June is a month for breaking down barriers

On the back of the Guardian article today, I thought iId share this slightly longer explanation and summary around Create / Innovate.

June is a month for breaking down barriers – First and foremost Create and Innovate  is about thinking differently it will be about experimentation, discovery, play, learning and reflection.

One of the reasons for holding Create / Innovate is to respond to a recent Council report to our Corporate Leadership Team in relation to the Barriers to Digital Innovation. The key findings of that report stated that we had a diverse set of reasons why digital innovation specifically was difficult and they were different across the organisation and in different service areas, however across the council it was a combination of one or more of the following barriers:

• The attitude to risk across different service areas, some were naturally more relaxed than others

• The cultural challenges and associated issues

• Policy constraints and issues arising from a few conflicting policies

• Technical barriers and issues – these were not just about ICT access as information security concerns were also affecting usage

• Resource issues and perceptions that the “flood gates” would open and we would struggle to manage the multiple channels effectively

Corporate Leadership Team supported the report and tasked Corporate Communications in collaboration across the council with a series of actions which would start to unpick and address the barriers. The actions which have helped trigger Create / Innovate are listed below:

1. approve the review and rationalisation of relevant policies and guidelines and re-present to staff

2. approve a continued programme of staff engagement, awareness raising and training delivered in creative and innovative ways;

3. support digital and social media pilots/prototypes and the establishment of digital leaders across service areas

So why Create / Innovate?

There were three things really, which led to the idea of Create / Innovate being a month long series of events and activities, although originally it was only planned for one week as it seemed more realistic to fill one week with activities.

The first was a conversation with colleagues at the Met Office in Exeter who recently held a similar event. In conversations I explained my aspiration to hold a similar event somehow at the council and mentioned that our Corporate Leadership Team were really supportive, so they offered a room at the Met Office for our Corporate Leadership Team to hold their first meeting in June. After a further conversation with our Chief Executive and his Executive Assistant about the practicality, they agreed that they would give it a go and try it to see how using different spaces helps change the dynamics of the conversations and decisions. So on Monday 3rd June, the councils Corporate Leadership Team will be holding their meeting in the Met Office, they will be using digital devices and smartphones and it will be reported live to staff via the councils yammer network.

The second thing was a conversation with a local Service Design Agency Redfront Service Design (Simon Gough and Phillippa Rose) who organised the recent Service Jam event in Exeter back in March (XJam) and there was an opportunity to host and get involved in supporting a specific Service Jam for the public sector in June (GovJam), which locally we have called XJamGov www.xjamgov.co.uk – this takes place between 4-6 June.

Photo by Paul Clarke (from XJam photo set on Flickr)

The idea of GovJam is to work around a common theme, small Teams meet at multiple locations, working for 48 hours on building innovative approaches and solutions towards challenges faced by the public sector.

GovJams are especially relevant to local government and public sector professionals, and will give us the opportunity to grow collaborations  – exchanging techniques, insights and ideas with colleagues near and far, while working on concrete projects addressing key issues inspired by the common Theme.

35 locations around the world are currently hosting an event including: LA, San Francisco, Barcelona, Warsaw, Eindhoven, Bologna, Mumbai, Berlin, Helsinki, Santiago, Montreal, Toronto, Perth, Canberra and Melbourne – In the UK only Exeter and Dundee are currently hosting events.

The third opportunity also came up through a twitter conversation with the Local DirectGov Team which added more scope to a months long event, was to host a Really Useful Day at County Hall – it is in so many ways similar to the Jam experience although we know the topic in advance.

The purpose of the day is to learn about and explore customer user journeys. It aims to map existing user journeys and take people through a process so that participants are more aware of how the real user journey can be improved – the following challenge is then taking that back into the work place and implementing it.

The great thing about both of these events is that they aren’t exclusively for staff at the council and will be attended by a diverse group of people from across the region which helps us to build new connections and collaborations.

Encouraging a culture change

Like most people the real challenge is trying to change a culture from the edges and this won’t happen in June alone. Culture change is a complex thing to make happen and we are fortunate here in Devon that we are in a climate where the whole organisation is starting to shift and there is more awareness of a new culture emerging.

The council has also spent the last twelve months exploring the next 5-10 years under the heading “Future Landscape” which has provided a lot of internal momentum and has engaged around 300 staff across all services and at all levels in thinking differently, so we won’t be starting from scratch in terms of engaging people in opportunities to think differently and challenging existing cultures.

My aspiration is that if we can nudge or disrupt people forward by 5 steps and then in July they take 4 steps backwards, at least we would have moved. The greater challenge will be in sustaining the momentum from some of the staff and amplify that and make it more visible.

Adding value and the wider benefits

We’ve also looked at how some of what we do can involve the wider public and although the primary focus is to challenge the internal culture of the organisation, we have an opportunity through some of our public facing services to involve and engage the public in helping us to think differently as well as challenging them to think differently around how our services are provided.

One of the most active service areas is Libraries, where we have adopted a more public image called “Time to Make and Play” which we hope will help people engage in small scale activities in some of the libraries to help them explore how the spaces can be used and how collaborative approaches within communities can use those spaces more effectively as well.

Some examples of the activities happening in libraries are, Raspberry Pi Jam, Gadget Days, Free to Play tables, Musical drop in sessions, Smartphone advice and make a noise in libraries.

Lessons so far…

• Involve people:
  Working collaboratively with a wide group of people from different orgs requires you to be flexible in the tools you use and how you communicate with people.

• Sell the idea
  Don’t sell a programme of completely fixed events, although start with something to build around, do sell an idea and ask people to help fill the programme with activities and events they believe will help challenge thinking and provide opportunities to do things differently – this allows you to capture all the variations of events and activities that people feel are required, from the more formal events like XJamGov to simply having a social media surgery so people can understand how to use smartphone more effectively.

• Be patient, keep focused and relax
  There were times that I didn’t think this would happen, I was initially getting concerned by the lack of progress in setting things up and sorting the logistics etc, but being patient, staying focused and involving people means you can relax a little and things do and will happen.

• Be flexible and prototype
  An absolute must, no matter what you originally thought would happen and wanted to happen, you need to be flexible and be prepared to change plans, adapt to other peoples ideas and timescales and most of all, let go of any notion of a formal plan…after all the whole month is a prototype of how we can engage people in different things.

Final thoughts

My aim has been to ensure that Create / Innovate is a creative and fun approach to addressing barriers to digital innovation and a key objective is to start to build sustained awareness and understanding of the opportunities for staff to be more creative and innovative within the council.

We are trying to disrupt people in fun and creative ways and we also hope to inspire people to try new things…the whole idea is really a prototype, so some things may not work out as we expect but that is ok so long as we learn.

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Social Technology and Lessons from Pixar

The other night I watched a documentary on BBC 3 about 25 years of Pixar Animation and it got me thinking about technology and in particular social technology. (UK folk should still be able to view this on BBC iPlayer)

I’m not talking about how Pixar run social media campaigns, to be honest I don’t know if they do (I suppose I’d know if they did 🙂 ), however what struck me from the programme was a comment by Chief Creative Officer – John Lasseter. He referred to his first pitch to Disney for a fully CGI animation and his boss (or similar position) replied – “how much is this going to cost?” Lasseter replied “the same as a normal film!”. He was then released from Disney shortly afterwards.

Now the lesson I learned and if you have watched any Pixar film you will know they are utterly amazing and will blow you away with how realistic the animation is – Water in the Incredibles and Finding Nemo, Complex environments in Wall-E, Finding Nemo, Cars and A Bugs Life, Body Hair in Monster’s Inc, 25,000 balloons in Up!!, the list really does go on….. They really have pushed animation forward and in my opinion film making in general.

Anyway on to my lesson….(can you tell I’m a big Pixar fan)

Just because they used advanced technology techniques and embraced innovation and creativity, it didn’t mean that they could cut corners or deliver things faster, because what mattered was the output – in this case Excellence in Animation.

Now I know the current climate in Public Sector won’t really support this kind of approach, however my issue is that in order to deliver the changes and culture we need to move toward a more efficient public service, we need “time” and social technology will NOT fast track us to this end game, just like animation it requires hard work, knowledgeable people who can multi-task and the biggest thing a strong commitment from all parts of the organisation that you are doing what is right – not just for the business, but for your customers, service users etc.

Pixar has in my humble opinion never released a bad film, I’ve watched all their movies with my kids and on my own…Pixar’s key focus is to NOT separate the Adults from the Kids when making films. This focus on the audience and user is critical and is another lesson the public service could learn from.

I know life is probably simpler in Pixar and it is far more complicated in the Public Service, but the lessons are there – we just need to look for them.

Building the “reusable video” player

UPDATED: To include link to the dedicated Video Player website

I thought i’d share some pilot innovation work that I have been involved in with a guy called Bill Wells from 2 dot 0.

This all started from a conversation over lunch we had earlier this year.

The basic idea was that in my previous role as Corporate Web Manager, we always had conversations with people about video hosting options along side a video player tailored specifically for the local authority. Not a unique problem, in fact quite a common one i imagine. However the issue for me was that i couldn’t justify the costs associated with video storage solutions when sites like youtube, vimeo, blip etc offer pretty good solutions either free or very low cost. The other issue was that as a local authority it is unlikely that we are going to spend thousands of pounds on the creation of new video content regardless of the quality due to capacity and skills.

So the conversation went on for a good hour or so and ended up with me basically asking for a solution that did the following:

What i’d like is a player which has the ability to pull content from any source, youtube or vimeo or a traditional video storage platform – I’d also like to add value by providing a feature that allowed me to layer content, questions etc over the top to gain additional benefit from the original content. I’d like to be in a position to reuse our existing video archives and repurpose them, or use other public material from either central government or other local authorities providing the content was reusable”

I was keen early on to see how this could benefit and enhance the digital engagement offering as we could reuse community created content and layer questions over the top to gain some additional targeted feedback whilst someone was watching the video itself, instead of after the event.

So let me share what the early beta product looks like and how it might fit within a local authority situation.

Firstly it is worth checking out the original video offering that i suggested  – a video created by our road safety team on biker safety called “a day out in Devon”. The original youtube video is below:

NB: if you can’t watch youtube on your machine or via your network you will not be able to view either video.

Now as this is in beta, it isn’t yet available for embedding in other sites (to my knowledge). But this is the version which contains a number of questions at particular points as well as a scrolling “news” item which could be fed dynamically from the corporate site.  It is important to remember that this player is pulling the content directly from youtube when viewed and is simply providing a container for questions and feedback collection.

Below i a couple of screen shots of the video with a question displayed over the original video. (click on image to enlarge)

The following image explains the concept visually – it is also available as click through on the video at 1minute 17seconds in. (click on image to enlarge)

To see the video and questions in action, check out the link below.

• Video – a day out in Devon  – with questions

What we get at this point time is the data submitted by those who watch the video – This is complimentary to the “comments” section within youtube which could contain generic feedback and observations which could in fact drive the questions in the first place.

What is also interesting and in my opinion probably the killer application, is the statistics side  – What we are able to see is the actual behaviour of the viewer. So we can identify whether or not someone watched the whole video, part of it or none of it.  We are also able to tell whether or not they paused the video and when and layered with the questions, we can start to understand when in a video a good time to ask questions might actually be.

The following image is a graph from a single film view (click to enlarge).

• Green – 45 degree lines – normal play
• Yellow – vertical – fast forward
• Blue – horizontal – pause
• Horizontal axis – real time
• Vertical axis – time within the film.
• Content watched summary on the right – green = watched

The opportunities and intelligence this presents in terms of use and take up of video content is quite huge and the potential to reuse video content across the public sector means that we can start to see some content as shared services.

In its simplest form it adds value to existing content as it allows the owner to obtain additional statistics and seek specific feedback about particular parts of a given video.

I’m not a sales person, nor do i have any personal or vested interest in this succeeding, however I do personally see many opportunities within the public sector for this and i’m not going to pretend i know your business and tell you how you could gain value, but what i will say is, if you have video stored somewhere and you want to know how to gain extra value out of it now, this is something you should explore.

I’m probably not doing this any justice at all, but it isn’t my role to sell this, i am simply sharing something which i am personally quite excited about and can see this transforming how local government and the public sector use video content online to gain feedback and engage with people.

I’m going to continue to look at how this can be integrated into some of our digital engagement offering, but at the moment we are still in the early stages and as such don’t have any real life “live” examples. Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, i’d be interested to hear what you think of this idea.

UPDATED 10th February 2010 – 2 dot 0 now have a dedicated website for this video player.

Unnovation – HarvardBusiness.org

You have just got to love it, i guess what this really means is that we aren’t listening to what people really want anymore – enter social media or am i just biased!!

A extract:

Unfortunately, much of what our economy produces today isn’t innovative — it’s unnovative. The evidence is hard to dispute: we merely need to note how deep the global decline is, how consistently 20th Century business fails to do stuff that matters — or just how many industries are caught simultaneously in deep crisis.

Here are some examples of unnovation.

The Hummer was a product unnovation, which destroyed value for both society and Detroit.

via Unnovation – Umair Haque – HarvardBusiness.org.

Gartner – Innovation and change in the public sector?

A colleague Martin Howitt who blogs over at the Devon Enterprise Architects Blog spotted this post by Gartner

• Innovation and change in the public sector.

The views and position it highlights in the post is one of the reasons why i enjoy doing my job as it essentially challenges this position and tries to encourage the organisation to understand risk better and to become more creative and innovative.

The work i have been doing over the last 9 months i believe has been challenging the risk adverse culture that exists.

However i feel the tide is shifting faster than i had anticipated, I was having lunch on Wednesday when a colleague from a Directorate who was in the audience of one of my awareness sessions told me that the problem they have now is managing expectation as to what people can do and how that can be managed in terms of resources and capacity. Great result but it now identifies a new challenge, which is understanding and promoting good use as well as progressing the online participation and social media policy. The other challenge is making sure people are using the right tools for the right job and are not just jumping in any tool expecting an audience or customer base to be there.

No doubt i’ll post more on how we tackle this but it almost feels like we have overcome the hard part and are now moving toward a wave of adoption. Or i maybe over optimistic…