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At today’s webinar for The Public Service Transformation Academy, Chrissie Gregory and Sharon Davidson described how learning from the Commissioning Academy had changed their work in children’s services.
They described a shift from service thinking to system thinking. Both already had considerable experience. The Academy helped them connect and apply what they knew, with a clearer framework for helping other people think differently.
Chrissie described bringing leaders together around children whose lives involved education, SEND, social care, and youth justice. They were often working with the same children, paying separate bills. Looking across those services meant asking what hadn’t happened earlier in those children’s lives, which conversations hadn’t happened, and what people could do together now.
Sharon described how their offer had developed: from helping a leadership team think about its priorities to helping it understand its system. That included connecting conversations with senior leaders and frontline staff, and carrying what each was saying back to the other.
There’s some precision needed here. Consultation, collaboration, and coproduction all have value, and involve different commitments. In our preparation conversation, Sharon asked: ‘What are you prepared to give up if you want co-production to be effective?’
They valued trauma-informed practice and equalities being there from the start. The eight aspects of commissioning opened up their thinking. These include relationships, capability, and people’s influence over decisions, as well as commissioning processes and ways of providing services.
And the ‘common mess’ gave them a way to acknowledge what working with people involves. Leaders need to hear what staff and families are experiencing, including things that require leaders themselves to change.
Chrissie singled out Ann Graham’s recent speech: all the talk was about children and young people. She connected that directly to Ann’s leadership and determination to make a difference in their lives.
They also valued how the learning happened: the balance of peer learning, guest speakers, action learning sets, and applying ideas at work. Adult-to-adult conversations, with room to think, question, and enjoy yourselves. Parachuting cats and wolves have evidently stayed with them.
Sharon was clear that these ways of thinking apply across public services. Understanding the common mess, and helping leaders work differently within it, is useful well beyond children’s services or a commissioning role.
Where in your work do the people you’re trying to help get to define what ‘better’ means?
