The Rocketship Files II: We’re all solving the same problem

Published in

Rocketships

5 min readJun 30, 2023

Follow two Heads of Profession on a mission to make a real difference. We are writing about how we create conditions to get people to collaborate to solve problems that really hold us back.

Read all chapters here https://medium.com/rocketships

Understanding the problem

A few years ago I started a new design leadership role at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and I felt overwhelmed by the newness and the sheer amount of things on my plate. To understand how I could improve my ways of working, I started monitoring the different tasks and clustering them. To my shock and horror as a designer I found that the minority of tasks were “design-ey” and most of them were general admin tasks.

When running this by several colleagues we found a huge overlap of tasks — we realised we all had started solving the same problems in isolation. For example I found that every single person I spoke to had started their own list about how to onboard a new starter into their team.

At the same time I was working on a project to promote closer working across some of the MoJ areas. This gave me interesting insights into why collaboration is difficult, and helped me understand the scale of the problem.

It wasn’t just me who saw those issues. In Justice Digital, the digital part of MoJ, the Digital Strategy 2025 is all about becoming a more flexible organisation, working collaboratively across organisational silos and to ensure that users are at the heart of our services. This means we have strong support by the leadership to start solving those cross-cutting issues that stop us from having the transformational impact we want to have and we are strongly encouraged to start initiatives that help us innovate and break through the barriers.

As Justice Digital’s Chief Digital and Information Officer (CDIO) Gina Gill notes

“I see more examples of us practising what we preach in terms of delivery through multidisciplinary teams and I also see self-forming groups to tackle common problems or take advantage of opportunities.”

A big step forward for us was when the Heads of the Digital Professions started collaborating as a team. Instead of meeting once a month we now have several weekly ceremonies in place. By setting up a shared backlog we got much closer to understanding the sheer amount of invisible work and problem solving that was already happening, and saw more of the effects of working in silos. This helped us start to cut through the duplication that was happening. By working closer together we also got a much better understanding of the causes and effects of the issues we were facing.

The key issues we were facing

THE CAUSES

First of all we found a lot of good things that were going really well in our organisation!

Digital transformation, growth & scaling up: Justice Digital has grown a lot in the last 10 years — by size and scale, now reaching more teams in different areas across policy and operational divisions. A lot of MoJ areas have their own digital teams now.
A very strong focus on delivery: The digital teams are very focussed on delivering user-centred digital services for their areas. This is how we measure success, this is where the budget goes.
People want to fix things: Our colleagues are very engaged and are active problem solvers. They tackle issues when they see them.

But all these good things together, unfortunately, created a lot of silos. In the short term, silos can be a very efficient architecture to deliver things quickly…

But beware Conway’s Law, which says “businesses will create organizational systems that closely mirror how they communicate internally.”

That’s exactly what was happening.

The MoJ consists of a lot of areas and agencies. They have independent leadership, org structures and processes. The digital teams aligned closely with those existing structures and so we evolved into an architecture of silos that are hard to cut through.

EFFECTS

All of this was having some ugly effects:

Lack of cross-cutting initiatives — Siloed systems lead to an underappreciation of cross-cutting initiatives — they don’t fit in the world view.
Duplication — The delivery in silos can lead to duplication of problem solving.
Knowledge Management issues — Delivery in silos leads to information silos. People use different tools, different frameworks. It becomes impossible to find the information that already exists somewhere in the organisation, and this, again, leads to duplication.
Lack of innovation — Systemic restrictions like these make it difficult to innovate across the bigger picture — it’s hard to do anything groundbreaking if you can only look at a small part.
Professions vs Delivery — The singular focus on delivery within areas leads to tensions with communities of practice, which are set up to grow maturity and capability and support delivery across the whole organisation.

In our organisation we have several areas that are quite different from each other, for example the Legal Aid Agency, prisons, courts. They all have different delivery imperatives, different timescales, different organisational cultures. The professions sit horizontally across those areas in a matrix management system.

Delivery focus leads to tensions between “Delivery vs Capability” — the WHAT we do vs the HOW we do it. All the power — budget and headcount — sits in the vertical areas and often professions aren’t empowered enough to spend time developing skills, fixing cross-cutting problems, and maturing their practice and craft.

The problem with this is that we can’t deliver high-quality work without highly skilled and motivated people — and disempowered people get frustrated and leave.