The Centre for the Edge
A new initiative to help public sector leaders support emerging alternatives
This post has been co-authored by Sophia Parker, Emerging Futures Director at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and James Plunkett, the convener of Kinship Works
How can leaders in our struggling institutions of government support promising alternatives? In this post we’re announcing a new initiative to help public sector leaders grapple with this question. The work will be delivered in partnership by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Kinship Works, a collective that supports more human ways of making society better.
We’ll start by describing the problem the initiative is intended to help address and then we’ll share our initial thoughts on the scope of the work. We’d love feedback on whether the diagnosis resonates and whether we’re focused on the right topics.
The work will start in earnest in October and in the meantime you can follow Sophia on LinkedIn and Medium; Kinship Works on Blue Sky or LinkedIn; or James on Blue Sky and Medium.
Context: The responsible work of supporting alternatives
We are living in a time of instability and change, when systems and institutions that shape our lives, and that had once seemed stable, are faltering. The promises of progress and growth on which these institutions were founded seem to have been broken, and this is exposing the power dynamics and patterns of control that sit behind these systems, bringing their legitimacy into question.
Our governing settlement simply does not seem able to deliver what we have come to expect from it, as evidenced in everything from tumbling trust, to worrying projections of long-term fiscal sustainability. Public institutions that were once emblems of our ambition and ability to act collectively can now feel like monoliths, out of sync with our times, and reflecting operating models and assumptions that belong in the past.
Although there are many reasons for this breakdown, we believe an important part of the problem is that our public institutions struggle to renew themselves. Even in the face of recurring crises, the system is better at sustaining and replicating its current logic than it is at supporting and integrating alternatives.
The centre may be struggling, but the edges are vibrant. Over the last two decades, a turbulent period has given rise to a dizzying array of alternatives, often emerging under necessity in response to a sense of crisis. Some communities have taken matters into their own hands, reclaiming and repurposing spaces for civic purposes. Others have developed pioneering relational services, or experiments in deliberative democracy. And many people are trialling alternative economic models, especially circular and regenerative approaches in response to the climate crisis. These are all examples of people exploring fundamentally different ways to cooperate to make our lives better.
These alternatives may seem small and disparate, compared to the scale of the challenge. But history shows that large-scale change often first takes hold in seemingly peripheral initiatives — what Gal Beckerman has called the ‘quiet before’. Supporting these efforts is a way of kindling future possibilities, and, we would argue, it is also the responsible thing to do — a way of stewarding our social settlement by helping it to adapt.
Despite the importance of this work, however, our public institutions have struggled to engage with alternatives. Sometimes parts of government have wanted to support alternatives, but have not known how to go about it, or have done so clumsily. Even rarer are the examples of alternatives being integrated into the way public institutions work.
It seems our existing institutions struggle precisely because these alternatives are so different. They don’t look like the work the public sector is used to funding. They don’t fit traditional standards of evidence or theories of change. They don’t slot neatly into silos, or click with our main models of governance. And they seem risky in the eyes of standard approaches to assurance.
The Centre for the Edge is a new initiative to help overcome these barriers, bridging from the centre to the vitality and imagination at the edges. We want to help with the difficulty that is summed up in that old cliche: ‘how do you re-build the plane while flying it?’ We want to help institutions that seem to recognise the need for renewal, but that struggle to engage with the alternatives that might offer it.
We know this work is difficult. Public sector leaders are busy enough just keeping things running — even more so as the world gets more chaotic. There is fierce pressure on bandwidth, pulling all of our resources — time, money, political capital, legislative capacity — into ekeing out incremental improvements, and managing crises.
More than this, public sector leaders have to meet the demands of the old system — its governance and risk-management requirements, its hunger for certain types of evidence — while trying to do things differently. This makes the work of changing the system feel like battling against the system.
We believe there are ways to ease this tension. Public sector leaders can support alternatives in ways that respect the valid needs of the institutions they work in. This is essentially the craft of system adaptation. The goal is to spend less time optimising within the system, and more time working on the system — to make it more porous and dynamic, and to draw vitality in.
This is hard, practical work. It requires new skills, tools, mental models, and institutional forms. And it means accepting that we cannot predict and control everything — that by trying to avoid all risks will only make the system more brittle, creating bigger risks in the long-run. This is the terrain we want to explore.
Our commitment throughout this work is to stay concrete, so we plan to dig deep into four themes. We describe each theme below and share some speculative thoughts about where each one could lead. We would love feedback on whether these feel like the most valuable areas to focus on.
1. Data, evidence, and control mechanisms
Any competent government uses evidence and a range of control mechanisms to make sure public money is being spent wisely, and risks are being managed. However, we also know that governments rely on unnecessarily narrow standards of evidence, designed for systems we built in the past. This means the way we use evidence can make public institutions rigid— we only fund things in the bureaucracy’s own sclerotic image.
We see this happening today, as proven alternatives, such as relational services, struggle to get funding, or find that they have to contort themselves to meet the expectations and assurance processes of the old system. At best, this adds a huge tax to alternatives that drains the time and motivation of reformers. At worst, it stops promising alternatives from spreading, or even snuffs them out.
A wiser approach might see experimentation as responsible, not reckless — a way of discharging our duty to adapt. In a time of escalating crises and complexity, we would use evidence not so much to find the ‘right’ policy answer, but as a more organic form of intelligence, learning in real time.
In this theme, we will explore practical ways to bring an open but empirical eye to alternatives. For example:
In a world in which the future is so uncertain, and in which we want to experiment with diverse approaches, how do we learn over time? How do we understand the impact and contribution of approaches that don’t fit the standard model of RCTs, cost-benefit analysis, and retrospective evaluation methods?
What assurance mechanisms can we use to focus on systemic and existential risk, so that we don’t stop small risks only to amplify the bigger risk of system failure? How do we recognise the risk of not acting, or of not acting fast enough? How do we judge the riskiness of an experiment when we know that not experimenting might carry far bigger risks?
What can we learn from similar challenges in other sectors? For example, can we learn from the discipline of meta-science, which is working to tackle sclerosis in the scientific discovery process? And what can we learn from the frontier of natural science — from ecology to complexity theory — about processes of adaptation and emergence?
Where could this lead?
We could support a broader range of methods for learning and evaluation, to suit a wider range of work, for example building on the recent addition to the Magenta Book.
We could help to develop new governance, risk-management, and assurance mechanisms that avoid blocking alternatives. This could mean exploring the value of a ‘Mode B’ governance regime; allowing our public institutions to switch modes for different types of work.
We could work with partners in philanthropy and wider civil society who are exploring ways to fund emerging work and field-building (e.g. Pando Funding, mycelial networks, and networks like Governance Futures).
2. Internal worldviews, mental models, and culture
The second theme is about the ways of thinking that can cause institutions to become stuck, and hostile to alternatives.
Work on institutional change tends to focus on the outward manifestations of institutions — procedures, organisational structures, and written rules. We might go looking for a rule we can change, or we might restructure a system like the NHS. But institutions also live within us, in the ways we see and make sense of the world — in concepts, mental models, and in the language and metaphors we use. Institutional change often fails when it bumps up against these mental models — we change structures or job titles, but our thinking has stayed the same.
The late Joanna Macy wrote about ‘the great turning’ that takes place when we realise that in order to transform systems, we must also transform the lenses through which we perceive them.
For all these reasons, we want to look at the inner barriers that block alternatives, and the social dynamics around them — the way an alternative might prompt eye-rolls, or be sidelined as fluffy or unserious.
We think there is a lot of work to do here, for all of us. In our public institutions, it’s clear that we are experiencing a form of calcification as the norms that regulate behaviour go from being helpful to making us dangerously resistant to change. We also notice how these norms now often divide us into insiders and outsiders. There are insiders who work in public institutions and speak their language, and outsiders who sit beyond the system and critique it. The dialogue between these two groups is often strained, inhibiting productive conversations and reforms.
In this theme we will look at ways to surface and soften these mental barriers. We’ll focus in particular on the role leaders can play in creating cultures that are more open to change. For example:
How can leaders become more aware of the assumptions and mental models that shape their view of the world, and the views of their teams?
What capabilities are needed when leadership is less about optimisation, and more about helping institutions adapt? For example, how can leaders help people to work through conflict, or imagine new possibilities?
What techniques can be used to help people talk productively with people with very different worldviews?
How can language and rituals be used to relax an inward-looking or rigid institutional culture, to legitimise and make spaces for alternatives?
Where could this lead?
We could support new approaches to professional development for public servants — for example, training focused on culture change, and contemporary leadership capabilities
We could help to define the essential skills for today’s public sector leaders — for example, we could help to develop a broader curriculum, on the model of Teaching Public Service in a Digital Age, for public leadership in an era of complexity and change.
We could help refine and popularise techniques for making our underlying assumptions explicit (sometimes called ‘depth pedagogy’), drawing on the work of organisations like Wolf Willow.
This theme will also learn from work being led by Amy Gandon at Demos, which is exploring the social and cultural aspects of bureaucracy. For example, see The Human Handbrake.
3. Institutions and operating environments
In the third theme, we will explore how alternatives can be blocked by the institutional forms and operating environments of the public sector, and why those forms have become so homogeneous and unchanging.
We are interested in this theme partly from the perspective of institutional diversity and renewal. Bureaucracies become brittle in part because the public sector lacks mechanisms for renewal. In the private sector, of course, start-ups spread new operating models and old companies feel pressure to adopt them; notice how challenger banks spread agile ways of working. In the public sector, there is no such disciplining mechanism, and even new institutions (e.g. the UK’s recently created Combined Authorities) tend to be built in the image of the old system.
Britain has a proud tradition of creating new institutions, from the NHS to social security, but has done so less recently, and the practice of institutional design itself has barely changed in a generation, even as the world has changed around it. There has been little innovation in the design of public institutions in Britain or across the world. Meanwhile the public sector is bad at closing organisations that are no longer serving us well, and finds it difficult to create and scale new institutions.
Beyond the public sector, there is now a huge diversity of institutional forms — institutions that are networked, agile, relational, light and meshlike, as opposed to heavy, hierarchical and bureaucratic. These forms seem more adaptive and better suited to today’s challenges, yet they are not spreading into government. This is especially striking when it’s so clear that the forms of the state — hierarchical, functionally-siloed bureaucracies — are so clearly ill-suited to much of the work we now need to do. It raises the worry that we have got stuck in a narrow and inadequate slice of what’s possible.
We are also interested in this theme from the perspective of the operating environments and incentives that drive behaviour in public institutions. Accountability is at the heart of this, and right now it is framed almost entirely in terms of running the current machine better. We see this in incentives that reward compliance, not experimentation. Pay and promotion are linked to optimising the current machine, not imagining something different, or closing something that is no longer needed.
None of this is to say that we don’t need to keep essential services going. But the risk is that we end up, at best, aiming for a local maximum — optimising a machine that is fundamentally outmoded, getting incrementally better at doing the wrong thing. We know there are creative moral leaders inside our public institutions: what if they were rewarded for these qualities, and supported to exercising them?
In this theme, we will look at ways to free ourselves from these constraints to try something different. For example:
What legal, financial, and governance mechanisms can help us experiment with different institutional forms?
Which constraints are most to blame for keeping us locked into narrow forms and models? (e.g. regulatory, financial, imaginative.) Are there different rules or frameworks that would give us more freedom?
What mechanisms and practices can we use to create a more dynamic cycle of birth and death? Can we create more systematic processes to spawn and scale new types of institutions, and to retire old ones? For example, learning from earlier work by Stewarding Loss and The Decelerator.
Are some operating models more conducive to learning and change than others? If so, which ones?
Where could this lead?
We could contribute to the growing field of institutional design, such as the work of The Institutional Architecture Lab. This is just one example of growing interest in institutions (e.g. see the Nuffield Foundation’s recognition of the importance of effective institutions in its recent Strategic Review).
We could prototype a process for institutional renewal: mechanisms that the public sector could use to systematically seed and scale new institutions, and to retire old ones.
We could help to catalogue and taxonomise the diversity of institutional forms at the edges, and understand their strengths and weaknesses, and what it would take to spread them.
We could contribute to relevant work on public service reform, for example by exploring how the UK Cabinet Office’s Test, Learn & Grow initiative, can help to legitimise and spread new ways of working.
4. Politics and power
The final theme of the four is about the political and social processes that make public institutions hostile to alternatives.
We see changing public institutions as social and political work in multiple respects. First, because the work has to happen within the context of politics — institutions need to change in ways that are legitimate, and that feel legitimate, and that fit into a government’s overall political narrative.
Second, we see adapting public institutions as political work because people will always fear that change will create winners and losers. Some people may worry that they will end up less powerful as a result of change, and this can trigger territorial battles.
Third, this work is political in the sense that alternatives don’t spread via rational argument but via a social and psychological process. For example, systems adapt more easily when people feel trust, and a degree of power and agency. Change can also take hold because it feels exciting, and people want to be part of a movement. Public institutions that design for these conditions, rather than relying on more technocratic views of change, will probably prove to be more adaptable.
In this theme we’ll explore how we can work with these political and social aspects of change. This includes the difficult question of the role public institutions can play in movement-building and in creating the social conditions for change. For example, we will explore:
Whether public institutions could do more to foster hope and agency, and combat fatalism, without being directly political.
How public institutions could legitimately support grassroots movements, or communities of innovators.
Whether there are legitimate ways for public institutions to promote narratives that are unifying, as opposed to divisive; positive, as opposed to destructive. For example, see the work on frames, metaphors and collective values by Common Cause, Larger Us, Inter-Narratives, and Rubber Republic.
Where could this lead?
We could help to develop more ‘bottom-up’ and ‘outside-in’ narratives for public service reform. Finding ways to talk about reform that situate change not at the centre or the top of the system, but at the system’s edges, in neighbourhoods and communities.
We could help people learn techniques for spreading alternatives, such as using exemplars or ‘lighthouses’ as visible demonstrations that can guide the way.
We could support networks of change-makers and grassroots movements, and help public institutions to understand their role supporting grassroots movements as a way to help our society navigate turbulent times.
We could convene reformers more directly, building a groundswell behind alternatives. For example, we could support the next era of public sector meetups and networks (UKGovCamp, OneTeamGov, TransformGov, Creative Bureaucracy Festivals, etc.).
Conclusion
We would be interested in feedback on these four themes. Have we chosen the right topics? What is missing? And do you have thoughts on reference points — reading materials, relevant projects, expert people and organisations — under each of the four themes?
After taking feedback onboard, we will share more in the autumn. In the meantime, you can follow Sophia on LinkedIn and Medium; Kinship Works on Blue Sky or LinkedIn; or James on Blue Sky and Medium.
This post was co-authored by Sophia Parker, Emerging Futures Director at JRF, and James Plunkett, the convener of Kinship Works. You can read more about Kinship Works here. For more in a similar spirit, you can read James’s recent piece: How to save bureaucracy from itself and Sophia’s reflections from work JRF supported to map emerging alternatives.