Spurring innovation in government agencies through trust

Through these traits, these agencies are likely fostering trust in a way that promotes innovation by 1) encouraging employees to try better ways of approaching a problem and 2) inspiring employee trust in an organization’s efforts to maintain motivation, high standards, honesty, respect, and workforce support—which ultimately contribute to the agencies’ ability to innovate.

2. Trust improves information flow

Empowering employees to identify and solve problems is critical, but it is not the only ingredient necessary for innovation. After all, no single individual can know everything. It is unlikely that someone could know both an organization’s problems in detail as well as all the cutting-edge solutions in academia and industry that may be able to solve them. Therefore, information flow is another important part of innovation. And trusting the person you are getting information from only helps speed up and spread information flow.

Trust comes down to the person-to-person social connections of each individual, and so, individuals playing key social roles are critical to the development of innovations. Research on the spread of hybrid seed corn among American farmers in the 1930s to 1950s established that while the diffusion of innovation is observed at the aggregate level, it is shaped by circumstances at the individual level.⁵ Innovations are adopted by individuals who will be impacted by their specific interactions with an innovation, their expectations of an innovation, and their contributions to an innovation—and each of these individuals is linked to networks within an organization. It is these individual, influential, person-to-person connections, which are based on trust, that can boost information flow within networks.

Establishing networks can help facilitate relationships in a way that encourages more innovation in an organization. Networks provide structure so that ideators know who to share an idea with, who to ask for resources, who can help develop a prototype, and who can provide an honest go/no-go decision.

3. Trust supports adoption

Given the often-rigid personnel policies of the public sector, taking a risk on a successful innovation is unlikely to make an ideator or connector the next C-suite executive; so, it’s important to recognize its other incentives. In government, broad trust in the benefits of an innovation can be critical for adoption. Leaders can instill trust across siloes, create space for risk-taking, and mitigate fears around an innovation’s impact. These actions can be key to offsetting the disincentives of adopting a new process or technology—namely, having to make changes. By creating a greater willingness to take risks, trust can support the diffusion of an innovation and subsequently help increase the probability of scaling innovation.

Person-to-person trust networks are essential for spreading an innovation across an organization, each of which may adopt at various paces. Identifying influencers across different networks can spur a greater breadth of adoption and help reach acceptance across segmented groups throughout an organization.⁶ Influencers (figure 2) can help to diffuse innovations because these individuals are trusted by their colleagues. As an innovation begins to be adopted, an ideator can become more reliant on networks of managers to share the benefits of the new technology among employees.

How do we scale networks of trust?

From continuous-aim gunnery to NASA, trust clearly plays a central role in the success of innovation. But this can present a dilemma for leaders: Although trust is fundamentally one individual’s perception of someone else’s reliability, innovation often requires it in massive scales. So how do you scale trust to the sizes needed for modern innovation? In other words, trust operates at the level of individual human relationships—between one individual and another or between an individual and an organization—but innovations often operate at the level of groups, organizations, and even whole industries. So how can the success of one individual be replicated at those massive scales?

What you should not do is the same thing you did to earn the trust of one individual. That is because different types of trust can be needed at different stages of innovation. At ideation, individuals need to trust the organization not to jeopardize their careers as they innovate. In the prototyping stage, leaders need to trust the idea enough to commit the organization’s resources to it, while in adopting, other workers need to trust leaders and influencers enough to begin using the new solution. Merely copying what worked in one stage will not ensure scaling to another.

First, understand innovation roles

So how do you scale individual trust to the scale of an entire industry? The answer lies in understanding people’s roles.

In innovation, we have already seen how different roles are needed for an innovation to succeed. Different individuals playing different roles are key at different stages of the innovation lifecycle. Take the example of continuous-aim gunfire: Admiral Scott was the innovator fostering trust among a small group to create a new idea; Lieutenant Sims was the connector who linked a problem with a promising solution; and President Roosevelt was the influencer who could marshal enough support for the innovation to take hold.

But these roles of innovator, connector, and influencer are not unique to specific individuals. Different people can be ideators at different times, and the same individual can be a connector in one group and an influencer in another. And importantly, for scaling, the characteristic relationship patterns of these roles seem to appear at any scale of human interaction.⁷

Nor are these roles fixed within a network. People’s relationships can change over time, which allows them to play different roles.⁸ For example, as a person gains more and more connections within a close group, the more effective they can become as an influencer. And when someone from a densely connected group gains connections with outside groups, they can begin to play the connector role quite effectively.

So, by understanding the key roles needed as innovations are ideated, prototyped, or adopted, leaders can find or train the right individuals to fill those roles. That way, leaders can ensure that innovations are developing the right type of trust, with the right people, and at the right time, no matter the scale (figure 2).

Developing individuals with the connections needed to play these roles can require both informal networks (e.g., people at work with whom innovators have a relationship or shared interest) or formal networks (e.g., an agency-created innovation network with roles carved out to develop an innovation). Regardless of informal or formal networks, for an organization to innovate systematically and repeatedly, a network of supporters is needed to create enough momentum to push ideas forward and avoid stagnation.

Second, adapt to each stage of innovation

The type of trust will shift as innovations move from ideation to prototyping to adoption, but the roles of ideator, connector, and influencer remain the same. Consider the following example.

First, let’s focus on trust shifting across the stages of innovation: ideation, prototype, and adoption (figure 3). After sunsetting the Space Shuttle Program in 2011, NASA shifted toward a public-private partnership (PPP) model for transporting crew to the international space station. Within this structure, NASA sought industry to develop solutions for the new concept of commercial crew transport and began to work with connectors to find out what was feasible.⁹ In the ideation stage, NASA shifted to leveraging external companies such as SpaceX and Boeing who became the ideators to design potential solutions. While creating new rockets and spacecraft in the prototyping stage, the companies in turn trusted NASA executives to play a connector role to influencers in Congress to deliver steady funding and regulatory approvals. By shifting ideation and prototyping outside the organization, NASA is also shifting risk outside of the organization. In this, NASA trusts industry’s process and is steadfast in its PPP arrangement, despite inevitable early prototype iterations. Finally, adoption has taken hold across the space community with the successful launch and return of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 in 2020 in conjunction with nearly 160 launches overall.¹⁰

Now, to focus on roles. The role of ideator shifted from NASA to industry as the emphasis shifted from creating a new concept of space travel to creating physical spacecraft—but the role of ideator still exists. By paying attention to roles, government leaders can help ensure that the right people are in place at the right times to build the trust needed (figure 4). Even organizations built for innovation, such as NASA, could fail if there isn’t trust in place. But by using roles to help build networks of trust, an innovation can garner buy-in across siloes and can be spread throughout an organization.

Recommendations for instilling innovation in your agency

If you’re a manager reading this, you may be thinking about potential pitfalls. Pitfalls can arise when there is a breakdown in trust between people. But remember, trust is founded on person-to-person interactions influenced by capability, reliability, humanity, and transparency.¹¹ While trust starts between just two people, our recommendations for spurring innovation hinge on using trust to activate networks of trust. Networks can help amplify ideas and diffuse innovations across an agency for adoption (figure 5).

If you’re struggling to spur innovation in your organization, it might be time to examine your innovation structures and trust networks. To begin spurring innovation through trust, organizational leaders should:

1. Define what’s important: Innovation efforts rarely fail because of lack of good ideas. Rather, they can fail because organizations lack structure in their innovation process—getting a random barrage of good ideas instead of a pipeline of ideas that are organized around organizational goals. Structure starts with defining what is important to the organization. What is the goal that an innovation seeks to achieve? This will help determine the type of innovation (disruptive or incremental) the organization should pursue. For example, are you looking for improvements to the efficiency or effectiveness of current processes? Or are you looking for entirely new ways of delivering on the mission?

The right goal can help create the incentives and metrics needed to guide its achievement. Metrics and incentives are critical to driving the type of innovation behavior that organizations seek. Incentives are the monetary and nonmonetary rewards that help spur an organization’s workforce and external partners to actions needed for innovation. Metrics, on the other hand, help leadership track both internal and external progress toward innovation goals.

2. Manage talent by role: With the right goals established, leaders can turn to individuals who will carry out those goals. Leaders have long known that having the right person with the right contacts in the right position can make or break a project. But often, placing these key workers is done based on personal knowledge or intuition.¹² Understanding the role that someone will play in an innovation ecosystem can help leaders put the right person with the right connections in the right position or, alternatively, help a person already in that role grow the right connections to succeed. For example, a leader who identifies that a given position in the organization tends to function as a connector between scientists who create new ideas and mission end users who apply them can use organizational network analysis to find candidates for the job who may be able to best bridge those two groups.

3. Continually measure trust: Finally, with the goals, metrics, incentives, and people all in place, leaders need to make sure the ecosystem is functioning properly. For innovation, this means that the players trust each other enough to create or adopt a new idea. Existing frameworks can help leaders select the right metrics to monitor the particular trust dynamics important for their innovation processes. But this is not a one-time action. As innovations move through the stages from ideation to prototyping to adoption, the type of trust needed evolves as well. Therefore, leaders should continually monitor trust metrics within the organization with an eye toward the specifical innovation goals and stages they are dealing with.

Getting started is often the hardest part. That’s why this article is designed to be an actionable guide you can take and implement. Individually, bringing in any part of these tools can help move the needle, but by compounding several of tools we’ve discussed—networks, structures, empowerment, and effective leadership—organizations can build layer upon layer of trust, which will ultimately bolster an organization’s chances of turning one person’s idea into an organizationally supported innovation that can create value at scale. Build the momentum and build the capacity for innovation in your organization.