session 5 · •• resume responsibility • use their knowledge • • support their efforts get...
TRANSCRIPT
Session 5 - Leadership for Turbulent Times
Anton Florek, Strategic Adviser, Staff College
Public services face unprecedented challenges. Rising demand, changing demographics and increasingly stretched finances mean that the choice for local authorities and public service providers is stark: change the way they work, or face the possibility of service retrenchment, increasing irrelevance and perpetual crisis management.
RSA (2015)
Over the course of this decade, UK Government spending is forecast to decline by a fifth as a proportion of GDP. Among advanced economies, the UK looks set to drop from the 16th biggest spender on its state to the 26th, requiring a profound adjustment in how the public sector operates. In other words, Government in the UK is recalibrating – and that recalibration aims to align lower public spending with a leaner public sector.
The State of the State, Deloitte LLP (2015)
Recalibrating government
£1 billion – what the UK currently spends on debt interest per week – more than it spends on education
Deloitte LLP (2014)
The State of the State in numbers
Liverpool City Council…....
After 2017, he (the Leader) maintains, the Council will not only have no money for any discretionary services beyond what it is legally required to deliver, but “we will also have to cut some statutory services”.
Scaremongering? The Council’s auditors, Grant Thornton, put it almost as strongly: “It is possible that during 2017/18 the Council will no longer have sufficient funds to deliver any discretionary services. A tipping point could be reached in 2018/19 when the Council could struggle to fund all its mandatory service provision.”
A remote group of British islands is about to run out of money for the
day-to-day running of the community…….
The Council of the Isles of Scilly says it has been told it will need to borrow up to £3.5m to cover costs until April………
….....debts have been building up for several years and the council says it only has £500,000 in the bank.
Scilly’s Council has been issued with a formal notice to improve its financial controls and has been told it will need to borrow up to £3m to pay its staff and suppliers in the last two months of the financial year. (February 2017)
Council launches crowdfunding campaign
A £400,000 crowdfunding campaign is being launched by Brighton and Hove City Council to kick-start the repair and regeneration of a section of the city’s crumbling Victorian seafront arches. Council leader Warren Morgan said: "We're not looking to raise funds for the whole of the restoration works but we do need support to raise an initial amount to get the ball rolling." BBC News
9
Raising retirement age will not plug black hole Legal & General has warned that the Government will have to raise taxes, borrow more or cut back on healthcare spending, even if the retirement age is raised by 10 years. Projections by L&G Investment Management show raising the state pension age to 75 will still leave the Government with a budget deficit of more than 5.5% of GDP. The Daily Telegraph (2017)
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has published its analysis of the budget and warned that Britain faces “a third parliament of austerity” after 2020.
On your table:
• compare and contrast the effects of austerity measures in your local area
• compare and contrast any new ways of working that are emerging in response
• what new thinking is emerging regarding the ongoing role of the LA over the next 5 years?
Permanent White Water:
• The effect of the national austerity measures
• The perception of the welfare state by citizens.
Leading to:
• The changing context of working in the public sector.
Volatility
Uncertainty
Complexity
Ambiguity
Turbulence and countless, often conflicting, dynamics at work
The past is no longer an accurate predictor of the future = less scope for confidence and certainty
Inter-connected events and apparent randomness of results – cause and effect become indiscernible
The combined impact of volatility, uncertainty and complexity – even experts struggle to make sense
Paparone et al. ‘From the Swamp to the High Ground and Back’ (2011)
One of the key failures is to lead us to find what is probable rather than what is possible. The VUCA environment means that we must focus on what is possible (because anything can happen) rather than on what is likely to occur (which is determined by what happened before).
Oxfordleadership.com (2017)
Vison
Understanding
Clarity
Agility
• Ask different types of questions;
• Take on multiple perspectives;
• Develop a systemic vision;
• Look at the whole picture; take a step back to see
what’s possible.
So, why do you do what you do?
Valuing and believing:
Beliefs are the underlying convictions which determine what is valued and are reached by imaginative leaps which go beyond that which is possible to prove
Values are concepts like truth and justice in which we evaluate thoughts, feelings and actions
Opinions are reasoned personal judgements derived from valued concepts and beliefs
Attitudes are the expression of personal judgement influenced by feeling
Behaviour is the active response made to situations
So, what is our common moral purpose?
Question:
Leadership at local level
Moral authority does not come from managing people efficiently or effectively or communicating better or being able to motivate. You get moral authority by:
Being authentic and genuine: believing in what you do, showing a willingness to be open to what you don’t know and by expressing your true feelings and emotions. Demonstrating integrity: acting ethically, ensuring that your words and actions match; showing that you serve a purpose beyond yourself and through this you build trust. Having self-belief: being confident and showing conviction in what you do and how you do it; being able to articulate why your vision and your direction is right for the organisation and those within it. Showing self-awareness: being sensitive to your impact on others and to the emotions and interests of others; recognising when you are going too far or losing followers. Being able to demonstrate a real and deep understanding of the business you are in and through this build confidence.
Ethical leadership demands authenticity and the willingness to tell it the way it is, to create “islands of sanity” as part of of the foundation from which to work out together a way forward. The Staff College (2015)
Wicked, Tame & Critical issues
Anton Florek, Strategic Adviser, Staff College
Grint (2005) defines leadership by the type of problem an organisation faces. He categorises problems as tame, critical or wicked:
• Tame problems are where the causes of the problem are known and can be tackled by applying known processes through conventional plans and projects. Tame problems require management.
• Critical problems threaten the operations of the organisation in the short term. Decisive action is called for and people are required to follow the call for action in a highly disciplined way. With this type of problem a leader takes charge. Critical problems require commanders (often this is confused with leadership).
• Wicked problems involve complex challenges that can rarely be solved and which tend to have multiple stakeholders who have different perceptions of both the problem and the solution. Wicked problems require leadership which is best displayed as asking intelligent questions.
Tame, critical and wicked issues
• Problems as puzzles
• Complicated rather than complex
• Resolvable – have technical solutions
• Management problems
• Requires management
• Examples:
• introduction of new systems
• completion of review
Tame
• ‘Self-evident’crisis
• Immediate and real threat
• Requires immediate action
• Legitimises coercion for public good
• Requires commander/ direction
• Examples:
• Safeguarding intervention
• Civil emergencies
Critical
• Either novel or recalcitrant
• Complex rather than complicated
• Multi-faceted – requires collaboration
• No right or wrong solutions
• Coping rather than solving
• Inevitably uncertain & ambiguous
• Requires resourceful leadership to maximise potential capacity
Wicked
Increasing uncertainty about solution to problem
TAME
WICKED
CRITICAL
CALCULATIVE/ RATIONAL
NORMATIVE/ EMOTIONAL Soft power
COERCION/ PHYSICAL Hard power
COMMAND: Provide Answer
MANAGEMENT Organize Process
LEADERSHIP: Ask Questions
Increasing requirement for collaborative compliance/ resolution
Grint suggests that the most appropriate approach to tame problems is to manage them. It is best to command crisis situations and making progress on wicked problems requires the exercise of leadership.
Activity
Of those challenges which you are currently facing, which are Tame, and which are Wicked?
In trios discuss and determine which are the wicked issues facing you Prioritise these!
Session 6 - Adaptive Leadership
Anton Florek, Strategic Advisor, Staff College
Think of a leader….................
Leadership
“Leaders need to create a climate where the organisation learns, effectively using information and questions and ensuring that honest mistakes are not punished”
Leslie and Canwell (2010)
“Managers and leaders aim to reduce anxieties – their own and others – in a world of disorder and uncertainty. Everyone wants there to be someone, somewhere in control”
Zwanenberg (2010)
Adaptive work is required when our deeply held beliefs are challenged, when the values that made us successful become less relevant, and when competing perspectives emerge.
Heifetz, R. A. and Laurie D.L. (1994)
Adaptive Leadership Beliefs behind Heifetz’s work:
• problems are embedded within complex systems
• much of human behavior reflects an adaptation to circumstances they are in
• people adapt more successfully to their environments by facing painful circumstances and their fears and developing new attitudes and behaviors rather than ignoring or avoiding them
• leading change involves loss. Slide taken from a presentation by Dr Val Ulstad
Identify the adaptive challenge
Cook the conflict /
regulate distress
Create the holding environment
The Seven Principles for Leading Adaptive Work
• Create the heat • Sequence and pace the work • Regulate the distress
Protect the voices of leadership from below
• Resume responsibility • Use their knowledge • Support their efforts
Get on the balcony
Give back
the work
• Work avoidance • Use conflict positively • Keep people focussed
• Ensuring everyone's voice is heard is essential for willingness to experiment and learn • Leaders have to provide cover to staff who point to the internal contradictions of the organisation
• May be a physical space in which adaptive work can be done • The relationship or wider social space in which adaptive work can be accomplished
• A challenge for which there is no ready made technical answer • A challenge which requires the gap between values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours to be addressed
• A place from which to observe the patterns in the wider environment as well as what is over the horizon (prerequisite for the following six principles)
Maintain
disciplined attention
Heifetz, R A and Linsky M (2002) Leadership on the Line Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading, Harvard Business School Press.
Adaptive leadership recognises there are basically two kinds of problems that people confuse when trying to find solutions. First, there are “technical problems” where an adequate response has been developed; there are one or more experts with general credibility and an established procedure will suffice i.e. there is an established procedure to follow, etc. The problem is more mechanical and someone can “fix” it.
The second kind of problems are “adaptive problems” where there are no set procedures, no recognised experts, and no adequate responses developed. In practice, the problem definition is not clear cut and technical fixes are unavailable.
It calls for adaptive leadership where the leader does not have the answers. Instead, for adaptive problems, change must come from the collective intelligence of employees at all levels. Together they learn their way towards solutions.
Adaptive versus technical problems
Martin Linsky Ron Heifitz
Adaptive versus technical challenges
Technical
What’s the work?
Applying current know how
Who does the work?
Experts who have learned how to apply it
Adaptive
What’s the work?
Learn new ways of being/ acting
Who does the work?
The people with the problem
Working out your adaptive challenge…
Adaptive work diminishes the gap between the way things are and the way things need to be to create a better future.
The most common cause of leadership failure is treating an adaptive problem with a technical fix.
Getting on the balcony and watching the dance floor • reflect on the action you are part of
• get perspective, leave the dance floor
• step back in the midst of the action
• look at what you are doing as well as what the others are doing
• unpick your emotions
• look at authority figures for clues
• listen to the song beneath the words
• ask – what is really going on here?
An example of getting on the balcony
William Ury is an American author, academic, anthropologist, and negotiation expert
Using Adaptive Leadership • Observing events and patterns
around you
• Interpreting what you are observing and developing multiple hypotheses for what is going on
• Designing interventions based on your observations
• Move back and forth between the dance floor and the balcony making interventions and observing their impact.
Identify the adaptive challenge
Cook the conflict /
regulate distress
Create the holding environment
The Seven Principles for Leading Adaptive Work
• Create the heat • Sequence and pace the work • Regulate the distress
Protect the voices of leadership from below
• Resume responsibility • Use their knowledge • Support their efforts
Get on the balcony
Give back
the work
• Work avoidance • Use conflict positively • Keep people focussed
• Ensuring everyone's voice is heard is essential for willingness to experiment and learn • Leaders have to provide cover to staff who point to the internal contradictions of the organisation
• May be a physical space in which adaptive work can be done • The relationship or wider social space in which adaptive work can be accomplished
• A challenge for which there is no ready made technical answer • A challenge which requires the gap between values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours to be addressed
• A place from which to observe the patterns in the wider environment as well as what is over the horizon (prerequisite for the following six principles)
Maintain
disciplined attention
Heifetz, R A and Linsky M (2002) Leadership on the Line Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading, Harvard Business School Press.
Productive range of distress
Threshold of learning
Limit of tolerance
Technical problem
Time
Disequilibrium
Technical vs. adaptive Work Adaptive challenge
Heifetz, Ronald A. and Marty Linsky. Leadership on the Line, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA (2002, pg. 108)
Tension of change
Work Avoidance
Work Avoidance
I can’t cope with any more change I have too many priorities Don’t tell me to change anything more I’m really stressed
I don’t feel stretched I’m getting bored
I am learning and getting my work done I look to you for coaching and support I know what I need to do
Keeping work in the zone of tolerance
When the heat was too high:
• One person in the group identifies a time when the heat was too high
• How did you know?
• What did you do to bring things to a productive level of tension so progress could be made?
Lowering the heat:
• Validate feelings, acknowledge loss
• Simplify and clarify
⁻ address the technical aspects
⁻ break problem into parts.
• Restore, add, or reallocate resources
⁻ temporarily reclaim responsibility for tough issues
⁻ give your attention
⁻ take stock of what is available
⁻ allot more time, enrich knowledge and skills.
When the heat was too low: • One person in the group identifies a time when
the heat was too low
• How did you know?
• What did you do to bring things to a productive level of tension so progress could be made?
Raising the heat:
• Raise the standards
• Increase accountability
• Change the task to something more motivating
• Refocus on higher, more widely shared and yet compelling purpose.
Identify the adaptive challenge
Cook the conflict /
regulate distress
Create the holding environment
The Seven Principles for Leading Adaptive Work
• Create the heat • Sequence and pace the work • Regulate the distress
Protect the voices of leadership from below
• Resume responsibility • Use their knowledge • Support their efforts
Get on the balcony
Give back
the work
• Work avoidance • Use conflict positively • Keep people focussed
• Ensuring everyone's voice is heard is essential for willingness to experiment and learn • Leaders have to provide cover to staff who point to the internal contradictions of the organisation
• May be a physical space in which adaptive work can be done • The relationship or wider social space in which adaptive work can be accomplished
• A challenge for which there is no ready made technical answer • A challenge which requires the gap between values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours to be addressed
• A place from which to observe the patterns in the wider environment as well as what is over the horizon (prerequisite for the following six principles)
Maintain
disciplined attention
Heifetz, R A and Linsky M (2002) Leadership on the Line Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading, Harvard Business School Press.
Characteristics of Adaptive Leadership
Adaptive leadership reflects the actions of leaders who:
• think and act to exert strategic influence on their environments. They act to assure that their organisations are well positioned competitively
• are proactive, foresee opportunities and put the resources in place to go after them
• employ a broad-based style of leadership that enables them to be personally more flexible and adaptive
• entertain diverse and divergent views when possible before making major decisions
• can admit when they are wrong and alter or abandon a non-productive course of action
• are astute students of their environments.
Activity
In trios identify a collective adaptive challenge and consider what a true collective approach to addressing this might look like?
Session 7 - Leadership for Social Change: Designing Safe-fail
Experiments
Anton Florek, Strategic Adviser, Staff College
Belief: our users are passive
recipients of services
This creates dependency
particularly in the most vulnerable They stop
believing change for them is
possible
The need increases The public sector spends more and
achieves less
What is Social Capital? Social capital refers to the institutions, relationships, and norms that shape the quality and quantity of a society's social interactions. Increasing evidence shows that social cohesion is critical for societies to prosper economically and for development to be sustainable. Social capital is not just the sum of the institutions which underpin a society – it is the glue that holds them together. World Bank
Social capital is about the value of social networks, bonding similar people and bridging between diverse people, with norms of reciprocity.
Dekker and Uslaner (2001)
…the web of cooperative relationships between citizens that facilitate resolution of collective action problems
Brehm and Rahn (1997)
Collective rather than individual social capital:
place based social capital
citizen capital
Investing in strategies that develop the emotional intelligence and capacity of local communities; Devolving real responsibility, leadership and authority to ‘users’, and encouraging self-organisation rather than direction from above; Offering participants a range of incentives which help to embed the key elements of reciprocity and mutuality.
What is co-production?
• recognising people as assets – start by asking what people can offer
• building on existing capability
• mutuality and reciprocity – creating expectation and opportunity for people to support each other
• blurring distinctions between professionals and users
• the local authority facilitating rather than delivering.
The cultural change needed for this…
The Challenge in Co-production:
Recognising that some expertly staffed and well-run services don’t deliver the best results for the people they should benefit because the services do not reach them; they see them as hard to reach or as having deficits. The need is to believe that residents have aspirations and resources, but can feel powerless and stigmatised by the way we provide services and that this unintentionally reinforces social isolation. The key challenge is to fundamentally shift the nature of the relationships our services have with our citizens so we also shift the balance of power.
Implementing Co-production
This requires complementary cultural shifts in: • The way staff work across agencies, specifically the way they interact
with service users and residents, by replacing the passive dependent citizenship with a belief that residents have strengths and resources to bring to the table
• How services and new models of delivery are developed by nurturing
much closer interaction between the community and professionals and encouraging the design and delivery of localised solutions embracing public sector, commercial and voluntary contributions.
...a means to delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families and their neighbours. Where activities are co-produced in this way, both services and neighbourhoods become more effective agents of change. Boyle and Harris (2009) “The Challenge of co-production” Nesta
Redefining Co-production
Human capital is created in diverse contexts, in the family and home, in communities, in the workplace and in many other social settings. The arena for policy intervention is therefore wide.
OECD (2001)
From a Whole Systems Leadership perspective, change doesn’t take place one person at a time. Instead, as Margaret Wheatley notes, it happens “as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common cause and vision of what’s possible”. Drawing from the lessons of complexity science, Whole Systems Leadership recognises that when many interconnected individuals and groups take many small actions, a shift happens in the larger patterns of communities, organisations, and societies. University of Minnesota and Life Science Foundation (2010)
What is Social Prototyping?
Social prototyping can be thought of as a process of design through trial and error, conducted transparently and openly. • profoundly “social”, in partnership • collaborative trial and error • at the level of action, moving beyond the table/studio/desk.
Social Prototyping
Initial idea
Traditional planning approach
Static participation, ownership and quality
Research
Design Implementation Launch
Reframe Reframe Reframe
Test Test Test
Design (Re) design (Re) design
Social prototyping approach
Increasing participation, ownership and quality
Universal
Discretionary
Targeted
Statutory
Aim: To transfer services to the community
Role of the LA: ENABLING or FACILITATING
The challenge:
· to manage the authorising environment which may be hostile to any transfer of services
away from the LA,
· to identify and build communities and help them define need rather than do it for them,
· to create a sense of common moral purpose, a new approach to citizenship and new kinds of political engagement.
Aim: To transform services for users Role of the LA: COMMISSIONING or PROVIDING
The challenge:
· to re-engineer services to take account of whole systems,
· to build user engagement into service design (co-construction),
· to commission for improved outcomes (for children, young people and families).
· What is a community, and how do we help communities step into the space vacated by the shrinking
state?
· What risks is the local authority prepared to take in handing over services? How much bureaucracy
can be dispensed with?
· What infrastructure is needed in the LA to manage handover and monitor provision?
· What is needed to ensure that provision is sustainable in the long term?
· Does mobile and digital technology have a role to play in linking people together to create
communities that support themselves?
· How do you reconcile timescales in an intervention authority with the long term investment that is
needed to be confident that communities can deliver?
· What services should the LA be commissioning?
· Is it possible to re-engineer services if the regulator has a fixed view of how they should be provided
and is unwilling to consider alternatives?
· What level of risk is permissible in experimenting with different kinds of service delivery? What will
elected members understand or tolerate?
· How can LAs be sure that they are reaching the most vulnerable? How should they identify those
children, young people and families that are at risk of requiring statutory intervention and what action
should they take?
· What are the impact measures required to judge the effectiveness of early help?
How do you work with
communities to deliver
early help?
Leading for social
change.
‘We all construct the world through lenses of our own making and use these to filter and select…we need a constantly expanding array of data, views and interpretations if we are to make a wise sense of the world. We need to include more and more eyes. We need to be constantly asking, ‘who else should be here? Who else should be looking at this’
Wheatley (1999)
Multiple Ways of Seeing
Moving Forward…
• how does what I’ve heard, impact on my view of our challenge and my own systems leadership practice?
• what kind of support and challenge will we need, for our own learning about systems leadership practice and in taking our systems leadership challenge forward?
• so……what is the work?
• who: have we got who we need in order to begin making progress?
• information: what do we need to know, that we don’t already know? Do we know that we don’t know?
• relationships: where do we need to build alliances?
MAKE A COMMITMENT
Designing a safe-fail experiment…
• Experiment freely and expect failure
• Consider as many ideas as possible
• Start with experiments where failure can be tolerated. Be comfortable with ‘safe uncertainty’
• Design experiments that can be monitored
• Run multiple experiments in parallel
• Share the results of your experiments with others
• Learn from the results of their experiments, including about your own practice.
Using the group to create a ‘safe-fail’ experiment
• Outline your current objectives for a shared safe fail experiment –and identify the potential for learning: agree as a place team what these are.
• Take time to reflect before offering one good idea each for a possible safe fail experiment.
• Reflect on the ideas offered and co-construct a do-able safe-fail that you can all commit to completing before the final workshop.
• Consider what you want to learn about your own leadership practice through the process.
• Complete the safe-fail grid as a reminder of the conversation and guide to action.
How do you work with this? – Myron’s maxims:
• real change happens in real work
• those who do the work do the change
• people own what they create
• start anywhere, follow it everywhere
• connect the system to more of itself.
Measures for assessing impact of thinking:
• Are problems getting solved by our solutions?
• Are we applying what we learn from mistakes?
• Are we quicker to identify problematic behaviors or old patterns
that no longer serve us?
• Are we taking more risks? Experimenting more?
• Are we more confident? More of a ‘can do’ attitude?
• Do we truly feel “We’re all in this together”
• Are we behaving better with each other?
• Are we handling stress better? Margaret Wheatley
Amateurs built the ark….. whereas, professionals built the Titanic. (Anon) A popular saying meaning that the accepted wisdom isn’t always accurate. The Biblical Noah built an ark and saved humanity from a great flood; the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage in 1912 to New York City.
Move away from service centric thinking:
ask the question what needs to be done rather than what do we need to do?
Periodically, take time to reflect on the big picture
Moving Forward…
• How does what I’ve heard, impact on my view of our challenge and my own systems leadership practice?
• What kind of support and challenge will we need, for our own learning about systems leadership practice and in taking our systems leadership challenge forward?
• So……what is the work?
• Who: have we got who we need in order to begin making progress?
• Information: what do we need to know, that we don’t already know? Do we know that we don’t know?
• Relationships: where do we need to build alliances?
MAKE A COMMITMENT
Your turn………
In your home group start to map out and frame your systems leadership challenge in detail including a delivery timeline.
Session 8 - Home Groups: Reflection and Commitments
Anton Florek, Strategic Adviser, Staff College
Leading Systems Change
Residential 1:
Leading in Complex Systems
April 23th – 24th 2018
Westerwood Hotel
Cumbernauld
Safe Journey Home!