In Praise of Third Parties

(Two interiors: The entrance to the building which houses the Council on Virginia's Future; and the lift lobby in the former Greyhound bus station, which houses the US's Partnership for Public Service)

I’ve already posted about the fact that some successful collaborations have deliberately appointed a non-partisan organisation to take a ‘whole system view’, in addition to the leader. I think there’s more to be said, though, about the role of third parties in supporting those who are doing successful collaboration across government agencies.

By third party, I mean someone that has no responsibility whatsoever for directly delivering the services in question, (I’m thereby cutting out groups like the Corporation for Supportive Housing in New Haven Connecticut, who do also build housing).

They seem to perform two main roles. One is a ‘secretariat’ or ‘steward’ function. Examples I've come across in the last five weeks:

• The Toronto-based Institute for Citizen Centred Service (ICCS), provides the secretariat (including agenda planning) to the Public Sector Service Delivery Council, that is a forum for Service Delivery Chief Executives to come together to plan collaboration. The ICCS is a non-profit outfit, funded by fees from member organisations, from ‘all three levels of government’ in Canada: federal, provincial, and city. It also supports a parallel body, a Council of Chief Information Officers.

• The US’s Partnership for Public Service is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works “to revitalize the federal government” and is funded mainly by private foundations. It acts as a secretariat (and catalyst) for two networks within the US Federal Government - one for Chief Information Officers, and one for Chief Finance Officers

Their second role is as a ‘data provider’. More examples:

• The Richmond-based Council on Virginia’s Future produces an annual report on the performance of the State of Virginia, against a set of indicators. The Council is a creature outside of the executive, deliberately taking an advisory role and reporting to members of the legislature and local community and business leaders.

• The Institute for Citizen Centred services (ICCS), mentioned above, has been running client satisfaction surveys for government bodies since 1998, and provides both public and private (benchmarking) data to key government agencies to inform their operational and strategic plans for service integration. It does this - and its secretariat function - with only 11 staff!

What’s the advantage of their independence from Government? My impressions are:

• More trust by the public, politicians and even frontline staff, in their data. After a period in the early 2000's of departments publishing a lot of their own data, the UK media became very suspicious of the way it was presented. The National Audit Office now has very strict protocols about when and how statistics are published in the UK. I think these third parties are given a similar, independent, credence.
• More challenge back to the Government about the speed at which they are providing better services. Those who work in these third parties have good knowledge about what is going on and can often see the links between agencies in a way that those inside them don't always notice.
• They are able to act as an independent ‘witness’. It reminds me of those anthropologists who get nervous about their subjects behaving differently when they know they are being watched. When governments know they are being watched by someone externally, they behave differently.
• They can use their position to influence across the Executive, and they are not bound by hierarchical considerations (one government employee a few weeks ago mentioned a barrier to collaboration being his grade - because his partners didn't know if he was worth talking to because he was quite junior, and he couldn't get access to very senior people), or by whether someone is in the executive, legislature or a community organisation. They can talk to anyone, and influence systemically.
• Their existence is not threatened by changes in political administration, so they provide continuity of insight.

Customer centricity - and the PSSDC, a long acronym that made a difference.

I spent Friday writing up most of my interviews with those I met when I was in Canada. Revisiting the material reminded me what an impressive journey both Service Canada, and Service Ontario, had made.

Both are based on the idea that a single organisation runs a front counter that faces the public. The citizen can go in to the same office, to sort out their pension, their employment insurance (Jobseeker’s allowance), get their social insurance number, renew their passport, their driving licence, and so on. The back office processing part may happen in more than one agency - like the Passport Service, or the Tax Office - but the front office is a ‘one stop shop’ for the government. Compare this to the UK - where you go to the DVLA for your driving licence, the Identity and Passport Service for your passport, HMRC for your national insurance number, the Job Centre for your jobseekers allowance, and the local authority for your housing benefit, and you can start to see why this seems surprisingly rational.

Canada's service integration is still work in progress. For example, from what I could see,

• The ‘Bigs’, like health insurance, and the Revenue, haven’t come on board completely yet, though that’s looking more and more likely in the Canadian Administrative Services Review, which is underway at the moment - which is being run by a former Chief Operating Officer for Service Canada, who has the service integration bug.
• There are still divides between the Federal and the Provincial level that don’t quite make sense from the citizen's point of view
• Each new service integration creates lots of technical issues to iron out, like whether the right legislative authorities are in place, differing “proof of identity” requirements for different services, and different management information and computer systems coming together, all bumping up against each other in the one front office.
• They may, eventually, hit a real cultural reluctance to have government sharing an awful lot of data on citizens, between different Agencies.

One official described what he called a necessary cycle - “Putting it all together, making it make sense, then resuming growth. The second phase, making it make sense, can feel like it’s all cobbled together with duck tape and string at the back. That’s why you need to spend time on that one.”

But there are such rational things going on! For example, they organise services by life event. On the front page of the Service Canada website, it invites you to click on options like ‘finding a job’, ‘raising a family’, having a baby’, ‘retirement planning’ and ‘starting a business’. They then aim to bundle the services together around the life event. One bundle Service Ontario was very proud of, was getting the birth certificate issued at the same time as the social insurance number. They also managed to get the turnaround time for a birth certificate down from 9 months to 8 days. Oh, and did I mention? They saved money at the same time.

What made it work? Lots of things, including being very attentive to customer feedback, strong leadership and soforth, but almost every single interviewee I spoke to (and I met about 6 or 7, from very different parts of the business), mentioned three things.

1. A simple vision: putting the customer at the centre.
2. Attention to creating a citizen-centric culture, from the ‘service agent’ at the front line, right through to the leader at the top. There's loads more to say about this, but just one example is, when they set the 8 day target for the birth certificate, they promised the citizen their fee back if they didn’t make the turnaround time. I wonder whether we could do that in the UK!
3. A body that met twice a year called the ‘Public Sector Service Delivery Council’ (the PSSDC). This was for ‘Deputy Ministers’ (our Chief Executives, or possibly Permanent Secretaries) of delivery agencies.

The first couple of times the PSSDC was mentioned, I noted it down on my handy cognitive map and moved swiftly on. It sounded like a dull old get together of important folk, a talking shop. But as I reviewed the cognitive maps last Friday, I started to question my lack of interest. Five or six people had mentioned the PSSDC as being one of the 'how's', getting central government agencies collaborating more. It actually seemed to be a significant ingredient in the success of service integration. Not the only factor, for sure. But it was referred to as the place where joint projects were initiated, where trust was built between Agency heads, and where the desire for collaboration grew, was nurtured, and was actioned. It didn’t just happen that way by chance: it was set up with the mandate of fostering collaboration.

Where is the UK’s version of this, I wondered? When do the Chief Exec of the DVLA, Job Centre Plus, the Border Agency, and HMRC, come together and pursue joint plans? I think of the work that the Cabinet Office has been trying to do recently, to work with Agencies to integrate their website interfaces, and my impression is that it has been slow going.

Last week, Ian Duncan Smith launched his new ‘universal credit’ , which will incorporate Income Support, income- based Jobseeker’s Allowance, income-related Employment and Support Allowance, Housing Benefit, Child Tax Credit and Working Tax Credit. That list of benefits implicates Job Centre Plus, Local authorities, and HMRC for a start.

I think the Department of Work and Pensions would do well to pay attention to Canada’s experience. Why wouldn't the Universal Credit only be the beginning of an effort at increased service integration? As part of that path, Britain might need its very own clunkily named Council of those that lead organisations doing public sector service delivery.

I’ll be interested to know if my Canadian interviewees agree with my impression of the PSSDC!

And what was the point of it all again?

I’ve taken some time at the end of this part of my fellowship to reflect. I’m ensconced in a wooden cabin in Arizona, with just WiFi, deer and squirrels to distract me.

It's the spiritual aspect of 'wholeness' that has caught my attention in the last few days. The picture, by the way, is of the rocks at Sedona, which I visited on Wednesday. Sedona has all sorts of spiritual resonances.

I’m staying on the land of a very interesting gentleman called Bodhi, who has travelled a lot, and read a lot, exploring ideas about spirituality and human consciousness. A couple of nights ago, Bodhi pointed me in the direction of the text, ‘I Am That’, the Dialogues of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. This text encourages the seeker to go beyond the mind and experience the self, to focus on the question, “Who am I”. I am summarising something I haven’t finished reading (and indeed something I don’t entirely understand. Though that, apparently, is the booby prize compared to awareness!), but let me have a go.

Maharaj says that pain and pleasure are just an endless source of either indolence or restlessness, a cycle where you cannot know your true self, which is joyful awareness of universal consciousness. If you come to the ‘now’ rather than the past (memory) or the future (desire based on memory), then you can hope to find pure joy. The sense of separateness between oneself and another is an illusion. Pain and pleasure come from the mind, rather than true awareness of consciousness. There is only oneself in the present moment, and “I” and “another” are actually the same thing. We are all one.

Eckhart Tolle seems to be getting at something similar in his book, The Power of Now. You surrender to the now - whether that be suffering or joy - and just be, rather than do.

Is the implication of all this, therefore, that you should just let the world ‘be’ as it is? That you can’t possibly assess the 'appropriateness' of someone else’s joy or suffering, and you shouldn’t try to influence it?

Although much of the advice in these texts I find very compelling (certainly release from fear is very attractive!) I find myself resisting as well. Where does helping another come in to this? Is that just dismissed as ‘doing’ as opposed to ‘being’? If someone is suffering, is their suffering an illusion, something for which one should not take responsibility? Is my yearning to improve the lot of those in the world an unnecessary and pointless ego trip? (I do wonder!)

I want the world to be a better place. I want children to have excellent education so that they can express themselves and be healthy and happy and care for each other. I want us to conserve energy to allow us to sustain our existence on the planet, that we can continue to enjoy our environment, deer and sq

uirrels included. In particular I want people at work to feel that their work is meaningful and they are free to do it well. We all desire autonomy (the desire to be self-directed), mastery (the urge to get better at stuff) and purpose ( see the RSA animated lecture for a compelling exposition of this). I so want to be an instrument of these things for others. To me, tackling these challenges require us to engage in a complex world, which in turn means they merit understanding, collaborative work, joint effort. Certainly all those I have interviewed are passionate, keen to change the world so that it is a better place. Is it worth it?

Maharaj says, possibly not:

Whatever work you have undertaken -- complete it. Do not take up new tasks. Unless it is called for by a concrete situation of suffering and relief from suffering. Find yourself first, and endless blessings will follow. Nothing profits the world as much as the abandoning of profits.... The only help worth giving is freeing from the need for further help. Repeated help is no help at all. Do not talk of helping another, unless you can put him beyond all need of help.

I reflected with Bodhi about all this today. As I described various experiences I had had in the last year, he kept bringing me back to what that meant for my fellowship.

I started by saying, "I had an experience, earlier this year, of working on the question of self-love for a weekend," I said. "In the process, I realised I had to welcome and love all of me - even the bits I considered pathetic, unimpressive, weak, unpleasant, bitter, selfish. It was difficult."

Bodhi said, "Some people say that to criticise yourself is to criticise divine perfection! Now, from that space of self-love, what would that mean for collaboration?"

I thought for a second. I remembered being in that place of acceptance, of big-ness and lack of fear. "It's almost like, you wouldn't need to "collaborate". A formal effort at collaboration would be unnecessary. Everyone would just come and be whole, and offer their gifts. Things would change just because you were being at your most expanded."

Then my thoughts moved on. "I feel like I've been looking for something these last few weeks. A sort of holy grail. I want to find a partnership , or a constellation of organisations and people that exists like that, where people feel welcomed in their wholeness, and they in turn see from the whole. It doesn't have a guiding mind, it's sort of organic, although I'm guessing it may need some sort of container to make it safe. Service Ontario felt like it was the closest to 'nirvana', so to speak, but there was still a huge amount of change management effort going in. I'm looking for something more creative and less imposed. People know what to do inherently, and they feel like they're creating something bigger between them.The closest I've come is hearing about Tonya's model at Toronto's Centre for Social Innovation. But that's for nonprofits and even then it could verge on the 'guiding mind' bit if you weren't careful. It's too scary for a bureaucracy. You'd have to give up so much power."

Bodhi, 'Well that's the edge then. What is scary for a bureaucracy? Maybe that's what is worth doing? What would it like to be in a big organisation, 'being' rather than 'doing', noticing where those connections, those authentic exchanges between people were, and giving them attention? Following the joy?"

Now that made me think....

Is it only the person in charge that sees the whole picture?

It’s election time in the USA. This morning, the state of New Mexico (where I am at the moment) heard that its Democrat Governor was making way for a Republican. Some of the officials I’ve been meeting this week aren’t too sure if they’re going to have a job once the new Governor settles in. The extent of political appointees for executive functions is much greater here than in the UK.

As far as ensuring that government agencies work successfully together, my impression is that this isn’t exactly a recipe for success. I’ve heard the same story a couple of times from my interviewees who are involved with State government, or indeed with New York City.

A very senior leader, maybe a Commissioner or Special Advisor, is appointed by the Governor or Mayor or First Lady. They’re an enthusiast for collaboration, and they set up a structure whereby they force agencies to start coming together. In addition, the Governor or Mayor makes a point of challenging their commissioners at Cabinet level over how successfully they’re working in collaboration. They even get agreement on a set of data that shows the extent to which the City or the State is achieving a particular outcome, and they use this to further challenge what is really going on, and collaboration improves. Further down the food chain, key officials work out technical compromises between departments.

(One of the ones I like, which is a good example, is where those planning prisoner discharge in New York City were very reluctant to let the Child Support Agency people near their ex prisoners. They didn’t want to ‘give up’ their convicts to child support, thereby leaving the ex prisoners with even more debt on leaving prison. But the Commissioner saw a win-win, so persuaded Child Support to offer very gentle repayment schedules to the former prisoners. The key officials made sure this worked in practice, and that the discharge planners were bought in to the process.)

So, this is all well and good. What does collaboration need? Strong leadership. A commitment to working collaboratively. Creativity in the face of conflict. Holding people’s feet to the fire.

But then the collaboration enthusiast moves on. Maybe, like in the State of Virginia, the Governor’s term of office is only limited to one term of four years. Or maybe the leader gets to thinking, I’ve been doing this for 6 or 10 years, and I need a change.

What then? In one place I visited, they were clear this had been really problematic. “Performance, and the collaboration, went on a plateau.” Another said, “We did stick with it, even without the leadership. We’ve had regional roundtables. But it’s easy to forget, easy to get in to silo’s again.”

That left me thinking, there has to be a way to sustain the desire to collaborate. It has to be more than just strong leadership that makes this happen. How do you embed it into a culture?

The first clue I got to how to answer this came in my visit to the Corporation for Supportive Housing in New Haven, Connecticut. They talked about a collaboration that had been going for 15 years, trying to prevent homelessness in ex-offenders. A key success factor had been having a number of actors who ‘saw from the whole’, who weren’t just the key commissioners of service. For them, it was what they calle

d the OPM. I think this is the Office of Policy and Management, and it seemed to perform a similar function to the UK's treasury, in that it co-ordinated budgeting. It therefore incentivised agencies to co-operate through funding structures. They also had an independent, non-profit agency, the CSH themselves, sitting on the collaborative and looking at the big picture.

Aha, I thought. So along with the convening power of the leader in those earlier examples, what the leader is doing is ‘seeing from the whole’. And to try and embed that in to your culture, you can ensure that its in other actors’ job descriptions that they have to ‘see from the whole’ as well.

I then started wondering about the holy grail. Would it be possible to have the whole system seeing from the part and the whole at the same time?

In the UK Border Agency, my caseworkers would often be asked to do several things at once. They’d need to conclude a case quickly, and needed to make sure that the ‘control’ aspects were suitably attended to - background checks, following up intelligence, etc. As far as possible we tried to prevent putting productivity and control in conflict with each other. But it isn’t always easy. I popped in on the UK's visa office in New York when I was there, and this was definitely a live issue. Of course it’s easier to set a target for turnaround times than it is to set a target for preventing undesirable people coming to the UK. So sometimes the system can get a bit biased in favour of the simple metric rather than seeing ‘the whole’.

How do you do get every actor, including frontline staff, to see from the part and the whole, I wondered to myself?

Service Canada’s answer was to put service and the citizen at the heart of their junior staff’s work, rather than just administration. They re-trained over 5000 staff, re-classified their profession as service rather than administration, changed the competencies that they were promoting people on, and had a massive engagement and communication effort on the part of senior managers, ensuring that the vision of being service oriented was embedded.

I saw another fascinating example in the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto, which has a constellation approach to organising non-profit groups when doing joint advocacy. Tonya Surman turned the idea of who's in the lead, completely on its head, and deliberately set up a structure to honour 'chaos and complexity'. Her guiding principles were to 'break rules', 'be provocative' and 'have fun'. (The picture below is of one floor in the Centre for Social Innovation, a place where lots of different organisations can rent a hot desk, or an office, and work from the same shared space.)

In her model, there would be one 'magnetic attractor' - an issue that pulled lot

s of different organisations and people towards it. (In Tonya's case, this was toxicity and children's health). Those that were attracted would be in the 'ecosystem'. You couldn't choose who was in that ecosystem, or who your partners were, it was simply whoever was interested - so it might include the producers of the toxins as well as those campaigning against them. Then self-organising action teams would coalesce around sub-themes. In Tonya's case they'd had an action team on 'mercury', one on 'education' and one on 'policy', and others too. From each self-organising action team, there would be a representative on a stewardship council. The stewardship council was deliberately charged with 'looking after the ecosystem'. So people who served on it would have their own partial view of their action team AND be charged with looking at things from the whole. There was a secretariat for the stewardship council but this was deliberately in a third party and was not attached to any organisation in the ecosystem. The Secretariat's role was to incubate and support the stewardship group. You can read a lot more about this model in Tonya's article.

So, my mind spun with whether you could apply this to a government collaboration. The attraction? All the people who are interested in a theme self-organise. There is a significant group of people who are charged with 'looking after the ecosystem', and they are not all the people with power or money, they're just the people that care the most and have the expertise. Those people are spread liberally around the ecosystem. The downside? As government, you'd be highly reluctant to 'let go of the power' and let the self-organising principle do its stuff. What if they didn't focus on the minister's (aka the public's) priorities? What if you had to work with people that you really didn't want to work with, who were angry and undermining?

But what a lot of food for thought!

How home cooking relates to collaboration

In Canada, I’ve had home cooking, and honest to goodness hospitality. I feel such gratitude and connection for this. I’m sitting on a plane heading to New Mexico at the moment (they have WiFI up here! I'm having one of those moments of simultaneously thinking, "I can't believe it" and knowing at the same time that WiFi in planes will feel completely ordinary in about 6 months time...) and I feel a bit choked up about it. So I’m wondering, what is it that moves me?

When I was in Ottawa on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, I stayed in the house of some Quakers, whom my parents met in 1986, when we lived in Ottawa for 6 months (I was 11 at the time). Over the years, my parents have unfailingly sent their annual Christmas letter to Carol and John, and very very occasionally have stayed with them if they have been in Ottawa. Likewise Carol and John have perhaps stayed one night at my parents’ place in Reading, England, in 25 years. The offer of hospitality was unhesitatingly extended to me last week, along with home cooked food, lifts to the bus and train stations, and the 24-digit password to their WiFi.

The same again in Toronto. Allison and Bob are my second cousins, once removed (their son is my third cousin) - which means that my mum and Allison have the same Northern Irish great-grandmother. Allison and Bob put me up in 1991 when I ventured out for almost the first time to a foreign country on my own (aged 16) - and watched me emerge as a confident woman from my chrysalis of self-doubt and teenage anxiety, in the space of about 4 weeks. Then they hosted me again in 1994 at the tail end of my year out before university. And I’m not sure I’ve seen them or even been in touch in 16 years. But this week I got a big welcome and a comfy bed, and tolerance to my comings and goings, a metro card, a lift to the airport, and good food.

And in both places I had fantastic conversations. In Ottawa: The state of the Canadian government and its attitude to the churches. The state of Quakers in the world. The idea of the international commons and how to work on this legally. Ottawa as a government town. Grandchildren and farming and the Ottawan winter (which is very snowy and very sunny) and the links to solar energy schemes...

In Toronto: consulting firms and how they want experts who turn in to managers who turn in to ‘rainmakers’ (making money for the firm). How to use your distribution unit as a hub for connection to your customer, and to value your employee’s time spent making relationship, not just how much money they make. Bob recounted a tale where he was chatting on the phone to a customer far away in another part of Canada, and once they’d done the business, he asked, ‘How was your winter?’ And a whole new frontier of relationship opened up. Provence and the French Alps, and the merits of blackberries over I-phones. Regular online checks of the Belfast Telegraph and the unusual animal-related stories therein.

And that’s just for where I stayed. Then there was dinner with Tony and Marie, who I’d never met before but who barbecued salmon for me and downloaded their wisdom on transforming public services. There was breakfast with Emily who I first met in the kitchen of a Quaker camp in 1991, and today over pancakes and coffee we talked about life and death and love and books. And then there’s all the meetings and connections I have made in just a few days, through people who had willingly opened up their contact book and connected me with others.

You get the picture. I left today, gratitude in my heart, having felt nurtured and welcomed. And I wanted to extend offers of hospitality to Carol and John, to Bob and Allison, Tony and Marie, Emily, and to their children and grandchildren and unborn great grandchildren and nephews and nieces. What moves me is the way these supportive connections are offered over many years, and inter-generationally, in subtle ways, and that these then link families and communities and, ultimately, nations in understanding.

I had a breakfast when I was in Washington 2 weeks ago, with some community funders, and our discussion turned to whether the purpose of collaboration was to achieve change, or the purpose of collaboration was to be in relationship. One woman said, both. ‘The people that keep coming back to the advocacy work don’t just come back to make a difference in this town. They come back because they want to be in relationship with the people they are doing the advocacy with.’

Yesterday I had lunch with a woman who works at United Way Toronto and she said a similar thing. “We help the homeless get back in to work, through social enterprises. And what this offers them isn’t necessarily dignity or money or a home. It’s connection. Most homeless people are really isolated. When they get work, they start to belong, to feel connected. And the best thing? Sometimes, when they feel really connected, they start giving back, and being a volunteer.’

And so I want to acknowledge that this theme of mine, collaboration, is also, sometimes about just being in relationship. Offering support. Welcoming folk. Remembering how we’re connected rather than how we are different. It’s simple, and profound, and it nurtures the soul. And that’s why I have a tear in my eye, because I’m very very grateful for this and how it gets manifested in my life.

Cognitive Maps: More Info

I’ve been in a lot of Ottawa taxis today, meeting all sorts of people involved in Service Canada. I used the cognitive map as a way of recording the perspectives of interviewees. It's the first time I've done it concurrently with interviewing, rather than doing it after the fact as a way of making sense of my notes. I’ve used a couple of pictures of my first drafts in this post, to show you what the scribblings look like.

For the benefit of those I might be seeing in the next few days, and those who asked me about cognitivemapping today, I thought I’d post up a bit more information about it.

The notes below are by Professor Jake Chapman, with whom I teach systems thinking at the National School of Government.I can also recommend a very detailed set of instructions about how to do cognitive maps in this paper.

Cognitive mapping is based upon Kelly’s Theory of Personal Constructs. An individual’s constructs are their way of making sense of the world – and they also condition how they experience the world in the future.

A cognitive map is a model of ‘the system of concepts’ used by an individual to communicate the nature of a problem. Visually it looks much like a multiple cause diagram, but there are a number of differences both in its construction and in the

conventions it uses. In work with clients you can abotain, through interviewing, a cognitive map from each of the senior managers involved. You can then tuse the maps to explore differences in the way the problem is perceived – and can also combine maps to produce a ‘bigger picture’ that can be used as the basis for agreed action. This whole approach is based upon the assumption that the manager is involved in the psychological construction of their world, rather that the perception of some objective world.

Cognitive maps are extremely useful at demonstrating differences in perception or world views. The map shows how people with different perspectives reason differently about the world or problem or situation. This can be of enormous benefit in complex situations where differences in view are obviously present, but not addressed (other than at the level of argument or negating each other).

It is critical to realise that a cognitive map is as accurate a representation as possible of another person’s way of thinking. It is not my view of how they think – it is a model of how they actually think based on their own words and cannot be regarded as valid unless checked by the individual whose thinking is being represented. It is important to use the person’s own words in the map.

A key insight from construct theory is that you can clarify the meaning of a concept by asking the person “as opposed to what?”. One of my Open University colleagues once had the task of resolving serious problems in the management committee of a large national charity. After interviewing everyone he noticed that they all described their meetings as ‘sticking to the agenda’. When he did follow up interviews, which were aiming towards a cognitive map of each person’s view, he asked “meetings sticks to the agenda .. as opposed to what?” He received an enormous range of answers, including the following:waste time

• make decisions
• allow people to rabbit on
• doing any creative thinking about our problems
• let people speak out
• deal with anything urgent where we might have an impact

In a cognitive map a person's construct is represented by the original phrase (called the positive pole of the construct), three dots and then the opposite (also called the negative pole). Thus

meetings stick to the agenda … making decisions

The best way to read this is to interpret the three dots as “rather than” or “as opposed to”.

(Jake Chapman)

I’m noticing some interesting differences and similarities between the cognitive maps I made today while at Service Canada and the ones I've made from last week. So for instance, today, it was significant how big a theme the issue of a really coherent vision was - and how substantially the vision (of a service-centred organisation focused on the citizen) has been embedded at the front line and in the executive management. The themes of ‘good relationships’ were much less significant today than they have been in my interviews on the East Coast of America. Which leads me to wonder if one can substitute a bit for the other.

Collaboration and... The Dark Moments

I’ve spent all week being inspired by what my interviewees achieve. But this post is devoted to the dark moments that seem to go with collaboration.

I’ve been asking some of my interviewees to draw rich picture diagrams about what it’s like working in collaboration. I’ve also been asking alm

ost everyone the question, ‘When has working in collaboration kept you awake at night?’. Only one person has said that emphatically that it hasn’t.

(These are my recollections of what these 6 separate interviewees said, pulled together from my notes):

Interviewee 1: “I spent 18 months trying to work with City Government over them commissioning our service. They wouldn’t be clear about what they wanted, they were hard to reach, they wouldn’t call back. I couldn’t put a face on them. That kept me awake. It was the uncertainty of not knowing.”

Interviewee 2: “I feel a bit like Sisyphus: pushing the boulder up the hill. There are a lot of seething people. We’re trying to work with them, and there’s a lot of noise. Collaboration is hard.”

Interviewee 3: “With my original 3 collaborators, they get it, they’re the real leadership group. But others can be begrudging. Sometimes I ask myself, why don’t I just forget those partners? We could just do it ourselves. It’s only because it’s in my organisation’s DNA that strong civic infrastructure in local communities is important, so I keep at it.”

Interviewee 4: (Artist of the rich picture with the hearts) “Here are the government agencies, and the hearts represent the providers. I’m in the middle. There are all these crazy paths - the green ones represent tension, as do the lightening bolts. My role,

as the collaborator, is to engage with all this craziness with open arms and a smile on my face. Our goal is to weave a yellow brick road. But I need a forcefield protecting myself from the tension. Now I know why I get so tired by 2pm!”

Me: “Was it stressful?” Interviewee 5: “Oh my God! The resistance! It’s personality driven. Oh man! I was going to kill someone! They were giving you a hundred reasons why it can’t be done. But [the key instigator of the collaboration] persisted. And eventually those government departments got bought in. But taking on these discussions requires effort. That’s why leadership really helps.”

Interviewee 6: “I called all 3 and said, ‘What the f**k?’ Why didn’t they share what they knew with me? I felt at a disadvantage. I said, ‘I’m going to continue to share. I’m really disappointed, given what I’ve done for you in the past year.’

[And on the rich picture:] "I’m in the picture, trying to reach out to people on the edge, and trying to push the people in the middle further along. It’s hard. It’s lonely. The emotions I feel are hope and frustration all at the same time.”

Collaboration... and the Strategist Action Logic

I’ve got a hypothesis that it takes a certain mindset to want to work in collaboration. Someone who is capable of seeing the world from the lot of different points of view at once, and simultaneously work to appeal to all those different points of view.

Bill Torbert, a Professor of Leadership at Boston College, and huge proponent of the practice of action inquiry, might say that your action logic is a good predictor of this ability to see things from many different perspectives. (An action logic is how someone makes meaning in the world. What you bring in to your frame to make it make sense. There’s a useful description of all the different action logics in this article, and the outfit that assesses your action logic and has written the book on it all is Harthill Consulting.)

So, I’m assuming that you need to reason from at least that of an ‘achiever’s action logic’ in order to be interested in good collaboration, but that it is probably done best by those who reason from a ‘strategist’ action logic.

Achiever: “They are open to feedback and realise that many of the ambiguities and conflicts of everyday life relate to differences in perspective. They know that creatively transforming or resolving issues requires sensitivity to relationships and ability to influence others in positive ways. The tight focus on goals and objectives means that leaders working from the Achiever action-logic can be clear and decisive.”

Strategist: “When they operate out of the Strategist action-logic, people who have developed to this stage can create shared vision across action-logics, engaging with people in an iterative, developmental process that encourages both personal and organisational transformations. Strategists deal with conflict more comfortably than those with other action-logics and they are better at handling people’s instinctive resistance to change. As a result they can be highly effective change agents.... They distinguish themselves from Individualists [The action logic you pass through between achiever and strategist] through their focus on organisational constraints and perceptions, which they treat as discussible and transformable.”

When I first learnt about the strategist action logic, I was told that it was originally called ‘the collaborator’ by those who mapped action logics in the 1970's. This epithet was ditched when the concepts came over from the USA to Europe, because the word 'collaborator' had negative overtones in Europe.

Now I couldn’t possibly be certain of the action logic of anyone I’ve interviewed so far. Harthill run a diagnostic test that allows you to find out your own dominant action logic. I had toyed with asking my interviewees to take the test, but it was a bit much to ask! But I have been noticing some typically strategist ways of looking at the world, in my interviewees.

Sonia Ospina is an Associate Professor at the Wagner School of Public Service in New York University. I met her and some of her faculty on Wednesday. They teach nonprofit management, and explore social transformation, especially how the private, public and nonprofit sectors intersect to produce soical transformation for the common good.

In the last five years they have worked with the Ford Foundation who have sponsored 20 groups a year, for 2 years at a time each, to partner the Wagner School. In effect this means that Sonia gets to work with social change leaders. She says the School ‘sits together with the people’ - helping leaders do their own inquiry (which she described as their wondering, having puzzles), and their own dialogue, and using themselves as the subjects of their own research.

She described what they are doing as exploring ‘leadership as a collective achievement’, in particular how we ‘make sense together’ and ‘adapt as they go along’. The idea of paying attention not just to leadership but also how you exercise this in a collective group, that you assist your ‘followers’/co-workers in making meaning, sounded pretty ‘strategist action logic’ to me.

Linda Gibbs is one of the Deputy Mayors of New York, working for Mayor Bloomberg. I met her on Wednesday too. We met in Bloomberg’s famous ‘bullpen’ , (the picture I took of the bullpen is the picture I've used for this post) which meant I could grab a decaf coffee from the snacks counter and see the Mayor's desk in amongst the throng. The bullpen itself sounds pretty transformational.

“Bloomberg imported the cubicle concept from his Wall Street days, and he sits at a desk the same size as the 51 others. His closest confidante, First Deputy Mayor Patti Harris, is within arm’s reach. He donated the computers and pays for the snacks (bagels in the morning, salad in the afternoon). “As a work space, it is something that you do not think that you can ever get used to,” says a former bullpen resident. “But when you see the mayor hosting high-level meetings in clear sight of everyone else, you start to understand that this open-communication model is not bullshit. And that it works.” (Ref)

Linda described herself as ‘a collaboration addict’ in an environment where she knows that many might think that collaboration can be a waste of time. She has found that when there are many different players operating, and where many of the players are not directly reporting to you, that running a broad and inclusive process gets more buy in. And in turn, these have a more sustained effect. To paraphrase her, she said,

“If you are willing to share your power, and people see you giving it away, that gets a lot of buy-in, even when you, in the end, settle for 75% consensus rather than 100% consensus. The fact that you have gone through a process already of sharing power means that even the 25% that aren’t on board have more buy-in to what the final solution is.”

This focus on how to handle people’s inevitable resistance to change reminds me of the strategist action logic too.

Today I met Michelle de la Uz, head of Fifth Avenue Committee, which is a residents association based in Brooklyn. As part of bringing economic justice to the Brooklyn community, Michelle builds affordable housing. She told me about Atlantic Terrace, an eco-friendly building which has 59 affordable apartments for local families, and 20 units at market rates. Michelle has put the funding together from private financial institutions, city and federal government, and the local community.She told me that at the launch event last night were bankers, mortgate financers, a nonprofit helping first- time homebuyers, local politicians, the cabinet making business that builds eco-cabinets and employs local people, and the artist who designed the countertops out of recycled materials - and also hires long-term unemployed to make the counter tops. Michelle is intent on leveraging all the $38m of the scheme to benefit the local community.

She also told me how last night’s successful launch event was actually borne of a lot of uncertainty. The 2007 housing crash made the project's funding look very precarious. The banks were losing 40% of their staff, to the point that it wasn’t clear who she should talk to any more about the project. Persuading the bank not to foreclose on the loan took a lot of influencing and relationship building - including using influence through other relationships such as former bank employees or government. At the same time as all this, she needed to persuade the buyers of the property to stay interested.

It sounded like she was having to see the world through multiple different perspectives at once, spinning plates, just to keep everyone on board. That sounded like big time strategist action logic behaviour too.