Leading Libraries Series: Leading for Innovation
Innovation cycle
Getting going: choosing a challenge to work on
Do you want deeper, more collaborative relationships with your users? Do you want to create new and distinctive offers? Do you want to release the full creative potential of your staff and colleagues. If so, try building your collaborative
innovation skills on a 'live' challenge as you work through this Leading for Innovation set.
This segment will help you identify an aspect of your work that you would like to focus on to help you begin to scope your 'innovation challenge'.
Remember – innovation is not about ways of implementing a known solution to a problem you have already thought of – it's about setting off into the unknown with a set of tools and techniques for navigating your way…
Setting yourself an innovation challenge
You will get the most out of this series if you choose an ‘innovation challenge’ that you would like to work on during your learning.
Even better, gather a small group of colleagues who want to develop their innovation skills and work on something together.
You don’t have to have a clear idea of what you want to work on right now – the materials will guide you through the process of ‘scoping’ and refining your inquiry.
But you can reflect on these questions to begin:
- Have you noticed that there any issues or gaps in your services to the public?
- Is there an area of your service which you would love to make some improvements on?
- If you had a ‘magic wand’, what would you change for the better?
If nothing is immediately springing to mind as a challenge – try considering the different prompts below to see if you can recognise a place, a time or a group which holds an innovation opportunity.
A place for innovation?
You might identify an innovation opportunity by considering a physical space that you think could be improved, or a concrete example of a service that you are part of. Remember that innovation approaches can be used to redesign any of
our public-facing services to make them more effective, more desirable and more sustainable.
These approaches give us new, creative ways of looking at problems: just as a product designer can create a toy to delight a child, we can use innovation approaches to craft service experiences that create positive change for their intended
users.
But you can also innovate in the way you deliver your services with colleagues – thinking about the more organisational aspects of what you are doing – business processes, recruitment, team working etc. etc. Sometimes these 'back office'
innovations can also have positive effects on the 'front line' delivery and so make a difference to our service users as well as our staff.
A moment for innovation?
Innovation approaches are also well-suited to times of turbulence and uncertainty – times when a lot needs to change all at once.
Sometimes it's tempting to 'do what we did before' when things are shifting all around us but these are the ideal moments for making something new happen.
You can innovate when:
- your organisation is undergoing major change
- you have been working on something for a long time and have run out of ideas
- your group or team is fragmented and conflicted – strategic questioning will help clarify positions and look for new alternatives
- A group or team only sees one or two alternatives and needs to do some creative thinking together.
A collective opportunity for innovation?
Innovation is 'developmental' – the kinds of inquiries and methods used help us learn a huge amount about our contexts, our users, our colleagues and ourselves.
So, even if you can't identify an immediate challenge to work on yourself, you may already have a good idea about who you might want to work with – your own team, an existing network of colleagues or a particular group of users or citizens
that you serve. If you are able to engage a group of people to work with you, you can let them identify a challenge that would be interesting and intriguing to them.
If you decide to begin by bringing a group together to help you identify a suitable challenge, the question types below can help to structure the conversation in a coherent way while also creating space for many different views.
- Visioning questions: concerned with identifying ideals, dreams and values. Examples include: ‘How would you like it to be?’ and ‘What about this situation do you care so much about?’
- Change questions: move from the static to the dynamic, how to get from the present to a more ideal situation. Examples include: ‘What could make a difference?’ and ‘What will it take to bring the current situation towards the
ideal?’
- personal inventory and support questions: identifying people’s interests, potential contributions and the support required for them to join with you in this challenge. Examples include: ‘What would it take for you to participate
in the change?’ and ‘What support would you need to work for this change?’
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