Failing Forward in Local Government: a CPI and NACA collaboration
By Devon Genua, Senior Associate, North America; Josh Sorin, Global Director, Climate Action; Andrea Mirviss, Program Manager, North America; and Majo Acosta Robayo, Senior Associate, North America
Failing forward is synonymous with innovation - with identifying problems and figuring out the right solutions to address them. As the County Administrator for Lane County, Oregon (OR) and the President of the National Association of County Administrators, I am familiar with the public sector’s many barriers to innovation. For many years, and for many good reasons, we have been laser-focused on managing risk, oftentimes to the detriment of experimenting with new ideas. But this approach is no longer tenable: the residents we serve call for a more responsive, resilient, and creative government. They are asking us to fail forward in the name of progress.
As leaders of large institutions, making this change can be more difficult than we care to admit. We can’t just tell people to be more innovative, to take more risks, and then simply to expect results to materialize. We need to shift our thinking from the traditional, top-down approach where we try to tell people what to do, and instead think about how we want our organizations to be. We need to create the conditions that enable all staff - from senior leadership through the frontline - to be innovators themselves.
For public servants out there considering adapting this work to your own communities, I recommend the Fail Forward process wholeheartedly. The process empowers people to embrace continuous learning and to take the initiative to get stuff done. Despite what the name might connote at first glance, Failing Forward is a fundamentally optimistic endeavor. The process is rooted in a firm belief in the ability of governments to reflect on what hasn't worked and the courage to imagine what could work better in their communities. It has been effective in Lane County, and I know it can be effective for you, too.
Sincerely,
Steve Mokrohisky
President of the National Association of County Administrators (NACA)
Lane County Administrator
Program overview
In the summer of 2021, the Centre for Public Impact and the National Association of County Administrators asked public servants from county governments across the country a rather sensitive question: why is it so hard for you to acknowledge and learn from failures? What do you want to do about it?
Through a year-long pilot program titled Fail Forward in Local Government, 100+ public servants from four different counties embarked on a journey to answer those questions. They interviewed people inside and outside of government to better understand the barriers they experience to learning from failure, and then tested out new ideas to break down those barriers. By the end of the year, departments developed a set of beliefs, relationships, and practices that enabled a culture of innovation rooted in teams’ ability to learn from failures, or 'fail forward.'
Pilot program
Fail Forward in local government program purpose & origins
The Fail Forward in Local Government program aimed to build cultures of innovation in which employees - from department directors to frontline workers - are incentivized and motivated to embrace experimentation and continuous learning in their day-to-day. Rather than focusing on one particular policy area or program to innovate on, the program is designed to create the enabling conditions for innovation to occur. To that end, its core objectives included: stronger appetites for risk-taking, increased organizational agility and resilience, improved psychological safety, and greater capacities to identify and solve problems for residents.
The program focused on the idea of failing forward (e.g., learning from failures) because we believe that, regardless of the degree of an innovation’s complexity, the innovation process begins when an individual or team notices things are not going according to plan and tests out different ideas to address the problem. Learning from failures along the way is key to finding the best solutions.
The program design was informed by three main sources: human learning systems, human-centered design, and CPI & the Aspen Institute for Urban Innovation’s original research on failing forward. For more information about these sources, see our Appendix.
Pilot program structure
The pilot program had three phases: understanding barriers to learning from failure, experimenting with ideas to address those barriers, and planning to embed those ideas (and new ways of working) over time within broader department structures and policies. Before launching the program, they conducted a pre-program setup phase where they established core Fail Forward teams comprised of ten to twelve team members from a diversity of experiences and roles.
Phase one: understanding barriers & assets to learning from failure. Participants embarked on a two-month process to explore why it is so difficult to learn from failure in their departments. They did stakeholder mapping, conducted interviews with people both inside and outside of government, and analyzed what they learned. Participants completed Phase one with clear, well-rounded articulations of cultural and systemic barriers to innovation.
Phase two: experimenting with ideas to break down barriers. Participants then spent eight months experimenting with new ideas to break down these barriers. They tested ideas out with different groups, modifying them based on the results of their tests, and scaling accordingly.
Phase three: embedding & scaling the influence of successful ideas for sustainable culture change. Participants developed and implemented plans to ensure that their ideas would be sustainable (e.g., determining ownership) and that their influence could be scaled more broadly (e.g., sharing their ideas with other departments or localities). Further, the teams developed plans to ensure that the skills and behaviors they developed through the process would continue after the program was completed.
Masterclasses
This program is predicated on the belief that culture change must start from the top of an organization. To that end, we paired the departmental workshops with four, two-hour virtual Executive-level masterclasses on leadership topics related to innovation, risk-taking, and learning from failure. The first session, led by Toby Lowe, explored how government leaders can build learning systems by focusing on the theory and practice of Human Learning Systems. The second session, led by Hilary Cottam, focused on the importance of relationships, connection, and radical experimentation for creating healthier public systems. The third masterclass, led by Harvard Kennedy School professor Dr. Jorrit de Jong and former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter focused on how leaders can build and sustain cultures of curiosity over time. The final masterclass, led by Shamichael Hallman and Susan Dalton focused on building an external ecosystem of residents, community members, and cross-sectoral stakeholders that enable learning from failure.
Program participants
In total, departments from four U.S. county governments completed the program (with two-three departments participating per county). Departments reflected a wide range of service areas (e.g., Human Services, Public Works, Parks and Recreation). Each department team consisted of roughly ten public servants with staff at all levels, spanning from the frontline employees to department directors. Departments operated independently, each supported by a CPI coach. The masterclass program operated in parallel to the workshops, and attendees included department directors, county administrators, and other senior executives.
Pilot program impact
This program was designed to address interpersonal and structural challenges to innovation. While only a pilot - and therefore with ample space to fail forward on the design and structure itself - it was highly effective at creating cultural dynamics where all staff see themselves as innovators.
In fact, 92% of participants observed positive cultural changes in their department as a result of the ideas they developed. One department director summed up her department’s progress: "People now understand that everybody has the ability to initiate a change, that everyone can bring something that can be changed whether small or big. Seeing immediate results caused this: someone saying 'it should be this way' and you see that turnaround and inspiration that something will happen now motivates that person to speak up more and affect changes on their own."
One challenge that teams faced was low psychological safety, or the inability to discuss hard topics without fear of personal or professional repercussions. Indeed, at the beginning of the program, only 61% of frontline staff felt that their team would support them in the event of a failure. To address this, teams focused on new ways to build stronger relationships across hierarchies and teams. By the end of the program, the number of frontline staff who felt “comfortable trying new things because they knew their team had their back” had increased to 94%.
Teams also faced structural challenges in learning from failures. In some cases, staff simply did not have the time for reflective conversations. In others, staff with fresh ideas had no clear avenue to share them, which made them less inspired to do so. As one department described this challenge: “We do not have a defined process for staff to learn what is and is not working… This leads to low morale, makes staff feel devalued, and turnover. It also means information about successes and failures is never shared.” To address this, many teams focused on creating new structures to identify failures and discuss solutions. By the end of the program, 85% felt that staff at all levels felt more empowered to contribute to continuous improvement efforts.
Teams also developed a wide range of skills that will enable them to identify, analyze, and take action to address future failures and promote innovation. In particular, they learned how to challenge their assumptions through conducting user interviews, prototype testing, and survey development. Participants learned how to experiment with new ideas in a low-stakes way before rolling them out more broadly. By the close of the program, 96% of participants said they already use or plan to use what they learned in the program in their other work.