Exploring the paper Mazzucato, M., 2018. Mission-oriented innovation policies: challenges and opportunities. Industrial and corporate change, 27(5), pp.803-815.
Blog five of five, in a series by Dr Chrissi McCarthy.
How then do we apply a mission-oriented approach? This is where we move from thinking to doing.
Let’s outline the steps we need to take to ensure we don’t fall into the traps of the business and social cases.
We build on Mazzucato and propose using Fairness, Inclusion and Equity (FIE) as a diagnostic tool to understand how FIE can help us achieve our goals. You can see our earlier blogs for why we use FIE rather than EDI. Here, we strike a balance between business needs and social value that ties back to the business’s overall goals, enabling us to build buy-in and demonstrate the value of our work.
Let’s break that down into steps in a strategy
- Mission
- Diagnosis
- Design
Mission: Desired outcome
To determine the organisation’s mission, you need to consider the number of leads and the gap between your policy and practice.
First, you need to understand who your interested parties are.
Do you have one clear source, a strategy? Or perhaps you are working on a complex joint venture or research project with multiple leads, each with competing ideas.
Determine what you need to align to.
Next, consider whether the missions align with practice.
For example, is an inclusive environment at the heart of your strategy but absent from policy and practice?
If so, you might not want to position it as a mission.
People will not be motivated to undertake the work if they are being rewarded and driven in other directions.
Instead, look at what the organisation rewards rather than only what it says it values.
Goal: aim to establish 3-5 missions
Diagnosis: Where are the barriers
We use a unique approach that utilises FIE as a diagnostic.
It’s a lot to explain here, so I’ll keep it simple with a main points outline following three main steps.
Firstly, identify which groups have power (eg SLT) and which groups have restricted power in your organisation (Eg, part-time workers, supporting roles, disabled staff).
Then select a control group (group with power) and three or four groups with restricted power.
Secondly, for each mission, develop a series of questions to understand how people experience the process of trying to achieve the mission.
We use a lens of fairness (distributive, procedural and interactional). So, if you are trying to achieve greater innovation, you might ask, “Do you have the tools you need to implement innovative ideas?” “Are you able to put forward innovative ideas?” “ Are your ideas treated with respect?”
By asking groups with power as well as those without, you can build a picture of how your people experience their environments and identify areas of ingrained inequality.
It’s important here to use established coproductive techniques, such as the Nominal Group Technique, to increase the chances that all voices are heard.
Finally, use a system to filter responses so you can manage your workload.
Goal: Establish three main areas of focus per mission
Design: Root causes and objectives
Often in organisations, we attempt to fix symptoms, not root causes, meaning we are, at best, bailing out water as the boat sinks around us.
That’s why, once you have identified three clear areas of focus to achieve your mission, you need to undertake a root cause analysis.
Taking time to understand the source of the problem will help you develop practical and meaningful SMART objectives.
If you fail to undertake this step, it’s likely your initiatives will plateau, leading to frustration.
Goal: Create three objectives per mission aligned with your areas of focus.
How do I progress?
Creating a mission-based strategy using FIE as a diagnostic can enable you to develop a plan aligned with your organisational goal, contextual to your environment, and co-produced with your people.
This particular pathway increases staff buy-in and provides mechanisms to limit the amount of work you undertake.
If you want to implement this approach systematically, FIELDS provides the step-by-step process and templates to take you from mission definition to four deliverables. Taking you from the conceptual ideas to four key deliverables: an inclusive environment strategy, action plan, governance plan, and comms plan.
