Disentangling

My lovely husband and I have spent the last couple of weeks sorting out the move down to Dorset and getting set up in our new place. It’s a process of working through which bits of our old life we want to bring with us and which we’re going leave with love behind in Sussex. This is a joyous (most of the time) process of decluttering and appreciation and we feel very lucky to be able to do it.

I’m trying to do the same with work. I’m thinking about which of the ideas, the experiments and the thinking that we did together at Adur and Worthing. It’s a chance to reflect and appreciate that work and the team that did it. We did all of this while wrestling with some really extreme budget challenges in Worthing driven by the exponential housing needs in the town. I am so proud to have been part of a team which rose to this challenge with such an appetite and ambition to innovate and make things better even when the financial challenge was relentless.

This reflection process is also about thinking about which bits I can take as concepts and ideas into Dorset and explore them in a different context and what feels of the moment and very specific to Adur and Worthing. I did want to do this more collaboratively with people at Adur and Worthing following a suggestion at an all staff that we do a ‘post-catherine retro’ to see what will stop/start/continue – but we ran out of time to do that sadly.

For people in new my team in Dorset – disclaimer! This isn’t a plan – this is my thinking out loud (more on how and why I write here in this why I still blog blog).

Thinking, feeling and doing: In the leadership team, we often talked about, and practiced, blending ‘thinking, feeling and doing’ as a way of both accommodating different thinking/working styles as well as an approach to creating psychological safety and pace at the same time. Its not a unique approach by any stretch but its a really accessible way of building in some of the inherent approaches needed to develop high performing teams based on psychological safety – the first step of that being the ability to understand and accommodate each others needs. It feels fairly portable as a concept – though different teams may want to work towards different language for it.

Design principles to tie things together: The design principles which we worked to (participative, adaptive, resilient) instinctively feel right to me as a foundation for modern public services but I’m going want to test those in another context in order to see whether or not it’s having design principles which is right or whether it’s these design principles specifically. These really helped as we looked at the overall organisational design and helped to make ensure that small and larger changes aligned not just to the organisation design as it was on paper but to the intent we had in creating that design.

This was hugely helped by actively using a model of which reflects different organisational design lens. We looked at culture/behaviours, skills, governance, structure, systems/processes and resources as different lens. We also used place as a lens as we were looking at a much delivery as possible as being delivered with neighbourhoods.

Missions to create focus: I strongly feel that while mission delivery language may not sit comfortably in all organisations the practical step of creating multidisciplinary delivery/strategy teams that are focused on key outcomes is really powerful and I want to explore how that can happen in a different context. A simple decision making framework is essential to make good decisions with agility and pace – while still ensuring good governance. Creating something simple is often a difficult to do but creating clarity for staff and partners pays dividends.

Local government, more than any other context I have worked in, is a constant wrestling match of different priorities with contradictions and resource constraints piled on top. Planning and prioritisation needs to be dynamic and persistent if you are going to make progress. But this risks an industry and measurement and bureaucracy which stifles creativity, alignment and agility. By organising in a multidisciplinary way around the big things that need doing together you create a framework for those planning and prioritisation conversations which helps find alignment and shared purpose. This needs some careful thinking as to how services align with missions and also identification of the cross cutting themes (such as prevention) which need to appear in all areas – but combined with the organisational design work, and a lot of time spent refining the backlog of projects, it really helped develop a shared view of the programme of work which both met service needs and longer term priorities (or missions).

The last bit of this puzzle is how to work ‘inside and outside’ at the same time – making those priorities or missions relevant and accessible to actors beyond the organisation. Anything which is big enough to be a mission is beyond the capacity / capability of one organisation to deliver, perhaps by definition, and so creating the conditions for shared purpose is an essential element of mission based methods.

In terms of other work we have developed there are are some strands I want to explore further in a different context:

Digital everywhere: The embedding of digital practitioners within services alongside a digital skills development program is something I feel we’ve tested in a limited way but clearly it works when done right and I’m really looking forward to having the capacity to develop this approach. This requires a really strong approach to making sure those digital roles are properly designed and also wired into the core digital team as well as clear guide rails that need to be context sensitive.

Curious AI: More laterally I’m really enjoying how we approached AI by providing people with the opportunity to (alongside safe governance and core skills) just be curious and experiment. There are such a risk with AI that we do it to people in the name of efficiency and in doing so fail to unlock the opportunity to discover the kind of change that it could bring. If we want to find ways to enhance what we do we need to explore in a prosocial positive way rather than with an extractive reductive efficiency seeking mindset and I’m keen to explore how you could do that in a wider context. I also think we need to do be doing this with our partners including our communities as we blur the line between our own practice and workforce and out local ecosystem and economy – but that is perhaps a whole piece in its own right.

Participation as a core activity: Led by Ruth Pineda and Noel Hatch we did some brilliant work in the participation space which I want to continue to develop as a practitioner wherever I am. Noel is an active ‘thinker in public’ and I really recommend having a look at his blog but the work on Thriving Together, the Kitchen Table project and our internal participation lab with frontline workers demonstrate our participative principle. So much rich learning in this work – and it’s really only a starting point that was possible because of both councils commitment to being ‘councils for the community’.

When I got the CEX role I called it my ‘be careful what you wish for’ job. Being a CEX is an incredible opportunity to bring some of the things that really matter to you and which you think are important into your organisation and you will see the twinned themes of digital and participation, which are all the way through my work, represented here. But with this there is a huge responsibility not just to throw ideas at an organisation and see what sticks – abstract ideas are not enough – you have to work through the real and practical implications in a way that makes sense to everyone. Ideas are the easy bit – it’s getting stuff done that is hard.

The ideas here have all been tested and explored in one context but it goes without saying that every organisation is different and so I’m going to hold these ideas a little bit lightly as I’m walking into a much more complex organisation and I really need to understand what that means as a first step.