91. An opportunity assessment for public services

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I'm developing something for our Public Services Board (local strategic partnership) that will help them set up working groups to address priorities that they have identified.  I'm sharing this partly in search of feedback and partly as it may have applications elsewhere.

Essentially this will be a template to help them work through proposals and to feel confident that they are doing something that is achievable and that will make a difference.  One challenge will certainly be framing a distinct ‘product’ and avoiding the temptation to set up groups that disproportionately spend time discussing problems rather than making solutions.

Below is my first draft of an Opportunity Assessment – this is an idea that comes from agile product development but seems ripe for adapting into a public service context.  Here is Marty Cagan's original post that I have worked from.

Turns out that Carl Haggerty has been thinking about something similar and I've been able to have a peek at some of that work in drafting the list below.

Finally, the work of Public Services Boards in Wales is geared to promoting sustainable development under the provision of the Well-Being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015.  The final five questions reflect the five 'ways of working' that are identified under the Act.

Any comments / suggestions very welcome.

An Opportunity Assessment for Public Services

The following questions need to be answered before work is initiated.

Product Opportunity Questions

1. Exactly what problem do we want to solve? (value proposition)
2. For whom do we solve that problem? (target population)
3. How important is it for our organisations that we solve this? Is it mandatory? Does it help address service pressures or budget challenges? (organisational imperative) 
4. What effective solutions already exist? Are there solutions that can be borrowed from elsewhere or local solutions that can be scaled up? (what works)
5. Why are we the right group to do this? (our differentiator)
6. Why now? (urgency)
7. How will we get this to happen? (realisation strategy)
8. How will we measure success? (metrics)
9. What factors are critical to success? (solution requirements)

Sustainable Development / Ways of Working Questions

1. How will long term needs be safeguarded? (Long term)
2. How will the prevention agenda be supported? (Prevention)
3. How will the national well-being goals be addressed? (Integration)
4. How will collaboration be enhanced? (Collaboration)
5. How will affected citizens be involved? (Involvement)

90. Use zero-to-ten scale questions to assess wellbeing

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Scaling questions ask people to assess how close they are to a self-identified preferred future using a zero-to-ten scale.  The technique is used in solution focused brief therapy but I am suggesting that it can be adapted for the process of producing a well-being assessment.  The purpose of this post is to set out how.

Well-being Assessments in Wales

One of the things that local partnerships have to do to comply with the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act is produce a Well-being Assessment.  Guidance here if you like the detail.

It is different from the needs assessments that have been required in the past in a couple of important aspects.

First it is based on an asset rather than a deficit model ('what’s good and how can we have more of it?' rather than 'what’s bad and how can we fix it?').

Second there is an expectation that the assessment will be linked logically to an analysis of the likely response (see my post on Driver Diagrams for an example of what this might look like).

These two points, plus the emphasis on achieving a ‘preferred future’, suggests to me a big overlap with solution focused approaches (see my previous post about this) of which scale questions are an established part.

Scale Questions 

Scale questions are not a research method nor are they a scientific tool.  What they are is a way of framing the conversation about a particular outcome and, most importantly, a way of making the link between assessment and action.

Within the therapeutic context, Ratner et al describe it like this:

A solution focused scale is a way of enabling a client to focus on the degree of progress towards their preferred future; it has nothing to do with assessing the extent of their problem. After a client has explored how they have got to where they are on the scale, they can be invited to consider what will tell them (and others) that they have moved to a point further on.  It is important to remember that the scale is the client’s subjective view of the situation.  It is not a scientific assessment! [1]

So, answering a scale question is a matter of judgement and perception not mathematical certainty.  This is of course true of any assessment particularly when a number of different sources of evidence are involved. There is no way, for example, of drawing together quantitative and qualitative research other than by an informed judgement.

In the context of a well-being assessment the appropriate point on the scale can be debated with a view to reaching a consensus.  This is no different from the assessment process that an interview panel goes through to agree a mark for a candidates question or that a tender panel goes through to assess a presentation from a perspective contractor.

The second point that can be drawn from the quote above is that the scale question technique calls for a focus on what positive things have got us to the score that we have agreed.  So, for example, we might think about the outcome; ‘Children have a good start in life’ and agree that it is a ‘5’ for the local area.  Considering what makes it a five may draw attention to excellent play schemes or Flying Start provision – assets to be developed rather than problems to be fixed.

The next step then is to ask ‘Ok, if we are a ‘5’ now, what would get us to a ‘6’?

Hence the technique moves quickly from ‘situation’ to ‘response’.

Applying the Technique to Well-being Assessments

So, what would a well-being assessment, based on scale questions look like?

The first step is to be clear about the preferred future that is being assessed.  This is likely to mean a set of outcomes, broken down into sub outcomes perhaps, that describe the future conditions you want to see.  These are set locally; as with the therapeutic context, the fact that they are 'self-determined' is really important.

The Well-being Assessment will then be structured around those outcomes providing a one-to-ten score for each based on the available quantitative and qualitative evidence.

Here is my suggestion of what each section might look like.

1. The evidence will be summarised for each outcome starting with "One a scale of zero to ten, where zero represents the worst things can be and ten the best they can be, we gave this an 'x'"
2. Next, under the heading “‘Why we gave it an ‘x’”, for each outcome the assessment will discuss “What makes it an ‘x’?”  This will highlight the assets that contribute to the score whether, physical, cultural, services, initiatives or otherwise.
3. The next question is ‘How would we know if we had got one step higher?’  Again, this is a matter of judgement to be negotiated collectively.  The answer might point to the evidence that would be required to push the score one point up the scale.
4. Finally the assessment should propose, for each outcome, “What would make it an ‘x+1’?”  This might point to an extension of existing schemes or approaches that have worked elsewhere.

Benefits of the Technique

Approaching the assessment in this way has a number of advantages:

• As a solution focused approach it places attention on assets rather than problems
• The scale questions allows us to be both ambitious about the future AND realistic – while the statement that ‘children have a good start in life’ may be a desirable if ultimately unachievable in full, the focus on ‘+1’ ensures that the conversation remains manageable and practical.
• Scale questions move us quickly from an assessment of the current situation to what the response might be
• Partnerships will be required to identify a small number of ‘well-being objectives’ and to address them within Well-being Plans.  Using scale questions provides allows progress against different outcomes to be compared (remembering that the scores represent judgements not facts).
• The scale question technique can be more widely used for research and engagement outside of the well-being assessment process - a new tool in the engagement toolbox.
• It is easy to explain and to get people engaged – it lends itself easily to public involvement – a public survey can be fed in, or conducted in parallel, for example.  Public results can be reported separately and compared to the partnerships' scores - big differences will provide an interesting topic for debate!

[1] Ratner, H, George, E and Iveson C (2012) Solution Focused Brief Therapy:  100 Key Points and Techniques P115.

78. Perform your strategies like jazz

We don't like to talk about strategy making do we?

I don't mean the stuff that the strategies are about, we love talking about that, I mean the business of making strategies; the mechanics of how they actually work. That stuff is boring isn't it? But not thinking about that stuff might be a problem if it means those strategies don't do what we want them to do.

Often strategy making is just 'common sense'. You know, vision is followed by aims is followed by objectives that are followed by an action plan.

Sometimes we have a method. Results Based Accountability and Balanced Scorecards have been popular of late. Driver diagrams are something I've come across recently. You might even try something more bottom up like Appreciative Inquiry.

Of course we never have a methodology (despite chronic misuse of the word) but that's another story.

So where Am I going with this?

As someone involved the writing of community strategies and other partnership plans I think it would be great if, in a given locality at least, we could all use the same approach.

Health plans are made differently to police plans which are made differently to council plans etc etc. This makes it really hard to fit plans together - to make them talk to each other.

Having worked on Single Integrated Plans (the Welsh upgrade of community strategies) I've seen how hard it is to incorporate everything into one strategy. Rather than the tricky task of making 'one plan to rule them all' perhaps it would be more productive if everyone simply worked to the same strategy making principles?

Hence the jazz metaphor.

Jazz musicians improvise, yes, but within a shared key, shared time signature and shared tempo (probably).

In the same way wouldn't it be groovy if partners in a given area could agree to work within a common structure including:

• Shared definitions (things like aims, outcomes etc)
  
• Shared method
  
• Shared outcomes
  

Strategies would be made separately but within a shared framework. The result would hopefully be harmonious.

That would be cool man.


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54. Communities of Practice (civic solutions #2)

This is my second post about how whole place partnerships might employ civic solutions to tackle wicked problems. By civic solutions I mean:

Emergent strategies that involve the whole community including public services and the voluntary and business sectors.

My first stab at thinking about what civic solutions might look like in practice focussed on the public innovation literature and ended by looking at the ways in which whole place partnerships might harness collaborative innovation for problem solving.

I want to undertake a similar exercise in this post but this time I am drawing on the communities of practice idea that has grown out of the literature on learning and knowledge management and that is associated with Etienne Wenger in particular. Wenger has provided a general overview of the theory here.  Wenger has also written a book with Richard Mcdermott and William M. Snyder called Cultivating Communities of Practice and it is from this I am getting most of the content for this post.

I first came across the term communities of practice when it was the name of the predecessor to the Local Government Association’s Knowledge Hub. I’m not sure if that was inspired by Wenger’s concept but there are certainly some elements in common.

Anyhow, to business.

Communities of Practice

Wenger et al's definition is as follows:

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topics, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis.

The idea is not a new one; in fact communities of practice are a naturally occurring phenomenon that can be observed throughout history. From the trade ‘corporations’ in Rome to the guilds in the middle ages right up to the tech networks of Silicon Valley in more recent times. We already belong to communities of practice even if we don’t recognise them as such; families, school communities, hobby clubs for example.

At the heart of the communities of practice concept is knowledge management as, according to Wenger et al; ‘knowledge has become the key to success’. Knowledge is collective, a dynamic social process and getting the greatest benefit means finding and utilising the right social structures – and this is where the communities of practice idea comes in. As communities of practice are in some senses natural the way to make them grow is through cultivation – creating the right environment and providing the right resources.

Getting this right can be of benefit to organisations and business in particular. Wenger et al argue that communities of practice have the potential to:

• Connect local pockets of expertise and isolated professionals
• Diagnose and address recurring business problems whose root causes cross team boundaries
• Analyze the knowledge-related sources of uneven performance across units performing similar tasks and work to bring everyone up the highest standard, and
• Link and coordinate unconnected activities and initiatives addressing a similar knowledge domain

It doesn’t take a much of a leap to see that similar benefits would be very desirable in a civic context. Indeed, while the primary concern is with private companies, Wenger et al are also keen to show how communities of practice can be applied to community problems. So, for example, the approach has been used to set up family services coalitions that address the bureaucracy surrounding ‘at risk’ families seeking government assistance in the US. The learning networks that were formed as a result achieved some valuable benefits such as new after school programmes and a dramatic reduction in the forms that families needed to fill out. The point here is that these solutions were emergent and developed from the bottom up – the leadership role was to facilitate the networks not design the solutions.

If we accept the argument of Wenger et al then communities of practice clearly have the potential to provide a means for whole place partnerships to address wicked problems. But what would this mean in practice?

Cultivating Communities of Practice to Tackle Wicked Problems

To help with the task of cultivating communities of practice Wenger et al break them down into three structural elements:

• The domain which creates the common ground and the sense of common identity – affirming its purpose and value.
• The community refers to the social fabric, the relationships and the human interactions.
• The practice refers to the frameworks, tool and ideas, information, stories and documents that the community members share –in order to ‘proceed efficiently in dealing with its domain.

For whole place partnerships these elements can be translated as follows:

• Domain = the outcome they want to achieve or the wicked problem they want to address
• Community = the relevant practitioners, public and politicians
• Practice = day to day delivery of projects, programmes and services

Wenger et al argue that ‘the most important factor in a community’s success is the vitality of its leadership’. In practical terms the role of ensuring that communities stay focussed on their domain, maintain their relationships and develop their practice falls upon the whole place partnership. Building on seven functions that Wenger et al suggest for the role of the community coordinator it is therefore possible to identify the core tasks for a whole place partnership that is seeking to cultivate communities of practice in order to tackle wicked problems:

1. Map the important issues that need to be addressed if the agreed outcomes are to be achieved / wicked problems solved
2. Plan and facilitate community events
3. Promote informal networking between members in the different communities
4. Foster the development of individual community members
5. Ensure that the formal organisations do not prevent communities from functioning – that they give people space, time and flexibility
6. Build resources to support practice such as a ‘knowledge base’, practice events etc
7. Regularly assess the health of the various communities and monitor their impact

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52. Collaborative Innovation (civic solutions #1)

In my post about wicked problems I suggested that the answer to these problems might be civic solutions which I defined as:

Emergent strategies that involve the whole community including public services and the voluntary and business sectors.

In this post I want to look at collaborative innovation as one possible framework for thinking about civic solutions and consider what this approach might mean in practice for whole place partnerships. 

There is a large and diverse literature on innovation and I’m not claiming that this post is any kind of a review.  I’m going to draw mainly on just one recent paper that Sørensen & Torfing wrote as an introduction to a special edition of The Innovation Journal - it provides a nice overview and is of course well worth a read.

Innovation is a contested term insofar as there are a number of different ways to define it.  While the literature has historically been concerned with innovation in the private sector in recent years there has been a growing interest in public sector innovation to the extent that this now represents a field of research in its own right.  It is, however, important to understand the difference.  As Hartley argues in this paper in Public Money and Management:

... there is an important difference in innovation between private and public sectors. In the private sector, successful innovation is often seen to be a virtue in itself, as a means to ensure competitiveness in new markets or to revive flagging markets. In public services, however, innovation is justifiable only where it increases public value in the quality, efficiency or fitness for purpose of governance or services. Moreover, in the public sector at least, innovation and improvement need to be seen as conceptually distinct and not blurred into one policy phrase.

Sørensen & Torfing define innovation like this:

Innovation is a dynamic process through which problems and challenges are defined, new and creative ideas are developed, and new solutions are selected and implemented. It is a complex process with many jumps and feedback loops. Innovation can be seen as an intentional, learning-based practice that incorporates occasional chance discoveries. It brings about qualitative change as it breaks with conventional wisdom and well established practices. Innovation is not always based on an invention, but may also involve identifying, translating and adjusting new ideas and solutions from other countries, policy fields or organizations.

Innovation in this context is an emergent strategy process that depends on bottom up and frontline activity rather than top down planned solutions.  It is about recognising where public services need to be delivered differently, working through options ans implementing changes.   As Sørensen & Torfing suggest, the greatest public value is generated when innovative processes are collaborative, not just limited to individual organisations:

... we propose that public innovation can be further enhanced by bringing together different constellations of social and political actors in collaborative processes that involves a constructive management of difference . A constructive exchange between different kinds of actors helps to identify and define problems and challenges in ways that capture their complexity and to develop new, viable strategies for dealing with this complexity. Collaborative interaction facilitates trust-based circulation and cross-fertilization of new and creative ideas, and ensures a broad assessment of the potential risks and benefits of new and bold solutions and the selection of the most promising ones. Finally, the implementation of the new solutions is facilitated by resource exchange, coordination and the formation of joint ownership.

Hence collaboration is a civic process in the sense that it involves public, politicians and professionals.

But what does collaborative innovation mean in practice for whole place partnerships wishing to employ it as a means of tackling wicked issues?

Again we can turn to Sørensen & Torfing who have mapped out the different roles that managers will have to perform if they are to overcome ‘the different barriers to interaction, collaboration and innovation’.  They argue that managers must act as conveners, as mediators and as catalysts.  Below I attempt to translate each of these roles into a set of concrete tasks for whole place a partnership. 

 

Convening

 

Sørensen & Torfing suggest that:

...in order to create well-functioning interactive arenas with active and committed actors the managers must act as conveners. The convener motivates, empowers and brings together the actors, creates and frames the interactive arena, sets the initial agenda, clarifies the process and ensures a mutual adjustment of the expectations.

For the whole place partnership this could mean:

• Identifying the wicked issues and setting out what is expected to change
• Identifying the people who need to be involved in the collaborative process and inviting them to participate
• Designing the innovation process i.e. as a one off event or a longer term project, determining the method that will be used
• Securing resources; perhaps buying in external support
• Investing in and managing collaborative events as part of the agreed process
• Reporting back to participants at the end of the process
• Giving account, for example to scrutiny or external auditors

Remember, the expectation here is that the process will not be hierarchical; the partnership has to trust participants in the process to design and implement solutions.

Mediating

According to Sørensen & Torfing:

...in order to encourage and facilitate collaboration between the stakeholders the managers must act as mediators. The mediator aims to create or clarify interdependencies, manages the process by dividing it into different phases, builds trust and resolve disputes by aligning interests, constructing common frameworks and removing barriers to collaboration.

This is an interesting point to reflect on – it is important to recognise that conflict (even if it is with a small ‘c’) will exist in local governance and will need to be managed.  Sources of tension may include; competition for resources, funding relationships, issues of legitimacy between the elected and the non-elected; and tensions between organisational and partnership priorities. 

The partnership tasks might include:

• Recognising and understanding tensions and conflict 
• Defining what is shared in terms of values, vision, outcomes etc - but these must real for participants - they cannot be imposed top down
• Managing conflict through the design of processes – using appreciative processes for example
• Using overarching plans to provide a common framework
• Intervening where strategies and plans overlap or are in conflict
• Actively giving people permission to participate where they might otherwise feel constrained

Catalysing

According to Sørensen & Torfing:

... in order to spur innovation, the managers must act as catalysts. The catalyst exercises an entrepreneurial leadership that encourages re-framing of problems, brings new knowledge into play, explores existing and emerging constraints and opportunities, manages risks and encourages transformative learning and ‘out of the box’ thinking.

The point to reflect on here is that while members of the partnership cannot do everything, they certainly can be involved in the flow of the work and show ‘leadership by doing’.

This might include:

• Getting directly involved as a participant inside and outside of events
• Taking ownership of small projects
• Acting as a sponsor / champion to encourage others
• Talking up innovation and showing that they are relaxed about failure
• Enthusiastically communicating to reinforce and appreciate successes

External facilitation might be good in this context as it gives members of the partnership a chance to act and be seen to act as participants rather than leaders.

Photo credit: Jon Fravel

38. Agile Partnerships

I’m arguing in this post that we should apply the same flexibility to partnerships that we are beginning to see applied more and more to public sector working practices.  Before I get onto that, let me say a little a bit about current attitudes to partnerships.

The Partnership Problem

Partnerships, especially the formal ones have a pretty bad press.  The dominant narrative is, in a nutshell, that there are too many of them.  This can be broken down into a number of specific criticisms:

• Many partnerships meet unnecessarily including those that have continued beyond their sell by date
• Too much precious resource is used supporting them
• Many lack clear focus or purpose
• The same people meet again and again in different partnerships
• They lead to unnecessary complexity
• Accountability is unclear – they can create a ‘democratic deficit’

This type of critique (although I have yet to see it properly evidenced – correct me if I am wrong) has led to governments pursuing partnership rationalisation.  This was one of the aims of Local Strategic Partnerships in England and now informs the thinking of the Welsh Government (see this recent consultation).   The argument that follows is that we need to reduce the number of partnerships, simplify structures and create hierarchies so that accountabilities can be strengthened.

The Joy of Partnerships

I want to argue from a different perspective.  I think partnerships are a good thing.  They involve people coming together around a single issue or shared concern such as community safety, health inequality or literacy.  In fact, in many ways, partnerships make much more sense to me than organisations such as local authorities or health boards.

I remember someone from social services once telling me that partnership meetings were usually productive and often motivating; a good use of time.  It was the internal meetings, of which there were many more, that she wished didn’t keep taking her away from her ‘real’ work.

So, for me the ‘partnership problem’ is that we apply organisational thinking (and quite old organisational thinking at that) to something that needs to be fluid and flexible.  Remember, partnerships are not usually organisations in the sense that they formally control resources or people.  And yet we can’t help formalising them, agreeing terms of reference, producing minutes and establishing reporting mechanisms.  I’m not sure that all this is necessary.

Agile Partnerships

I’m really interested in the current ideas around agile working and I think they should be applied to partnerships.  Agile working includes things like home working and flexible working but, at heart, is about being more concerned with the outcome than the process.  Here is one definition from Paul Allsopp:

Agile working is about bringing people, processes, connectivity and technology, time and place together to find the most appropriate and effective way of working to carry out a particular task. It is working within guidelines (of the task) but without boundaries (of how you achieve it).

An agile approach to partnerships would have the following features:

1. Spontaneity - partnerships form wherever and whenever they are needed; there should be no limit on the number.  This should also apply to the ending of partnerships.  People must feel free to walk away when partnerships are not longer working / necessary.  Ironically, more rigidly organised partnerships are harder to end. 
2. Informality Rules – regular reporting, minute taking and partnership agreements should be avoided.  If something needs to be noted or shared then just do it.  Partnerships don’t have to be bureaucratic.
3. Voluntary Participation – it seems to me that the success of partnerships depends on the passion and purpose of the participants rather than the rules we establish to make them work.   If people have to be ‘signed up’ before they can participate then, in my book, it’s not a partnership.
4. One Purpose – However you want to define them, partnerships work best when they concentrate on a single outcome such as reducing domestic violence or the number of young people outside of education, employment and training.  ‘Sector’ partnerships, such as for health and wellbeing or children and young people, risk being overly complex and can struggle to prioritise.
5. Personal Accountability - for me the answer to the problem of accountability in partnerships can be solved by locating accountability purely with the individuals involved.  It is impossible to ignore the fact that people already bring their organisational accountabilities with them but this can be a virtue rather than a problem when people are able to find partners with shared aims. 

Ultimately, I think, the secret is for organisations to invest their trust in the people that work for them and to let partnerships become a natural way of pooling resources; part of the natural ebb and flow of public professional life.  These agile partnerships are surely better than the pseudo-organisations that many partnerships have become; generating the mistrust of professionals and elected representatives alike.

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