Archived: Originally published on 15 March 2018. There will be no further updates to this Open Educational Resource.

Planning for the future

Innovation enablement

Embedded ways of working are hard to shift, particularly when these are tied to personal and professional identities or to dearly held values and principles.

Traditional cultures of care that are based on generic and professional assumptions rather than personalised or community outcomes can be hard to change because they are connected to powerful, unconscious aspects of self and identity. Resistance to change is therefore inevitable and some sense of loss when new systems are emerging can be expected, even when people choose and initiate the changes.

Creating space to discover and test new ways of working will need careful managing and protecting to ensure that new ideas are not killed off too quickly or old ways of working are not simply recreated in a new guise.

Prototyping (small, practical experiments to explore new ways of working before piloting and perhaps rolling out more widely) is based on industrial design approaches. Prototypes create space for innovation to be developed while current practice continues.

Three factors are critical in enabling innovation:

The role of leaders and senior staff in creating an authorising environment for new ways of working – this is particularly important when these challenge current ways of working and confront established power dynamics. A clear message of support from senior staff can give permission for other staff to explore new ways of working and can provide senior cover for experiments to become opportunities for learning rather than succeed- or fail-type ‘fix it’ solutions.

Back the innovators – early adopters and people with the imagination and commitment to explore new ways of working are often seen as challenging or non-compliant and treated as if they are a problem. This is because they are often challenging and non-compliant with ways of working that are no longer fit for purpose. Protecting the innovators is a critical aspect of leadership and management if people with fresh ideas and an appetite for change are to be attracted to and retained in organisations. When senior leaders ‘lend’ their authority to innovators, new ideas are more likely to be protected and developed.

Allowing space and permission for people to talk about their response to change – this is important to enable staff to adapt and come to terms with changing identities and new ways of working. It allows deeply held values and belief systems to be acknowledged, which can be a critical factor in mobilising change.

The concept of the authorising environment was developed by Prof Mark Moore at the Kennedy School in Harvard in his seminal work ‘On Creating Public Value’. The authorising environment is the second stage of the strategic triangle which is a helpful tool in exploring what needs attention when developing public value.

An illustration of how Moore’s work has been adapted for a UK context.

Nesta produced a guide to prototyping in public services in 2012.

‘The art of Change Making’ published by The Leadership Centre in 2015 is a creative and practical resource for innovators and people interested in system change. It contains a menu of 70 tools, techniques and further resources for change making.

The Systems Leadership Hub offers a range of resource tools and a library of publications for anyone interested in developing a systems leadership approach.

Touchpoint toolkit

Download: toolkit / touchpoint-six.docx

Resources and signposting

Step into Leadership helps you to find resources and information to develop your own and others’ leadership skills. Scotland’s social services need effective leadership at all levels of the workforce, as well as citizen leadership from people who access support and their carers.

A coaching approach can help commissioners and managers to develop an organisational culture of service and business improvement. The SSSC Coaching Learning Resource can support people in Scotland’s social services to develop a coaching approach across their organisation.

Go back

Planning for the future by the Scottish Social Services Council is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://learn.sssc.uk.com.