Innovation extends far beyond the realm of new technology; people, cultures, processes, strategies – and even the way in which we drive innovation itself – are all areas that can benefit from new ideas. To foster continuous improvement, South East Water has adopted a human centred design approach to innovation.
South East Water’s Corporate Strategy 2028 outlines a clear vision for the utility: to innovate with purpose, and act with care.
The deployment of its groundbreaking digital metering program, adoption of circular economy principles and the development of its Environmental Sensitivity Map initiative are already placing South East Water at the forefront of innovation; with the utility ranking sixth on the Australian Financial Review’s (AFR) Most Innovative Companies list in 2023.
However, there’s more to innovation than technology and products; it starts by empowering people to be creative and fostering a culture of collaboration and curiosity.
To encourage this mindset, South East Water is piloting a new enterprise process that takes a collaborative approach to innovation with human centred design (HCD) principles.
Deliberately building an innovation culture
In 2024, utilities are harnessing the latest tools and technologies, and exploring the potential of rapid advancements in AI, IoT-enabled devices, and data driven insights. Unlocking the full potential of this digital transformation starts with building a culture of innovation that encourages experimentation, embraces change and drives business-wide collaboration, while educating and empowering customers and employees.
As workplace flexibility becomes more and more important to employees, office spaces are becoming spaces for purposeful and deliberate collaboration and learning. At South East Water, this means their WatersEdge HQ is transitioning into a destination space where employees can connect and share ideas.
By nurturing an environment of creativity, South East Water strives to not only tap in to the valuable knowledge and diverse experiences of its employees, but empower collaboration between different areas of the business.
“In order to innovate, you really have to be in the right environment. That includes both your mindset, and your physical environment, and we tried to drive that [with this process],” Ms Vincent said.
The Innovation Pathway
In the lead up to South East Water’s inclusion in the AFR Most Innovative Companies list 2023, the utility undertook an external assessment, which identified enterprise process as a key area for improvement.
The utility then looked at how it could create an enterprise process that drives innovation.
South East Water Innovation Manager, Olivia Vincent, explained that the utility chose to leverage HCD methodology as a starting point for this process.
“We built out this enterprise process called the Innovation Pathway, which has a number of key milestone moments that match to how you take innovation from an idea through to market, and embed it in the business,” Ms Vincent said.
HCD methodology is informed by the ‘Double Diamond framework’, which centres around divergent (where multiple options are suggested) and convergent (where decisions are made) thinking. The Innovation Pathway encompasses the five key stages of this framework: align, discover, define, develop and deliver.
Collaboration was key to actioning this pathway, and the utility sought to facilitate this approach by hosting an Innovation Summit, which brought people from all aspects of the organisation together to define key challenges and brainstorm solutions.
Aligning from the top down
Before the summit could take place, the first milestone in the pathway was to create alignment at an executive level.
“Driving deliberate alignment, both at the executive level and then the next level down, the senior leadership level, before we started to innovate or come up with the ideas was really important,” Ms Vincent said.
“So, [the next step was figuring out] how do we actually align around an innovation challenge?”
To achieve this, the Executive Team was tasked with deciding on a theme for the inaugural Innovation Summit. , In April 2024 they settled on the theme ‘improving how we anticipate, embrace and drive change, together’.
“One of the things that we focused on within that was the word together,” Ms Vincent said.
“There can be a tendency, particularly when you’re dealing with ambiguity and the unknown, to either divest responsibility somewhere or to finger point [and fall into] an ‘us and them’ mentality. So, [the next question was] what’s that together piece and how do we drive that?”
Empowering collaboration
The cross-business Innovation Summit held on 5–6 June 2024 made up the next two steps in the pathway.
The two-day event comprised of two milestone activities: a Senior Leadership Team (SLT) Alignment Session, and the Hackathon.
“We started with a half day futures and foresight capability uplift, which we worked on with Reanna Brown [founder of Work Futures], who’s really terrific in this space. What she does is take a futures perspective, but translates it into the practical,” Ms Vincent said.
“That masterclass gave them a different way of looking at our external landscape collectively to identify some of the things from a water industry perspective that might be declining or changing.
“Then, in the second half of the day they broke up into eight tables to condense that external landscape view and then distill it into a ‘how might we’ statement.”
These statements then paved the way for the Cross-business Hackathon on day two, where 60 subject matter experts (SME) collaborated to develop solutions to those challenges.
- A winning idea was chosen for two categories:
Ready to launch: an idea that could reasonably be piloted within 12 to 18 months; is as applicable for frontline workers as it is for office-based workers; and has identifiable benefits to customers. - Most disruptive: casting aside all constraints, this idea has the most potential to positively disrupt South East Water for the benefit of itself, its customers community and the environment.
This structured innovation process provides South East Water with a clear pathway for identifying problems and brainstorming solutions and then transforming these ideas into tangible outcomes and actions.
Safety to fail
Prior to launching the Innovation Pathway, South East Water established its Wellbeing Framework, which outlines the utility’s commitment to becoming a psychologically safe organisation and Ms Vincent explained that their goal was to see innovation as an expression of that.
“I think, at scale, we can do a lot more around psychological safety, and feeling safe to fail,” Ms Vincent said.
“You’ve got this natural tension between engineers and scientists and people whose very jobs ride on the fact that they get it right, with very significant implications if they get it wrong. But acknowledging all of that, there are still windows where you can delineate that this is the space where it’s safe to fail.
“If we have a psychologically safe environment, and we have empowered people, and we can provide these ring-fenced areas for experimentation where people feel safe to fail, learn and try again, then the outcome of all of that should be that we’re an organisation that generates high innovation.”
Where to?
The next step in the process was to take everything that it had learned from the innovation summit and develop it further into possible applications.
“One part of that is that we need to look at the ready to launch idea and activate that into pilot within the business.
Similarly, with disruptive idea, there’s less of a hard commitment around how this gets taken forward. But we want to do more discovery within the business to see what ideas might be applicable for us in the future,” Ms Vincent said.
The second part was to look at the summit itself and identify the aspects that were a success and how the pilot event could be built upon and improved in 2025.
One aspect the utility is contemplating is how it can get great involvement from frontline employees and how it can get the right evidence – both from customers and employees – to inform the conversation that executives are having.
“This year, we will be testing the ideas from our innovation summit with an online community as well as early thinking around key business projects. Building out this rich base of consumer understanding will be a big factor in how our Executive choose the theme for next year’s Innovation Pathway.”
The utility also looked at feedback from attendees about how they could improve the experience next year.
“Failure is essential to innovation. We need to get better at not just saying, ‘look at what we did well’, but saying, ‘in hindsight, that [particular element] was a miss’,” Ms Vincent said.
“One of the misses was that we didn’t get the executives to explain why they chose a theme in their own words. They were provided with very high level context around the theme, but some more nuance around this would have been very helpful.
“On a personal level as well as an enterprise level, if we’re going to say to people that it’s safe to fail, then we need to be leading from the front with that with this programme. So, things like saying ‘we don’t quite know yet’ or ‘there are certain things we could have done better’ are important.
“People are the greatest enabler of innovation. While we have a tendency to associate innovation and technology, galvanising the diversity of people’s smarts, their perspectives, , their quirks, and bundling them together in service of your organisation’s vision and strategy, and then saying, ‘how do we innovate?’ – that’s the magic.”
Featured image: South East Water Innovation Manager, Olivia Vincent, at the 2024 Innovation Summit. Image: South East Water
