Qld Business Improvement in Government (BIIG) Network
Posted by webmaster 24 March 2009
Early March about 250 delegate gathered together in Brisbane for the annual BIiG Conference (BIIG is the Queensland counterpart of VPSCIN). The underpinning message from many of the speakers was certainly the issue of innovation (not surprisingly) and the value of people, collaboration and leadership in the field of innovation.
Speakers included James O’Loghlin, Host of the ABC’s “New Inventors” who drew on the ideas gained from his five years on the programme and discussed how important it is for us to be more creative. James challenged the audience of Qld Govt employees to see themselves as innovators and Ideas people, even in the public sector where bureaucracy, conservative management and red tape stifles forward movement.
The point was made that during tough times we often default to a task orientated way of working and ignore and forget the people orientated things such as valuing people, investment in people, enabling people and helping them think creatively and laterally. This is really selling ourselves, our people and our organisations short. And it does not help us in this turbulent, chaotic time where we have not been before.
Leadership in these tough times takes on real importance. Leaders need to enable their people to question through role modelling of their own behaviours. They need to allow their people to be free to perform at their best. This is best achieved by the leader who is both emotionally aware and intellectually capable. Best summed up by ” Leaders need to make sure that the people climbing the ladder have their ladder against the right wall. As leaders before we can do this, we need to make sure our own ladder is against the right wall”
Further more innovation needs to be encouraged and fostered. Space for creativity and thinking time needs to be part of organisational life. It needs to be both fostered and valued. Process is only a small part of the job, creativity and innovation along with thinking is the other vital part. Process ought not to exist without these
Organisations need a way of harvesting ideas, they need to encourage people to explore unrelated bits of information for connexions and to solve problems. The ideas generated need to be treated like gold and allowed to grow. After they have had space to grow, then judge an idea, not before.
Lots of this can be achieved through collaboration. Technology only supports collaboration. It does not create it…people create it. Technology only supports knowledge growth and sharing We need to find, through the collaborative process i.e. people, the other people who can compliment the knowledge we have as we generally only have part of the picture. (Francis Bacon was the last person to know everything apparently) Things change so rapidly in this world that we cannot know all there is to know, others through the collaborative process can contribute the bits they know to make a more whole picture.
And last but not least……. Do you know the average weight of a bee? This sort of specialised knowledge can be found in a second via a google search whereas not that long ago this type of knowledge was purely the domain of the entomologist or zoologist. An simple example of the way the world is changing.
So lots of learning, thinking and ideas that are also relevant and applicable to the Victorian Government context in the field of innovation and leading in turbulent times.
March 25th, 2009 at 10:42 am
There is real resonnance in this from the point of view of leadership…….emotionally and intellectually capable people are those who are able to support and understand the need for innovation in turbulent times. How rare are these? Risk averse behaviour is so much more common.