Sean Kershaw's Weblog
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February 20, 2009
How does innovation happen? Talking with Ted Kolderie
Having established that our mission is fundamentally about rebuilding civic imagination and capacity, it is only appropriate that we talk about what this really means, or how it happens.
Talking with Ted Kolderie provided important insights, as it always does. And the conversation made the need to realize our mission more important. Some notes:
* It's not enough to say "stop doing bad things and start doing good things". How will you make the good things happen?
* We're trying to 'do' improvement, rather than set in place the opportunities that cause improvement. We're focused on 'what', when we should be focused on 'how'.
* Our times call for talking about how we create self-improving systems, not put all of our energy into one-time improvements. Rather than say "how do we do 'x'", we should be asking "how we can structure systems so that 'x' is most likely to happen"? What are the reasons and the opportunities for improvements. How can we reestablish the mechanisms that generate innovative ideas?
My thoughts: This is a perfect example of several points.
1) Why 'imagination' is important. We have to be able to 'see' how things can improve, and why we need a better model for policy-making.
2) Why 'capacity' is critical. It's not that we're trying to create the perfect answer or the perfect solution, but ultimately to create the capacity to build these better answers.
3) Why we need to talk about the civic 'infrastructure' needed for this to happen. What are the roles and resources and relationships and incentives in the system that are needed for these improvements to occur?
This makes our upcoming series on 'Innovation' perfectly timed. After the talk with Ted, I'm thinking of calling it 'Imagination Works'. An attempt to get at both the big ideas, and the means/mechanisms/systems to make the big ideas materialize.
Posted by Sean Kershaw at February 20, 2009 4:46 AM
Comments
Sean, could you give an example or two that would help paint the picture? Systemic approaches are easier to grasp with examples. We're going to have a lot of one-time improvements with the stimulus money but probably few systemic improvements.
Posted by: Griff Wigley | February 20, 2009 6:23 AM
Good question Griff! Here are some more thoughts from Ted.
+++
In industry
In the early 1900s there were terrible accidents in the steel mills. The companies took the view that accidents were the workers' problem, not the company's problem. Companies spent their money not for safety but to hire lawyers whose job was to deny liability. Then, beginning in 1911 in Washington, states created a new kind of insurance program. Rather than having injured workers sue in the courts the idea was to accept that accidents happen and to create a workers' compensation fund to pay for the medical care and for the lost income of those injured. The money was raised by an assessment on the employers. Companies, knowing they would pay those costs, quickly saw a reason to introduce safety programs in order to reduce their costs - which of course they had always had the opportunity to do. Over the succeeding 20 years the injury rate in the iron and steel industry fell by 90 per cent. [Footnote: The story is told in Mark Aldrich, Safety First, Johns Hopkins Press, 1997.]
In county government
Through the 1950s there was growing conflict between Minneapolis and its suburbs. The city and suburban officials were fighting over taxes, roads, parks, welfare; all advocating, not surprisingly, for their own jurisdictional interests. Everyone knew the 1960 census - reflecting the growth of the suburbs - would require a redistricting of the Hennepin County board. At the time four of the five commissioners came from the city of Minneapolis, one from the suburbs (then still called "rural Hennepin").
There was a strong desire not to recreate in the restructured county board the city/suburban warfare raging at the municipal level. The Citizens League proposed that five new commissioner districts be laid out with one entirely Minneapolis, one entirely suburban and three overlapping the city/suburban boundary. The idea was to give a majority of commissioners a reason to focus on the problems of the county as a whole; to deny these three an opportunity to represent the interest of either Minneapolis or the suburbs. It worked.
Posted by: Sean | February 22, 2009 4:08 PM
Very helpful. Thanks, Sean... and Ted!
Very timely in that here in Northfield, I'm trying to figure out how to structure a way for independent journalists/reporters to get paid by the community. (Community-supported journalism" is the catch-phrase).
In other words, rather than having journalists work for the newspaper, either as full-time staffers or as freelancers, they'd make their story 'pitches' to the community.
Posted by: Griff Wigley | February 22, 2009 10:02 PM
Is self-interest the only option here, or is there a place/need for a more highly developed sense of ethics?
Posted by: Ann Berget | February 25, 2009 8:19 AM
Good point Ann. I guess I was assuming that it should always be enlightened self-interest, with the distinction making all the difference.
Posted by: Sean | February 26, 2009 4:19 AM