Collaborative working, seven years later

The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust recently asked me to reflect on the influence my Fellowship had on me and on others. This is what I wrote.

Emily Miles, a UK senior civil servant, went to the USA, Canada and India in 2010 and 2011 to find examples of publicly-funded collaborations between different organisations. She was looking for inspiration from the boundary-crossers: those who worked collaboratively across departments, between agencies, between national and local government, between the public sector, social enterprises and NGO sector, and with the private sector. She talked to nearly 70 different people in three countries, working in 49 different organisations, on 47 different collaborative projects. She wanted a bottom-up, grassroots view of what was needed to work collaboratively, rather than a theory. 

She had been inspired by the story of Winston Churchill ‘wooing’ FDR during the second world war - and how significant personal relationships were between Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill, as the war was played out. 

“Their (Franklin and Winston’s) story is a kind of love story. There was an early period of skepticism and courting from the invasion of Poland to Pearl Harbor; once America was in the war, Churchill and FDR spent two years in a grand pageant of personal intimacy and diplomacy. Then, beginning in the autumn of 1943, at Teheran, Stalin drove a wedge between them. The story of what happened at Teheran is riveting - games of teasing, sarcasm, and chilliness directed against Churchill, who at one point literally stormed from the dinner table. It's just amazing that such a thing could happen at the highest levels during the greatest war in history. But the personal matters to everyone, and Churchill was a very emotional man. And Roosevelt could be a very chilly one. But there is no doubt their friendship helped win the war.”  (John Meacham, Franklin and Winston )

She was fascinated by alliance building because she had become frustrated at the amount of effort and money she saw being wasted as publicly funded organisations struggled to work with each other. ‘We are all funded by the taxpayer’, she would say to herself, ‘Why can we not sort this out better?’ This was in spite of at least a decade of central government initiatives in the UK that had mandated much collaborative working at regional and local level in the UK, especially on cutting crime, regeneration, and dysfunctional families.

The Results

Firstly, Emily kept a blog while on her fellowship, here.  

In 2011, Emily wrote up her findings in a report on ‘Collaborative Working’ for the Institute for Government.

In particular, she discovered that all the successful collaborations had a number of key things in common, including 

• a shared common purpose, 
• an effort to put the service user or citizen at the heart of the work, 
• an emphasis on relationships not just formal systems, 
• sharing power and trusting those closer to the service user, and 
• a strong vision held by several senior leaders that collaborative working was what was needed. 

She came up with a model that described this.

Some of the anecdotes she collected gave clues for particular ways in, for example:

• Asking an external body to witness the internal workings of the collaboration through sitting on its board (Service Canada; and Corporation for Supportive Housing, Connecticut; Wikipedia, India. See more here.); 
• Making sure that delivering the change to new ways of working was supported by sufficient resource to help do reorganisation (Coporation for Supportive Housing in Connecticut); 
• The power of a single source of data on performance, to drive behaviour across organisations (Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative in Bernalillo County, New Mexico; and Children’s Services in Virginia). 
• The significance of leadership and relationships, even where the legal powers and structures were in place. (Children’s Services, Virginia, Service Canada. More here.)

She then went back to work, running a programme to close down a policing agency and set up a new professional body for the police in 2011-12; then becoming the Director for Policing policy in the Home Office in 2012-14; then going to the Cabinet Office to review Government practice on tackling illegal working and exploiting migrants in 2014-15. 

Her current role is in Defra, the department responsible for the environment, food and rural affairs, as Group Director of Strategy. 

The findings of her research have influenced Emily in her work. For example: 

• Devolving from national to local. Having discovered how important ‘sharing power’ was, she worked hard to support the devolving of responsibility for fighting crime to local areas, as part of her work on Police and Crime Commissioners.
  
• Organising around the offender, not the organisation. Similarly, while at the Cabinet Office, she led a pilot in five local authority areas in 2014-15, to look at how different enforcement organisations - including HMRC, Immigration, local authorities, Fire and the Police - could tackle rogue businesses who broke the rules. These better business compliance partnerships resulted in better join up of data, and better intelligence sharing between enforcement organisations.
• Organising around the user, not the organisation. With the significance of putting the ‘service user’ at the heart of work, she has been a strong proponent on Defra’s executive committee, of organising work as systems of organisations, rather than just as separate entities. She helped produce the first Defra group strategy, supported work on a single departmental plan for the Defra group, and was closely involved in work in 2016 to reimagine the 12 largest organisations in the Defra group into ‘outcome systems’. She continues to fly the flag for collaborative working within the Defra group. This approach is enabling those groups of organisations to plan services in a more collective way.

In all these examples, she has kept applying the lessons from her research, including reminding everyone involved of the significance - and effort required - to spend time on relationships, the need for a shared vision or common purpose; and supporting senior teams to deliver the strong leadership that insists on collaborative working.

Her work has also influenced others in the public sector.  In particular, Emily’s collaborative working model is now taught to future civil service directors, on the ‘senior leaders scheme’.  During the course, Emily’s model is used to critique recent government practice, for example on universal credit, and to show how working collaboratively would have made a difference. She does not know specifically how this has influenced her peers, but would love to hear from people who have adjusted their own leadership practice because of it.

Emily has taught seminars on collaborative working to civil servants at all grades. 

Additional information

Her paper has also influenced a UN Development Programme paper on collaborative working (https://d1rz56ot08aua0.cloudfront.net/attachments/library_files/118/original.pdf?1440331419 p.6)

Links

Emily’s blog while on her fellowship:  https://systemsandleadership.blogspot.co.uk/

Emily’s final report:  https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/Collaborative%20working.pdf

Emily Miles on Twitter: https://twitter.com/emilyhmiles?lang=en