Innovation Month 2017
Rippleffect: new ways of delivering our business
Recorded on Tuesday the 27th of June 2017.
Introduction
Geraldine:Hello and welcome to the Department of Employment’s first Innovation Month podcast. Innovation Month is a platform to showcase and celebrate the Department’s achievements as well as facilitate and encourage collaboration across the Department, the APS, the private sector and end users. This year’s theme isMaking it Happen!The Department of Employment is a public service leader in innovation. Over the last four years the Department has established an Innovation Framework, made available a range of innovation tools and cultivated an environment that is open to new ideas. The theme Making it Happen! focuses on making innovation tangible, practical and applicable to our everyday work.This year the Department has launched Innovation Month through a rippleffect event. rippleffectis a program of events where cutting edge thinkers are invited to share insights and our people present to internal and external audiences.The concept behind this is that great ideas, whether from a spark of innovation, best practice examples or evidence base, can have a ripple effect. They not only impact on a particular person or project—but ripple out to overlap and intersect with other ideas. This sharing of ideas is the backbone of thought leadership—harnessing innovation by connecting ideas and people and putting those ideas into practice.Today rippleffect takes the form of a panel discussion to explore new ways of delivering our business using non-legislative policy levers focussing on data, self-regulation and a consensus approach. Our three panellists: Dr Deen Sanders, Rob Hanson and Nicky Chaffer share their experience with these policy levers and help to reflect on how we could apply these to our work.
Rippleffect Event
Sandra Parker: Good morning to you all both here in 12 Mort and everyone who is listening to the podcast, or will be listening to the podcast. I am Sandra Parker, I am the Deputy Secretary of the Workplace Relations and Economic Strategy Cluster and am delighted to be the MC for this event. This is our first event to kick off Innovation Month. Rippleffect is the department’s thought leadership program of events where we have the opportunity to share our knowledge and learn from experts across and outside of the public service. This is the second rippleffect event this year, on this occasion we’re focusing on one of the priorities in our Innovation Framework. We will explore different ways to deliver more jobs and great workplaces using a variety of policy levers and non-legislative approaches. I would like to start by inviting The Secretary, Renee Leon, to officially launch Innovation Month and provide her views on today’s topic. Please welcome The Secretary.
Renee Leon: Thank you Sandra. And before I start I would like to respectfully acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which we meet today, and pay respect to their elders, past, present and future. I would also like to extend that respect to other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who are with us today. Thank you very much to Sandra for MCing and TO our panellists for coming to present in this discussion today. Our thanks to Deen Sanders from the Professional Standards Authority, Nicky Chaffer from the Fair Work Ombudsman and Rob Hanson from Data61 who we’ve done some exciting work on in the Future of Work space already. It is really great to be launching Innovation Month as you know innovation is a really key part of what we do and closely linked to our core pillar of being forward looking in the department. Soon we’ll be exploring some particular pieces of innovation in terms of what we can do as an alternative to legislation which we often reach to as our first tool book, tool in the tool kit, instead of how to achieve policy outcomes in other ways. But first, let me say a little bit about Innovation Month. It’s been a highlight of our calendar for a few years now and I’ve really noticed how people in the department and our teams have taken to imbedding innovation frequently and explicitly in how we work. This is partly because we’ve focused on having an Innovation Framework that created the seed bed for ideas and also creates that expectation, so it creates a cultural framework as well that people and the leaders of the department will be both generating ideas and welcoming ideas and moving them forward to implementation. Of course, it’s very hazardous listing a few great ideas that people have come up with because it would be impossible to cover all of the great innovations that people in the department have been prepared to develop and implement but let me just highlight a few. So last year we had the Shark Tank for graduates and this week we’ve rolled out the intranet which includes the implementation of one of the ideas that came out of the Shark Tank which is to have a key word search function in the corporate directory. So you can see that innovation doesn’t have to be you know inventing some really out of this world app or something that’s right out of the ball park. It can be just really handy little ideas for things that we use all the time and that will make our day better and being able to look up a key word search term was a great idea from the Shark Tank last year and we’ll be holding the Shark Tank again this year. It’s a great way to get our Graduates while they’re still fresh, have fresh eyes to bring to what we do and fresh skills out of their degrees and capture their enthusiasm and get ideas to get ideas that help inspire and enliven our department. But of course it’s not only grads who have great ideas, great ideas come from across the whole department and we’ve set up an ideas management system in Spark so that we can both put out challenges and get people to contribute their ideas, for example we put one out about some of the questions we’re asking ourselves on the gig economy and we had a whole range of ideas come in for that and pretty soon we’re be announcing which ones will go onto the next stage and be developed into a potentially implementable idea. And as well, Spark has a brainstorm space so you don’t have to wait for the Executive to put out a challenge and ask for input. There’s a place where anyone can come up with an idea and start a brainstorm or discussion on Spark so that we can get ideas about things we haven’t even thought about. And as well as those things that get the profile on Spark or because it’s an Executive challenge, there’s lots of pieces of work that have been done in individual teams that innovate on what we do and make a great difference on what we do. So for example we’ve implemented the ME in progress tool as part of performance agreement discussions and the feedback I get is that it’s been incredibly successful to make those performance agreement discussions more meaningful and for people to feel a genuine connection about well what is their development needs and how is the Department going to support those. So it’s a great piece of innovation in a part of the work of the Department that’s often a bit under done but that’s really important that investment in development. On an even bigger scale we use innovation processes to promote transformational change in the societies that we serve outside and a very prominent one of those is youth and the investment that we’ve been making in youth unemployment over recent years. We’ve really known that it’s a problem and wanted to find ways to address it and the government has been keen to help us to address it, but we haven’t had a really good evidence base about what would be the best things to do. And so, the government funded us to do the empowering youth initiatives which by definition had to be innovative. It couldn’t just be one of the same old things we’ve done before, it was designed to test innovative ideas about what can make a difference for young people to help them make the transition either from school to work or from welfare to work and to be able to turn their lives around in that way. So we’ve provided grant funding to a whole lot of not-for-profit, non-government organisations, and they’re running trail projects for up to two years each so that we can be genuinely open to finding out what works. Of course it was a challenge for us as a department too, to innovate in that way because all of our usual ways of assessing grants depended on them being some kind of evidence base that showed that this could work so we had to really thing differently ourselves in deciding how to award the grants to all of those who were seeking to help young unemployed people or people at risk of unemployment in the future so I’m really looking forward to the results of those. Importantly, we have to be prepared for the fact that not all innovation succeeds, so some of those projects probably won’t deliver really stellar outcomes and that’s something not to be disappointed about it but to be pleased that we tried it and that’s how we find out and how we learn, but being prepared to try new things and not expect that they’re all going to succeed. If you only every do things that you know are going to succeed that’s called risk averse, and you won’t really find out very much that way. And speaking of risk, one of the ways we’ve innovated is by having new risk architecture in the department. We always get very positive results on the staff survey and in the whole of public service survey about how well we prepare for and manage risk and when you’re managing a program that’s over a billion dollars a year as well as many pieces of policy and program that impact on the lives of a very large number of Australians you have to have a positive and proactive approach to risk. So we’ve innovated in our risk architecture. We are very active in the behaviour economic space. We’ve got half a dozen projects on the go that are testing behavioural economics as a means of achieving program and policy outcomes and we’ve been using data in new and innovative ways. We’ve participated in GovHack but also we’ve used data to think really fresh about how we get jobseekers to comply with their mutual obligations that we’ve had the policy responsibility for and the outcomes of that were adopted by the government in the most recent budget as a whole new approach to compliance that rewards the mostly compliant with greater autonomy and sanctions the deliberately noncompliant with progressively harsher sanctions and that was a complete turnaround from the kind of one-size fits all approach that we had before. We’ve also done something which shouldn’t be innovative but it seems to be innovative to ever have a success in commonwealth state relations and the delivery and engagement group has been at the forefront of that. We’ve worked with the New South Wales Industry Department and the New South Wales Tafesto develop a shared project where we’re setting up an infrastructure skills centre that will deliver specialised pre-employment training for our jobactive participants to get them into vacancies on the big infrastructure bills that the New South Wales government is investing in over the next 5 years. So, this will be both a really great thing in its own right in terms of they’re be something like 20,000 jobs on that project so getting some of our unemployed people into that work will be huge and beneficial for them but also we’re using that again for sight for us to gain evidence about what works. So how do those place based, project based, partnering arrangements best work so that we can bring to it the unemployed people, someone else brings to it the large scale jobs, and someone else bring the training and skills building and that together we can do so much more than we can do on our own. So, they’re all some great innovations that we’re doing in the department and also because of what measures matters, we’re also developing a framework for measuring innovation which sometimes people lose sight of what it is that’s innovative because it starts to just blend with the furniture and so being able to measure what the innovation culture is and what the innovation achievements are in the department will be a great thing but also it’s an innovation in itself and we’ll share that with other agencies that are keen to improve their own innovation work. So, it’s Innovation Month. I really encourage everyone in the department to be looking at their own work and thinking how it could be improved and innovated on and also to think of using some of the tools that we have, like Spark, as a way to get a broader audience to your ideas or contribute to the refining of other people’s ideas. Your ideas can be either about how we deliver our programs or policies in a better or effective way or they can be ‘so what should our department be like, how can we be even better as an organisation and a more exciting place to work and more effective in what we do’. So, all of those kinds of insights are welcome in the innovation process. And, innovation usually happens best when you share it with others rather than just keeping your great ideas to yourselves. So share it on Spark, or talk to your own team, or share it with the team who’s responsible for the thing that you’re interested in changing and be open to their ideas about how you can make it happen. Innovation Month will bring us lots of opportunities to be inspired by other people ideas. This is no exception. At the end of July there will be a 2030 Hypothetical which is an opportunity to look forward to 2030 and discuss what the government’s role will be then in supporting jobseekers, workers and employers to create new jobs and to make workplaces even better. It’s that kind of horizon of far out into the future that enables you to drop the shackles of this is what we’re doing now and to really think innovatively about well, ideally what would the arrangements be. There’ll be a Workforce of the Future discussion also at the end of July about how ready we are for what’s called the Fourth Industrial Revolution as increasingly our works augmented by both automation but also the digitised power of computers and data. This will be a joint event with the Department of Education and Training because of course they’re so many things we can’t do on our own and working together with education is really important in terms of what are the skills our future workforce needs and they’ll start getting those through the Education system. Apart from the events throughout the department they’re be quotations and provocative and stimulating thoughts posted on walls and screens around the department sharing the experiences of jobseekers, providers and employers so that we think about how our stakeholders are seeing the future and get inspired by and stimulated by their perspective and not just our own. That piece of user centred design that we’ve already started doing is a really key part of realising that ideas come from being exposed to a broader range of perspectives than just your own. If just your own perspective was going to give you a new idea you would’ve already had it. Whereas exposing yourself to the perspective of those who use them is a really great way to understand and then be able to influence what we do in the broader world. And Peter Cully who is our innovation champion who is with us today will be delivering a podcast in July on what innovation means, how we can make it happen and his personal experience of innovation in the department so that will be well worth listening to. And then it’s not all serious, there is a lighter side to this. We will have Innovation Month Happy Hour on the 14th of July where there will be puzzles and questions to unlock other parts of your brain as well as having fun at the same time. So it’s a great line-up of Innovation Month event and I really thank the Innovation team for putting it all together and giving us all plenty of opportunities to be stimulated. And so I’m pleased that our launch event today is this panel discussion where we’ve got a diverse group of experts, getting people from outside our thinking and stimulate us to thinking in new and different ways, about how we can have an impact through non-legislative policy levers. We do a lot of legislations in the department but it’s often difficult to get through as Sandra can share with you, but also it’s not the most effective way necessarily every time to achieve the change that you want. And so some of the things that we can probably do better in many spaces is narrow down what the problem is by using more data to understand what the real drivers are. Working at an early intervention stage with our stakeholders to resolve issues before they need legislation or exploring all the regulatory options from scale down from legislation to self-regulation and to education and information so that consumers can regulate the market themselves. So a lot of these are more challenging to develop and get right than the relatively blunt instrument of legislation. You have to think more subtly about what you’re trying to achieve and how best to achieve it and also on the up side you get the benefit of being able to change it and iterate it as you go along whereas once you’ve done legislation it’s often hard to get it changed until a fair bit of time has elapsed. So, that’s what we’re here to discuss today. I’m pleased to be able to launch Innovation Month with this important and practical piece of discussion. I think it’ll be really useful for our work as well as really interesting so thank you to our panellists and I’m looking forward to sharing the event with you today. Thanks.