September 2015 Issue 4 Inside this issue:
Welcome to the September newsletter of the Innovation Programme! It is easy to slip into viewing innovation as big, world changing activity but innovation is simply all about doing something different or new.
an anti-bullying strategy and coming up with new ways to engage staff. The role of each group is to generate ideas and activities. Although we know that many of these ideas will not work In order to innovate we need a that should not prevent us from ‘can do’ attitude and to be giving things a go. (See Page 3) empowered by our managers and A recent workshop looking at senior leaders to try new things. failure taught us that the way we A lot of work is currently respond to mistakes and failure underway to help drive this is very important. (See Page 2) agenda forward. Learning from these experiences,
Do you love the F word?
2
Driving Innovation and Staff Empowerment forward
3
Innovation in Poverty and Prevention
4
Don’t Blame the Council?
5
Contact the team
5
Supporting you through change
6
The Innovation Community are and one another, is a key theme busy working with the Chief moving forward. Executive on key issues such as
Fancy a coffee? What contains caffeine, takes under an hour, and has a positive impact on your work? A Randomised Coffee Trial!! A Randomised Coffee Trial aims to get people together to discuss their work or anything else—they are random! The idea originated at Nesta, an innovation charity, as a way to create connections across the organisation. How do they work? 1.
2.
You sign up to having a 30—60 minute conversation once a month (face to face, over telephone or skype) You are randomly assigned somebody to have a conversation with
3.
You talk to each other!
4.
And repeat!
Why should we bother? They are a simple and effective way to network and learn within the workplace, According to Nesta benefits include:
Totally random conversations, as well as some very useful work related conversations, which break silos in a really effective way
Offering the chance to make time to talk to people you should be talking to anyway and to meet people you wouldn't ordinarily work with
A really good way of revealing and developing links within the organisation
Fancy finding out more? purple.room@swansea.gov.uk to involved.
Email get
Nesta, the Red Cross, LocalGov Digital and Wales Audit Office Good Practice Exchange are all doing it! Are you?!
Do You Love the F* Word?
*Failure!!
Learning when things go wrong was the focus of a recent workshop in the Purple Room. The workshop entitled ‘Learning to love the F word’ (failure) was run by Chris Bolton from the Wales Audit Office. Chris invited us to think about whether ‘failing to fail’ means we are not pushing the boundaries. Some key thoughts from the workshop are highlighted below. Picture the scene. Something has failed. What do you do? Do you: a)
bury the evidence?
b)
blame someone?
c)
learn the lessons?
Chris suggested that the way an individual responds to failure is different from the way an organisation responds. Organisations tend to respond by burying the evidence or looking for someone to blame. Our personal response on the other hand is to try and learn the lessons. Is this true in the City & County of Swansea?
Success is a Journey …
7 REASONS WHY FAILURE IS GOOD 1.
Where you learn the most
2.
Supports improvement
3.
Leads to Innovation
4.
Helps build resilience
5.
Can be a motivator
6.
Teaches humility
7.
People will like you more
Do we need a Public Sector Museum of Failed Initiatives? The Museum of Failed Products in Michigan is home to over 110,000 products which have failed to launch. People visit this museum for inspiration as it is a great source of innovation.
Thoughts to take away…..
Failure is inevitable
Context is everything
How you RESPOND makes the difference
Chris suggests that we often reinvent the wheel because we bury the reasons for failure and we don’t explore the reasons why things don’t work. In his blog Chris explains that a museum of failed initiatives in the Public Sector could have considerable benefits. You can find out more here: http://whatsthepont.com/2013/11/16/do-weneed-a-public-services-museum-of-failedproducts/
Driving Innovation and Staff Empowerment Forward Volunteers from the Innovation Community have been working with the Chief Executive to look at four key issues. The role of each group is to develop objectives and take the lead in generating ideas, creating activities and most importantly getting on and ‘doing’.
Leading an Anti Bullying and Harassment Strategy The objective of this group is to make sure that the Council’s zero tolerance commitment to bullying and harassment becomes a reality. The group are considering:
Creating a consistent Management Culture This group is looking to define the behaviors, attitudes and practices we should expect from both our managers and ourselves. The group are working through staff feedback to ensure the outcomes are relevant and meaningful to us all.
The difference between bullying vs performance management and how we can identify such behaviour The types of support we can give to people experiencing, or being accused of, bullying How we can create the right environment so that these unwanted behaviours do not occur in the first place
What is the Innovation Community ?
Staff Engagement This group is tackling how we can engage such a diverse workforce where many people work out and about and have different patterns to office based staff. The group are designing a programme of events, perhaps some ‘wacky’ ones, to encourage staff to put forward their ideas and participate in making the Council a better place to work.
Review, relaunch and embed the Staff Suggestion scheme The focus of this group is to help redesign and embed the new staff suggestion scheme. The group are considering all aspects of the scheme and are developing a new IT platform to submit an idea and keep track of progress. The group are also looking at recognition and ways we can thank staff for creating ideas and putting them forward.
An informal gathering of like-minded employees from across the Council
A hub for sharing knowledge, ideas and good practice
One way of helping to drive cultural change and innovation
Open to any member of staff involved or interested in Innovation, continuous improvement and change activities
Supported by the Innovation team
Voluntary—you can choose how, and to what level, you want to be involved For more information—http://staffnet/ innovationcommunity
What does ‘Innovation’ look like? Innovation can mean different things to different people. The Innovation Team are working with services to consider what innovation looks like to them and how they can share their innovations with each other and across the Council. Below are some outcomes from a recent workshop with senior managers in the Poverty and Prevention service. Like spinning plates
It’s the unknown!
Giving things a chance
Learning and sharing
Being trusted and trusting others Enthusiasm Being Proactive Doing new things
Polite challenge
What does innovation look like in Poverty and Prevention?
Linking programmes
Leadership Business as usual Somewhere between order and chaos
Better use of resources and partnership working Static electricity
Delivering projects and services that are ‘outside the box’
Empowering people to advocate and support others
A creative process working with individuals and the community
How can we share innovation?
What do we need to capture? Ideas
Skills
Graffiti walls
Stories
Expertise
A ‘Swansea’s Got Talent’ Event
Success
Good practice
Interactive blog
Failure
Resources
Youtube, Facebook, Twitter
Problems
Workforce
1-2-1 meetings
Knowledge
Learning
Purple Room sessions
Suggestion boxes
What does innovation look like in your Service area?
Don’t blame the Council? All Councils are under pressure to change in light of reductions in funding. The recent ITV1 documentary ‘Don’t Blame the Council!’ provided a revealing inside view of Wigan Council’s response to having to make £100million worth of savings.
Some things to consider include: Engagement and ‘buy in’ is essential for an initiative to be successful Proper and meaningful consultation is important with both the workforce and residents
Wigan is trying to reinvent itself as a profit Different generations have different making enterprise and has set up ‘the deal’ with perceptions of what the Council should be its residents. ‘The Deal’ is an informal doing / delivering. Do we really know what agreement between the council and everyone our residents want / expect of us? who lives or works in Wigan to work together to A scheme to reward residents who carry create a better community. Council tax bills out their civic duties could be a good way will remain low if residents ‘do their bit’ by to incentivise and motivate them recycling more, volunteering in the community and using online services. Find out more about the Wigan Deal at The Innovation Community have been https://www.wigan.gov.uk/Council/Theconsidering what we can learn as we move Deal/The-Deal.aspx forward through these times of change.
Did you know? The DVLA are working with our Housing Benefits and Council Tax teams to carry out ‘usability testing’ on some of our external webpages. This testing will allow us to watch our customers interact with our live webpages. The objective is to ensure that our webpages are fit for purpose so that in the future it is only the complex cases that need face to face or telephone contact from members of our staff. We will be sharing this learning through future innovation events and newsletters.
Contact the Team If you would like to become involved in any way or would like more information about:
The Innovation Programme Development Events, The Innovation Community, or How we can support you Please contact Leanne Cutts on (01792) 636885, visit http://staffnet/innovation or email purple.room@swansea.gov.uk
Systems Thinking A number of ‘Systems Thinking’ reviews are underway, including looking at our recruitment process and some of our call centre processes. ‘Systems Thinking’ aims to understand
how we currently work,
the reasons why we work in a particular way and
what impact the approach has on customers and services we provide.
The team will be running awareness-raising sessions on Systems Thinking over the coming months. If you would like to get involved please contact us.
Supporting you through Change A number of workshops are being run in order to support and upskill you during this rapid time of change. Below you will find an overview of the events along with upcoming dates. Events will be run on a monthly basis and it is recommended that you try to attend both sessions. To book your place, please email purple.room@swansea.gov.uk. Subject Topic
Overview
Duration
Subject 1 Understanding, coping with and building resilience towards change
This session explores the concepts of change management, how it affects the whole organisation, groups and individuals and how appreciation of this can help individuals cope with change taking place around them. This workshop will apply an emotional resilience tool to consider how resilient we currently are to change and how we can become more resilient in the future.
1 day
Subject 2
This workshop will look into the reasons why people resist change and try to block change from taking place. By Overcoming resistance to change considering personality traits of others, and yourself, the workshop will introduce you to various tools that can be used to challenge and overcome resistant and difficult behaviours that you may encounter.
1/2 day
Upcoming Dates Subject Topic
Date
Subject 1 Understanding, coping with and building resilience towards change
Monday 26th October
Subject 2
Wednesday 28th October
Overcoming resistance to change
Friday 6th November
th
Thursday 26 November
Venue
Civic Centre
Time 9.30am to 4.30pm
“Change is the only constant in life� Heraclitus
Civic Centre
Other Innovation Events The Innovation Team run an ongoing programme of development events. Events are designed for you to learn practical and relevant information that can be applied in the workplace without the need to be away from your work for long periods of time. Please visit http://staffnet/purpleroomevents for more information
9.30am to 12.30pm