as did nations and societies. These new ideas and inventions weren't simple iterations on previously accepted wisdom that saw society make minor adjustments but continue on its existing course.

Often when organisations seek to be 'innovative' they are actually focused on being iterative, to improve what they do in order to maximise their success within the current social and economic environment.

There's nothing wrong with this but it doesn't necessarily require the same approach as actual innovation.

Actual innovation is about overturning what is considered normal, breaking from current practice and finding new approaches which redefine how we see and behave in society and our economic, political and social environments.

This type of innovation is hard. It involves lifting people out of their unconscious patterns and creating lasting change, often overcoming fears of the unknown and the well understood and comfortable lives people and organisations have created for themselves.

In fact humans are biologically wired against too much, or too fast, change. Scientific research has established that our brains reside in a lower energy state when supporting or defending the status quo than when we try to actually change our thinking. 

While we can, and do, change, it's far easier to consider innovative change when we're fresh, fit and fed rather than when we're stressed, tired and hungry.

So it's important when seeking to create or support innovation to create the right environment to foster innovative thinking, picking or designing appropriate locations and times for change to occur.

It's also important to use the appropriate systems and tools to support innovation. These need to help people step out of their comfort zones as comfortably as possible, to give people a change to play with ideas and approaches in non-threatening ways.

When people feel comfortable and safe they're far more capable and open to new concepts and approaches and able to consider the flaws in current situations in a far more objective way.

While I didn't realise it when I invented Social Media Planner, my card-based game-like system for helping people to design effective social media strategies around a table, over years of testing I've found that it fosters this innovative thinking. By taking people from a digitally-focused space to a collaborative tabletop environment they are better positioned to objectively play with different and innovative approaches and concepts.

When I observe or work with individuals and groups using Social Media Planner, they rapidly shift into an innovative state of mind, considering new options, devising new ideas and working together to develop and assess them to design new approaches to their social media engagement.

This is of course one small corner of innovation, but it has shown me the power in giving people a familiar and flexible tool, the physical playing cards used in Social Media Planner.

Through fostering an interactive physical activity in a low distraction environment with game-like goals and limits, individuals and group find they have the space to experiment, brainstorm and reflect.

The approach also addresses the 'blank page' issue, where people struggle to find a place to start on solving a problem or finding a solution. The scenarios included in every Social Media Planner pack allow people to safely learn the system without feeling foolish or lost.

The card-based approach also addresses the challenge of holding complex models in one's head. Most people typically can retain 5-9 items in their short-term memory at a time, however with the Social Media Planner tools cards laid out on a table it's easy for individuals to access 40 different concepts without relying on their short-term memory and interfering with creative thought.

If your organisation is seeking to innovate - or even to iterate - it's worth investing in the systems and tools which will help your teams do so in the fastest and most successful ways.

I've used Social Media Planner as an example of these types of tools because I designed it, tested it and have seen how effective it can be for organisations planning their social and digital media engagement. 

There's many other tools useful when innovating that are worth considering, as well as organisations experienced at fostering the spaces and mindsets that foster effective innovation and change.

So if your organisation needs or wants to change, to improve how it operates, to become more effective at serving its customers, clients, citizens or stakeholders, invest in tools that will help your people to innovate, accessing the creative potential every human possesses.

Don't simply put in place frameworks and processes to refine and proceduralise innovation and change, also invest in the environments and tools that foster innovation.

You'll get better outcomes, faster and more cost-effectively. And your people will be happier and more productive by being part of the journey.

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PolicyHack review by guest blogger, Anne-Marie Elias: The PolicyHack Experiment – A Futurist vision

This post is republished from LinkedIn with the permission of the author, Anne-Marie Elias, who attended PolicyHack as Champion and Facilitator for the Incentives To Develop Social Enterprises stream.

PolicyHack happened – just like that!

It was the courage of a newly appointed Assistant Minister for Innovation the Hon. Wyatt Roy MP and his bold vision to hack for change that led to one of the most sought after event tickets in town.

The Policy Hack experiment was about challenging the way bureaucrats collaborate and encouraging them to engage with the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem to develop better policy and deliver better outcomes.

It was a brilliant exercise that demonstrated the capacity and appetite of entrepreneurs to come together with those from academia, corporates, capital, advisory firms, civil society and the tech and start-up sector to collaborate and develop innovative policy options for government.

PolicyHack had its fair share of critics. A number of blogs and articles appeared immediately prior to the event. They commented on the lack of planning and process, its haphazard development, its ‘exclusivity’ and the likelihood that it would produce no real outcomes in just one day.

In part they were right. However, in its defence, it was an experiment in innovation, pulled together quickly with no funds, a lot of goodwill, the generosity of a community and an enormous desire to show government that embracing the tools of innovation and entrepreneurship could deliver better outcomes. The Hack was well supported with mentors from Disruptors Handbook and Pollenizer and many others. 

It was very brave of the Hon. Wyatt Roy MP , BlueChilli and StartUpAus to take this on and push past the critics. Their chutzpah was rewarded. The energy was infectious with 150 participants, ten teams and champions - 60% of those women- generating 10 ideas in 6 hours. 

Was it perfect? No. Is that a problem? No. We know how to make the next one better.

Innovation is never perfect and neither is the current approach to policy design.

Innovation is agile, it’s iterative, it’s responsive and above all else, it’s nimble. It doesn’t stand still while ever there is a problem to be solved.

Compare this hack philosophy to the current approach to policy development. This requires the development of an evidence base (by the time it is gathered it is often out of date), it draws input from the usual suspects, often involves expensive reports from well-paid consultants, has to pass the front page Daily Telegraph test to avoid upsetting vested interests and frankly as a result, often fails.

Is it any wonder then that so many programs cost what they do and deliver so little to the end user they were meant to serve?

I am a firm believer in supporting initiatives that disrupt the status quo for the better and was blown away by how well PolicyHack turned out.

 PolicyHack was about demonstrating that there is a better way.

Champions 60% women 

The Vision 

Assistant Minister Roy spoke about the need for us to be diligent in our expenditure of public funds and observed

“We are going to be fearless and embrace the future. Help shape the vision for how our country can be a hub for entrepreneurship and Innovation."

Wyatt Roy, Assistant Minister, Innovation 

The Assistant Minister made it clear that PolicyHack was an experiment that allowed us to collaborate. He explained that this was the first of many PolicyHacks.

Assistant Minister Roy left no one wondering about his aim to encourage all members of the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem to leverage our capital and support government to deliver better outcomes for our society and economy.

Who won?

The winning pitches at PolicyHack were Erin Watson-Lynn's Digital Innovation Creative Entrepreneurial Kids (DICEKids) an educational program for school children that prepares the next generation entrepreneurs and Nicola Hazel's NEIS 2 Entrepreneur accelerator, in effect a revitalisation of the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme.

These are both simple to implement immediately and can create our new generation of entrepreneurs in a relatively short time frame without any significant hit to the budget.

A quick diversion – the NDIS

The last time I got excited about policy was the National Disability Insurance Scheme.  I worked for the NSW Minister for Ageing and Disability, the Hon. Andrew Constance MP and he, like Wyatt Roy, was enthusiastic for change and drove an innovation agenda.

We co-designed the policy with people with disability and their carers. Living Life My Way was a policy hack of sorts where government collaborated with service users and service providers. Where it didn’t meet expectations was that little actually happened after the ideas and exchange.

It ended up being a great big expensive exercise with good intentions but little change. A few years later the outcomes of the scheme remain underwhelming.

Last year in the AFR, Laura Tingle highlighted the frustration with the burgeoning costs of the NDIS trial sites growing out of control. We hear that bureaucrats are hiring more consultants, commissioning more reports and there are concerns about how a scheme of this magnitude will be managed out of State and Territory governments in the next year or so.  

 Let’s deliver outcomes

In my humble opinion, the current set of bureaucrats working on the NDIS need to meet Paul Shetler, CEO of the Digital Transformation Office (aka the PM's Tsar) and his team as well as Pia Waugh of @AusGovCTO. They need to invite Paul and Pia to facilitate innovation dialogues to help the NDIS get back on track with the help of hackers from the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem. Hackers who will apply their smarts and collaborate in order to solve this wicked problem without needing to spend any more money.

If anyone is listening we need to hack for disability to see how we can stretch existing budgets to extract more and deliver better outcomes for people with disabilities, their families and carers.

A similar idea was generated last year by the Cerebral Palsy Alliance (CPA) andUTS called Enabled by Design a design-a-thon bringing together people with disabilities and designers to hack practical solutions for accessibility, usability and desirability. We have some incredible minds in the innovation space that have done much for health and disability – Prof Hung Nguyen and Dr Jordan Nguyen are transforming health technology with their engineering, artificial intelligence and tech driven focus.

Delivering PolicyHack

StartUpAus will curate the content of the OurSay platform and the hack and Assistant Minister Roy and his office will deliver packaged outcomes and suggestions to relevant agencies for consideration and action. Policy Hack is a brilliant initiative and with a bit more notice and planning we can make an enormous impact on any big spend issues and, I believe, bring more efficiency and innovation to government.

The PolicyHack model presents a powerful method that can solve a lot of wicked problems for government. PolicyHack can be the darling of Expenditure Review Committees and razor gangs because it gets bureaucrats thinking outcomes not just process. It gets them collaborating to make change not compromises and it delivers breakthrough ideas that solve problems and create opportunities. Which as we know sits at the heart of good policy.

What next?

The challenge now is what happens next?  Craig Thomler says “the devil is in the delivery and while perfection should not be the enemy of trying, communication is key, transparency about the process, outcomes and community engagement is integral to the process.”

We haven’t nailed it yet. I think we need to invest some time in doing that. Coming together is the beginning. While we generated amazing ideas, I don’t know what will happen to these ideas post hack. Go to any of the hack sites and you see the promotion and maybe the winning ideas and teams but no further info beyond that.

My proposition

Here are four steps we can take to deliver an outcomes driven hack.

1. Start with cross sector thought leadership groups to design the parameters and set the policy agenda.
2. Align the right agencies (State and Commonwealth) with innovators in teams to co-design solutions.
3. Set up a Post Hack Incubator so that the ideas can be further developed and piloted. These pilots must be supported both by government (through recalibrated funds and resources) and the innovation community.
4. Keep talking to ensure all stakeholders remain engaged and informed by sharing the process, the results of implementation and the success or otherwise of outcomes.

We should be so lucky

I for one want to thank the Hon. Wyatt Roy, who, backed by the Prime Minister, the Cabinet Secretary Senator the Hon. Arthur Sinodinos AO, the Hon. Paul Fletcher MP Minister for Territories, Local Government and Major Projects and a growing number of Ministers, Members and Senators including  (Fiona Scott MP and David Coleman MP) our champions of change, have seen the constellation of government, corporate and the innovation community align.

We need to deliver outcomes from PolicyHack and develop an ongoing program of hacks for change because it is time that we did things differently and moved into a new paradigm where collaboration is key and where we get shit done, because our communities, economy and ultimately, our future depends on it. If not us, then who? If not now, then when?

Read more about the mechanics of PolicyHack in Gavin Heaton's blog Wyatt Roy's Policy Hack - A view from the inside.

Anne-Marie Elias is a speaker and consultant in innovation and disruption for social change. She is an honorary Associate of the Centre for Local Government at UTS.

Anne-Marie has recently joined the Board of the Australian Open Knowledge Foundation.

Follow Anne-Marie's  journey of disruptive social innovation on Twitter @ChiefDisrupter or visit www.chiefdisrupter.com 

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