It’s not the hope series, part four – Join the conversation on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_dante-emerges-from-the-inferno-he-looks-share-7489458365564227584-Tm7P/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAADUV_eUBZSxZvFpx70OV050F6K5HM2MhTMo
Dante emerges from the Inferno. He looks up – and sees not the starry veil of heaven, but a mountain. It’s another metaphor for ‘Rewiring the State’.
Isn’t it exciting?! Devolution by default (I’m way of the slogan though). Local fiscal authority. Public services aligned around place. A smaller, more strategic centre. Room for prevention and local action.
After years of centralisation, fragmentation, and argument, the gate may finally be opening.
But beyond it is not the shining city on the hill. It is Mount Purgatory.
The work of undoing, unlearning what the old system has formed in us.
Public services are not approaching this climb in good shape. The NHS has carried the pandemic, backlogs, vacancies, financial recovery, repeated restructuring. Commissioning has been abolished and remade more than once. NHS England itself is now being abolished. Local government carries austerity, growing need, service failures elsewhere, unstable funding, and repeated demands to transform. Many employees are not merely tired, they’re damaged by previous promises, traumatised by what they’ve been through, morally damaged by compromise. And they’ve seen new structures with old behaviours, taken responsibility without power, been given accountability without resources.
Some will look at the mountain and say, ‘At last, we can begin.’
Others will say, ‘I haven’t got another climb in me.’
Others will wonder whether the shining city at the summit is another mirage.
‘It’s not the despair that kills you, it’s the hope.’
Despair asks very little. Hope asks people to pick up their equipment again.
So this next stage cannot be presented as another burst of heroic transformation.
A climb like this needs many camps. Places need time to establish shared understanding before being driven towards delivery milestones. They need to map demand, money, authority, risk, and information across institutional boundaries. They need to build local capability through real work, not generic leadership programmes. They need ways to learn which change the operating system, rather than evaluations which record whether a pilot ticked boxes. They need proper supplies: resource, capacity, data, institutional memory, and political cover – to be able to trust. And they need permission to stop where necessary, recover, adapt the route and bring people with them.
The mountain is real: austerity, backlogs, vacancies, fragile morale, distrust and financial crisis won’t disappear if and when constitutional wiring changes. But obviously not an argument for staying in the Inferno.
There’s now a genuine possibility to move from a state organised around departmental control towards places able to sense what is happening, decide closer to the work, move resources and learn.
Worth climbing for! It’s great to see the stars again.
What do you need to see at the first base camp before asking exhausted people to climb again?
chosen path 