(Mis)Education at the 27e Région: how to keep on learning ?

This article is part of a series aimed at describing the transformations we are striving to bring about at the 27th Region to cultivate what we believe to be our strength and our purpose: the development of transformative skills, capabilities, and resources within public organizations; the creation and long-term facilitation of coalitions bringing together local governments, private-sector actors, and researchers from different regions, to help them make progress together on a public issue; and the mobilization of multidisciplinary groups that integrate research and action to address increasingly complex challenges and generate actionable knowledge. 

Who? Public officials, for one: double agents, accomplices, ambassadors… We have a colorful repertoire of affectionate terms to describe the officials who today form a community of mutual learning, crossing paths with our webinars, blogs, programs (or parties)! And from designers, on the other hand, since the 27th Region has served as a testing ground for the many designers who have passed through our team and our projects…

What ? Training takes various forms—always collaborative—in many of our programs: through hands-on experience, in most of our programs that allow officials to test a design-based approach to public policy; through putting things into perspective, dialogue between theory and practice, and testing tools in programs like “Labonautes (external link)” or “Pushing the Boundaries of Innovation in the Public Sector,” for example; through taking a step back, particularly when it comes to exploring new approaches or projects in other regions—in France or abroad—as in “Enacting the Commons (external link)” or, very soon, around issues of environmental justice;

At the 27th Region, we strive to deconstruct the traditional concept of training in order to invent new forms of learning. But we also view training as an ecosystem within which we must find our place to help raise the level of transformation skills in the public sector.

Since our inception, we have been walking the fine line between participatory research and action-oriented training. Quite soon after our first program, *Territoires en résidence*—which aimed to assess the relevance of design in improving the development of local public services and policies as diverse as transportation, public libraries, and education—the question of “setting a precedent” arose. Indeed, after testing these approaches, an increasing number of local governments expressed a desire to bring these skills in-house. This was the driving force behind the launch of the La Transfo program (external link), a year-and-a-half-long experimental initiative designed to foster the emergence of public innovation labs within about ten local governments, thereby building in-house capabilities in innovation through practice, experimentation, action research, and design.

Today, across all our programs, we choose to work with the relevant staff members (those in charge of finance in “Nouvelles mesures (external link),” economic development in “Rebonds (external link),” urban policy in “Nouveaux accords (external link),” etc.), to work alongside them through the phases of investigation, hypothesis and scenario formulation, and then—depending on the program—conducting tests, evaluation, and documentation.

This path has allowed us to clarify our positioning and our core principles: partnering with our members (external link) to build internal capacity (rather than simply providing services); initiatives led by the employees involved—from all professions and categories—in a distributed manner (rather than an expert-led approach); learning by doing and through peers, drawing on internal resources and skills (rather than outsourcing).

Over time, we have also produced numerous resources for the community: for example, by codifying public innovation competencies in the Training framework (external link); by developing common benchmarks, such as maturity matrices (external link)or Sonar (external link); and, of course, by documenting our approaches and lines of inquiry—as open-source content—on our blog or those of other organizations, such as in this recent contribution (external link)to *L’Ecole du terrain*. We also serve on the scientific advisory boards for several public policy design training programs: in Nantes, Nîmes, and Lyon, as well as in New York City at Parsons School.

Finally, we have led training programs, such as the “Réenchantez l’action publique” series, “Les aventuriers de l’innovation publique,” and the “Journées découvertes,” which offered nearly 400 public servants an introductory immersion into the field of public policy design (and a first opportunity to meet one another); however, we discontinued them when they no longer seemed to align with the action research approach that is at the core of our identity, while still striving to convey and share its principles and methods with professionals interested in these approaches.

Among the more experimental approaches to the subject:

• (Dé)formations, (external link) which focused on training elected officials on the transition and highlighted the mismatch between training for elected officials modeled after vocational training (designed on an individual basis, in silos, etc.) and actual needs, and to develop several lightweight learning tools that have inspired stakeholders as diverse as the Institut Paris Région, the ANCT, and several local governments.
• L’École buissonnière, a program that unfortunately never got off the ground, which sought to address the need for cross-disciplinary training among students with backgrounds in design, political science, or engineering.
• Training for economic developers, for which we are exploring—together with the CNAM and Intercommunalités de France—how to rethink the program to better integrate the challenges of ecological and social transition.

What about our relationships with training organizations themselves? When it comes to staff training, despite regular exchanges over the past 15 years, we have not (yet) succeeded in building strong, lasting synergies with organizations such as the CNFPT or the INET, nor—on the design side—with schools or universities.

How can we better structure the pedagogical dimension of our programs? While our reflections on evaluation (external link), cooperation, and systems thinking (external link) help us be more intentional in how we design our programs and participants’ learning journeys, we’re exploring how we might extend the lifespan of our programs by sharing the lessons learned through training sessions. We’re currently testing this idea with Rebonds and Nouvelles mesures—feel free to contact us if you’d like to learn more (external link)!

Today, after all these years, we see that there remains a gap between the current state of knowledge in public innovation, what is taught in training programs, and the practical needs of local governments and public administrations. Most public officials lack the skills to address increasingly complex environmental, economic, and social problems in a context of high uncertainty. Most training programs focus on a few methodological aspects but neglect strategic and policy issues.

That is why we are launching La Synchro, a new program conducted in partnership with the CNFPT, with support from the DITP, and in collaboration with the OECD’s Observatory of Innovation in the Public Sector, designed to realign researchers, practitioners, and public innovation training developers. The goal is to create a safe space to help those responsible for designing innovation initiatives consolidate their practices, reconnect their concrete challenges to theories and methods for managing complexity, and contribute to a process of collaborative learning and the development of collective resources. To learn more, click here (external link)!