Change and Complexity gets thrust upon local council services
So, I was working to design services on day, and the next day all that was out of the window.
A council realised that they had to put together a response to COVID19. This was morphing into something new every day, it is highy complex for the council (because it is so unknown), and the trajectory is rapidly upward.
They asked me who I had worked with in the past, and as someone who thinks differently to them, to help.
On friday we started with a room, and three people who were given tasks to pull together various bits of information. And the steps of how we progressed are like this:
- Greet each other, and I helped them to state that we need to know what we are here for, and then to work out what to do.
- We also realised that this needed to move to a point of knowing, from the unknown. The first real step was to know.
- Then we began by sensing what was happing from a systems picture. Starting with the purpose, that had to be defined from the public’s need.
My role here was to help them, to create clarity from fog. To bring in systemic thinking, and to develop a team. A team, as opposed to a group, is one that has a purpose.
4. We listened to demands, and the need from the public was suddenly easy to grasp. And so we formulated priorities based on these demands. We formulated the main actors in the system as we saw it at that time.
5. The team working together is critical, and we had a conference call with a couple of others who were working from home. We paid attention to listening to them and pulling them in to our collective work. We were forming. I was ensuring that we were creating a safe space for everyone to work within, especially as so many workers simply get told what to do in their normal work. This has to be different.
5. At the end of day one, we realised that we were getting somewhere. We felt we had a sense of the direction we were going to go in. We had some actors and structures that we needed to populate with knowledge. We were sensing the possibility of making decisions that will help people.
So, my role is facilitator, to help them look at this systemically, to work in a way where the team of people catalyse and magnify the output of each individual person. From a complexity perspective, the nominal operational mode is sensing, coordinating and collaborating. Doing this best by networking face to face. There is no other way… certainly not how they were used to working in their regular jobs — for however long they had been working there!
Monday Day 2 — we are starting to understand who is doing what, and the team in the room has had to move to a bigger room — we had 7 in today.
I was writing up simple diagrams to help describe how we were working, and moving onto end to end flows. The big one today is to link those who have with those who need. That is emerging as the real purpose of our team.
What I find really interesting, each time I work with a team, is that the data that we find in the IT systems, the knowledge that is stored, is helpful. But it is never as useful as the collective knowledge that the staff have, And that collective can work together to resolve issues that are highly complex, from people who have little idea as to what the problem to sovle really is. In this game, brains are far greater than computers.
Reporting
Reporting is a big topic in most organisations. The bigger the organisation is, the greater the importance of reporting. They need robust structures to push the information up the hierarchy.
We were asked to write a daily update for the SLT… Hang on, thats writing something complex down simplistically, in ways that bear little resemblance to the reality, and it is one way communication only. Fine for simple and procedural operations. We said that we needed a person from the team to go to the SLT meeting when Covid19 comes up on the agenda, and we give a verbal description of what we are doing. It allows the SLT to then ask questions, and to interact with the team in real time. I great example of changing behaviours, and yes thats happening now…
Methodology
The underlying methodology is that we as innovative change/ designers/ systems thinkers/ etc; we have the skills to help deal with complexity, to rapidly create clarity, and to move with uncertainty. We must be agile, and to work with a disparate group of people who need to be pulled together quickly.
We need to help them to challenge current decision-making so that they develop the confidence to sense when they need to make decisions themselves. They need to sense what matters, and to act. I help them to release their fear from risk and lack of accountability. I help them overcome GDPR inspired rigidity.
The concept of agile working and prototyping is essential here. It is about reacting one way, then adapting to a new way when Boris adds something new. It is about trialling something and paying close attention to the outcomes.
I have experienced that when anyone in an organisation is working normally, their mind works in a particular fashion that teveryone is familiar with .The public sector loves their meetings and consensus. But, when a crisis happens, something happens to that person’s mind, so that normal rationality and behaviours seem to go out of the window. So, suddenly when COVID19 hit, no-one could even think about normal operations. I tried very hard, but my mind was not able to focus on the re-designs anymore. My logic had become quite different.
I like Grint’s description of complexity, where the three states of critical, tame and complicated, and complex exist in different realms. They require quite different approaches, ways of perceiving and actions to resolve. We had suddely been thrown into crtitical. But while Grint states Command & Control as the management behaviour, the action on the ground was complex. And it was up to us to make sense of that dichotomy, and to dance between them.
I am writing this sitting in a room with no TV, in a council building full of vulnerable residents. The restaurants are shut, and I have gone into survival mode as to finding food. (I dont react well to my favourite restaurants closing!) Tomorrow, we have a great agenda to kick off with, and lets see what dice get thrown in our direction
