I’m 4 months in post at Dorset Council and I’m coming out of the new girl haze with a real sense of purpose and clarity about what needs doing. Highly dangerous as clearly I still have a lot to learn about the place and the organisation but the world doesn’t wait for you to catch up, you just have to jump on and get going.
One thing I am spending a lot of time thinking about is how we shift the underlying skills profile of the organisation. I believe that as we give people modern tools and ways of working then they will drive the modernisation of the organisation themselves – creating the context for change and then working with people rather than driving change in a top down way.
I loved this piece from James Plunkett about the rise and falls of professional disciplines in government. The thing I took from it the most was the need for traditional disciplines like political strategy or statistics needing to shift and create space for newer disciplines like design or product management. It’s deeper than that as there is need to shift the framing and context of government thinking not just to change the approach to creating policy. I’m not doing it justice so please do go and have a read.
There is so much beneath this; the dominance of a specific kind of education and background in Whitehall, a snobbery about strategy as being higher status than delivery and ultimately a belief in old paradigms which separate thinking from feeling and assume that if you think hard enough with enough fancy models and theories you can make complex things simple.
We really need to leave new public management in the rear view mirror and embrace something much messier and relational.
But skills are only part of it, it’s also how we use them that matters. I’ve written a lot about the need to create a real culture of multidisciplinary team work where different knowledge and perspectives can create and deliver new ideas.
For that to happen we need to accept that change in a complex world is messy, emergent and often opportunistic. We can’t simply admire the problem with lovely analysis, we need to get in there and wrestle with it in the real world until we can see a way through.
That’s not to say you don’t need structure and process but those need to be used to help shape the work and keep it moving forward and not as a shield against failure. Public services are struggling across the board and arguably at greater risk of failure if we don’t change.
That means we need pragmatic ‘get it done’ energy, supported by new skills and the discipline of iterative problem solving methods like agile or action research. We need to test and learn and then when we take a wrong turn we need to learn harder and go again.
Clearly this is all easier said than done and I have been reflecting on the conditions that are needed to give an organisation the confidence to work in a very different way.
And this is why I put the building of people’s skills and their confidence in using those skills at the heart of any radical change. Change is a process of simultaneous unlearning and learning and if you want it to stick you have to give people time to do that.
Even if equipping people to have agency in their own change process wasn’t just the right thing to do there is a strong logic for doing so beyond that. I’m often struck by the difference between what we are trying to do outside of local government and how we try and solve the same problem internally. If one of the drag factors on economic growth is low productivity and the need to modernise skills then surely the same is true within local government?
To reach this shift in gears we will need to be all in. How many times have we tried to graft something like service design onto the side of a programme and then been surprised that it didn’t get the cut through that it needed to create different outcomes? We can’t be half hearted about this, it’s about modernisation of skills across the board with more traditional disciplines being asked to make room even as the newer skills are mainstreamed and translated into everyday practice.
I’m now thinking about how we land this in practice, and probably how we create some experiments to test and learn how we create a process with learning at the heart of the change process rather than something that just happens at the end. Its a big shift but one of the brilliant things about being the CEX is the ability to knit things together across the organisation, so I’m going to use that and see where we get to.
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