Sustaining innovation has failed us. It's time to think more radically

Link: A Three Horizons Framework for Government Reform, by Jennifer Pahlka

Important analysis from Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America, that is about government technology and services but could just as easily be about news and journalism.

She introduces the Three Horizons framework for thinking about change and building towards a shared vision of the future. Here, Horizon 1 is the status quo, Horizon 2 represents improvements to that system, and Horizon 3 represents an improved system rather than an optimized present.

There are four kinds of innovation: research, sustaining, breakthrough, and disruptive. The first two don’t lead us anywhere new on their own; they might provide extra capacity and create more headroom, but they aren’t systemic change. Any fundamental problems with the status quo probably won’t go away. In contrast, breakthrough innovation brings in fresh ideas to solve problems in a new way, and disruptive innovation creates new systemic models that serve people in new ways.

Jennifer’s point is that a lot of government reform work — including Code for America — has been sustaining or incremental at best, which has relieved some pressure but hasn’t really changed anything. The same problems persist.

Philanthropic funding has compounded the problem by funding that kind of innovation instead of more radical solutions. This, for me, is the key sentence in her piece:

“Funders need to ask not just whether an investment does good but whether it changes the conditions under which good can be done at scale.”

And there’s a finite window for more aggressive change. This has been created by the AI shift, changes in the US government, the COVID-19 pandemic, and other changes that have highlighted how poorly our current system has adapted.

In government, that need has become rather obvious, but it’s true in news too — another key part of our civic framework. (And this is also true for social media!) These same factors apply, and philanthropic funding has been similarly risk-averse, aiming for sustaining innovation that builds capacity rather than changing how everything works to serve people better. The fundamentals aren’t changing and they haven’t been serving us. We need to think much more radically, and we need to fund much more radically.

In that framework, it’s incredibly important to articulate what the more radical futures we could work towards actually are. Jennifer points out that there are multiple, potentially contradictory, possible futures — the point is not to coalesce into one agreed-upon Horizon 3 end state, but to be able to describe where any current change might be leading to. Where is this taking us, and why?

Let’s allow ourselves to imagine something better. And then, let’s finally go there.