Applying KonMari to public service
There’s a load of snarkiness in online think pieces about Marie Kondo that really bothers me. Some of this is because of the amount of male writers who dismiss household management as something trivial, and partly because some pieces have veered into outright racism.
What public services can apply in terms of complexity
The recent Basecamp podcast on Marie Kondo got me thinking about simplicity and public service.
DHH applies Marie Kondo’s thinking to programming. Research in Practice and Research in Practice for Adults are currently working on our new website, and his points around ditching what you don’t need to streamline your service equally applies to our website and process design. There’s been a couple of occasions where we’ve been mapping complex online processes to find that that the real problem is the human side of things. By simplifying and reducing the clutter around what we really need, we’re able to design a service that works and delivers what really matters. This is where digital transformation can help in a much wider way by moving beyond being an end in and of itself into a much wider service improvement.
There are of course lots of things to consider around this. For instance, those that apply lean methodologies in their purest forms will strip processes of all waste. The thing to bear in mind is around where value is added, particularly in public service. A system inefficiency may result in someone spending a lot of time with staff, but that human contact might be the most valuable aspect of a service to that person. John Seddon is quite disparaging about people who obsess about tools at the expense of outcomes in ‘Freedom From Command and Control.’
“Creating the label ‘lean’ (what it is), leads naturally to the notion of tools (how you do it), obscuring the importance of perspective leads to a failure to appreciate that Ohno (who developed the Toyota system)’s ideas represent a philosophy for the design and management of work that is diametrically opposed to today’s norms. The codification of method misses this important issue: thinking. While the tools are accurate descriptions of what happens in terms of method, it is the context that is more important.”
How much support should we provide?
There’s a lot of good work out there on the patriarchal nature of public service and how we can limit people’s lives by providing too much support and reducing both voice and choice.
I’ve been working on a webinar on transitions this week, and the Marie Kondo thinking also struck a chord here. Julie Pointer from NDTI was great, and her thoughts on independence really resonated with me. Julie said that independence isn’t about cutting all support and ties, but about helping people to live their best lives.
The reduction of support is usually the rationale behind moving to a resource poor version of co-production (which I’ve blogged about previously). It’s worth thinking about how we can stop people from reaching crisis point and therefore the need for intensive support. Really, it’s just about understanding what a good life looks like and helping to make that a reality.
