Small & creative ideas with big results: February 2011

24 February 2011

DotGovLabs: Innovation Hub

Just been sent details of this website which is designed to provide "a virtual space enabling digital innovation of public services."

The philosophy of the Innovation Hub will help you learn more about how the hub brings together users, innovators, investors and government to shape and build radical digital solutions to social challenges. The Innovation Hub provides new ways to collaborate. Finding solutions to social challenges and breaking down barriers

Here is the link: https://dotgovlabs.direct.gov.uk/Page/Home

So it is a place to find out more ideas on how to deliver public services in innovative ways. Please visit!

(Thanks to Noel Hatch for the invitation)

23 February 2011

Do you know where you smalls are?

Regular readers of my ramblings will know I run two blogs: one about leading change and development from a whole systems perspective and this one about the small and creative ideas that are making a difference in the public and third sectors.

I am posting this - just to remind people that this blog has over 300 ideas for how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of local services.

This blog is:

Totally free
Totally searchable
Totally open to more ideas being added!

In these stringent times - there may just a few small ideas in here to help you reduce costs while still maintaining or even improving services.

The blog also stands up for public service organisations 'home growing' their own improvements rather than spending buckets of dosh on consultants who borrow your watch, tell you the time, keep the watch and slip a needle in to carry on drawing blood too.

And this links back to my other abiding interest: leadership. What are leaders doing or should be doing... (apart from not signing cheques for large consultancy contracts that add no value) to foster the necessary levels of engagement / verve / commitment / creativity (even in these austere times) amongst public service staff?

Answers on a postcard - or better still - please post them on the parallel post on my other blog here.

Thanks

10 February 2011

A festival of ideas

News from the Innovation Unit of exciting developments in Leeds:

Local authorities helping innovators

Yesterday, Innovation Unit hosted its tenth Festival of Ideas in partnership with Leeds City Region Local Enterprise Partnership looking at greening public services. In the room, were senior colleagues from local authorities across the Yorkshire and Humber region, social investors who work closely with innovators from the community and voluntary sector and eight innovation projects working to green our public services...

Full story here

Why this blog...?

Readers may wonder why I created this blog. I hope I have made it clear what this blog is the description above and in the first post - but perhaps not the why...

I guess it is because I am generally fed up with the focus on big initiatives and massive reengineering projects and whole scale restructuring as being the answers to better results. Instead I take the view that within almost all organisations are people with ideas for improvement urgently wanting to be heard. But it seems that these organisations would rather hire expensive consultants / programme managers / high flying executives to come in and do improvement to the organisation. The implicit beliefs underlying this are that we need people from outside (or at the most senior echelon) to have all the big ideas.

However it seems to me that the most important ingredient in success for any organisation - large or small - is motivation. This is not just the motivation to turn up, or indeed the motivation to do good professional job. The kind of motivation I am talking about is the desire to think "how can we do this better?... how can we deliver even more to those we serve?... what do I and my colleagues have to do to achieve even more than yesterday?..." This kind of energy is rare in many organisations. Indeed, many of these organisations do not even know what they are missing.

If organisations focus on bringing in outside "experts" - I think this kind of ordinary but rare motivation is neutralised (or at the very least it is not nurtured). At the worst - people are turned off and will maybe even seek to sabotage the organisation or harm it in some way.

I know I am not alone in thinking this - but I and my fellow activists against the "bring in the expensive experts" approach to organisational development are sometimes marginalised. Perhaps this is because many senior people do not allow themselves to really believe in the boundless creative energy of more junior people - despite the oft favoured words of "our people are a greatest asset". Large consultancies, naturally, collude with this view and happily (and expensively) introduce cumbersome systems of performance management, target setting and human resource management strategies (etc.) which weigh down the organisations and squeeze out creativity.

I declare that I have a profoundly optimistic view of people. I believe most people, given the right conditions, default to being creative, clever, enthusiastic and committed. But given the wrong conditions, all of us can become cynical, de-motivated, dull and tedious.

And so this is why I wanted to create this blog. I wanted a blog that would celebrate the small ideas - the small ideas (that can easily become the big ideas with great results too) that come from the ordinary people in organisations - the people whose voices and ideas deserve and demand to be heard. I want this blog to be part of the effort to help make this happen - because I believe it is good for business, good for people and good for the world.

Crucialy, I am interested in what leaders in these organisations (where these ideas bubble forth like a mountain brook), are doing to create the right context. This for me is critical. Simply exhorting organisations to do more to unleash the small ideas with big results is not enough. I want to hear about and publish here what leaders are doing to make this happen. In this way I hope that other leaders will learn and add to their own practice.

My ultimate aim for this blog is that it will become a self regenerating hub, humming with the small and creative ideas from all over the world that are making the world a healthier, wealthier, happier and sustainable place for us and for future generations. Please contribute & please circulate. Thank you

Small & creative ideas with big results

24 February 2011

DotGovLabs: Innovation Hub

23 February 2011

Do you know where you smalls are?

10 February 2011

A festival of ideas

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Small & creative ideas with big results

24 February 2011

DotGovLabs: Innovation Hub

23 February 2011

Do you know where you smalls are?

10 February 2011

A festival of ideas

Note for spammers

AddThis

Search This Blog

To add or share an idea...

Blog Archive

Contacting Jon

Blog owner

Why this blog...?

Subscribe To

Intellectual Property

Followers

New pages