© 2017 PSD ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

2017 Municipal

Innovators Community

Conference In Review

September 27-28, 2017 | Guelph, Ontario

Pre-Conference Workshop

Session Insights

Presented by,

Presented by the Public Sector Digest

Tyler Sutton & Sloane Sweazey

rom September 27-28th, 2017, municipal employees and public servants from

across Canada gathered in Guelph, Ontario for the third annual Municipal

Innovators Community conference. The conference allowed for participants to

share and celebrate their innovative municipal work, and most importantly, learn

from other municipalities to ensure the future growth and prosperity of their own

communities. Municipalities are faced with emerging challenges, such as those linked to climate

change and a growing and changing demographic, while also tackling old struggles, most notably

financial restraints. The Municipal Innovators Community conference offers municipalities the

ability to learn from one another and gain valuable resources, strengthening their capacity to

provide sustainable, effective and efficient public services.

PRE-CONFERENCE: September 26, 2017

PSD Presents: A Workshop in Municipal Innovation

To kick off the conference, PSD held the pre-conference “Workshop on Municipal Innovation.”

The workshop began with TED Talk-style presentations from five municipal innovators, providing

examples of innovative solutions implemented in their respective communities. The following

duration of the workshop involved two group sessions. In the first group session, participants

shared their own municipal issues and challenges with fellow attendees and innovators, and in

the second group session, brainstormed and offered possible solutions to overcome them. The

following sections provide summaries of the challenges and innovative solutions discussed.

Asset Management (AM) Participants shared the lack of priority dedicated to AM initiatives by municipal management as a

core challenge. As such, municipal assets risk being improperly maintained. Central to this issue

is the challenge of receiving management buy-in to support AM activities. Another major

associated challenge was data collection. A suggested solution to the former challenge was a

bottom-up approach: exemplifying the benefit of asset management and then presenting

findings to senior leadership for more support.

AM software is a solution to the latter data collection challenge. Even more, making

management aware of funding opportunities to lever asset management initiatives, such as for

purchasing AM software, is another practical solution. FCM’s Municipal Asset Management

Program offers funding opportunities specifically for asset management activities, offering a

practical solution to communities whose management’s resistance is simply due to lack of

F

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available funds. For Ontario communities, it is also worth noting Bill 6 regulations to encourage

management to be proactive about fulfilling future AM requirements.1

Funding Challenges One of the most pressing challenges facing municipalities is ensuring adequate funding for

projects and services. This challenge was discussed at length in the group discussions.

Participants noted that the fear of funding cuts discourages departments to share their project

ideas with other departments. The lack of engagement may result in departments being

unaware of relevant projects that they can collaborate on, which in turn risks inefficiencies in

service delivery – exacerbating the negative effects of departmental silos. This particular issue

illuminates the lack of communication between departments in municipal government, another

problem highlighted. A solution to overcome lack of communication between departments is

employing an internal software system that enables employees to converse with each other,

sharing work activities and material. More open dialogue can hopefully allow for greater

collaboration between departments and in effect, provide more funding and resources for

projects. Of course, it is always important to be proactive about grant opportunities available to

municipalities as well.

Government Culture An overarching issue highlighted by participants was the overwhelming need for a change in

culture within municipal governance, emphasizing the slow pace of culture change in municipal

government. As noted by participants, it takes a long time to “get things done” due to

departmental silos and that the current municipal culture is risk averse. A sub issue to this

1 Further information on asset management best practices: https://publicsectordigest.com/article/building-asset-

management-team-survey-canadian-models-best-practices.

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challenge is the effort by many municipalities of going paperless. Some departments may be less

willing to transition to ‘paperless’, as one of the host innovators, Julien Patel, acknowledged in

his case study about the Magic Pen. Likewise, a change in culture also requires the

implementation of “savvy” technology, which an older mentality may be reluctant to introduce.

The major downfall of falling behind on technology is a lack of efficiency.

Core to overcoming the challenge of culture change is proving to management that a change in

culture, such as introducing innovative technology, will make operations more efficient and

effective. For example, Julien Patel’s case study explores how the Magic Pen pilot project

increased administration efficiency by 1200% in Newmarket’s fleet division. Similarly, as

reported by Brandon Currie, the City of Waterloo’s employee advocacy pilot program increased

social media click through by 10 times. Providing proof that new technology and innovative

solutions are more efficient and effective, offering a legitimate rationale for culture change.

Julien Patel discusses the implementation of the “Magic Pen” and transitional technology

Communication Participants reported that they wanted to have a better social media strategy, such as one that

Brandon Currie described (municipal employees share municipal content on their personal social

media platforms). The main concern surrounding social media challenges was ensuring that

employees relay messages correctly and accurately. Brandon Currie explained that municipalities

need not worry about how the message is communicated to the public (if management is

reluctant no matter what, Bambu can write the messages for employees instead). Instead, he

suggested that the messages that are relayed to the public via social media are not ones that

warrant the risk of inaccuracy. In other words, municipalities should resist posting topics related

to tax due dates and overarching municipal goals on their social media accounts. This makes

municipal governments’ social media accounts seem annoying and hinders the reach of their

social media platforms.

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Brandon Currie presents on the City of Waterloo's employee advocacy program

Growth Management One of the main issues recognized by large municipalities was growth management. A key

challenge noted was the rural/urban divide – ensuring that services are provided to all residents.

Similarly, managing traffic congestion was another noted concern, especially by municipalities

facing significant growth.2 One solution for traffic congestion is to encourage local businesses

and organizations to implement flex hours in an effort to diminish “rush hours”. Another

solution posed was the option to implement new parking technology that allows for drivers to

use their cellular device to pay for parking, as opposed to using change.

The need for a comprehensive parking strategy was a challenge that garnered a lot of discussion

in one group session. Limited budget, staff and technology were noted as the core impediments

to creating more parking spaces. A suggested solution was to reach out to local businesses,

explaining how better parking would help their businesses, and in turn increase support (and

possibly, funding) for parking infrastructure. As explained by Jeff Loney regarding the Town of

Gravenhurst’s Downtown Revitalization program, as well as Susan Stolarchuck’s experience

implementing a transit system in the small town of Deseronto, building strong and positive

relationships with business owners and municipal stakeholders can prove to be very beneficial in

advancing community projects. Another solution proposed was to strengthen the internal

capacity to propagate greater commitment – building a team committed to bringing the strategy

to life.

2 A case study of challenges related to traffic congestion can be read here: “An Analysis of Traffic Congestion and Policy Solutions for Canadian Municipalities.”

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An aging population is another issue confronting municipalities. Indeed, succession planning is a

critical concern, in which municipal governments are faced with the challenge of encouraging a

diverse population of students to consider a career in the municipal sector. The lack of culture

change within municipal government certainly has an effect on the recruitment of young

professionals who seek to work in fast-paced and impactful careers. Therefore, solutions to

succession planning challenges are also those of culture change solutions. Nonetheless,

municipal governments can be proactive in their succession planning activities. For a more

thorough review and tips on both retaining and recruiting the most talented, PSD’s webinar,

“Building Skills for Leadership in Municipal Government” is a great resource.

To conclude, there were several solutions that were common across all categories of municipal

challenge. These included learning from other communities and their best practices, engaging

and building relationships with relevant stakeholders for additional support, and connecting with

local post-secondary institutions and community organizations for additional resources and

knowledge. John Ariyo was a particular advocate for community partnerships, noting that

community organizations were champions of the City of Hamilton’s Resettlement of Syrian

refugees project. On a final note, it is also worth taking the time to consider what innovation

means to one’s own community. Working towards conceptualizing and defining the notion is a

strategic first step when trying to achieve innovative solutions and making innovation a priority

in your municipality.

Special thanks to our sponsor,

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Day One: September 27th, 2017

Session 1: Leading in Innovative Environments with Dr. Martha Lenio

In her presentation, “Leading the Way Through

Uncharted Territory”, Dr. Martha Lenio reflected on her

time at the NASA Mars Probe simulation mission. The

goal of the mission was to learn how best to pick a team

for long duration missions – a psychological experiment

of sorts. The mission lasted eight months and from it,

Martha learned insightful lessons about team-building

and what it takes to work together – applicable to most

work environments. One of the first lessons she noted

was to recognize different leadership styles,

understanding and being conscious that different

personalities, and possibly more importantly, different

projects and goals, require different leadership styles in

order to excel. Earning the command position herself,

Martha determined that a strong leadership style was not necessary with the skilled team she

had, and rather, a passive leadership position was better suited. The majority of her presentation

was dedicated to her team, however, reflecting on the social challenges they faced together. She

stated, “You’re never going to pick a crew that is perfect, who is never going to have conflict,

people who are never going to get depressed. These are just normal things and they happen in

just about every team.” Her fellow seven team members all had varying personalities, to which

she attributed as a strength. Commenting little on the actual conflict that was had, Martha

stressed the importance of conflict management, deeming that one person’s priorities can

impact everyone else and as conflict naturally heightened at the end of the mission, weekly

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meetings changed to daily meetings to maintain communication and trust. Martha attributed the

seldom conflict to dedicated time to bond. During the eight-month duration of the mission, the

team members spent all major holidays together. In addition to conflict management, Martha

notes the importance of being self-aware when working shoulder-to-shoulder with co-workers.

Martha’s lessons are valuable lessons not just for those looking to endeavor on a trip to Mars,

but to most work environments; appropriate leadership styles, conflict management, self-

awareness, and staff-bonding are all crucial to healthy staff relationships and work settings.

Session 2: Dealing with Failure in Government with Ashley Good

This session surrounded the topic of failure, and more importantly, how to understand failure in

a different way. That is – and in reference to the title of the session – in order to deal with

failure, one must recognize failure not as a lack of success, but as a teachable moment. Leading

the session was Ashley Good from Fail Forward, and as she contended, failure is not always due

to incompetency, but more often due to complexity of situations and challenges. Relating this to

municipal governance, public sector practitioners work on complex projects and failure is

inevitable. This is especially true in an environment when innovation, an overarching theme of

the conference, is encouraged. When failure is inevitable whilst trying new things, managing the

risk is of utmost importance. Ashley posed this challenge to Hillary Hartley, Ontario’s Chief Digital

Officer, asking, “How do we protect the room to take new risks in the fear of failure?” Hartley’s

answer was to ensure that the organization is agile, which to her meant recognizing and

expecting failures to happen. By acknowledging the inevitably of failure, the impact of failure will

have a smaller impact and the organization will be better prepared to quickly move on from

them. Dr. Gavin Armstrong offered a business perspective to failure, extending Hartley’s slogan

“fail small and fail fast” to “fail small, fail fast, and fail cheaply”. Additionally, Gavin added that it

is important to admit failure to your customers; if you articulate why you fail and not just admit

that you failed, customers will appreciate your transparency and accountability, strengthening

your legitimacy.

Session 3: Accelerator Jam with Rick Boersma

Rick Boersma from Juice Inc. led a World Café session to introduce a new methodology to

facilitate innovative conversations. The concept behind World Café is cooperation, resting in the

belief that we are wiser together than we are alone. Rick had attendees break into groups,

answering three questions:

1. How might we find alternative funding sources?2. How might we risk-manage disruptive innovation?3. How might we manage public engagement?

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The objective of the group work was not to necessarily answer the questions, but to test how

well World Café works as a methodology in producing innovative ideas. In other words, whether

conversations conducted through a World Café process led to better and more useful ideas.

There was an overwhelming response from the room that the World Café methodology

stimulated greater discussion and even more, offered validation from colleagues and peers. As a

useful suggestion, one attendee recommended that participants be able to have a take-away

“place-mat” that summarizes the ideas proposed during the group work. In doing so in the

future, participants will be able to share their ideas with colleagues, and the positive aspects of

the World Café will benefit not only attendees, but a larger group as well.

Audience partakes in a World Café activity led by Rick Boersma

Session 4: Behavioural Insights with Sami El-Sibaey

Sami El-Sibaey, a behavioural scientist for the Ontario Public Service, introduced his audience to

the relationship between behavioural science and municipal governance. He shared insight into

how behavioural science can be applied to policy and program design, and as he contended, “a

tool to add to our toolbox.” Learnings from behavioural science allow policy makers to better

understand the human decision maker that the policy or program is directed at. Expanding our

perspective of the decision maker involves understanding and recognizing the complexity of the

decision-maker's life based on context and context impacts choice.

As Sami stated, the difficultly for policy makers is overcoming automatic intuitions of how

something or someone is perceived. Simply put, the brain expects the world to work in a certain

way. Yet, by employing a different perspective and understanding why a decision was made (or

not made), policy-makers are able to change the policy or program in a way that is more

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effective. This change often comes in the form of a frame, or a different approach. An example

that Sami provided was the effort by government to encourage citizens to use less electricity.

Enumerating kilowatts usage to residents does not decrease their incentive to use electricity,

most simply because the unit of measurement is unclear to them. Instead, the amount of

electricity used must be conceptualized in a way they understand in order to change their

behaviour, such as a visualization of an electricity amount in comparison to their neighbours.

Sami contended that by applying behavioural insights to policy and program design,

understanding the environments that the information in presented in, government is better at

interacting with citizens and their policies and programs will be more effective.

Session 5: Digital Transformation Panel

Moderator: Barbara Swartzentruber Panelists:

• Hillary Hartley, Ontario’s Chief Digital Officer

• Ryan Androsoff, Deputy Director and Product Lead for the Canadian Digital Service

• Gabe Sawhney, Executive Director of Code for Canada

When asked what “digital transformation” meant to them, all panelists offered different

perspectives of its meaning and importance. Hillary Hartley stated that technology has the

potential to make government simpler, faster and better. She also contended that the heart of

digital transformation is a changing culture. Likewise, Ryan Adrosoff submitted that the

importance of digital transformation rests in the reality that the modern citizen has an

expectation of government, especially in regard to public services, to be digital and by embarking

on a digital transformation, government has the opportunity to strengthen its legitimacy by

enhancing quality of public services and government’s capacity to make lives better. Likewise,

Gabe Sawhney submitted that a digital transformation is one that closes the gap between using

technology not only in just our personal and professional lives, but also introducing it to civic life

as well.

A key takeaway from the session, and one that was referenced by sessions that followed, was

one of capacity. Hillary stressed that a digital transformation need not require a dramatic change

in inputs. Rather, many staff in a municipal organization likely already have the tools, skills, and

capacity to help the organization digitally transform and have not been given the power or

authority to do so. Another piece of advice that Hillary offered, and again one that was

referenced in future sessions, was to experiment with digital right away – dedicating time and

resources to creating a framework or policy is redundant, and rather, the organization should

build policy only when they begin embarking on a digital transformation.

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Digital Transformation Panel: Gabe Sawhney, Ryan Androsoff, and Hillary Hartley

Day Two: September 28th, 2017

Session 6: Thinking like a Designer with Helen Kerr, Marco Romano, and Amy Stevens

Helen Kerr, Co-President at KerrSmith Design, discussed how designers approach policy-making

differently. She described this as an adaptive and purpose driven approach, and compared it to

reactive decisions and strategic solutions. The problem with reactive decisions is that immediate

decisions are not ideal, although sometimes necessary, for addressing complex problems that

have long-term consequences. Likewise, strategic solutions can often become conveyer belt

solutions (input determine an objective develop a plan of action outputs). If the

conveyer belt ever were to break, an organization may not be equipped to continue solving

problems moving forward.

Being adaptive and purpose driven is what Kerr recommended as being the most valuable and

beneficial for municipalities. To begin, inputs are much greater in number and instead of an

objective, a purpose must be determined. Guiding principles offer a solution when the conveyer

belt breaks down – or something does not go as planned – and in the process entirety,

organizations are left with outcomes and not outputs. In this way, directions and plans can

change, but the underlying purpose remains the same.

Marco Romano and Amy Stevens from the Region of Peel reflected on how the city embraced

adaptive and purpose driven design to community planning. One of the main changes that was

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made was creating a 20-year plan, “Peel in 2035”, as opposed to the traditional 4 year cycles. In

regards to increasing the amount of inputs, the Region embarked on an ambitious public

engagement campaign, employing different engagement methods to understand how the

community envisions the Region in 2035.

Session 7: Civic Innovation Labs with Calgary, Guelph, Kitchener,

and Vancouver

Moderator: Stewart McDonough Panelists:

• Jonathan Veale, Innovation lead with Calgary Civic Innovation YYC Lab

• Lindsay Cole, Solutions Lab at the City of Vancouver

• Karl Allen-Muncey, Lab Director of the City of Kitchener Civic Innovation Lab

• Sam Laban, Guelph Innovation Lab

Panelists discussed the challenges and opportunities of civic innovation labs. Stressed by Sam,

the biggest challenge to innovation labs is the pressure to succeed. This is especially true for a

new lab. But as discussed in Session 2: “Dealing with Failure in Government”, failure is inevitable.

Labs are faced with an overarching challenge of innovating while finding opportunity in the

learnings that come with failure. One strength of innovation labs, however, is their ability to

collaborate with other labs, creating a culture of innovation. Such a culture allows for new ideas

to blossom, and as all panelists contend, make them better equipped to deal with the

permeability of high frequency and uncertain change, exposing people of the possibility of what

could be. It is in this way that civic innovation labs offer a unique opportunity and resource to

municipal organizations facing complex challenges and limited resources. And to be certain, as

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Hillary and Ryan stated earlier in the conference, there are no shortage of ideas from employees.

Rather, it is bringing the ideas to life. As Jonathan stated, “a huge part of our roles is not just to

expose ideas, but to bring [them] into execution.”

Session 8: Innovation Impact

Moderator: Helaina Gaspard, Ph.D. Panelists:

• Helen Kerr, KerrSmith

• Kristofer Kelly-Frere, City of Calgary

• Joseph Bou-Younes, Canada’s Open Data Exchange

Helaina began the discussion by offering 3 key frames:

1. The importance in measuring the impact of innovation is to ensure that whatever we are doing with our money is being done well and effectively2. By evaluating and monitoring, we can help correct issues that arise3. When you are a public servant, you are to give advice to elected officials, and because of this, we should care about results

The three panelists provide varying perspectives on the importance of measuring innovation.

From the City of Calgary, Kristofer discussed how to define goals. He shared the City of Calgary’s

planning project, which adopted a similar design that Helen Kerr described in the “Thinking Like a

Designer” session. Calgary crafted guiding principles, such as “adaptive” and “future focused” to

shape the city’s goal to spark the interest of stakeholders.

Discussing the data that is needed to measure results, Joseph submitted that it is important for

organizations to be agile in how innovation is measured as technology and projects change

rapidly. Importantly, he also stressed the need for governments to always keep inclusion, equity

and access at the forefront of innovation measurements.

Finally, Helen offered insight into how to communicate those measurements. As a designer, she

stressed the importance of qualitative story-telling, in addition to providing quantitative

measures. Qualitative story-telling, she stated, highlights the emotional content of issues in a

different way.

Session 9: Lawrence Hill and the Power of Storytelling

In a special closing session, author Lawrence Hill shared his insights on the power of storytelling. In his words, “one of the things that I love about story is imagination, is the possibility to

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introduce real but forgotten events.” Through his writing career, Lawrence has shared multiple stories, illuminating the misfortune and mistreatment of minorities. He noted that his objective through storytelling is to personalize stories in an effort to engage Canadians and Americans of social injustices. Lawrence stresses the power of story, explaining how stories are how people understand issues, those both personal and collective. It is in this way that story is powerful; that stories of innovation need be shared for change to happen.

Lawrence left conference attendees with a strong and inspiring message:

“I believe that Canada has some of the best and most livable cities in the world, but I also hope and believe that we all can do much, much better especially in addressing the areas of public transit, urban poverty, low-cost housing and the need for more of it, providing safe spaces for vulnerable and disenfranchised people and responding to crises and pressing need, such as the arrival and integration of refugees and new Canadians, and the desperate need of the growing number of people succumbing to the opioid crisis. Municipal leaders are in the best place to identify and spearhead meaningful social change and improvement.”

Contact us if you are interested in sharing your ideas and best practices in an upcoming issue of

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