Three aspects distinguish this from conventional governance reform. First, it treats culture, not structure, as the primary lever addressing the psychological fear of failure that OECD evidence identifies as Latvia's core barrier. Second, it applies a research-grounded framework: Humble Governance was developed by Demos Helsinki with Prof. Charles Sabel (Columbia Law School), validated through the Finnish Prime Minister's Office, and recognised with the Creative Bureaucracy Festival Award (2021). This gives the approach both academic rigour and practical credibility. Third, it combines this framework with an extended experimentation journey where civil servants test solutions on real problems, embedded within the Digital Academy's infrastructure (reach of 71,000+ public servants), creating conditions for long-term impact, sustainability and scale that standalone innovation projects rarely achieve.

The Symposium was delivered in January 2026. The 10-week Humble Governance Journey is in its final phase, with cross-ministerial teams completing experiments on real governance challenges. Embedded within Latvia’s RRF-funded Digital Academy, the programme is culminating with a Grand Finale event on 24 April to share results with stakeholders across government. The Humble Governance framework and methodology by Demos Helsinki, is adaptable to other national contexts with contextualisation.

VAS provided institutional legitimacy, participant mobilisation, cultural knowledge, and the Digital Academy infrastructure. Demos Helsinki contributed the Humble Governance conceptual framework, international facilitation methodology, benchmarking case studies, and journey programme design. Current and ex-government stakeholders from Finland, Denmark and Latvia provided practitioner keynotes or panel talks on leadership, trust, experimentation lessons, failure and transformation.

Direct beneficiaries: ~30 senior civil servants across Latvian ministries and agencies gained practical leadership tools and peer networks. VAS gained institutional capacity to deliver the methodology independently. The Digital Academy ecosystem benefits from a proven model for practice-driven leadership development. Indirect beneficiaries: Latvia's broader civil service and citizens benefit from more adaptive, trust-based governance as participants embed the approach in their organisations.

Pre/post surveys revealed four measurable shifts: (1) Reduced fear of experimentation as participants embraced failure as learning, not career risk; (2) A new community of practice as isolated participants discovered shared convictions across ministries;(3) Shift from outsourcing to internal capability, as officials recognised the value of building the state's own problem-solving capacity; (4) Action-oriented mindset replacing assumption-based planning. 100% of participants acknowledged facing challenges too complex for traditional planning. Participants independently defined humble governance around trust, collaboration, shared responsibility, closely mirroring the framework, suggesting genuine internalisation and change readiness.

The primary challenge was cultural: in Latvia's administrative context, the fear of failure is deeply embedded and "humility" can be misread as weakness. The programme needed to explicitly reframe humble governance as a strategic and structural choice, as courage to act under uncertainty, not passivity. Senior civil servants have demanding schedules; maintaining engagement across a 10-week journey requires careful touchpoint design. Measuring culture change remains inherently difficult, the most important impacts (shifted mindsets, new behaviours) are the hardest to quantify. The programme developed survey instruments, but long-term tracking beyond the journey is needed to assess lasting impact on governance practice.

Embedding within the Digital Academy and its massive 71,000+ civil servant reach provided institutional infrastructure that standalone innovation projects lack. VAS's role as a trusted national training institution meant the programme wasn't perceived as an external imposition. A research-grounded framework gave participants confidence in the approach and the extended journey model (not one-off training) enabled genuine behaviour change avenues beyond awareness. Experiential methods made the approach 'felt' and participant seniority created potential for systemic culture change. Finally, alignment with OECD's prior Latvia work and VAS's mandates provided a compelling reform continuity narrative.

Three lessons we'd like to share: (1) Culture, not structure, is the primary lever: addressing the psychological fear of failure matters more than reorganising institutions. Creating psychologically safe environments to learn and collaborate drives systemic change more than mandates. (2) Scale follows infrastructure: embedding humility-based governance within the Digital Academy created conditions for replication that a standalone project never could. (3) One-off events don't change culture: the extended journey with experiments, clinics, and peer support was essential for impact. The symposium created awareness and the journey enabled lived-practice. This model offers a transferable blueprint for other administrations across Europe.

This programme follows a longer arc of OPSI-Demos Helsinki-Latvia collaboration. In 2021, Demos Helsinki partnered with OPSI and Latvian State Chancellery's Innovation Laboratory to develop experimentation guidelines for the Latvian public sector. The Humble Governance programme builds directly on that foundation, moving from experimentation guidelines to an embedded governance culture that makes experimentation possible. The framework itself, developed with Prof. Charles Sabel (Columbia Law School) and validated through the Finnish Prime Minister's Office, is grounded in published research and adaptable to other national contexts with relevant contextualisation. The Grand Finale event (24 April 2026) will generate additional results.