7.1 Horizontal Not Just Vertical One significant benefit of creating a civic innovation capacity is that this core team can begin working across and bridging the various silos inside the city government. Beginning to introduce a common innovation language that can be used by all departments and disciplines adds significant muscle to the government’s ability to become more adaptive, more resilient and more able to address complex challenges when they arrive.
7.2 Outreach Not Just Internal While many civic innovation initiatives begin phase 1, with some form of internal team skill-building transformation, ultimately that team will need to engage externally in the community to be effective. Operating externally in the context of hands-on changemaking is an orientation not typically found in governmental contexts. Now within their civic innovation team, civic leaders are acknowledging the need to onboard in phase 2, externally directed innovation leadership skills.
8. Visual Systemic Thinking
“One significant benefit of creating a civic innovation capacity is that this core team can begin working across and bridging the various silos inside the city government.”
Many challenges that exist in our communities are interconnected with other challenges, which makes it important to consider each of them from a systems thinking perspective. This often involves a different mode of thinking that is typically not found in governmental contexts. Savvy leaders are integrating systems thinking and visualization to make the connections between diverse challenges more visual and understandable to multiple constituents.
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