In our heart, we know the solution does not lie in reforming silo by silo but in organizing our silos the way people organize their lives, so that the neighbourhood becomes our primary unit of analysis and change – Cormac Russell
I’ve spent two days this week with both the
Connected Places Catapult in London and the
Energy Systems Catapult in Birmingham. I’ve had long conversations about climate change, automation, the ageing society, housing shortages and technological disruption. And that’s before we got to health inequality, crime or poverty.
My brain is a little fried.
We are faced with countless wicked problems in the world—issues so severe and so complex that finding answers almost seems impossible.
And yet right now as I write this there’s a politician on my TV claiming they’ll have ‘solved’ four or five of these by 2030. Good luck with that.
In truth every single one of this intractable problems will affect our organisations to some degree. How do we respond without going bankrupt (or insane) in the process?
First of all – let’s take a deep breath before we launch any new initiatives.
Earlier in the week I learned that for all the millions spent on smart metering and fuel initiatives
precisely nothing has changed in our behaviours. We still use the same amount of fuel.
It’s valuable to look at the outcomes we are getting before launching something new.
The National Health Service we are told is
the world’s best healthcare system. Yet the NHS has a poor record on one fairly important indicator – actually
keeping people alive.
We often hear that
housing associations prevent homelessness , but in the 50 odd years since
Cathy Come Home rough sleeping has increased from about
965 people each night to over 4000.
We have a ‘world class legal system’, but most of our prisons are overcrowded. By contrast the Netherlands has
a shortage of prisoners.
How can it be that so many sectors face such crisis at
exactly the same time. Is it rising demand? Lack or resources? Or the impact of years of austerity?
Or is it something more fundamental. A deeper design flaw.
Perhaps we are too keen on firing magical silver bullets – that look like attractive ways to solve deeper problems.
As
Chris Bolton has written – in organisational life the term Silver Bullet has come to mean anything new that can miraculously solve difficult problems. But as he says silver bullets should actually be called Silver Boomerangs, because they fail to address the problem and keep coming back. How to avoid them? Well, I’m with Chris , if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
My reflections on this week is to return to themes that I, and many others, have written about before.
How much of our impact across the social sector is diluted by our lack of connectedness?
How much of our impact is wasted through by-passing the process of facilitating citizen-led discovery, connecting, and mobilisation?
When all of the bullets are being fired by disconnected organisations at disconnected individuals it’s hardly surprising that most of them miss their target.
Why don’t we have seamless health, care and housing that isn’t compartmentalised, siloed and rationed across disparate organisations?
And how much of our collective resource is tied up in back office ‘management’ rather than pushing ourselves ever closer to the community?
What would it take to make such a radical shift?
In a provocative piece Adam Lent makes the case for a new law that would shift power from public institutions and into the hands of citizens. If institutions are reluctant to drop their paternalistic mind-set, handing power and resource over to communities to solve their challenges themselves –
why not force them to through legislation?
Placing unconditional devolution and a duty to collaborate on local authorities and institutions may sound radical, but it shouldn’t be dismissed given the challenges we have.
Whether we legislate or not we need to see a transformation in leadership within our organisations. People simply aren’t prepared for a world requiring citizen led change. As I’ve written before, there are reasons for
why we don’t collaborate, and our organisations are largely complicit with them.
To paraphrase Cormac – it is time to awaken to the fact that we don’t have a health problem, nor a social care problem, nor a climate problem, nor a housing problem, we have a neighbourhood problem.
The worst two things you can do in a crisis is panic and throw money at the problem. Pausing, reflecting and doing some deep problem definition, could be the least exciting but most radical thing we could do right now.
Related:
The Smartest People Will Never Work For You
