Prior to its reinvention as the FCDO, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) asked LeaderSpace to help enhance one of its teams’ ability to drive innovative policy making. We worked with the team leader, his staff and representatives of neighbouring teams to capitalise on their existing skills and insights, recognising that they already innovate on a daily basis. Together, we identified and addressed the forces within and around the team that were helping and hindering innovation. The result was a team better equipped to develop innovative policy across Whitehall and internationally.
The shift the client was seeking
NATO sits at the heart of the UK’s defence policy, and the FCO’s NATO Team’s role was to promote UK objectives within in support of Euro-Atlantic security and prosperity. The team operated in a complex stakeholder environment, balancing the Cabinet Office, Ministry of Defence, Home Office, UK Parliamentarians, NATO and its member states, think tanks, NGOs, the private sector and the media – all in service of the British public.
The team’s leader, Ross Matthews, asked LeaderSpace to help his team ‘up the ante’ when it came to innovation. Given the range of threats to Euro-Atlantic Security, Ross wanted to ensure his team had the skills and confidence to develop innovative policy solutions which could challenge the status quo. He also wanted to focus on how to achieve innovation working across government departments, with his team due to become a joint unit that autumn.
Our approach to the work
It’s tempting for outsiders to ride in, dump a pile of models and tools on a team, then ride off into the sunset – leaving the team to put them to good, consistent, lasting use. But most people are already fairly innovative; that’s how we’ve survived and developed as a species. So rather than assume otherwise, we worked with the team to understand its existing strengths when it came to innovation, and what was limiting its willingness and ability to use them. After all, like most people, this team had busy, complex, high-pressured day jobs, where being more innovative could easily feel like an expensive luxury. We needed to get under their skin and work on the systemic and psychological barriers, not just hand over hints and tips.
Our approach role-modelled essential disciplines of innovation: engaging key people, ensuring clarity of purpose, understanding the ‘problem’, ring-fencing time to think, injecting challenge and disruption into established patterns, keeping it practical and – often missed – integrating creativity with respect for the status quo.
We built on existing foundations: the team’s awareness of Edward De Bono’s work on innovation, and the insights they had gained into their own and each other’s thinking styles using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). We also invited select members of neighbouring teams, to serve the objective of enhancing collaboration across organisational boundaries.
To strengthen people’s commitment to the work, we had them consider the rationale for a more innovative approach to their work and reflect on innovative policy-making they’d done in the past. We then helped them clarify what innovation meant in their context, assessed how innovative they already were day-to-day, and identified their ‘innovation remit’ – navigating a complex stakeholder environment to establish and challenge the boundaries within which the team had a licence to innovate. We defined a handful of discrete topics on which the team felt it should be innovating, and mapped the forces helping and hindering innovation in and around them.
We then helped the team address those obstacles, working on a real, current challenge, using LeaderSpace’s Three Core Disciplines (Direction, Commitment and Capacity) and drawing on the MBTI, peer feedback, psychological insight at the individual and team level, Edward De Bono’s Six Hats and a range of other tools to stimulate lateral thinking.
The impact we had
The team and their attending guests left with a better understanding of themselves and their colleagues, tools to help them innovate more effectively, and ideas for collaborative working across departments and with other governmental and non-governmental organisations. In the final months before the NATO Summit in Warsaw, they ran a number of sessions to develop policy plans quickly, drawing on the techniques from our work together. In one example alone, the approaches we’d shown them helped secure an additional £1m UK contribution towards NATO activity around the world.
“LeaderSpace provided a bespoke intervention at short notice, which met our needs perfectly. Richard’s engaging style meant there was full participation from the whole team and everyone took something away with them. This included a range of tools for collaboration and innovation and learning about themselves and their own and other’s way of working. The work we did together generated an even more positive and creative approach from the team during a busy period. This proved invaluable to the team as it prepared for the NATO Summit in Warsaw.”
