Innovation Exchanges: advancing meaningful improvements in Future Policing
If there is one thing policing and the private sector have in common, it’s the need to innovate. For-profit organizations are driven to innovate to increase their bottom line. Profit is king. Policing, on the other hand, generally seeks to innovate when there is a demonstrable public safety, political or community urgency to do so. In those agencies possessing a innovative influence within their cultures, innovation is driven by the realization that the social milieu in which policing exists today is constantly changing. To effectively serve their communities, these agencies understand that they need to change (innovate) too.These agencies focus on innovation and continual improvement to maintain their effectiveness at controlling crime and enhancing public trust and confidence. In the future, these needs will become increasingly more acute. By adopting a Innovation Exchange as a quick, easy and cost-effective innovation strategy, tomorrow’s policing leaders can better position their agencies to deal with an increasingly uncertain future.
Nearly every police leader understands the need to innovate within their organizations. Many are intentional about innovation and skillful in its execution. But mostly, police leaders who have a desire to innovate have not received training in how to create a sustainable innovation ethos within their agencies or are just not clear on how to do it. They struggle to bolt it to the culture of their organizations.
Fortunately, there are several esteemed police-focused organizations that can help people learn about either best practices in policing or the research that evaluates policing strategies. Most prominent among those are the National Policing Institute (NPI), the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) and the Center for Evidence Based Crime Policy (CEBCP) at George Mason University. And the programmatic side of the US Department of Justice also has a variety of entities that provide a wealth of information about innovative practices and what works in policing. Among these are the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) and the National Institute of Justice (NIJ).
Innovation happens in two basic ways: it happens organically in a more spontaneous way, or it’s an intentional organizational practice with guidelines for engaging in innovation, methods for capturing the lessons learned from the innovation efforts and strategies for expanding organizational knowledge focused on constant improvement. Police leaders can support both these innovation channels in a variety of ways. The most basic is to simply encourage their people to try new approaches and accept failure as a part of the innovation process. The more formal method is to acquire a working knowledge of innovation as an intentional organizational strategy and then set into place innovation programs that “make real” the process of organizational innovation and improvement.
Innovation’s implementation is often the result of both structured strategies and unintentional creativity coming together. The balance between these two aspects may differ considerably between organizations depending on their culture, leadership styles and specific goals.
Many policing organizations pursue intentional innovation by employing structured processes and strategies designed to facilitate creative thinking, problem solving and the creation of innovative products, services or processes. This can include:
Innovation Management: Establish roles or units dedicated to innovation such as “Research & Development” teams or Innovation Managers.
Innovation Processes: Applying formal methodologies such as Design Thinking, Agile Development, or Lean Startup to systematically develop and test new ideas.
Experimental Units: Organizational units created specifically to develop and test innovative concepts systematically.
Innovation Culture: Fostering an environment which promotes risk-taking, a tolerance for ambiguity, experimentation and an acceptance of failure as part of the journey towards success is paramount to innovation success.
Investment in Innovation: Allocating resources specifically to innovation activities, including funding projects or laboratories or partnerships between startups and academic institutions.
Examples of how spontaneous innovation occur naturally without being planned in advance or intentionally implemented, include:
Individual Initiative: Employees may come up with novel ideas or improvements in their daily work that stem from personal insight, expertise or solving a specific problem they've come across. Of course, the precursor to this is an organizational culture that supports innovation and views reasonable failure part of the innovation process.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Encouraging informal interactions and collaborations among members from different departments to yield unexpected and innovative solutions.
Adaptation to Crisis: Crises or urgent needs can create opportunities for innovation as organizations rush to find rapid solutions or adapt quickly to unexpected obstacles. Where there is challenge there is also opportunity. Innovative leaders make the best of difficult situations by focus on learning after the crisis has passed.
The Balance Between Intention and Spontaneity
Successful policing organizations often strike a balance between creating an environment that fosters spontaneous innovation and implementing structured processes to guide intentional efforts at innovation. One example of this is when an agency allows employees to spend a portion of their duty cycles working on projects they find interesting and believe have potential for improving the organization. Many agencies have “pay back days” as part of their deployment schemes. In addition to training or special assignments during these periods, agencies could allow this to be used as experimental time for interested employee. This strategy has the potential for developing significant improvements in the agency by blending structured support (time and resources) with individual interests and creativity.
An Innovation Exchange is another approach to facilitating innovation in policing. It is a straightforward technique to increase innovation that balances intention and spontaneity. Moreover, it builds on existing inter-agency relationships and the inherent sense of comradery found in policing. It’s one of the most easy-to-implement, inexpensive innovation concepts. It works like this:
Cooperative police agency leaders in a definable region agree to allow personnel from other agencies to shadow their counterparts in their agencies to learn better methods, technologies and policies;
The program guidelines are clear that when an agency sends someone to another department the purpose is for the employee to focus on those things the agency being visited does better than the department sending the employee;
Program guidelines also acknowledge the natural inclination of the people in the program to invariably compare pay, benefits and working conditions – but the primary focus is on exchanging innovations or best practices, not salaries, etc.;
When the visiting employees return from the visits they must document the experience and note those things the hosting department does better than their own;
Visiting agencies must create a mechanism to capture the observations of their visiting personnel and explore the improvements that were identified so polices and practices can be changed to reflect the “better way” of doing things; and,
There should be an evaluation mechanism built into the program so that periodic adjustments can be made in terms of which employees are best at this, the impact on staffing because of the program, quantification of the benefits from the improvements learned from the hosting agencies, etc.
Clearly, there will be leaders who say they cannot afford to let any of their personnel spend time in other agencies learning about their operations. They are needed in their own community full-time to address local problems. Of course, there are times when this is true, and places where that is mostly true. However, a contrary, forward-leaning perspective to this might be that agency leaders who think they can’t do this actually cannot afford NOT to use a program such as this. To paraphrase an adage frequently attributed to Albert Einstein, “one definition of organizational illogic is to do the same things that aren’t producing the desired outcomes over and over and expect different results.”
Policing organizations that are struggling with staffing, training, equipment, technology, community engagement or constitutionally correct policing are the agencies most in need of new ideas and perspectives on reoccurring challenges. Rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship does not save you. It may give the appearance of useful, productive actions, but in reality, it does not solve your dilemma.
Finally, the character of any leader is most clearly revealed when they faced with difficult times – not when everything is going well. Inspiring the troops, creating hope for the community and acknowledging they don’t have all the answers are hallmarks of a courageous, authentic leader. The leader’s acknowledgment that their agency doesn’t have the market on every great idea in policing, isn’t perfect and can learn from colleagues in other agencies are key components of an agency’s journey from good to great. Exchanging innovations, best practices or just good ideas is a winning strategy for leaders, followers and the communities they are sworn to protect.
Conclusion
Policing organizations can and do pursue innovation intentionally through systematic processes and strategies. However, the ability for innovation to spontaneously arise as part of an adaptive organizational culture is equally essential to its success. Creating an environment in which both intentional efforts as well as spontaneous creativity are nurtured and valued are key to realizing innovation's full potential in police organizations. A collaborative approach to discovering innovations through strategies like Innovation Exchanges is a winning strategy to enhancing policing and the trust and confidence the public has in the police.
In our Future Policing Tools section of our Resources page, we have posted a department-wide memo used by one agency to capture the regional innovations and best practices of surrounding agencies through their innovation exchange. After the agency visitations, the “better ideas” gleaned from the visits were examined for adoption by the agency leadership. From its first agency visitation, a traffic supervisor brought back a cost recovery idea that has generated over $1 million since his half-day visit. That’s a pretty good return on investment by anyone’s estimation.
The memo, and its attendant Post-visit Debrief Form, are in Word format so any interested agency can download them and modify them for their own use.