Hello, I'm Catherine Mangan. I'm director of the Public Service Academy and also
the head of the Institute for Local Government Studies at the University of
Birmingham. I'm here today to share with you some research and some work that we've
been doing looking at the kind of skills and roles that public services are going
to need in the future. In particular how they're going to be able to innovate in
the world of permanent austerity that public services are now operating within. I'm
going to talk about the research that we've done into the 21st century public
servant which has come up with 10 themes around the roles and skills that public
servants going to need in the future and we're going to cover the ones today that
are most relevant to think thinking about innovation and how councils and
other public sector bodies can do things differently. So the first finding from
the research is that in the future our public servants are going to need to do a
very different and new set of roles and they're going to have to innovate by
thinking very differently. So the kind of roles that we are encapsulating and you
can see on the slide, is this idea of a municipal entrepreneur. So somebody that
works on behalf of a place and can come up with interesting ideas and different
new ways of doing things for that place and with the people that live in that
place. The other kind of roles that we see playing an important part in
innovation are roles such as storyteller.
We know how powerful it is when you say use stories about people's experience of
the public services particularly health journeys, health pathways and ideas
around being a resource weaver. So somebody that understands the kind of
resources that are in a place and can bring those those together in a
different way than they have been done in the past. Ideas around systems
architect, so somebody that can actually design a new system for people that
perhaps is something different and brings, you know, something new to
public services. Ok, I'm going to move on to the next slide. One of the reasons why
public servants are going to have to work in a different way and focus on
innovating and creativity is because our citizens are changing. So
this is an end to deference, citizens are much more able to represent
themselves now. So you know, through social media for example, so there's this
sort of end of, you know, looking to public services and public servants to
sort of help them with things and there's a real call from citizens to be
able to do things with public servants and to be able to design their own kind
of services. So we've seen this in the development of personal budgets, in both
social care and healthcare, where if you give the money to residents they will
come up with some very different models of support and care and that's the kind
of innovation that public servants are going to need to be able to do in the
future, so that sort of letting go of control, letting go of perhaps your
professional expertise and working very much in partnership with citizens to
design something new and something different and when we talk about public
servants is not just about the officers. As you can see on this slide, we've been
doing some work looking at the kind of roles that our elected members are going
to be playing in the future, as well and the kind of roles that we are thinking
of there, are again, a steward of place. So you know, how can the elected members
work on behalf of a place, how can they create new things? Thinking about the
idea of a catalyst enabling residents to do, you know, sort of different things
designing radical ideas and new ways of doing things and again this idea of an
entrepreneur and perhaps an orchestrator who can bring together different people
to have different conversations from those that they've had in the past and
when we've talked to counsellors about this, for them, you know, this is quite a
radical shift in terms of not just being there to represent their residents but
actually working, you know, with them to redesign services and this might not
just be about services because, you know, all the services are you know, being
radically cut. So for example we've heard from councillors who have been asked by
their residents about you know, well what about the bus service? Now you've cut
that how am I going to get to the hospital?
And instead of you know, sort of lobbying for that to be reinstated what the
councillors are now doing are having conversations about 'okay, well who do we
know in the local area that perhaps has got a minibus?' You know, as driving
license you know, who would like to perhaps you know accompany people on a
shopping trip to the local superstore you know, perhaps can we sort of set up
group journeys to the hospital. So it's about having the confidence and
different type of thinking to have those different conversations. This kind of
innovative and creative thinking is going to need a different set of skills
for public servants and what we found is that there's quite a sort of gap between
the hard technical and professional skills that public servants have been
recruited for in the past, they've been rewarded for. So if you're perhaps a
planner, you are promoted on the basis of your knowledge of planning whereas
actually the kind of skills that are going to lead to innovative creative
thinking are much more about the softer skills. So relationship building, being
able to listen, being able to sort of organize, perhaps being sort of more
caring, that idea of emotional intelligence or understanding perhaps
you know, what the real issues are underneath some of the presenting issues
and these softer skills are becoming more and more highly prized but what
we're seeing is not necessarily a shift in the way that people are being
recruited or rewarded. So there's still the focus on the hard technical skills
but actually we need to shift much more towards those softer, more generic skills
in order for people to be able to come up with different ways of thinking. And
with things particularly for example with social care commissioners who
perhaps have been recruited for their ability to manage contracts but actually
in this new world of austerity what they're needing to do is to be very
creative about the kind of packages of support that they are commissioning for
people. So it's no longer about home care, about residential care, much more about
you know, shared lives type of approach you know, this is a circle of care kind
of approach and that's a shift for commissioners, who in the past have
thought in a very firm transactional way to be much more
transformational in the way that they're thinking. And as much as we need a
different set of skills from our public service we also need our organisations
to be very different. So moving away from the sort of traditional command and
control hierarchical, bureaucracy, people that we talk to when we were doing the
research talked about trying to be different and creative and a 21st
century public servant but they're working in 19th century style
organisations and we need to break those silos down and create an environment
where people can be agile and they can work across different parts of the
organisation and sort of get out of there, it's almost that sort of
psychological you know, mind prison that people are in, it's very challenging to
break those down, because again people are quite sort of you know, beholden to
those silos you know feel quite comfortable with that and actually this
idea of sort of agile working you know, boundary spanning even within one
organisation is still quite a challenge to people. But unless we give people the
permission to sort of walk - work across organisations, we're not going to get the
creativity, we're not going to get the sort of serendipity that happens if you
know, if you're sitting next to somebody who's in a completely different part of
the organisation from you, you share things you learn things from them and
creativity can, can flow from that. So what we've been doing to help spark some
different conversations and some creativity within public servants, is we've
come up with a set of playing cards that sort of challenged the way in which
they're sort of currently thinking and currently organised. So an example on the
slide you can see, we've got this idea of freedom to act. So you know, you are not
going to achieve different thinking innovation within an organization where
people are sort of hide bound by processes. So this is about, have people
been given that freedom at all levels of the organisation to try things out to
take a bit of a risk. A senior chief executive said to me the other day that
their mantra was for their staff, was proceed until apprehended, and I think
that's a really nice way of saying, just get on and do things, we want you know,
you're the ones with the ideas, you're close to to the ground, you're close to
people, we want you to, to you know, get on with things, come up with new things. And
I think something that's really central to innovation is this idea in the public
service that we quite often have, is that there is a single you know, magic
bullet out there, that there is one answer that if we could just find that answer
we would solve you know, childhood obesity, we'd solve you know, social care
problems and actually we all know that that's not the case and so what this is
about in terms of releasing you know, innovative creative thinking is about
that sort of incremental discussions about you know, what if we just tried
this you know, this isn't working very well, how could we just you know, try and
tweak this bit of the system to work better and working with other people and
having those conversations daily is much more productive than trying for a Big
Bang solution. And the final sort of a suggestion that I'm going to share with
you is this idea of understanding the whole problem. We know that our public
services are very siloed, even within the combined authorities that we've got here
in the West Midlands and Greater Manchester that we're working with, there is still
that sort of silo mentality and it's very difficult to understand the whole
problem and think creatively about what could be the answer to that big problem
if you're thinking in silos. So the kind of work that we've been doing is working
with frontline staff in a very particular local area and asking them
you know, what do you need to be able to do differently? You know, what do you need
to be able to change in order to make a difference to people here? And so for
example, in one small area in Suffolk, Lowestoft, they've been focusing on
letting the frontline people, the police the GPS, the counsellors, work things out
for themselves and they've had tremendous success in terms of you know,
reducing the number of rough sleepers, reducing the number of them people
drinking on the streets, just by enabling people to come together and understand
the whole of the problem. So we know that for example,
childhood obesity you know, there's not one cause of that, there's not one
solution for that and actually you need everybody in the room to be able to
understand that whole problem and then you can start thinking about what the
solutions might be. I hope that was helpful, I've shared you some of the ideas
that we've had about how we can release some of that innovation in creativity
within our public services. I'm not here today sadly but more than happy to take
you know, questions by email and to continue the conversation. Thank you.