Ten ways to keep the peace

Major restructuring of the police appears inevitable and is creating a plenty of debate in political and media circles. Consultant Jon Harvey weighs in with his own points of order. There are many ways to respond to the looming 25% to 40% cuts in resources that are coming to a police station near you...

Full article in Guardian Public

Austere:IT

I am part of a small team which is planning a guerilla conference on a make do and mend approach to using IT in public services. The aim is to create an event that will enable people to exchange ideas and develop new ones on how to make the most of existing IT. Specifically, we hope the (free) event will be a celebration and dissemination of all that can be achieved without purchasing new kit / software / contractor time / bells / whistles etc. (This event will be an antidote to the burgeoning number of other events which are still promising huge cost reductions by paying for just that one more piece of ("waffer thin mint?") IT investment

Please watch this space - there is more to follow - including what we mean by a guerilla conference! (Well - you have heard of guerilla gardening... try thinking along similar lines...!) The date will be towards the end of the year - possibly early into the next.

But meanwhile... do you have examples of where you have spotted or even initiated a change or achieved a result with a deft (and zero or very low cost) use of an existing IT system?

Please post these examples below as a comment or email me if you wish. With your permission - I will also upload these to my small creative ideas news blog as well.

E-books: now more easily available

When this blog reached 10,000 uploads I turned into an e-book. You can now access and download if you wish, this off Google Docs by going here.

For your information my other blog (Small Creative Ideas) is also available in e-book form as well (produced when it hit 15,000 uploads) from here.

Austerity plans & budgets: who has the ideas?

In anticipation of the Comprehensive Spending Review outcomes, nearly all public service budget holders will now be taking a long hard look at where the money gets spent and what is achieved. I can almost hear the distant clicks of numerous hatches being battened down.

Less money, probably a lot less money is going to be spent on not only on the 'frippery' of change management, organisational development and public engagement (etc.), but also on the wages of people providing direct services to some very vulnerable citizens.

Whilst there may well be very limited room for manoeuvre with the amount by which budgets will have to be reduced in these austere times, I am wondering just how much scope there is in just how budgets are reshaped.

Who has the ideas? Who needs to be involved? How will those people be involved?

I am concerned that many managers will feel driven to retreat behind closed doors, perhaps with a tame accountant, to craft the changes to be made. This is not an unreasonable course of action, of course. If people's jobs & indeed livelihoods are being questioned, if services to people in severe need are being scrutinised or if some critical priorities are being examined then confidentiality is to be expected.

The stakes are so high and the interests so potentially in great conflict, as to prevent anyone else (staff member, other connected departments & agencies, the wider public & service users) being involved in a more open & transparent discussion... would be the argument from many people, I suspect.

I have argued previously on this blog for 'Austerity Charters' (see below) and I stand by this.

But, am I alone in thinking that there is much to be gained from having more inclusive approaches to deciding just where and how budgets should be cut? I take the view, that given the right context, the right leadership and the right information, many more people could contribute constructively to building these new austere budgets. Yes, there will be conflict and yes, people will seek to express and protect their interests. But also, I think, people could earnestly, collaboratively and creatively find many more ways to do more with less than a manager (with tame accountant) is able to achieve on their own.

Or am I living in some fairytale world a million miles away from the grinding & crushing reality of austerity budgets where the only 'involvement' of staff, colleagues and citizens must only be during the titular 'consultation' periods?  

Improving performance: who has all the ideas?

Some years ago, while being shown round a car manufacturing plant, I was told a story about the importance of workforce involvement. Part of the plant had to shut down for a refurbishment which meant that one car model had to use the paint shop normally used for another model. The manager in charge was prevailed upon by a company improvement facilitator to have a meeting with the staff involved to plan what needed to be done. The manager was unconvinced that he had anything more to discuss but dutifully went along with the idea.

The meeting was held.  The staff came forward with several ideas which the manager publicly noted but inwardly was ticking off all the ideas that he had already had. "What a waste of time", he thought. Right at the end, one person who had said nothing until then asked about what would happen with the estate models.

The manager paused and realised that was an issue he had not considered. The rest of the meeting was spent resolving what to do. From that day, that manager was convinced of the value of staff involvement.

How convinced are you?

How do you put your belief into action?

Or is this just a trite story with no relevance to the complex challenges you face as a manager..?

2012 WOSONOS London: Breaking News! ~ UPDATE

I attended the World Open Space on Open Space in Berlin earlier this year (the book of proceedings is here - warning this is a large pdf file) and it was decided there that London would host the 2012 annual WOSONOS. (Next year's event is in Santiago, Chile).

The Improbable Theatre Company, with support from Romy Shovelton and myself, are making the invitation. We are now at the point where we are inviting others to get involved in planning for the event. Here is the letter from Matilda at Improbable describing what is happening next:

>>>

Opening space in the UK for WOSONOS 2012 London

How will we make it happen? Do you want to be part of it?

Dear All,

In May of this year, at the close of the Berlin WOSONOS, we made an invitation, which was accepted for WOSONOS 2012 to take place in London, for the first time. It will be the 20th World Open Space on Open Space since they first started in the States back in 1982.

While it was Matilda that made the actual invite, it came on behalf of the whole of Improbable, and with the support of the other U.K. facilitators present – Romy Shovelton and Jon Harvey.

First a brief bit about Improbable, for those of you that don’t know:

Improbable create theatre, opera, site-specific work and since 2005, Open Space events for the arts community and others, both in the UK and throughout Europe and the States. The company’s research into and application of Open Space has broadened our reach and purpose, developing an approach to grappling with complex issues that has not only caught the imagination of the arts community but has also had a huge and very significant influence on Improbable’s working practices as a whole. We now use Open Space to run our company meetings and to create our theatre shows. You can look at other Improbable things at www.improbable.co.uk.

After the Berlin WOSONOS, Matilda and Phelim (from Improbable) met with Jon and Romy, and together we decided we wanted to use Open Space to help us facilitate the coming together of a UK WOSONOS 2012 host team. We want to ensure that anyone in the UK that wants to participate is able to do so. We see this is as a fantastic opportunity for UK OS facilitators, practitioners and participants to meet one another and connect.

There are many different areas to be considered in hosting a WOSONOS and so numerous different kinds of skills and roles are required: websites to be designed and run; venues and accommodation to be found; food to be planned; social events to be cooked up, and more…Please come and contribute your ideas, passions, thoughts, concerns, dreams, questions. All are welcome.

We will meet on the weekend of November 6th and 7th to open space for a day and a half on our question: WOSONOS 2012 London UK: How will we make it happen? Do you want to be part of it?

As yet we do not have a venue confirmed but please save the date and the full details of place, time and Saturday night social will follow ASAP. On Saturday the day will run from 11am till 6pm, and on Sunday from 10am to 1pm.

We very much look forward to seeing you there.

From all at Improbable together with Jon and Romy

<<<

So - would you like to come along and take part? For the moment, all you need to do is make the date in your diary. More information will be forthcoming soon. If you wish, you can email me and I will send you further information when it is available. See you there...?

UPDATE!

Full details with venue and evening entertainment have now been posted by the Improbable team here. Hope you can make it!!

Who are the 'ultra shrinking violets' in your organisation?

There is a great discussion on the IDeA website (do subscribe if you have not already done so: http://www.communities.idea.gov.uk/c/140560/forum/thread.do?id=5040218) about what are the characteristics of a 'systems thinker'. Robert Park of Edinburgh City Council introduced the idea of the 'shrinking violets' who often get marginalised, an idea which was picked up by various people deeper into the discussion. My last contribution to the thread included:

I prefer to think not in terms of training people to be systems thinkers but instead of helping people to reconnect and widen their systems thinking capabilities. The question for me is how come we have created organisations / society / politics where systems thinking is beaten out of people. I suspect that has far more to do with greed and power. On this basis, I think the systems thinkers that we see (as opposed to the people who have the unseen inner potential &/or quietly working in the background in a systems thinking "ultra shrinking violet" way (?)) tend to be people who are centred, grounded and inwardly powerful - to the degree that they have no need or desire to have power over others... The ultra shrinking violets are probably very centred too!

So my questions to you: are you an ultra shrinking violet working undercover, as it were, quietly trying to subvert the organisation you are in towards one that takes greater account of whole systems? Or indeed are you a leader who supports these people or do you overlook them? Or worse do you banish them?

Who are the ultra shrinking violets in your organisation?

Change alchemy: using pictures & photographs

Leaders create strategy. Or rather, perhaps, they create the conditions whereby good strategies are generated and followed through into actions and results.

A good strategy says not only what will be done but also what will be achieved. 

Pictures can help to motivate change and also create a vision of the future.

It is said that when Turner painted “Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhon coming on" he was assisting the abolitionist cause.

What pictures are helping you implement your strategies? What other pictures might help more?

A small milestone

Just to note that over 10,000 pages from this blog have been uploaded over the last 14 months. To celebrate this, I have created a PDF of all the pages from this blog. If you would like a copy, please email me and I would be happy to send one to you.

Please keep reading & browsing!

Thank you.

Big Society: report on the network meeting

OK – so I am reflecting on the Big Society network meeting (see below) at the Department of Communities and Local Government that happened last night (6/7/10). All in all, I am very glad I went. As always a great networking opportunity and I met some lovely people with whom I plan to keep in touch. It was also helpful to hear a little more about how the plans for the Big Society are shaping up – although everything is very much in an early stage of development as was stressed to us by Paul Twivy yesterday. The format used did allow some shaping of the agenda from the floor – which was a healthy innovation for a meeting in a government building.

I could be very picky about the process used (it was NOT open space technology in my view and it concerns me that some people will have left last night thinking that it was) but I recognise the constraints that the organisers were working under. The room size for the numbers present and air con were severe limiting factors for sure. There was some tweeting and talking about the (minimal) visible diversity present in the room and indeed amongst the people who got up to nominate discussion sessions. And so I am left feeling that several opportunities were missed to join people up and indeed allow those collected the chance to help shape the future agenda. Much more could have been achieved with a little more space, time, design and cool air.

Where next? I am hoping this is just a beginning and over the course of the next few months, there will be more scope to develop this idea of a Big Society. Some questions are buzzing in my head (and I am grateful to the meeting yesteday for helping to stimulate these thoughts):

• Can you get ‘owt for nowt?’ (Energising, coordinating, developing volunteering in the UK won’t happen without some considerable investment in a range of structures designed to do this. This was a point made several times last night)
• What local leadership will help the Big Society come to life? (There are already many volunteers in local government at all tiers already, including several thousand unpaid community / town councillors. Moreover there are many district, unitary and county councillors too. Beyond this there must be many thousands of treasurers, chairs, secretaries of thousands of local voluntary groups. All these people have a leadership role and will be helping, or not, draw more people in. What is now needed to support the leadership that will help do this?)
• Just what levers can be pulled to grow the legions of voluntary workers still more? (Some people seemed to believe it was an absence of information about opportunities that was a significant barrier to more people getting involved. Others wondered whether just be inviting people, that in itself would bring more on board. Others, including me, wondered if a key factor was confidence in that a person needs this to be prepared to volunteer. There were many more factors explored such as the use of technology. My hope is that evidence and research, as well as more ruminating, will help identify what interventions will achieve the most gain  and guide action from here.)
• How do you engage the unengaged or even the ‘don’t want to be engaged’? (If the Big Society is to really take off, many more people will need be involved. How will some people, particularly those who may feel they have nothing to offer, be attracted to join in?)
• What wheels need to be reinvented and which existing one, with a bit of oil perhaps, could work far better? (For example, Paul Twivy spoke yesterday about the idea of a new mutual financial institution that could provide low cost indemnity insurance to volunteers etc. I was left wondering don’t we already have a people’s financial institution called the Post Office? I am worried that in the rush to produce some shiny new ‘Big Society’ some existing structures, such as local libraries, may just be overlooked. Equally there may be some bodies that have served their purpose and something new is required. These decisions need to be made carefully, I think.)

So as always, more questions than answers – but let’s keep the dialogue going!

Why we need 'Austerity Charters'

A few weeks ago I was talking with some civil servants about the implications of the budgetary cuts to come. One matter that was concerning them was the impact on staff discipline. As one person put it succinctly "why should I seek to sack an underperforming member of my team, when I know that if I do, the then vacant post will be frozen. It is better to have 50% of one person than 100% of nobody".

Another possible result of the current circumstances will be that just when you need everyone to be thinking about how to innovate and do more with less, people will be more inclined to keep their heads down and play 'safe'. (I have blogged about this already here.)

There are probably many more examples of perverse & unfortunate consequences of the current resource regime in public service organisations. The question is: can anything be done about this? My proposal is that every public service organisation should develop and approve what I will label an 'Austerity Charter'

The purpose of these charters will be to make crystal clear the principles, policies and values that will underpin how decisions will be made about where and how the large reductions in expenditure being considered will be implemented. For example, one point might cover the issue above such that posts vacated as a result of disciplinary action will not necessarily remain frozen, might go some way towards alleviating the problems that might emerge otherwise. Another part of the charter might seek to clarify that decisions about job losses will not be influenced by what action a person takes to innovate better ways of providing a service.

I don't really know what would go in such an Austerity Charter. But I do know that it up to the organisations themselves to resolve and that this will be best done in as open and inclusive a way as possible. Trade unions and staff associations clearly have a role to play, as do other stakeholders. (You will not be surprised to know that I would favour a whole system approach to the development of such charters.)

Such charters probably already exist but in the various fragmented & suspicious minds of all those who are affected, be they people who are likely to be made redundant or those will have the task of making such decisions. Nobody will find this easy, and some will find the process over the coming months distressing and life changing.

With reference to transactional analysis, will the leaders of the organisations be 'adult' enough to agree, focus and make explicit how these austere measures will be implemented? Or are we moving into a time where not only will the decisions be made behind closed doors, but the way of making the decisions will also be kept secret and implicit? I believe the latter approach is likely to lead to more staff distress, more harm to citizen/customer service, more distraction, less innovation and, probably, more procrastination and sabotage.

What do you think?

Or has your organisation already produced an 'Austerity Charter'?

Big Society with a big Open Space

In anticipation of a meeting I am going to next week:

The Big Society Network is an organisation to exists to help people achieve change in their local area. Our aim is to create a new relationship between Citizens and Government in which both are genuine partners in getting things done: real democracy using all the human and technological tools we now have available. This partnership will also add a third and fourth leg to its sturdy chair by involving business and the voluntary sector.... On the afternoon of the 6 July we plan to bring a cross section of people from across civil society into a conversation with the Big Society team. (http://bigsocietyopennight.eventbrite.com/)

I thought I would post three excellent videos about Open Space in action and how the process helps to nurture engagement and responsibility - themes that will no doubt be picked up by those present next week. (The event is still open for anyone who wants to go...)

Recently posted 3.5 min clip about Open Space in the city of Harrisonburg, USA, sponsored by the local Mayor

Same sponsor, this time 4 min clip about sustainability issues

Jutta Weimar and the Berlin-based BOSCOP team present a short 6.5 min 'trailer' for Open Space

I am very excited by the fact that the meeting next week will be "facilitated using open space technology which will enable all participants to shape the agenda". It will be most pleasurable to be part of an Open Space that somebody else is facilitating! I will let you know how it went... watch this space.

And many thanks to Brendan McKeague of the Life School (Perth, Australia) for these youtube links. And thanks to Ingrid Koehler of the IDeA who alerted me to the event.

Cost reduction in a cold climate

Barry Toogood from Mentis - has just sent me a link to an excellent paper which will stimulate your thinking around the subject of how to move forwards in these austere times. It contains some useful mnemonics & frameworks for thinking. Do have a read and I am sure that Barry would be interested in your thoughts. (Copy me in too - thanks!)

Here is the link to the paper:

http://www.mentis.co.uk/COST-PAPER.pdf

What is your cutting angle?

In many organisations there is a great deal of what I call ‘quick fix’ (QF) activity. You can recognise QF by the fire-fighting loop that many parts of an organisation get caught up in going round and round. People come to work and work hard – “bloomin’ hard!” And, every now and then, something goes wrong and there is a mistake. And as we all know, often from a very early age, “you can’t win ’em all!” To err is human, near enough is good enough. But the mistake has to be fixed, using up more time and resources. This only adds to the work load and probably increases the chances that more mistakes happen.

Stay fix (SF) on the other hand takes a subtly but radically different approach. When the mistake happens the ‘stay fixer’ will wonder “why?” In other words they will wonder what elements of the system (the whole system) made it likely that that particular mistake would occur... They are thinking about prevention. The mistake still has to dealt with of course but at this point, the stay fixer spins out and seeks to fix the system and put in place changes that reduce the chances that a similar mistake will happen in the future. At this point prevention is done (not just considered) and so work becomes easier and indeed people begin to work smarter not harder.

In any organisation, activity can be classified as QF, SF or Doing the Business (DTB) where the service / process happens as it should do with no mistakes occurring. Hence an audit of QF/SF/DTB can be conducted. When organisations have done this, they often find that vast amounts of money, time and stress are expended on a combination of QF and SF – sometimes up to 20% or even 40% of the overall budget.

But a choice then emerges. Do you want to carry on spending vast amounts of resource on this ‘cost of failure’ or do you want to invest in SF in order to bring down the costs of QF. Ultimately if you do this well, there can be massive savings in QF costs, even SF costs which in turn bring down the overall cost to the organisation. Not only is the organisation more efficient, it is more effective, economic and indeed elastic (since good SF builds in versatility to changing contexts too). And if SF is done ‘with’ the whole system, rather than ‘to’ it, more energy and commitment is released as well.

However there are a couple of big(ish) problems. The reductions in QF take time to come to fruition. Also investing in SF is a bit like stoking a steam train engine, it takes a while to gather speed. As a consequence, the overall cost to the organisation goes up before it can come down. This is always the case. QF savings do not magically appear without some effort. There is no easy solution to this but the only one which can work, in my experience, is prioritisation of the SF activity. For example avoid trying to reengineer all of your processes in one go – instead select a couple where some early gains are possible which then gives you some commitment and slack to move onto the next and the next and so on. This is why strategic planning is so very important as it helps an organisation select where to invest its SF activity.

There is another significant problem too. Thinking of the QF and SF loops, there is a small tunnel from thinking about prevention back into “you can’t win ‘em all”. People often go through this tunnel when they say things like “I am so busy right now, I don’t have time to think about the wider system, I will do the prevention task a couple of years from now, when I am not busy...”

Blocking off this tunnel requires leadership. This leadership must:

• Role model SF practice (which is hard for the leaders who have been promoted on the strength of QF ability)
• Provide structures, tools and techniques to educate, enable, empower, support and inspire people to work in a SF way (such that QF becomes the work equivalent of leaving home without brushing you teeth!)

Organisations are far more complex than this, but I have found over the years that people find this model helpful in making sense of why continuous improvement is difficult but also what can be done to design a way forward that is doable.

In these current times when resources are going to get ever tighter, the need for investing in SF to bring down the costs of QF has never been greater. However, one can imagine the costs of an organisation laid out as three blocks: DTB, SF and QF. The shrewd leaders and managers will identify where the QF costs are and tackle them one by one. The less shrewd leaders who are in a hurry to sacrifice the future for the price of today will cut horizontally as it were and slice through DTB and SF as well as portion of QF. This will damage the short and long term capability of the organisation as well give up the opportunities to be had from investing in SF. It will also cost more in the long term.

Perhaps one key measure of how shrewd & strategic a leader is, in this current context, will be the angle of the cut: somewhere between horizontal and vertical.

What is your angle?

Cutting without bleeding

Advice to senior leaders on how implement cost savings in the public services

The public services are facing an unprecedented challenge to reduce costs by upwards of 25% whilst maintaining frontline services. There are some who would say this is impossible and that, after years of efficiency savings, there is simply no more ‘fat’ left to trim. This article says the opposite and offers you 10 progressive ideas to assist you in making these cuts without doing any long term damage to the social and physical fabric of this country, or indeed the public services we have grown to depend upon. 

1. In all of your communications about your strategy to implement these cuts make sure that you only discuss the costs of services, never the benefits. For example when you come to publish expenditure on the web, as progressive councils are already doing, do not outline what the money was spent on. Staff and public alike are only interested in what cash (their cash of course) is going out and not on what has been purchased or provided.
2. Beyond telling the public and staff what you are doing (mostly, of course, to avoid Freedom of Information enquiries and comply with statutory consultation requirements), do not seek to involve or engage them in ‘thinking’ about how the resource challenge might be met. They will only bleat on about ‘saving jobs’ or ‘saving services’ and offer no constructive ideas whatsoever. They are not paid enough to be creative. You, however, are paid enough to have all the ideas, take action and be a decisive leader.
3. Make sure you hire a team of expensive, but valuable, consultants to do most of the unpopular leg work for you. Many of them are very bright economics graduates who will have spent all of 8 months or so learning their consultancy craft and gaining experience of the ‘real world’. They will get to understand your organisation inside out in a matter of hours. Do not worry that the partners who sold you the consultancy assignment now seem to have disappeared as they are there in the background closely ‘supervising’ the team that are now working with you.
4. Absolutely do not let smooth talking ‘process consultants’ lure you into thinking that the public services can be ‘reshaped’, ‘redesigned’ or indeed ‘re’ anything. They may even try to suggest that if you work in partnership with other public service providers that ‘things can be done differently and more cheaply’. This is a distraction from the main task of reducing your budget and your budget alone. You did not get to where you are without being fiercely parochial! Be on guard against any talk of ‘whole systems’, ‘total place’ or members of the public ‘living joined up lives’. Dismiss all talk of 'radical efficiency' as well, as this is full of daft ideas like 'empowering consumers'.
5. Sometimes you may get to hear of ministerial announcements or emails from central Government Departments advocating ‘collaboration’. This is a clever ruse to persuade you to give up some power and control. This is to be resisted at all costs. After all, since when did Whitehall Departments ‘collaborate’? Never of course! So their attempts to get you to do it, is clearly designed to weaken you and strengthen them.
6. The best way of achieving cuts, of course, is to demand that every budget holder makes a similar percentage cut no matter what their department, unit or function does or achieves. Although you may be aware (or not) that some functions provide more vital services to the public than others, and indeed some units have already been cut within the last 12 months, this is no consequence. A uniform ‘salami slice’ taken off everyone is the only fair and responsible approach. There are several accountants who will support this strategy.
7. This is not say of course that you do not have a few favoured functions who have shown over the years to be of huge value, who may have invited you to open a new facility or indeed have asked you to speak at their ‘team away days’ etc. The heads of these functions will have shown themselves to be of particular value for money in that they have never challenged any of your decisions. These value for money functions should of course be allowed to cut their services by slightly less than the others. But this should not be widely known until after the event.
8. Whilst you may talk about accountability and empowerment (always very good words to use during downsizing) and that you will ‘leave it up to the budget holders to make their own decisions’ about how to implement their contribution (another very good word) towards the cost reductions, do make sure that you put in place a few ‘no go’ areas. Yes of course it may be cheaper and perhaps better to empty bins once a fortnight, you will know that this is not popular with certain parts of the news media. There are other examples too. Therefore it is your leadership responsibility to make sure these ‘no go’ changes are clear to all concerned. Some managers may moan about having ‘no room for manoeuvre’ but dismiss these people as ‘troublemakers’ who do not really understand what empowerment is all about.
9. Although it might seem like a soft target, one function that must not be cut more than the very minimum is ‘public relations’. These are the people you must rely upon to get your message across to a sceptical public and staff. Money spent on glossy publications and road shows explaining how frontline services are not (really) being cut and only the ‘chaps and chapesses in the jolly old backroom are having their belts tightened’ is money very well spent.
10. Above all, whatever you do, do not let anyone including even your most trusted lieutenants suggest that your assumptions should be examined. You are a senior leader and therefore all that you believe and say must be correct, if not enlightened. 500 years ago Machiavelli may indeed have suggested that true leaders need people around to tell them the truth. But he was clearly wrong as evidenced by the fact that he died a long time ago. Be certain, be sure and be confident: the strategy that you are implementing is unavoidable. (You may wish to write this last statement out and place it on your bathroom mirror.)

UPDATE:

On 26/6/10 this post was mentioned by Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for the Department for Communities and Local Government who tweeted "Without endorsement, I loved this" (http://twitter.com/EricPickles). Thank you Mr Pickles!

And today I noted that this blog is now listed on http://mcarthursrant.blogspot.com/ McArthur's Rant - Human Resources, Organisations and HR 2.0 as one of a number of blogs that rant!! I am tickled! Thank you Scott McArthur!

Radical Efficiency: Different, better, lower cost public services

Went to a fabulous session this morning which launched a new report from NESTA about 'radical efficiency' and how to make it work. The point was well made that delivering public services in a radically different way is no longer just very important or even critical - it is an imperative! Here is a link to their excellent report:

http://www.nesta.org.uk/home/assets/features/radical_efficiency

The launch had some excellent presentations and questions - which prompted lots of ideas in my head about how to make effective and efficient innovation happen. I will write more later - but here is quick summary which I have already tweeted (of course!): 

• Use the common wealth to create more common wealth...
• Look for ways to connect consumers together to create new expertise resources
• Stop blaming central govt and just get on with taking radical action locally
• Break accountability 'rules' and give authority to the point of service delivery
• Lead so that you enable risk taking, not to close it down
• Get everyone in one room so that professionals can 'hear' the voices of consumers directly!
• Think of doing more with more (not less) - but redefine what you count as your resources
• Create a culture where structure & passion coexist sublimely to achieve real results

My huge thanks to everyone involved with the report and indeed present at this morning's event. (I wish we'd had the whole day to debate the issues emerging... perhaps NESTA would like to organise such a day....?)

50 years of research into expectations

I have had the pleasure of being a cohort member of the National Child Development Study which is a longitudinal study extending back over 50 years. Throughout my life I have completed various questionnaires and being medically examined in order to trace the ingredients of what goes to produce people of my age. The Study's data have been used by researchers countless times and from around the globe.

Most recently, Radio 4 did a series of short programmes featuring cohort members where they compared their predictions aged 10 with how their lives have actually turned out. (You can listen to the programmes here.) I have listened to these broadcasts and not only are they a delightful example of social history, one particular conclusion appeared to emerge.

There seems to be a strong link between how successful a person is and how successful they expected (or were expected) to be. Put simply, if a person's parents expected them to do well in life, people often rose up to meet that expectation and did pretty well. The converse was also true, to a limited extent. Clearly life 'success', however that is measured, is down to a myriad of factors to do with social class, educational achievement, race, gender etc etc. But the importance of expectation, self belief and the confidence in oneself which go hand in hand is there, it seems to me.

This got me wondering about what leaders can do to support and nurture expectation, and conversely what they can (and do) do that erodes confidence and an expectation of success.

The other week, I was running a leadership development programme and we got to talking about how leaders can help build cultures of continuous improvement through praising and expecting the best of people. One manager said that he had not thanked any of his staff of late since none of them had done anything extraordinary that, in his view, deserved a thank you. Another manager suggested that he might not be looking hard enough whilst another wondered why none of his staff were doing anything extraordinary... It was a good debate.

So my questions in this blog post are: 

• How much success do you expect from your staff?
• How do you let them know what you expect of them?
• When do you thank your staff: what do they have to do to get your thanks?
• What are you doing that shows you expect high performance from your team? 

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge: Albert Einstein

Just been sent this great set of 100 inspirational quotes about education and learning. It is a joy to read! Perhaps one or two of there will inspire you to consider what more you can do to create learning organisations where improvement is in built!

http://www.accreditedonlinecolleges.com/blog/2010/75-inspirational-educational-quotes-for-the-classroom/

Learning never exhausts the mind: Leonardo Da Vinci

Enjoy!

(and thank you Accredited Online Colleges)

The 4 E's

Clearly we need all public services to be:

• Effective
• Efficient
• Economic

But we also need them to be

• Elastic 

as well.

These must be the 4 E's of improvement and making sure that the cuts are done strategically not just reactively! Given that 'events' happen (credit crunch, volcanos and oil leaks)... versatility is vital!

Three juggling balls: keeping leadership in balance in these stringent times

A couple of weeks ago, I was facilitating a leadership development programme for some local government managers and we got to talking about the looming cuts and how it will be to work in this environment. We addressed some difficult issues in that context, not least just how far above the parapets they might want to put their heads right now. This was all within a programme which sought to assist them in finding & developing their authentic leadership style and approach. In other words: how to put their heads above the parapet and be an exceptional local government leader.

Out of the conversation that we had (and I am most grateful to the team of managers, whose contributions, declarations and questions helped me shape these thoughts), emerged for me a model based on three 'juggling balls'. I imagine that many public service leaders are, right now, having to work out just how to throw these three balls around:

Ball number one is professional integrity. Almost every public service leader I meet is highly focused on shaping their contribution to making their part of the world safer, cleaner, healthier, wealthier etc... They have a real concern for helping achieve valuable & robust social outcomes in return for the taxes paid, as efficiently, effectively and elegantly as possible. But in this time of looming cuts, these same leaders are naturally worrying that they will have to implement changes which they know or believe will work in the opposite direction. Maintaining a customer / client / user / citizen focus, professional standards and ethics is going to be huge challenge for many public service leaders.

Ball number two is survival. Alongside this desire to deliver VFM with professional integrity, there is natural desire to survive and stay in the job. Balancing how much to 'play the game' and engage in 'career supporting' actions against how much to engage in 'truth telling' which might be perceived as 'career limiting' actions is a dilemma for some, perhaps for many. Working out how best to challenge the status quo to deliver more VFM without upsetting those who structured (and prospered from) the existing regime is an issue that many public service leaders face all the time. The current economic pressures bring this into even sharper focus.

Ball number three is work life balance. Juggling the first two balls could well be at a cost, possibly a high cost to the leader involved. Preparing for change that will deliver increased efficiency in a way that keeps all stakeholders happy (especially those who have more power than others) may well take a great deal of emotional effort and physical toil. There is a need therefore to pay attention to this third ball and keep a close eye on whether the overall impact on body, soul and personal relationships are indeed worth it.  

I am very interested to know how public service leaders are indeed handling these three balls?

It strikes me that the best jugglers will be: 

• Clear about their purpose and what their ethical 'bottom line' is
• Mapping their stakeholder interests shrewdly, knowing who has power and what their preferences are
• Developing their expertise at challenging people so that they 'wriggle but don't squirm'
• Paying attention to their own bodies, minds and personal relationships, watching for signs of damaging stress
• Considering their long term career such and exploring how being in a job is not necessarily the same as being gainfully employed
• Staying in touch with the people and communities they serve and looking for evidence of harm or benefit
• Practised in looking at innovative ways to deliver more with less

 And probably many more things.... how are you improving your juggling skills?