Systemic innovation in Umeå requires creative energy and a black belt in bureaucracy

In the northern Swedish city of Umeå, where dark winters stand in contrast with almost around-the-clock daytime in the summer months, the climate transition is well underway. But it needs to go faster. The city is ramping up the speed through the North Star project, financed by the NetZeroCities’ Pilot Cities Programme. By prototyping innovative approaches, the project is finding ways for systemic transformation within and beyond the city administration. From dissolving departmental silos to creating new organisational roles, Umeå is fundamentally questioning norms and reshaping the status quo of sustainable urban development.

Understanding systems change and the need for transformation

According to Kirsten Dunlop, CEO of Climate-KIC, climate change is systemic, and complex. It causes radical uncertainty. Our responses to it therefore must also be systemic, and changing the way we do innovation is essential. What is understood as innovation – or traditional innovation – does not address complex societal issues at their core because it focuses on surface-level, technical solutions rather than the underlying dynamics of the system itself.

“Our habits of thinking, acting, investing, and decision-making do not lend themselves to deliberately designed, new social structures. We need whole systems to change with impactful climate change mitigation and adaptation happening across cities, landscapes, industries, and finance. We need systems change,” says Dunlop.

Systems change has been defined as shifting components that make up a system – and the interactions between these parts – to ultimately form a new model that behaves in a qualitatively different way. These shifts, when taken together, change how the whole operates. If the city of Umeå is the system, the North Star project represents some of the changes needed to transform the city so it can reach climate neutrality.

“In Umeå, we’ve been quite successful in decarbonising the heating of buildings and procuring the energy used for heating from biological sources. We have done good work regarding renewable energy use. We’ve successfully implemented electric buses around the city. But we are still far from where we want to be,” says Lucas Röhlinger, Strategic Development Officer at Umeå municipality.

To become climate neutral, Röhlinger advocates the need “to work holistically and systemically.” The North Star project tests how to make these changes happen by creating structures and methodologies across city departments and initiatives aimed at tackling sustainability challenges. These changes are intended to drive city-wide transformation and answer important questions around what it truly takes for a city to reach climate neutrality.

The starting point: collaboration

The city created a partnership called the Umeå Climate Roadmap, now part of the city’s Climate City Contract, that brought together diverse local stakeholders. Collectively, they committed to working towards climate neutrality, yet they repeatedly encountered the same challenges and barriers.

“While we occasionally addressed these issues, it was never in a deliberate or strategic manner. A more intentional examination of these obstacles is at the heart of the North Star project,” says Röhlinger.

Three types of barriers were identified:

• Organisational lock-in: established practices embedded in budgets, project models, and workforce skills that increase efficiency but hinder change.
• Behavioural change: also needed, not only from citizens but within organisations and from external stakeholders, such as local businesses and national legislators who influence climate policy.
• Sub optimisation: by optimising their own systems without considering the wider impact, organisations risk unintended consequences that undermine emissions reduction on a systemic scale.

These are interconnected challenges that require interconnected solutions. According to Röhlinger, such interconnection is inherently complex, and solutions will require a deep understanding of social, economic, and environmental networks. The approach should be pragmatic, moving beyond theoretical debates and taking practical steps. It’s important to “learn while doing and accept uncertainty,” he says.

Case prototypes test systemic approaches

The city has selected a series of pilots, or ‘case prototypes’, to experiment with systemic approaches, which are also carefully designed learning opportunities.

One of the case prototypes is about grey water heat recovery. While the local buildings already boast efficient energy ratings, the ‘grey water’ (or wastewater) remains an area in need of improvement.

Greywater warmth represents one of the last major opportunities to improve energy efficiency as it exits the building ‘system’. This case prototype aims to improve this process beyond a single building, but also at the level of the block or neighbourhood. Eventually, such initiatives could be extended to the level of an entire city.

This kind of problem-solving demonstrates the potential for heat-recovery solutions on a systemic level. Rather than each landlord optimising their own building, the city can work with them and other relevant stakeholders to provide city-wide benefits.

Public sector innovation leaders

Systemic change requires new organisational capabilities and, as part of the pilot, Umeå created dedicated roles for innovation within the city administration.

“This made a huge difference for us. It now allows us to work far more strategically in-house and strengthen our innovation work,” says Röhlinger.

The city administration is putting resources towards creating dedicated roles for innovation leaders, who are responsible for driving processes within the city administration that develop new solutions and create organisational value. They challenge bureaucratic systems, traditional boundaries and working methods, finding allies, listening, and building trust to uncover needs and opportunities.

“In short, an innovation leader in the public sector requires balancing creative energy with a black belt in bureaucracy,” he says.

While building innovation capacity is common in businesses, it is not the status quo for municipalities. What the team in Umeå is learning is that creating dedicated roles for innovation is resulting in improved capacity for trust-building, stakeholder engagement, and efficiency.

Building local capacity for the climate transition

Building capacity beyond the municipality is also priority for the North Star team, and they are this doing in close collaboration with local stakeholders. The city developed a new learning platform featuring several pilot initiatives, such as learning meetings, learning circles, and a Change Maker Conference.

The learning initiatives explored what it means – and what it takes – to lead transition processes with others.

“The collaborative nature of this work was highly appreciated by everyone involved and helped strengthen both our partnerships and our collective capacity for meaningful collaboration”, says Röhlinger.

Better relationships and dialogue with local stakeholders will improve their ability to move together towards common sustainability targets.

“We’re excited to continue exploring this and will keep offering relevant training opportunities to our partners,” he adds.

To make the learning easily accessible and replicable, they have also created a handbook detailing one of the initiatives and are working on a digital resource bank to complement the learning platform.

Diverse voices for inclusive transformation

From the outset, the North Star team brought together voices from within and beyond the city administration, including a social inclusion officer, to ensure diverse perspectives shaped their work.

Practically, this part of the project brought people from different sectors together in thematic meetings, (i.e. about transport, agriculture, or construction), attempted to overcome traditional departmental roles, and create opportunities for cross-sector collaboration.

“Many of these people were working in similar roles but operate in isolation in their own companies, like a sustainability officer in a construction company. Bringing them together to share tips, frustrations, and experiences helps them get new perspectives on their roles and to learn from each other,” says Röhlinger.

Towards new ways of working

While the North Star seemingly covers a very diverse range of initiatives, what they all have in common is the fact that they take a systems change approach. All the initiatives are collaborative, inclusive, and do not shy away from complexity.

As Röhlinger puts it:

“If you only talk about enabling factors and avoid the barriers, you’ll never overcome them.”

The team learned that resistance is not a sign of failure, but often a signal that transformative work is underway.

Discussing resistance and failure demands emotional intelligence and organisational courage – a willingness to put the finger into the wound and address the real challenges preventing meaningful change.

This became especially clear in the wastewater heat recovery case, where stakeholders initially embraced the exploration of new solutions, but excitement faded when it became clear that moving forward would require them to rethink their own business models and organisational structure.

“Change can become personal – and sometimes painful,” says Röhlinger.

The working group recognised the need to pause, allowing participants to express their hopes and fears about what this change could mean. For the case leader, this required patience, moving slowly, while keeping the door open for stakeholders to return once they had processed the possible future changes. According to Röhlinger, the process was uncomfortable and challenging, but incredibly valuable. By acknowledging mistakes and understanding where resistance came from, they were challenged to change their own ways of working in order to enable change at a pace that all parties were comfortable with.

As the project enters the final stages of its two-year lifespan, the North Star team will be faced with questions of how to bring this work forwards in the second half of a critical decade. The pressure will be on to ramp up the speed and demonstrate results of their work.

With systemic work, things don’t suddenly change from one day to the next, says Röhlinger. Instead, the effects are cumulative:

“The results of our work become visible over time and with consistent effort. If we don’t work systemically, then we know our progress will be half-measured,” says Röhlinger.

The North Star has created new conversations, new collaborations, and a strengthened approach to understanding city-level climate transformation that will rise to the challenges yet to come.