Back to term with an inspiring example of #publicservicetransformation that shows how hard the work is!

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Back to term with an inspiring example of #publicservicetransformation that shows how hard the work is!

A lot of public service reform still has a bad habit; it takes a model from somewhere else, gives it a local name, adds a diagram, runs a few workshops, and then does a mishmash of ‘what we were doing anyway’ and whatever they understand of the imported model. And, guess what, it doesn’t stick…

That’s one reason talking to Lee Tillman and Damian Allen from Doncaster Council was so interesting; they weren’t trying to sell me a model.

In fact, they were careful not to. Their Thrive work isn’t presented as a five-step method, a branded product, or a heroic example. It’s much more serious than that – it’s a long-term attempt to change how the council and its partners work with places.

The important word is ‘with’.

Not doing things to places, designing services for places in a meeting room, or importing a success story and hoping the local conditions are roughly similar.

Doncaster has built a nested approach. There’s a ten-year borough strategy, the Team Doncaster partnership, five localities, locality partnerships, delivery networks, six regenerative neighbourhoods, and then work that gets right down to particular streets, schools, parks, landlords, GP practices and households. Inspired by a raft of brilliant thinkers and theories, a synthesis all about right action in context.

That’s what I think matters; a two-way connection of strategy to reality.
In Edlington, the work involved a very specific set of conditions: three streets, absentee landlords, derelict housing, crime, schools with deep relationships, and a need to rebuild trust through visible action. In Highfields, the conditions were different: weaker community capacity, a need for a gathering space, a new CIC, a community house, and even a pump track because that’s what local people and young people said would make a difference.
Same broad principles. Quite different work.

This is what too many discussions of ‘scaling’ (and ‘learning’) miss. You can transfer method, posture, and discipline. You can’t transfer the answer. And the mechanisms for both are quite different!

There is a tendency in public service reform to tidy things up too quickly. We turn situated practice into a model, then turn the model into a presentation, and fret when it doesn’t change the world.

The Doncaster story is more useful because it’s less tidy. It suggests that the real work isn’t to find a better model, but to build the capacity to understand a place, act with the people who have trust there, learn as you go, and keep enough political and organisational authorisation around the work for it to last. If you don’t understand the place, you’re not transforming it. You’re working for your own ego.

I recorded this interview some weeks ago; release delayed as unfortunately we’ve been unable to recover the video from Microsoft Teams! Full audio at link in comments.

What do you take from this story?