7 priority actions to put creativity at the heart of politics

“Today, companies have an almost insatiable thirst for knowledge, expertise, methodologies and professional practices around innovation”, according to Tom Kelley, a North American consultant in the field and head of the prestigious IDEO agency. The same cannot be said of the political world. But this has to change, or we risk failing in the face of crises and collective frustration. It won’t be easy, warned a while back (at an OECD Innovation in government conference in 2014) Christian Bason, Director of the Danish Design Centre: “For many managers, it’s very uncomfortable to say ‘we’re going to learn from citizens now’. All these barriers… it’s a process, it’s not about standardised answers and ideas, it’s about a complete reconfiguration of the public sector for the 21st century. This will require a double empathy: towards citizens and towards administrative systems. It will require applied imagination, embracing what we already know. We need to be impatient in terms of implementation, and not stop until we see results on the ground.”

It’s a huge programme, because we need to create an environment and processes that will encourage people to think and act in a more agile, inventive, experimental and daring way. But it’s not enough to want “more inventive elected representatives”, “to turn the tables” or “renewal”, we need a method. We need a whole ecosystem of debate, listening, inclusion and participation to improve interaction between stakeholders and the acceptability of public policies. A handful of the best ideas in the minds of an enlightened elite will not solve the problem. Otherwise, a few courses in creativity techniques at ENA would do the trick. We need new institutions, we need to change the relationship between the public and private sectors, and we need to change the culture of citizens, civil servants and elected representatives alike. There is no ready-made programme for activating the system’s creativity, in the same way as you might organise a team around innovation in a company. Nevertheless, the complexity of the task should not prevent us from tackling it. From the obstacles and examples we have identified, we have identified a number of ways of moving from the current dynamic, which undermines collective creative potential, to one that encourages it, identifies it, values it, cultivates it, disseminates it and amplifies it. The aim is to identify where the channels of creative energy meet and to remove the obstacles to the circulation of innovative solutions. The avenues suggested below are open to discussion and enrichment. Each one is a huge project in itself.

First and foremost, we need to change our culture, both as citizens and as public authorities, to officially declare public creativity and innovation as priorities, to cultivate boldness and adopt the necessary tools with seriousness, being wary at every stage of their possible trivialisation. 

1. Let’s accept complexity in politics and make the most of it.
2. To achieve this, we need to involve citizens and all relevant players in the creative effort.
3. We’ll also need to teach creative techniques and cultivate a cross-disciplinary approach.
4. This requires us to see the State differently, no longer as the great organiser of our lives, but as a facilitator, with structures that allow solutions to be circulated, encourage long-term thinking and give it the time it needs.
5. We’ll also need to build the democratic ‘plumbing’ that will help fertile and active imagination to flourish: institutional reforms, a revised role for lobbies and think tanks, renewing the political class, as well as new work habits, such allowing mistakes and facilitating experimentation.
6. Finally, this reform programme will only succeed if it also makes politics more attractive and helps those who endorse it win elections.

The first lesson is that creativity and its corollary, innovation, must be explicitly placed at the heart of political action. It’s no longer a question of simply calling for change, or hoping for it at the drop of a hat in an election, or at the turn of an administrative appointment, arriving at the finishing line exhausted by political battles and media coverage. Instead, we should give ourselves the means to foster creativity, by cultivating creative capacity and innovation through a conscious, voluntary approach. 

To do this, it is essential to start with the symbolic. Citizens and the State must proclaim the importance they attach to genuine renewal. The appointment of Axelle Lemaire as Secretary of State for Digital Affairs and Innovation to the Minister for the Economy and Finance in 2017 was an interesting step in this direction. But we need to go much further, by making the approach an integral, cross-cutting priority for elected representatives and government departments. However, this awareness of the importance of getting organised to encourage imaginative thinking in politics must also come from the general public.

Let’s allow constructive mistakes.

This is a change of culture that citizens must endorse, even before their elected representatives. Is it conceivable today that citizens will accept that elected representatives fail and learn from their mistakes? We are going to have to learn to test, fail and try again. 

The task need not be so arduous. Mistakes can be liberating, as the example of the Isère region and others in this essay have shown. Laure de la Bretèche from SGMAP stresses the need for management to support the acceptance of constructive mistakes: “I’m personally convinced that one of the major challenges facing the State is to allow people to take risks, and therefore to make mistakes. So we need to be able to congratulate mistakes that have shown that a particular idea did not have the desired impact. When people carry out a project, they take pride in it. In an administration, they act in the general interest, it’s in their genes, it carries a lot of weight. But they also need to see that afterwards, the first recognition will be the authorisation to make a positive impact, to spread the word”.

We can no longer wait for “courageous leaders”.

Placing creativity and innovation at the heart of political action requires boldness on the part of everyone, citizens, civil servants and elected representatives alike. Stéphanie Bacquere, from the nod-A agency, tells her clients in the private sector: “Stop thinking and acting like a cog in the wheel. Don’t take refuge in a critical attitude to the system”, but look for solutions. This means focusing on the real problems and recognising and celebrating successes and achievements.

Let’s get rid of our denials in order to foster change.

In the face of widespread pessimism, the French Economic, Environmental and Social Committee (EESC) defines as a priority the need to “rediscover the path of confidence”, emphasising: “in a country that doubts its future and adds up fears (individual downgrading, collective relegation), where the mistrust of economic players remains high, it is to these doubts and fears that public action must respond”. The EESC calls for “rebuilding a community of destiny by investing massively in preparing for the future”, including “by highlighting France’s traditional assets: in particular, the French spirit of enterprise, creativity and universalism”. Looking to the future, without forgetting the past, but without being weighed down by what is no longer relevant, will also enable us to move beyond our disavowals and overcome the obstacles to an immediate conversation, as the paper industry was able to do, or as we could do by considering the situation of taxi drivers in terms of the next 10 or 20 years rather than the next 5.

We should give ourselves more time.

Putting inventiveness at the heart of our operating system requires us to put in place mechanisms for reflection and experimentation that take longer. We need to plan for longer development phases, with successive cycles of ‘divergence’ (multiplication) and ‘convergence’ (selection) of ideas, prototyping, testing and evaluation, sometimes over several years.

We should be wary of “creativity washing“.

People will talk to you about “hacking”, doing “lab this” and “lab that”, “barcamps”, “fablabs”, “hackatons”, and other fancy terms till you drop dead.

Through the irritating fashion of such Anglicisms in various languages, we can already see a tendency to pick up buzzwords without worrying about the best way to apply them, even though behind some of these words lie tried and tested concepts and methods. For example, the Belgian Green Party no longer organises “congresses”, but holds “eco-labs”. However, resolutions are passed on motions presented by the hierarchy… in short, nothing different from traditional party congresses. Cyril Lage, founder of Parlement & Citoyens, is also concerned about the wrongful exploitation of civic tech. He sees a real danger of legislating “to exclude associations and take control of civic tech”. Just as there was greenwashing on the theme of sustainable development, just as we had a quick taste of participatory democracy before even making the most of it, and now we’re applying collaborative democracy to everything, there’s no doubt that the next fashion will be for “creative stuff”. And this fashion will disappoint if it is just that: at best a “laboratory democracy” with no systemic impact, at worst a rapid rehash of old ways of doing things. So beware of “creativity washing”. Creativity is too important to be left to politicians alone.

Let’s take creativity seriously.

The creative process itself transforms the way we think. The key words here are trust, humility and openness. These qualities are multiplied by a resolute commitment to a collective creative process, which has the virtue of helping participants to “team up” and which generates its own positive energy. Activist and psychotherapist Mary Pipher writes: “Neuroscientists have discovered that the human mind works best when there is hope”. And a creative exercise brings hope to those who take part. Édouard Le Maréchal, President of the Créa-France association, emphasises just how liberating and joyful taking part in a creative process can be, both personally and collectively: “That’s why, in companies today, it’s the human resources departments that are in charge of creativity, whereas a few years ago it was confined to the R&D departments, because it transforms the relationship with work and hierarchy”. Imagination, fertile thought and boldness can make politics more positive and joyful, provided they are genuinely sought after and not just for the sake of being cool.

“We are told that politics ‘must’ be simplifying and Manichean. Yes, of course, in its manipulative conception that uses blind impulses. But political strategy requires complex knowledge, because strategy is conducted by working with and against uncertainty, randomness, and the multiple interplay of interactions and feedbacks”. – Edgar Morin

The second crucial condition for opening the way to a creative collective approach and resisting the harmful attraction of populism is to be wary of simplistic answers. Citizens have to admit it, and politicians have to say it: complexity is at the heart of politics, and there are no simple answers to any of the problems we face. This has various implications.

Let’s face it, the answer is complex, and so everyone has a part in it.

“What is the role of a statesman?” asked Benoist Apparu, Alain Juppé’s campaign manager, a few days before the first round of the Right and Centre primary in 2016. It seems to me that the role of a statesman is to guide public opinion, not just follow polls and trends”. This dichotomy between “opinion” and “leaders” needs to be overcome, not by falsely confusing leaders and voters, as populists do, but by getting the two to work together. “The exact purpose of politics cannot be known to anyone with certainty, even the government. Individuals know what they want for society, but the goals for society as a whole are a mixture of the goals of each of the individuals who make it up. The overall goals of society emerge as the system evolves. In a complexity approach, an important aim of government is not to impose precise goals, but to create an environment in which people reflect on their authentic goals for society, so that these can emerge”, stress Roland Kupers and David Colander.

Let’s accept complexity without making it more complicated.

Complexity does not mean confusion, as each of the examples examined in the previous chapters show. From the pavements of Bogotá to the roads of Sweden, solutions that were not obvious at first sight were found, then explained and applied simply. We need to choose elected representatives who believe that we can retain more than three isolated policy proposals, expressed in less than 140 characters each, without their language becoming technical and confusing. The media must cover the different dimensions of the proposals, while continuing to carry out fact-checking and offering contradictory opinions, as the online newspaper LeDrenche.fr does, which offers an opinion piece on each subject, one for and one against. And we citizens must learn to be wary of linear and simplistic solutions: if a politician does not examine the interconnections between problems, those “acupuncture points” where original and more effective solutions can emerge, a red light must go on in our minds.

Let’s reframe politics positively.

In order to get out of the infernal mechanics of populist discourse, George Lakoff recommends “not thinking about the elephant”. Rather than playing on the same ground, trying to refute the non-arguments of the other side with facts, Lakoff invites us to reframe the debate by presenting a positive discourse: “Provide a truthful and positive framework that undermines contrary assertions. Use facts to develop a positively presented truth. Use repetition”. Lakoff goes on to stress the importance of “staying away from unpleasant exchanges and attacks”, of starting from values which “come first, with facts and policies following in the service of values”, and of abandoning identity-based approaches. Alternativet in Denmark seems to be successfully doing just that. On the other hand, the theme of “happy identity” used by Alain Juppé in the run-up to 2017 was a mistake, because although it sought to turn the Sarkozist framework on its head, it merely reinforced the same theme, but in a subaltern way.

Let’s put values at the heart of political action.

Certain fundamental elements, certain values, leave no room for ambiguity. Are we prepared to accept thousands of deaths and serious injuries on the roads every year? Are we prepared to accept a risk of one in ten – the one we are currently running – that global temperatures could rise by 6°C by the end of the century, a rise that would mean the end of the world and of humanity as we know it? How long will we accept the fact that thousands of people are drowning on our doorstep in the Mediterranean? If we were to start by debating the vision of society we want to achieve, and the values we want to cultivate, we could see where we might converge on the essentials. This would make it possible to pacify a good number of discussions, to embrace the complexity of the issues without confusion, to enrich the discussion on possible futures, and then, by ricochet, the various options for achieving this vision. This work on meaning also has the merit of enabling us to integrate perspectives other than those of technicians alone. Meaning is typically the domain of artists, whose contributions are sorely lacking today.

Let’s take economic tools with a pinch of salt.

Economics has powerful analytical tools at its disposal. However, between simplifying economic models and indicators, a simplistic vision of possible options, and the predominant role of economics among the social sciences consulted by governments, other disciplines need to be given more space, the restrictive framework of certain indicators needs to be put into perspective, and these indicators need to be enriched to provide different insights into the political decisions and laws being considered. When will we see “senior advisers” at the very heart of government, for sociology, psychology, anthropology or other disciplines, as integrated as the Chief Economic Advisers are today?

Human sciences and creativity alongside the tools of complexity.

Thanks to advances in science, mathematics, Big Data and the increasing speed of computers, ‘complex’ decision-making tools are emerging. The literature on systems and complex thinking in politics, and the tools available, are growing richer by the day. Empirical co-creation, using less quantitative techniques and drawing on human resources, can complement these new tools for managing complexity: crossing disciplines, adopting multiple points of view, considering different possible scenarios over the short, medium and long term, revealing the expectations and deep-seated values of the people concerned… all these benefits can be achieved by a creative process involving citizens and stakeholders, at a lower cost and without the risk of being set up as an exclusive dogma. Organised creativity is complexity, and it’s not just for those who have mastered the tools of complexity analysis.

Open up the policy to a diversity of stakeholders.

This brings together different analyses of a given problem, helps to define it correctly, and facilitates its effective resolution. But there is another, less immediately perceptible reason for “co-creating”: it increases the possibility that people who are intrinsically motivated by the policy will participate, and not just actors with extrinsic motivations. The former will a priori be more creative. But will “active” citizens, those who already feel concerned and are active in associations or through their profession, and “passive” citizens, those who are neither aware nor mobilised, be able to be involved to the extent required by this change in our modes of governance? And will they be universally involved? We fear not. An unprecedented level of mistrust among citizens towards institutions coexists with a growing expectation to be involved in the decision-making process. Experiments in intensive participation – such as those conducted by the town of Saillans, for example – show that maintaining interest over time is not easy. And identity-based and community-based attitudes run counter to the idea of participation that benefits everyone. Organising incentives and structures to enable the relevant players to participate in the issues being addressed is therefore a priority.

Cultivating diversity is an asset in a complex world.

A country such as France is fortunate to be very diverse. This diversity of population and territory is an advantage in the face of complexity, because it generates different perspectives. Diversity is at the heart of the major centres of innovation, from Venice to Constantinople yesterday, from Silicon Valley to Bavaria today. Because diversity, if we give ourselves the means to manage it and listen to it, enables us to grasp complexity by enriching debates, by examining the interconnections between subjects, by getting the winners and losers to talk.

Let’s make it easier for new energies to enter politics.

Philosopher Dominique Bourg has proposed a statute to make it easier for people from the private sector to enter politics. In doing so, we must ensure that change does not come solely from the “cultural creatives”, that fringe of the population “who are ready for a certain change and whose culture tends to be largely influenced by ecologists, feminists and alter-globalists who have contributed to an awareness that another world is possible”. This section of the population has a pioneering role to play, but can also put off those who do not sociologically identify with it. Should we go further and consider forms of positive discrimination? Majid El Jarroudi, founder of ADIVE, an agency for entrepreneurial diversity, has given some thought to these issues and notes that “in politics and everywhere else, it is ‘positive action’, not mechanical ‘positive discrimination’, that must be applied, in other words a logic of inclusion and not of exception”. Anything that can help increase the diversity of political leaders while strengthening their grasp of the issues will be conducive to political creativity, for example by:

• Diversifying the recruitment in the grandes écoles and civil servant training colleges. 
• Fighting the accumulation of political mandates, with the possible exception of Senators, whose role is to represent the territories at national level, and for whom the possibility of exercising one (only) local elective mandate in addition to the national mandate is therefore important in terms of competence… if we do not go significantly further in modifying the Senate or replacing it.
• Setting fixed term limits. Without dogmatism, because the experience gained is important: two successive mandates seems to be a good balance from this point of view. Prohibiting a second term of office as a Member of Parliament is unwise if we want to allow a renewal of perspectives and mastery of subjects and processes.
• Ensuring gender parity and greater age parity on electoral lists.
• Opening up governments to civil society figures.
• Introducing a dose of proportional representation.
• Making it possible to be elected to the Senate from the age of 18 (without ruling out more ambitious reforms of this institution).
• Experimenting with the right to vote from the age of 16.
• Opening up senior civil services to profiles other than those of ENA students. Jean Pisani-Ferry, General Commissioner of France Stratégie, is proposing that 25% of the senior civil servants appointed to the Council of Ministries, i.e. some 250 people, should be recruited from among university graduates, people with experience in the private sector, and other backgrounds.

These are all proposals that are very popular with the French. However, we must be careful not to fall into the opposite trap, which would be to constantly seek to renew the players involved in public action. For while novelty, freshness and non-dependence on private interests are assets, renewal also requires mastery, competence and knowledge of the issues. So, as we have said, we will also take care to slow down the renewal of ministers in office. Should there be an age limit of 70 for elected representatives? More than two thirds of French citizens are in favour of this. A false solution: being over 70 doesn’t mean you can’t have good ideas. Sociologist Michel Wieviorka warns: “In politics, age is important, but it’s not enough. You can have experienced politicians with a great capacity to think and act, and young, terrifying little marquises”.

The inventiveness that makes it possible to respond to societal issues more effectively can be found at all levels of society, including in some government departments. What’s more, democracy is above all characterised by the equal opportunity for everyone to influence public decision-making. Opening up the system, particularly to the social categories furthest removed from civic life, and developing creative thinking in politics as a priority therefore requires finding better forms of collaboration between citizens, civil society, entrepreneurs, constituted bodies (or not), administrations and elected representatives. It’s not a question of replacing one (representative) system with another (direct? participatory?). It’s time to move towards a new vision of public authority, neither “mothering”, where citizens expect “the top” to solve all the problems of “the bottom”, nor demonised, where public authority would be emptied of all authority. It’s a question of coordinating the relevant players to mobilise all the creative energies. Emile Servan-Schreiber, a specialist in collective intelligence, which he uses to help governments through his consultancy Lumenogic, sums up the challenge clearly: “Today’s problems are so complex that experts alone cannot solve them. We need to bring intelligence from the field”. To do that, he believes we need to pool the skills of citizens:

“Democracy is part of collective intelligence. The aim is not to become a participatory democracy at every level, but to recreate the democratic link, to restore confidence between elites and citizens”.

The “bottom up” approach must meet the “top down” processes half way. The people and the experts, who are better involved, must come together with elected representatives and administrations, with the latter working as closely as possible with the grassroots. This must no longer be conceived in a utilitarian mode, for the needs of visibility or specific support (inaugurations, electoral door-to-door canvassing, etc.), but in a “co” mode: listening, meeting, understanding, reflecting. This is a powerful virtue, because, as François Jégou of SDS points out, “one of the difficulties that elected representatives have in being creative is that they are too far removed from the ground, they only think in circles”, so “when we take elected representatives out into the field, they come up with ideas. Creativity is inevitably created by experience, by putting the real thing into practice”.

Let’s face it, the people don’t always know best.

Not all subjects lend themselves to open methods and consultation, say academics and practitioners. It’s not a question of dealing with every issue dogmatically “with the people”. In English, we would say “democracy, not democrazy”. We need to open up the possibility for interested parties to participate, while targeting the relevant audiences. What’s more, you can’t expect the citizen to do everything. Sébastien Arbogast, a consultant in lean management methods, recalls the following quote from the pioneer of the car industry, Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have told me faster horses”. Serious consultation can bring out some interesting options, but you have to sort through the abundance of them. Industrial designer Tom Kelley of IDEO believes that “clients are full of good intentions, and they try to help, but it’s not their job to be visionaries”. Laure de la Bretèche, General Secretary for the Modernisation of Public Action, does not see this vision as anti-democratic, on the contrary: citizens are certainly in the best position to identify their needs and problems, but they are not necessarily in the best position to develop innovative solutions. Some even argue that cultivating the art of constructive criticism internally can be a more effective way of innovating than soliciting input from citizens, customers or other external audiences.

In order to give political creativity the best possible chance, we also need to recognise the essential role of government departments, experts and elected representatives in promoting the general interest and contributing their expertise and knowledge to the development of new, more effective approaches that go beyond “faster horse” solutions. A new, richer distribution of roles between citizens, experts, administrations, civil society, lobbies and public authorities needs to be found. The task is perhaps less complex than it seems, since it has been proven that it is by practising creativity that the players become creative and “team players”. Laure de la Bretèche believes that this distribution of roles is actually well understood by most citizens: “[Citizens] are very clear on the subject, as we see at every consultation. We need to restore to institutions, politicians and citizens what they can contribute to making politics good, and in that way we can avoid sterile debates”, contrasting representative democracy and participatory democracy. The “bashing of institutions is not positive. It’s much more useful if we take a cooperative approach”.

Let’s make democracy truly participative and collaborative.

Bottom-up, whether online or face-to-face, to capture the analyses and proposals of as many people as possible, is expected. It does, however, require a great deal of rigour, while respecting a few principles that will guarantee that the citizens’ contribution will be of high quality and will be passed on to elected representatives and decision-makers, and that they will listen carefully. To achieve this, we need to:

• Support citizens in their participation, which is what they themselves expect. According to a TNS Sofres survey, they are expressing a need for information and education, as well as guarantees that their participation will be effective. The French are in fact “aware that citizens do not always have the capacity or skills to give “informed” opinions on all subjects. The priority for them is therefore to have the information they need to form their own opinions. To this end, 92% of respondents felt it was important to develop citizens’ conferences, which allow citizens to express their opinions on a subject after having been provided with the necessary training and information. The second incentive for participation mentioned by citizens is “having the certainty that giving your opinion will make a difference to the final decision”.
• Ensure that the right people are involved so that the proposals that emerge are not invalidated by one or other part of the system, depending on the objective sought. And ensure that everyone, including the disadvantaged, can participate, by making special efforts to reach out to them. For real deliberation on behalf of a given population, we need to have the means to recruit a truly representative sample.
• Enable the necessary trade-offs to be understood by presenting the ins and outs in a balanced way, by training participants, providing balanced information and rigorously moderating debates.
• Ensure that what is captured during the consultation reaches the right ears. In the case of significant public deliberations, this may require the close involvement of the media and public authorities.
• Be transparent about the purposes of the consultation: It may be carried out simply for information purposes, or to provide input for the diagnosis, or to co-develop a public scheme, or finally in a spirit of co-decision. While each objective – information, analysis, co-development, co-decision – is legitimate, depending on the situation, transparency and commitment are essential. If the aim is to give power in part, as in the case of participatory budgeting, the players involved must respect their commitment to follow citizens’ choices. This is also a point that the SGMAP has been vigilant about in creating the “Ateliers Citoyens”, a mechanism inspired by citizens’ conferences, in order to gather the opinions of French citizens on an issue that concerns them directly: “Whether or not it retains its various components, the sponsor must be accountable and justify its choices”.
• Playing as a team from start to finish: The rules of the game need to be explained, participants need to be involved in defining, prototyping, testing and evaluating them, being transparent and accountable… Bertrand Pancher, Member of Parliament for the Meuse region, who is very committed to issues of citizen deliberation, and for this reason Chairman of the Décider ensemble think tank, stresses the importance of thinking about the whole process: “Experience shows that when debates have been organised in the past, the upstream and downstream phases have often been neglected: You have to start the debate as soon as possible on the general options, then explain the framework within which you are organising the consultation on the specific project, and then after the public debate you carry out the project, while continuing to communicate and involve the public concerned. The downstream phase is important, as decisions are often taken on issues that are financially onerous and complex, and decisions are taken 5-10 years after the debates, so the precise recommendations of the debate have often been forgotten, the context may have changed, and the conditions for implementation have arisen. “390

Let’s facilitate dialogue between public institutions and citizens.

For example by:

• Creating a public petitions platform, which triggers an obligation to react (such as calling a referendum) once a certain quota of signatures has been reached.
• Facilitating parliamentary referrals for better consultation upstream of major infrastructure projects or, more generally, public debates by parliamentary referral.
• Giving everyone the right to amend legislative texts, through the “citizen amendment”: this would allow any proposed amendment to be brought before the Assembly or Senate as long as its author gathers a sufficient number of signatures on the web. The promoter of the idea, Socialist Party MP Olivier Faure, believes that in this way, “no debate, no position that resonates with public opinion, could ever be avoided”, with the debate gaining in “interactivity, creativity, but also representativeness, since all shades of opinion, including those not represented in Parliament, would be able to express themselves”.
• Providing more resources for more widespread consultation. Why not promote access to citizens’ consultations and their results, for example by making it compulsory for a “citizens’ jury” or a “deliberative poll” to be held before every major government reform project, including at European level? Professor Dominique Rousseau recommends institutionalising conventions of citizens chosen by lot. For my part, I recommend an annual deliberative poll supported by the European institutions, organised independently and feeding into the discussions of the Heads of State and Government on key issues.
• Once again raising the question of the popular initiative referendum, as practised in Switzerland. Iceland’s collaborative draft constitution proposed going a step further, by giving citizens the right to propose legislation, provided that 2% of the population signed up to it. “This is an extremely important tool for showing the people that they are not powerless between two elections,” says Birgitta Jonsdottir, co-founder of the Icelandic Pirate Party.
• Making the right of citizens’ initiative at European level more effective by relaxing the conditions of admissibility. This right of initiative can also be developed at local level, as shown by the experiment in Grenoble.
• Encouraging open innovation. We could, for example, encourage the participation of communities of innovators from outside public institutions, from different disciplines and backgrounds – companies, NGOs, universities, etc. – depending on the case, for example “brigades of coders”, either on a one-off basis or for medium-term contracts.
• Not limiting ourselves to paperless procedures, which are not accessible to everyone: we also need greater access to Members of Parliament, for example, in their offices.

Let’s cultivate “open gov” even further.

We need to open up data and models to encourage new forms of collaboration and new business models, as well as new political approaches. In particular, we should:

• Increase the openness of public data. Make it easier to appropriate, for example by encouraging data mediation.
• Make data “activatable” by civil society players.
• Promote an “open government” culture at local level.
• Develop indicators or a label for the “openness” of public institutions.

Let’s rethink the place of lobbies and experts.

“Elected representatives must be completely open to scientific and citizen expertise; citizen expertise must be completely based on scientific expertise, otherwise it’s all pointless; and scientific expertise must be multidisciplinary and open to the social sciences,” says Bertrand Pancher. In this new balance between public players and “stakeholders”, what used to be known as the “living forces” of society, it is imperative to rethink the role and methods of lobbying and the contribution of experts. Even if open gov and the co-development of laws and public decisions provide a counterweight to lobbies, further thought needs to be given to countering their structurally conservative nature. This requires:

• A much better framework for lobbying, with greater transparency and rules of integrity, and we need to ensure equal access to different interests, while facilitating the transition between the private and public sectors. We cannot be satisfied with leaders who know no other career than politics. Henry Kissinger rightly noted: “What you do in government is spend the intellectual capital you have accumulated outside it”. To overcome silo thinking, it is essential to cross spheres and disciplines. The risk, however, is that of the “revolving door” between the private and public sectors, which means that things have to go back to where they came from. While transparency is not the answer to correcting the imbalance in the representation of interests, it is nevertheless a necessary step. This transparency must also be encouraged at industry level. The possibility of pursuing a professional activity at the same time as a parliamentary mandate must be prevented. Cooling-off periods for officials must be strengthened. This calls for careful consideration.
• Better integration of expertise in decision-making. Far from the rhetoric that distrustfully pits the “people” against the “experts”, it is essential to better integrate the various forms of scientific and technical expertise into the processes of shaping public choices. We need to invent 21st century ways of integrating experts into the decision-making process. Perhaps, for example, at European level and in the Member States, a college of a dozen experts drawn at random from a group of candidates nominated by the national capitals, rotating every year, whose advice would be made public?

Inventing new ways of involving experts.

When policy-makers go outside their usual circles and work closely with experts (civil servants, NGOs, foundations, companies, etc.) to develop policy solutions, they integrate the solutions identified much better and implement them more effectively than if they had received the same recommendations in a report in their “to-read” pile402. Conversely, the European Commission’s external service had the idea of introducing “change agents” into its departments responsible for conflict prevention.

Rather than asking outside consultants for analyses and suggestions, a budget was set aside to allow outside experts to come and work for a year within the department, thus creating a new form of internal reflection. The philosopher Dominique Bourg and a number of political scientists brought together by the Fondation pour la Nature et l’Homme have made similar proposals. Finally, for each problem, we need to ask ourselves: what can we do today to solve the problem effectively, with constant technology? This constraint will give rise to fertile reflection on possible solutions that are real and immediately achievable.

As we have seen, creative techniques can be taught, and there is everything to be gained by making the teaching of creativity a priority at every stage of the educational process, for politics as well as for the economy and individual fulfilment. A teaching policy that values inventiveness, risk-taking, the development of team projects and cross-disciplinarity is essential. While a good education normally teaches people to be creative by nature, teaching creativity as a discipline and a body of skills and know-how is no easy task. 

Learning by doing.

François Taddei, biologist, founder of the Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires, and author of a report on education for the OECD , argues in favour of education systems that train creative self-starters and institutions that know how to evolve: “The ability to adapt to change is necessary for everyone. We need more creative individuals, but also more creative institutions. (…) You get into a dynamic of change when you see that it’s possible to do things differently. For example, before taking up a job, a person could go and see others who perform the same functions, but in a different environment, to understand how things work. Doing a foresight exercise also allows you to change your point of view” . He also believes that “institutions should encourage creativity in society, for example by devoting 5% of a budget to creative projects and entrusting their evaluation to an independent jury”. 

Let’s boost creative potential from primary school.

The OECD notes that “there is a growing consensus that formal education must nurture students’ creativity and critical thinking skills to help them succeed in globalised economies based on knowledge and innovation. However, the ability of teachers (and countries) to foster and monitor progress is limited by a lack of understanding of how some of these skills are realised at different stages of development. One of the reasons why these skills are not promoted systematically is that education systems have rarely put in place ways of formally assessing them. A related reason is that, beyond agreement on the general objective, it is not clear how these skills can be articulated in a visible and tangible way by teachers, students and policy-makers, particularly in the context of the curriculum”. The OECD has therefore decided that creativity will henceforth be included in the PISA ranking criteria, which each year measure the performance of the education systems of the organisation’s member countries. Some fifteen countries, including France, are currently experimenting with the introduction of creativity training for teachers and pupils at primary level. Watch this space.

We need to ensure that our teaching is rigorously multidisciplinary.

Developing the ability to think in a cross-disciplinary way cannot be achieved by giving a veneer in different subjects. To “cross-fertilise ideas”, disciplines need to talk to each other, and therefore individuals need to be able to avoid being locked into “silos”. More precisely, to be able to invent one day, you need to be able to think ‘T’: both cross-disciplinarily, to link issues together, but also in depth on one or other dimension of a problem. This is where the difficulty lies in teaching cross-disciplinary thinking: mastering different areas to gain new insights. Yet this cross-disciplinary approach is currently being abused, if we are to believe Jean-Claude Lewandowski, a freelance journalist specialising in education issues: “interdisciplinarity must be based, sooner or later, on solid and real knowledge in each of the fields considered. (…) If the approach is not properly mastered, it becomes either a gimmick or a complete nonsense, as seems to be the case in a number of examples that have appeared in the press in recent months concerning the EPI [Interdisciplinary Practical Teaching] in secondary schools. This is understandably upsetting for teachers who are generally used to teaching a single subject, which they have been doing for years. This is because teachers are both individualistic and all the more reluctant to change because they have been subjected to a series of reforms over the years, with no end in sight. All this requires tact, patience, evaluation, dialogue with stakeholders and gradual adjustments”.

Let’s teach creativity techniques to public managers.

The game will be won when every university student “thinks it’s normal to have a creativity module in their course”, says Marielle Thievenaz, project leader of the Promising programme coordinated by the Université Grenoble – Alpes, which encourages cross-disciplinary teaching to facilitate innovation. This should also be the case for students of public issues. The approach initiated by ENA with the 27e Region should be made a priority, developed and disseminated to all Sciences Po, regional institutes of administration and other Collège de Bruges. Everywhere, the training of administrative managers should include open data, open government practices, digital practices more generally, as well as design thinking and popular education methods. If Georgetown University created the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation in 2014 to “develop new solutions to systemic problems” and “push creative thinking around societal problems at the intersection of data, technology, capital and public policy innovation”, if Stanford’s d-school (d for design) and so many management schools have courses in creative methods and innovation management, the equivalent could be offered in all the schools that train our political and administrative leaders. Similarly, courses in political science, sociology and law should be offered to students of design and other creative disciplines. In addition to their studies, as is the practice in Isère and other government departments, training courses of this type should be offered more frequently to civil servants in the State and local authorities.

Transversality is also a feature of institutions.

Elected representatives know how to move from one subject to another. They are constantly having to juggle different themes and link them up, but lack of time often makes it difficult to master the “T”. So, outside the education system, we need to help politicians to master cross-disciplinarity. With this in mind, we could:

• Limit to two the number of government reshuffles possible during a presidential term. On average, since 1958, a minister in France has stayed in office for 15 months. It should come as no surprise that it is difficult for them to master their subject – and therefore to propose new approaches – to act effectively, and to be held to account for their actions. With such a rapid turnover of ministers, responsibility for innovation is de facto handed over to the administration, which alone will have the capacity to set up long-term programmes of reflection and action.
• Initiate a debate on knowledge management and the collective management of our institutional memory. 
• Clarifying the visions and values to which we aspire. As in the case of Germany’s energy transition, this allows us to look further ahead by drawing on the past, while opening up the discussion on the modalities.
• Looking beyond our borders: the European dimension needs to be better understood and thought through through more parliamentary and public exchanges and more time devoted to European issues in Parliament.

Let’s look beyond the short term, which will also help to promote cross-functionality: 

• Give the Prime Minister a Minister of State for Public Innovation and Future Generations, working with his peers on the model of the British Cabinet Committees, to learn from the difficulties encountered by Kristina Persson in Sweden.
• Set up a Parliamentary Office for Foresight at the National Assembly, modelled on the Parliamentary Office for the Evaluation of Scientific and Technological Choices, with which it would also work closely, to help Parliament take better account of the long term when debating major pieces of legislation.
• In debates where the long term is particularly important, and where uncertainty about scientific data and possible developments is high, introduce more in-depth forms of public consultation, such as those conducted by the Danish Board of Technology in Denmark (consensus conferences or similar models).
• Convene a national foresight conference once every term of office, with trade unions, major recognised associations and others, to analyse the major issues and the solutions that need to be found?

Dominique Bourg and others are proposing to go further, with the creation of an Assembly for the Long Term, a third chamber whose power would consist “above all in injecting the concern for the long term into parliamentary debate, in imposing that it be debated”, with the power to “design major legislative projects linked to the long term.”

We cannot expect political inventiveness to emerge spontaneously, as if we were leaving Petri dishes to develop colonies of bacteria in the open air. Let’s assume that we have followed the four principles outlined so far: the call for creativity in politics has been made loud and clear; citizens and elected representatives recognise the need to examine the issues in all their complexity; the people, entrepreneurs and civil society are invited to take part in the making of laws and public decisions, at all levels, equipped as they are with new skills and techniques… All this will create a ferment of ideas and expectations. But how can we ensure that these processes of creative divergence and convergence are orchestrated more effectively at the level of society as a whole? So that there is as little wastage as possible of useful approaches, in terms of both diagnosis and prognosis? If this flow is to lead to the relevant outlets, the State and local authorities must be seen to be responsible not just for thinking, ordering and regulating everything, but also for building the pipes that will bring the flow of ideas to the dam and produce political ‘electricity’. Innovation in politics requires a global approach, at every point where players meet, think and act.

Put an end to hyper-presidentialism

The French system sucks too much of political life into a single moment, that of the presidential election, which polarises political life and prevents compromise with the opposition, isolates the Presidents who rarely meet the MPs, an isolation that they compensate for with polls that prevent the audacity to change, reinforce the role of advisers all cut from the same cloth, and stifle parliamentary imagination. While the authority of the State and the President is important, reforms are needed to open up the political game and democratic debate.

The State as a “broker of solutions”

This is the vision of the modernisation of the French State proposed by certain officials in a recent report, which “outlines a change of posture for the State on [the change of scale], which becomes at once an accelerator of innovation, a broker of solutions between territories, and an innovator in its own methods of designing public action” . The challenge is to “scale up”: to ensure that local initiatives are replicated elsewhere. With this in mind, as was the case for SynAthena in Greece, public authorities must first of all be able to identify initiatives that have a proven impact and provide a solution to a problem encountered elsewhere. They then need to provide active support: identifying the project leaders and putting them in touch with “receivers” who are prepared to adapt the solutions they come up with. “In the institutions”, explains François Taddei, “we need to set up places of creativity – preferably physical, but also virtual – led by driving personalities. We could start networks among civil servants.

Hierarchies should simply be benevolent, for example by allowing free time for personal projects during working hours. We need to encourage risk-taking”. All this can of course be helped financially and legally, but also by a guarantee or a label, and by bringing together and recognising scattered players. This is the role of Public Innovation Week, “so that people are happy to showcase their innovations, and in the regions, to show that innovation is not just a word with an ‘-tion’, as the French have so many, but to show the concrete achievements that are changing the game”, stresses Laure de la Bretèche, who also insists on “promoting experimentation as a way of working”, with its corollary, the protection of innovators, by valuing trial and error. An effective state today is one that breaks down the “transparent walls between innovators in civil society and political players” deplored by Belgian MP Isabelle Durant.

The State as a platform for collaboration builds trust, provides impetus and coordination.

“The role of the State is no longer to do things, but to get things done. It completely changes the way we think about public service”, notes Thomas Saint-Aubin of the DILA, when the State realises that its authority makes it possible to bring the sometimes reluctant players to the table. The first institutions in this field, mentioned above – SGMAP, RE-ACTEUR public in France, Innovation Center Denmark and MindLab in Denmark, etc. – bear witness to this growing awareness. However, this vision of the way in which public players operate and their responsibilities requires a major cultural change. The collaborative innovation method initiated by the DILA, for example, would not have been possible, insists Thomas Saint-Aubin, without the understanding of the Ministers and the cabinets to which he reported, making it possible to overcome the reticence of certain parts of the administration. “The experience of my hierarchy is no longer valid in this environment”, he explains. But “to move forward, I can’t be stuck in administrative time. They have to trust me, and sometimes I have to go along even if they don’t follow me completely.

Civil servants are usual are afraid of these advances. Politicians are very limited in their room for manoeuvre. Prefects don’t necessarily see the need. Thomas Saint-Aubin notes that he has been able to overcome this reluctance thanks to the support of his minister. By organising the task into four stages, as Christian Bason, former director of MindLab, invites us to do, the task seems achievable: “moving from haphazard innovation to a conscious and systematic approach to public sector renewal; shifting from human resource management to building innovation capacity at all levels of government; moving from managing by tasks and projects to orchestrating co-creative processes, creating solutions with people, not for them; and, finally, moving courageously from administrative management to innovation leadership across the public sector and beyond.”

Let’s adopt new indicators that encourage experimentation and innovation.

The action of an innovative State must be measured according to performance indicators other than the traditional indices of consumption, employment or GDP: deliberation, civic vitality, transparency, social relations, happiness…

Once creativity has been placed at the heart of the city, once it has been recognised that it thrives on the soil of complexity, once all the relevant players have been brought together, once they have been equipped with the right methods, once they have been truly listened to, once the State is no longer seen as an omniscient and omnipotent guardian, but as a catalyst of creative energies, what concrete reforms can open the floodgates of innovation and bring it to a safe harbour? We need to create places, equip people and provide them with resources: it’s a whole infrastructure conducive to creativity that we need to design. More precisely, an “eco-structure”, because it’s not just about piping, it’s also about culture. 

Let’s put political innovation at the heart of the State.

By creating a Ministry of State for Innovation and the Future, as we have already mentioned, and by issuing mission statements making the search for creativity and innovation a core priority for each minister. As we have seen in the case of Kristina Persson, the unsuccessful Swedish Minister for the Future, symbolic gestures and labels will not suffice if they are not backed up by a sincere desire and real changes in the way things are done and the powers that be. However, if the intention is there, they can visibly translate the desired change. 

Let’s open the doors of Parliament and the legislative process wider.

To allow more creative solutions to emerge, and for other reasons, it’s time to overhaul the legislative process in France. For example: 

• Aim for fewer but better laws: The race for ever more legislation must be replaced by an objective of quality, which depends directly on the diversity of viewpoints involved in the legislative process.
• Give more time to preparing legislation and involve parliamentarians more closely: Could we spend less time passing laws and more time writing them better? This is what MP Dominique Raimbourg is proposing: a note of intent to be sent to the government upstream, enabling citizens’ consultations to be opened up “which would start with the diagnosis and the problems before looking at technical and legal solutions”. They would also enable parliamentarians to contribute more effectively to impact assessments. Thierry Mandon, Secretary of State for State Reform and Simplification (2014-17) recommends a real policy debate before each major bill, making it possible to clarify the government’s intentions even before the impact assessments, which should be more in-depth and more accessible to the general public.
• Create a public platform enabling citizens to participate in the drafting of legislation, along the lines of Parliament & Citizens, while ensuring that independence is guaranteed by the participation of bodies from outside the State.
• Enable several hundred thousand citizens to put a subject on Parliament’s agenda, to create a form of porosity with civil society, by encouraging popular questioning of parliamentarians.
• Make this openness to dialogue consistent by abolishing or restricting the use of Article 49-3 of the Constitution.
• Facilitate real-time interaction with members of parliament during sittings of the Assembly and Senate.
• Make it possible to monitor the drafting of legislation “live”, with or on the model of the Fabrique de la Loi website.
• Modify the format in which legislative texts are posted online to enable them to be used and monitored as they evolve.
• Consider the creation of a “deliberative social assembly“. Dominique Rousseau proposes replacing the Economic, Social and Environmental Council with such an assembly, which would have legislative powers alongside the National Assembly and the Senate, since the latter address issues “necessarily from an electoral angle”. Others propose a Deliberative Assembly made up of citizens chosen by lot to replace the Senate, or other formulas to be invented, the concern being to give a more central place in the legislative work to the “living forces, according to an old-fashioned expression which clearly identifies what it means”: workers, managers, entrepreneurs, artists, academics…

Christian Bason believes that “we need to invest in new places, ‘innovation labs’ and ‘innovation teams’, new types of structures that catalyse the process, that are not the path or the solution, but that helps the process”, without there being any specific form of organisation for this. He adds the importance of “an investment that ensures that innovators are not isolated, but are an integral part of the change and its acceleration. Collaboration and sharing are key”. The 27th region is playing this role alongside the other 26 regions and at national level, notably with SuperPublic, “the first space entirely devoted to innovation in the public sector”.

Very different structures are emerging in this spirit just about everywhere. They need to be encouraged and connected so that their research and actions can be identified, shared and understood. There are probably also new links to be forged between parliamentarians, civil servants, citizens and specialists in existing State structures, and work to be done to rationalise those that pass on knowledge between ministries, between administrations, from local to national, from local to local, and between national levels. These bodies – and there are many of them: France Stratégie, Conseil d’Analyse Economique, CESE, Cour des Comptes, etc. – must themselves open up more to the outside world, to the publics and territories they analyse. Civil society must also contribute. In the same way that some organisations act as “community organisers”, as Alliance citoyenne helps citizens to put forward their demands, some could see their role as that of “creativity organisers.”  

Let’s support civic tech.

Given that France is the second country in the world after Denmark in terms of equipment and connected objects, we have unrivalled potential, at least in technical terms, to get ideas circulating in this way. Axelle Lemaire’s idea of creating a “civic tech house” to incubate these projects is a welcome one, as is the announcement by Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris, of a new incubator dedicated to “citizen” start-ups in the heart of the capital. Like New York’s Civic Hall, which is based on the idea that innovation comes from people coming together, facilitated by technology, it would be “a unique community hub for the world’s citizen innovators” and “a space where social entrepreneurs, change-makers, civil servants, hackers, academics, journalists and artists can share knowledge, build tools and solve problems together”.

Think tanks must also open up.

Think tanks are ideal places for creative political thinkers to think and meet, provided that they do not confine themselves to an uncreative elitism, as some do. The forecasting phase should call on techniques as varied as participatory observation and scenario development, with equally varied knowledge and “experts” – in the broadest sense of the term. Those who concentrate on analysing and supporting a single possible solution – the “advocacy tanks” – must take care to cultivate a diversity of proposals. Think tanks also need to take a long-term view of their work, not by jumping from one commentary on current affairs to another, but through multi-year programmes to enrich, disseminate and validate ideas, as the Institut Montaigne, for example, has been able to do in the field of education in recent years. Think tanks also reflect the insufficient diversity of political players, and they too need to diversify their staff. Enrique Mendizabal, founder of the blog onthinktanks.org, believes that “think tanks need more than just a mix of skills, they also need a mix of disciplines. A team of four economists is not as interesting as a team made up of an economist, a political scientist, an engineer and an anthropologist. Their ability to explain complex problems and find the most appropriate solutions will surely benefit from the combination of disciplines.

All too often, I come across centres that are more like mini university departments than think tanks. They are structured around disciplines: economics, political science, health, education, etc., and each of these is populated by staff with the same educational and professional backgrounds.”

When will the traditional “policy directors“, “research managers” or “knowledge managers” become “creativity directors” within think tanks, and will they be trained accordingly? Can we imagine dedicated training budgets, and recruitment that deliberately prioritises diversity of experience, knowledge and profile? If we take a step back, is it conceivable that a think tank today might feel that it does not have the resources to devote to such functions?

Some do: Grupo FARO, an Ecuadorian think tank launched in early 2014 that seeks to “build a more democratic, sustainable and inclusive society” through “innovative ideas, informal dialogue and collective action”, believes, for example, that “the scale of the challenges facing our societies requires a more collaborative approach to generating knowledge as well as the capacity to transform ideas into better policies and practices. In other words, we believe that in the future, think tanks will become ‘think nets’ that create and connect networks of knowledge-producing organisations around a common project”.  The funders on which think tanks depend, foundations and governments, must support these approaches, to move from the ‘between oneself’ to the ‘between all’. 

Let’s reward creativity in politics.

We need to identify and reward those who take risks and innovate through labels, prizes and awards. Organising more competitions can encourage citizens to come up with new solutions. This brings us back to the essential question of objectives (the famous “key performance indicators” or KPIs of the private sector), evaluation and measurement of creativity and impact. These are complex issues, which have been studied extensively elsewhere.

Let’s deploy human and financial resources

Public authorities and private players can contribute to providing resources for imagination and innovation. The former can provide subsidies, appropriate tax systems, or alternative methods of financing such as public procurement or social impact bonds, recently developed in the UK. This promising innovation enables private investors to provide funding for social services that would not otherwise be covered. Calls for projects are also a simple way of supporting political inventors. To detect and promote socially innovative projects, dedicated investment funds have been set up by the State and the regions, and should be developed further. They can help the “fourth sector” to contribute.

These players, halfway between the public and private sectors, who are focused not on profit but on social progress, have a particularly important role to play in facilitating new approaches. As Colander and Kupers note: “If institutions were designed to encourage people to tackle social problems, there would be social entrepreneurs leading the way in creating non-governmental, bottom-up solutions to these problems. This is not happening because the current institutional structure is not conducive to social entrepreneurs.” Some are also thinking about concrete incentives and ways of getting involved, such as citizen participation as an alternative to taxation, through “public-private-population partnerships.”

Foundations must dare where the state does not and demand better evaluation.

The philanthropic world has an essential role to play in policy innovation, and more foundations need to take an interest in the effect of their funding on experimentation with new approaches. They have the privilege of being able to take more time to allow innovations to mature and be disseminated, and to be able to think systemically. Donations to foundations have been made easier in France, but they still need to be encouraged here.

Philanthropists can also encourage better evaluation. William MacAskill, founder of the Effective Altruism Network, whom Bill Gates calls “a data geek like I like them”, believes that philanthropic organisations can do much better in this area, particularly by using the masses of data available. Professors Helmut Anheier and Diana Leat of the University of California at Los Angeles also believe that foundations have a unique role to play in targeting their interventions in the direction of collective inspiration: “We argue that foundations are ideally placed to make possible forms of diffusion of innovation that are both homophilic [between groups or individuals with similar characteristics] and heterophilic [with radically different attributes], crossing boundaries, connecting actors and bringing together communities that would not otherwise be connected.”

Let’s experiment and prototype wherever possible.

You can prototype anything,” says Christian Bason, “you can make anything visual, even for long-term and complex issues like climate change”, he explained to me on the sidelines of a conference, adding “you can visualise what the future might look like. Go and see the glaciers and how they are melting, make things concrete and tangible”.

Artists can be particularly involved at this stage. They have the know-how to give shape to ideas, to make the invisible – the concepts – visible. This must be the first step before experimentation.

In order to experiment more effectively, we need to give more responsibility to local authorities.

As well as experimenting from the “centre”, it would make sense to give more autonomy to the periphery. According to UDI deputy mayor Yves Jégo, the solution to loosening the regulatory and centralised straitjacket that limits imagination is not to deregulate. Rather, in his view, “the rules need to be more flexible, the State needs to refocus on the essentials and leave room for manoeuvre to the local level; but that’s not the culture here. Our model is too centralised and over-regulated.” The French are overwhelmingly in favour of this, and it is one of the keys to greater autonomy and experimentation.

In order to encourage lateral thinking, Pascal Lamy insists that “in a country like France, this implies much more decentralisation. Not deconcentration: you have to let go of power. It’s a painful process for us”. He adds, with regard to the notion of the facilitating State, that “in France, it’s very difficult, because of the concomitance between the belief in the magic of political action and the election of the President by universal suffrage. Only decentralisation can remedy this: you have to break the system, you can’t change it very much”, provided, he adds, that you don’t “replicate at local level the failings of the national level”, as exemplified by certain baronies. According to Jonny Oates, British Liberal Democrat Lord, “The more power is devolved, the more innovative it is. Because you can more easily afford to fail”.

There are many examples of different approaches being tried out at local level that provide “proof of concept”. From this point of view, the local area, and in particular the region, which is large enough to measure the impact of a policy, but small enough to allow experimentation, is a breeding ground for political innovation. 

France can be the playground for European experimentation.

While cultures and regulatory frameworks still differ greatly from one country to another, each EU Member State can see itself as experimenting with the policies of others, when it is ahead of the game, as Finland is currently doing with its Universal Minimum Income, for example.

We could go further than the excellent reports on sharing good practice compiled by the OECD and its thematic branches, or the occasional parliamentary observation visits, by deciding that several countries would step up our exchanges to design and organise these experiments together on a national or multi-national scale.

Let’s co-assess better.

There is little point in experimenting if we don’t evaluate properly and if the lessons learned are not used by others. And giving autonomy to the regions will not lead to innovation elsewhere if the infrastructure for learning and dissemination is not in place. As in the example of the Youth Justice Board, it is essential that the “periphery” and the “centre” work together. We need to evaluate properly. The Conseil d’Analyse Économique (CAE) notes that, methodologically, “evaluation is difficult to implement institutionally, because only a rigorous protocol, defined if possible before the policy is implemented, can produce a credible evaluation.

This protocol must guarantee the independence of the evaluators and their access to the data required for the evaluation. It must also allow time for cross-disciplinary discussion of the hypotheses and results. Finally, the evaluators must be free to publish their findings and discuss them with other experts, both in France and abroad. (…) A credible evaluation should be based on a tripartite structure comprising a coordinator (Parliament, Cour des Comptes, Inspection générale des finances, etc.), the administrations concerned and independent experts. These elements are within the reach of a government determined to sort out its public policies”. Some will object that the cost in time and money could be significant. However, the time saved upstream and the errors avoided will result in substantial savings.

The CAE also points out that, “while a credible assessment takes time, a reliable and independent diagnosis can save time later on in the decision-making process”. With this in mind, and in addition to the aforementioned places for summarising and monitoring innovation, the following avenues of reform could be considered:

• Make impact studies compulsory before parliamentary bills can be accepted.
• Require a discussion and vote on the explanatory memoranda and impact assessments before any new legislation is examined.
• Make testing compulsory for businesses, local authorities and government users.
• Systematically involve citizens in the preparation of impact studies.
• Entrust an independent body, possibly a citizens’ body, with part of the evaluation of major public policies and provide for a posteriori evaluation mechanisms for the most important laws.
• Making evaluation reports more accessible and transforming their content into public data.

Let’s allocate more resources to better evaluation.

The SGMAP recently highlighted the difficulty of effective evaluation: “Strong methodological requirements are needed to ensure that the results are based on objective foundations. It is also necessary to encourage structures (ministries, local authorities, associations, etc.) that propose new initiatives to lend themselves to such evaluations (the simplest way is to also co-finance the initiative itself) and to encourage qualified research teams to apply to carry them out. This last condition implies a sufficient level of funding to carry out an evaluation, which may seem costly, but which rarely represents more than a few percent of the cost of the measures implemented, in the case of experiments, and one thousandth or one ten thousandth of the total cost in the case of more general measures.

Finally, the independence of the evaluators and the credibility of the results must be guaranteed, in a context where many public policies are evaluated by their promoters themselves, on the basis of more or less precise protocols. The results of evaluations must be widely disseminated, debated and compared with the judgement of those involved in these policies and with the results of research in the field in which they fall. To ensure that the lessons learnt extend beyond the limited sphere of those involved in these projects, the experimentation process must be transparent, with the aim of publicising all the tools and practices developed within this framework (…).”

Let’s spread the word: “small is… small”!

Experimenting and evaluating will only be useful for renewing public policies if the lessons are effectively integrated into the decision-making process. To do this, we also need to design systems that will enable us to accumulate the lessons learned from numerous local experiments, so that they can be analysed in a coherent way, enabling the results to be duplicated, and so that they can be inventoried, shared and accessed by different types of decision-maker, whatever the level of governance.

This is what many organisations – the OECD’s Observatory of Public Sector Innovation, the World Bank, United Nations agencies, think tanks, etc. – and initiatives – such as the European Commission’s Join Up website – are working towards. It would be beneficial to reflect on the effectiveness of these mechanisms and to rationalise them in order to make the most of them, as well as on the other public or private “creativity brokers” mentioned above.

We also need to think carefully about how to replicate solutions elsewhere and on a larger scale.

Here too, discussions are underway and need to be pursued. A working group within the SGMAP recently raised the question of the feasibility and desirability of creating “a permanent public scheme to support change of scale”.  At central level, spin-off engineering could complement the range of social and territorial policies”. The report also suggests ways of supporting and equipping the project engineering and experimentation capacity of local authority staff.

At the end of the day, it’s all about seeing policy in beta testing mode. At least that’s the conclusion that Christian Bason, Director of the Danish Design Centre, invites us to draw. To innovate in public policy, you have to accept that you are constantly trying, evaluating and adjusting. He says: “Even when the reform is generally right, in fact no strategy survives reality. When implementation is top-down, you discover that a lot of things need to be adjusted… So how do you get the feedback you need to make the right adjustments? This is a major challenge, and the government machinery is not open enough from this point of view. But it’s a fundamental question: we mustn’t see a policy as fixed, but always open to adjustment, in the beta mode of development”.

Inviting political leaders to admit that “everything is connected” and that “it’s much more complicated than it seems” does not seem to be a good basis for winning votes in elections and ratings points. And yet it’s inescapable. But acknowledging complexity, cultivating creative capacity and diversity, and creating the ‘pipes’ to channel these forces of invention into more creative, and therefore more effective, solutions that are more likely to ensure the re-election of those who implement them, will not be enough to make innovation a priority for candidates in power if it does not pay off electorally.

What can be done when politics has become above all a spectacle? This is the ultimate question that will decide whether creativity and innovation are treated seriously. This is an essential gamble, because if political innovation is confined to the marginal inventions of disillusioned citizens or under-supported administrations, if it is not driven by a strong public demand that translates into a political movement, then its transformative potential will not be realised. So we need to be able to win elections on a platform of creativity, and to do that, we need to inspire people. To do this, the more active and substantive involvement of community organising specialists, artists, “creatives” and psychologists is essential.

Creativity to bring greater meaning.

The ability to think differently will not just produce a few interesting ideas, as we have seen, but will also enable people to experience politics differently. By focusing on fundamental issues, “creativity could help us rediscover the meaning of voting”, says Edouard Le Maréchal, President of Créa-France, the French association of creative people, although, he notes, “perhaps we could move on to other models. We might realise that we need to do something different. In any case, the first politician to adopt creative practices that break with previous ones will have a much freer speech. We’re going to get away from the wooden language. The person who realises the extent to which they can have ideas and listen – it’s all about listening – and coordinate desires… is going to be a big hit”. Above all, you need to connect with your deepest aspirations. That’s what the innovation process invites you to do, and that’s what practitioners of popular education and community organising know how to mobilise to encourage commitment. Meaning and values touch deep emotions, which can be positively cultivated, as Barack Obama’s Yes We Can showed. But it has to go beyond campaign slogans. Giving primacy to imaginative daring and the profound meaning of public action could also help to re-interest artists, whose “job” is to find and give meaning, but who have for the most part lost the desire to get involved in politics. Alain Reinaudo, a contemporary art consultant, believes that the task will not be easy, considering that “artists are ready to go and meet politicians. But in my experience, politicians are not. They want immediate results”. Considering the urgency of innovation and the profound meaning of political commitment would provide a basis for renewed collaboration between artists and politicians.

“Innovate to outdo the others”.

“Elected representatives and the general public have contradictory expectations: they want both simple and nuanced answers”, says Isabelle Durant, a former Belgian minister and until recently leader of the French-speaking ecologists. She adds: “It’s not easy to get more than 50% in elections with people who want nuanced answers. It certainly doesn’t work if you say ‘it’s more complicated than that’. So we need to innovate to put the others off their guard”. So we have to innovate in terms of the forms of communication and commitment, because creative methods can also be used to campaign differently, to make people want to campaign more, to think together, to give their time… and to win elections. We need more community organising specialists here too, and more creative people, over the long term, beyond just campaign slogans and posters.

Foster emotional creativity.

We need to renew the political spectacle, without cynicism, but with strategy, beyond the “reframing” of political concepts and agendas. Genuine listening, giving people time, warmer forms of engagement, and also relying on feelings of fed-upness, exclusion and the desire for something different, can help to draw these emotions and aspirations upwards and lead to original solutions that correspond to real needs, as shown by Podemos, Alternativet and others, but so far only for a certain fringe of the electorate. Rather than simply cultivating the underlying disappointments, the challenge is to connect this resentment to an infrastructure for discussion, for identifying ideas, and for mobilising activist energies. The pro-active involvement of citizens in the creative effort, combined with more joyful forms of sharing, and the aspiration for a better life, will generate greater public support. Unfortunately, this takes more time. So we also need to tap into the psychological springs of the electorate to cultivate the deep-rooted aspiration to be “empowered“. Politics, activism and the involvement of citizens in the consultation and decision-making processes all need to be made more attractive through more effective communication and forms of action. To achieve this, we also need to innovate on an emotional level, in particular with specialists in social psychology.

These ideas for reform will put creativity and innovation at the gates of power. But will they be enough to change the way in which certain media and social networks malign our democratic debates? The above proposals are certainly part of the answer, because the media above reflect what we expect to hear. As soon as we change the way we do politics, the media will change the way they talk about it. But this is an urgent and essential area for further reflection. Do these reforms call for a creative Sixth French Republic? Proposing to engage sincerely in a process of mobilising political boldness to find new modes of organisation and concrete solutions will not satisfy those who believe that there is no point in putting band-aids on a sick body. They would prefer, for example, to replace elective democracy with widespread recourse to citizens being chosen by lot. These ideas deserve to be pursued and could lead to more radical advances. However, this book shows that many initiatives designed to generate greater political creativity can be implemented immediately, making our institutions more effective and overcoming the opposition between “them” and “us”.

It will not have escaped you that some of the reforms required to unleash political innovation are similar to some of the proposals for founding a Sixth Republic. Clearly, the ideas presented here deserve to be considered within a broader framework of institutional modernisation. Alongside the essential objectives of democratic legitimacy or better protection of the environment, it will be necessary, in any event, to ensure that the creative efficiency of the system is at the heart of any constitutional revision, so that the creative force of all is drawn upwards. The very survival of democracy depends on it.