1. John Jackson
President
Police Futurists International
the
innovator’s
interview
The Innovator’s Interview highlights unique innovations from a wide range of industries, and is an
opportunity for futurethink and some of today’s leading innovations to share insights and ideas.
April 2010
Turn innovation into action
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2. the innovator’s interview 2
John Jackson
the background
This Innovator Interview series highlights leading innovators at Fortune
500 companies. In contrast to past interviews, focusing on a single
innovation, this series examines the state of innovation at global
organizations. We spoke with both innovation leaders and practitioners,
within varying business units and organizational structures, across a
broad range of industries both for–profit and not–for–profit.
The interviews offer a unique insider’s view into the world of
innovation—what makes it work, what holds organizations back,
and what critical advice new innovators need to know to be more
successful with innovation overall.
the interview
futurethink spoke recently with John Jackson, a member of the
Houston Police Department and President of the Police Futures
International. Police Futures International’s mission is to help bring
foresight practices to everyday police work and create a more
proactive approach to law enforcement overall. Read on to learn
Mr. Jackson’s thoughts on how public and private sector innovation
are different, the need to celebrate project successes and failures,
and the importance of the half-baked idea.
Your experience in the public sector – working in the Houston Police
Department and now as the head of Police Futures International –
makes you unique among those we’ve interviewed. How does the
public sector innovate differently from the private sector?
In some ways, the public sector experience is very similar to that of
companies in industries that are very highly regulated, like financial
services or pharmaceuticals, for example. Regulated organizations have
a much harder time embracing a lot of typical innovation concepts just
because they aren’t allowed.
Standardization and regulation certainly serve some purposes. However,
one of the negative side effects is that they also create inertia and
make it difficult to change direction or think outside of certain boxes.
In government, innovation is often viewed with anxiety because it’s
seen as being risky. Law enforcement in general is a very risk-averse
institution because it’s a serious job and police decisions are often life
and death decisions. That makes people hesitant to embrace anything
that’s too innovative.
When we do innovate, our mission tends to be broader, so our focus
tends to be quite different. In the private sector, your primary focus is
on profit and efficiency. In the public sector, the focus is more on issues
of equity and representation. We are very often called upon to trade off
efficiency for these other values that are part of our political culture.
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3. the innovator’s interview 3
John Jackson
What are some of the big challenges that you’ve seen when it comes
to making innovation happen?
Changing the leadership mindset is the biggest challenge. In the public “In the public sector, one
sector, we can become victims of our past successes. Very often, the
people that are decision makers have gotten there through practices
of the challenges is that
that are outdated, and in an environment that may no longer be we are victims of our past
relevant. So when they look for successors, they’re looking for people
who mimic their own skill set. What we really need are new and more success. Very often, the
progressive skill sets. people that are decision
For example, when we talk about adopting social media in policing, the
manager’s instinct is to say “Well, that’s great, but we’re going to have
makers have gotten there
to control the content.” My response is that social media doesn’t work through practices that
well that way. If you really start getting into social media like Twitter and
Facebook, your employees must be allowed to go out and communicate are outdated, and in an
messages without fearing they will be reviewed and sanctioned by
people in power. Many managers aren’t going to let this happen.
environment that may no
longer be relevant.”
It’s a huge shift of power and control.
Policing is about teamwork and police officers often work at the line
level in a networked, free flowing way even though administration is
very hierarchical and rank oriented. The need to control is important
to executives and we depend on the hierarchy to exert that control.
However, I think that control is often an illusion. Real control tends to
be elusive, particularly within larger departments. It’s going to take
a shift in thinking to get adaptation of this new, networked way of
communicating and operating. It is almost a leap of faith to abandon
the desire to control at the micro-level. We have to allow the values,
customs, goals and other “protocols” to control the network. As leaders,
we have to shape those protocols to produce the outcomes we want.
And have you seen anyone in the public sector who’s been able to do
that successfully?
A good example of this is a case in Pittsburgh. They created a crime
consortium that includes the FBI, some universities in the area, and
the private sector. Its purpose is to look at internet based crimes, a
need that emerged out of the FBI’s field division. The partnership – the
National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance – operates more as a
network in which control is distributed among the partners.
Is that a model that can work for other law enforcement organizations?
Yes, but that example is on a smaller scale than what’s really needed in
law enforcement. Increasingly, the police have got to learn to operate
networks. Right now, that’s how police agencies work with other police
agencies to deal with common problems. Inevitably, we’ll need to
network externally and internally to be more successful.
How are innovations communicated and tracked in law enforcement?
Mostly at conferences – using presentations or word or mouth. Chiefs
will get together and they’ll talk about what’s working for them. We also
learn a lot through trade publications.
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4. the innovator’s interview 4
John Jackson
What constitutes ‘innovation’ in your world?
Even though cities are different, very often we experience similar
problems in our police work. In cities all across the nation, you’ll find “[Innovation] tends to be trial
different types of programs to solve the issues you’re dealing with – by fire. We come up with a
because everyone is dealing with the same things. So, when we have a
recurring problem such as drunk driving, open air drug markets, graffiti problem, and then captains
or gang problems, and somebody comes up with a solution that seems
to work, that’s where innovation gets applied. The success spreads via over in particular police
word of mouth, and people start adopting what worked. districts, or the managers
Innovation also gets applied on the micro level. We’ll come up with
a new tool, using a new technique for something like license plate
that oversee these areas, will
scanning, or a particular city will start setting surveillance cameras in apply different strategies to
public spaces that seems to work and reduce crime. Those tools and
techniques are a little lower on the radar, but they get spread. deal with the problems.”
How much of your innovation is leveraged from learnings or
developments in the private sector?
Many of our new tools come from the private sector. I’m not sure that
the policing ‘industry’ has been of a scale that vendors want to focus
on it; it’s been somewhat of a niche market. As a result, the big players
aren’t innovating or creating many products for us. You therefore wind
up getting niche vendors who are taking their existing technology
and adapting it to police work. For example, a company will take their
existing camera technologies and say, “how can we adapt this so that
police departments can use it?” The consequence is that we don’t often
get to economies of scale that really drive those prices down and these
technologies tend to be too expensive for a lot of departments to buy.
As a result, the number of departments that can actually afford them
tends to be relatively low. This is improving because I think information
technology and advances in manufacturing are making it more feasible
for companies to target law enforcement as a sector exclusively.
We’re seeing some of that with patrol cars. Most of our police vehicles
around the country are Ford’s Crown Victoria, the GM Impala, or the
Chrysler Charger. Car makers are simply finding additional uses for
an existing vehicle. But now, there’s a company out of Atlanta, called
Carbon Motor Companies, that is designing a car built specifically for
police work. They are not taking a production model car and adapting it
to police work. It’s designed from the ground up for policing purposes.
How much are police forces participating in the development of
those types of innovations?
Many of these technology companies have added people to their Board
of Advisors to help them. They also invite police officers to be on their
advisory panel to help guide and best meet police departments’ needs.
They’re actively trying to bring police officers into their design process.
How does innovation occur in police work?
It tends to be trial by fire. We come up with a problem, and then captains
over in particular police districts, or the managers that oversee these
areas, will apply different strategies to deal with the problems. Whenever Anticipate. Activate. Innovate.
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5. the innovator’s interview 5
John Jackson
analyzed and it gets copied. Then, if it’s successful enough, it’ll be
bragged about to other police departments and they’ll pick up on it.
The other way that innovation sometimes occurs is that they’ll give a
“As part of innovating what
special unit or task force a problem to tackle, like robbery. And then, we do, we are starting to
the innovation happens on the line. Those special projects are not
documented nearly as well because it’s seen as a kind of street-level pay more attention to what’s
innovation may not be easy to generalize. The nature of policing is
very distributed. and police agencies are very hierarchical except
successful and why things are
when you actually get to delivering the service. It’s very much like a successful when they happen.
swarm, it self organizes.
It’s important because with
When you say it’s like a swarm when things are actually starting to innovation, you should try
take off, what do you mean by that?
When an event happens – a robbery, for example, the call goes into to understand both your
our computer system and officers will volunteer for it or self organize
around it and monitor the dispatcher information. If somebody
successes and your failures.”
needs backup, the dispatcher doesn’t have to tell somebody to do it.
Somebody’s usually volunteering and saying, “I’m close by, I’ll go do
it.” If an officer needs help, if he’s actually is in danger and puts out a
call for help, then nobody needs to tell anybody to do it. It just happens.
So, it seems that in one sense we’re a very decentralized organization.
When we’re actually out on the street, we operate with little direction.
At the same time, we’re very hierarchically bound when acting as a
centralized, bureaucratized agency.
After an event happens, how often do teams discuss what could have
been done better or what things worked well?
Within police work, discussions happen when things go badly. We’re
trained to find what’s wrong. As a result, we tend to focus on the
negative rather than on the positive. That’s why an appreciative inquiry
is not a normal method of looking at things for us. As part of innovating
what we do, we are starting to pay more attention to what’s successful
and why things are successful when they happen. It’s important
because with innovation, you should try to understand both your
successes and your failures.
How does the police force incorporate foresight and futurism into
what they do on a day to day basis?
Foresight and futurism are not incorporated into the profession broadly.
Some agencies will engage in low-level futurism, tracking trends and
conducting horizon scanning. Keep in mind, the average organization
is about 10 people. Most police departments in this country don’t have
the resources to keep on top of future trends because they deliver a
broad range of police services with a very small number of people.
There is a group – the Society of Police Futurists International of which
I’m president – that seeks to change this, to spread the use of futures
methods through the profession. We often refer to our group as PFI. We
act as a community of practice to facilitate the sharing of information
and dialogue. I am also a member of the Futures Working Group, which
is a joint venture between PFI and the FBI. We develop publications
that target police leaders, informing them of trends, possible future Anticipate. Activate. Innovate.
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6. the innovator’s interview 6
John Jackson
and success stories to be aware of. PFI and FWG are trying to help the
profession meet its “futuring” needs. That’s why we came to be.
Do you have a favorite technique you use to get police leadership to
do some visioning?
One of my favorites is called Ten Years From Now. I ask them to
envision 10 years in the future and imagine that everything they want
to come true has come true. Now, describe that. They can be very
articulate and specific in their answers; it’s amazing, actually.
But why is this so amazing? Because in police work you’re almost
never asked these types of questions, let alone given latitude to answer
them. With this exercise, you’re giving them permission to dream.
Once we have articulated the vision, we can identify common ground
or, even better, the great ideas that are magnetic. After we’ve settled
on a worthy destination, we can do a backcasting exercise to build a
roadmap with milestones to achieve the vision.
What would be the biggest piece of advice you would give to
another organization in the public sector who’s trying to get an
innovation program or a foresight practice up and running? What
roadblocks should they watch out for? What things must they pay
attention to and do?
First of all, you have to be diplomatic and you’re going to run into
pushback. You’ve got to approach things in a very inclusive way. I think
trying to bring stakeholders in is always good. More is better than less,
but you can get pushback from power groups.
Secondly, you need to develop an environment in which people
are able to brainstorm, to throw out a half-baked idea and get it
knocked around a little bit without being personally reprimanded for
it. Leadership must create a safe space where people can engage in
divergent thought without being punished.
Anticipate. Activate. Innovate.
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John Jackson
What can you learn from the Police Futures approach to innovation?
• Change leadership mindset: In conservative sectors, the biggest barrier to innovation is often
leadership itself. What are some quick wins you can do that get leadership more comfortable with
taking smart risks with innovation? How can you get them involved in the process to get behind it?
• Give permission to envision the future: Too often, teams have ideas about the future and what they’d
like it to be, but aren’t given the time or permission to even discuss it. Use a ‘Ten Years from Now’
exercise with your team to learn their thoughts on where they see your business or industry heading.
• Leverage communications and networks: There may be other organizations or teams working to
solve the same issues you face – do you know who they are? Do you connect with others to share
approaches to the similar issues that you face?
To learn more about the research, tools and training you need to better innovate, visit us at getfuturethink.com.
Anticipate. Activate. Innovate.
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