Innovative policy-making at the Foreign Office

We were keen to role model the core disciplines of innovation from the start. This meant focusing on:

• Engaging key people
• Ensuring clarity of purpose
• Understanding the ‘problem’
• Integrating creativity and respect for the status quo
• Ring-fencing time to think
• Injecting both challenge and disruption into established patterns of thinking and working
• Keeping it practical – by demonstrating alternative approaches to gathering opinions, analysing data, generating and critiquing ideas, and selling new propositions to key stakeholders

We explored Ross’s objectives for the work, the FCO’s capacity to invest time and resources in the work, and participants’ past experience working with innovation and team dynamics. We were keen to build on existing foundations, such as the team’s awareness of Edward De Bono’s work on innovation and insights they’d gained into their own and each other’s working and thinking styles from using the Myers-Briggs (MBTI) personality tool. We also invited select members of neighbouring teams to take part, helping us attend to the objective of enhancing collaboration across organisational boundaries.

Ross then laid the foundations for the work before introducing LeaderSpace to the rest of his team and its guests. In doing so, he encouraged them to consider the rationale for a more innovative approach to their work and reflect on innovative policy-making they’d done in the past, as well as on some of the questions LeaderSpace would be posing once we came together.

Working with the team and its guests, we then invested in:

• Clarifying what innovation meant in their context
• Assessing how innovative they were in the day-to-day – both individually and collectively
• Identifying their ‘innovation remit’, navigating their complex stakeholder environment to establish and challenge the boundaries within which the team had a license to innovate
• Defining a handful of discrete topics on which the team felt it should be innovating
• Exploring the various factors and forces helping and hindering innovation, which helped us create an extensive map of the obstacles to innovation in and around the team

From here, we applied our Three Core Disciplines to help the team take innovative approaches to addressing those obstacles – applying their learning to a real, current challenge. This included drawing on the MBTI, Edward De Bono’s Six Hats, peer feedback, offering psychological insights at an individual and team level, and a range of tools to stimulate lateral thinking.

No team coaching engagement is without its challenges. The challenges we faced at the FCO were challenges we face in any organisation seeking to be more innovative. It’s tempting for outsiders to ride in and dump lots of models, tools and techniques on a team, then ride off into the sunset expecting the team to put those tools to good, consistent and lasting use. The reality is, most people are naturally fairly innovative – that’s how we’ve survived and developed as a species.

Rather than making assumptions, we worked with the team to understand its environment, its self-perceptions and its existing assets for innovation, as well as the factors limiting its ability (and willingness) to innovate. The latter was critical: the reality is, like most people, these are people with busy, complex and high-pressured day jobs. Being even more innovative could easily feel like an expensive luxury or unreasonable expectation. So we needed to really get under their skin and work on the systemic and psychological barriers to innovation, as well as providing helpful hints and tips.

The team and its guests were left with a better understanding of themselves and their colleagues, a range of tools to help them innovate more effectively and a wide array of creative ideas to enhance innovation and collaborative working across their departments and in relationships with other governmental and non-governmental organisations. This proved invaluable to the team as it prepared for the NATO Summit in Warsaw. In the final months before the summit the team hosted a number sessions to quickly develop policy plans drawing on the techniques from the session. In one example alone, the approach helped achieve an additional £1m UK contribution towards NATO activity around the world.”