The three kinds of enablement in government
One of our new year’s resolution was to work more “in the open” and share what we are learning as we go along, not just at the end when we’ve got a polished report. This short note is an attempt at opening up our thought process. We would love to hear from you if this connects with something you are working on or if you have thoughts you would like to share.
As we have been exploring the world of “enabling” approaches in government we have come across a wide variety of examples of “enablement”.
We have found, roughly, three types of enablement: enablement at the organisational, the programmatic, and the structural level. Let me give you one example for each:
Buurtzorg, probably one of the most talked about organisations in this space, is a Dutch home care organisation that works in a completely self-managed way. According to a study they deliver better care compared to conventional care providers, do so more cheaply and the staff are highly satisfied.
Buurtzorg deals with enablement at the level of the organisation.
Wigan Council in the UK has worked prioritize the needs of the individual and bring together different agencies to deliver high-quality health and social care services. Rather than work along established historical, organisational, legal and budgetary divides care services are provided in an integrated way.
The efforts by Wigan Council to provide care services that take the “whole person” into account operate on a programmatic level.
Finally, in the UK there has been a movement towards devolving decision-making powers away from central government in London towards more local levels of government. One example are the powers that the Greater Manchester Combined Authority has been granted as part of a “devolution deal”. This devolution allows Greater Manchester to make more (though possibly still not enough) decisions itself and is meant to increase the adaptiveness to local needs.
The devolution of decision-making powers to more local levels of government is a structural kind of enablement.
These three categories of enablement — organizational, programmatic, structural — provide a useful classification not just for the three examples mentioned above but in general as we are trying to make sense of the various efforts and experiments that we are finding.
Like any concept, you can turn this one on its head and use it for evil ends. If your mission in life was to go around and disempower everyone and everything around you these three categories might also make for a useful checklist:
Organisational disempowerment works by adding layers of management and control inside an organisation.
Programmatic disempowerment involves standardising activities and preventing discretionary decision-making.
Structural disempowerment involves removing decision rights, financial autonomy and other powers from organisations.
This is, of course, the status quo in many places. Pushing back against it is vital and it is why the work of pioneers like Buurtzorg or Wigan Council is so important.
