Infrastructure vs. Innovation: a tragedy in three acts.

We don’t even speak of progress any longer, but rather of 'innovation' — Adam Greenfield

The transport sector's approach innovation needs to change. Let's move from 'innovation theatre' to Actual Progress.

Caveat: This article contains opinions that are definitely my own. It does not represent the views of my employer. It’s possible that I’m full of s*** on this topic!

Act 1: No more dragons.

I stood on the Dragon’s Den set wearing a knock-off augmented reality headset. I tried, and failed, to pretend that I was experiencing the future. Thankfully, I wasn't making a fool of myself in front of that one angry Scotsman who runs some gyms. Instead the CEO for Thames Tideway (aka. The Super Sewer) looked on with bemusement.

Was my companies' pitch any good? No, not really. We kinda just wanted an AR headset to play with. Pitching for some innovation money felt like it was worth a try. Plus, there were drinks afterwards and a cool motorbike outside (pictured)!

So there I was, along with a bunch of other people who presumably had better things to be doing, in an expensive location, distracting the leadership of a challenging mega-project. It was a serious dose of ‘innovation theatre’.

HBR describe innovation theatre as…

“a form of organisational whack-a-mole — a futile attempt at trying to swat at problems as they pop-up without understanding their root cause.”

The article goes on the describe how ‘innovation theatre’ sees public sector organisations responding to disruption with 'process' rather than creativity. Organisations adopt the affectations of innovation (hackathons, design thinking, etc.) but not the act itself.

Innovation theatre is a form of delusion. We do it to convince ourselves that we are preparing for the future. But actually we're merely creating a smokescreen in the present. It’s an understandable urge. We all know that the future is impossible to predict, but that some form of change is inevitable. As Roy Amara famously said:

"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."

We are over-confident in our ability to pick transformative technologies. We see the unpredictable- retrospectively- as 'inevitable'. (Why didn’t we buy Bitcoin in 2015 dammit!?) We expect lavish benefits whilst failing to anticipate negative consequences. We delude ourselves into thinking we are players on the court, rather than spectators to the machinations of others. We are bystanders to the broader macro trends of late-stage platform capitalism. All the world's a stage, but we are the trees.

There are a huge range of approaches to innovation. My argument here isn’t that the public sector shouldn’t innovate. Rather I'm arguing that our innovation must always have a reasonable path to accruing sufficient public benefit to warrant the use of taxpayer’s money. We shouldn't be afraid to let ideas die, or to let Big Tech do the work for us. And we should leave speculative innovation to venture capitalists and academic. Most of all, we shouldn't perpetuate unsuccessful approaches to innovation just because that's the way we've always done it.

There is no one “true” path to innovation. Yet all too often, organizations act as if there is. They lock themselves into one type of strategy and say, “This is how we innovate.” — HBR

We all want to get out of the innovation theatre, and on to the innovation court. But first we need to understand what has kept the theatre in business for so long…

Act 2: No more apps.

Public sector organisations exist to avoid natural monopolies and private sector price-gouging. We swap profit motive for public benefit. In doing so we also remove the existential dread of bankruptcy. Our only real existential threats are incompetence and the caprice of politicians. Consequently, public organisations often lack a crucial piece of information: their ‘Unique Selling Point’ (USP) . What can they do better than others? And where are they wasting their time?

A lack of self awareness combined with the complexity of public organisations means that its harder to understand who should be innovating where. Different parts of the organisation will have wildly different ideas of their own capability. Some teams will underestimate their capability, others will overestimate. The outcome is that we end up with two dysfunctional types of innovation:

1. ‘Navel Gazing Innovation’ (NGI): where we underestimate our ability to effect change. In practice this means following someone else's lead. Building our innovation around legislation, regulation, KPIs or management consultant advice rather than thinking about the outcomes that we want to realise. The tendency of NGI is to tweak rather than to challenge. Navel gazing innovators don't question 'the process', they try to improve it.
2. ‘Hubristic Innovation’ (HI): where we overestimate our ability to effect change. Here we generate only “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” In a race to do 'cool stuff’, hubristic innovators forget the purpose that their organisation exists to serve and their responsibility to use taxpayer’s money wisely. We forget that we're not a VC-backed startup.

Navel Gazing Innovation includes:

• Any project involving VBA or daisy-chains of spreadsheets (ahem... PHE).
• Any project that requires someone to email data to someone
• Any project where the output boils down to ‘the same crappy data you already have, but now on a dashboard/map!’
• Apps that nobody ever asked for.
• Decision support tools that will never help anyone make a decision.
• BIM models that exist because the contract said that BIM models must exist.
• Projects that exist to give teams (or worse, bids) a gloss of exciting techno-wizziness.
• Any project that ultimately ends up storing data on a hard drive under someone's desk. Doubly so when drones are involved.

Hubristic Innovation includes:

• The British Rail Flying Saucer! Because clearly interstellar travel is easier than getting the trains to run on time.
• Public sector apps with better private sector alternatives. As a counter example, props to TfL for enabling rather than competing with CityMapper.
• Public sector projects that invest in shiny things without any thought for adoption or support. Meaning most investment in augmented reality, virtual reality, digital twins, blockchain, etc.
• Simulations of everything, without the data for anything.
• That one idea that Steve came up with at a workshop which sounded pretty silly at the time but we wrote it on the whiteboard and it got put down in the minutes and now we have to take it seriously.

Some quick hacks to test whether you are working on an NGI or HI project:

• Is it easy to find a sponsor in the business?
• If so, does the sponsor understand anything about the underlying technology?
• If so, has anybody been willing to commit to tangible medium-term benefits?
• If so, are you going to stick around long enough to prove that this project actually delivers? And will anyone notice if you don’t?

We have inherent political bias towards shiny new things, and people don't like saying "no". Often it's easier to find funding for new ideas than it is to keep existing good ideas going. This gives navel gazing innovators license to tweak ad nauseum. And it enables hubristic innovators to launch innumerable pilots, trials, proofs of concept, alphas, and so on. The scarcity of OPEX in the public sector further reduces the likelihood of successful adoption into 'business as usual'. Many a passion project withers on the vine. The innovators move on to selling the next thing, and the business are left with nothing new (and less remaining funding for their BAU work).

Neither navel gazing nor hubristic innovation works. At least 'navel gazing innovation’ has the advantage that it’s inherently self-limiting. Whereas hubristic innovation can realise some sort of bizarre perpetual motion (“we’ve invested so much in this, we’ve got to see it through”). So what should we aspire to instead?

Act 3: no more excuses

Actual Progress? occupies the space between navel gazing and hubristic innovation. Actual Progress isn’t theatre. It does not tirelessly plough one furrow. Nor does it birth endless orphan projects into the void. It is a caring mother, nurturing it’s children with both humility and a desire to contribute to society.

So how do we engage in Actual Progress? Well here’s a few suggestions:

1. Get some perspective: In 2019, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) alone spent $26bil. on R&D (and their average employee in the UK earned ￡223k). The amount of money sloshing around in Big Tech makes the cost of running a nation’s infrastructure look like peanuts. The public sector simply can't (and shouldn't) compete with tech firms who outspend them by a factor of 100:1, and who pay an average coder more than their exec. Don’t bother, find your niche, find the use cases under-served by Big Tech.
2. Focus on outcomes: Without attainable outcomes innovation is a public subsidy in disguise. Often a subsidy to firms that struggle to make a margin otherwise (e.g. Carillion, Mouchel). What the public needs is reliable information, safe operations, and decent infrastructure. If you can achieve these outcomes without an app, or a drone, or AI, or blockchain, then just do that. The cool stuff will still be there once you’ve sorted the basics out.
3. Deliver platforms not projects: Technological development is an incremental process. Every time we switch on a computer and start developing something new, we are “standing on the shoulders of giants”. Treating every innovation project as a standalone initiative creates redundancy and rework. Admin like shared services, data modelling, collation and cleansing, business analysis, and infrastructure-as-code all take time. If we ask every project to start from a blank slate and do its own admin, then we reduce the incremental value of each investment. But if we create common client-owned platforms where new projects can quickly understand and build upon previous investments then we can reduce our rework (and, usefully, avoid vendor lock-in and fights about IPR). The goal of public sector innovation shouldn’t be to create a bunch of competing projects with massive technical overlap. Instead it should seek to incrementally build capability by inviting the best of academia, start-ups, and the supply chain to work in a consistent way using publicly-owned platforms.
4. Beware the chasm (between innovation and adoption)! The chasm doesn’t care a jot how clever or revolutionary your idea is. All the chasm cares about is whether people can use the damn thing, and whether they want to. Innovation projects that pretend that the chasm doesn’t exist stumble blindly into it. To avoid the chasm we must assume that our innovation is going to be wildly successful so that we can put the foundations in place to ensure success. We must reach out to early adopters to understand what excites them and how to make it easier for them to pull your project across the chasm. Actual Progress? focuses on giving users something they actually want, not something that a boffin thinks that they ought to want. Generally, this means toning down the ambition of the technology, and cranking up the focus on culture, adoption, training, and user experience.

As public sector innovators we can use emerging technology to fill the gaps left by the private sector. We must shepherd Big Tech, stead their best ideas, and soften their monopolistic tendencies. We cannot allow ourselves to become their proxy sales force, or to subsidise their product development. Our superpower is not in replicating their brains, but in caring about more than just profit.

What happens next, however, and how these technologies are woven into the fabric of modernity, is our responsibility — Aaron Bastani

Let’s not take Actual Progress? is neither defeat nor compromise. Rather its an opportunity to leverage- rather than squander- the limited funds available to the public sector. It's a chance to work through technical debt, and build an ecosystem of partners. The returns to investment in Actual Progress will be incredible. The returns to innovation theatre are for the birds.

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. — Hamlet