Radical Place Leadership – Making it possible, easier and sticky

Mark Smith, former Director of Public Service Reform at Gateshead Council and pioneer of the “Liberated Method”, argues that Radical Place Leadership provides the framework needed to embark upon public service reform that actually starts, works and sticks. This article is part of our Radical Place Leadership series.

The growing movement towards relational public services, inspired by the likes of Hilary Cottam and Donna Hall, represents a form of public service and partnership that is hard to disagree with, because it’s more effective and more human.

But it keeps getting stuck when it comes to sustaining, growing and reaching a scale that might create a critical mass and widespread change. A key reason for this is that it’s hard to sustain this work locally, not because the work done is flawed necessarily, but usually because something is missing.

However, there is hope that these lessons, a renewed spirit of cooperation and some developing approaches, such as Radical Place Leadership, can help move the dial on reform.

This short article looks at the various archetypes of where such good intentions, actions and results end up. Perhaps you’ll recognise some of these scenarios? I freely admit that I’ve probably ended up in all these places at some point or other over the last 20 years…

Whilst not leading to the kind of reform that I might have naively hoped for, each attempt, each test-and-learn if you will, taught valuable lessons that helped us to go again, not least that getting up and going again is very much a pre-requisite.

More helpfully, honestly reflecting on the frustrations and barriers honestly helped turn them into provocations and something I can try and do something about.

My reflections revealed several themes:

a. Sometimes it was really hard to get started in earnest, even if the idea had credence and a workable alternative

b. Even if we were able to start something different and do reformative, effective things, it was such a grind, with people (leaders, those in the work, everyone but nerdy me) getting bored sooner or later

c. When we hit upon something that worked, iterated, got better, got traction and gave me hope, someone new would come along with power and no skin in this game and kill it. 

I shared my frustrations with people that I thought might help me makes sense of it and suggest ways forward. This includes the good folk at Mutual Ventures. We realised we needed an approach that had to cover these questions:

1. What makes it possible to start this work in earnest?

2. What makes it easier once you start, both in terms of honing new methods and eliciting system change?

3. How can the learning and gains be sustained within and beyond the scope of the site of learning? (this is the trickiest one)

   
   

One way to make this work is to deliberately and specifically create environments that enable, deliver and make sense of what’s being done and learned. This is especially helpful when done within a bound geography, with broadly co-terminus organisations. These organisations were keen to deliver something reformative to reduce inequality save money and improve productivity.

It also needed relational, radical methods of design and delivery, such as the Liberated Method, as developed by my team at Changing Futures Northumbria (they are still iterating and doing incredible work).

Additionally, there needed to be some evaluative practices that allowed for sense-making such that everyone learned, changed, got better at this. This is something that the public service reform academics at the Policy Evaluation and Research Unit at Manchester Met University have helped me with over recent years.

Mutual Ventures coined a framing for all of this, Radical Place Leadership, which I believe describes the scaffold needed to embark upon reform that starts, works and sticks.

This scaffold suggests three environments that must exist for any successful approach to public service reform.

• Enabling environment – leadership and others with system power to resource and sustain real, practical work and iterate practice and system on the basis of what’s learned.

• Delivery environment/s – where work is done, learning is done, iteration is done

• Sense-making environment – where we specifically gather to look for patterns, relationship of the learning with the current reality (what helps, what hinders)

It’s vital to understand that this is not a structure in which people reside.  These environments in which anyone and everyone can and should be – but what’s key is to deliberately know you’re in the one you’re in at any given moment. Leaders should not lead sense making just because they are often ‘in charge’ and have power to create the enabling environment.

All three of these environments have been created in various projects and initiatives that I’ve been involved in, but very few have created them all and connected them.

Here is what typically happens when you don’t, and I should add that I’ve done all of these to my cost, and to my learning benefit. See if you recognise any of them…

Frustratingly, even if you manage to form this scaffold and the elements connect and iterate, it can still lead to problems. Perhaps the most predictable is ‘appropriation suffocation’: that phenomenon where a successful and enduring initiative or method becomes vogue and as such, every other project starts tagging itself with it. This can dilute, suffocate and distract to the point that genuine reform gets clogged with improvement initiatives that are reinforcing the status quo. This is especially frustrating.

Having an independent source of counsel and challenge with external perspective and no baggage might help to keep your agendas true and to bring about the reform we’re all working towards. I’ve always valued some perspective when I’m trapped in a plan, a cult project or everyone is pinning their work to mine. It’s hard to stay with it without help.

Possible, easier and sustainable – we crack that, and we might well have something to build upon that endures at a time when we very much need it to.

To find out more about MV’s Radical Place Leadership approach, click here.

If you are interested in the ideas presented in this article, feel free to reach out to MV’s Chief Executive Andrew Laird at andrew@mutualventures.co.uk.