How can governments create a culture that allows them to learn from failure?
In this webinar, we explored insights from city leaders, leading academics and public servants around what it takes to build a culture that supports and even encourages failure as a productive and inherent part of successful innovation.
During the session we discussed topics such as exploring shifts in mindset, relationship building, new systems and processes, and fostering external ecosystems that embrace innovation.
Speakers:
Andi Mirviss (Program Manager, Centre for Public Impact)
Peter Shergold (Chancellor, Western Sydney University)
Tina Walha (Director, Innovation & Performance, City of Seattle)
Facilitated by:
Subho Banerjee (Deputy CEO, Research and Advisory, ANZSOG)
Materials Hub
To take our webinars further, we’ve collated a wide range of material exploring Failing Forward. Scroll down to explore.
The Webinar
Watch the webinar, and read more about what our CoP is saying.
Webinar wrap-ups: Check out key insights and highlights from the webinar, as well as a record of our webinar group chat.
CoP digests: Check back soon - we’ll be editing and uploading content here shortly after our first webinar.
The Theory
Dive more deeply into this topic by learning more through blogs, articles and reports.
CPI’s report, How to Fail (Forward) provides a framework for fostering innovation in the public sector, informed by real-life workshops the team designed and led.
ANZSOG’s article, “What we need is a safe space for policy failure” explores policymakers’ struggles to test assumptions, and the role of narratives in failure.
ANZSOG commissioned a paper for the 2019 Independent Review of the APS on 'Evaluation and learning from success and failure’. You can also read a summary here.
Public managers want safe spaces to fail, and governments need to offer them better training to support that, according to a report by ANZSOG.
ANZSOG's article with Mary Ann Loughlin describes how governments can embrace trial and failure, through a focus on implementation and context.
In his VPSC Victoria series presentation, Dr Tim Kastelle explores whether public sector innovation is an oxymoron. Spoiler alert, it’s not!
In the Harvard Business Review’s article “The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures”, Gary P Pisano describes the difficulty in creating and sustaining innovative cultures.
In the Harvard Business Review’s article, “Strategies for Learning from Failure”, Amy C Edmondson describes how strong leadership can build a learning culture, and address different types of failure.
Professor Peter Shergold’s report to government, “Learning from Failure”, explores why large government policy initiatives have gone so wrong in the past, and how we can improve in the future.
In the Harvard Business Review’s article, “When Not to Celebrate Failure”, Ron Ashkenas argues there should be limits to embracing failure, and times to play it safe.
TED has created a Benefits of Failure playlist, featuring 6 TED talks on embracing failure.
In Practice
We’ve collated case studies and material to illustrate what these ideas look like in practice, and offer frameworks and tools to support experimentation with a similar approach in your work.
CPI’s report, How to Fail (Forward) provides a framework for fostering innovation in the public sector. Insights were derived from Failure Foundries - read more about them in the report!
In The Learning Communities Handbook, Louise Wilson and Dr Toby Lowe describe a model for teams that enables peer accountability and positive error culture.
CPI’s article, “When impact falls short” details how we can learn lessons from policy ‘failure’ and sets out a few policy ‘failure’ case studies to learn from.
The Australian National Audit Office’s Better Practice Guide explores 10 case studies from Australian government agencies, highlighting key observations and lessons learned.
CPI interviewed leaders in local government to understand their experiences in failing forward. Read our interviews with Carrie S. Cihak, Chief of Policy at King County Metro; David Noguera, Director of Housing and Neighborhood Revitalization at the City of Dallas; Bobby Humes, Director of the Seattle Department of Human Resources; and Kate Bender, Deputy Performance Officer at DataKC.
A number of event series have been created to view failure in a different light, and some are open to you organising your own event in the series! Fail Festival, Fuckup Nights and Fail Fest are the three biggest organisers.
Join us
Our Community of Practice is a forum for conversations over the course of the webinar series, as well as a chance to build new relationships with like-minded people passionate about reimagining government. Content in webinars will be brought to life, with interactive sessions, conversations and networking opportunities.
Register below, and join us as we reimagine government.