Freelance Public Servant Diary #8

Discovering public governance; from practice to theory

This week I’m mulling over my approach to researching governance, using some solution focussed questions in group work and learning about Happy Cities.

Research

I’ve been reading around the academic literature on governance and thinking about how I might organise it in support of my future work. Part of this, as I’ve discussed before, is the question of how theory and practice link together.

Drawing on some of the key ideas of solution focussed thinking, which is very practice based and practical, and and design thinking, which starts with the needs of users, I’ve been developing a ‘from practice to theory’ approach.

Essentially this starts by establishing the characteristics and needs of governance actors and moves to describe what they do in practice and what they want to do. Only then is ‘theory’ brought in to suggest analytical frameworks that actors might find useful and critical perspectives that might help develop their understanding of the world.

Underpinning this approach is the assumption that every public governance ‘system’ is complex, unique and socially constructed. For those involved, discovering public governance is a personal journey in unique circumstances that the actors themselves recreate everyday.

In other words, if you want to explore governance, theory can give you a map and some tools, but the experience is yours, and yours alone.

In other, other words, public governance is what you make it.

Partly for this reason I’ve been thinking about the practitioners that make public governance work. Particularly the idea that there is a common practice between the various members of public bodies and that their might be some value in networking across different sectors. Here is the short piece I wrote.

Freelance Working Method

I mentioned that I had some solution focussed training recently, well I was in a public engagement session (for the development of the Council’s wellbeing objectives) last week and found that solution focussed questions can be very useful in groupwork — even if the activity hasn’t been designed with that in mind.

People were asked to talk about what they wanted the city to be like in future. Naturally enough there was plenty of focus on problems but SF questions did help to turn the conversation in a more constructive direction. For example:

• When someone says ‘there would not be (bad thing)’ ask ‘what would there be instead (reminds me of the SF training example that you don’t get into a taxi and tell the driver where you don’t want to go..)
• When someone says ‘there would be less (bad thing)’ you can also ask ‘where are the examples of of this not happening? where are the exceptions?’ (Exceptions are things that can be developed and expanded — the positive future is already with us!)
• When someone says ‘we should be more like (another place)’ ask ‘what would people from there like about this place if they visited?’ (perspective shifting-seeing our world through the eyes of others can help us see the positives that we otherwise might not notice..)

Democracy

I’m still super impressed by the work that Democracy Club are doing and, while I’m here, a little plug for their ace polling station finder: wheredoivote.co.uk . If you want it on your website details here.

Also, all the very best to the army of good folks supporting the general election process and particularly those working overnight — my simple prayer for you:

May there be no recounts

And don’t forget your snacks.

Workwise

This week I supported a meeting of the group that’s developing the wellbeing plan. As well as discussing the timetable for the plan we had a really interesting presentation from Liz Zeidler at Happy City. They provide a number of tools for measuring city wide and individual wellbeing.

The group was really interested in this project as it deals with a number of challenges that they have been working with (eg. how do we measure wellbeing? how do we prioritise some issues over others?).

Anyhow, if this is your bag I suggest you check out their website.

Next week I’ll be running our councillor in(tro)ductions sessions so looking forward to that — I’m sure similar sessions are running all over wales — I hope they all go well and get everyone ready for their roles as scrutiny councillors.

Less than four weeks to go btw.

Reading

Interesting piece on collaboration from a board perspective — useful for public governors via Cassie Robinson.

This report on Strategies for increasing listening and engagement by government covers familiar but important ground — via The Delib Team (unfortunately the download didn’t work when I last looked)

These life teachings from Yoda are surprisingly solution focussed. Actually, not surprising it is.

Good to see Helen Sullivan getting back to that book on collaboration. Some important problems sketched out here.

Nice piece by Ben Proctor: Why a target operating model is killing your public service

Note: I really must get a better system for organising what I’ve read so I can list it here — looks like Neil Tamplin is very good at this — what’s your secret Neil?