The fourth and last Consortium Group Meeting (CGM) of the year 2023 took place online on 7 December and was organised back to back with the monthly Learning & Intervision Session.
The Learning & Intervision Sessions are peer-led sessions, in which the Host Partners and innovation coaches help each other solve challenges that they run into in working with the Flow Forward. This month’s session was prepared Matthijs Wijnands (Forty), who is the innovation coach for the (Spiegel)Waal. Matthijs presented three challenges, which he had prepared with the Host Partners for this pilot area. An example of the challenges presented is: Although there were innovative, ‘out of the box’ ideas developed in the brainstorm session(s), the pilot area team prioritized the safer ideas.
How can we get the team to be a bit bolder so the solutions we develop are smarter/digital and more scalable? These challenges were discussed with the peer group of Host Partners. The Approach Partners’ enriched the discussion by providing working methods tailored to the challenges presented.
The CGM was dedicated to the North Star, which describes the impact that we envisage the Connected River project will have. We had developed draft impact statement after the Take Up session in Copenhagen. This statement has been discussed by our Steering Group in their meeting of 24 October. Their advice was to put those words into focus that are most crucial to the project partners in terms of success. They also shared their expectations from the Roadmap, which is our tool to shape the steps to achieve the North Star.
During the CGM, we discussed how to take the Steering Group advice forward in the next year. An example of how to further develop the North Star and Roadmap was presented by Benno Bultink (Rijkswaterstaat). He showed the outcomes from their biannual Learning Session, which took on this activity. Though the outcomes are work in progress, the working method (going from impact to activities, and back) proved to be a very practical one.
The CGM also provided the opportunity to share the progress of each Host Partner with Flow Forward. And to reflect upon the support that they receive from the Approach Partners. We found that we all find it difficult to follow - in between meetings - where each Host Partner stands with the steps of Flow Forward. This lack of insight slows down learning between Host Partners, and it makes it more difficult for the Approach Partners to provide tailored support. Several good ideas resulted from the CGM to address this challenge. A key idea being to keep some kind of logbook for each pilot area that shows where they are in the process, and what they have learned from it. This logbook can help the Host Partners to identify synergies between their pilots, and help Approach Partners to keep track of lessons learned (incl. challenges) about their methods. In this way, it can become a pull factor for the peer learning process. Another idea was to organise (loose) coffee meetings around the logbook in order to keep up-to-date about progress of others.
Source: Rijkswaterstaat
Biannual Learning Session / Rijkswaterstaat
