Last week we hosted a DeepDive workshop with Bill Eggers, in conjunction with the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet and the HC Coombs Policy Forum. Bill Eggers is Global Director for Deloitte Research and Executive Director of Deloitte’s Public Leadership Institute and his recent books on innovation include The Public Innovator’s Playbook, Government 2.0, Governing by Network and If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government.

The DeepDive was an intensive workshop that involved developing and testing ideas and prototypes. Our challenge for the day was to create an ‘innovation dashboard’ that would measure innovation in our organisation. However, the challenge we were addressing was not really the main take-away message for me. The message for me was that here was a process to tackle problems and come up with innovative solutions.

The process is about fast and furious development of ideas by diverse teams, followed by sharing ideas with other teams, testing your prototypes and then refining your own prototypes after having a look at other people’s ideas. Rinse and repeat until you get a final prototype then everyone votes for the best one.

It was refreshing to have a fairly robust process to problem solve with rather than the standard “Problem > Innovation/Magic > Solution” that comes to mind whenever you are asked to ‘think outside the box’

This type of prototyping process has its advantages. There is drive to churn out a lot of ‘quick and dirty ideas’ at the outset. This is great for innovative solutions as it allows some more far fetched and unusual ideas to see the light of day, and rather than try too early to ‘identify and back a winner’ you can explore multiple options that may warrant a closer look at, even though it might not have been the most appealing at the outset.

I can see challenges to this process in being applied in the public service – the need for diverse teams, incorporating some of the movers and shakers in the organisation as well as those at the front line of the problem, the time it takes to effectively carry out the process (the workshop started at 8.30am and finished at 4pm) in between the business-as-usual work, and the normal buy-in problems that innovative ideas face.

But at the end of the day we had a few rough models of how to generate, implement, sustain and (even) measure innovation to vote on and ready to be explored further. All the models were better, more complete and well-thought out for having been exposed to the DeepDive process.

So the next time your manager says ‘We really need to find an innovative solution to this problem’ you might want to try the DeepDive process.

There were a number of participants from the public sector innovation network and other Departments which helped the collaborative nature of the event. For those who came, how did you find the day? For others, have you tried the DeepDive Process (or something similar) at your workplace?

Sample of Innovation Dashboard from Eggers DeepDive 11 Jul 2011Tabletop showing the tools used at the DeepDive workshop

 

Tabletop showing the tools used at the DeepDive workshop