At Mutual Ventures, we talk about Radical Place Leadership. It can seem quite a nebulous concept. Andrew Laird says that when you boil it down, it’s just a story of “silos” and “bubbles”.
When Professor Donna Hall joined Mutual Ventures as Non-Exec Director last year, she immediately pointed to the fact that people are still having to repeatedly tell their story to different public services. The left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing is delivering poor outcomes and costs the system huge amounts in repeated assessments and passing people from pillar-to-post.
This isn’t a new problem. So why hasn’t it been sorted?
The way local services are funded from central government and the way they are regulated encourages service silos. Linked to this, the concept of New Public Management (NPM) still runs rampant. NPM is where you take a big societal problem and then slice and dice it down into commissionable chunks and then apportion out delivery under strict and usually rigid KPIs. Some still consider this way of working as ‘running a tight ship’…But having a ‘tight ship’ doesn’t mean it is sailing anywhere useful! Under NPM, when the pressure's on, often the only response these siloed services have is to raise thresholds and send people away until their situation deteriorates.
So far, so bad.
Many leaders get that this approach doesn’t recognise the complex situation many people find themselves in – but it doesn’t help that some well-known “league tables” still use methodologies which look at individual services, use basic metrics and therefore (probably inadvertently) encourage this type of siloed thinking.
But stay with me! There are some great examples of better practice out there. Donna's Wigan Deal put in place genuinely integrated neighbourhood teams. They had a single point of contact with a person or family and the support worker had time to really understand the situation. Trust was established, core challenges were addressed and opportunities for a person to have a better life were identified and taken.
There are other examples, like the amazing work the Changing Futures Northumbria team are doing in Gateshead. You may have heard of the “Liberated Method”. This wonderful approach focuses on the needs of the person and using common sense to support them. “Start somewhere, go anywhere” is a phrase Mark Smith uses to capture the flexibility.
The problem is that many of these collaborative working practices exist in a bubble created and maintained by: an inspirational person (a maverick, a rebel!) with a driving ambition to push against the system and to do what makes sense; and/or external, time-limited funding, such as a central government programme (Changing Futures is a great example). So, if that inspirational person moves on or the funding comes to an end, the bubble bursts and everything goes back to how it was.
In the case of external funding being withdrawn, it can prove paralyzingly difficult for a local place, and the organisations and services operating in it, to agree and apportion the cost of keeping it going.
So that's the problem. What do we do about it?
This is where the concept of Radical Place Leadership comes in. The idea is to create an enabling environment within which those brilliant ideas, those bubbles, are supported and sustained by the system.
We do this by getting the leaders in a place (Council, NHS, third sector, police and others) to look at the evidence and accept that without better collaboration and a more person-centred approach, none of them will be able to achieve what they need to achieve. To make it real and practical, we identify the top shared challenges they all face. For example, in a London Borough, homelessness is a common challenge across services and organisations. It is a real problem that does not respect service silos.
Having common priorities, missions or goals acts as a catalyst to bring leaders together to create the enabling environment for innovations like the Wigan Deal or the Liberated Method to thrive and be sustainable.
If you can establish this shared view, then anything is possible. You can develop a model for closer collaboration specific to the needs of your communities. You can develop a metrics and community intelligence model that allows you to identify the people who need help before they spiral into crisis.
This type of proactive leadership is needed to break through the silos & connect the bubbles so that this is no longer “radical” place leadership - it’s just what you do every day to support people to live better lives. And what’s more, you can release some of the resource currently wasted on constantly assessing people and passing them from pillar to post.
I have described our approach in more detail, here.
PS - It's also worth saying that this isn't about reinventing the wheel. There will be things in existence in your place like community hubs and the emerging health-driven Integrated Neighbourhood Teams. This is quite often about stitching together what's already there in a way that makes sense to the people you are trying to support.
Do get in touch if you want to hear more - we’d be delighted to offer an exploratory session with your team.
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