Trending
Our job is to the mind the gap between the bureaucracy of our systems and the opportunities in our communities ~ Cormac Russell
Who really benefits from the bureaucracy of our systems and organisations? It’s certainly not the people they were set up to serve.
I’ve recently finished Dan Davies’ book The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions. In it, he describes how systems have evolved to create “accountability sinks”: situations in which a human system delegates decision-making to a rule book rather than an identifiable individual. If something goes wrong, no one is held to account.
We can all identify with being being stuck in the no-mans-land where no one is responsible, but an anonymous and Kafka-esque system.
In the social sector it can be worse, as the ‘decided upon’ have no power. That lies purely in the hands of the decision maker.
In fact the entire premise relies on the decision maker. For all the talk of co-creation, collaboration and customer focus the ‘decided upon’ have little voice.
The challenge is how to switch your organisation to be in listening rather than decision making mode. And that requires more than a new leader or CEO. It requires a whole system change.
A move from telling to listening.
A move from managing to coaching.
A move from filling the gaps with services to closing the gaps through connections.
The bureaucracy of our systems would be reduced if we stepped back and listened before acting.
Last week we began the first phase of place based working models, but it’s really less of a model and more of a hypothesis:
“Does connecting the people who already work in a place together, and removing them from management and stakeholder silos, lead to better outcomes for the public?”
In response to our first weeknote on this Eoin McFadden linked to an article he wrote discussing organisational debt:
Organisational debt (is) behaviours and structures which may have been fit for purpose at a time in the past which are the issue. These behaviours and structures have been allowed to continue, even when they are no longer optimal for the organisation.
In an organisation as old as the one I work for, that debt can build up to such an extent that the people who are supposed to deliver maximum value become constrained by the organisational debt layered on top of them. Organisational physics compounds the problem, as Eoin explains:
Public sector organisations are usually organised as pyramids with staffing and budgets allocated to business areas with specific corporate plan objectives. This has the advantage of clear accountability for expenditure against outputs. However, this often siloed approach to delivery can act as a disincentive to collaboration and innovation. Outputs may be defined against the resources available rather than resources targeted on the optimal outcome.
What gets measured gets done, unfortunately ‘what gets measured’ is rarely of value to a real human being.
Place-based and person centered approaches begin to flip that approach by starting with listening not measuring, as Wendy Lansdown says it’s more about ‘responding based on what we hear, rather than on a KPI’.
It’s not easy to change people’s mindsets from deciding to listening. It’s not easy to remove the scripts, policies and rules we have built around our institutions that suffocate creativity and deny accountability.
That means:
- Refusing the urge the micro manage – instead investing in people and giving them the space to think differently.
- Relentlessly giving people permission to challenge preconceived practices and ‘rules’.
- Refusing to rush to technology as a solution, recognising the vital role of people as relationship builders.
- Taking a different attitude to risk and learning from failure
In essence, listening and responding are essential components of accountability because they promote learning, growth, trust, and positive outcomes.
We need to move on from a decided by/decided upon model to one that is genuinely:
‘listened to’ and ‘decided with’.
Related: Imitation Breeds Mediocrity