The Story
We gathered as international public sector innovation (PSI) practitioners in a community of practice (CoP) where we explored the transformative boundaries and edges of practice together. The public sector is being called to work more ambitiously, systemically, and respectfully on the most urgent and complex social and ecological challenges of our time. As a group, CoPs tend to generate insights that are useful in different contexts, apply them in practice, share them with the broader field, and mobilize and inspire impact. So we asked what might public sector innovators need to cultivate within ourselves, and what might we need to nurture amongst us, to become better catalysts, enablers, and advocates of this transformation?
We asked PSI practitioners who work in an innovation unit or lab, intrapreneur nested in a team that is innovating in some way, who are holding big questions about why it is time to be more ambitious in the transformational intent of their work, how they are doing that, and what this all might mean for the larger movement of public sector innovation at this moment.
This CoP included:
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Live Virtual sessions each month(ish) started in October 2023 and ended in July 2024. Sessions were recorded and shared on our YouTube channel.
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Asynchronous writing, reading, and reflecting space in Medium. Co-hosts seeded the space and we hope that as we write up and make sense of CoP in sessions, you’ll join us as readers and writers. If you want to be part of this writing and sense-making experience, please join our Medium blog.
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These dialogues were amongst international PSI practitioners who came together to share and learn with one another.
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Thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada New Frontiers in Research Fund, this process was free for participants.
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An action- and applied research project was co-hosted by the University of British Columbia, States of Change, Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation, La 27e Region, The Lab in Auckland, and the City of Vancouver Solutions Lab.
If you are interested to learn about our journey and and curious about possible future projects, please contact us via email: Lindsay.cole@ubc.ca
Call to Action + Accountability
Public sector organizations are facing increasing pressures to address complex challenges like climate change, growing inequities, reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, and many others at the scale and rate that these challenges demand. Innovation in the public sector is quite urgently needed, and public institutions must begin to adapt the paradigms, processes, systems, structures, and tools of our trade. In order to transform the root causes of these kinds of complex challenges, we must look beyond the dominant paradigms, systems, and structures that created them (e.g. New Public Management, colonialism, capitalism). Many so-called ‘innovations’ may be inadvertently working to uphold these problematic systems and structures of the dominant system and distract from, or even prevent, more radical transformation from occurring.
Some questions that we held:
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What does it mean to push the boundaries of public sector innovation at this time?
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How might we (re)imagine and strengthen the theories of transformation we are using to support higher impact, ecologically responsible, and socially just public sector innovation work?
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How are personal/inner and systems/outer work shaping the ways that we think about and practice transformative public sector innovation, and how can we clarify and deepen these entanglements?
Community of Practice Overview
Communities of practice (CoP) are groups of people who share a concern or passion for something, and learn how to do it better by interacting and supporting each other. As a result of working together in this way, members of CoPs tend to learn more quickly than if they were working on their own. As a group, CoPs tend to generate insights that are useful in different contexts, apply them in practice, share them with the broader field, and mobilize and inspire impact.
The Pushing the Boundaries of PSI CoP began by setting some shared foundations for our work together through two live and recorded dialogues and blog posts by different authors. We then had three focused cycles of inquiry on the following questions: (1) What are helpful and strong theories of change for transformation? (2) How might we connect the inner- and outer work of transformation? And (3) What is working(ish)? . Each of these three cycles had two ways to be involved during the live virtual sessions - as a more involved Core member, or a more observational Constellation member (more on this distinction in the FAQ section). Recordings of the sessions are available on our YouTube channel, and written blogs have kept us connected asynchronously. We will close the experience with a virtual learning festival of some kind (tbc) that will invite other PSI practitioners in to learn and be inspired by the work of our CoP, and to see what might come next in this field of theory, strategy, and practice.
Co-hosts
Peyvand Forouzandeh
Action Research Assistant
Action Research
This project is funded by the New Frontiers Research Fund, a program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It is an action research project, meaning that the work we do together is meant to generate insights and resources that are useful for practice. We expect to generate and share resources in the following ways: recordings of the CoP sessions; writing blog posts; generating practitioner-oriented publications, tools, and presentations; and writing academic publications. When you sign up to join the CoP you will be asked to provide your consent to participate in this action research. You will have control over the level of anonymity of your participation when you are initially asked to provide your consent, as well as throughout the CoP.
The research is guided by rigorous ethics approvals from the University of British Columbia Behavioural Ethics Review Board. The collective learning and experiences from Pushing the Boundaries of PSI will be shared so that other public sector innovators and researchers can benefit from our learning. So - you’ll need to be okay with this arrangement! If you have any questions or concerns about the research consent process, you can be directly in touch with maggie.low@ubc.ca.