Are services bad for people?
Community Organising has interested me for a while, particularly how it fits with working with people’s strengths and building on a communities’ capacity.
Benjamin P. Taylor shared a thoughtful paper called ‘Services are bad for people: You’re either a citizen or a client’ by John McKnight. The title is a bold statement that pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the piece.
Power and hierarchy
There are some great points in the article around how the current structure of services can take power away from communities:
“Service systems require clients and community organisations require citizens. That is why service systems are often antithetical to powerful communities. Systems are hierarchical and not democratic. They harness people’s power to execute the plan of a central authority.”
I like how Community Organising sees community knowledge as core to knowledge as a whole. It’s something that we endeavour to do at Research in Practice with our Evidence Informed Practice model.
There are parallels between Community Organising and Servant Leadership. Both ask how we can make things work for you, as opposed to offering options based on an organisation’s setup. Community Organising inverts the classic hierarchy of power so that those who are closest to the situation and have the most knowledge can act.
“The professional model is a versus inferior, or dominant submissive relationship. Service systems act on the premise that the professional has expertise and the client has the problem. The problem solving power of the people in the neighbourhoods is unimportant. That professional idea is exactly the opposite of what community organising attempts to do.”
This thread (or this post on Medium) from Danny Buerkli is good on where we need to get to (HT Kelly Doonan), particularly this tweet.
Do we make people’s lives worse?
There’s a lot I agree with in the piece around the problems that come with being service-centred as opposed to people-centred. Paul Taylor has written a great piece on obsolescence and how public services design themselves into perpetuity. I love the concept of delivering services to the point where they’re no longer needed.
“What if rather than plan on our services being around forever, we designed for the very conditions in which they would cease to exist? If we all planned for obsolescence we’d perhaps see a very different social sector. A sector where innovation wasn’t endlessly lauded so much as endlessly practiced.”
However I also have issues with McKnight’s piece. By denouncing services wholesale he ignores larger systemic issues, which ironically is something that government is really well placed to tackle. McKnight ignores the strength of services in the same way that services can miss the strengths of people and communities.
Services are often at their best when dealing with inequality. The decommissioning of services would have a very different effect in the richest and poorest areas. In fact, austerity has driven this. Services are now at their bare bones, and people’s lives aren’t any better for that.
I was working in citizen engagement when the Big Society was announced. Any initial optimism was quickly tempered by the lack of resource. I encountered a lot of cynicism from communities who felt that they were being asked to do things that they didn’t want or have the time to do, that people in wealthier communities weren’t being asked to do.
So what should we do?
It seems to me that any statement that decries a particular approach wholesale in all circumstances ignores complexity. There isn’t one approach that can work for all people in all communities. The key then is to work to understand the system and what good looks like.
I was fortunate enough to spend a long car journey with Simon Pickthall a while back. I bent his ear for a good part of that journey to try and better understand the Vanguard Method. He shared this model for check with me, which starts from a person’s point of view.
“The service redesign becomes, then, a test of a hypothesis, rather than a leap into the unknown. It is a leap of fact, not a leap of faith. When the leaders undertake this study phase, they experience the key issues that they will need to tackle and build a desire to change the system quickly. Very rapidly you will have understood your system, and built a plan for radical change in thinking and therefore service redesign.”
I love the focus on normative learning, something that I want to look into in more depth in the future.
I also love the focus on learning and understanding. There’s certainly a lack of understanding in the wider world, but do we spend long enough understanding what services look and feel like? It seems like the understanding phase can be all too brief. What could happen if we really invested our time and opened our minds to what is possible? What if learning was central to service delivery and not a periodic exercise? Then I think we would be in a far better place to deliver excellent and equitable services.
