Homologation in social care
A couple of weeks ago Chris Bolton (a.k.a. whatsthepont) started a fascinating discussion on Twitter on Homologation, which is a fancy name for approval being granted by an official body to work to a particular standard. Chris has written an excellent post on this and how it might be applied in public service. In it, Chris shares how it has been used to great effect in Formula 1 to enable or constrain teams and to drive innovation.
Before diving in to what this might look like in social care, here’s a look on how it’s applied in a different sport…
What homologation looks like in cycling
In the cycling world, homologation has been used to constrain innovation instead of enabling it. Giant leaps forward were made in bike design and rider positioning in the 90s. Chris Boardman still holds the (tech enabled) hour record and further regulation was developed in response to Graeme Obree’s innovative bike design and rider positioning. Yet as a consequence of homologation, bikes look broadly similar to how they looked at the start of the twentieth century.
However using homologation to manage people is much messier than in engineering. We can see this in the way that people and teams navigate anti-doping rules. The homologation around substances has led to a gaming of the system. Whilst many drugs have been banned, there is use of Therapeutic Use Exemptions and muscle relaxants. Regulation of the mechanical world is a lot easier than the regulation of people.
Homologation in people-centred services
In this post on Human Learning Systems, I looked at why measures should be derived from purpose. Designing measures that don’t align with purpose leads to a defacto purpose for services. In terms of regulation, our understanding of whether a service has worked must derive from the service’s immediate aim, not a proxy measure. This is why I’m less inclined to think that homologation would work in complex environments. Homologation might skew a service instead of facilitating innovation. I’d more inclined to think about what stops regulation from being generative, which Chris has looked at in another of his excellent posts.
Linking innovation to micro-decision making
Homologation locates power and decision making away from the person accessing the service. There is a role for professionals to triangulate knowledge, but we need to recognise how much rich knowledge and understanding for service design and measurement comes from lived experience in complex environments.
I was interested to hear Dr. Adam Lent of New Local talk about micro and macro-decision making as part of Research in Practice’s Leaders’ Forum. I was particularly interested in the discussions around micro-participation and methods like Family Group Conferencing, where we can understand the complexities of people’s lives at an individual or family level, instead of at a whole organisational level.
When talking about macro-decision making, Dr. Lent talked about fundamentally changing the way that decisions are made. It’s well worth reading New Local’s work on the Community Paradigm to understand how services have shifted from state to neo-liberal models, and why there is now a case for shifting to a community focused way of planning and delivering services.
This might be critiqued as a postcode lottery of service delivery. Yet there is an inherent inequity in how services are delivered currently. Services are not set up to deliver what different communities want and need. As Pawda Tjao mentioned at an event on Child Welfare Inequalities, we’re currently in a position where some local authorities are getting to grips with this new reality. Some organisations are struggling to make ends meet under the current market paradigm,where interactions are reduced to transactions.
With better understanding of people’s lives, we can design services that help people to live better lives. To do that we need to think about how services are stripped back to their core purpose. That means aligning measurement to the direct purpose and not to proxy measures. Because as Chris says, what gets measured gets done.
