Following the first phase of the first annual fellowship, the NS GovLab Leadership Team organized a retreat to reflect on the initial offering of the fellowship and to plan for the future. One of the key milestones from the retreat was an early draft of principles to help guide the work. To learn more about the process of developing these principles, check out this blog post. Since then, an eighth principle has been added. Side note: If your life is lacking in animated gifs and/or cephalopod trivia, this blog post will not disappoint!
With our third cohort, we explicitly embedded the principles into the work via the framing of in-person gatherings and in our communication with fellows with emails, newsletters and event invitations. At the last in-person gathering of the first phase, we asked the third cohort of fellows where the principles surfaced during their work to date.
The exercise yielded interesting results and fellows were generous with their feedback. Fellows highlighted both strengths and gaps with the current approach. Collectively, the feedback pointed to tensions within a single principle and across principles. The feedback pointed out elements of the fellowship that resonated, specific locations that aligned with the principles and how principles were being integrated into their fellowship. A summary of the themes from this exercise are included in a table below.
How did NS GovLab principles show up in the 1st phase of Cohort 3?
Co-Create the Future
· Making time and space for unlearning
· Opportunity to learn from and work with Mi’kmaq Native Friendship Centre
· Anti-oppression session
Start Somewhere…Go Everywhere
· Experience with prototyping
· Opportunity to meet unexpected people
Everybody is Needed
· Elders and Indigenous lens incl. in fellowship
· Individual lived experience has value
· Contradictory view can be challenging
· NS GovLab a safe space for diverse engagement.
Relationship with People and Planet
· Planet didn’t feature
· Orientation retreat + activities at Windhorse Farm
Learning over Knowing
· Listening to different perspectives
· Journey of iteration…frustrating at times
· NS GovLab experience & focus on learning
Discomfort Happens. It’s Temporary.
· Facing a blank template and not knowing where to begin.
· Conversations where personal value or beliefs conflict.
· Feedback that makes explicit biases and assumptions.
Whimsy, Creativity and Wonder
· Multiple elements of 1st phase — improv, drawing
· An openness and curiosity with disagreement can lead to growth
Be Scrappy. Care Deeply.
· 1st prototype
· Identifying gaps in research
· How easily caring can become defensiveness.
Reflecting on the exercise and the feedback, I have identified some weak signals to explore further.
The role of principles in validating emotions and experiences. Developing the first prototype can feel risky and vulnerable as it is likely a lower fidelity representation of the idea the group had in mind and feedback will be solicited from folks you don’t know. Having a personal bias or a strongly held assumption questioned or challenged can be a tough experience. Despite the discomfort, these experiences are necessary for growth and change.
Tension(s) within a principle. Looking at the principle ‘Everybody is Needed’, there is a tension with recognizing the value with individual lived experience, but also seeing the challenges with diverse values, views and beliefs. This tension manifested itself in several different ways and is a pre-condition for working in this way.
Tensions across principles. Under ‘Co-Create the Future’, fellows shared their appreciation for the opportunities to both unlearn as well as incorporate new learnings (e.g., anti-oppression and Indigenous). Under the ‘Discomfort Happens. It’s Temporary’ principle, fellows shared the discomfort experienced when presenting prototypes to an Elder Council and having assumptions and biased questioned. If these principles are to inform and guide the work, then understanding the conditions under which they resonate as well as the conditions under which they are integrated will be key. This is especially true as we work with the Mi’kmaq Native Friendship Centre and commit to reconciliation.
On an entirely pragmatic perspective, some of the content developed didn’t resonate with our fellows. We were also made aware of a few blind spots that we can address. This feedback is valuable to not only understanding what is happening within the fellowship, but how we can iterate to provide a different experience next time.
This first experiment with our principles was a valuable starting point. The feedback will help to shape and inform future work. I believe that a good evaluation question is one that leads to more questions. This exercise certainly left me with far more questions than I started with. I am curious about how the principles are adhered to over time and how the principles might lead to our desired outcome of a province that thrives with an aging population.
