This article shares practical insights and learnings from a trial series of innovation sprints with government, and demonstrates how they can be a powerful tool for organisations to explore new approaches and achieve ambitious goals.
Queensland Government had embarked on an ambitious human-centred, digitally enabled transformation and recognised that developing innovative strategic thinking capability across the organisation would be a critical enabler.
The small central team realised that a new approach was required, one that created a safe space to conceive and apply innovation and challenge conventional approaches. One that could inspire and show what was possible and how to get there. One that built buy-in and momentum for change. This was an ambitious goal, made harder because the central team had to influence other departments to collaborate.
So, trying to break new ground, in 2016 Queensland Government partnered with the recently established team at the Queensland University of Technology Chair in Digital Economy and Liquid to design and trial a series of innovation sprints. This was, in itself, innovation at work.
These NextGen sprints were more successful than anyone expected. The original commission was for three two-week sprints, and that expanded to a total of eight sprints over nine months due to the success of the approach. Since then, its continued to roll out as a tried and tested approach and each sprint has spawned new projects or initiatives across Government.
During the trial a broad range of topics and challenges were tested. The briefs became increasingly esoteric as we pushed to see if there was a limit to the type of problem an innovation sprint could solve. However, every sprint felt in some way like a bold leap that could have gone horribly wrong. With this insight, this article shares practical insights and learnings from the trial for anyone looking to follow this approach.
Making a breakthrough, but keeping it real
For instance, when designing a decision support tool for customers starting a small business, it would have been easy to create a clickable mock-up, but we wouldnt have had confirmation that the right data could be scraped from government websites or that the underlying decision tree model would allow independent curation from government agencies.
Without this confirmation, it would have been all too easy for other stakeholders to dismiss the concept as mere fantasy and return to business as usual. But by building an actual decision-tree service with its own branch-and-node content management system, the team proved that the approach was technically achievable, and that progress didnt need to take years. We proved that under the right circumstances, meaningful progress could be achieved in weeks.
Even where the sprints focused on communications, content and strategy, rather than software, we demonstrated achievability by breaking the strategy into small, simple steps and providing samples for every step. These samples not only proved that the strategy was achievable, but also exactly what it should look like when executed. This is important because the biggest problem that strategic sprints run into isn't people saying, that cant be done its people saying, were already doing that. Often the difference lies in the execution not whats being done, but how it's being done.
Team composition
The NextGen sprints had a team structure that fostered collaboration across government, academia and industry. The core team consisted of seven people:
- one person from government(project management and stakeholder engagement)
- two people from QUT(research and workshop facilitation)
- four people from Liquid (strategy, content, design and development).
In addition, depending on the brief, a small number of people from relevant departments were included in the core team.
There were many supporting contributors from all three organisations. Some joined the sprint full-time, some stepped in to help with ad hoc requests. Sometimes the core team grew slightly bigger, sometimes smaller; sometimes it was heavily technical, sometimes creative, sometimes analytical; it all depended on the sprint. It was essential that the team could judge its own progress and call in the right kind of support when needed.
While everyone had a specific responsibility, there were a range of design, strategy and research tasks that overlapped across the team and it was in this cross-disciplinary flow that the breakthroughs happened.
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