Power is not pie

“Equal rights for others does not mean fewer rights for you. It’s not pie”

This quote went viral a while back. I *LOVE* this.

I want to expand the pie metaphor so that it applies to power. Here’s why.

One of my last posts for the Wales Audit Office outlined my frustration on talking about co-production for the best part of ten years, but seeing very little action. I think I should probably add a caveat — I’ve seen very little actual co-production.

And that’s where the pie analogy comes in. Just because I share my power with you, it doesn’t mean that I have none. Generally I’ve seen abdication of responsibility, not empowerment. This is because the attempts at co-production that I’ve seen have been about saving money, not about delivering better services.

Some of what I’ve seen has involved the worst aspects of Community Asset Transfer — “Let’s give the responsibility for running this to the community, so that we have none.”

Chris Bolton (a.k.a. whatsthepont) has recently written a great post on the power dynamics between services, particularly the importance of context. Chris quotes Nye Bevan, because this post in turn was written in the context of the 70th birthday of the NHS.

“The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away”

Models of engagement

One of the best engagement models I’ve seen is Arnstein’s Ladder of Participation as it neatly shows how each step further empowers people.

However the idea of empowerment as a continuum isn’t necessarily helpful. It’s a binary model that implies that one end is good and one end is bad. But if a decision has been made and there’s no power to share, informing someone is the right course of action to take. Likewise, I don’t particularly want to co-produce my own brain surgery, and if it comes to that I’m not sure that I’ll have the time to upskill myself properly! I would like to be consulted on it though.

The other problem is that the model suggests that co-production is at the absolute opposite end of the scale to manipulation, when in fact the two can be linked. People can be manipulated if they are given responsibility without any wider resource to work effectively. In these circumstances, Arnstein’s Ladder might be seen as a cycle as much as a continuum.

It’s all about The Benjamins (or not)

Co-production is often misused when its central organising principle is money. Dave Briggs has written a great post recently on why buying new software shouldn’t be seen as a way of saving money, and likewise the same thing can be applied to new methods of service delivery:

“First, implementing new systems is hard and takes much longer than anybody cares to admit. Second, the real benefits can only come when radically redesigning the way a service runs, and that takes even longer — particularly as you’ll likely need several stabs at it. Thirdly, those much trumpeted savings? Don’t forget where they are coming from, which is mostly what the organisation spends on people. That means restructures, which will mean more time, and more pain.”

I was a bit disheartened recently to see a slide at a social care conference that showed that more organisations are opting for co-productive approaches as a means of saving money. Co-production can result in saving money, just as any use of data to develop understanding can aid service design by reducing inefficiency. But to decide in advance of any research or discovery phase that money must be saved usually ends up in a reduction of support in one way or another.

And we are not empowering anyone by renouncing all responsibility.