Week (ish) notes

I’ve been on holiday* and have used some of the time to catch up on things I wanted to capture here and perhaps come back to:

• I have am still getting responses to my piece on buying better stuff (thank you!) and I am going to invite people who are interested to a virtual workshop to see if there is something in it we can work on — open space principles — the people who turn up will be the right people! Ping me if you want an invite.
• Our redesign work is moving at pace and we are should have all teams through the design phase before Christmas — that feels like a huge milestone and one we will celebrate. Its still a HUGE load on the organisation to be doing this ourselves but I would still advocate for doing it this way — compared to programmes run by specialist teams and done to the organisation this is making much more profound and sustainable change. I’m going to think about how we might test that assumption / assertion (in true action research style).
• We have been looking at how we organise our programme of work — ie all the things we need to deliver which aren’t easy defined as ‘business as usual’ (which is a terrible phrase in its own right — I have yet to experience usual!).
• Our participative principle has come to life in our recent community leaders events (beautifully designed, held and talked about here by our Participation Lead Ruth Pineda) which have been a bit messy but very much about us showing our work in progress and opening up a more dynamic and exciting conversation — we have had two really great sessions so far and I can’t wait to see how this evolves. We want to use these sessions to help shape how we change, while getting the balance right between what staff need in order to feel safe and supported in the middle of redesign and how working in the open with communities can build better and deeper collaboration.
• I spent a brilliant 24 hours with the New Local Radical leaders group a couple of weeks ago. This is something I’ve been part of for a while (more on the work that is evolving from it here) and it was a real treat to spend time with the group in person. As someone else from our leadership team is also part of the group, its been great to find a place where we can test some of the ideas we are working with in our organisational design and especially our key principles of adaptive, resilient and participative. More to come on this but in short; no more new public management instead we want leadership systems that reflect the human and dynamic nature of what we do.

But all of this really positive work has meant that I have been getting fairly tetchy about the constant media trope that associates tough choices with spending cuts. I have written and then self-redacted a longer piece on this but in short;

• the more you concentrate on the money the more it narrows down your focus — even when money is tight you have to look beyond this
• In making the finance the focus you are ignoring the really tough choices needed to drive public service reform — the money is important but it’s only central if we make it so

Better choices are redesign, ruthless prioritisation and integration of priorities — don’t invest in things which only meet one outcome or address one crisis.

Clearly public service finances are dire (remove competitive grants! Long term settlements!) but the really tough choices are in redesigning them so that they reflect the way the world is now not how is was when they were conceived.

Originally published at https://www.curiouscatherine.info.