3. Revised model of anticipatory innovation governance
This chapter outlines the updated model for anticipatory innovation governance model based on the empirical work conducted in Finland. The empirical analysis exemplified the need to pay additional attention to the motivation in government to adopt an anticipatory approach and the way in which to start building specific governance mechanisms that support both the agency and the authorising environment of anticipatory innovation. This includes functions those mechanisms need to fulfil and roles and responsibilities that need to be assigned to make the model actionable.
The revision of the theoretical anticipatory innovation governance model (presented in the previous chapter) is based on the assessment of the Finnish government system conducted in between 2020-2021 and the succeeding pilot case studies in four complex policy environments carried out in between September 2021 and the end of April 2022. Insights from both phases of analysis were validated in workshops with the Finnish Government in May 2022. The detailed findings of the assessment report are outlined in Part II and the pilot case studies and their methodology are described in Part III of this report.
The assessment of the Finnish government system showed that even within one of the most advanced governance and strategic foresight systems in the world, there are considerable gaps in anticipatory capacity and the ability to deal with complex problems systematically, with a long-term perspective. It is not enough to assume that governments have or are able to develop capacity to anticipate change and innovate in the face of complex challenges when they are faced with them. Looking at the Finnish Government system and other governments OECD has worked together with, it becomes apparent that governments face:
A considerable strategic foresight impact gap. It is not easy to integrate futures and foresight into core strategic processes, innovation and experimentation. The use of strategic foresight in government appear to suffer from a set of individuals, collective, and institutional limitations that prevent the use of high-quality futures knowledge in policy making (i.e. the foresight impact gap). Futures and foresight work may be present in abundance, but there also needs to be time to take on board the implications of the findings; accountability in doing so. Conversely, continuous crisis mode also created bias towards action rather than reflection about different possible futures. The more complexity, the more options need to be considered and thus the more difficult the process becomes.
Lack of futures literacy. Overcoming this requires building up the government’s futures literacy1 (see Box 3.1 for an example of futures literacy at work) and setting up appropriate structures to integrate strategic foresight within core strategic processes, innovation and experimentation. The need to clarify the roles and responsibilities of the different strategic foresight actors within the system (e.g. the role of ministries and their internal foresight activities compared to government-wide processes) in challenging existing policies or solutions was also clearly highlighted. Without clear direction single organisations within the broader governance system can be uncertain about the degree to which they should develop internal capacities for futures and foresight activities, and to what extent this work should be carried out centrally. This may create pockets of excellence where some ministries or agencies based on ad hoc factors such as leadership support, contextual challenges and push from outside partners have very good transformation units, foresight capabilities and innovation functions, but on the systemic level anticipatory capacity does not exist. Meaning, that truly complex, cross-government challenges become difficult to address as there is not enough capacity across the system to leverage.
As described in “Transforming the Future”, Futures Literacy Labs (FLL) are designed so that people make their anticipatory assumptions explicit and thereby reveal not only the determinants of the futures they imagine but also the attributes of the anticipatory systems and knowledge creation processes that they use when thinking about the future. FLL expose why and how people use-the-future. This data emerges from their inter-actions as participants learn to ‘use-the-future’. The starting point for perceiving and understanding AA is to interrupt the routine action of ‘using-the-future’ to provoke a sense that there is a problem when imagining the future. This realisation kicks-off the learning cycle that serves as the skeleton for building an FLL (Almirall, Lee and Wareham, 2012[1]).
Through structured on-the-ground learning-by-doing activities people from all walks of life and all ages learn about the origins and power of what they imagine. By delving together into topics they care about, from the future of health and well-being to the future of jobs and gender, they undertake learning voyages that enable them to source their hopes and fears in their history, culture, context and aspirations.
Futures Literacy Labs deploy action-learning and collective intelligence to co-create the meaning of sustainability, peace and inclusion where people live, work [and play]. When people are capable of deciding why and how to use the future, they become better able to detect and create the otherwise invisible – innovation and transformation. They are more at ease with novelty and experimentation. Less anxious about uncertainty. Humbler about controlling the future. More confident about being able to comprehend and appreciate the potential opened up by change.
Source: (Miller, 2018[2]; UNESCO, 2020[3])
Need for individual and organisational capacity. There is a lack of individual and organisational capabilities in anticipation, innovation and futures literacy and an uneven spread of transformative leadership capabilities both in public administration and politics. For both administrators and decision-makers, the research in Finland showed that short-term tasks take precedence over long-term thinking. Strategic development responsibilities in public sector organisations tend to fall on few people with very full portfolios. Without direct resourcing (both in terms of allocating human capacity, financial funds and time) skills for anticipatory innovation governance will not develop. These capacity needs to be tailored to different individual roles and also organisational capacities within the system (see Box 3.2 from an example from Ireland). There is a need to strengthening the capacity of public servants to reflect and act on future policy challenges by increasing access to and experience with anticipatory innovation approaches and tools. To create demand for anticipatory innovation, leadership skills and capacities need to be addressed and additional support structures and practices put in place in organisations to develop signal reading and anticipatory policy making skills that lead to innovation. Nevertheless, without prioritisation of anticipatory capacity and structural processes that support it, public officials tend to be too overburdened with coping with change (new processes and responsibilities) rather than to reflect on a better way of doing things or having space to try something new.
Building on Our Public Service 2020, the Irish government is embarking on OPS2030, a new framework for development and innovation in Ireland’s public service. The goal for OPS2030 is to ensure that Ireland’s public service is fit-for-purpose to 2030 and beyond. It is critical to ensure that the Irish system of governance and public service are equipped and ready to meet challenges, recognise opportunities, and work to the benefit of the social and economic well-being of citizens.
In this context, the government of Ireland is undertaking an upgrade in policy development and strategic foresight spanning the whole public service. This project aims to increase the ability of the public service to address complex policy in areas such as climate change, digitalisation, demographic changes, and long-term healthcare, and to contribute to future-proofing of such policies. Moreover, having a model of strategic foresight and anticipation to steward public policies is important for building more effective, legitimate, and proactive institutions that are suited to a changing context and evolving and emerging needs.
Strategic foresight as part of the policy-development system is fragmented across the public service in Ireland. Recent OECD assessment showed that, while there are pockets of excellence, there are significant gaps in both foresight capability and practice. Strategic foresight and anticipatory innovation governance can help policy developers in Ireland find the right balance to advise on immediate decision-making choices, while situating their reasoning in a comprehensive, informed, and well-judged reading of the situation now and in the future.
Under the European Union’s Technical Support Instrument (TSI) programme, the OECD is supporting the Irish government in these ambitions. The envisaged programme of work includes a number of activities in policy development and strategic foresight, including action plans, toolkits, communities of practice, and professional training. The training provided will target three main groups according to their function and needs: policy experts, foresight practitioners, and senior decision-makers.
Source: OECD.
Need to balance central steering with bottom up approaches and the autonomy to explore alternative scenarios. Recent events around the world have shown the need to imagine the unimaginable. However, there is a tendency in governments to refer to predictable futures, alternatives and options that can be quantified and where clear risks can be calculated. This can leave governments considerably vulnerable in the face of uncertain change be it connected to internal or external security, environment etc. While the prior section argued for collective and systemic development of futures literacy, it is important that the ministries, agencies and other public sector bodies have an opportunity to challenge collectively aligned futures and for civil servants to distribute anticipatory knowledge to all parties and stakeholders. Futures methods need to be mainstreamed and tied to core government tasks, while ‘opening the system’ would allow for more radical ideas to emerge. This means also concretely financing strategic foresight activities in this vein.
Need to open up governance systems for collective intelligence. Public interest and participation are essential to an effective anticipatory innovation system as starting points for the exploration, contextual understanding, and creation of narratives. The findings in Finland to lack of institutionalised citizen participation methods to consider policy alternatives early on, closed processes and lack of facilitation skills in the public sector. There is a need to counter ‘standard’ arguments against citizen participation, such as that politicians do not want the processes to be open, or that sped-up processes do not allow for wider engagement. It should be clear how citizen and expert input is going to be used and to which processes it is channelled. Consequently, public servants throughout the system need facilitation skills to work with citizen input, and design open and inclusive policy processes to counter expert bias and groupthink to make the anticipatory innovation governance work. Responsibility should be assigned to look into what is changing in various potentially relevant sectors and socialising those developments with wider audiences for engagement. Bringing strategic foresight out of “narrow circles” and involving more outside and international experts in the work can help bring a diversity of perspectives and keep the focus on long term visions.
Lack of alternatives exploration. The assessment of Finland and OECD’s research in other country’s innovation systems (OECD, 2019[4]; 2020[5]; 2021[6]; 2021[7]) has shown that in general few expert pioneers are push forward experimentation and innovation in governments, but largely these approaches are side-of-the-desk activity. As outlined above, inside government, there is a lack of capacity and futures literacy at both individual and organisational levels and few organisations have structured signal reading and sense making processes or teams. Experimentation specifically is not always timely in policy-making processes and does not suit established linear policy-making processes. It is worthwhile to look at which structured ‘future seeking’ and experimental moments in policy reforms actually exists, where policy making timelines create clear demand for future perspectives and experimental approaches. Is it possible to explore alternatives on a continued basis and input into policy change or are policies largely developed through predefined (waterfall) processes with little iterative learning? There needs to be a clear value chain from futures and foresight to exploration, experiment design, innovation and policy development. An example of this is provided in Box 3.3 based on OECD’s work with the Slovenian government on the topic of future of the public sector and talent management.
In collaboration with the Slovenian Ministry of Public Administration, the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation has developed a set of scenarios to challenge and reframe assumptions and plans in Slovenia’s public-sector human resources, while also generating insightful content to present for discussion in the context of Slovenia’s upcoming presidency of the Council of the EU.
In a first phase, a set of scenarios was developed using an accelerated process that channelled expertise from public administration and talent management in Slovenia, alongside OECD expertise in a broad variety of domains. The scenarios served to spark imagination about the plausible challenges and opportunities to which talent management may have to respond. Participants also expressed aspirational ideas of the kind of public sector they would wish to see, and the kind of society to which it should contribute.
Implementing the findings of this process involves envisaging and preparing innovative experiments and policy initiatives (Figure 3.1). This second phase involves a series of prototyping workshops which use a methodology of connecting visions of desired future states with alternative contexts presented by the scenarios, followed by responses crafted from actions that can be taken with respect to various strategic levers within the competency of the Ministry of Public Administration to alter.
Source: OECD based on (OECD, 2021[8])
Fragmented use of anticipatory information. Anticipatory information is often not standardised, harmonised or applied effectively. Fragmented information maintains organisational siloes and prevents a common understanding of the present situation from which futures can be explored. Evaluation of past initiatives is not effectively used in the development of new initiatives (the ‘evaluation gap’) which means that there is not only an issue with using new data to vision policy opportunities, but also an issue with inadequate learning from the past and the real possibility to repeat past mistakes. There can be considerable gap around historical knowledge and situational awareness of the current context: data concerning the situation, as it is now, is very important but very fragmented making it difficult to come to a shared approach on future if there is divergence in understanding about the current situation.
Within the context of digitalisation there might be room to also consider digital tools that could allow collective intelligence, signal collection and systematisation of data and thus, through processes support the development of anticipatory capacity. Digitalisation might allow for greater alignment between different processes and help break silos; it forces discussion of the interfaces. Data analysis methods and barriers to data interoperability are standing in the way of user-centric approaches and development of new, future-oriented services. It is difficult to triangulate knowledge from citizen participation and other sources of data for anticipation, which could help to improve the government’s ability to pick up on emerging changes or unfulfilled goals.
Traditional policy steering mechanisms – strategic, budgetary and legal – inhibit anticipatory innovation. Especially, established policy steering mechanisms make it difficult to explore of policy alternatives and tackling complex problems. Anticipatory capacity involves the ability to challenge current policies, stress-test them on an ongoing basis and actively explore a variety of future opportunities. The conducted research in Finland indicates that often strategic, budgetary and legal steering mechanisms act as challenges to future-oriented exploration and policy development in Finland. For example, the current budget emerges as one of the major drivers enforcing organisational silos and inhibits addressing policy phenomena as complex problems. As such, often budget allocation and strategic steering in government serve different aims: the first enforcing organisational silos, while the other emphasising cross-governmental goals. There are a variety of improvements that could be made to make resource allocation more iterative and agile, including more flexibility in government transfers, budget monitoring tools etc.
Alongside more incremental improvements, phenomenon-based budgeting could act as a more transformative approach, tackling co-ordination and organisational issues while including anticipation and innovation in the budgetary process. Setting up phenomenon-based resourcing and budgeting pilots can also shed light on how to counter the effects of organisational silos. Additionally, the assessment showed that often regulatory processes are perceived as limiting agile and iterative ways of experimenting with emerging issues, while strategic processes are seen as not offering enough actionable future-seeking moments or as overprescribing solutions up front.
Enduring influence of government silos. The conducted research shows that the Government of Finland is still characterised by very strong silos. When new, cross-governmental issues arise, responsibilities are assigned in ad hoc ways, lacking clarity of process. Cross-cutting issues such as climate change lack clear leadership and there may be a rational reluctance to meddle in other organisation’s portfolios. Structural solutions that initiate, empower and co-ordinate the whole ecosystem level and assign responsibility over topics may be the way forward. Simply, wider input from government and non-government stakeholders is needed to deal with system-level issues, but that input needs to channelled somewhere. Without clear direction and accountability co-ordination across government or across the ecosystem can become another administrative burden that takes resources from action. Consequently, it is important to make sense of the purpose of collaboration first and then invest into it. This may not have to be structural, it may be also operational: changing operational models is a more agile approach than changing structures. For example, this can be done by increasing mobility across silos or creating dedicated challenge-based teams (e.g. phenomenon taskforces), within or spanning across public-service institutions.
Nevertheless, governments need a more unified approach to analyse new emerging problems, how to tackle and assign responsibility for them in government is needed – this would also help to incorporate anticipatory innovation approaches from the start to examine these issues in a more institutionalised manner. Otherwise not only responsibility over this work remains siloed, but knowledge is as well. Sectoral policy areas tend to only research what is immediately relevant to them and have often little awareness of what may become disruptive from outside of their system, inhibiting the ability to anticipate potential exogenous shocks to that system in advance. This involves both sense making processes, institutional design and planning capacities, tools, methods and ongoing monitoring, and evaluation.
Continued issues with continuity of reforms across policy cycles. Policy cycles and political factors play a large role in anticipatory processes as most complex issues cannot be addressed in a standard 4-year government term. Often strategic visioning and policy development simply do not have time to mature into robust implementation before shifts in government. Time for proper implementation is too short to develop theories of change and operationalise and evaluate changes on the ground. Effective implementation of reforms and tackling complex challenges is highly dependent on policy cycles that disrupt continuity of reforms and follow-through, leading to the proposal of additional institutionalised transition processes for switching of governments. It is important that government programmes give strategic directions and do not lead by solutions – locking in the systems. Inflexibility in agreed upon goals and actions in government programmes can lead to serious lock-in and avoidance of emerging risks, issues and challenges that do not fit the established consensus.
Consequently, there needs to be systemic thinking around both government transition management, but also agility of political governance. To what extend it is possible to keep major, long-term reforms on track across government terms versus the need to adapt quickly when the direction taken does not match the needs of the environment or new developments. This requires ongoing evaluation and monitoring and handover of the information to decision makers. This involves tackling the knowledge ministries/departments/other public bodies need to produce during government turnover and what time, otherwise the information shared is dependent on a variety of approaches different public organisations can take. In most countries there are no written rules about how to deal with change of government from a handover of challenges and learnings perspectives. There is a need to tackle the issue of distance between developing visions for alternative futures and their implementation which often spans across several policy cycles. Anticipatory mechanisms could help bridge this gap by reducing time-to-implementation of policies (e.g. through constant iteration and testing). This becomes especially acute in many policy areas, where changes are speeding up and public sector is getting closer to real-time policy making. To assure the continuity in development, mechanisms are needed that allow to continue policy exploration and development across policy cycles supported by new evaluation and measurement procedures. But not only, the assessment in Finland also points to the need of new government transformation and handover functions where continuity of problems and learning is ensured.
Figure 3.2 summarises these challenges in the context of the Finnish governance system in the context of the anticipatory innovation governance system as presented in the prior section. Overall, the research conducted on the systems level in Finland (Part II) showed that while governments may have good practices across the system in futures and foresight and may advance some areas considerable (e.g. in the case of public interest in Finland), practical knowledge about anticipation is not well distributed or used systematically. This is something that the anticipatory innovation governance model needs to account for in terms of institutionalising capacity across the system. What government mechanisms are necessary and sufficient to make anticipatory innovation governance actionable?
Source: OECD.
While the assessment of the Finnish Government system provided knowledge about the real systemic challenges public sector’s face in integrating anticipatory capacity into their government steering systems, the aim of the conducted pilot case studies helped to contextualise these issues and start to explore proactive ways in which to build up anticipatory capacity and structures in government. OECD conduced pilot case studies across 4 different areas – continuous learning (Part III, chapter 3), carbon neutrality and evidence about the future (Part III, chapter 4), child wellbeing (Part III, chapter 4) and collaboration between politicians and public officials (Part III, chapter 6). All apart from the last case, were connected to connected to complex policy areas, where different reforms had been initiated and some still ongoing; however, a clear need for a more anticipatory approach was identified. The pilot case surrounding the dialogues between politicians and public officials was designed to look at the roles of both sides in the anticipatory innovation governance system more broadly referencing the other pilot case studies when needed. Part III chapter 1 of the report outlines reasoning behind the selection of the pilot case studies and the conducted work in detail and provides a comparison of the cases. Here the goal is to summarise the learnings more broadly to understand the key components of an anticipatory innovation governance model.
The pilot case studies outlined a wealth of knowledge about the importance of different anticipatory innovation governance mechanisms, how to build them and create sustainability around them. They also pointed to specific needs in anticipatory innovation capacity in different policy context which hindered or held back successful reforms. These are outlined in Part III chapter 3 in detail and summarised in Table 3.1 below.
The analysis of the pilot case studies showed that all identified items under the anticipatory governance model are relevant for an effective and action-oriented use of futures information in government (see Table 3.2 on the essential elements to each pilot case). In many cases elements of anticipatory practices were already in place: from the use of strategic foresight, collecting signals and data on future projections, visioning and ambitious future targets, collecting relevant experts and ecosystem partners to deliberate etc. However, by and large these practices were based on one-time efforts and not systematically applied. There was no concretely defined demand or supply for anticipatory information, ways to systematise it or incorporate it into organisational and operational solutions to tackle emerging challenges. This is what a functioning anticipatory innovation governance system should do.
The most important learning from the pilot case studies pointed to the need operationalise the anticipatory innovation governance model and tackle how both agency and authorizing environment in different contexts are created. The model worked well as a starting point for a diagnostic – which elements were already in place, where there were gaps and further development needs (Table 3.1 above). What the model, however, a priori does not do it is give clear guidelines on what actions to take when these needs and gaps are established. The pilot case studies showed that designing and operationalising anticipatory innovation governance mechanisms is always contextual to the complex problems addressed and the challenges faced. What it points to is that within a governance model that aims to be anticipatory in nature there needs to be:
room to carry out anticipatory diagnostics of complex problems
enough flexibility to design context specific solutions that give agency and also authorise change in a sustainable manner
clear follow up on these responsibilities to learn from different solutions.
These principles will be taken up in the next section in updating the anticipatory innovation governance model.
Specific learnings connected to different anticipatory innovation governance mechanisms highlighted that:
Creating agency – ability to act – for anticipatory innovation usually starts with collective sense making. The quality of the preceding and ongoing sense making cascades into other parts of the governance model (e.g. how well networks and partnerships are managed, if the right type of institutional and organisational capacities is defined, how data on the issues is collected and systematised, etc.). It became an obvious barrier to action (present in almost all pilots) when critical stakeholders connected to the policy challenges were not involved into the problem framing and a common understanding about the phenomenon at hand was not reached. These issues usually cascaded into institutional misunderstandings, network misalignment and poor use of anticipatory knowledge. As such, collective sense making of anticipatory information and the connected tools, methods and capacities are vital to enable co-ordinated action among stakeholders trying to address complex phenomena.
The pilot case studies also showed the importance of political engagement within the anticipatory innovation governance system. Value-based decisions are often questioned in the public sphere, in media, thus, it becomes difficult for politicians to participate in sense-making around complex issues and normative futures. Meaning that politicians and senior civil servants do not de facto discuss important policy goals for the government term or challenges that need to be tackled long-term. Sense-making becomes a critical function in reaching at least a dynamic consensus eligible for change over time that allows productive action to be taken. Variety of very complex reforms with long time horizons (e.g. the SOTE reform challenges) demonstrated in Finland how lack of sense-making and consensus can lead to enduring challenges across different policy fields also present in our pilot case studies (e.g. child wellbeing). Addressing mistrust between different actors – e.g. politicians and public officials, actors across different levels of government – is critical to make sense-making successful. There is often asymmetry of information between different parties that has to be objectively addressed and facilitated. Media reporting on a real-time ad hoc basis can create tension between both communities, reinforced by social media bubbles and echo chambers. All pilot case studies showed that public officials need to take a role in producing and presenting futures knowledge and insights. Politicians and public officials need to collectively engage in sense-making of that knowledge and work towards concrete actions. When designing anticipatory processes accountability should also be a role: there is a need to make sure that inputs (e.g. the advice of civil servants) actually matter and are taken into account.
Collective sense making should concrete follow up processes and not remain one-time, stand-alone in the policy-making process. While anticipatory processes should be underlined by collective sense making, specific tasks and areas of action that are manageable – e.g. introducing annual cross-sectoral priorities (missions) to be tackled to ensure responsiveness to emerging themes as in the case of child wellbeing – should follow. The need to innovate, test, pilot, explore alternatives should be part of the decision points after collective sense making processes.
Anticipatory information – data and measurement, collection of signals of changes – need to be better packaged and synthesised across government. Anticipatory information must be synthesised in ways that help stakeholders to address their jobs to be done (be it vision, stress-test, diverge etc.). Level of integration of anticipatory data sources (data and analytics) and the collaborative networks it depends on is crucial for action in complex policy domains. Moreover, signal reading requires more immediate connection to implementation and its partners crossing the However, the pilot case studies showed that there is a broader lack of capacity to support signal detection on the policy ecosystem level and the analysis of that information on a continuous basis.
In anticipatory knowledge synthesis technology has invariably a role to play. The times of big analytics departments in public sector organisations have probably gone, while more agile, targeted, digital analytics units are emerging, where the role of people is to more spot and test new assumptions, make sense of the data, while the analytics are done by computers, artificial intelligence, algorithms etc. Finland has pledged to be a digital first country meaning that there would be an opportunity to take this forward.
Use of anticipatory tools and methods needs to become systematic across the policy-making system. Adoption does not happen on its own: there is a need to experience new tools and methods, provide peer examples and socialisation before adoption. Regular use of anticipatory approaches allows stakeholders to align on objectives, and stress-test and readjust strategies. Cognitive biases in implementing new tools and methods need to be taken into account as much as the capacity to use the latter. Furthermore, organisational cultures in government are often not supportive in hiring or building up anticipatory capacities that is not directly aligned with their immediate priorities. Communication here is key (see Box 3.4 below). Hence, anticipatory capacity needs to be pushed not only on the individual, team level, but also addressed across organisations. It is very difficult to create demand for new approaches that are uncertain in nature and do not fall into anyone’s specific field of responsibility. Creating demand for anticipation should be a core feature of the anticipatory innovation governance system.
LabX, Portugal Anticipatory Innovation Starter Kit sets out to address the main challenges faced by civil servants and the public sector, such as:
Volatility, uncertainty and perception of urgency resulting from the 2019 coronavirus pandemic.
The prevalence of ad-hoc routines and reactive approaches with ‘presentist’ options contributing to a feeling of helplessness towards the future and to limited interest and skills about future literacy.
To effectively address these, the toolkit is based on a problem-solving, user-centric approach, which makes it actionable, modular, and accessible to all public servants in a variety of different fields. The toolkit is based on experimental principles, where co-creation and iterative development processes are key. Its learning-by-doing nature also makes it an ideal starting point for users to autonomously engage through a continuous self-improvement process. It is structured around four different ways of framing/tackling the problems addressed: 1) Alternative futures; 2) Drivers of change; 3) Vision; and 4) Strategy. The toolkit’s main expected outcomes include: (i) shortening the knowledge-action gap (through the Kit’s actionable/contextualisable nature); and (ii) acting as a starting point for capacity-building by generating interest and awareness among beginners.
Source: (LabX, 2020[9]; Hanson, 2021[10])
Creating responsibility to act on complex, systemic challenges through functional mandates (institutional structures) does not happen a priori. There has to be a follow up function that evaluates if the work is actually undertaken and urgency is created by establishing accountability for inaction. Frequently, there are issues of assigning ownership over cross-cutting government phenomenon (organisational capacity), which become important predictors of success in anticipatory innovation processes surrounding complex problems. On the one side, there needs to be ownership by one actor (ministry, agency etc.), clear role as a driver of the issue; but on the other side, for success, it is important that policy design and implementation are done in collaboration, in a distributed manner with the whole ecosystem. Hence, ‘owners’ of complex problems and emerging challenges should hold dual roles and be held accountable for success in both. Consequently, there often needs to be an ecosystem level approach with a joint shared process of defining the key strategic processes to be handled by the ecosystem. As mentioned above, if there is a working ecosystem then also signal exchange can take place.
However, often co-ordinating tasks of complex and cross-cutting issues in government fall at the middle management level, where they become one of many issues to tackle competing for attention and time. As such, the level of middle level management on use and interpretation of anticipatory information is crucial; they interpret and steer the work. Here there is a need to tackle overburden structurally and also create psychological safety at the workplace to push back on exorbitant number tasks, otherwise space for innovation is not created among middle management or for their subordinates.
Alternatives exploration is often hindered due to existing processes and lock-in of strategies (e.g. in the case of child wellbeing) or tools and methods used (e.g. carbon neutrality in budgeting). Established structures and processes are difficult to unpack and resistant to experimentation due to constant time pressures and expert biases. Public actors often become entrenched in their functional roles and though the anticipatory process it should be possible to expand or create new roles to explore alternatives within in the system (e.g. expanding the responsibilities of the ombudsman to include foresight activities together with ITLA and their funded future-oriented research and experimentation).
Finland has strong strategic foresight capabilities, but the pilot case studies showed that the value chain from one-time foresight activities to experimentation and implementation with the connected learning loop is yet to be developed. While futures and foresight are essential to consider various alternative futures, the work in Finland shows that it is also important to avoid becoming too centric on the role of strategic foresight as it tends to put the weight on imagining the futures rather than making them happen. Hence, within the anticipatory innovation governance model there is a need to be cautious of “vision burnout”. Furthermore, often futures and foresight practises are not systemic enough and not repeated at dependable intervals: many foresight efforts and applied methodologies are one-off studies and thus, cannot be systematically and continuously relied upon in both strategic policy making, but also in the innovation process that follows especially in the context of dynamic change.
Leveraging the knowledge of networks and partnerships can help to build a better understanding of the diverse future challenges associated with complex phenomena such as the changing demand for skills, child well-being, and climate change. Such participation also builds the legitimacy of a shared information resource and concerted collaboration, which can be relied upon by different stakeholders as a foundation for shared decision-making. Co-ordination and network activities need to be separately resourced as ecosystem management across the pilot case studies was found to be poorly organised, which means that continuous and collective intelligence, not to mention action, is missing on emerging issues. There is also an established need for tools, methods and capacity to build ecosystems in ways that break silos and discourage competition between ministries, agencies, etc. Pilot cases on continuous learning (Part III chapter 3), child well-being (Part III chapter 4) and also carbon neutrality (Part III chapter 5) proposed actionable ways to integrate anticipatory capacity better in network governance.
Regular collaboration and engagement of high-level stakeholders in complex issues – throughput legitimacy – is essential for their prioritisation (e.g. in the case of continuous learning or carbon neutrality), however, holding the attention of senior decision makers is difficult with competing day-to-day issues. There have to be functions in government that call for senior decision makers to continuously engage with complex issues and anticipatory information. Co-ordinating across government challenges requires an actor who as the legitimacy to convene. There also has to be measures in place to deal with politically-motivated interests in getting credit for transversal work and ways to incentivise both civil servants and politicians to go beyond the existing silos.
Legitimacy also comes from sustainable inputs to the policy making processes. As such, there is a need to assure that funding and other resources are aligned with policy goals, which was not the case in all substantive pilot case study areas (continuous learning, carbon neutrality, child well-being). Hence, broader stress-testing of policies and accountability for implementation is required within a functioning anticipatory innovation governance system.
As most of the pilot case studies were at critical junctions of change – defining new policy frames (child well-being), areas of action (continuous learning) or in the process of aligning traditional tools to emerging challenges (carbon neutrality) – a lot of effort had not been put into evidence and evaluation of issues in the long term. However, in some cases it was key to start establishing long-term sustainability of reforms and helping to keep the policy issues on the agenda (e.g. child well-being, continuous learning) and creating output legitimacy. As was shown by the carbon neutrality case, evidence and evaluation should not only have a retrospective nature in an anticipatory governance system, but also give insights into the effects of potential different future scenarios. Thus, evidence and evaluation should not only serve the goal of accountability, but as a decision-making and learning tool for the future. Consequently, anticipatory information has a role to play in evidence informed policy making, by making uncertainty in projections visible, proposing alternative scenarios and thus, making government responses more resilient. This requires also the acceptance of different types of evidence, the speculative nature of most qualitative and quantitative simulations and the need to continuously monitor and evaluate emerging situations.
After the initial diagnostic and work on the pilot case studies following the anticipatory innovation governance model, three general governance issues rose to the forefront that were not explicitly covered by the model. These included:
Starting point and focus: where to get started in developing an anticipatory innovation governance system? There are many interconnected anticipatory innovation governance mechanisms and it is often difficult to ascertain where to get started. The gateway to analysis and action within the pilot gate studies was the diagnostic done through the anticipatory innovation governance model, evaluation of the mechanisms and their functioning. System dynamics (described in Box 3.5 below) emerged outlining the important connections between actors, actions and enablers for anticipation in the Finnish government system. The cases themselves were identified and supported by highly engaged and motivated senior decision makers and experts, who truly wanted to see change happen in their policy context. This is still ad hoc engagement with anticipatory innovation and cannot be called a systemic capacity. However, how should change towards the anticipatory innovation governance model happen in different policy context and policy lifecycle stages where there is an interest to build up an anticipatory governance mechanisms?
Sense of urgency and motivation to act: in many of the pilot case studies analysed there was not enough agreement on the urgency of challenges involved – all were deemed important and essential to Finland, but it was unclear how they were prioritised across all the different problems governments face on a daily basis. This seemed to influence the motivation to act, resources put behind reforms and simply time allocated to issues at hand. In many cases crisis mode creates windows of opportunity for some policy issues, but in general means less opportunities – bandwidth – for informal exchange and relationship-building that is crucial to establish trust that was discussed above. Increasing speed of policy decisions and external change and shocks have taken too much attention to build anticipatory capacity. Both politicians and public officials tent to be consumed by emerging issues and pressures, very focused on the day-to-day, lacking a long-term perspective.
Actor and responsibility: who has the responsibility to develop the anticipatory innovation governance system, ensure that policy processes follow an anticipatory approach and follow up when critical challenges and emerging issues are not addressed? The theoretical anticipatory innovation governance model outlines the agency (the mechanisms that are needed to take action in an anticipatory way), but does not assign responsibilities to actors to develop the system or concrete roles in anticipatory innovation governance more broadly (e.g. the role of regulatory agencies, implementation bodies, broader government steering units). This, however, becomes important when the governance model is operationalised in practice. Anticipatory governance does not start from a blank slate and will have to fit into different government contexts, governance traditions and public administration models. Hence, after the assessment conducted in Finland these roles can be imagined and responsibilities signed. As such, in the context of Finland – a fairly centralised country with a strong national government – different actors at the centre (Prime Minister’s Office, Ministry of Finance etc.) seem to fit the role to develop anticipatory innovation capacity from centre (Ministry of Finance in developing leadership capacities and civil service skills, Prime Minister’s Office taking the lead in assigning organisational solutions for new emerging issues and co-ordinating strategic responses, platformising anticipatory knowledge, Ministry of Justice creating room for experimentation in legislation etc.) but these tasks and responsibilities are not formally defined. How should this happen in other country contexts? The model should provide a gateway to define these roles and responsibilities, but allow for assessment into existing path-dependencies and roles.
The work together with the Finnish experts on the pilot case studies showed that mechanisms of anticipatory innovation governance become interconnected and there are lot of different enablers at play to making the anticipatory innovation mechanisms work outlining concrete actions to specific actors.
The Figure 3.3 below (outlines a dynamic representation of the system of governance in Finland from the perspective of enabling effective and impactful anticipation. It is the result of a review of the analysis conducted throughout the project, as well as consultations with experts and high-level officials, which identified a number of needs to make the anticipatory innovation governance model more actionable and concrete for Finland and other countries.
These cross-cutting needs were:
Motivation: it was considered that the mechanisms of the original AIG model are necessary but not sufficient to initiate anticipatory innovation actions. The concept of impulse is therefore pertinent, as are the origins of that impulse: the demand and expectations coming from citizens and civil society.
Actionability: all of the mechanisms of the AIG model are abstract, emerging from the concrete actions and interactions of individuals and organisations. Hence, they are emergent properties, whose origins need to be traced back to the source in order to identify concrete actions to change the system.
Concerted collaboration: more than mere co-ordination, experts and leaders in Finland identified the need for individuals and organisations to pursue common objectives, resulting from mutual understanding of issues.
Bandwidth: Finnish officials noted that where issues are identified as salient and urgent, time and money is accorded to create organisational capacity needed for dialogue and anticipation—this was referred to as “oxygen”. Understanding how these issues are prioritised is an important starting point to allocating adequate bandwidth to issues that may need anticipatory attention.
Focus: the whole anticipatory model consists of a large number of potential areas of work to improve a country’s anticipatory capacity. It is unlikely to be possible or effective to try to act on all of them at once. Exploring the dynamics of the Finnish system allowed experts to identify some key areas where particular attention would yield the greatest benefits for the work put in.
The dialogue and analysis around the anticipatory innovation governance model was not and should not be expected to deliver the change needed on its own. The benefit of the process was to identify and sharpen focus on the main missing requirements in the system (enablers), the individuals and organisations (actors) capable of making a difference, and how the two can be brought together (actions).
Source: OECD.
Taking the learnings and the gaps outlined above from the assessment of the Finnish governance system and the pilot case studies on board, the next section proceeds to upgrade the anticipatory innovation governance model to make it actionable across different context.
The empirical work in Finland has shown that the anticipatory innovation governance mechanisms are a useful and relevant tool to analyse governments’ anticipatory capacity and can be used as a diagnostic in different policy fields to tackle concrete emerging challenges. Based on the analysis presented above and the detailed accounts of the works following in Part II and III of the report, some additions however need to be made to the model. Specifically, the work in Finland has shown the need to operationalise what anticipatory innovation capacity in governments looks like; how it interacts with both the core steering processes of government – strategy, budgeting, regulations –, but also the organisational and individual capacities and capabilities that need to be addressed. Consequently additional layers need to be added covering in detail:
Functions that those mechanisms need to fulfil and alternative ways that these functions could be achieved
Instrument to assign roles and responsibilities for those functions
These are outlined in detail in Table 3.3 and Figure 3.4 below with specific functions identified in regard to strategic planning, legislation, government planning, oversight, transformation and innovation, human resource planning, digitalisation, open government, futures and foresight, communication, procurement, leadership etc. In different governments these functions and the assigned roles and responsibilities may take different forms.
Source: OECD.
Based on the revised model and functions and roles described above, there are steps that the Finnish Government can take to make anticipatory innovation capacity more systemic across the government system. These include:
Government transition function
As the model described above describes a new role for transitions in government, there is a need to professionalise/systematise the government transition process to ensure the continuity of long-term reforms and avoid the loss of know-how and insights in the process. To address this, the Prime Minister’s Office and Ministry of Finance should establish a knowledge repository around long-term reforms and anticipatory issues encouraging learnings from one government to another, but also between public officials and politicians and the wider ecosystems connected to policy problems. They should also use technology to make data across government interoperable and user/phenomenon centric.
Devising a new function in government to plan responses to emerging issues requires a clear procedure to diagnose emerging issues and design flexible, reflexive and impactful anticipatory organisational solutions with clear ownership over policy problems (new function of change management). This should become an impulse for change from the top – creating urgency and legitimacy around policy problems. There should also be a clear and open procedure to raise emerging issues to cross-government collaboration and anticipatory diagnosis from the bottom up. This should entail a methodology to diagnose and make sense of emerging policy problems, assign ownership, responsibility and resources to issues in a flexible, but transparent manner. As both the Prime Minister’s Office (strategic steering) and Ministry of Finance (resource planning) have a role to play, the development of the mechanism should be a joint responsibility. Ministry of Finance should also devise how to staff and resource new cross-cutting teams, so it would become possible for public officials to ‘move’ across organisations with emerging issues and problems rather than getting stuck in government silos.
Establish a standing committee or group across government for senior leadership to discuss emerging, anticipatory issues with the ability and connected resources to create demand for anticipation and alternatives in the strategic planning and policy-making process by commissioning regular anticipatory studies, pilots etc. Having the sole purpose to discuss anticipatory policy issues is to ensure that these topics remain in top leadership attention and that they are prioritised in assigning resources. The working methods of the committee should entail a clear prioritisation function to signal areas of risk and opportunity where action or further exploration is needed and required. This body could be co-ordinated from the Prime Minister’s Office and work closely with the Futures Committee of the Parliament of Finland.
The structures and processes described above should also be supported by anticipatory knowledge sources. Combine dedicated human resources with technology to create synthesis and collective awareness (e.g. through platforms) for anticipatory knowledge and signal detection including anticipatory, user-centric and preventive use of data in policy and service development. Digital tools that allow for collective intelligence, signal collection and systematisation of data in interoperable ways could be also used for monitoring and evaluation purposes. As the co-ordination of digitalisation in government lies with the Ministry of Finance, the ministry together with the Prime Minister’s Office and the other public organisations should prototype and pilot an ecosystem wide collective signal detection methodology.
From the side of strategic policy steering it is essential that collective sense making – as the starting point for strategic processes with the appropriate tools and methods to involve diverse stakeholders – is institutionalised. Collective sense making requires less time investment than linear policy processes allowing the government to speed up policy processes and respond to the increasing rate of change. This should be supported by the Prime Minister’s Office, but also tools and methods developed and rolled out for ecosystem facilitation and dialogue from the Ministry of Finance. These methods should help unpack and understand the different motivations for change among diverse stakeholders and facilitate co-creation rather than just working organisationally in working parties. Some of these methods were already used as part of the pilot case studies. As such, centre of government should take an active role in facilitating an ecosystem led approach to strategy and connected dialogues and its implementation having links to different organisations who are responsible for projects in their own areas.
Strategic policy making tools should be used to go beyond sense making and visioning to develop future-oriented targets and missions to explore through innovation (closing the vision and impact gaps). This means that there should be a level of anticipatory quality control over strategies from the Prime Minister’s Office both in terms of their ability to create common purpose, but also their flexibility (leaving room for experimentation and innovation) and reflexivity (ability to change based on learnings and stress testing of variety of future avenues). Regular reviews taking into account these criteria should be carried out from the centre and learning shared with communities of practice.
There is a need to create clear and structured future-seeking moments in existing policy cycles where new alternatives and policy goals can be brought forward both by politicians and public officials. These may involve existing moments of reflection (e.g. similar to the President’s yearly discussion) or be a standard part of any strategic policy planning process: budget planning process, yearly reviews, government mid-term reviews etc. These needs co-ordination from the centre, but also the involvement of ministries owning the issues with support from the Ministry of Finance in facilitation skills.
Ministry of Finance should use more iterative and agile forms of resource allocation and government transforms to facilitate continuous experimentation in addition to assign dedicated resources for anticipatory ecosystem co-ordination and capacity and skill development to collaborate with external partners in an effective manner.
In line with the carbon neutrality pilot case study, there is a wider need in Finland to integrate anticipatory tools and methods into fiscal planning and investment prioritisation. Ministry of Finance should prioritise the testing and use alternative tools for data generation that take into account uncertainty connected to policy issues in fiscal planning.
Ministry of Finance together with relevant public organisations should use upcoming phenomenon based budgeting pilots to test and ensure that budgets serve to prioritise emerging issues and cross-government goals rather than government silos, so that anticipatory funding principles are integrated into fiscal planning processes.
Agility of core government steering processes was outlined in the assessment of the Finnish Government system and the core part of the anticipatory innovation governance model. One of the central issues that has been identified in the Finnish system is the dominance of regulatory measures in policies and their potential lock-in effects. Here, Ministry of Justice needs to address legislation can be a barrier to change. There is a need to create agility in regulation for exploration and experimentation also as part of ex ante regulatory impact assessment. The ministry should also explore the possibility to institute a ‘right to challenge’ function2 for strategies, policies and services with resourcing to explore alternatives.
Create closer ties to regulatory impact analysis with both ex ante and ex post anticipatory components and institutionalise other means to make regulations more ‘future proof’ (including sandboxing etc.)
HR function and skills and capacity development
As the model extensively references the role of HR function in government, the Ministry of Finance should develop anticipatory innovation capacity across the civil service including targeted programs for public sector leadership, civil servants and futures and foresight and innovation experts.
Ministry of Finance, as the principal in developing the civil service, should also take the lead in review of leadership and middle management roles and tasks to create space and room for anticipatory governance roles (alternatives exploration, collective sense making, experimentation, innovation etc.). As identified in both the assessment and the pilot case studies, there is a need to help leaders and middle management identify what can be ‘let go’ to make space for anticipatory innovation. This also involves a change in the high level leadership role (the expectations they create and the type of work they demand) which should be supported also from the centre.
There is a need to build trust between citizens and public officials and engagement in democratic processes. There is a need to develop people’s willingness to understand the subject of the future and acceptance of long-term investments. Guidelines should be developed to institutionalise citizen and other stakeholder participation methods to consider policy alternatives early on and help provided to public organisations to facilitate these discussions and collective sense making efforts. This means that the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Justice who currently hold the most expertise in deliberation should help with partners (e.g. SITRA) other public sector organisations to create continuous deliberation on long-term policy issues and public values among politicians and public officials and the larger public to counter immediacy bias. It is also important to develop communication guidelines around uncertainty with honesty and openness as central values.
There is a need to identify and create more future-seeking moments as part of government change (see the transition function above) and as part of policy reforms. Ministry of Finance should help put in place deliberation and dialogues in which both politicians and public officials can contribute to knowledge around future developments. Institutionalise these processes in policy-making processes and policy cycles to make them dependable and dynamic. Centre of government (and public sector organisations thematically) should assign an objective facilitator to facilitate moments of reflection and discussion with ministers as the new government is installed.
As there is an implementation gap that needs to be addressed, systemic capacity to innovate in the public sector of Finland needs more direct attention. Anticipatory innovation capacity requires the ability to keep ideas continuously coming forward from government futures and foresight activities and ensure that those learnings are shared back to the strategic steering process. Ministry of Finance should put forward how current public sector innovation activities align with anticipatory innovation needs, which further gaps exist and which investments are needed to create skills and capacities for innovation across the system, but also make the practice systemic in policy design and implementation processes. Efforts should be directed to developing and resourcing innovation and experimentation activities in organisations and integrate strategic foresight within the latter.
Ministry of Finance should also systematically devise and co-ordinate learning from innovation projects across the public sector that test and demonstrate the use of new anticipatory tools and methods across the ecosystem.
While the futures and foresight system in Finland is very developed it should be better aligned with ongoing policy making procedures. It is important to include anticipatory tools and methods (scenario planning, horizon scanning etc.) in collective sense making practices in a continuous and systemic manner. As outlined above Ministry of Finance could have a direct responsibility of this developed tailored training programs for experts, policy makers, senior leaders in anticipatory innovation capacity. Include anticipatory innovation skills into existing competency models or create new ones if needed. Furthermore, there is a need to and supply anticipatory knowledge within organisations – future reviews fulfil these goals to an extent, but are not speedy, open to the ecosystem or aligned with policy making enough. Hence, lack of impact, predictability and expert bias have remained problems. Ministries and public organisations should be encouraged by the centre to bring strategic foresight out of “narrow circles” and involve more outside and international experts in the work can help bring a diversity of perspectives and keep the focus on long term visions (instead of on reactive response to the crisis of the day). The Prime Minister’s Office in their role as a foresight co-ordinator is best to address this in a systematic manner setting guidelines of openness and transparency and encouraging system wide, timely strategic foresight interventions.
State Audit Office of Finland could take up a more proactive role in following up on the value chain from futures and foresight, strategic steering to innovation and experimentation and implementation. It should be continuously made transparent and clear how this value chain worked: e.g. which signals/information/scenarios were considered, how they were made actionable and what the results were. Consider which risks and opportunities were taken up, stress-tested or ignored and why and the costs associated with the former.
References
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[2] Miller, R. (ed.) (2018), Transforming the future: anticipation in the 21st century, UNESCO Publishing, Paris.
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[8] OECD (2021), Towards a strategic foresight system in Ireland, OECD Policy Brief. OPSI, https://oecd-opsi.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Strategic-Foresight-in-Ireland.pdf.
[5] OECD (2020), Initial scan of the Israeli public sector innovation system, OECD, Paris, https://oecd-opsi.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Initial-Scan-of-the-Israeli-public-sector-innovation-system-FINAL.pdf.
[4] OECD (2019), The Innovation System of the Public Service of Brazil: An Exploration of its Past, Present and Future Journey, OECD Public Governance Reviews, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/a1b203de-en.
[3] UNESCO (2020), Futures Literacy, https://en.unesco.org/futuresliterac (accessed on 25 June 2021).
Notes
← 1. Futures literacy has been defined as the “capacity to explore the potential of the present to give rise to the future” (Miller, 2007[11]), which means recognising that developments in the present are signals of what the future might hold.
← 2. 'Right to Challenge' is a function by which public organisations, local governments and public officials could apply for an exemption from an existing rule, regulation or strategic direction. To be granted this right, applicants have to show how they would be better able to innovate or explore an alternative to deliver improved public outcomes with this 'Right to Challenge.