‘Survival of the fittest’ is the default mind-set in professional life. This will have to change if Total Place is to work
Total Place is on everyone’s lips but the tone emanating from Whitehall appears focused on saving money. While there is nothing wrong with asking agencies to work together to do this, on its own it is highly unlikely to radically improve public services or usher in major innovations that can solve our social and environmental woes.
To truly do more with less, everyone involved in service provision must understand what collective working really entails – and embrace the cultural changes that will be necessary to move from hierarchical to collaborative systems.
Unfortunately, these changes require investment – at least in time, energy and effort – before they begin to pay off.
In fact, they require a complete mind-set shift if they are to generate significant breakthroughs in service quality or impact. If initiatives such as Total Place attempt to use the same old management processes and leadership styles (which they seem to be doing), they simply cannot achieve their potential.
Everyone involved in a collaborative endeavour must leave traditional civil service attitudes and hierarchical behaviours behind and share responsibility for ownership, creativity, risk and uncertainty.
This kind of transformation requires nurturing. Pressurising teams to provide rapid evidence of cost savings for political expediency triggers stresses that resist such a shift to open, collaborative working.
John Atkinson, managing director of the Leadership Centre for Local Government, has identified two requirements if Total Place is to work: tackling performance management structures that inhibit local collaboration and redesigning services based on users’ experiences.
These barriers point to the changes needed within the system. Public sector hierarchies are designed to reward (and control) personal and organisational performance, rather than foster exemplary benefits for the user. This is part of a long-running Western obsession with individual success and self-interested decision-making (on which, of course, our entire economy is premised).
The Victorians, who hijacked Charles Darwin’s theories and coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, instilled a culture of competition that has become the default mind-set in professional life – including the public sector. This culture is fundamentally at odds with collaborative ways of operating and therefore obstructs any initiative, no matter how laudable its aims.
Recent research from pioneering psychologists at the Max Planck Institute suggests that altruistic and co-operative actions are intrinsically motivating to human beings – and that rewarding these behaviours actually reduces their frequency.
So for Total Place to succeed, how can public servants reading this harness these fundamental insights into human co-operation and collaborative culture change?
The answer must lie at the grassroots. We can’t expect entire public bodies to collapse traditional hierarchies and change governance and reward structures overnight. If management is not leading a total cultural transformation – and is really just after cost-cutting headlines – then Total Place’s success will lie with individuals and their intrinsic motivation to serve the public (no matter how many byzantine barriers and bureaucratic frustrations might be encountered every day).
Every public servant involved in the programme can help foster a collaborative and creative environment in their sphere of influence, enabling social innovation to flourish. This will not be easy. They will have to step up and become an ‘everyday leader’, no matter what their pay grade. These inspirational individuals must put their ultimate goal – creating smarter user-focused services with less drain on the public purse – above their own short-term interests.
In this way a collaborative culture really can start with, and spread from, individuals in any outpost of the public sector, no matter how remote. The question, then, remains: will you join us?
Nick Jankel is chief executive of consultancy Wecreate
