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Public services are facing a crisis of purpose.
Funding constraints, workforce challenges, and outdated systems converged to create a perfect storm. Our institutions are now ill-equipped to navigate the demands and complexities of the 21st century.
Our organisational structures often exacerbate these challenges. Siloed working between departments and agencies hinders communication and coordination, preventing integrated service delivery. Centralised decision-making can be inflexible and unresponsive to local needs. Bureaucracy and red tape create barriers for both users and service providers.
Simon Parker writes that many organisations find themselves trapped in a paradox when it comes to strategic innovation:
As things get really tight, it will feel like the safe thing to do is stick with what you know.
Double down on the same processes, hire the same people and hope technology will save us. The problem of course is that if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.
If you really want to be safe , you can’t afford to play it safe any more.
Last week Bromford launched the second of our approaches to place based working. This is an effort to move away from playing it safe, and an exploration into what a social business retooled for the 21st Century should look like.
The old model is broken. We need to shift from traditional, top-down service delivery models to integrated, community-centric approaches.
We need to reinvent our organisations: from the bottom-up.
This requires some fundamental changes:
- Shifting perspectives: Moving away from a deficit-based view of communities (focusing on problems). Moving towards an asset-based view (recognising strengths and resources).
- Empowering local teams: Giving teams in specific areas the autonomy to make decisions. Allowing teams to tailor services to a community’s unique needs.
- Building strong partnerships: Collaborating with local authorities, the NHS, and other organisations to tackle community needs effectively.
- Breaking down silos: Bringing together different teams within Bromford (neighbourhood coaches, engineers, cleaners, etc.) to work collaboratively in place-based teams.
The productivity malaise that has overcome many sectors is mirrored on the other side of the Atlantic.
Also last week Donald Trump appointed Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk to lead a new non-governmental “Department of Government Efficiency”. This has upset a lot of people.
I get it.
You might think Trump, Musk or Ramaswamy (or all three) are insane.
You might think this raises all sorts of conflicts of interest, particularly for Musk when it comes to subsidy.
But, if we just park those two major concerns, can we agree it’s not the worst idea? Especially if it was, instead, a Department of Government Effectiveness? (We’ve already established that being efficient is not half as effective as management would like to think.)
We are wasteful. I think most organisations are at least 30% wasteful but I’ve been challenged by people who think it is closer to 60%
Wasteful as in: difficult-to-use systems that complicate processes and hamper what customers and colleagues really need.
Wasteful as in: corporate guff that fills time but adds no value and results in calendars chock full of back to back meetings.
Wasteful as in: siloed teams and directorates getting in the way, and creating one size fits all practice that isn’t adaptable to complex human lives.
Most companies think and see in vertical lines across a series of vertical silos. This leaves numerous blind spots where complexity and inefficiency can thrive: cross-functional, cross-geographical, cross-business activities. This space is like the dark web – an ungovernable place where no executive or team has a single point of accountability.
It’s in this dark place that the way the organisation really operates is revealed. This doesn’t appear on any structure chart, in any process map, or in any strategy.
Yet rather than looking here , or even becoming aware of its existence, we can often spend our time rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic instead. Doing restructures, bringing in new people and consultants, incrementally improving processes that often shouldn’t exist in the first place.
Once you look into this space between the silos you see that whole system change is needed. Whole systems thinking: recognising that the parts of a system are all connected and, therefore, influence each other is required to address it. Rewiring this requires a commitment that few will be willing to make.
Our decision at Bromford to move to place based working literally forces you to look into the space between the silos and re-think the organisation from a horizontal perspective.
Perhaps we fail to deal with the 30% of waste simply because we are looking at it the wrong way. We don’t need a Department of Effectiveness, we just need to look at the problem from a different perspective.
Never look vertically.
Look horizontally.
Once you’ve seen the wasted time, money and effort you can never unsee it.
Related: The Anatomy of a Bad Idea: How Poor Decisions Are Made