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I asked for exam questions recently and, Jim Nicholls threw me a doozy!
I’ve spent 25 years or more thinking about this, so rather than agonise, I’m just typing my answer straight.
There are two answers, which point the way to a third.
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First: do really really good work analysing your citizens, their needs, your priorities for shifting public outcomes, and then design an adaptive, outside-in organisation which really works on the needs you have identified.
Each part of that is important, and deserves a breakdown I don’t have time or space for here. But in being part of kicking off the transformation of Hammersmith & Fulham council in the early 2000s, I’ve seen this work well — as far as it goes.
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Second: work with individual citizens to deeply understand their needs and ‘pull’ in the required expertise. It’s really really the Vanguard model, which I was bowled over by in 2002, and which informs so much of the ‘community paradigm’, ‘human learning systems’, ‘the liberated method’ and so on, and which aligns with the way Cormac Russell has taken Asset-Based Community Development forward.
It’s brilliant — when you can create a bubble to deliver.
And it’s brilliant at creating passionate converts and bitter enemies
And then the organisational immune system kicks in, and takes over.
That’s because it’s a threat, and because it doesn’t offer all the answers to the pressures of meeting demand within reducing budgets, nor does it tell you how to actually build an organisation that can do this in either a targeted or a scaled way.
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Both approaches have complementary blind spots.
The third approach is to recognise that we are trying to help people achieve their purposes in life. So what counts is what adds value in their lives:
1- we need big clunking production of ‘services’, capabilities and outcomes at scale where we know the overall needs
2- and we need intensely focused, human-centred partnering to work with individuals and families and groups to create value that makes sense in their context
3- so (1) need to do both mass-production to meet large-scale needs, and to offer the capacity and capability in the right place at the right time to be ‘pulled’ (2) for truly citizen-centred services
This requires a type of thinking and a type of organisation which recognises both sets of approaches and needs and can work with both. The work isn’t fully done yet and nobody — save a few people with services to sell — is claiming it is. But I am working on it.
What do you think I need to add to explain this fully?
[EDIT – I should point out that the slides are ‘some of’ the thinking ‘up until this point’ – they don’t speak directly to this post in any linear way, other than to illustrate some of the points of (1) and (2)]
#publicsector #innovation #transformation #publicservices
chosen path 
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What’s missing…
fifth discipline stuff blahblah, damasi, goleman, fast and slow blah
emergent consensual conversational skills
recognition that universal service provision to all citizens is better than any targeted provision which is always exclusionary often vindictive and is just preparing services for salami privatisation.
you can’t have socialism in one LA
and you can’t have your improvements without simultaneously working to develop and maintain public service VALUES.
read Jane Jacobs, dark age coming, systems of survival, The Nature of Economies. in order of publication….
guardian culture v market culture
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Thanks – yes, there are definitely whole dimensions missing, these are good nominations, thanks.
I would challenge the idea that targeted person-centred provision meets that criteria – I think there’s a fundamental difference here – but there’s a good learning point in the types of provision that are shifted from universal to targeted and then diminished – more likely by the 80/20 rule dynamic a la https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-well-do-you-understand-business-streamlining-steve-whitla/
(I don’t think necessarily privatised, but then I don’t see that as a particular bogeyman *if* actually managed properly – sometimes a big ‘if’)
Socialism in one council? Hmm I’ll definitely think about that – I don’t think the *same* pressures apply but perhaps some real issues there.
And yes – ‘monstrous moral hybrids’ – definitely bears some more thinking on – I’ve always been curious rather than committed to that, probably time to read more…
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I’m more interested in being a cassandra anticipating unintended systemic consequences. USI
and no i don’t mean VUCA which is facile snake-oil bolx.
beware the USI!
this because i embrace the sfbt methodology and its miracle question observables process rather than forensic organisational pdychiatry (FOP).
give me a time machine and I’ll change you unhappy childhood, as if
ite it’s not just about understanding complexity it’s about swimming in it, drowning in it, sailing in it and embracing emergence as a given and a method and tool and a problem.
LearningCompany p1 ..s1….p2….s2….etc
where
p problem and s solution
gaah
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https://youtu.be/g3j9muCo4o0?si=QBneKSTZ_YlzWIJX
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most fully only share the last sentence of this clip, the whole scene is richer
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most folk only share the last sentence of Malcolm’s diatribe but the whole scene is richer….
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Ah yes, that’s good. And not to get too ‘indigenous wisdom’ on your ass, but very much chimes with Tyson Yunkaporta’s TEK:
“Our approach to technology is that no new technology can come into the world and into our life UNLESS it’s accompanied by an equally powerful SOCIAL technology that can prevent that thing from being weaponized. Sometimes that means that limitations — regulatory feedback loops, etc. — need to be built in. But more powerfully, you need that social technology, that psychotechnology. It comes down to that good lore in the end, the stories that prevent people from weaponizing these things. That’s ‘slow tech’ — it’s TEK, Traditional Ecological Knowledge — that holds the solution to that. You can never compromise your ‘T.E.K.’ with your ‘T.E.C.H.’, if you know what I mean.”
(as quote here: https://twitter.com/michaelgarfield/status/1778999652160831520 )
(And also the thinking of the New Luddites, who have a serious branding problem but some very godo thinking).
But of course Jeff was never going to win any arguments at that dinner, was he? So something else is definitely needed..
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Ian Malcolm ‘Jeff Goldbum’ worked at the SFI santa fe institute, there’s a preface to one of the Jurrasic books – a lecture by Ian at SFI, written by Crighton [obvs] – its well worth a read.
“But of course Jeff was never going to win any arguments at that dinner, was he? So something else is definitely needed..”
Typical bloody academic, nice leather jacket though, and pianist
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if you want community, targeting destroys it, read this:
https://medium.com/@playkx/thoughts-on-playing-inclusively-7c4155982aaa
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Another paradox of public service organisation to reconcile.
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a perceived paradox
is a sign of a mind
that has yet to fully grasp
what’s going on underneath
there’s probably a better expression of that idea,
but i can’t think of it just now
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