Why D.I. (Disruptive Innovation) in the Public Sector and Community Governance

In the last post, a strategy of applying Professor Clayton Christensen’s Theory of Disruptive Innovation to the public sector and community governance was raised. More needs to be done but the question that needs to be asked more directly is “why?” What are the big problems that Disruptive Innovation or a D.I. approach has the potential to solve that will likely remain beyond our grasp without it? Does it even matter why one innovates, let alone disrupts in the public sector?

Several premises need to be set before addressing this question. The first is that numerous communities are in serious financial difficulties. The second is that a very sizable portion of those problems are due to decisions made in the past by leaders, both public sector and political, in city halls based on auto-centric and accelerated growth fueled by debt resulting in an overabundance and misalignment of retail space relative to the economic needs of communities, not to mention the problems that accompany that. Third, the economy is a complex system and becoming more complex not only with exotic financing mechanisms but the innumerable basic interactions of business transactions by autonomous agents across a global stage. Fourth, this complexity is feeding and is fed by the realignment of the economy to metropolitan areas around the globe, which do not have their own level of representative government. Fifth, that smaller local governments are, it can be argued, in too many cases doubling down on past bad decisions, and seeking to maintain control through overly complicated processes based on twentieth century management making them incapable of addressing complex, wicked challenges of the twenty-first century. Sixth, that as a result city halls can become entrenched over time in which, despite the appearance of democratic inclusion, community engagement becomes more and more of a whitewash, effectively disengaging, disenfranchising and disempowering people over time. The result is that our communities fall further behind. A follow up premise at seven is that due to the financial difficulties facing communities and the role that public sector pensions play, in large measure due to decisions made by those holding power in local government institutions, the nature of public sector employment will change and therefore the nature and essence of local community governance. The choices are between that which is most likely to be played out being local community services are provided in an increasingly commodified manner by McGovernment type institutions and constituents become customers hoping for resolution of problems through call centers with no real hope of meaningful input or alternatively a means is devised to instill community members with the capacity of being true co-creators of democracy and having a meaningful role in the creation of their communities.

This is an extensive list and communities don’t necessarily interact directly with the first three on the list but the shifting of economic concentration through what the Brookings Institute is calling the Metropolitan Revolution does have an impact upon smaller but far more numerous communities. The inability of community members to change the direction or enhance the ability of their community because of power held by a few is also of direct consequences. Individual communities will vary in the degree to which they see themselves falling under each premise, some far more so than others.

To innovate or not is one question and it seems logical that communities would want to innovate to optimize providing better services based on the wishes of the community while holding down costs. To disrupt, and to integrate and apply that disruption through a process of innovation is another question.

For the entrepreneur working for economic reasons, the answer why apply disruptive innovation is obvious, once you understand how disruptive innovation works. It permits one to build a company from nothing that can go on to dominate a market. It’s the most effective way to innovate as a means of generating tremendous wealth. In business it could be argued, the reasons to disrupt make intuitive sense. It may be more matter though of disruptive innovation being an inherent organizing principle in economics whether the entrepreneur or market entrant has a full understanding or not. System elements within a business environment if aligned properly, including the creation of ‘asymmetries of motivation,' or perhaps incentives would be a better term in this case, will more likely result in disruption of the market in question. This raises the hypothesis that disruptive innovation could be brought about by design.

The asymmetries ascribed by Christensen cause the creation of noncompetitive space between the entrant and incumbent. The entrant initially goes after customers that the incumbent has no interest in but that is not enough, the entrant must also continually attract those of diminishing interest. If the entrant is not able over time to pull away customers from the incumbent there will be no disruption, only a new niche market. The entrant invariably works from the bottom of the market up forcing the incumbent to circle their wagons around an ever smaller number of high-end users until they also jump ship and the incumbent folds. This process of progressively moving up, however, does not need to be readily apparent at the start.

It is the entrant, entrepreneur or startup firm, who is incentivized to move or to react to the different elements of the business environment moving them into alignment through management processes to result in the disruption. This is done though by incentivizing customers or users to adopt a specific solution to a specific Job-To-Be-Done or JTBD of the customer which the incumbent has failed to adequately address. Overall, this starts as a limited or narrowly focused solution meaning that only a small part of the market will choose the entrant over the incumbent but overtime through technical improvements, proper management, greater customer education and acceptance and most importantly that this occurs within a noncompetitive field due to the “asymmetries of motivation” there is a transformation from scarcity to abundance not only for the individual participants of the system, particularly the entrant and customers (incumbents, not so much) but for the economic system overall. If the right solution can be found for the true JTBD of the constituent as opposed to ‘it doesn't come in that size’ approach of incumbents, little outside motivation is required and users become co-marketers and in some cases co-innovators.

The value created for the customer in fulfilling the JTBD does not exist before the disruption and is great enough to substantially improve the economic value of both the customer and entrant and especially the monetary assets of the entrant, all of which in combination are greater than the loss of economic value of the incumbent which are for the most part transferred to the entrant and customers.

What about in public service and community governance? There is a long list of specific issues that could be addressed to consider. Do we first prioritize? Which is more important, introducing more self-service options for government, building community engagement, changing how we select representatives and the rules of engagement for their terms, fixing a corrupt tax system, or figuring out a way to get our debt under control? Is basic infrastructure, roads, bridges, or is border control more important or the social safety net? Why are we unable to balance the books? Why are people disengaged or feel they aren’t empowered and that government is the enemy? Are there limits to good governance?

There is very unlikely a D.I. magic bullet which addresses all of these but then that should not be expected. At this stage, it is not even necessary to directly determine the means of addressing any of these and even if we did, it would likely be a sustaining innovation without an organizing principle of disruption behind it. Much of the success of D.I. in the private market is more apparent in hindsight and solutions to JTBD are only fully understood after they have been adapted and adopted for some time. No one should assume limits to what could be created as possible solutions in the future. It can also be proposed that the list of issues raised above are in reality more from or in reaction to an incumbent led perspective and that what is needed is to take some time to apply design thinking methodologies to create better JTBD solutions focused directly on the perspective of the community and its members. Without a D.I. perspective, the more likely approach is to simply wait for the next sustaining innovation to appear which in reality does nothing to change the nature of community governance and especially not that of entrenched community government institutions. What should be examined more closely are more general factors defining the application of disruptive innovation to the public sector.

There should be expected to be fundamental differences between using D.I. in the private market economy and the public sector. The driving incentive of private market disruptive innovation is the personal motivation of the entrepreneurial entrant. D.I. can also, however, be viewed from a systems perspective made up by the relevant components of the economy or business environment in which the D.I. could potentially occur.

The organizing principle of D.I. is admittedly not as great within the public sector or community based governance as it is within the private market economy. It could not be assumed but instead would have to be purposely applied. The intention is to argue that this is needed to bring about the desired paradigm level changes needed by our communities.

Would it be possible to create something similar to the “asymmetries of motivation” within the public sector and at the same time address relevant community based JTBD or civic issues that could be scaled? Could a comparable shift from scarcity to abundance be made within an environment, with which community governance was concerned, by the community itself?

If the answer is even a possible yes, if the deliberative design of disruptive innovation could be applied to the creation of new community paradigms then this strategy should be pursued. There is no expectation of quick fixes by sudden bursts of D.I. insight. Community advocates, those incentivized to take on a D.I. perspective, could though raise the potential of innovative disruption shifting, at a community level, a field of scarcity and abundance over time. At first through disrupting innovations as opposed to disruptive innovations in that the former do directly challenge the incumbent or through basically outside sustaining innovation efforts of organizations such as Code for America. The public sector incumbent can then choose to oppose or adopt the specific innovation. One example of disrupting innovation is the Building a Better Block approach initiated often through a Tactical Urbanist perspective. These, by themselves, may not though result in the paradigm level changes that are coming but that will not be defined in a manner of our choosing if left to their own devices. Going beyond these though is not something that can be done after the fact. An approach featuring an organizing principle of natural community inclusion which did not require the blessings of any entrenched city hall would be arguably optimal.

An outside of city hall, grassroots generated from the community approach which incorporated a disruptive innovation perspective would have the potential to take these ideas, recombine them, re-adapt them, re-apply them through better focused JTBD solutions in an environment of imposed 'asymmetries of motivation’ with an overall long term objective of establishing far more expansive use of radical, or as recognized by this effort fundamental, community engagement. What needs to be developed next is who and how and what determines them? The particulars of this theory of disruptive innovation in the public sector and community governance, such as JTBD or how incumbent businesses and entrenched city halls have equivalent roles in a system of disruptive innovation, despite having no other commonalities, needs to be developed further.

Community Engagement versus Engaged Community

The issue considered In the last post was that, “We need to stop sucking at community engagement.”  A fairly easy accusation to make but more should be done in diagnosing the reasons and coming up with alternatives.  First, who is the ‘we’ we are talking about?  Taking this from a new community paradigms perspective it can’t only be those working in government and especially not City Hall.  These can be used as avenues of engagement but not as the foundations for engagement. Instead we have to look more closely at the nature of communities and how they engage, as referred to in the last post, with other external or separate organizations, institutions, and other communities as well as how they engage internally between members to members or members to the larger community.  

To better understand the workings of community engagement will mean listening and learning again from the many voices participating in the LinkedIn Community Engagement Group. Stuart Graeme, who hails from Australia, was introduced on these pages in the last post. He raised the question, “Can anyone help with a definition of community engagement relating to people being involved in their local community not in terms of organisations engaging the community?” to which a number of Community Engagement professionals contributed a response.  So it seems that one can learn lessons in community engagement from across both the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. 

Once one starts looking closely at community engagement, it becomes easy to understand why its hard to come up with a definitive understanding because of the number of different terms used to define it with the definition of those terms often being amorphous.  

A more workable definition of the first half of the term under consideration, ‘community’ will wait for a later post. The definition of community will be more of a matter of understanding as a system so will likely be more abstract and involve systems thinking in some aspect. This means taking a few steps back to understand ‘community’ and its ‘engagement’ within an environment as a system.  Less passion and more analysis but for the purpose of better understanding where the passion needs to be directed.  The focus for this post is on the second half ‘engagement’ considered as more of a verb expressing action, state, or a relation between two things as in the act of being engaged.

What is commonly labeled community engagement usually involves some external organization or institution that is seen as being the subject responsible for the engagement.  How engagement, as a verb, is implemented depends upon the planned objective of the subject institution. The institution has its own motivation to engage the community. “City Hall will host a legally mandated meeting, on Thursday at 7 pm, on a new project to get comments from the public.” The community then becomes the passive object.  The last post referred to local governments needing buy in from residents for certain projects.  It is therefore reasonable to suspect that what is called community engagement is, as one CE professional put it, often more about governing and controlling and not really about the community.  

Community engagement can be realized in two basic ways or a combination of the two, either by the assistance of some external development services, including local government, religious or other nongovernmental organizations or instead by communities themselves through the use of self-administrative and social structures.  Currently, most energy and resources are allocated by and toward the first category with either meager support to active opposition for the second.  Under new community paradigms, resources and energy are allocated by both approaches to supporting the second path to be taken by the community itself. 

The idea of restricting “community engagement by formal organizations" conveys something one-directional.  As one CE professional pointed out, engagement should be a mutual two way process and not only a one way process. 

Another CE professional participating in the discussion proposed that instead of talking about community engagement what should be talked about is an engaged community.  One active citizen made it known, according to one story, that as far as he was concerned the community was already very engaged with each other, and that the project should really be about the government institution in question learning to engage with an already engaged community.  

Others cited lessons learned from Results Based Community Planning by the Australian Local Community Services Association through which they discovered that when the local councils (similar I suspect to city councils or planning commissions here) presented an idea as a plan, what it conveyed to the community was an excessively top down management approach.  The community preferred instead to talk about community action.  

How successful such efforts are depends upon the make up of the community as illustrated by another story involving Steve Johnson of Organ’s Portland University, who when participating in a number of community discussions of a planning matter observed that in some cases, “People just turned up and before anyone announced the process they just started working together. They grabbed markers, flip chart paper, and started talking, writing, drawing and came up with some ideas, documents concerns and aspirations, etc.”  At others, even though he made the same workshop resources available when people arrived they instead just sat down, looking awkward, waiting for someone to lead them. The lesson to be learned is that the extend to which communities can be engaged needs to take into account the extent to which the members of those communities are engaged with each other. 

Communities are in reality organic and complex rather than mechanical and complicated entities. Seeing communities as complex allows one to understand community engagement from an organic perspective by which the engagement is initiated and led by the community through a grassroots, bottom up approach.   Community engagement from an organic bottoms up perspective involves grassroots social structures participating in the improvement of their community from the identification of communal challenges to the realization, and management of projects identified to address those challenges.  Involving the community as a whole in a participatory manner becomes what defines community engagement. 

Engagement, when not coupled with community from a top down perspective, then is more likely to refer to activism, advocacy, networking, representing, connecting or other appropriately descriptive verbs.

Grassroots community engagement, however, rarely occurs spontaneously without some organizing focus or energy and that often comes from a formally constituted organization, whether internal or external. 

Community engagement then, according to one CE professional, becomes about planning the process to build both the 'Bonding' and 'Bridging' of 'Social Capital' within a  community.  One metric whether community engagement has been successful or not is the extent to which the process has helped the community to build social capital, making the community stronger and more connected.  "Social Capital" was seen though by some as being part of a technical discourse with which the majority of people are not engaged, making it a more useful term when examining community engagement from a more systems perspective.

Governmental institutions, however, often do not take kindly to the organic development of communities. The trouble is that government institutions treat community problems and community engagement as complicated issues, which they can at least in part control, as compared to a complex problem with which they have a great deal of difficulty.  

The organic based direction a community takes can be diverted by institutions attempting to fulfill what they see as their institutional mission.  Even when well intentioned, professionals whether directly involved in community engagement or more likely indirectly as part of some other function, say economic development, often lack a true understanding or appreciation of what community engagement as a means of building real community capacity is about. 

Even if one starts with the right motivations and frame of reference, it is still difficult to work with a community that is disengaged or disenfranchised or with a group that lacks sufficient social capital in the larger community.  This can arguably be widely applicable as many if not most people in any large community feel disengaged, as social capital is only generated where people are actively engaged.  The individual then rather than the organization becomes the most basic component of community engagement.

Those individuals engaged in their communities at an organizational level are often known as ‘community volunteers’, while those working in the community without the backing of any organization are likely to be known simply as ‘good neighbors’.  This goes back to some of the ideas discussed in the last post. 

Stuart Graeme examines ideas of individual community engagement by citing an article by Colin Williams, "Fostering community engagement and tackling undeclared work" which asserted that community engagement involves "spending time, engaged in unpaid activity, doing something that aims to benefit someone (individuals or groups) other than or in addition to close relatives, or to benefit the environment."  

In Stuart’s view this does not necessarily have to happen through an organization but could arise more like the "good neighbor" concept.  It would be based, in my view upon the existence of what has been labeled ‘Civil Society, particularly when thinking of community paradigms as a set of community relations.  Stuart also seems to suggest that these 'good neighbors' could be the ones to start in engaging with the community to build the connectedness comprising the 'Bonding' and 'Bridging' of of 'Social Capital.'  

They are also the ones who initiate the creation of new community paradigms by ‘Building Better Blocks’ or encouraging direct deliberative democracy in their communities.  The idea of volunteering becomes not only a matter of community engagement, it is also a matter of community building especially in a period of often unavoidable austerity as we find ourselves.  It can have an economic impact as well as a social or political impact on a community as was first raised by this endeavor under  A Beginning: Working to create Liveable Cities through Liveanomics and "Liveanomics" EIU Livable Cities Studies wiki page.

Community paradigms as a set of community relations

The relationship between new community paradigms efforts and existing city hall governments, including their political and public agency elements has been raised in past articles concerning other matters but not directly addressed. This needs to be clarified further not only in relation to city hall but all components of a community as a new community paradigm would not be possible if just one component of a community were to undergo fundamental change, all do, both individually and collectively.

A community taking a new community paradigm approach as its path for future growth would not be dependent upon institutions, though it could and would use them. The glue that holds a new community paradigm approach to community building would be a concept of civil society. This concept of using civil society as a platform for new community paradigms was discussed last month on this blog. Taking some relevant definitions from that post, as put forth by the Australian Centre for Civil Society, first what it is not:

The term does not refer to 'politeness' or 'civility' in public life, as important as this is.

It refers to that part of society that is not part of the state, hence the term 'civilian' when used to distinguish a person in civil society from military personnel or state officials, or the notion of a civil offence in law which is an offence between persons in civil society rather than a criminal matter.

What is civil society in relation to new community paradigms?

The term 'civil society' refers to the relationships and associations that make up our life at grass-roots levels of society, in families, neighbourhoods and voluntary associations, independent of both government and the commercial world. Our aim is to strengthen civil society and empower people within it.

As was said in the post on Visiting Innovatitown and Parochialville, this blog is directed toward the individual citizen of a community who has decided to take on the challenge of creating fundamental changes in their community and is seeking resources to bring that about. It is being designed for someone who sees themselves as being a producer of democratic governance and the tangible public policies that come from that and not merely a consumer of those policies.

Civil society as a platform for new community paradigms provided some insights to possible relations with traditional institutional and bureaucratic forms of municipal government. This relationship could be anything from a full partnership, an uneasy alliance, to direct opposition. An effort to implement new community paradigms would, however, need to go further regardless of cooperation of the existing local institutional political power structure.

It would require its own organizational structure. It is not the intention of this blog or the related wiki to create the basis for such a structure. It will work to suggest templates but each community will have to find its own form of structure that works best for it. It would hopefully be based though on the ideas of Community Governance as put forth by the New Community Paradigms wiki.

There will be a change in defining a different role for the citizen or under the concept of civil society reverting to an older role of ‘voluntary participation‘ as opposed to 'volunteering' in one’s community.

Volunteer can be defined as 1. a person who voluntarily offers himself or herself for a service or undertaking or 2. a person who performs a service willingly and without pay, which may imply placing one's self at the disposal of some institution. This raises its own set of issues but the focus here is taking on a role of greater active participation in not only achieving the community’s goals but defining those goals in an ongoing basis as well.

It seeks to answer the question from the post on Using Online Communities to encourage Direct Democracy for On-The-Ground Communities, How do we reach untapped "domestic reserves of energy" - people who don't vote, don't volunteer, or don't talk with neighbors? With the answer, It starts with participation, respect, and working together toward a common goal.

It does not require authorization or sponsorship by city hall as was shown in the post on the Better Block project, a demonstration tool that shows How to Build a Better Block by temporarily re-visioning an area to show the potential to create a walkable, vibrant, neighborhood center.

It does require, as was said in the post Second look at Making Cities Work, creating an environment from which there is more social capital from which to draw. This will require a good deal of voluntary participation from members of the community.

Voluntary participation is a better term, as defined in the post Civil society as a platform for new community paradigms, than volunteering as it is not limited to formal volunteering in a community through institutions but includes all altruistic forms of social interaction.

Voluntary participation, at its best, is a face to face proposition which means creating social connections within a community, helping to increase the democratic participation being sought.

It would also work to change the relationship with the professional workforce core of municipal governance, the planners, engineers, economic development professionals among others, who implement the supposed goals and objectives of the community.

This relationship has soured over the years because of perceived inequities between public and private compensation. There has also been the rise of a barrier of expertise between city hall and the community. This was touched upon in the last blog post Strong Towns and job creation - navigating between Scylla and Charybdis.

I hold to the belief that there is truth to the Strong Towns view that there has been too great of a dependency on government professionals. This is most often true when such a dependency is enmeshed in a bureaucratic or politically skewed system. A sizable portion of the responsibility of the problems facing communities needs to be laid at the feet of economic development and planning professionals. Individually, though, most people in government are endeavoring to make the community better.

The professionals in the field may complain that the layoffs, budget cuts and recent thrashings found in the media on too generous retirement benefits are unfair (and they are) but it is becoming an increasingly moot point because the fundamental nature of the economy and the interaction between government and citizens is changing.

Communities are either going to a commodified basis of government services in which employees work in a Mac’government role or communities will be pursuing some form of new community paradigms and government professionals will have an opportunity to participate in an emerging creative economy. Many of the old institutions will not be able to adapt to these changes. This will be explored further in future posts, in particular, the relationship between amateur community members and institutional professionals.

Finally, it means a change in working with and building strong relationships with other change-agent organizations and community groups. This is part of the reasoning behind the New Community Paradigms Facebook Connections wiki page. This aspect also needs to be developed further.

Creating New Community Paradigms by Building Better Blocks TEDxOU - Jason Roberts -

Opposite to the business as usual ‘top down’ concept of urban design is the community based BETTER BLOCK process, founded in Dallas’ Oak Cliff by Jason Roberts and Andrew Howard.

The Better Block project is a demonstration tool that temporarily re-visions an area to show the potential to create a walkable, vibrant, neighborhood center and shows How to Build a Better Block.  It has the feel of flashmob architecture and an occupy your community approach to community development.

The idea and the charrettes to realize it have quickly spread to cities like Memphis, St. Louis, New York, and Boston. National media coverage includes NPR, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

The BETTER BLOCK approach is action oriented as opposed to a process of deliberative consideration and advisement under the auspices of a recognized body of authority like a City Council.

While the BETTER BLOCK approach did not do anything particularly criminal, it obviously did in some cases thumb its nose at city regulations and policies.  It does, however, follow some important principles that it discovered in creating the process of building a BETTER BLOCK that are aligned with the process of creating new community paradigms and with a Strong Towns approach.

Below are some of the key elements needed:

• - Identify a location with a block of buildings that has a good pedestrian form, but lacks a complete street. Typically pre-war built areas, or former streetcar intersections.
• - Assemble team of grassroots community activists, artists, and DIY’ers. If possible, work with existing area non-profit leaders or organizers (Community Gardens groups, local volunteer corps, etc.)
• - Create groups to develop and install temporary “pop-up” businesses to show the potential for what could be if the street had a more inviting presence. 
• - Include as many people-friendly aesthetics. We worked with a local props warehouse to bring in planters to help divide the street, and temporary street lighting. You can also build your own planters from old pallets, build sandwich boards. 
• - Paint your own cycle track! You can use a lime green paint in the typical parking area and paint a 5′ stripe. It’s also good to add a 2′ buffer zone (painted white diagonal lines) to allow for adjacent parking/door zone clearance.
• - Invite artists to perform in the street. Music is a key component to having an exciting street. Use a guitar amplifier and pump out tracks from an iPod, or invite DJ’s, drum circles, et cetera.
• - Remember that people want a reason to stay and be apart of the environment. Be sure to provide plenty of seating, things to read (maps, build simple kiosks to use as community boards, food/drink). Chess boards, et cetera. Print out and post the story of the block (its history, its present, its future as a neighborhood place).

The final piece of advice from BETTER BLOCK is to:

- Invite your Mayor, council members, city staff, so they can see the possibilities for themselves. Be sure to track sales to show the increase in area business (potential for increased tax revenue is a city’s largest motivator for change), and spotlight how traffic slows but people still have easy access and come out.