When I said a little over two years ago that I would start working with a venture closely linked to the public sector, a colleague at the time shook his head. This was followed by an insight into her experience with this and how square and "stubborn" I could expect it to be. I didn't think much more about it, but enthusiastically went on to work at Compare with the digitalization of welfare services according to plan.
I still work at Compare today. My desk is filled daily with projects and tasks that allow me to be creative, innovative and where I get to develop methods that promote efficiency and create results. An innovation-promoting environment, I would say.
Innovation is rarely the result of a single individual's effort, and it's also so much more fun to solve problems together. We work in teams with skills from different backgrounds and with experiences that contribute to our projects being able to gain both depth and breadth.
Do I need to add that my main collaboration partners today come from the public sector...? Most often, we combine skills from both the public sector, business and academia. A fantastically fun way to work.
We meet so many enthusiastic, competent and forward-thinking individuals who really WANT to move forward. They want to develop, innovate, improve tomorrow's solutions so that we can have a better society. They have so much experience and so many valuable insights that we benefit from together when we come up with new solutions. And it is precisely this driving force that we want to lift and encourage. As I see it, it is precisely this that is one of the cornerstones of creating change in the long term - regardless of whether we are talking about the private or public sector.
How do we then work to create change and encourage innovative thinking?
In my role as a process manager within DigitalWell/DigitalWell Arena, it is a lot about discovering what needs to be improved (or invented!) and then leading the team through the process we are working with. Here it is important that we really include them in our way of working, and make this available.
We analyze and root in the problem picture to find the core. Then together we come up with solutions and develop services for a healthier society with the individual's needs in focus.
In concrete terms, this means that we often "educate" in thinking in new ways through, for example, workshops and sprints. We get closer to the users through dialogues and interviews and we act as a meeting place for individuals and organizations that need to reach each other across business boundaries. And we have design thinking as a base when we do this.
There is a lot of discussion around service design today. It became very popular to learn it in 2018/19, but I still think there is a large group of people who find the methodology too "fluffy" or simply too far from the comfort zone they are used to operating within.
We recently applied the service design methodology during a workshop for students at Karlstad University, where the task was to write requirements for a procurement of a digital service for the prevention of ill health in the workplace. Procurement and Design thinking. An unexpected combination? Yes, it was for us too, but also great fun to see the possibilities of these methods.
Beauty often resides in the simple, and service design is really about a very logical and simple approach: We make sure to solve the right problem and when we do it, we do it with the user's needs in focus. Sustainability is also an important aspect of everything we do within DigitalWell/DigitalWell Arena, and this way of working aligns well with those values.
Sometimes our perspective and our approaches may differ significantly from those commonly used in the businesses with which we collaborate. A challenge of course, but a fantastically fun one.
We recently conducted a workshop with 87 employees in the Värmland region to find out what challenges they saw in their operations. A different working day for them, while we had the opportunity to get an insight into their world and their needs in the workplace. This day resulted in two work areas that we will continue to work on during the spring.
So, my former colleague had a point in what she said; is it stodgy and square to work with the public sector?
Of course, it can take longer in certain contexts, but that is not what I have chosen to highlight here.
The new thinking and driving force needed for innovation is not in a system, a business or a process per se, but in the people who work within these walls. And this is a prerequisite for us to be able to develop, innovate and create solutions for tomorrow's health society together.
Do you want to stretch your way of thinking a bit and see how this can create new opportunities? Contact me at marika.martin@compare.se
