‘Innovation’ isn’t necessarily a word that springs to mind when you think about our public services. The word seems to jar a little with the reality of the daily grind, delivering vital services in an increasingly constrained and fraught environment.
However, earlier this week, I was reminded (along with another 200 public service leaders and doers) of something fundamental. Innovation isn’t just about the big, transformative ideas. It’s about adapting, tweaking, and creating the conditions where change can actually happen.
During his keynote speech, Ravi Gurumurthy of Nesta outlined some key ingredients of innovation in public service delivery, which we continued to discuss and develop throughout the morning. Here are the things that kept coming up:
- Innovation is the day job. Public sector leaders are constantly innovating, making change happen with limited resources and a huge amount of goodwill. It needs to be embedded in everyday work and sustained beyond one-off pilots. The challenge is to weave constant improvement and iteration into the way we work.
- We navigate significant constraints. Leaders are navigating a rules-based system of both internal governance and legislation. Our teams are delivering services that are compliant but not necessarily achieving the outcomes they want for communities in the City Region. The challenge for leadership is to identify the workarounds and give permission to teams.
- We all need psychological safety. Do public sector leaders ever have permission to fail, in the political environment we’re in? How do we treat one another when things don’t work out? We heard that, although the aspiration is there, the ability and appetite for taking risks is severely limited. However, this is the value of partnerships – done right, we can share that risk and create a safer environment for learning.
- Relationships are the project. My colleague Emma (Director of Design and Doing) shared this as the principle that underpins our work at Capacity. We’re privileged to have the time and space to undertake deep discovery work and build the essential infrastructure of hope and trust.
Stepping back, so much of this resonated with my own experience in frontline service delivery, suggesting these tensions are felt at every level of the system. How can leaders model the humility and vulnerability within their own organisations to create an environment that fosters innovation at every level of the system?
Phil Porter (Chief Executive of Sefton Council) offered an anecdote from a Mum in Sefton, which illustrates the deep, relational work that’s possible when we have permission to do things differently. After multiple changes in social workers, this Mum was, understandably, reluctant to engage with the new one who knocked on her door. She was in the middle of cleaning the house, anyway. But this new professional did something radical – she offered to help clean, and this opened up a whole new way of working between the two.
Quiet innovation like this is happening every day within our public services in the Liverpool City Region. At the heart of this lies a growing network of people and organisations united by a common purpose – to turn deeply rooted challenges into opportunities for meaningful change.
We’re committed to shining a spotlight on this innovation, connecting people and ideas, amplifying the work of those sparking change, and helping leaders test and refine approaches to unlock new possibilities.
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