Devolution by design


Petworth house in the sun

Speaking very personally, I’m living with the tension between being passionately up for both local government reorganisation and devolution and my equally strongly held belief that how you do something really has an impact on the outcome you are creating.

This was always going to be a messy process and the balance between figure it out or we will do it for you for the first stage from MHCLG was necessary but uncomfortable when you reflect on how dependent this is on the strength of relationships rather than the certainty of a process which will keep people safe.

The next big step in this process is developing the actual unitary footprints – and this needs to be a careful politically led exercise supported with data. I think there is a role for design thinking in there but to be honest not on the timescales that the priority programme for devolution which allow for.

However, once we are all working on reorganisation plans in our local systems we do have more control over how we go about it and I have been thinking about how you could design a design process for the new organisations which will be emerging. This could start to emerge as we develop the unitary footprints.

A visible design process will be hugely helpful if we are going to make the most of the digital transformation opportunity in all this and look at service design as well as organisational design. It will also help us bring people with us as we step into very new territory with staff, politicians and our residents. I also think its the best way to avoid one of the big risks in all this that everything will both change and stay the same…..

We very deliberately focused on a design process and not a restructure and not simply a restructure when we implemented our new organisational model – it was hugely important to create space to look at all layers of the delivery model and not just thinking about moving people around. There is huge benefit in properly designing something but it does need thinking about from the very start of the process.

I don’t want to get hung up on a specific approaches as I really think these need to be developed in place (but in the open so we can learn from each other) but I think the key considerations for me are very much along the lines of what we gave worked hard to design in the new design at Adur and Worthing:

  • Participative – make sure that people have a voice and can contribute. This is beyond the need for districts to be seen as equal partners but also is about giving our staff a voice in all of this. Rather than keeping our different experts in their separate worlds lets create spaces where they can collaborate – our experience of involving people more widely has been that they come up with solutions and ideas that are much more ambitious than we would. Participative also needs to apply to our communities – I would like us to be developing local public services in partnership with our communities and not taking the speed of change as an excuse for doing this in darkened rooms
  • Adaptive – I would like to see us adopting the principles of ‘test and learn’. We did a lot of ‘working in pencil’ to test out ideas, structures and approaches as we iterated out organisational design and it served us very well
  • Resilient – This has to be at the front of our mind as we need to create new organisations which are more resilient in every sense. This, for example, means thinking about how the new unitaries of place are networked together with skills like digital (or building control!) being mapped and shared across the place. We also need to get into the messy business of financial resilience and we need to be ready to make climate resilience central to everything we do.

A design process needs designing – it needs a group coordinating and developing that process in the open but ahead of the people working the problem. All of this needs a high level of skill and a high level of psychological safety. So – before we get into the question of whether we want do this, do we have the skills available and can we see a way to create the psychological safety that will make it possible?

This idea of a design process for a whole place, when combined with the citizen’s assembly thought from my democratic dreams piece is hugely ambitious and probably not realistic. However, dreaming isn’t practical. Dreaming is here to explore what could be so we can work back to what can be. Sometimes the gap between to two things is bridged by finding the people who share the dream.

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