(#4) Symbiotic Governments | Successful missions need CoCreators

To shift from fixed and siloed governments, to?symbiotic governments, we need a different approach.?I've been translating 7+ years of experience working with governments into a series of thought experiments around missions - what comes next is the role of?‘CoCreators’, ensuring fluidity and leveraging deep expertise. This article explores the ‘why’, the ‘what’, and the ‘who’ of CoCreators through a possible lens for addressing the dilemma of the Covid19 vaccine.

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Early on in the series I addressed the perception of governments being rigid, difficult and slow to change, limiting innovation and creativity. The root of this problem lies in the structures and systems under which governments operate. In over 100 years, the operating models of ministries (and mandate driven entities), their memos and decisions, have barely changed! Governments’ reaction and preparedness for the recent pandemic is an ideal case of the short falls of these structures and systems.

The response systems need to change!

We need more fluidity, not just agility

Better response systems require the adoption of new practices. Whilst there is surface level adoption - for example embedding agility - it is still limited to being reactive, operating at the fringes of government. Instead, 21st century governments need to be proactive, with fluidity ingrained deep within the system’s design.??

We’ve seen the difference in an agile approach (managing the spread of Covid19) versus a fluid approach (the vaccination programs). The UK embraced agile, with overnight policies, laws and regulations surrounding lockdowns. Yet, it still struggled to curtail the spread of the virus due to a constant reactive approach. But for the vaccination program, the UK recently put out an intent of distributing 15 million jabs by February 15, 2021. This is effectively a mission-driven approach. With this bold target we’ve seen a whole ecosystem of solutions - from vaccinations in churches to employer schemes - coming together in pursuit of this shared mission.

“All of us

share the responsibility

and the opportunity

to?co-create a better world.”

-?Christina Figeures

CoCreators: A practical way of embedding fluidity

Allowing for change in a preemptive, calculated and comprehensive manner is a fundamental principle of a successful symbiotic government. Such fluidity needs to be embedded in the design itself. Facilitating a constant flow of perspectives, schemes, experiences and objectives, creates a positive ripple effect across the whole system, and eliminates the silos of knowledge.

To embark on this transformation, it is paramount to embed deep expertise at the beginning of any solution, policy, regulation or initiative. A prime example being how the ambiguity of the Corona virus resulted in a lack of expertise fortifying the decision making, which then led to the downfall of many government response initiatives.

A practical way of instilling fluidity and deep-expertise into governments is by embedding, ‘CoCreators’ - designated experts empowered to initiate change and innovation, cutting across all mission clusters as autonomous vital forces.?CoCreators are easily pulled in at various intervals of any mission's life cycle, from ideation and strategy design to planning and execution.

The autonomy of the 'CoCreators' safeguards their independence from a single mission or mandate, and ensures their ability to cross-pollinate ideas across missions.?It also ensures fast deployment, measured in minutes and hours, especially given the speed of change in today’s world.?Furthermore, the deployment of CoCreators needs to offer an array of sprint modules - from a 1-hour virtual sprint, to full in-person 30-day sprints - dependent upon the mandate of each mission.

A Portfolio of 7 CoCreator Clouds

It is ideal to group CoCreators into 'Clouds' to help maintain a uniformity in operation and execution by the CoCreators, as well as ensure a pooled source of knowledge and expertise around a specific area. Discussions and debates with colleagues and leaders across various sectors, informed the selection of seven 'CoCreator Clouds' most relevant for today’s world: Experimentation, Partnership, Data, Technology, Sustainability, Citizenship, and Stories. These cloud themes can (and will change) over time - as certain societal, environmental, economic and technological trends emerge the cloud themes alter to align with new priorities.

To enable a less theoretical perspective on CoCreator Clouds, the role of each has been mapped out below in the form of a proposal on how governments could alter their distribution and management of the COVID19 vaccine for better results.?

Experimentation Cloud

Governments of various countries, such as Finland, UK, Canada, Chile and the UAE have tapped into the power of experimentation to advance their governance models and policies. Yet, this expertise is often isolated into specific ministries or departments, constraining the potential for innovation.

The Experimentation Cloud would facilitate the culture, skills, tools, and mind-set of trial and error, allowing failure to be part of the process, as opposed to being a negative end result. They would help missions to gradually increase the scope, risk and impact of experiments. This in turn can help pivot and truly action the learnings from the experimentation.?

Vaccination Mission: The Experimentation Cloud could support the mission cluster with dispersed sandboxes to test what works and doesn't as interventions for the hard to reach populations, like ethnic minorities, urban residents or skeptics of the vaccine. The Cloud could also run experiments through gaming, before and after the jabs, to evaluate incentivization, be it from knowledge sharing or data visualizations of the immunity curve.

Partnerships Cloud??

Today, governments’ role is expanding to encompass additional responsibilities, such as ensuring security in a virtual world, convening multinational players, and facilitating discussions amongst citizens of divergent mindsets. This ever-expanding purpose identifies partnerships as an imperative for 1) distributing the insurmountable pressures of a complex interconnected world, and 2) ensuring collective problem-solving, inclusive of a wide-range of perspectives, to enable a cohesive and comprehensive response.

The Partnerships Cloud would manage all partnership agreements across Mission Clusters. This encompasses the full process, from initiation and value proposition design, to execution. Such oversight enables a more comprehensive cooperation and collaboration, with multiple mission clusters leveraging the partnership's fullest value-add across different platforms.

Vaccination Mission: The Partnerships Cloud could propose innovative, shared risk-reward models, around government financial assistance for products developed by pharmaceutical companies to ensure a win-win in investments. Partnership could also be set up with unconventional stakeholders in the ecosystem (i.e. churches, mosques, libraries) where highest-risk populations visit and trust. It could partner with car-riding apps (i.e. Uber) to coordinate visits for the elderly, or neighborhood apps (i.e. Nextdoor) to recruit street-level vaccination champions to visit the elderly and offer assistance. Partnerships can be with device manufacturers (i.e. home oxygen monitors) to better diagnose when to go to the ER. Most importantly, the Cloud would identify ways in which the partnerships would be leveraged beyond the vaccinations schemes, and across different missions (if possible).

Data Cloud

Data-driven innovation has been a vital enabler in addressing the world’s ‘wicked problems’ - from expanding city congestion and extremist terrorism, to chauvinistic nationalism and social inequality. Governments are a major source of data, both as a producer and collector.?Yet, most government departments or units do not have Chief Data Officers or Data Scientists to tap into on-demand. How can this data be accurately categorized and safely distributed to ensure the maximum balance of benefit, security and privacy?

The Data Cloud would be the central go-to expertise of incoming and outgoing data-flows across all missions. Centralization, uniform categorization and distribution facilitate data being analyzed comprehensively, with a complete 360-perspective. This oversight role enables informed decision making by ensuring all the necessary data is shared with the relevant missions at the right time. This also allows for a stronger and more holistic message to be dispersed, both internally and externally, to encourage a specific action or persuade a certain audience.

Vaccination Mission: The Data Cloud could work with the Health Missions cluster to showcase data visualizations and infographics depicting hot zones for the virus, highlighting comparisons between concentration of outbreaks in comparison to vaccinated areas, or sharing how few people have experienced any side-effects at all. This keeps citizens and residents connected and more aware, guiding them to make better decisions, and incentivized to take the jab. Such transparency would build the trust needed in the government, its direction and its ask.

Technology Cloud

Technology is more than just an enabler it can be an exponential driver. The pandemic further highlighted the value and power of technology to ensure interconnectivity, speed, innovation, and most importantly continuity. Yet, given the dearth of deep AI and blockchain technology available for deployment, various infrastructures, government bodies and numerous systems are at an alarming risk of cyberattacks.

The Technology Cloud could disperse deep tech expertise across all missions, mitigating the effects of 'tech for tech’s sake', and instead activate real-world applications. This enables a spill-over effect, whereby tech solutions can go beyond their intended use (space travel innovations led to artificial limbs, phone cameras and even baby formula) as each Mission can leverage and innovate with the same technology differently.

Vaccination Mission: The Technology Cloud could deploy AI solutions to solve vaccination challenges, such as prioritizing certain individuals based on their demographics, or leveraging the networks and influence of certain high profile individuals to incentive the jabs. The Cloud could also create APIs (application programming interfaces) for the myriad of existing apps that are operating in silos, as a means to support decision-makers based on accurate data.

Sustainability Cloud

When it comes to sustainability - viewing the world from an overlapping social, economic, environmental lens?-?typically, only one lens is addressed by any single entity. Most of the time, economic growth is the key driver and incentive, across both government and the private sector, regardless of environmental or societal repercussions. Government has the ability and the potential to be the leader in instigating a change in mindset towards socio-economic-environmental inclusiveness through various remedial measures (i.e. taxes) and relevant missions.

It is the mandate of the Sustainability Cloud to ensure a balance (not necessarily an equality) between the three lenses. Applying social, economic and environmental perspectives, simultaneously, across all missions and initiatives eliminates the curse of short-termism plaguing today's world. Being able to readily deploy the necessary sustainability expertise ensures an active presence for all three lenses across any mission, and enables more informed decision-making based on long-term value.

Vaccination Mission: The Sustainability Cloud would be mandated to 1) run campaigns to ensure everyone is informed and knowledgeable of how to prepare for both post and pre vaccination, mitigating fatal complications; 2) alleviate the ramification on nature from billions of vaccine vials, masks and PPE waste increasing pollution levels; and 3) address expenditure, budgets, alongside supply-and-demand obstacles linked to wasted vaccination doses (which seem to be on a rise due to logistical hindrances).

Citizen Cloud

Most government departments don't have direct access to citizens, with only a handful of countries leading the way on citizen-centric approaches to governance. Portugal has been working on co-creating solutions with citizens through their ‘Citizen Shops’, and more recently the LabX, which encourages innovation by bringing together citizens and public servants to address a single issue or ideating solutions to improve citizen support. Singapore’s ‘The Moments of Life' platform enables seamless interactions between government, business and citizens by unifying multiple touch points into a single coherent service journey. In South Korea, the Citizen Design Group has been facilitating central and local government sessions with citizens for designing public services from the citizens’ point of view, engaging them throughout the complete process of policy development.?

The Citizen Cloud is mandated to ensure citizen engagement and involvement at various intervals throughout the overall process, or else we risk the activation to become yet another academic exercise with no value-add. The Cloud could counter the existing lack of understanding around public service design, as well as embed behavioral change expertise, to incentive the allegiance of citizens, and, where applicable, incentivize a flow of people to receive the benefits of a country’s specific offering.?

Vaccination Mission: The Citizen Cloud could run sessions to better understand the hindrances or incentives for taking the jab, which would better align messaging, distribution methods and support pre and post vaccinations. The Cloud could also create programs and schemes that visually foster the right conversations and behaviors. For example, those receiving vaccinations can wear a badge to signal their support of the vaccination, and the subsequent conversations can then create the fundamental network effect for others to take the jab.??

Stories Cloud

Stories are both a qualitative and quantitative tool for portraying experiences, highlighting trends and mitigating emergent issues. Authentic stories can instill trust, change behaviors, and create a ripple effect of actions, especially in times of uncertainty and complexity. UNDP’s Accelerator Labs capitalized on 'micronarratives' to facilitate a deep dive into the emergent issues post the pandemic, which could enable societies to better prepare for what needs to come next. The current randomness and segregation of messaging from governments has created siloed narratives (after the fact), making them PR archives stating the details, versus effective stories showing the journey and the impacts. This arbitrary messaging has not helped with today's increasing levels of government mistrust.

The Stories Cloud is the main communications source for all the missions. It is aware of all new initiatives, as well as the deep-rooted purpose behind every mission. Its oversight allows it to show (not tell) a comprehensive story, putting together components from various missions. This allows for a clear representation of a country’s progress and journey towards the missions.?A single story, with interconnected components, sends a powerful message of unified leadership from a well governed country, with a dedicated purpose.

Vaccination Mission: The Stories Cloud could create anecdotes, narratives and features across multiple formats - from documentaries, personal-experience snippet to social media stories. This would help transform the narrative from an impersonal vaccination mandate into a personal (human) story, encouraging others to take the jab. In the end, the overall story would portray a country’s success in achieving milestones along the way towards the greater mission.

"If you always do

what you always did,

you will always get

what you always got"

-Henry Ford

There are tectonic level shifts happening, therefore governments need to be better equipped and fluid, to both face and overcome these challenges. In today’s world, innovation and future planning seem to be isolated or centralized to specific departments, teams or labs. This creates a vacuum effect, wherein intelligence, knowledge, observations and findings do not diffuse to all corners of government. Symbiotic governments need CoCreators to facilitate a fluid movement of expertise, experiences and co-creation.

If you find this series on symbiotic government and the power of missions valuable, it would be great to have your expanded networks' views and perspectives, to help build and strengthen this thought experiment.

Please like/share/comment for others to come across this article, so we can expand the conversation, and build towards the the next post in the series, which will elaborate on how government leadership can also encompass Missionpreneurs.