Public sector innovation

One of my current projects is related to the government's recent efforts to transform the delivery of rural public services - in particular in relation to farming, food and conservation. there are many stimulating thoughts around this, but the one I've had in my mind all morning is about the culture of public services, and how this affects innovation. So what I've been discovering in my interviews is a mindset. And then I came across this post by Seth Godin about Abundance and Technically Beyond Reproach, which just sums it up a treat. He concludes with this:

I think what it comes down to is the first question you ask yourself when you see an opportunity or a challenge.

Is it,

"How can I make this bigger, do it faster and change the outcome for all of us?"

or is it

"If this doesn't work, will I get in trouble or will I be okay?"

So the next question is, what to do about it? There is a real need to innovate in the delivery of public services, and from my interviews, there are plenty of people out there at the sharp end with excellent ideas on what to do. But the culture and organisational structure ensure that they either develop a TBR attitude over time as they fail to combat the culture and organisation, and maybe as they get stuffed too frequently by 'getting into trouble'.

Or they leave. As I did. So what's next? Well I'm mulling over a few ideas as part of my report back. Watch this space...

On the road again

So tomorrw at a far less reasonable time of the day than in the summer, I head off to the UK for 10 days. Some work for a faithful and much loved client, (and ex-employer), and a fair bit of time at the home ranch in Swansea.

These work trips have the feel of a relativity experiment sometimes. The difference in the experience of passing time between my small but perfectly formed family here, and me while I'm there is vast - light years you could say, (if you were prone to exaggeration). And the difference in my experience between when I'm here and when I'm there is also big, (as in space is big ... you may think it's a long way down the road ...). I enjoy the contrast myself, although the transition is a bit wierd.

Preparation today is not just bits of paper and files from PC to laptop, but also practical, (wood, fuel oil, cashflow, garden etc.). It is also remarkably psychological. The only analogy that springs to mind is shutting down one PC operating system and booting up another one.

This opens up interesting questions about my research idea where 'living in two worlds' is one of the themes. I wonder if the transition from virtual to real geography is similar. I read an interesting peice somehwere about how multitasking isn't that efficient because of the impact of changing attention from one task to another and back again, (however necessary it gets sometimes). These kind of changes disrupt the 'flow' of being thoroughly connected to your task or moment. So what do we know about these changes? How can we understand them better? What implications do they have for anyone wanting or needing to manage the processes as effectively as possible?

Declutter

I'm having a bit of a professional tidy up at the moment. I have phases where I generate a few ideas and then follow a few up until I see whether it works out or not. Sometimes this trial period can becoem a bit of a habit, and I forget to check if it's worked out. In the last couple of months, I've been aware of a lack of job satisfaction and have been gradually exploring what that's all about. And gradually closing chapters and trying to tidy up loose ends. The elephant and the flea experience is part of that, but by no means all of it. At the smae time, I'm discovering the joy of binning 'stuff' that might have been useful if some of the trials had come off, but now they are being parked, it can go.

This has spilled over into other aspects of my life too, as I let some things go, and put others away. Not surprising since I've been deliberately weaving my life into one story instead of a collection of boxes. A minor part of that is the pile of about 100 paperbacks that I want to pass on. I have had a few thoughts about how to do it:

Amazon third party, (but I have to get them all back to the UK);
Giving them to charity shops, (but I have to get them all back to the UK);
Trying some kind of book swap here in France, (I like this but need to think of some ways to do it). One idea is that for the cost of exchange postage, I could swap with other expats.
Or, maybe there are enough expats or other English readers around here somewhere that I could stick them in the ZX and trot off to meet up with a few other folks and swap.

Anyway, they're all here, if anyone is interested in finding out what they are, let me know. If you have an idea of how to get them out into circulation, please tell me!

Looking in, being there

The outside view is useful. You've heard it as

+ objectivity
+ thinking outside the box
+ getting a second opinion
+ bouncing ideas off someone
+ an outsider's view
+ helicopter view

and many others. It's one of the things I do for people, as a coach, researcher or project catalyst. I am more and more involved in conversations. They have a great advantage in opening up empathy and trust. But they also have the bonus of being two-way. So I learn something about myself as my partners learn something about themselves, their projects or the world they live in. To do that though means allowing the flow to be that interactive, without diluting or confusing my partners' needs from the time we spend together. I think I can do more of that. By choosing who I work with, how and why. I have increasingly detatched myself from some of the more distracting motivations for working with people, like money, and portfolio status, among others. It's a risk. But I have to say that now when I work with someone, I really want to do it, because I believe in what they are doing, and I see our time together as a joint adventure into the world. So in fact it's not that I believe in what they are doing, but in what we are doing together for however long it is. If I choose to create that partnership, then I am in there 100%. I believe it's good for us; time will tell ...

the elephant and the flea

Another of Charles Handy's best sellers sprung to mind over the last few weeks as I work through the inevitable pain of disengagement from one of my longest projects. There is a structural issue, symptomatic of which is cashflow. Big organisations, especially when nested in a context of other big organisations do not move quickly. And small independent people like me end up trying to carry the highs and lows of the inevitable cash flow roller coaster. The same problem can crop up for any small business working in bigger environments, to the extent that in the UK the government has recognised it in the right to charge interest on late payments. I'd be interested to know what effect this has had on the number of small businesses going to the wall.

The worst offenders are apparently in the public sector, and this is the case in my current experience, although I have other far better behaved public sector clients, (THANK YOU!) In France, I am assured that things are even worse. Why doesn't that suprise me? Public sector contracts are frequently known to take up to two years from invoice to payment.

For my part, I pay bills as quickly as possible, especially to other small contractors like myself. On a more general note, I wonder about the sustainability of large established inflexible organisations in either the public or the private sector, and the tendency of third sector organisations or entrepreneurial business start-ups to emulate them after a certain period. My theory is that there are ways to maintain flexibility based on understanding project dynamics. There are ways of making start-up, delivery and wind-down, new start-up, delivery etc. etc. into a way of professional life across the sectors, rather than some kind of bizarre exceptional 'change management' project, or 'IT roll-out'. Well, I'm thinking I may need to team up with some like-minded people, (if there is such a thing) to do it and see.

I think it was Kathy Sierra that recently refered to a piece on dignity is deadly by Paul Graham, about how this early energy gets lost as an organisation somehow chooses to become a 'proper, dignified, professional' place, instead of the dynamic, can-do place it used to be. It's worth a read.