Campfires, Trails and Warm Data: Documenting Sensemaking. Government runs on documents. Facilitation produces warmth. The artifact has to do both — record what happened and argue it mattered.

Launching collaboration, practicing it, and sustaining it are three different organizational capabilities. Launching collaboration is not the hard part.

Most organisations are actually quite good at it. The kick-off gets held. The MOU gets signed. The working group convenes with energy and intent.

Six months later, the meetings have thinned out, partners are drifting, and no one can quite explain what happened.

What happened is that launching collaboration, practicing it, and sustaining it are three different organisational capabilities. Most institutions build the first one and assume the other two will follow.

What does your organisation actually have — and what is it assuming will take care of itself?

How It Got Fixed: Why Workshop Ideas Rarely Become Action www.shiftflow.ca › ideas › how-it-got-fixed...Ownership is designed in, not hoped for. A report-out from a GovMaker workshop where 934 ideas met the limits of what facilitation alone can do.

The implication for organizational change is significant. If you want to shift culture, you have to create conditions where new paths get travelled repeatedly. Not just announced, not just documented, but actually walked. And recognize that walking new paths will require more effort, more time, and more preparation than the usual route.

Cards Against Bureaucracy is a structured play experience for leaders and facilitators ready to move beyond strategy into the conversations that actually change things. Demo live now!

Scaling innovation is not the act of replicating a program across more sites. It is the process of embedding a new way of working into the structures, behaviours, and incentives of a system.

Innovation labs in government often fail not because of poor ideas, but because organizations lack the structures, incentives, and pathways needed to implement and scale those ideas.

Organizational change rarely happens in a single breakthrough moment. In government and large institutions, transformation usually unfolds in degrees: through small shifts in behaviour, governance, relationships, incentives, and resource flows that accumulate over time. This matters because leaders often expect dramatic change while the real work of transformation is slower, more uneven, and more structural.

Budget cuts rarely transform systems when the underlying resource flows stay the same. In governments facing structural deficits, austerity often reduces spending without changing the incentives, delivery models, staffing patterns, and decision rules that reproduce existing outcomes. The result is usually not transformation, but a more strained version of the same system.

Exploring the Heroine's Journey as a metaphor for integration in organizational transformation. It emphasizes the need to facilitate the integration of transformative experiences, focusing on inner work, and aftercare to support the sharing of the boon upon return.

ShiftFlow’s Principal Consultant Nick Scott reflects on his time working in the Government of New Brunswick and the attempts to provide experiential learning to his fellow public servants.

To achieve true transformation, innovation needs to reach these concealed depths. A dive into the culture of an organization is essential.

Nick Scott shares how he worked to advance open government, grow innovation capacity and foster a culture of innovation within the public sector.

In times of fast changes, no single organization or government can know everything needed to be responsive. Investing in networking and the ability to work with actors across sectors is a necessity to creating public value in the 21st century. Networked governance is an approach to doing just that.

We need to transform what we measure in government.

How can our public servants learn to embrace innovation through the concept of a self-lacing shoe?

In this post, ShiftFlow’s Nick Scott discusses a powerful metaphor for the essence of transformation within government.

This blog post covers off on one of the trickiest aspects of human-centered design - collaborative problem framing.

Embracing lessons from times of crisis can help us build public services that are agile, responsive, and focused on people's needs.

Accelerate change in government with innovation adoption theory!