myAIPMFrontline Innovation in Times of Crisis: Learning from the Corona Virus Pandemic
Mia R K Hartmann, Rasmus Koss Hartmann | Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice
Abstract
The current COVID-19 pandemic brings about dramatic challenges for frontline police officers and their organizations. This will, we argue, likely have two implications for frontline learning and innovation. First, the pandemic will surely occasion a surge of frontline improvisation and innovation in police organizations responding to the crisis as the experienced needs for new solutions dramatically increase. Secondly, but equally importantly, this wave of frontline innovation is likely to be more transparent than is typically the case for innovations developed in frontline police work, because of changes in formal mandates and informal tolerance for procedural deviance. At this moment of unusually widespread and transparent frontline innovation, we propose an approach to capturing and diffusing this frontline innovation. By taking seriously the unique dynamics of frontline innovation, such an approach is likely to capture valuable innovations that might otherwise rapidly dissipate and be lost.
Introduction
There can be no doubt that the current Corona Virus Pandemic dramatically challenges the frontline organizations responding to it. This includes police organizations. Police organizations play key roles in enforcing lockdowns and educating citizens on a massive and unplanned-for scale, while avoiding that criminals exploit the current state of affairs. In doing so, many will be dealing with a number of shortages. Conventional structures and procedures for carrying out police work will frequently be unviable due to requirements to minimize contact and uphold social distance, protective equipment may be insufficient, etc. Nonetheless, police officers are likely to be exposed to infection and subsequently forced to quarantine, thus reducing the number of officers available to execute these new tasks. All of this profoundly upsets established routines.
How organizations respond to, and are impacted by, crises are complex phenomena and anticipating the consequences of the Corona Virus Pandemic is likely to be difficult. It is, however, relatively clear how this particular crisis will impact frontline innovation. Frontline innovation is typically motivated by personal need (von Hippel, 2005) and typically arises as a response to non-canonical problems faced by frontline workers (Brown and Duguid, 1991). Frontline innovation is also frequently hidden (Hartmann and Hartmann, 2020) as a result of frontline innovators interpreting their innovations as exceeding their formal mandates to adopt and adapt new solutions. When immediate managers are perceived as focused on control and adherence to procedure, hiding tends to be ‘deeper’. In a crisis situation like the present, the occurrence of non-canonical problems experienced in the frontline increases dramatically as does the perceived necessity of responding to these problems. Also, the perceived mandate to innovate and managers’ informal tolerance for frontline innovation will typically expand dramatically. As a consequence, we can expect to see both a surge of frontline innovation and much increased transparency around these innovations during the crisis.
There is a very real risk that these innovations—and therefore the learning that they embody—will not be effectively institutionalized by existing approaches to knowledge management and ‘lessons learned’ once the crisis subsides and police organizations return to bureaucratic normality. At this moment of unusually widespread and unusually transparent frontline innovation, this article proposes an alternative approach to capturing these learnings, focused on ‘lead user identification’ and ‘horizontal’ diffusion and presents practical guideposts for applying this approach in the police context, as well as important caveats to its efficacy. Our purpose is to reduce the risk that valuable learning dissipates and fails to impact future preparedness, leaving police organizations underprepared and wider society at risk.
Two issues deserve mention already at the outset. We do not mean to imply that frontline innovation is the only form of innovation that this crisis will accelerate. Innovation will obviously happen at virtually all levels of the police organizations. Much of the strategic learning is, however, quite likely to be captured by commonly used ‘lessons learned’ systems. That is, we fear, not the case for frontline innovation and hence this call to consider alternative approaches to learning from the current crisis, lest learning opportunities are missed. Moreover, while several of our arguments rely on evidence drawn from military organizations, we do not mean to imply that police and military are culturally or organizationally equivalent. There are similarities, differences, and trends towards both convergence and differentiation between these types of organizations, and within each, there is considerable variation (Chan, 1996; Holgersson et al., 2008; Rahr and Rice, 2015; Rivera, 2015; Coyne and Hall, 2018). It is also clear that there are both similarities and differences in the nature of the frontline innovation process between the two (Hartmann and Hartmann, 2020). Our suggestion is not that the military experience of post-crisis learning will mirror the police equivalent, or vice versa, but to take the shortcomings of common military approaches as a point of caution for police efforts. It is in that spirit that we proceed.
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Frontline Innovation in Times of Crisis: Learning from the Corona Virus Pandemic, Mia R K Hartmann, Rasmus Koss Hartmann, Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, paaa044, 2020