The pursuit of citizen-centred innovation is a condition for sustaining continuous improvement in the service system. The creation of Services Australia Regional Support Centres will provide an ongoing opportunity for innovation in areas such as community engagement, digital access and support, the design of collaborative forms of regional governance, the recruitment and development of “trusted” and “local” community service coordinators, and, a practical opportunity to convert complaints to learning and innovation opportunities at the regional scale.
This will require the institutionalisation of innovation and challenge. One of the greatest weaknesses in government is that basic assumptions too often go unchallenged. The most innovative companies in the private sector encourage challenge to the received way of doing things. They often employ people not for their manifest desire to conform, but for their potential to offer new ideas, to develop new products, for their ability to ‘shake things up’. More established corporations inevitably develop settled hierarchies and systems in much the same way that the civil and other public services do; but larger corporations often find ways of ‘institutionalising’ challenge, for instance by experimenting with new markets, goods or services through wholly-owned subsidiaries which are left to thrive or sink on their own. Success leads to the adoption of new approaches by the parent firm; failure to (usually) controlled financial losses, and possibly a search for new jobs by those responsible for those losses.
The public sector does not tend to work in this way. In part this is because experimenting with services that are mandated by elected political leaders and on which citizens might depend is unacceptable. The public sector also tends to shy away from challenge and innovation because its norms are of compliance not challenge, and its rewards are for the management of processes and of inputs and outputs, not for outcomes and achievements.
One way that we think government can encourage challenge is institutional. It can emulate the practice of the private sector by ‘ring-fencing’ challenge functions, for instance by setting-up shadow boards in organisations or service peer review in which service agencies provide developmental feedback to one another or where cross agency task forces are created to solve common delivery problems.19 Another way is to systematise reward for innovative thinking. Instead of systems of annual review that reinforce behaviour that is compliant, orthodox and which successfully manage processes at the input/output level of operation, government and the wider public sector needs to actively reward results, however they are achieved.
19 The Wales Assembly Government has a ‘shadow board’, although its role is primarily to air issues and offer alternative perspectives to the main management board (and to encourage staff development) rather than to explicitly challenge organisational assumptions.