Alliance Building: Fellowship Theme

This is what I said to the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust when I was interviewed for a fellowship back in January 2010:

Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt for some years, urging Roosevelt to help the Allies in the war in Europe. These letters inspired Roosevelt and it was the beginning of a diplomatic relationship that helped defeat Hitler and the Axis powers. As the historian Max Hastings said,

"Few lovers expended as much ink and thought as Churchill did in his long personal letters to President Franklin Roosevelt, two, sometimes three, times a week. The least patient of men, he displayed almost unfailing forbearance."

This relationship sparked an idea for me. What is this practice of alliance building? (Or coalition building, or partnership working, or seeing from the whole rather than the part... there are lots of ways to describe it.) It's essential when you're faced with a massive threat, and the synergy creates enormous opportunities. How might this synergy be maximised to the advantage of the public sector in the UK?

So I am interested in how to build successful alliances in the public sphere, to realise complex change. I intend to examine:

*Funding, performance management, [strategic] planning and governance arrangements

*The leadership skills of those leading the alliance, especially how they lead across and outside their organisation.

*The way relationships between organisations are managed, including how conflict is tackled and problems are solved.

*The role of co-production (i.e. providing the service with the explicit involvement of the citizen, as opposed to the service being ‘delivered’ by professionals to a passive recipient, in the way a pizza arrives at your doorstop).

I have funding from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust in 2010, to travel to the USA, Canada and India to broaden my understanding of how to make this work.

My premise is that the UK is highly centralised in the way that it delivers public services. Given the savings Government is expected to make in the next four years (probably around 20-25% cuts), and failings in the centralised approach, we need to think differently. That thinking has started. But do we really know what ‘different’ looks like? I wonder if our thinking is limited by our own context and experience.

What might a decentralised country like the USA teach the UK? What might Canada, who cut their own deficit dramatically, have learnt from that experience? And in a place where government must still provide basic infrastructure and little welfare or education, but business is booming (like India), what do collaborations look like when Government isn’t getting in the way?