I have been lucky enough to do some thinking and a bit of work with Pritpal S Tamber, whose work you can find here. If you aren’t familiar with him and his work, please investigate.

Pritpal interviewed me just after I finished at Bristol Health Partners in 2018. This transcript is one of the best summaries I have of my main reflections in that role — mainly due to the skill of the interviewer :)

I offer this as the public sector in the UK remains caught between the two stools of working as organisations to working across whole places. My work now is all about getting to the latter — I hope the reflections in this piece will help to move things in that direction, and Id love to talk to anyone trying to do this too :)

The whole piece is below:

Lessons from the Frontline of Cross-Sector Partnering

As I reviewed it again (its from 2019), the following stood out:

health is an outcome shaped by one’s experience of place, the wider social context. Accordingly, the challenge — and opportunity — is in trying to achieve change in a place and not just in an arbitrarily defined ‘health system’

we didn’t set strategic priorities like ‘cancer’ or ‘cardiac services’. Instead, we made better and more effective collaboration the strategic priority and then supported communities of practice as they came forward with often very diverse ideas. This approach allowed us to unlock and mobilise a whole range of expertise and capability from across the city — all with very little money.

When leaders talk about their ‘core business’ they’re just describing what the system does. For me, this concept is increasingly unhelpful, even indulgent. What matters is what’s achieved, not what’s done, but what’s done is what’s focussed on as though efficient services and savings are the ultimate end. For me, the ultimate end has to be to better identify and mobilise the capabilities needed to deal with the factors that really shape health and health inequalities. Given that health is defined by place, it’s about having the capabilities to use the resources available across that place. Within that frame, collaboration is the only way to do this.

Leaders who only think in terms of their own organisation are potentially harming the places we all share; an organisational focus creates a societal opportunity cost, which we all have to bear, not just the organisations themselves.

All too often in collaborative work we assume that a better structure will deliver the outcomes we seek. It’s natural because structures are visible. What’s invisible — or at least often hard to see — are the frameworks of value that shape our decision-making day-to-day. These frameworks are what shape our systems, often unquestioningly.

For instance, in the business case template in a hospital you have to justify any new spend usually within a two-year frame. What that implicitly means is that we prioritise things that can be achieved within two years, rather than things that might take longer. Given that reducing health inequalities might take two decades, not years, what that template is communicating is that inequalities don’t matter. Of course, no health care leader would say that but it’s being communicated loud and clear. There are numerous examples of this in our everyday processes and decisions.

I’m trying to help people in senior roles be more much more ambitious, to try to change places not just help their organisations survive. In practice, this means getting them to reset their relationship with ‘the system’. Rather than be subjects of, or commentators on, the system, they need to become activists. Doing this requires thinking deeply about the frameworks we all carry around with us and shape our everyday decisions. These frameworks need to be challenged.

I’d love to discuss these issues with anyone also interested in much more ambitious collaboration. Please comment or get in touch direct dcjrwork@gmail.com

I recently attended a reunion of the UK military unit I served with at the start of my career. Many of my colleagues have now gone on to very senior roles both inside and alongside the UK Ministry of Defence, including contributing to the ongoing UK Defence and Security Review.

This Review has passed me by and is almost complete, but I’m writing this as a late contribution to the debate. I’d like to focus on the wider contribution that Defence makes to the UK, because I suspect this is an area that isn’t being well examined by the current Review (please prove me wrong:)

I’m basing this observation on my previous attempts to engage with Defence about the Net Zero opportunity. As far as I can tell, The UK MoD sees Net Zero as something marginal to ‘core business’ and in terms of the challenge (not opportunity — more below) of reducing the energy — and CO2 — required to conduct its business.

There are a number of issues here. First, ‘core business’. Across the various sectors that I have worked in over the past decade or so, and especially in the case of UK Government departments, there has been a tendency — largely driven by cost pressures but also indicative of a prevailing organisational mindset — of focusing on the core business, the essential activity, of those organisations. I think this is a fundamental mistake — I’d go as far as saying that organisations now — and especially in the public sector — need to start their discussion of purpose and prioritisation of activity — with the stuff that they do with others. Any ‘core business’ that also equals ‘stuff that we do ourselves’ is increasingly something that is a potential indulgence and whose impact is being limited because opportunities are being missed to work with others and create additional benefits.

Net Zero is a wonderful example in the case of Defence. Defence has huge resources that can contribute in a wider way to the national objective of developing a green economy. For example, UK Defence is a major landowner — why isn’t it also an energy producer or actively managing its land to sequester carbon? It also has a crucial asset from a national perspective — an estate full of poor quality buildings that need retrofitting. This estate work is crucial to addressing the challenge of reducing the energy footprint of UK Defence (and the cost of operating it), but it’s also an opportunity — and one that is going begging just now.

One of the practical limits on the UK’s aspirations to develop a green economy is the skills base. In construction, for example, there are just not enough people with the right skills to do all the new build or retrofit work needed. See the failed Green Homes Grant scheme abandoned in March 2021 as a great example of this — the scheme was great in principle but there simply weren’t enough qualified people to do the work.

For people and firms to start investing in the skills needed to decarbonise the UKs buildings, the market for these skills needs to be made. And it doesn’t get made just by policy (see the foot dragging over the adoption of the Future Homes Standard for example) but by the physical opportunities to do the work — i.e. buildings.

Defence has lots of these. Just imagine the market for skills created if Defence committed to retrofitting its estate to ‘zero energy in operation’ standards by 2028. And this is doable — just ask the US Department of Defence who since the late 2000s have been a leader in terms of decarbonisation and improving energy efficiency in the built environment (I wrote about this in 2011 (!) here).

So as well as developing the capability needed to enact whatever Defence policy emerges from the Review, UK Defence has a massive opportunity to make a foundational contribution to the development of a green economy in the UK. Is this in the Review? If not, it should be, because as well as being an essential part of its own plans for energy reduction, Defence has a great pitch to the Treasury and the rest of government about the contribution it can make to greening the economy — which after all is one of the Governments 5 National Missions.

The other area where I’d like to hear more from Defence is the role the military can play as a social institution. The UK military is, I’d argue, one of the most diverse institutions we have in terms of people’s backgrounds, life experiences and education. The military builds cohesive teams from people who would most likely never have crossed paths had they not joined up — is there another public body for whom this is true in the same way?

This mixing of backgrounds, and the lifelong relationships that develop in teams that get truly tested, is something very unusual and precious. Shouldn’t the military be talking more about this?

There is a wider point here about getting all government departments and public policy to develop approaches focussed on collaboration and the creation of linked benefits that they might not regard as ‘their job’. I will write more about this, but for the moment I wanted to share the case of Defence as an example.

As part of the Defence Review, there should be some focus on the wider contribution that UK Defence makes to our country and society. There is — or shouldn’t be — no longer any such thing as ‘not our job’. If public bodies can have positive wider effects, then they should have a duty to do so. It’s also, by the way, the best way to spend public money. At present, UK Defence and other bodies like the NHS are walking past opportunities all the time to deliver these wider benefits.

If we want to do the most with increasingly constrained national resources (which is surely our joint challenge as a society?), then this needs to change.

As always, Id love to discuss this with anyone who is interested.

Net Zero is the agenda that keeps getting more important and seems — quite rightly — to be everywhere in policy development and the discourse about the major challenges and opportunities that face us today.

But beyond the flurry of new language about the issue, we seem now to be getting stuck in terms of how to actually bring this to life. Net Zero feels (wrongly) like a medium term challenge to many people and it is very easy for it to be pushed aside as people focus on the critical operational challenges facing much of our public sector. But this crowding out of the issue by (apparently) more urgent matters isn’t the real issue in terms of why we are not taking Net Zero forward rapidly enough.

My contention is that we are trying to address the challenge of Net Zero in ways that are far too limited in scope, lack imagination and are based on an organisational, not system, understanding of how change happens. This needs to change, and the way this will happen is for us to;

• Take a more radically ambitious Place based approach to delivering Net Zero,
• Reimagine the potential impact of our major public bodies, and;
• Develop a genuinely collaborative way of working.

I’d like to talk about each of these in turn.

First, the idea of Place as a way to deliver Net Zero.

At present we are trying to deal with the challenges of net zero as single organisations or parts of the public sector. For example, the NHS has a Net Zero target, the National Union of Farmers has a 2040 target, individual councils or businesses will have their own too etc etc. But this implicitly assumes that we will achieve progress by organisations or groups of organisations working on their own — which makes no sense. For example, it is unrealistic to expect a thirty year old District General Hospital or even a county level Integrated Care System to achieve Net Zero. Given the quality of most of the public estate, even with massive infrastructure development this isn’t going to happen. But what if we thought of the challenge of getting whole Places to Net Zero? What if there was a way to offset (sorry) the emissions associated with healthcare or some other activity with emissions reductions elsewhere in areas such as agriculture or land use choices (eg salt marsh restoration)?

If we think of the Net Zero challenge as one for whole Places, and not single organisations, then we may have a chance of doing something meaningful. Yes, there is a whole lot of accounting and governance that would need to be developed to make this work, but this is something we can do. And we have to, because the NHS in North Devon (where I live) is never going to get to Net Zero on its own. But Northern Devon as a place certainly could.

Second, I’d like to talk about reimagining the role of institutions.

And specifically, how we might think of the role of these major (usually public sector) institutions in delivering Net Zero. There has been much written on the idea and role of so-called Anchor Institutions and Net Zero gives us a chance to develop this even further. In my mind the challenge is to get our public bodies to become ambitious participants in the shaping of Places, not simply the deliverers of services. To do this those bodies need to widen their imagination in terms of their role, impact, and the resources they have available.

There are two great current examples of this — ‘open goals’ that the NHS and others like the Ministry of Defence and Police are walking past.

The first is their role as landowners. The MoD is the second largest landowner in the UK — but how is it using this asset to help deliver Net Zero? Its land use choices could help sequester carbon or even generate energy — but where are its plans to do so? Did you know what Warwickshire Constabulary owns some arable land? But is it using this to help deliver emissions reductions?

The second opportunity going begging is the role of the public sector estate as a jobs engine. At some stage very soon we need to prime the market and supply chain for retrofit in the built environment. But attempts to get started (Green Homes Grant etc) have been scuppered by a paper thin skills base and supply chain. We need to kick start this market and the best way to do it may be the public estate. This has a number of advantages. First the estate is big and it’s in poor condition — it provides a genuinely big market to drive skills development and job creation. Second the estate is everywhere — and often in places where there isn’t much else in terms of public bodies. So a rapid investment programme in the public estate will benefit all communities — a ready made ‘levelling up’ initiative if you like.

These two examples are pressing, but there are others. Most hospitals will be responsible for a significant proportion of all road journeys in a place, but this won’t feature in a description of the organisation or the impact they want to have. Local Plans are developed as mechanisms to deliver housing targets but there is no reason why they shouldn't also be a mechanism for support (or requiring?) emissions reduction, habitat restoration and the reduction of health inequalities?

As far as I can see, we aren’t doing any of the things above at the moment. Why not? Because we have a 50 year old view of the role of public bodies baked into the may those bodies work and set out their purpose and impact. This isn’t a problem of planning, it’s one of imagination.

Third, we need a way of working — and thinking — that is genuinely collaborative.

It is self-evident that unlocking some of the opportunities I’ve set out above requires collaboration. Yet much of the culture and processes of major public bodies actively mitigates against this. Some of it is mindset — for example when drawing up its recent plans on Net Zero the UK MoD based those plans on what emissions it thinks it needs to operate, rather than thinking what wider contribution it could also make. Planning departments in Local Authorities tend not to think of their role in creating long term health outcomes or entrenching health inequalities — but that’s often the result of much of the work that gets done on Spatial Planning or Local Plans. Simply, we operate in a way that ignores connection and dependence, and is almost wilfully blind to the way outcomes are created across or in different parts of a system. In order to address this, we need a public sector way of working that is much more collaborative from the outset. We need to see ourselves as real joint stakeholders in Places and see our public bodies as mechanisms to mobilise the resources needed to improve those places, not simply to look after the interests of individual organisations.

Perhaps this may be the biggest challenge — to collectively unlearn decades of incentives and training and cultural reinforcement that keeps us in our organisational boxes. But if we can’t escape them, Net Zero will never happen.

I’d like to finish on an upbeat note. The Net Zero agenda, if developed in the way I’ve set out here, is one of hope and change and transformative benefit to us all. It gives us the chance to radically reimagine much about our communities and the institutions that support them. It offers the chance to create thousands of jobs and genuinely improve quality of life.

But we won’t deliver these benefits by continuing to try and make the way we do things now just a little different and hope that by 2030/40/50 (take your pick) things will be better. They won’t. Now is the time to be radical — unless we change, nothing else will.

— — —

If you would like to talk about anything I’ve written here, or work together on something, please get in touch using dcjrwork@gmail.com

Thinking about how we think about COVID.

How do we look beyond the immediate problems in front of us as the COVID response develops? How can we develop a genuine shared national (and international) campaign to prevent, deal with and mitigate the effects of COVID, and move away from what feels like a series of local responses to events?

This article is a sort of sister article to one I wrote in February on the COVID ‘deep battle’ — I’ve been reflecting in that earlier post and trying to work out how I could share some similar ideas, but framed in a different way.

So I’ve recast this to look more widely at the issue of ‘thinking about how we think’ about COVID — and sharing some frameworks that I think could open up our approach to this challenge and maybe promote a bit of innovation. I’d welcome feedback :)

The military has frameworks to help thinking about strategy, operations and execution. Lots of frameworks. Having been schooled in these frameworks in my first career in the UK military, I find myself applying these frameworks all the time, whether consciously or not. Sometimes that are helpful, and sometimes they aren’t. But just now, when looking at COVID, they are not just useful but also alarming. I’d like to share some of them here — and explain why I’m worried about what comes next in the UK's response to COVID.

The powerful thing about these frameworks is that they require that you think and act in a genuinely comprehensive way. You can cherry pick to a degree, but if you apply these frameworks in the spirit in which they are developed and offered they demand that you think through a problem in a genuinely comprehensive way. And that means all of it, over time, not just the bit that’s in front of you now.

Strategy, Tactics and Operations

The first framework if like to share is the framework of the different levels at which operations need to be conceptualised and connected. They are the strategic, operational and tactical level. The way these work is best described with an example.

Let’s take the example of the UK's involvement in operations in Afghanistan. I’ve got nothing to say here about the rights and wrongs of that involvement, but want to use it as an example to bring these levels to life.

First the strategic level. This is about rationale, about the long term purpose and framing justification of an endeavour. In my example, the strategic rationale was about things like staying close to and preserving a relationship with the US, preventing ungoverned space from becoming a safe space for threats to our interests developing, or about securing long term access to rare metals. Again, no value judgement here, just examples. So the strategic level is about why you are doing what you are doing. To what end?

I will now jump down to the tactical level. This is about everyday activity — on the ground. It’s about who is doing what when over the next day or week, and how we coordinate it. It’s the actual activity and how it is syncronised and organised. Day to day stuff — the operations you see on the screen in the ops room right now.

The operational level is what links these together. It’s also the most opaque and difficult to grasp — in the military those generals that really understand the operational level have a status akin to sages or wizards. The big top level narrative is easy, as is the day to coord. But finding the shape that connects to and makes sense of both is not.

In the example I’m using the operational level is about the operational design — in this case most simply described as developing indigenous capability across the security, economic, political and social domains and stepping back as this capability developed. That’s the core design principle that gave shape to day tactical operations, and linked to the strategic purpose.

So, we have strategic, tactical and operational levels. They are connected, comprehensive and they work together in a sort of gearing that sometimes moves fast and linear, sometimes is more of a fluid coupling. But the key thing is that successful operations (in the round) requires us to think about and set out our plans in terms of these three levels, and to recognise the dependencies between them. Just thinking about tactics doesn’t work, it’s an ever decreasing circle. Just doing strategy doesn’t work, you end up shouting into the wind. And just operational level is no good either, because without strategy it has no purpose and without tactics has no manifestation. Strategic, tactical, operational level. All connected.

OK — so lets now think about COVID. Can you detect in the UK's response a clear articulation of these three levels? I can’t. I can for the response in places like New Zealand — look at the way the team of 5 million has tackled this societal challenge and you can detect these layers in action — and most crucially you can see the operational level, the shape, the operational design and how it changes and develops over time. I just can’t do this for the UK's response. I haven’t heard the strategic narrative — the rationale seems purely the need to respond. The tactics are clear, most recently with regard to the vaccination programme which has been a textbook example of this level working well. But the operational level, the design and the shape? The phases and the transitions and the agility — where is this? I don’t think it exists. I may be wrong, but Ijust can’t detect it. The UK is all response and all tactics — the other two layers are generally missing.

Deep Close and Rear

The next framework is deep close and rear operations. This is a powerful framework that forces you to think and act in a way that recognises two obvious but easily forgotten things. First, operations are subject to and need to change over time. And next, that success on an endeavour depends on enabling conditions and that creating these conditions, not just doing stuff, is the key to success.

Close operations are the here and now — the activities that you aim to have an impact or effect (key word) in the short term, however that’s defined. It’s the stuff you’re doing now and the purpose of doing that stuff.

Rear operations are the things that allow you to keep doing what you plan to be doing. It’s the supply lines, the logistics, the legal frameworks that enable you to work. The things that if you neglect or get wrong will stop you in your tracks. Think dull, but essential. A sort of cash flow for your plans.

Deep operations covers the stuff you are doing now to shape or create the conditions for future success. Again, a bit like the operational art the deep operations can have a sort of mystical status among military planners, and those that grasp it can seem gifted with a sort of foresight that is unusual. But it’s not magic, it’s simply recognising the constantly transitioning nature of operations, that the conditions for success are what makes or breaks campaigns, that these conditions change over time, and that a key element of effective operations requires that you commit resources to creating those conditions.

This framework is the one that’s got me really worried. The UK is all over the close battle. The numbers of vaccines, the collective ticking off of the different vaccination cohorts. The rear operation too is obviously important in terms of logistics (think PPE) but has enough consideration really been given to public attitudes and behaviour as a key rear operational factor?

But it’s the deep operation — the deep battle — where the biggest hole is. Effective operational design requires some sense of the shape of a campaign over time, and the ways in which this will change and develop, and the tactics that will be employed as this ebb and flow takes place.

As I write we are firmly in the middle of a close battle to vaccinate — but what is the deep battle? I have no idea, because no-one has said what comes next after the vaccine has been rolled out. Even 100% vaccination won’t be the end of our campaign, because the virus will still exist, it will still mutute, it will still break out. What will we be doing then? What will our close battle be when we have got through the current phase? No one seems to know. So we keep fighting different close battles that pop up as opposed to investing in deep operations now that will shape the conditions in the future. We have literally no idea what comes next. So we don’t know what conditions we need to set to be successful. So we probably won’t be.

Perhaps the best example of what this means in practice is test and trace. What is it for? Is it part of the deep operation? How is it being developed and in relation to achieving what conditions? It’s impossible to say — because we don’t have a deep operation.

You can see the problem this creates. Without a deep battle we are stuck (as we always seem to have been) in the close battle. React, react, react. Not react, shape, change, move forward. We are collectively stuck on a close battle hamster wheel — and until some proper thinking, perhaps using some of these frameworks is applied — that’s where we will stay.

In summary

So, I think applying the two frameworks of Strategic/tactical/operational level, and Deep close and rear operations to the UK's COVID response is both very useful and very worrying. I admit I may have a partial, outside the tent view of all this, and I’d love to be proved wrong, but my fear is that our collective thinking is simply not comprehensive enough. It doesn’t take into account the design, the shape of what we are trying to do, and how this will change over time. What is the shape of the overall campaign, not just the latest daily number? How can we lift our eyes from the close battle and shape the conditions we need to succeed in the future?

How can we campaign, and not just respond?

If you have read this far, I’d love to hear what you think. And if you are working for HMG, I’d also like to help. dcjrwork@gmail.com

Photo by Jordan Heath on Unsplash

How can we campaign, and not just respond?

The military has frameworks to help thinking about strategy, operations and execution. Lots of frameworks. Having been schooled in these frameworks in my first career in the UK military, I find myself applying these frameworks all the time, whether consciously or not. Sometimes that are helpful, and sometimes they aren’t. But just now, when looking at COVID, they are not just useful but also alarming. I’d like to share some of them here — and explain why I’m worried about what comes next in the UKs response to COVID.

The powerful thing about these frameworks is that they require that you think and act in a genuinely comprehensive way. You can cherry pick to a degree, but if you apply these frameworks in the spirit in which they are developed and offered they demand that you think genuinely through a problem. All of it, over time, not just the bit that’s in front of you now.

Strategy, Tactics and Operations

The first framework if like to share is the framework of the different levels at which operations need to be conceptualised and connected. They are the strategic, operational and tactical level. The way these work is best described with an example.

Let’s take the example of the UKs involvement in operations in Afghanistan. I’ve got nothing to say here about the rights and wrongs of that involvement, but want to use it as an example to bring these levels to life.

First the strategic level. This is about rationale, about the long term purpose and framing justification of an endeavour. In my example, the strategic rationale was about things like staying close to and preserving a relationship with the US, preventing ungoverned space from becoming a safe space for threats to our interests developing, or about securing long term access to rare metals. Again, no value judgement here, just examples. So the strategic level is about why you are doing what you are doing. To what end?

I will now jump down to the tactical level. This is about everyday activity — on the ground. It’s about who is doing what when over the next day or week, and how we coordinate it. It’s the actual activity and how it is syncronised and organised. Day to day stuff — the operations you see on the screen in the ops room right now.

The operational level is what links these together. It’s also the most opaque and difficult to grasp — in the military those generals that really understand the operational level have a status akin to sages or wizards. The big top level narrative is easy, as is the day to coord. But finding the shape that connects to and makes sense of both is not. In the example I’m using the operational level was about the operational design — in this case most simply described as developing indiginous capability across the security, economic, political and social domains and stepping back as this capability developed. That’s the core design principle that gave shape to day to operations, and linked to the strategic purpose.

So, we have strategic, tactical and operational levels. They are connected, comprehensive and they work together in a sort of gearing that sometimes moves fast and linear, sometimes is more of a fluid coupling. But the key thing is that successful operations (in the round) requires us to think about and set out our plans in terms of these three levels, and to recognise the dependencies between them. Just thinking about tactics doesn’t work, it’s an ever decreasing circle. Just doing strategy doesn’t work, you end up shouting into the wind. And just operational level is no good either, because without strategy it has no purpose and without tactics has no manifestation. Strategic, tactical, operational level. All connected.

OK — so lets now think about COVID. Can you detect in the UKs response a clear articulation of these three levels? I can’t. I can for the response in places like New Zealand — look at the way the team of 5 million has tackled this societal challenge and you can detect these layers in action — and most crucially you can see the operational level, the shape, the operational design and how it changes and develops over time. I just can’t do this for the UKs response. I haven’t heard the strategic narrative — the rationale seems purely the need to respond. The tactics are clear, most recently with regard to the vaccination programme which has been a textbook example of this level working well. But the operational level, the design and the shape? The phases and the transitions and the agility — where is this? I don’t think it exists. I may be wrong, but i just can’t detect it. The UK is all response and all tactics — the other two layers are generally missing.

Deep Close and Rear

The next framework is deep close and rear operations. This is a powerful framework that forces you to think and act in a way that recognises two obvious but easily forgotten things. First, operations are subject to and need to change over time. And next, that success on an endeavour depends on enabling conditions and that creating these conditions, not just doing stuff, is the key to success.

Close operations are the here and now — the activities that you aim to have an impact or effect (key word) in the short term, however that’s defined. It’s the stuff you’re doing now and the purpose of doing that stuff.

Rear operations are the things that allow you to keep doing what you plan to be doing. It’s the supply lines, the logistics, the legal frameworks that enable you to work. The things that if you neglect or get wrong will stop you in your tracks. Think dull, but essential. A sort of cash flow for your plans.

Deep operations covers the stuff you are doing now to shape or create the conditions for future success. Again, a bit like the operational art the deep operations can have a sort of mystical status among military planners, and those that grasp it can seem gifted with a sort of foresight that is unusual. But it’s not magic, it’s simply recognising the constantly transitioning nature of operations, that the conditions for success are what makes or breaks campaigns, that these conditions change over time, and that a key element of effective operations requires that you commit resources to creating those conditions.

This framework is the one that’s got me really worried. The UK is all over the close battle. The numbers of vaccines, the collective ticking off of the different vaccination cohorts. The rear operation too is obviously important in terms of logistics (think PPE) but has enough consideration really been given to public attitudes and behaviour as a key rear operational factor?

But it’s the deep operation — the deep battle — where the biggest hole is. Effective operational design requires some sense of the shape of a campaign over time, and the ways in which this will change and develop, and the tactics that will be employed as this ebb and flow takes place. As I write we are firmly in the middle of a close battle to vaccinate — but what is the deep battle? I have no idea, because no-one has said what comes next after the vaccine has been rolled out. Even 100% vaccination won’t be the end of our campaign, because the virus will still exist, it will still mutute, it will still break out. What will we be doing then? What will our close battle be when we have got through the current phase? No one seems to know. So we keep fighting different close battles that pop up as opposed to investing in deep operations now that will shape the conditions in the future. We have literally no idea what comes next. So we don’t know what conditions we need to set to be successful. So we probably won’t be.

Perhaps the best example of what this means in practice is test and trace. What is it for? Is it part of the deep operation? How is it being developed and in relation to achieving what conditions? It’s impossible to say — because we don’t have a deep operation.

You can see the problem this creates. Without a deep battle we are stuck (as we always seem to have been) in the close battle. React, react, react. Not react, shape, change, move forward. We are collectively stuck on a close battle hamster wheel — and until some proper thinking, perhaps using some of these frameworks is applied — that’s where we will stay.

In summary

So, I think applying the two frameworks of Strategic/tactical/operational level, and

Deep close and rear operations to the UKs COVID response is both very useful and very worrying. I admit I may have a partial, outside the tent view of all this, and I’d love to be proved wrong, but my fear is that our collective thinking is simply not comprehensive enough. It doesn’t take into account the design, the shape of what we are trying to do, and how this will change over time. What is the shape of the overall campaign, not just the latest daily number? How can we lift our eyes from the close battle and shape the conditions we need to succeed in the future? How can we campaign, and not just respond?

If you have read this far, I’d love to hear what you think. And if you are working for HMG, I’d also like to help. dcjrwork@gmail.com

I aim to help people become leaders in places, not simply leaders in organisations, and to bring together work across the sectors that shape people’s lives. I focus on:

• Helping people to build collaborative relationships.
• Sharing the personal and organisational tools that make collaboration work in practice.
• Developing place based strategies to address social and economic challenges and opportunities.

If you are interested in collaborating and would like to know more about me and my background, my CV is below.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Su8egQK2gnyIs_u_DoWfB6d1ppFInk3S9bR5D3KTJ1E/edit?usp=sharing

Effective collaboration doesn’t happen by accident — and often the conditions that determine success or otherwise are deeply personal. They are about how we as people approach the prospect of collaboration and this often requires us to challenge ourselves and the way we have been working — often for whole careers.

I’m interested in three things that help set the conditions for effective collaboration — and I share them in this short video. They are:

1. Helping people to understand what they mean when they use the term ‘system’ and to consider their relationship with that system. Specifically, the importance of people seeing themselves as active participants in that system as opposed to subjects of it. Activists, not commentators.
2. Getting to grips with the very different ways in which people conceptualise — and therefore approach — collaboration. From the personal (and often selfish) to the societal motivations for working together.
3. Helping people understand their relationship with the three layers of leadership in any system or place. These are: the structural, which is necessary but not sufficient; the emotional, which determines our real level of engagement, and; the conceptual, to which we are often blind but which often traps us in ways of working that we know are ineffective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aglv7mqsTQQ

I’d welcome any comments on this video, and would love to hear from anyone who is interested in exploring — and maybe working together on — these issues. My email is dcjrwork@gmail.com

Thanks to https://medium.com/oneteamgov for stimulating and sharing this thinking :)

thumbnail photo by Freysteinn G. Jonsson on Unsplash — to whom many thanks

The challenge of leadership in places, and why its failing now

We are really good at identifying or describing challenges. We also have plenty of plans and strategies. We also have very common narratives in sectors like health about the characteristics of our current ‘problems’ and how they might be addressed. But we are really very poor at doing something about these issues or challenges — we regularly fail to act to address them, fail to mobilise the resources needed, and fail to change (in a meaningful sense) the way we allocate those resources. ‘Place leadership’ is failing now because of this gap between identifying issues and mobilising capability to address them.

Why is this failure occurring? My view is that we are failing as leaders in places because we only consider the visible aspects of leadership — the obvious and visible manifestations of the activity we conduct.

Change in places requires that we understand the visible and invisible constraints that bind and shape our thinking and work in practice.

We need to get beyond the visible — beyond structure. We need to name, interrogate and change the conceptual frameworks that govern our systems and decision making.

I understand this issue in terms of layers. There are — I observe — three big layers of leadership in practice that we need to interrogate and understand if we are really to make any progress on place based leadership. These layers are Structural, Conceptual and Emotional.

Layer 1 is about structure and it is visible

This layer is the organisations to which we all belong and to which we hand the responsibility to work to address issues on our behalf. It is also the Gant chart in a programme plan describing how a programme will develop and be coordinated. It is the governance mechanisms that are set out in policy papers or service change proposals, its the oversight and the scrutiny that we call all see.

This layer — the structure — is necessary but it isn’t sufficient, and the biggest mistake we make collectively is to act as though the right structure is all we need to address our issues or solve our challenges. But the structure isn’t the leadership — it’s a mechanism by which the leadership is applied and manifested. On its own it’s not enough.

And there is also a trap here which we often fail to avoid — if all we think about is the structure, then we end up constrained by it. This is a big problem — we have existing structures (local authorities etc) which operate in certain ways based on operating models designed around the challenges of decades ago.

Structure is only useful to the extent to which it helps us identify and address the challenges we face — but very often the structure ends up determining these challenges. A challenge that doesn’t fit the structure is not one that the structure will allow us to deal with.

So, structure is important but it isn’t the same as leadership. Also, we need to regard the structure as instrumental — a means with some end, some purpose other than its own ongoing existence. If we only think about the structure, we won’t deliver change — and worse we will end up being prisoners of it.

To be successful we need to think about change and leadership not just in terms of structures, but also in terms of the conceptual frameworks we use and the emotional context of the work.

The second layer is Conceptual and it is both visible and invisible

We need to be ruthless with ourselves — what actually guides the decisions we make and what does that say about how we actually think about value? We need to shine a light on the conceptual frameworks that trap us in practice, and then we need to tear them down.

The biggest thing I think I have learned in the last 5 years is about the importance of the conceptual frameworks that shape and constrain our thinking and work in practice. It is essential that we get to grips with this layer of leadership — because without doing so we will only ever be tinkering with the existing system within which we find ourselves and fail to change the nature and outputs of that system.

Worse still, we usually operate in a way that is characterised by an almost wilful unawareness of the conceptual frameworks that bind and constrain us. This creates the delusion that we can change things by addressing the visible structures of our system but this is a recipe for failure until we get to grips with the conceptual frameworks that shape and bind us.

For example, a huge amount of energy and effort is expended on transformation in the health system without addressing the day to day constraints we impose on ourselves in structures like the standard business case format used in most NHS organisations. This document is the visible manifestation of a conceptual framework that is based implicitly (you won’t find this written down) on a theory of value that only benefit and savings made in the next 2 years really matter.

I’m exaggerating slightly to make a point here but it’s true that there is a pervasive conceptual framework in the NHS and other public sector bodies (the current financial position makes this worse) that value and benefit is essentially financial and needs to be delivered quickly to be of value. The Outcome of this framework in practice is that we fail to properly value non-financial benefit and certainly benefits that accrue over decades not years.

In practice, this is at the heart of our collective failure to invest in ‘prevention’ in any meaningful way. It is a textbook example of how we are collectively being trapped by a conceptual framework that determines how we work in practice — and in a way that we fail to be properly conscious of.

These conceptual frameworks are everywhere. Some are visible, some aren’t — but they all determine practice. For the macro version of this, see my other blog on the Bristol project — which sets out how the lack of an explicit theory of value in health systems means we are trapped by a series of implicit, never stated, frameworks that fundamentally stand in the way of us being able to achieve the things we tell ourselves we want. We say that we want a health system and not an illness system but there is almost nothing in the way we currently spend time and resources that demonstrates this in practice. Why? Because we are trapped by a conceptual framework that we never even discuss.

How do we address this? The first step is straightforward enough but requires a degree of collective rigour and self awareness that we seldom muster. Simply put, our biggest challenge is to consider the conceptual frameworks that actually shape the way we work in practice and determine decision making priorities now.

We need to be ruthless with ourselves — what actually guides the decisions we make and what does that say about how we actually think about value? We need to shine a light on these, and then we need to tear them down.

Structure, Gant charts and governance is not enough — we need to see clearly the mental cages we put around ourselves and ask if the world we want will ever be delivered unless we change these. We are trapped and we don’t even know it — the first step out of the cave is to see your situation clearly.

The third layer is Emotional and it is invisible

The third layer that determines how leadership in systems and at the civic level work in practice is emotional. It concerns basic but complex notions of identity and individual purpose.

It is my experience that most leaders in places are still operating from a basic position of being organisational leaders trying to do extra system stuff as opposed to participants in a whole system or place in which they can have a positive impact.

This distinction is not academic because it determines the way decisions get made in practice and it also constrains to a severe extent the perceived ‘art of the collectively possible’.

Here is why. The first issue is that individuals (and other decision making fora like Boards) still largely make decisions on the basis of organisational interest. This is entirely understandable give the framework of incentives that exist in something like the health system but it also the result of basic individual assumptions about the legitimate scope of individual and collective decision making. Leaders of organisations on the whole still frame their purpose in an organisational way and make decisions accordingly. When asked ‘what team they play for?’ people still reply with the name of an organisation rather than (as would be entirely legitimate for a hospital or local authority CEO) the name of a place.

The result of this in practice is a significant constraint on our collective ability to mobilise the capabilities we need to address the problems that places and communities face.

If individuals feel emotionally connected to organisations rather than some civic construct, they will ultimately default to making decisions in the interests of individuals (ego-driven glory seeking for example) or organisations — they will not be making decisions on the basis of the interests of places or communities.

This creates hidden barriers to real system or civic working which makes it difficult to solve problems together — even those that we can identify. The other impact is that we fail to properly bring to bear the influence of major institutions in places. Here is an example — the CEO of a hospital Trust will of course be focused on delivering safe, high quality and financially viable services. But they are also in charge of a major employer (both Bristol hospital trusts employ 16000 people between them) and they will also be responsible for 5–10% of all the road journeys that take place in a city. Should they be using these connections and influences in a positive way — to become exemplar employers for example? Of course they should, but the extent to which this wider opportunity is exercised is varied — some organisations play this wider role and some don’t. What it seems to boil down to is whether the CEO feels basic emotional commitment to place as well as organisation. At the moment, it’s a happy accident where this takes place and accordingly opportunities to have a wider positive impact in places go begging every day.

The way to address this starts with talking about it. How do people really understand their identity and their responsibilities? Are people just leaders in organisations or do they also see their role in a wider context. For me the challenges faced in most places today require the latter — we must act as participants in places and see the leadership challenge as maximising positive impact in places, not simply delivering organisational objectives that may as well be produced by a large black box devoid of any geographical or social setting.

Our collective challenge is not delivering outputs more efficiently — its mobilising the capabilities we have to benefit the places we all share.

Why is change so difficult? Layers of Leadership. Structural, Conceptual and Emotional was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is something that I have very rarely heard discussed in practice but it fundamentally shapes the way that people and organisations work together. Unless we share the way we think about collaboration — and the nature of our basic motivations to collaborate — we may struggle to collaborate in a way that is truly effective.

In my experience, this early work is almost never done — this needs to change and a ‘Bristol Scale’ has offered me a typology to enable me and the people i work with to be explicit about not only what we what to achieve but how we need to collaborate to achieve it.

On the basis of the work that I have done in places like Bristol (hence the name), I have done a basic codifying of the types of collaboration that I think I have seen operating in practice. As you will see they are very different propositions with fundamentally different starting points and motivations.

My hypothesis is that the reasons that collaboration in often so difficult is that the participants are in practice framing the work in very different ways and want different things from it. This isn’t just an issue of a lack of ‘joint vision or common purpose’ — what we see in practice are fundamentally different motivations clashing against each other.

The first enabler of effective collaboration is ensuring that we know what the participants understand by the term — and how they are motivated.

Different perspectives can coexist, but they need to be visible…

Hence, the ‘Bristol Collaboration Scale’ — it’s a work in progress and shared here. My motivation in developing this is threefold:

• To develop a tool that i and other can test in practice — now.
• To hear from others about how this codification might be developed.
• To reclaim the ‘Bristol Scale’ (medics will understand that joke….)

The Bristol Scale — C1 to C5

When I work with people now I use (implicitly or explicitly), the following framework to understand their motivation to collaborate.

C1 — The ‘what’s in it for me motivation?’

I collaborate because I/my organisation benefits. My motivation is personal.

C2 — The ‘I need others to do something that will help me’ motivation.

I collaborate because I wouldn’t be able to achieve something my org values without others. My motivation is organisational.

C3 — The ‘I need others to help me achieve a wider goal that I can’t deliver myself’ motivation.

I collaborate because I want to achieve a broader societal/system goal and need others to help. My motivation is system based.

C4 — The ‘collaboration is an essential capability we need to develop’ motivation.

I collaborate because I believe that it’s an essential approach (in abstract) not something whose utility is limited to solving a particular problem. My motivation is building place capability.

C5 — The ‘I collaborate therefore I am’ motivation.

I collaborate because Iam fundamentally committed to working that way. My motivation is civic and social — my organisation is a means to that end.

How many of these types of collaboration do you recognise? How do you or your organisation approach collaboration? Are the people with whom you are trying to collaborate coming at it in the same way?

Ask yourself these questions — there are crucial if you want to collaborate successfully.

In terms of application , the scale enables us to:

• Clarify the approach — and motivation — that is shaping the involvement of individuals and organisations
• Be able to discuss what type of collaboration is needed to achieve different outcomes.

This second point is key because we often try to achieve very complex societal or place based work that requires C4 or C5 type collaboration working with organisations and people who are still working from a C1 perspective.

This is a recipe for frustration and failure — we need to be as clear about the type of collaboration that we seek to practice as we are about outcomes or objectives of a project. If we are not, we are setting ourselves up to fail.

And this doesn’t just have implications for the project in hand — it implicitly undermines the credibility of collaboration as a way of working and makes successful collaboration in the future more difficult.

So this is something we need to get right — because the longer we fail to address this issue the tougher we make it for ourselves in the future.

Structures and directives don’t solve complex challenges on their own.

As Toby Lowe has put it — the outcomes we seek (ie solving societal challenges) are the emergent properties of complex systems.

We can’t direct these systems — we have to participate in them.

And to do so we need a different approach to leadership. A more ‘distributed’ approach’ has something to offer us here — its not the full answer but a great place to start.

Distributed leadership is probably the basis of a much more enabling, participatory and (most important) effective leadership within, and not of, complex systems.

Please note the within, and not of, distinction here….

So, I’d like to share a talk I did a few years ago on distributed leadership. It’s below with some timing notes further down the page.

David Relph — Distributed Leadership and Strategy

Photo by Matt Lamers on Unsplash

In June 2013 I was asked to give a talk on leadership which I would like to share. The talk was a great opportunity to discuss some of my reflections on leadership based on the experiences that I have had in the UK military, the low carbon and renewables sector, and the NHS. These are of course, only my thoughts on what is a hugely complex and challenging subject, but I hope that they will be of some interest and provoke some discussion. The theme of the talk was distributed leadership, and it was trailed in the event programme like this:

Leadership has to change. We have seen the systematic decline and even failure of too many organisations and leadership is a critical component. Unless we can re-think how we approach ‘moving the people’ then the best strategy in the world is worthless. It’s clear that a top-down, transactional approach isn’t working.

If you haven’t got time for the whole talk, then it breaks down into a number of sections that begin as follows:

0.00 Introducing Leadership and trying to get a handle on the concept.

2.34 What do we mean by ‘distributed leadership’?

4.32 Leadership as a Philosophy and why this is important.

5.46 How the military does it.

8.35 Mission Command.

11.53 How can we develop a distributed leadership approach?

17.06 And how do we do this in organisations without a well developed philosophy of leadership?

21.29 What does a ‘distributed’ approach to strategy look like?

27.32 Summary — What I (think I) have learned…

This talk was filmed at ‘Leadership and Culture in the wake of Francis’, held in London on the 27th of June 2013 and organised by Andrew Vincent (Partner at Academyst LLP) — to whom I want to extend my sincere thanks for an excellent event.