#UKGC13 – Notes on Session re Big and Small Companies Innovating Together

At UK Gov Camp 13 I pitched the idea of a session about “How Big and Small Companies could Innovate Effectively together”; about 20 people  came along and whilst I think it’s fair to say that we did little other than scratch the surface of the subject I undertook to record key points that did come up.  That is the purpose of this blog.  I’ve tried to put a structure on it which mirrors but doesn’t necessarily follow precisely the chronological flow of the discussion. If any errors in the below are brought to my attention I will happily make changes.

Good examples

There was discussion of the “Partner Ecosystem” and “Partner World” at IBM and Microsoft.  For Microsoft the challenge is which of the 37,000 partners to use for a particular problem .  For IBM a key innovative role of small companies is using and innovating on their platforms to develop new products for a wider range of client segments than IBM can itself specialise in.

FutureGov are working with Google on Interactivism projects (see eg http://wearefuturegov.com/tag/google/).

What’s In it for the Small Organisations?

Access to frameworks that the Big Company is on but which the small company isn’t, access to resources more generally.  Access to the bigger brand.

For very small organisations (eg sole traders) a small organisation can be a useful bridge to work with a big organisation.

Practical Considerations

For a small organisation finding the right people to talk to about heir innovation can be very difficult.  Even where there is someone who is nominated (or willing) to act as an entry point there can still be many (costly) meetings after this.  The concept of “Meet the SME events” was suggested.

It also seemed clear that there is value in finding some relatively small items where the big and small organisation could work together to establish trust.  Although there is also a concern about whether the small organisations gets used for relatively simple things in that context: do they really get the opportunity to showcase their leading-edge skills.

Working Styles

An interesting contribution stated that there was an analogy with “anywhere working” ie when managing people who are working remotely it’s important to manage them based on outputs rather than detailed specification of precisely how and when they work – it’s similarly important to do this as a big organisation when working with a small organisation in order that the creative style of the small organisation is unimpeded.

Clarity came through many times as important, clarity of expectations, and clarity about which party is taking and managing which risks.

Innovation Together?

In the context of the session we mostly spoke about Big and Small Companies working together, and accessing each others innovation.  We didn’t actually get any discussion on the desired topic of “co-innovation”, but I think that reflects that this is a higher state which we’re not really close to yet?

The CIO at the Top Table?

(originally published as a Veredus blog here )

In an article this week on Government Computing I drew out some points that had emerged at the Socitm Conference in 2012 with conclusions for 2013.  In particular I mentioned that:

“The role of the IT profession within local authorities’ wider change agenda got some attention. Many of the people and process skills of change are baked in to the way that IT operates, yet many CIOs report a lack of recognition and traction in their authority, perceived as ‘techies in the server room’ rather than as change executives. How will the profession reposition itself – is the issue awareness or is there substance to address also?”

In this context it’s interesting to speculate on some of the blockages experienced by ambitious local government IT professionals who aspire to larger general management roles in due course.

• The Director of Resources Role.  The “obvious” career path for someone in IT towards the chief executive position is via the corporate director of resources role.  Often, elected members want an accountant for this role, and combine it with the statutory “section 151” role.  The legal requirement of the s.151 officer mean that it is advantageous to have the senior finance professional at the top table, and, understandably, especially in the current climate, members often want the best Finance lead they can get.  Not all authorities have a financially-qualified director of resources, but since many do, this narrows the pipe for IT professionals to progress.

• Reluctance to be “Corporate”.  I have detected in some individuals a sense that in order to progress to a corporate position one has to take on positions which will decide against the interests of the IT Department, albeit for the greater good.  I sometimes hear people talk of individuals who have done this as though they have betrayed their calling and turned their back on the profession (I exaggerate slightly to make the point).  The strong culture of IT as a profession and of IT departments therefore works against those who wish to leave.

• Career development.  It is relatively easy to develop a career focused on IT.  The challenges are real, fascinating, and continually changing.  There are well structured opportunities to network with colleagues in IT in other councils or other organisations.  Those role models at the top of the profession, are, by definition, those who chose to stay within it. By contrast it is harder to develop the networks for a future chief executive or resources director – where does one go to network with HR professionals, finance folk, policy wonks, lawyers…

There is a strong parallel with the HR profession, who often have similar debates about achieving top table status.  It is my experience that where the HR Director has a place at the top table it is (almost) invariably because of the particular strengths of the individual, rather than the job description or the post structure.  The chief executive and senior colleagues want the individual around the table because their input is known to be valuable, and not just in their area of formal responsibility.  Unfortunately there is a bit of a vicious circle about this – without opportunities to gain a corporate/strategic perspective it is hard to add value to it!  It is an interesting challenge for the profession (if it wishes) to seek opportunities to inculcate, and support their members who wish to develop, this wider perspective.

Building a Platform for Evidence Use in Local Government

This blog was originally published on Demsoc’s Open Policy Blog.

I attended the “Informed Future” workstream at the 2012 Solace Summit, and whilst I won’t try to give a blow-by-blow account I want to share here some of the key things which emerged, for me.  There is a lot of hard work at many levels required before Local Government in general can be really effective in this domain, and unless we progress each of the strands simultaneously the process will take much longer than it needs to.

Two statements of principle (to give us purpose)

- A rigorous  evidence-based approach will be essential for tackling some of the huge issues we face – especially long-term multi-agency preventative interventions. We have early examples which are tremendously encouraging – the work of the Dartington Social Research Unit looks especially strong in that regard. A lack of robust needs-based segmentation means that many folk are given services that are not aligned with their needs and so waste resources (arguably “Troubled families” are an extreme example of this).

- Evidence is not in opposition to judgement or democratic choice. Evidence informs both, but can only ever be one input.  It was startling how often in discussion even quite well-informed and senior local government folk appeared to regard evidence as being something which removed the possibility of judgement or democratic input.  It speaks to the lack of a culture of use that familiarity with a notion of democratic objectives and judgement giving rise to research questions which require interpretation and the addition of yet more judgement and democratic input does not seem well established.

Two things that Chief Execs can do in their authorities (to help it happen)

- develop a culture of use of evidence. This may mean a critical self-appraisal of their own comfort to engage with this, and the skills needed around them. Recruitment and personal professional development decisions in the next few years should all bear in mind a need to lead by example with emphasising the value of information. This is about incorporating and developing the evidence base into a coherent narrative of the organisation that it is the job of the CE to co-produce with members. There is almost certainly an opportunity to draw on public health expertise in this area.  A small step councils could take would be to add a box for “evidence base examined” to the many other pro forma boxes such as “legal implications”, “equalities impact” etc on their formal public decision-making committee reports.

- support data improvement.  Even if we resolved all of the cultural issues immediately we would be hampered in our ability to apply rigorous evidence by data quality and data sharing issues.  There are technical people in our organisations who are trying to resolve these issues; they should be sought out and supported – small investment over time will have a big impact when we need it to tackle the really wicked choices for our communities beyond 2015

Two issues for the Sector (that need to be handled at that level)

- We need to begin a discussion about use of evidence and engage/educate in issues around how we will test interventions. We need to get upstream of issues such as the ethics of control groups, randomised control trials so that when we are actually ready to do these things, this doesn’t suddenly become the constraint.

- We need to back LARIA, The Alliance for Useful Evidence, “what-works centres” etc as central repositories of research knowledge and expertise. Their results won’t be perfect first time, but there are some areas where we really cannot afford to have each authority in the country developing its own overview of all relevant research, and there must be benefits of collaboration.

In the Bleak Mid-Decade: The View from Bartle Borough Council in 2017

It’s 2017.  We are halfway through the projected decade of austerity. 

Bartle Borough Council is a (fictional) unitary with 250,000 residents. It describes itself as a “commissioning council” and more than 80% of its services are provided by the private or voluntary sector. Resident satisfaction is pretty good – just below upper quartile. 75% of its back office services are shared with Anderton Borough Council and Charlesworth Council, and sharing services means that its unit costs are in the lowest quartile of similar councils. Since austerity struck social care costs have been halved per service recipient by a combination of redefining thresholds, and descoping care packages, plus some more positive intiatives – but there are a lot more service recipients.

Despite all this good work from 2012 to 2017 the council faces a budget crisis. Reserves are at 1.5%, and there is a £10m gap in funding for each of the next five years (on the current base of £200m, which used to be £300m in 2009). Relentless demographic pressures, and worklessness take their toll on council services. Health inequalities have worsened but no-one seems as bothered by that these days. Where once there were 40 officers in the top three tiers of the council there are now 15. The chief executive is also the statutory director of adults and children. The Deputy chief executive covers resources and transformation, and there’s a Director of universal services covering roads, the (one) library, environment and schools.

They can’t believe that after five years of slog, and doing all of the right things, that they still have a budget gap. They feel poised on the brink of sliding down to the awful position which other councils are in, basically rationing ever more meagre services, and patching things up as best they can, seeing emergency national resources going to the less well run councils. Was this all that effort was for? Simply delaying the slide?

So here’s the question: Is this plausible – would a council which did “all the right things” actually be in this position? What can it do next? What should it have done 5 years ago? I have some views – what are yours?

I originally wrote this blog on a dark day in December last year and got too depressed by it to publish it (!)  though it has since then been quite a powerful motivator for me to think of solutions.  Since then I’ve had some injections of positivity too – not least last weekend’s LocalGovCamp and the LGC Future Leaders event, but we’ve also had the LGA graph of doom analysis  – so I’ve decided to put this out there and see what happens.  Please don’t hit me.  I’d love for this not to come true.

Thoughts arising from … #LocalGovCamp

Attended my first localgovcamp this weekend, (though it wasn’t my first unconference). These are my 10 takeaways – a clever format suggest by someone (possibly even Dan Slee) a little while ago:

1. Struck once again by how extraordinarily easy it is to enjoy the company of people who share a common passion and with whom you have “broken in” a relationship on Twitter. An attractive combination of the joy of meeting someone for the first time and greeting an old friend.

2. Chatting with an attendee who is a senior player in a local authority about the buzz and energy in the room – why can’t a day at the office be like this? The private sector place I work now is closer to the buzz and energy of a “camp” than the local authorities I have worked in and I think there is a relatively simple explanation – ratio of energy givers to energy takers. Having said that, culture, clarity of objectives, and performance culture can affect whether someone is an energy giver or taker – it’s not just innate to the individual. The culture of a localgovcamp is spectacularly encouraging.

3. Interesting thoughts about the parallels between the Victorian development of physical civic infrastructure and the current development of a civic information infrastructure in a locality. I am not a historian, but my perception is that at its best this was shaped by an enlightened relationship with business which realised that civic growth and economic growth went together. Does the fact that “business” now tends to be national or even multi-national mean that the bold local entrepreneurs of the past don’t quite exist in the same way, and therefore we won’t see the same positive inter-relationship? A different question: are we – can we be – as clear about the end goal if we’re thinking about civic informational infrastructure as it was possible to be when it was pretty obvious that roads, sewers, health systems and schools would be a good thing? Anyway, was pretty clear to me that much of the discussion about this appears to muddle two distinct things – technology in support of the physical city (eg Smarter Cities), and technology in support of the virtual, social media, digital city – if indeed such a thing can actually exist meaningfully in a geographical sense.

4. I need to find out more about the work that Wolverhampton homes are doing about digital inclusion – it sounds as thought they are doing some exemplary work.

5. A question arising from a discussion with Lloyd Davis – “how can you make good things happen in a society/community with as little structure as possible”. Underpinning the question are complementary desires for economy in a cash-strapped world, and a desire to interfere as little as possible. I wish “We Will Gather” the very best, and will track this (and, separately the fascinating Bristol Democracy project – go look).

6. A quote for which I do not know who to attribute – “there is no such thing as civic apathy, there are just barriers to entry” – further reinforced by a discussion with someone who said that as a councillor candidate the most common question he was asked was where one should go to vote.

7. Yet further realisation that the incoming Police and Crime Commissioners could be “problematic”, especially as they will be taking on their somewhat uncertain roles and having to make decisions about huge cuts in service straight away, decisions which will be scrutinised by new panels also uncertain of their own role. The glass half full version of this, thanks to a lover of local government, being that it is better that these decisions are taken locally as they will certainly be taken somewhere remote if not. I would like every PCC candidate to be asked the question “What specifically will guide your thinking as you decide where to cut costs by 20% or more during your term of office?”

8. A simple idea that a mechanism for public consultation about a location is simply to ask them what makes them sad/mad/glad about the place. No more structure than that. Don’t impose a set of questions about council services in council language until after you’ve had that unprompted response.

9. The idea of a “procurement camp” was mooted as it increasingly became clear that the methods of public procurement at present appear to be a blocker to innovation. In fact DCLG held a session a bit like this a few months ago, with folk present from private sector, voluntary sector and buyers from local gov. I was struck that simply by having folk from each of those constituencies speak for ten minutes about the view from their perspective that an extraordinary amount of value was added. So if procurement camp happens we need to ensure that we recruit enough folk from each relevant constituency. If I had a quid for every time someone simply failed to understand a perspective during localgovcamp, I’d have had, well … not that much, but certainly enough to pay for my excellent Garlic Chilli Paneer at Manzil’s the night before.

10. Lastly, what is #localgovcamp for? Is it a talking shop? What action comes out of it? Personally I don’t think that there has to be a specific tangible action – the law of two feet says that if people don’t find it useful they won’t go. If “fortune favours the prepared mind” then I think all of our minds are a little better prepped, to make connections as yet unimagined in the days and weeks ahead. Having said that, one of the things that I found really nice about the Brighton City Camp is that the open unconference day is followed by an “ideas hack day” where a smaller number of ideas can be worked up in greater depth, and the good ones are then supported through implementation by a degree of awarded cash, and monthly supportive meet-ups to provide continuity.

Themes from the LGA Conference

This week saw the annual Local Government Association (LGA) conference, which is always a great opportunity to understand the position and direction of the sector.  Here are some personal reflections:

Something Must be Done

The LGA presented research making projections of local government funding up to 2020.  In the style of the famous Barnet Graph of Doom they have produced a report which starkly sets out the need for significant action if the impact of reducing budgets and exploding social care costs are not resolved.  It is really worth reading. The main headline is that with increasing resources devoted to social care the amount of council money available for libraries, road repairs, investment in economic development etc will take a 90% cut over this time.

Much of the discussion over coffee was about the impact of this analysis.  In recent years the mood of the conference has been quite downbeat, with members realizing that they are going to have to make exceptionally difficult and unpopular decisions.  This year the mood was more up tempo, I think because there are a range of solutions that are starting to come through, ranging from work on community budgets, to shared services, to joint working with health.

The scale of the funding pressures means that there is no single magic bullet solution.  In particular it is clear that whilst back office efficiency has a role to play, it is in no way sufficient.  One councilor was saying that if he reduced his back office costs to zero that would only close a fifth of his funding gap.

Solutions, solutions everywhere …

Fortunately there is a wide variety of new candidate part-solutions available.  Many councils and providers were talking about their practical experience of implementing initiatives to reduce costs and in many cases improve service outcomes too.

In fact, the problem rapidly moves from being one of “what can I do?” to “which should I do?”.  There is a bewildering array of strategic choices, which I think is one of the main reasons that the idea of a “commissioning council” is gaining such sway – it recognizes that a core skill required of councils in future is the ability to make choices about service delivery based on increasingly sophisticated analyses of what outcomes are required, and then implement the choices rigorously through careful market management – whether that market is in-house, spin out, third sector, the private sector or a suitable combination.  I strongly suspect that next year there will be many more sessions to allow councils to compare notes about how their current experiences at the start of this journey are playing out in practice.

The Capacity Issue

Encouragingly, almost every council seems to be doing something new and innovative, which will clearly be a part of the solution.  Everybody has something of which they can be justly proud. Although it is not obvious that there will be sufficient capacity to do the large number of things that will be required, but there is clearly a mood to try.  The challenge to the private sector is to find ways of adding value flexibly and cheaply.  There was a lot of cross-sectoral consensus that the time and cost of procurement is a bad thing – though my personal view is that the process does bring some rigour and clarification, and in fact the evidence of some of the early public-public shared service models is that people have had to retrofit more of the contractual rigour that they thought they could do without.

Remember, remember the 15^th of November

The 15^th of November sees the elections for the first Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs).   Capita sponsored a session with IPPR North to discuss the implications of this for local government.  We did this because we see the issue as being an important one which people have told us they find hard to make time to think about.  It is clear that some authorities are significantly further advanced in their preparations than others.  We will do more of a writeup on this but two key thoughts stay with me – firstly that this is actually a really interesting experiment in localist democractic reform – never before has there been an elected strong leader of a single public service.  West Yorkshire, led by Joanne Roney, Wakefield’s CE, have a very impressive level of preparation and will have done all of the thinking to be able to agree a useful memorandum of understanding with their incoming PCC – if the PCC is minded to engage.

It’s the Economy, Stupid

A particularly constructive session concerned economic growth.  Local Government’s action orientation is increasingly being applied to the business of business in their locality.  As with the organizational reshaping issues discussed earlier, the issue is one of making choices about what to do rather than trying to identify something at all.  Skills, planning, and responsiveness were all cited as areas for work, though my favourite intervention came from a business woman who pointed out that all of the city strategies she has seen say exactly the same things (!) – differentiated economic strategies will be needed.

Vive la Difference

Perhaps the strongest emerging theme from the conference as I think back on it was an unstated feeling that localism – councils making their own decisions their own way – is really starting to be played out in practice.  No-one was talking about how they compared on national inspection frameworks, and people were clearly using the language of choice for their locality, rather than trying to come up with solutions that would be good for all councils everywhere.  People are looking to judgement from their citizens, not the centre.

Career Planning into Uncertainty

Originally published on the Veredus website.

I recently had the privilege of speaking to a London/South East group of the LGC Future Leaders for Local Government, about Career Management at a time of such uncertainty.

This blog is intended to capture a few of the key messages, and is aimed at people mid-career. It’s a five-step process and requires you to visualise a circle, and a fuzzy triangle!

1. Apply all your knowledge of demographic trends and economic projections around pensions to calculate the age that you think you will be when you can retire from work. Then subtract your current age. For me it’s about 30, for my audience it was about 40 and for a new grad it’s probably more like 50. That’s a long time.

2. Now visualise the circle I mentioned. It’s a pie chart of those years that you just calculated. How much of that time do you think you’ll spend in your current sector or with your current organisation? (All of it? Really?) How much time will you spend in the private sector, public sector, working for yourself? How much time will you spend juggling work and further study? How much time will you spend prioritising your career advancement, really focused on putting in the hours and building your base of achievements, and how much time will you spend giving a higher priority to family, or other objectives? The importance of this exercise is to get you thinking beyond merely the next job, and realising that you have many choices, especially if you can look beyond the immediate question of what to do next.

3. Now think back in time, from now, your years to retirement, think of what the world and context was like then, what was going on and what was the right career strategy for that time. Then consider the various trends that will play out over the remaining decades of your own work life. Pretty quickly you’ll realise that aiming to replicate the career path of people currently at the top of organisations is unlikely to be the way to get there, that the world has changed and is likely to change again many times.

4. Now think about the triangle. The base of the triangle represents the breadth of your experiences: you can aim for an apex above any part of the base. Wider experiences and skill sets lead to more options. The base can obviously be widened through a wider range of work if possible, but study, reading around and networking can extend the insights and skills that you can bring to bear. For example, a career accountant will, all else being equal, be a better candidate for a Director of Corporate Resources role if they have spent time and attention with HR colleagues, understanding their issues and contribution, rather than simply focusing on a deeper and deeper financial specialism. Good use of LinkedIn groups, subscribing to the right Blogs and (this will surprise some) intelligent use of Twitter can be very helpful in expanding the base of the triangle.

5. Why is the triangle “fuzzy”? That’s to symbolise what one very senior CEO described as “hinterland” – having more to what makes you “you” than simply work. We talk about authenticity in leadership and being true to yourself: there needs to be a “self” there that you can be true to. No-one on their deathbed says “I wish I’d spent more time at the office”

It is vaguely worrying that when I get invited to talk about career planning it is almost invariably to groups from just one sector, or just one function (and sometimes one function in one sector!) – it suggests a development model that is unlikely to be the working reality of many people within that function or sector. If, as with the LGC Leaders programme this is clearly understood and breadth is welcomed then this is less of an issue – but it will be a shame if budget retrenchment drives development and career planning into silos. In that context I had a very cheering conversation with a County Chief Executive who is thinking about leadership development for cohorts of future leaders across the public sector within the County. It poses the interesting question of that is the best form of cohort for leadership development – people with the same issues, or people with different ones?

Competing to be the most Business-Friendly Council

This post was originally published on www.localgovernmentmatters.co.uk.

 

I recently participated in a workshop arranged by a council to bring together its staff, local businesses and other relevant stakeholders in a session which focused on envisioning a future economic strategy.

It was an impressive piece of co-creation, and as is usual with these things the greatest insight came from listening to the customers – businesses in this case, about how their interaction with the local authority affects their own success.

For local authorities the whole issue of business growth is moving up the agenda, both because of the general need to drive economic growth – often through supporting local SMEs – and more prosaically because planned changes in business rates will mean that local councils have an more immediate financial stake in the success, growth and coverage of local businesses.

Local authorities have their hands on many levers of economic success – planning, transport, parking, housing, education (to an extent) and a broader influence over workforce supply, and can set a tone and context through formal and informal support to business networks and organisations.

A specific area that’s easy to overlook is regulation.  Recent research  has shown that for 54% of local businesses their only face to face contact with the authority is from trading standards, environmental health or similar.  The Local Better Regulation Office is currently promoting improved standards and competencies for regulation, with a clear line of sight to economic growth.  For firms with operations in more than one council area the primary authority concept is crucial to simplifying regulation and we are already seeing firms moving their choice of primary authority, and the associated spending based on the council’s capability to manage the national network of relevant regulatory agencies.  A strong regulatory team will be a factor in relocating headquarters in the future.

Some chief executives I talk to in business-oriented councils know the names of, and regularly meet with, the chief executives of their major local businesses.  We all know that some councils are better at promoting their locality for business rather than others (I suspect most people will remember the “Peterborough effect”).  Councils vary in their level of sophistication: one council with a pressing need for social housing nonetheless ensured that their plans included provision for a modest increase in executive housing because they were aware that a gap in this area made them less attractive to businesses.  This is undoubtedly an area amenable to strategic analysis, Michael Porter’s  ‘Competitive Advantage of Nations’, whilst obviously written on a larger scale, poses questions of relevance for local authorities in terms of the strategic industry clusters that they can create and support based on local factors, and recognises that supporting the competitiveness of your local businesses with customers outside your area is important to your own economic success.

And this is where it gets interesting.  There is obviously “competition” between councils and LEP areas for businesses and inward investment, but this is often implicit.  I have yet to see a Council’s economic development strategy (please point me at one) which explicitly addresses specific competition.  The technology exists to deploy a much more focused, almost predatory approach.  We could envisage an MD receiving an email like this

Dear John

 I’m the cabinet member for business at Bizton – you will know that we are a thriving centre for business, and we have been doing some research on your company.  Our industry analysis shows us that you are growing impressively, but are likely to be constrained for space in your current office, and if you are thinking of a move we would like to make you aware that:

• 10 miles from your current base we have a unit that should be a similar rent to your current business but with 30% more space for your expansion
• From analysis of our own businesses we know that four of your largest customers would be nearer to you here than they are currently
• Moreover 23 businesses within Bizton have said they would welcome greater provision of the graphic design services you provide
• We know that print and distribution are important to your business, the site we’re thinking of is adjacent to a thriving print business and there is a distribution hub within 5 minutes
• The site has car parking, and there are three restaurants within a 5 minute drive, and two more within close walking distance
• Average education attainment at GCSE level is 8% higher in Bizton than at your current location, our local FE college does Graphic Design to Foundation Degree level and 73% of the students have said that their first preference would be to find a local job
• In terms of workforce, we don’t have detailed statistics for local businesses but we do know that staff sickness rates at our local council are 30% lower than the council where you are now.

 In short we think there are very specific reasons why you might want to move to Bizton now, to create room and opportunity to grow.  I’d welcome the chance to show you around personally, together with the Council’s chief executive and one of our business relocation specialists who would work with you free of charge to help make your office move a success with minimal disruption.  We’ve done some homework on you but what we’d really like to do is understand in your own words how you see your business growing to think together about how we could help with that.  And in case you think this is a mass mailshot I can assure you that we approach only three businesses a month in this way: just the ones where we think there’s a really good fit for them and us.

 I hope you can spare the time, if you’d prefer to do it at the weekend that’s no problem.  We’ll be happy to send a car for you and any colleagues you’d like, to meet with us.  I’ll be in touch later today to see how we can support your business growth.

It’s like a move from simply advertising job vacancies to headhunting.  Will we move from competition for new business to becoming aggressively competitive, cherry-picking the best businesses from near neighbours and if we do, how will that affect collaboration in other spheres?

Guardian Public Services Summit 2012

This blog was originally posted on www.localgovernmentmatters.co.uk

The Guardian Public Services Summit is a rarity on the Summit circuit as it draws together people from across the public, voluntary and private sectors to share views on current issues and future opportunities in public service.  It provides an interesting snapshot of the zeitgeist and I have blogged on this in 2010 and 2011.

Coping with Change

In previous years the discussion has been about the wave of change about to hit, and possible strategies for dealing with it; this year there was more of a focus on actual change in practice.  What I found interesting about that was that there was very little setting out of one grand plan or big idea as the solution – in previous years you could have been forgiven for thinking that every known ill would be solved by social enterprises.  Indeed there was one whole session specifically rejecting the idea of “fashion” in public service design.  There emerged a clear appetite for: appealing to an actual evidence base to support decisions where this exists, a recognition of the need to try many different things, and not to be swayed by trendy management guru models invented for largeUScorporations.  Some strong views were expressed that an intellectual acceptance of the need for innovation hits a robust reality of risk aversion at a time of large scale people change and reduced capacity.

This was underlined in a talk by Mark Bee, the leader of Suffolk County Council who contrasted his council’s new approach to change with that driven forward by the previous chief executive, herself a speaker at the summit the year before. He talked with good humour about the need for bringing individual communities along on a change journey, and of working out practical detail to go beyond the big vision.  Much of the twittering (hashtag #pss2012) was about whether this approach could be fast enough to cope with the change required, but his essential stance seemed to be that it was the best available speed.  Having started with a moderately erudite Dickens quote he summarised his talk on a lower level but in very impactful way by quoting Banarama: “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it, that’s what gets results”.

The speaker with the highest potential for controversy was Dr Chai Patel, who bravely spoke after dinner to a room full of potentially tired and emotional public servants about the tremendous power of entrepreneurship, the relative liberation of private sector delivery of public services, and the social impact of being able to tap into risk-taking shareholders as a source of funding.  As chairman of a company which has taken on a large fraction of homes following the Southern Cross failure, he was clear that this was a “business failure, not a market failure” – shareholders do lose all of their money from time to time, and that’s why they need a return the rest of the time.

Local Government

Other specific items that will be of interest to the Local Government reader – Carolyn Downs, new LGA Chief Executive argued that action to mitigate unsustainable costs of Adult Social care is the top priority for local government.  The NIESR economist Jonathan Portes argued that youth unemployment, unless tackled, will have a scarring effect for years to come.  Meanwhile a couple of police speakers underlined for many of us the need to switch a little of the partnership attention from health and wellbeing boards into the many implications of the imminent elections of police and crime commissioners, and their relationship with the police and crime panels.

Joanne Roney, Chief Executive of Wakefield Council spoke powerfully and modestly about the partnership working which has helped Wakefield cope with some very deep cuts – they worked out that even after the cuts they would have £2bn pa to spend on Wakefield’s public services and so made their work about choosing a future together rather than slipping into silo-based service cuts.  As another speaker said “innovation lies in the shift from victim to architect”.  Dave Smith, CE at Sunderland spoke of his council’s investment in a powerful public infrastructure of superfast broadband and cloud solutions to establish Sunderlandas a natural place for technology businesses as well as integrating public service delivery at lower cost, based on understanding customers.  There’s an article here.

Emerging themes – Citizen and Culture

Indeed one emerging theme from the conference was understanding our citizens’ lives better in order to help – Damian Allen from Knowsley MBC said that “it is the lives lived that we have to shape, and the places where they are lived”.  That understanding needs to be based on analytical insight and engagement, despite the fact that it is often the community engagement and communication roles that are seen as classic “non-job” examples.

But perhaps the strongest theme that emerged from all of the talk about change, repeated time and time again by most speakers, was about changing the culture of organisations, whether about being more entrepreneurial or innovative, taking risks, engaging better with communities and partners, even just coping with the level of personnel change. As someone quoted “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, a pertinent closing thought for a room full of strategic leaders to take away.

The Tale of the Town Hall Clock

I wrote this shortly after joining Local Government, in 2001….

Once upon a time there was a town hall clock.  It was quite a famous clock because it kept very good time, and people for miles around liked to see it, and hear its chiming bells.  Lots of local people would depend on the clock to tell them the time, as they opened their shops, as they rushed to the railway station, and left the pub in time to see the football on telly.  The clock was important, and the man who wound the clock was proud of his job, and enjoyed it even though he had to climb 300 steps every day to wind it.

Once upon a time a few years later the clock had started to fall into disrepair.  Some of the cogs started to stick when they shouldn’t have, the face and hands got a bit dirty, the hammer on one of the bells got a bit sticky and so the chime got slightly out of tune and a chunk got knocked off the nice brickwork around the clock when it was hit by lightning one night.  To make matters worse,  the pendulum developed an interesting wobble.  As you can imagine, the clock wasn’t so good at keeping time any more, and people found they couldn’t depend on it so much.  The man who wound the clock still kept winding the clock, every day, but his tread on those 300 steps became a bit more weary.

Once upon a time a few years after that, the clock was in a very bad state.  The face of the clock was cracked, and the minute hand came loose one day and fell to the ground – they put it back but it was a bit dented.  The cogs got really dusty and dirty and started to grind against each other rather than neatly fitting together.  And the more they ground against each other, the less well they fit together and it got worse and worse.  Because of the friction in the mechanism, the man who wound the clock found that he had to wind the clock more often, so he had to climb those 300 steps twice a day.  The clock was very inaccurate now, and really didn’t look very good at all.  The man who wound the clock started to become ashamed.  Even though he was working even harder than he had before, and doing what he did as well as he could, the clock really wasn’t working.  Children would shout at him in the street “‘scuse me mister, have you got the time?!” and run away laughing.

One upon a time a little while later the people in the community decided that they wanted to do something about the clock, to fix it.  They realised that other town hall clocks were much better than theirs, and they really wanted to sort it out very quickly.  So they got some clock repair people in.  The thing is, although it wasn’t a very good clock, they did still need and use it, so the repair people were given the job of repairing it while it was still running.

And so one person started bending the top of the pendulum into shape, and another one started to replace the cogs – which was always tricky because swapping one cog for another in a moving clock  is very tricky.  A lot of people got their fingers nipped quite badly.  Other people started trying to straighten up the minute hand, while a builder let himself down from a rope to repair that nice surround.  It was chaos because all of the people got in each others’ way, and the man who wound the clock found himself constantly blocked as he climbed the 300 steps to the top with people and cogs and chime hammers coming up and down.  He was really unhappy – these people who were supposed to be helping were making it much much worse.  People started to laugh at the clock winder and he started to find it difficult to get to sleep, and his eyes got red and tired.

Once upon a time a while later it was still not getting better at the town hall clock.  All this running up and down stairs and getting in each others’ way wasn’t much fun for the repair people either, if you think about it.  Some people would laugh at them and say “are you still at it!” and other people would get angry with them and say that they must be very bad pendulum balancers, cog shifters and hand straighteners.  And the harder they tried to do their jobs really quickly the more they got in each others’ way.  They started to get angry with each other and started saying in the pub that the reason it was all so slow was because of the other ones.  Sometimes people believed one of these stories and sacked a hand straightener, or a face cleaner.  But even that didn’t make much difference because they had to find a new hand straightener or a new face cleaner, and it took them a long time to learn how the others worked, and so they got in the way a lot more than the old ones had done.  Some of the repair people quit because it was getting on their nerves, and went off to balance other peoples’ pendulums instead.  The clock winder was, by now, having to climb the stairs three times a day to wind the clock and it was really really hard work.  He started to get very crabby and some days he wouldn’t shave before setting off for work, even though he was usually meticulous about his appearance.

Then, one day the clock winder sat down on the seat opposite the town hall clock to catch his breath, and scratch his stubbly chin, before starting his climb of the 300 steps, and he saw all the people working away at the clock, bumping into each other and usually making things worse.  And he sat, and he thought.  And then he thought and he sat.  And he sat until his bottom ached and he thought until he felt his brain might start bleeding.

Just before tea-time he jumped up and shouted “STOP!!!!” as loud as he could (which was quite loud, actually).  All of the repair people stopped, and looked down at him, as he waved for them all to come down to the ground.

When they all got down he said to them.  “This is what we’re going to do.  All this getting in each others’ way is silly.  We’re going to do this very differently.  You’re not all going to work at once, that’s no good.”

But the local people who had gathered to hear what he had to say said “no, no, don’t be silly – that’ll take ages, and we’ve waited long enough, we must make these repair people work even harder.”  They kept on like this for a while until the clock winder had a headache.  Then he shouted (even louder than before) “SHUT UP!!”.  They all went quiet.

Then the clock winder said, ever so softly, “this is what we’re going to do….

Firstly, we’ve got to get the cogs in place.  The cogs are the heart of the machine, they are the most important part. Cog shifting is really fiddly, and we have to give the cog shifter enough room so that she doesn’t get her fingers nipped all the time.

Secondly,  we don’t have to have everyone else sitting around while she does that.  There are times when she’s cutting the cogs and calculating the ratios when the pendulum balancer can get in to the mechanism and adjust the oscillator nuts.  Because the pendulum is the next most important part of a clock, you see.

And we’ll carry on like that – we’ll give the person with the most fundamental job access to the mechanism, but carefully plan it so that whenever possible someone else can be doing something.  Then we’ll work through until we can start properly on the outside of the clock.”

But the local people began to grumble “but it’ll be ages before anyone can see that we’re working on our clock – all the stuff will be going on inside the tower, and people will just see this tatty clock with a bent minute hand”

“You’re right”, said the clock winder, “but you see although it might not look very good, the clock will actually be starting to tell the time better – people may not realise that because the improvements will be gradual, but the clock will actually be a better clock.”

The local people still grumbled, and so the clock winder said “well, okay, how about this: instead of the pendulum being the second job we do while the cog shifter isn’t busy, we’ll straighten out the minute hand instead, then do the pendulum afterwards.  It means it’ll be a bit longer before we’ve got really accurate time, but it will look like something we can proud of sooner”  The local people nodded at that and work began the very next day.

And for the first couple of days it was even worse!  All the repair people had to think a lot more and talk to each other a lot more.  The cog shifter had to become a lot more organised about how she did her work so that the minute hand straightener knew when to be around.  But after the next couple of days, when the repair people got used to it, it all started to get moving much better.

The repair people enjoyed themselves much more, and the clock winder could sometimes hear them singing as he climbed the 300 steps to the top.

Then one day, just as the clock was nearly completely fixed, the pendulum balancer came to the clock winder and said  “do you know, since the clock was made some people have invented a gearing device which means that we could run a crankshaft down the tower so that you could wind it from the bottom, instead of having to climb those 300 steps to the top.  I’ll put it in tomorrow – it’s the last thing we’ll do.”

The clockwinder was delighted, and all the local people were really happy, because they had a really lovely and very accurate clock, with hands that were as straight as straight could be.  And the clockwinder and the people kept a close eye on the clock in future, and when things started to go a bit wrong, they fixed it straight away, and kept the clock very clean, because they could all remember how bad it had been before.

The repair people did well too – everyone heard about how well they’d repaired this clock and they found lots of offers of work pouring in, and wherever they went they repaired the clocks using the method the clock winder had invented.

And the clockwinder slept really well, and the redness in his eyes went away, and he was really glad that he didn’t have to climb the 300 steps any more.  Although on nice days he still climbed to the top, where he would stand and look out over the town and the countryside, and all the people who were looking at the clock would see him there and wave, and he’d wave back.  And he smiled.