Sustaining Connections and Cooperation

“N Square created an environment to innovate … but the support (infrastructure, attention) seemed to disappear at the end. Rather than leaving the project’s future trajectory and success up to the fellows, it might be useful to consider short-term ‘bridging’ activities that take place the year following one’s N Square experience.”

MID-CAREER NUCLEAR PROFESSIONAL

“I think it’s a bit difficult to sustain the connections we built during the associated programming/fellowships. While the current [Mighty Networks] platform is nice, I don’t think it’s as good as regularly hosting in-person events.”

EARLY-CAREER NUCLEAR PROFESSIONAL

These comments highlight a misstep in project planning: While we do a good job of protecting time to design, iterate, and deliver programs, all too often we underestimate the time required to follow up on them. We move from one thing to the next too quickly, sometimes missing opportunities to advance opportunities for continued cooperation or to support the efficacy of our network. In the future we will ensure that all programs are managed to protect time and resources for the “bridging activities” mentioned above.

We, too, miss hosting in-person workshops or “design charrettes.” A staple of our approach, these highly interactive sessions allow us to bring a fuller suite of tools and techniques to creative work—including “learning journeys,” which often produce meaningful insights about how other people, organizations, and fields work with challenges analogous to those facing the nuclear field. Design charrettes also establish and cement interpersonal bonds, leading to enduring personal and professional relationships. On the other hand, we know that the time commitment involved with such place-based convenings poses difficulties for colleagues who are needed at home at the beginning and end of each day, and that the costs of international travel and accommodations are such that small convenings are sometimes insufficiently diverse because it would be so costly to design them otherwise.

And, of course, COVID persists. In light of those factors, we have decided to invest our limited resources in optimization of Mighty Networks, in our view the best available web platform for network management. Nevertheless, we are aware that we have yet to strike the ideal balance between distance collaboration and in-person work, and will make this a priority going forward.

Outsourcing of Fellowship Design and Facilitation

“A number of us in the mid-early career space talked about how therapeutic the cohort meetings were but that we’ve tried unsuccessfully or been unable to see how to use the tools produced to address the toxic challenges identified. And it doesn’t feel like there has been any followup.”

Given that N Square was originally conceived as a pilot program, several years ago the N Square staff and funder collaborative decided to explore the possibility of spinning off more mature offerings, locating them inside partner organizations in or outside the field. Our first experiment was with the fellowship, on the assumption that other colleagues with design, facilitation, and organizational development expertise would be well positioned to assume the role that N Square usually played in the fellowship. What we have learned:

N Square has established a unique combination of subject matter knowledge and process expertise that cannot easily be transferred

While we do not consider ourselves domain experts in nuclear challenges we do have an understanding of key dynamics in the nuclear system (and the nuclear field) that has taken years to develop. Conversely, while many of our nuclear colleagues have built significant capacity to practice techniques from humanentered design, systems thinking, foresight, and other domains, there is not yet a single organization with sufficient process design or facilitation expertise to run an innovation fellowship.

As we have gotten to know the field, we have gotten to know many of you

Shared history, mutual trust, and a track record of cooperation mean that the N Square team is pretty well equipped to evaluate the relative weight, relevance, or promise of ideas that surface over the course of the fellowship. This allows us both to see what fellows mean in ways that might be hard for others to see and to offer direction that they will find valuable.

On N Square’s Mighty Network, nuclear professionals and others share ideas, point out opportunities to one another, and create community.

These observations, combined with the earlier note about ensuring that we include sufficient follow-up in our project designs, have led us to decide that we will work with partners in new ways to deliver the fellowship program but will no longer plan to outsource its design or facilitation. We are aware that there may be lingering desire for follow-up from Cohort 4 in particular, and will factor that into our planning.

Structural Barriers to Innovation

N Square is, by design, not a standalone 501(c)3 organization or foundation. Instead we determined early on to remain a fiscally sponsored project, originally housed at Ploughshares Fund and now at New Venture Fund. This strategy means that we have not had to invest in back-office functions (HR, grants management, legal, IRS compliance, etc.) and has allowed us to be quite lean, adaptive, and (positively, we hope) disruptive.

On the other hand, having a professional fiscal sponsor with thousands of projects under management means that we are bound by technical and bureaucratic constraints we are continually learning about. Maybe that is a reflection of the fact that we have long pushed the boundaries of what can be done with charitable dollars in service of novel solutions. As a result, we have accumulated valuable knowledge about the legal and tax constraints involved with charitable use doctrine and how to work creatively within those boundaries— knowledge that we can, should, and will soon make accessible to the community. In other words, it is incumbent upon us to demonstrate how we have taken these structural barriers and turned them into opportunities to solve problems in new ways—that is, to take a bit of our own medicine and share what happens.

We agree with the sentiment, if not the ultimatum, implicit in this comment. If our strategy were only to build the individual capacities of promising nextgeneration leaders, we might favor more traditional “training” programs that aim to teach new skills without trying to ensure they are put into practice. But that is not our strategy, and the very real financial and other constraints in this field make that seem like a somewhat wasteful approach. A systemic, long-term commitment to innovation and change requires buy-in and alignment across all functions, from funding to leadership to professional development and strategic planning. In the absence of such alignment, it is difficult to believe that participants in our programs will be able to surmount the structural impediments to putting their learning into practice.

Yet we observe—and the survey responses we received as input to this report bear this out—that change is indeed happening in this field. People are finding ways to apply competencies acquired through the fellowship and skill-building courses. Key organizations are evolving:

• To acknowledge that success on nuclear goals is to a great extent influenced by contextual factors (society, politics in other issue spaces, economics, the environment, technology)

• To acquire better insight into those drivers of change in order to formulate more effective strategies

• To embrace innovation culture

• To adopt shared tools and language for systems thinking and problem-solving

These organizations may well be in the minority at the moment, but they are a signal that some funders, some leaders, and some planners are indeed creating space to approach policy-relevant work in new ways. While we have fallen somewhat short on our ability to influence the structural change required for this field to create a fully developed innovation system, we do think it is within reach.