Last year I wrote a post — cities & the future of work — as an introduction to my session with the Prime Minister’s Office of Finland. I have been invited back to Helsinki this year to further discuss some issues around reforming the government’s operating practices particularly moving toward a more collaborative culture.
In the emerging network era, leadership is helping communities and networks become more resilient. Government agencies can focus on creating more human organizational structures that enable self-governance. Leadership becomes an emergent property of a network in balance. Depending on any one person to be the leader only dumbs-down the entire network. Viewing all of our work and learning from a network perspective may in the long-run create a better society. One role of government in the network era is to enable knowledge-sharing and curate the knowledge of all citizens. It can start by doing this internally. Countries, regions, and cities should be designed to enable more and better connections between citizens. Learning and innovation are more about making connections than having unique ideas. Increasing connections makes for a more innovative country.
In Finland the government is looking at a cross-sectoral and phenomenon-based approach, which ensures that a phenomenon like youth social exclusion is understood and addressed by government departments together, before individual budgets and projects are initiated. I liken this to agile sensemaking, where these ‘situation rooms’ (work teams) are based on temporary, negotiated hierarchies, that can be re-organized to address different phenomena as they appear.