We need to reimagine ourselves if we want to deliver reimagined public services

The local government response to the pandemic gave us a window into the potential of our workforce to feel purposeful, flexible, and deliver services at pace. There is a real desire to sustain the ability of our staff to be disruptive and innovative. This would be beneficial to our organisations, rewarding for people in organisations, and potentially transformative for the communities we serve.

The pandemic response decimated already stretched budgets and deepened inequality in our communities. This disruptive way of working was a heavy burden for people to carry, with rising levels of burnout and people deciding they needed to step away from the work (me included.)

There are now huge recruitment and retention challenges across all public services and we are still working out how we balance the need to deliver services with the wellbeing and aspirations of our workforce.

People in thought-leadership positions are shifting their focus to imagination and inventiveness, recognising that if public services are going to meet the needs of communities then we need a fundamental reimagining of how we design and deliver services. Just this week I read a blog from Phoebe Tickell and Jo Brown on how Imagination is not day-dreaming and caught up on an event on Making the Impossible Possible led by Impossible Ideas Inc

Somehow we need to find a form of sustainable disruption that brings about the changes that are needed in the public sector, whilst supporting people in organisations to feel valued, cared for and able to achieve their personal aspirations.

Reimagining ourselves and not just our services

We need to find ways to continue to use our resources in a flexible and disruptive way to meet the needs of our communities but without the negative elements that come with being in a state of emergency.

This will require us to understand and focus on our key priorities so that teams and services are willing and able to share resources in support of our common purpose. It also requires us to reimagine how we support our workforce to be fulfilled and able to deliver these enormous challenges.

We cannot change how we work unless we release the potential of our people and ensure they feel valued and purposeful. There is a lot to say in this space but there are three areas I would like to focus on:

• Building a networked system
• Listen to your communities and your people
• Reimagining progression

Building a networked system

A key element of the pandemic response and the reimagining of public services is about building a more networked system across and between organisations.

The pandemic response showed us that, given the right sense of purpose, we can use our resources flexibly to deliver shared priorities across a complex system. We learned that staff already had transferable skills that could be redeployed across the system to meet the needs and that previously siloed teams and budgets could be flexed and wedded together.

Pre-Covid, many local authorities (and other organisations) worked in partially networked systems. There was a level of connectivity between teams, services, and communities but this was patchy and often sporadic.

Resources, especially staff, were (and still are) predominately held within teams and services to meet team/service priorities, that in turn supported organisational strategic priorities.

In my experience, when local government finds itself in emergency response state a central purpose emerges that sees resources redeployed to deliver on core priorities. This shared sense of endeavour strengthens connections between teams, organisations and communities and can give many people a strong sense of purpose.

I have seen this emergency response happen a number of times in my career. The response to the 7/7 bombings at Westminster Council, the Chalcots evacuation in Camden and the pandemic response. Resources are shared, silos break down and local authorities work in an agile way to deliver for residents. It is impossible not to iterate and continuously learn to improve.

During the pandemic especially we saw new services that were emerging for people across the country — food delivery, testing sites, vaccinations centres (and buses!) — in a way that would have seemed impossible at other times.

Building a shared sense of purpose and building sustained disruption outside of emergencies is hard and I’m not going to claim to have the answers. What is clear is that traditional forms of purpose building, such as strategies, often fail to engage communities or the people delivering services.

More work is required to disrupt budgets, team structures and how we measure success if we are to build networked systems that are pulling in the same direction.

Listen to your communities and your people

I wrote in more detail about the importance of listening back in May 2020. I believe listening is at the heart of how we build trust with communities and is fundamental to ensuring that people in our organisations feel understood and valued. It will also help us to find the new ideas that feel so important.

To reimagine the public sector we need greater cognitive diversity, described by Matthew Syed in as Rebel Ideas as “differences in perspectives, insights, experience and thinking styles.” This enables us to find the new ideas that feel so important.

Intelligent individual — The rectangles in the image above represents all the insights, perspectives and experience relevant to a particular problem or objective. The circle represents the knowledge and experience of one intelligent individual.

Unintelligent team — For complex problems, one person cannot have all the relevant insights. We too often build ‘unintelligent teams’; we gather people around us who share our ideas and perspectives.

Intelligent team — To have ‘intelligent teams’, we need to listen to a range of people with different perspectives and outlooks so we can understand a broader range of possible solutions and not limit our thinking.

Too often it is the same people leading the way in terms of what the future of public services can be in the future. We need to ensure that we listen to and understand a wide range of views and perspectives, knowing this will support us to make better decisions for our residents.

I think local government has taken huge strides in this ability to listen to communities and should be applauded for that. We need to see similar structures that release the power of our workforce.

This means changing who is in the room when decisions are being made but also requires us to reimagine how decisions are made. Too often there are top-down decisions imposed on teams and individuals and then a sense of disappointment when people don’t act or change in the way we had hoped.

Not all decisions can or will be made in this way. Where decisions are still taken in closed-door meetings there needs to be more openness and transparency about decisions being made in organisations. This is partly so that leaders can be held to account but also so we can learn from the decisions we make together.

In the same way that if my daughter helps to cook dinner she is more likely to eat it, people who can see and understand how organisations make decisions are more likely to get on board with them.

Reimagining progression

We need to reimagine progression and what success looks like for individuals in an organisation. If we don’t do this then our attempts to reimagine services will fail.

Traditional hierarchical structures do not support the growth of people in organisations. Hierarchical structures stifle imagination and innovation by putting a few people in charge of decisions. They create competition, resentment and disappointment and a set of insentive structures that suppress challenge and force people to fit certain mould and behaviours if they are to ‘succeed.’

We need to move beyond siloed progression, which will benefit individuals and the organisations we work in. This will release the potential of our people, allowing them to share their skills and knowledge across the organisation and create networked learning environments.

Siloed hierarchical progression — Opportunities for progression risk being limited to our profession. Routes to progress are often ‘blocked’ by other people in the hierarchy.

Staff who need to maintain their profession (social work, planning) are not able to gain from development opportunities in other areas or share their expertise with other teams/services.

Added to this, a traditional hierarchical model makes it impossible for large numbers of people to achieve what they feel capable of. More people will be left disappointed and feeling like they aren’t being recognised and haven’t achieved enough that those who succeed.

Early in your career progression is easier, there is more space. As you move up the ladder the number of roles diminishes and people tend to stay in those roles for longer. This viral tweet shows it as the top reason people leave their roles. If we stick with a siloed hierarchical model of development then this cannot change and organisations will continue to lose good people who don’t feel valued within the structures we have built. It is these people who we need to keep, to help reimagine public services.

Networked progression — in this way of working opportunities for progression are available via non-traditional routes. This broadens the knowledge of individuals and builds the collective intelligence of the organisation, due to the cross-pollination of ideas.

If you are a planner or a social worker or another professional role, you can get stuck in your progression lane. We should be aiming to help people build progression routes that support a more networked development. This has the potential to help them feel like they are developing, by learning new skills and ideas.

This might mean relaxing what is required for different roles in an organisation. In Camden, I worked with a team of managers in planning who decided to remove some of the planning-specific requirements from job roles, as they recognised that these were acting as a barrier to getting the best people.

There is also a range of networked development opportunities that should be explored further (at the risk of writing too much I won’t go into all of those today!)

Developmental progression — The space for reimagining is here. We should be supporting staff to achieve developmental progression, that focuses on a more rounded understanding of personal growth that is not about where you sit in the hierarchy.

Not everyone will want to or will be able to progress in a hierarchical structure. This approach no longer sees hierarchical progress as the goal — instead focusing on personal fulfilment, wellbeing, and purpose as the aspirations to aspire to.

This requires us to build much flatter structures, that would also see a greater parity of pay between leaders and frontline staff.

Final thought

If we are to truly reimagine public services we need to also reimagine ourselves. The inequalities we are tackling in our communities also exist in our organisations. Creating space for listening and beginning to reimagine what success in your organisations looks like is a great first step.

There is work we need to do if we are to build organisations where everyone can grow and develop and contribute to the sustained disruption of how we deliver services. This is about imagination. It is also about a willingness to deliver on those ideas by changing ourselves.