Innosprint – A Design Sprint for the Public Sector - Observatory of Public Sector Innovation

How to bring new ways of working and problem-solving tools to the Estonian public sector? Over the course of a year and a half the Public Sector Innovation Team of Estonia developed a design sprint format suitable for the Estonian public sector. By constantly adapting and improving the format the Innovation Team has seen that it is a highly effective tool for spreading design thinking methods and generating enthusiasm around them.

Innovation Summary

Innovation Overview

Once the strategic decision has been made to view the public sector through a human centered services perspective, how do you quickly upskill public servants to embrace design thinking methods? How to bring new ways of working and problem-solving tools to the Estonian public sector? Once the experience is created – how to find facilitators for dozens of teams several times a year without it requiring an endlessly expanding budget?

The public sector innovation team, or Innotiim, is constantly looking for ways to spread design thinking, agile development, and a culture of experimentation among civil servants. Google Design Sprint and other similar methods are widespread tools in the private sector, but they have not gained wide popularity in the Estonian public sector. Over the course of a year and a half, Innotiim has developed an innovation sprint format suitable for the Estonian public sector — Innosprint — and used it as a training ground for facilitators in the public sector.

An Innosprint takes place on five days spread over six weeks. What makes an Innosprint different from a traditional sprint is that there is time left between days 1 and 2 for all participants to conduct their own user research: interviews and, if possible, other kinds of field work. Innotiim sees this as an important step that changes the civil servants’ thinking and helps them understand the problem from the point of view of the user.

To date, four Innosprints have taken place, where altogether 381 people from 85 organisations have sought novel solutions in 53 project teams. Teams apply to the sprint by proposing an actual policy or service problem that they need to solve. It is important to emphasise that the vast majority of participants have never encountered design thinking before. The teams consist mostly of civil servants, but often include partners from the private or 3rd sector. Innosprints are centrally managed by Innotiim (a team of 4 people) and fully virtual (via Zoom and Miro), which does not prevent teams from having a physical war room and also allows people to take part in the sprint from all over Estonia.

One of the most important observations has been that the project teams can manage within the given time and activity framework even without a mentor proficient in service design. However, this means that they ask less critical questions and their solutions tend to be on the safe side. This observation gave rise to the idea to train facilitators, or sherpas, in parallel with the Innosprint in the spring of 2022.

The sherpa sprint is a unique training programme that increases the capacity of facilitation in the public sector and finds people who are inspired by the values of service design and enchanted by the possibilities of co-creation. In the spring of 2022, Innotiim developed and carried out the training programme in parallel with Innosprint, where, based on their previous experience and knowledge of working with civil servants, Innotiim provided 22 public sector employees with basic knowledge of managing a co-creative design process. In parallel with the training, each of them led a sprint team – half of them led their own team while the other half led a team of strangers from an unknown field. The participants considered the second option to be a more useful learning experience and said that they would like to do it again in the future for the purpose of further development.

The innovation benefits directly public servants across all levels of government, who gain new skills and tools. More distantly, it benefits the citizens of Estonia, since these new skills serve to produce more user-centric and efficient public policy.

The Innosprint format has been very well received by participants. Although so far Innotiim hasn't tracked the NPS score, the Innosprint has so far seen exponential growth in the number of teams applying to participate. The sprint is cheap to conduct and easy to replicate. So far the main constraint has been the number of available facilitators. However, since Innotiim added a training module for facilitators (sherpas) we can tap into that growing pool in upcoming sprints.

Innovation Description

What Makes Your Project Innovative?

Innosprint is innovative, because:

It's a scalable and efficient method for upskilling public servants in design thinking and co-creation methods.
All the participants conduct their own fieldwork. This has brought about a fundamental shift in mindset with many of the participants and given the civil servants a much better understanding of the problems they are solving
It brings about innovative solutions that the public sector wouldn't otherwise have thought of.
It is a very practical learning method, as participants practice design thinking tools on actual problems that need solving
The format empowers the participants to use design thinking in their day to day work and replicate the design thinking process on their own.

What is the current status of your innovation?

To date, 4 Innosprints have taken place, where altogether 381 people from 85 organisations have sought novel solutions in 53 project teams. Applications for the 5th are currently open.

After each instance we (Innotiim) have reviewed the sprint and improved bits and pieces of it - the latest addition being the facilitator training. Currently the sprint format has reached a maturity, where it is very easy to replicate either by Innotiim or anyone who has experienced the format. We see increased interest in participating in the Innosprint and several public institutions have replicated it on their own. We are currently at the stage where we are evaluating the larger impact of the Innosprints - what kind of work methods have participants integrated from the sprint into their day to day work and how have the solutions that were developed in the sprint fared afterwards.

Innovation Development

Collaborations & Partnerships

Public Sector Innovation Team (part of the Government's Office) - developed the methodology, trains the facilitators and organises the sprint
Ministries and their subsidiaries - propose the problems, provide team leads and team members
Civil society and companies - participate as contributing members in the project teams.

Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

Citizens, NGOs, Companies - as part of the Innosprint public servants conduct user interviews with citizens and later in the Innosprint, test their solutions on citizens. This practice strengthens democracy by giving citizens more agency in developing efficient public policies and increases transparency of how policies are created.
Public Sector - increased motivation to serve in public sector positions thanks to the chance to upskill and the liberty to test innovative solutions.

Innovation Reflections

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

We keep in touch with sprint teams and regularly check in to ask how are they faring with the sprint project and what kind of practices from the sprint have they taken away.

Innosprint has improved the quality of procurements. Sprint teams have a better undestanding of what kind of solutions they need to procure and are more concise in their descriptions.
Several public institutions have gotten the courage to use design thinking in-house to tackle problems
Several public institutions have started using collaborative tools for conducting meetings and documenting development projects.
Many public institutions have taken co-creative methods (e.g. using think-pair-share and reflections) and started using them in their day-to-day work
Participant feedback: ‘I have already used [the knowledge gained from the sherpa sprint] – for example, I am now developing the prototype in-house and trying to use the knowledge gained for this purpose and put small teams to work.’

Challenges and Failures

After the 3rd sprint we realized that although teams are quite capable of using the prepared Miro boards to conduct the sprint tasks, they often lack the depth and slide over more complicated questions.

During the 4th sprint we introduced the concept of sherpas - facilitators for sprint teams. Together with a call for sprint problems we also put out a call for sherpas. These are public servants who are interested in gaining better skills at facilitating meetings and design processes. The Public Sector Innovation Team trains them briefly before the sprint, matches them with sprint teams and supports them during the sprint.

Participant feedback: ‘I have already recommended the sherpa sprint to several colleagues. It is a wonderful experience to learn intensively through practice. I also really liked the structure of the whole programme: it was very professionally done by Innotiim. Each sherpa having their own mentor and analysing the day with the mentor was very helpful.'

Conditions for Success

Prior to Innosprint, Innotiim had already established itself as a team who offers exciting new working methods with tangible results. Innotiim has a level of trust among the public servants whereby they are willing to trying out new formats.
Although the Innosprint format is lean, it has been able to scale thanks to the support of public sector leaders who enable and encourage the participation of their staff.
The sprint format emphasises finishing the sprint with tangible results. These results leave the participants with a sense of accomplishment. We get to use these results to inspire new teams to try out Innosprint.
We continuously track the needs of public servants and adapt the sprint format to keep up with new needs and interests.

Replication

While Innosprint is organized centrally for the entire public sector, it has already been replicated in-house in a number of ministries and their subsidiaries. Innosprint is easily replicable and adaptable to the specific requirements of the replicating organization.

Lessons Learned

One experienced facilitator can support 6 facilitators-to-be each of whom can lead a team of 4-8 persons. Innosprint is a very efficient way of spreading expert knowledge!
Leaving time for conducting their own field work is vital! It helps bring together participants with different perspectives and gives so much nuance and depth to the understanding of the problem at hand. It's also one of the most talked about element of the sprint - increases word of mouth!
While Innotiim organizes and holds Innosprint virtually, sprint teams may prefer to hold physical war rooms - that's fine as long as the physical teams remember check-in times!
After the intensive (virtual) sprint, it's great to invite people to a physical meet-up at the end so that they can share sprint experiences and develop a network that can support them in organizing their own sprints.

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