For public safety leaders around the world, one thing is clear: while the basic mandate of maintaining law and order remains the same, the environment in which this mandate must be delivered is changing dynamically. Fueling this turbulent environment are powerful changes in public sentiment, demographics and social issues, pervasive and invasive technologies, and complex threats to community safety.

What’s imperative now is that public safety leaders gain an understanding of how to create newfound capacity for the future, outcomes and value that communities want, and the legitimacy that society demands.

To help public safety leaders address these questions and develop a vision for the future of public safety, Leadership for a Networked World and the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard, in collaboration with Accenture, convened The 2015 Public Safety Summit: Leadership for a New Era at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Participants learned and worked together on the challenges presented in this new era of convergence by collectively pursuing three Summit tasks:

Learning about strategies that organizations, inside and outside of public safety, have used to successfully adapt to societal change and transform their organizations and workforce.
Co-developing strategies for adopting emergent technologies, cross-organization collaboration, and new operating models while balancing individual privacy, due process, and civil liberties.
Gaining leadership insights on transforming organizational designs and operating models to better engage stakeholders and communities and build public trust.
Drawing on best practices from four case studies, insights from participants and special sessions, the report synthesizes action steps that public safety leaders across the world can embrace.

Realizing the potential of emerging ideas has always been dfficult. Even for path-breaking innovations with transformative potential, the road to implementation can be slippery and filled with potholes, twists and turns, and dead-ends. It begs the question: “How can leaders actually implement emerging ideas to realize improved capacity and outcomes?”

This question of how to achieve the potential of new ideas and business models is critically important in human services, given the powerful emergence of innovations such as Pay-for-Success and Social Impact financing, collective impact strategies, executive functioning science, evidence-based service design, two-generation interventions, and many more capacity-building and outcome-driving ideas.

Yet as leaders embrace the potential of emerging human services innovations, they come face-to-face with established institutional structures, legacy processes and systems, silo-based funding patterns, and calcified ways of measuring outcomes that raise formidable barriers to progress. To overcome these daunting barriers, human services leaders will need to excel in areas such as:

• Setting a strategy that drives innovation forward while safeguarding current capacity.
• Aligning new measures and outcome goals across programs, organizations, and sectors.
• Crafting non-traditional alliances that enable sharing of data, resources, and accountability.
• Pacing the organizational change and adaptation necessary for sustainable progress.

To help human services leaders acquire these skills and strategies, the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard, Leadership for a Networked World and Accenture, in collaboration with the American Public Human Services Association, convened senior leaders for the 2015 Human Services Summit: Emergent Leadership – Turning Ideas into Outcomes.

This sixth annual Summit, held from October 23-25, 2015, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, provided an unparalleled opportunity to learn from and network with the world’s foremost human services practitioners, Harvard faculty and researchers, and select industry experts. Participants left the Summit prepared to deliver new levels of outcomes and impact for society, communities, families, and individuals.