How to drive innovation
Analysts across the civil service face significant pressures to deliver demanding analysis at pace, which can get in the way of trying new things and making improvements to the way we work.
In support of this year’s One Big Thing, Adrian Richards (HM Revenue & Customs) and Matt Gurden (Deputy Government Actuary) were joined by Professor Sir Ian Diamond for an event that sought to draw on their experiences of how you can drive innovation across your own work or as part of a wider team.
In this blog, Matt and Adrian share some of their reflections from the event, as well as the thoughts of others on the call, to really understand what works well in driving innovation.
How to spot opportunities to drive innovation within your team
When it comes to innovation, we can sometimes get stuck on the idea that we need to make big revolutionary changes to say we’re innovating. In reality however, incremental changes can also be highly effective, especially when we combine them together in a series of adjustments that add up to more than the sum of their parts.
So, there are opportunities for incremental improvements to current approaches alongside big investments to make radical changes. We just need to identify those opportunities and think hard about how they fit into existing processes. And people at all levels of the process have a role to play.
For analysts, it’s key to understand how the decision-making works in your area, how your idea can help, and to really test that your idea is practical and will work. This should include testing at small scale first, capturing the benefits and then looking to scale up the successes. You also need to know who you need to influence to make the change a reality, and how to go about influencing senior leaders.
At our recent event “How to drive innovation” across analytical teams, Adrian shared some top tips on how to pitch innovative idea to senior leaders including:
- Sell the future vision – what does the world look like if your idea is implemented?
- Use the right language – can you link your idea to your department’s strategic goals or priorities?
- Focus on the outcomes and don’t get too into the technical details
- Describe the ‘size of the prize’ – how many ‘things’ could your idea improve?
- Explain how you’ve tested it – how do you know it works?
One of the primary drivers of innovation identified by analysts at the event was the need to share best practice among your peers and showcase your energy, skills and enthusiasm. In other words, to get others excited about a new approach or technique.
How to overcome barriers to innovation with analytical teams
For senior leaders, the challenge is to make space for your teams to include innovation as part of their day-to-day work. Some top tips shared at the event included:
- Consider it part of the job, not as an add on
- Be seen as a supporter and champion of innovation and ensure there is a mix of top-down emphasis on innovation and joining up bottom-up activities
- Don’t be afraid of failure, be ready to learn and adapt
- Build communities, both internally and externally
- Support and amplify your internal innovation champions, but don’t be afraid to look outside the civil service for expert input too
During the event, Adrian discussed an example from his time at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) where he created a central team to bring together a wide range of disparate elements linked to evidence building, including synthesising evidence, evaluation and looking to make use cases for opportunities to use linked data. Using this rich evidence base, the team could identify priority ‘Areas of Research Interest’, which they then shared with external researchers; looking to work with others also helped to create business and use cases for investment. Engaging with external researchers and data experts within the team meant they could jointly work to improve the knowledge base for MoJ, helping to tackle issues across the end-to-end justice system.
We asked analysts what the main barriers were to innovation and not having enough time came out as a top challenge, not just the time to implement ideas, but the time to think and reflect on how to improve their work areas. One tip shared was to test user requirements – can you alter timings, quality or the quantity of demand in the short term and bring alive the trade-off of potential gains for end users from using the freed time to innovate? Knowing that teams had the support of their senior leaders to try new things, and possibly to fail, was key, and that a lack of support could be a big barrier in freeing people up and giving them confidence to innovate. Ensuring analysts had the right skills and tools was seen as an important enabler for embedding innovative ideas.
How to build Resilience
All in all, there are lots of possible ways that you can drive innovation in your team, but it should also be acknowledged that it’s not always easy.
For example, it can be time consuming and take a lot of energy to keep pushing things forward, especially if there is high pressure to deliver analysis required urgently. That’s why a key component of any innovative team is resilience; the ability to keep going even when things are difficult, or you’ve suffered a knock back and keep trying.
Some of the things we’ve already talked about can help with resilience – building alliances and communities, sharing your enthusiasm and energy to pick people up, sharing the challenge as pressures come on to teams at different times and having the backing of your senior leaders.
The need for innovation will always be there, but if we aim high, experiment, and give praise for small advances, we can really drive improvements across all our teams.
Matt Gurden, Deputy Government Actuary (GAD)
Adrian Richards, HMRC
Other resources
Expand your knowledge with the following resources:
- Analysis Function Innovation Hub
- Turning knowledge into action
- GAD, innovation and the Analysis Function
- Database for Areas of Research Interest (ARIs) from UK governmental bodies
- Double Diamond Design Thinking Framework Training
- Reproducible Analytical Pipelines (RAP)
Matt Gurden & Adrian Richards