“Complex problems don’t have simple answers or tools.”
Part of a series of posts written by the Directors’ Network, supported by One Team Gov and the Cabinet Office’s Civil Service Group.
We’re writing this blog post to continue our series on growing the community of Directors committed to collective leadership, co-creation and building cultures that support collaboration. You can find out more about this work here:
Leading public services has always been tough — we have to tackle complex societal issues which no single organisation can face alone, especially during these times. As public sector leaders, Directors are at the forefront of this, wrestling with the systemic and interrelated nature of many issues.
We had our sixth breakfast call, which we ran slightly differently to previous calls, with the inclusion of a lightning talk from Dr Andrea Cooper. We were also joined by Richard Nugee and David Relph who balanced the group’s conversation.
We heard from Andrea about her insights into government systems and climate change — and how we collectively work towards positive change in an issue that is global, complex, and expansive.
From there, Richard Nugee’s three challenges back to the group on climate change were:
1. How do we empower individuals in a global problem?
2. How do we make it real for us when it disproportionately affects others?
3. How do we make sure the urgent doesn’t trump the important?
Using Richard Nugee’s provocation back to the group, we generated the agenda and had the discussions on the areas we felt passionate about. It was a very simple way of bringing a diverse range of views together on the theme of climate change and government systems.
It was a participant-led discussion:
- Lighting talk by Andrea Cooper, with a provocation from Richard Nugee
- using a Google Doc, we proposed a topic for discussion,
- we used “dot voting” (by placing emojis next to participant’s favourite topics) to prioritise the discussions, and
- we then discussed the highest voted topics.
We are continuing to grow our network and it was great to welcome new people to the discussion this week! This allowed us to split into virtual breakout rooms for group discussions on each topic before regrouping at the end to share our reflections.
Below is a summary of our discussions.
Topics 1 and 2: Government as a system or government as part of a system — how do we enable a combined response with the community? How can we work on long-term things like climate change, when we are driven by short-term incentives?
We had a fascinating discussion about incrementalism and the ability to change through harnessing the support outside government. We reflected on the questions that were driving our co-inquiry into climate change:
- How do we support emergent ways of working?
- What is it going to take to enable action at a local level?
- How do we create the enabling conditions that drive the change?
Our questions centred around whether we have really done enough to understand how government can exist as part of a system rather than seeing it as a system in itself. We wondered what the right blend between community and government is. Does the UK Civil Service now need to take a very different attitude that sees us explicitly entering the space of creating/curating platforms that allow that blend to happen? For example:
- Should we think about our role in convening and operating platforms (in the same way as we do the roads, railways and the national grid)?
- Where does platform building and getting network effects feature in the role of ‘government as a system’?
We discussed the power of local communities and regionalism as a way of breaking it down to allow for more personal connection to the issue. We explored how most of the relationships and networks that are going to be meaningful to citizens are going to be at a local level. We are currently segmented down different stove pipes, with layer on layer after that, so resolving this in a coherent way is important.
We were surprised that the government as a system toolkit did not include: enable, support, or help. Some ideas we want to explore further are:
- Is there an embedded assumption that government is the body that does (or at least initiates) the things that need doing?
- What might it mean to work and design structures around an enabling outcome or purpose?
- What does supporting emergent approaches mean in practice?
We reflected that we are trying to plan for long term change whilst being on short term cycles, which is incredibly constraining. What are the incentives that change our perspectives? We discussed how our response to COVID-19 has shown that we really can come together, transcend boundaries, and do something different when we focus on a common cause. Is climate change the next cause to coalesce around? What are our other big challenges?
The second half of the conversation focused on how we get people interested in 20–30 year challenges. We wondered whether more boldness on our part is needed — and whether we need to re-orientate how we think of ‘timescales’ to imagine a different future. Perhaps linking the timescale to the natural way in which people think about a future is the way to engaging people with a future and the changes needed to deliver that?
We found ‘time’ a fascinating concept to discuss in the context of change and transformation! Our conversation turned to how, societally, we operate a mechanistic world view. The machine metaphor is of a previous century; if we think of time in terms of cohorts (groups of people with common patterns of behaviours), it radically shifts our perceptions and paradigms. Having cohorts of people in our senior management decision making roles with a different paradigm will bring a different pace of change in a matter of years.
We explored how having a sustained, community approach to the next big challenge could be the primary unit of organisational focus, not individual departmental ones. What if the function of government as a system was to enable local self organisation and mobilisation, and to promote and build individual and community agency?
Reflection
We really being in a space that is very different from ones we’re working in right now. We reflected how long-term issues don’t have dates in them — and that we’ve seen a unity of purpose during COVID-19, where there is now the opportunity for the whole system to align behind a small number of big challenges. This is the moment for ‘government as a platform’ to take off! What is our appetite for that?
We think lots of small moves add up quickly to big change — and we loved the idea of a radical approach to enablement! There is no shortage of long term thinking in our communities, and we must focus on encouraging radically enabled place level or community action. What is the Civil Service’s role in that?
We reflected that everyone on the call had a named role of some kind, a formal positional authority, and what it would be like to work in spaces where the participants don’t have that . Collectively, we want to have more discussions about what needs to be achieved and our role in it, rather than what we can or should do about a challenge based solely on our formal positional authority.
The kind of change we need starts from within. Whatever your role or discipline , we believe everyone has a topic in them. All Directors from across the Civil Service are welcome to join the ‘Your Agenda, Your Discussions’ breakfast call.
The next call will be held on Thursday 25 June from 8.30–9.30am.
You can sign up using the link below:
We look forward to seeing you there!
