Entrepreneurialism in government: 'one ring to bind them all'?

I have just read - Public Service Entrepreneurs - a really good piece about public sector reform by Andrew Adonis. In it he talks about the need for radical reform of public sector delivery and, in particular, fostering an entrepreneurial approach...

... [an] entrepreneurial mindset will be essential. We need to break away from a view of public services that focuses on the efficient and effective distribution of state resources and instead focus on the opportunities to improve people’s lives, ...

...and goes on...

The reason many struggle with the concept [of the reforms] is that it often fails to translate into practical reality for people on the ground.

This makes great sense to me. Lately, there has been much written and discussed about new ways of doing things. A lot of it has focused on principles and governance and structure and process - all of which of course are important - but I have seen very little emphasis on the new behaviours that will be necessary to make it work.

Take a look at the new Government ICT Strategy. It is (genuinely) a sound document, but read the foreword: there is nothing about the human element of the change. To me it's just unthinkable that we could make such huge reforms without attending explicitly to culture, attitudes and behaviour.

If we are to make lasting change then it is really, really important that we have a simple behavioural model that can be expressed in a few words and that can be very easily understood and confidently adopted by everybody, wherever they are or at whatever level. I think that Andrew Adonis has picked just the right thing ("one ring to bind them all" perhaps). "Be entrepreneurial", is all the instruction that will be needed.

The era of the Wicked Politician

A few months ago - piqued by an article in the Guardian - I wrote, in a blog, some advice for the Prime Minister on how to tackle welfare reform, where I advocated a more incremental, experimental, collaborative, long-term (and so on) approach, than I think was contemplated. Mr Cameron has yet to comment; and, if I am honest, I have pretty much given up hope that he will. Busy bloke I guess. But, a long-time (and wise) friend of mine - Glyn Hughes - recently added a response, putting these words in to Mr Cameron's mouth...

"But now imagine PM's Questions if I admit that I don't know what to do about welfare reform, and instead I am going to experiment and learn, and experiment again. In a finely balanced democracy we can't afford to take such a rational approach, and I feel we have to take higher risks in order to demonstrate firm leadership and hopefully deliver visible change before the next election. How can you modify your approach to account for the realities of 21st century politics."

For context behind what Glyn wrote you might want to read the original posting but here's my response...

Ah! Mr Cameron. Here's the important part. It's not really you, or the Government, who needs to do the learning. Or least not the heavy lifting part. This is a job for society. Your job is to create the environment to let this happen. In your Big Society speech last July you said...

"We’ve got to get rid of the centralised bureaucracy that wastes money and undermines morale. And in its place we’ve got give professionals much more freedom, and open up public services to new providers like charities, social enterprises and private companies so we get more innovation, diversity and responsiveness to public need."

Bureaucracy-busting is where I think you need to take the 'higher risks' you mention. You should move quickly to put in place open infrastructure, standards and services - which I like to call Open Platforms - to enable others in society to work on the big problems. Example - roads are open platforms. Government works out where they should go and gets them built: society creates, owns and drives the vehicles that use them. Works well. We need to take the same approach with information management, which is where I sense we can get a good lever on these problems. Do listen to Tim O'Reilly (he of O'Reilly Media) talking about 'Government as a Platform' and the need to move away from, what he calls Vending-machine government.

Head-on, top-down solutions to complex societal problems, by and large, just don't work. I really like the alternative approaches articulated in concepts of Wicked Problems. Wikipedia defines these problems as, "...difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems.” These kind of problems need a more incremental, experimental, collaborative, long-term (and so on) approach.

There's good news that there are plenty of sharp folks advocating this tack. Example: see the Institute for Government report on Government IT - System Error - which talks about Government providing IT platforms to enable agile change. Done right, this approach will bring down the cost of changing things; maybe even some before the next election.

As you said in August, "... unlike previous governments, will govern for the long term. That’s why we are prepared to take the difficult decisions necessary to equip Britain for long-term success." But incremental approaches are not 'jam tomorrow', they should deliver benefit quickly and continuously; and this should give confidence that things are on the right track early. It doesn't mean that things won't be tough - witness the resistance to your Big Society ideas - but carry on.

Perhaps we are entering an era of Wicked Politicians who both genuinely understand how to tackle Wicked Problems and have the political skills (and perhaps luck) simultaneously to keep the electorate onside. Hope so.

Are more-incremental approaches politically difficult or just different? Is putting so much in the hands of society too risky? Do leave a comment.

Solving Wicked problems

That's Wicked with a capital W; not just ordinary wicked. And that's not wicked in the sense of street wicked (ie rather good) nor does it mean dreadfully evil like a demon or a nasty lady with a pointy hat. This Wicked is a term first used by two chaps from Berkeley - Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber - to explain their thinking (in 1972) about tough problems and how to handle them. Pinching the definition from Wikipedia, a Wicked Problem is one...

"...that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems."

Rittel and Webber talk about two types of problem - Tame and Wicked. Tame problems are those that have a clear objective and a straightforward way of telling whether they have been achieved, like putting a man on the moon or holding the Olympic Games or building the Burj Khalifa tower (these problems are undoubtedly hard but they are not Wicked). From the Berkeley chaps themselves ...

...[understanding a Wicked problem] is the same thing as finding the solution; the problem can't be defined until the solution has been found.

...say, fixing inner-city crime or reducing obesity or sharing knowledge better. These are typically problems whose solutions rely more on human behaviour than they do on the laws of physics.

Tame problems are generally solved through well understood and practised sequential processes: visioning, designing, building, testing and implementing (or similar). Wicked ones respond to incremental-ism, entrepreneurial opportunism, self-organising communities, transparent collaboration and adaptive learning. If that sounds like I am mixing methodological apples and pears here, well I probably am. And that's the important thing: the thinking is different.

There is no doubt that our skill at resolving Tame problems has given us much and made our society what it is today. But I sense that, if we are to continue progressing, we will have to get much better at handling the Wicked ones. Tame methods are familiar and (ostensibly) easier to control, but I worry that we may be applying them inappropriately in Wicked situations and doing much less well than we might. I need to stress that I do not at all believe that Tame methods are becoming irrelevant or that there aren't sensible strategies for fixing challenging problems, it's just that I think, as our world becomes more complex and more dynamic (see my post on When community-building leadership will prosper), our toughest problems will no longer yield to traditional approaches.

There is an obvious charge that the Wicked-problem approaches look chaotic and out of control. I guess they may be chaotic (because the context is chaotic and there's no way around that) but they don't need to be out of control. Control in the Wicked world is different and comes from the self-organising communities and transparent communication I mentioned earlier. A few years ago I would not have believed this feasible at the necessary scale but - with the emergence of social software and the new, much more transparent means of collaborating it brings - I think differently now. I believe it is possible.

So, I guess my conclusion is that we need to grow capacity in our organisations to recognise and to handle Wicked problems better, ...which, on reflection, is probably a Wicked problem itself.

This is a quick skim of Wicked problems and I have left loads out. If it rings bells, do look further: the Wikipedia entry is good (I particularly liked the bit about the Authoritative vs Competitive vs Collaborative approaches). For more, read the blog of Deb Lavoy who writes wisely and well on the subject - try her recent piece Planning may not apply. And for Rittel's and Webber's original work, see Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning - despite the non-wicked (the street meaning this time) title and perhaps slightly academic lilt it is well worth the read.

What do you think about this? Do Wicked problems really exist? Do existing engineering approaches actually already cater for Wickedness? Do you recognise a Tame approach failing to solve a Wicked problem? Please do comment.

The future of government organograms

Update 30 July 2011 Since I wrote this post the Government have published a new really rather natty organogram viewer thingy, which is absolutely great. There is good access to the underlying data too. I think my comments about maintenance of the data over time still pertain.

It's great news that the folks at No 10 have published new government organisation charts that Mr Cameron promised in May. Even better, I understand that there are plans to make this information available as electronic data.

But, I am concerned about how this information will be maintained over time. I imagine that most departments will not be keeping such information electronically in their resource management systems in a format suitable for instantaneous publication. For most, I guess that it will have been a not-inconsiderable effort for someone to prepare and validate it. With the requirement coming from the top, the job will have been comparatively easy: in the future, when there might be perhaps less of an imperative, it will be harder. The quality and currency of the data is likely to become uneven across the departments and is almost certain to decline.

I can't help thinking that being transparent about who does what is an important plank in building the new kind of open state that seems to be being so widely discussed at the moment. I believe it's worth a small investment to develop effective ways of ensuring this information is readily available and current.

I wonder if some sort of social solution to maintaining this data would be appropriate? I am thinking of something that will allow individuals to look after their own data such as an organisation chart wiki, like the one that I began on the Cogmap site, or the facility that is available within Yammer. (I have no connection with either organisation). If departments adopted a standard like one of these and used it to publish organisation charts both externally and internally, there would be a significant motivation for individuals to keep their entries up to date.

Even on it's own, something like this would be beneficial, but I can't help thinking that it could be a useful and very visible springboard for other initiatives to further transparency and openness.

I don't assume that this would be a trivial exercise. The software to support such an initiative probably doesn't quite exist yet and the change management involved would need careful thought. On the other hand it's not a huge undertaking either: perhaps it's worth some sort of low-cost experiment? Maybe something like this is already being considered?

If you know of what is happening or have views please do comment.

How to reform big things

On Sunday, the Prime Minister discussed the forthcoming overhaul of the benefits system with Andrew Marr.  A big-deal change challenge.  The discussion was reported on the Guardian's website and the piece drew all manner of comment: some of it amusing and some of it useful (but hardly any of it both). I found myself somewhat agreeing with one of the commenters who, rather rudely in my view, doubted the achievability of Mr Cameron's ambitions. Wanting to be more constructive, I found myself mentally spooling through a list of advice that I would wish to share with Mr Cameron were he perched on my sofa with Sunday cake and tea. Dammit I wrote it down and stuck it there amongst the other 300 comments. I read it again on Monday night and, despite it only receiving 6 Recommends (the Guardian equivalent of Likes), I was pleased.  The piece wasn't intended to be exhaustive or even useful: it was just what I felt at the time.  Copied here...

In a statement about The driving purpose of the Coalition Government on 2 August 2010, Mr Cameron said,

"this government, unlike previous governments, will govern for the long term".

If he really means this, here's what he should do about welfare reform (and probably pretty much every other reform too)...

Acknowledge that in complex and dynamic economies like ours, solutions to the really big challenges can only be grown and not manufactured.

• Accept that genuinely radical welfare reform will take many, many years to achieve and forget the idea of doing something politically big in the short term.
• Completely forget any idea of using 'Big IT' to drive the change - this would cost loads and get nowhere.
• Get going - right now - on some small, localised experiments to model and learn about the long-term reform he wants to grow. Let the learning from these experiments inform more experiments. And so on.
• Put genuine collaboration with the citizen (supported by small and smart IT) at the heart of these experiments.
• Build a team of passionate, smart and emotionally intelligent people to promote these changes. If necessary ignore his recent public sector salary hair-shirtery (many big firms are in the market for these sort of folks again).
• Do not, under any circumstances, allow the intellectual centre of gravity of these experiments to reside in a consultancy.
• And last: let the answer come - don't force it and a solution with the right support, policies, laws, technology will emerge.

Waiting is a change strategy

A play about change, wot I wrote...

Act One

One evening in a kitchen, somewhere in the south of England...

Wife of Change Management Consultant: What's that?

Change Management Consultant: It's an iPhone.

Wife: What does it do?

MC: Phoning and stuff.

Wife: What are you doing?

MC: Emailing someone.

Wife: So it does email?

MC: Yes. Is the kettle on?

Wife: What else?

MC: Stuff. Technology stuff. You wouldn't be interested.

Wife picks up and fiddles with phone...

Wife: I want one.

MC: You don't need one. What time is supper?

Act Two

Two weeks later, same kitchen...

MC: What's that?

Wife: It's an iPhone.

MC: You got an iPhone?

Wife: Yes!

MC: You got an iPhone??

Wife: Yes!!

MC: What are you doing with it.

Wife: Gmail. Google Calendar. Evernote. Remember the Milk. "Stuff", as you put it.

MC: But you hate all that.

Wife: I hated it when you were telling me I needed it. I hated it when I couldn't use it.

Chastened, the management consultant stares at the kitchen table, reminded that dramatic behavioural change is possible in even the seemingly recalcitrant; and that waiting until technology becomes usable by your average non-enthusiast is a sensible change strategy.

Disclaimer - Any resemblance to real persons, living, dead or asleep on the sofa in our living room is purely coincidental.

When community-building leadership will prosper

I reckon that one of the most important determinants of leadership style, is the nature of the business environment in which the leader operates. Think of two independent components of that environment - Complexity and Dynamism. Issues arise when there is change in either of these components. As environments become more Complex, it becomes harder for understanding to flow. Folks at the front line probably won't have the whole picture: managers might have most of the pieces but they probably won't have time to work through the complexity. So, analysis is tougher and decisions harder to make. Leaders respond by hiring more smart folks, strategising, applying analytic leadership styles and so on. And this works fine if Dynamism is low because there is time.

Where there is increased Dynamism, it will be harder to implement enduring top-down solutions because things change quickly. Leaders respond by moving faster, improving processes, relying more on instictive leadership and so on. And this works if Complexity is low because the situation is comparatively simple to deal with.

If there is modest movement on either of the (Complexity/Dynamism) axes, then leadership styles can usually adjust readily because not everything needs to change. But, if there is significant, simultaneous change on both axes, then it will be much, much harder. The established ways of doing things will stretch so far, but will eventually become ineffective. Like this...

This is the situation that I think many knowledge-intensive business are in. To respond successfully we must develop a bias towards more-enabling leadership styles; styles that promote collaboration and the emergence of self-directing cross-disciplinary communities; styles that enable spontaneous change.

In solving strategic problems or in seizing opportunities, the natural response of managers must be to begin by building a community around the situation, rather than by taking a more usual analyse-decide-implement approach. (The analyse-decide-implement stuff still happens but it happens organically within the community.) For many, the new ways will feel odd, if not, plain wrong: "We cannot demonstrate control", "We cannot provide the direction our people are calling for". We can, but the ways of doing these things will be different, so...

...if you want to see change (in Complex/Dynamic environments): first build a community.

Following can be more effective than leading

Dancing Guy - a great video showing... well, all sorts of stuff really. I like it because it shows that traditional leadership approaches may not always be the best way to precipitate change. With thanks to Derek Sivers.

NB This is not a video of me.

Video - The Mighty Flood

Here is a video - The Mighty Flood -about how network organisation models work better than hierarchies in times of great change.

A bit of excitement about transforming government

I am officially very excited.  I was mooching the web a few weeks ago and came across Gov 2.0 Expo - a conference about using the web for transforming government - held in Washington DC - May 25-27.  Three things happened: a subconscious flashing light lit, a contract was delayed and my new passport turned up weeks earlier than expected. Portents were good, the runes aligned and Mrs F wanted me out of the house. So I went. And... it was the most interesting event I have been to for utterly ages - or longer.  I am so glad I was there. Since arriving back I have enthused about it with anyone who would listen (and some who wouldn't) and I guess I now need to write my excitement down.

The conference was about using the web as a platform both for improving the efficiency of government and for enabling a new style of much more effective government. There were several thousand attendees - mainly from the US - representing diverse interests: central government, local government, bloggers and journalists, entrepreneurs, researchers, technical people, all sorts. Although there were many technology firms present, the conference did not have an overly tech flavour.  (I admit was a tad worried.)

For me the flavour was...

Here are some issues that struck me...

Government as a Platform

The chap running the conference - Tim O’Reilly - a prime mover in the Gov 2.0 movement (and coiner of the term), talks about moving away from a Vending Machine model of government - where citizens put in taxes to get services out - to a much more distributed model where government’s role is to provide a “Platform” for the delivery of services; a platform that can be used by anyone: government organisations, private enterprises or even citizens themselves.

We have an example of the beginnings of such a service here in the UK: FixMyStreet.com. If you know of a faulty streetlight, for example, you can use their website to log the problem and mark it on a map. They automatically inform the appropriate authority and chase them up if necessary: hugely efficient. These guys are logging more than a thousand reports a week. Some local authorities have opened up their fault logging systems to allow reports to be dropped straight in by the service: the beginnings of the Platform.

For more watch Tim O’Reilly talking about this.

Opening up Data

There was much discussion of the importance of opening up data. (As has Mr Cameron lately - see his letter to government departments.) A presenter - Joshua Robin, from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, talked about how they solved the problem of getting good quality, real-time information about bus arrivals to travellers.  They had tried to build a system using a conventional delivery approach and made little progress over many months. So, as a pilot, they decided to make their raw real-time data available on the Internet and invited a group of developers to a meeting to explain the problem. The next day one of them had produced an early solution on Google Maps, there was a live website within two weeks, live data fees to electronic signs within four weeks and an iPhone app within eight. All of this at no cost to Joshua’s Department!

It’s a relatively trivial example in the context of many government procurements but I feel that the principles of opening data up, engaging developers directly, tackling things incrementally are very widely applicable.  A simple idea with real vision.

More in Joshua's presentation

Social Media

There was much about social media - Wikis, Blogs, Twitter, Facebook et al - and the huge opportunities they present.  Although I have been involved with implementing some of these tools recently, I learned that I understood less than I thought.  Example: I was surprised when I saw, first-hand, really rich, smart ways that those involved in this Gov 2.0 thing were using Twitter and blogs to communicate ideas, build community and get things happening.

So many friends and colleagues I talk to about social media tell me the same thing; that they have heard about it but just don't have the time/need to get involved.  I absolutely understand: it's completely new and it takes time to get grips with.  I am more convinced than ever that folk involved in any way in transformative change in government, particularly leaders, need to understand social media and have a strategy for using them within their organisations.

Plenty of other folks have written about the conference: try Arianna Huffington or Publivate.

Conclusion

This stuff is important. It is going to happen. Get on the bus.