I've had a pretty inspiring couple of weeks, learning new things and attending after-work work-related engagements and following interesting conversations/events and I've been meaning to write, but I think it all needed to sink in first.
It hasn't sunk in but I'm going to attempt a summary of each of the major things, and maybe my mind will make some linkages among it all as I type (and if I don't start typing something now, it will all be lost, so please bear with the brain-dump!).
HealthJam 2014
A la GovJam, I was involved in organizing HealthJam 2014 in Guelph a couple weeks ago. The City of Guelph led the charge and I was brought onto the organizing team since I had prior jamming experience.
The 2-day event brought together health care practitioners from a number of community agencies/groups, as well as citizens and people with lived experience in the health system in Guelph. The topic we tackled was health care promotions - how we might start breaking down barriers to healthy living in priority communities in Guelph.
Top learning moment
Top of mind for me was the dynamic between citizens/people with lived experience and practitioners. Like GovJam, we had a panel of judges at the end of the event to provide feedback to teams and, ultimately, choose a couple of top ideas that leaders would commit to work on after the event was over.
Overall, the event was successful - I just finished reading feedback forms, and almost all of them provided positive reviews. But a lingering insight that emerged from the comments in the feedback surveys, and in the room, was an unanticipated power imbalance that affected how people interacted with each other and perceived their role at the event. It left me wondering how we might level the playing field to provide a safe space for people with more diverse backgrounds and experiences at such an event, and it also made me realize (having been my third Jam-type event) that the model we used to run the event might not always be the best one, depending on who the users/people in the room are.
Co-production & Family by Family
On May 22, I attended a speaker series hosted at MaRS. They brought in Dana Shen from Australia, the Director at Family by Family (FbyF).
FbyF came about from the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, which is part of their public service organization (how awesome is that?? I digress..), and eventually branched off and became an independently run social lab. They use co-production to help families thrive in South Australia.
Here's a simple summary on how it works: Seeking families (families going through tough times) are matched with Sharing families (families who have gone through tough times). Practitioners (the professionals) work in the background to support families in the process, and because empathy is built directly into the system, Seeking families not only come out on the other side of difficulties with their coaching/mentorship, but often thrive and give back to the program by becoming Sharing families in the future.
Top learning moment
Measuring success for social impact (I'm learning) is trickier than typical measurements we use in public service. You don't count outputs in a traditional manner (although FbyF also measures outputs and reports on them to receive funding from the government to run its program). The true and most meaningful measure of success, I think, is the reversal of role from Seeking to Sharing family; the point is to get people out of a role of dependence and into a role where families are thriving and giving back to the system. This is the true value behind co-production, and it just clicked in my mind like a missing puzzle piece as Dana was talking about FbyF; there's a real elegance to the model that's truly inspiring.
Social labs
Yesterday, MaRS hosted a conference that brought together some of the top leaders running social innovation labs across the world. I was following the webcast yesterday morning, and engaged with people using the #psilabs hashtag on Twitter.
We're starting to think a little bit about social labs in the i5 (OPS innovation community of practice), and what an OPS lab might look like. It was an educational event to follow, to say the least.
Top learning moment
Christian Bason from MindLabDK had a slide (see: slide deck) that summarized government's role in society quite succinctly, IMO: "Governments are the owners of public problems and policies are the approaches they use to address them," a quote from the Danish Minister of Education, Christine Antorini. Christian proposed that policy making needs to change in the face of the complex problems governments face today. As he was speaking, he put up this image of a "new and more humble policy model."
Apologies for the fuzziness (it's a screenshot of the webcast) - here's what it says:
- Current policy model (move towards) > Design for policy
- Resisting complexity > Embracing complexity
- Problem-oriented; reactive > Vision-oriented; proactive
- System focus > Citizen focus
- Unilateral action > Shaping new alliance
- Facilitation > Stewardship
- Strategy emphasis > Impact emphasis
The proposed policy model would work like this:
Societal challenge > Identification of problem > Idea > Test > Policy > Proposal > Political Agreement > Act/reform > Implementation* > Intended effect
*in between Implementation and Intended effect would be Unintended effects/potentials, which would be a space for policy makers to loop back into the Idea stage and start the process over.
I just fell in love with the model Christian proposed... how might we move from the way we approach policy making towards the future Christian Bason proposed? Are we already on our way, and if not, where do we begin?
In sum
There's a lot of really great thinking and experimentation happening around service design, the future of public service, and how to measure whether the efforts/pilots/experiments being undertaken are meeting real and meaningful outcomes for the people they're impacting. It's too much to absorb all at once, but I think I really need to continue exploring the social innovation space and figuring out how I might use some of the thinking in my work for the OPS... hopefully my next post will be less scattered and have more of a tangible OPS example to share!
Note: this blog post was originally posted on May 27 on OPSpedia, an internal Ontario Public Service network, by Melissa Tullio, one of the co-organizers at HealthJam.
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