Innovation is as innovation does
What do you generate by burning bad people? The answer, of course, is synergy.
This overused concept is on my mind right now.
I used it quite a lot this morning in my speech to the HE Leadership Institute (a high point of which was me reading aloud some of the great comments to Monday’s blog). As well as challenging universities to be better at collaboration with other local agencies and with other HEIs I also talked about the need to promote better collaboration within institutions.
It is in spaces and processes which bring together people with different interests, expertise and resources that innovation is most likely to occur. It is also here that we can identify ‘the hidden wealth’ (a capacity for creativity, generosity, trust and solidarity) which often lies dormant trapped between specialisms and hierarchies and crushed by narrow incentives.
In the past, speaking of such issues has (notwithstanding my brilliant way with words, on which it is perhaps unnecessary for me to dwell ongoingly at this moment in time) left me with a hollow sensation. It was all very well blahing on about innovation, but not being a brilliant entrepreneur, inventor or explorer myself, who am I to opine on such matters?
But now it feels like I may have some foundation of authority on which to stand. When the RSA, in conjunction with our friends at CRI, won a contract to provide post-treatment drug and alcohol rehabilitation services in West Kent it was important for three main reasons: first, providing public services on a payment by results basis is an exciting new challenge for the Society; second, we have this opportunity following a six year process of research, prototyping and experimentation; and third, because the bid had Fellowship engagement at its heart.
Already, I hear this engagement paying off with meetings to explore collaboration between the West Kent project team and Fellows who are senior in local public services, the community sector and business. A similarly high powered gathering held recently in Peterborough – also discussing community support for people in recovery – apparently reaped both great ideas and concrete offers of help.
Over the last few years we have sought fundamentally to change expectations of Fellowship. Instead of an assumption that the primary role of Fellows is as donors who enable paid staff to have ideas to change the world, we see Fellows themselves as being full participants in our charitable mission. This means we can really tap into the hidden wealth of our Fellows and the idea of Fellowship.
Despite West Kent, Peterborough and many other examples of Fellowship action, the journey is far from complete. Having now raised expectations and aspirations we have the welcome, but growing, challenge of providing sufficient support for an ever more active and ambitious Fellowship.
But it does now feel like we can advocate social innovation to others from a position of insight and legitimacy. I also have no hesitation is inviting anyone out there who has a generous, collaborative and inventive mind set to explore the possibility of Fellowship (if you want to know more email me at matthew.taylor@rsa.org.uk).
And finally another synergy: our events team has built some great partnerships, including with prestigious media outlets like Channel Four and LBC. One example is our hosting of BBC Radio 4’s series Four Thought. The short lecture on education and creativity being broadcast tonight at 8.45 is given by RSA Fellowship Council member Gerard Darby. Whatever a self-satisfied old bureaucrat like me says, it is great FRSAs like Gerard who are the best possible advert for RSA Fellowship.
Can we get engaged?
Undeterred by the gradual drying up of comments, this is – for the time being – the penultimate of a series of posts on ‘the paradox of entitlement’. The most recent have explored two ways of reinforcing the reciprocal dimension of welfare and public service entitlements: conditionality and the contributory principle. Today I return to one of my recurrent themes over the years; how can public services be reimagined and redesigned to accentuate their reciprocal and relational core?
This is hardly novel and should be an easy argument to make. We know parental engagement is vital to the success of pupils and schools; lifestyles, attitudes and observance of treatment regimes are crucial to the prognosis of NHS patients, and the police find their job almost impossible if communities don’t exercise at least some level of responsibility and self- policing.
Public service outcomes are demonstrably the result of the collective efforts of service providers, service users and the wider community. Whether a basic public service entitlement turns into a life enhancing experience depends to a large degree on us and the ways we relate to those services. Yet still this truism remains marginal to the narrative, culture and day to day practice of public service management. So rather than making the case for relational public services again, I want to explore through concrete examples some reasons why the insight seems so hard to act upon.
The first is simply that change takes time and effort and can go wrong. The RSA itself offers an illustration. Following strategic guidance from Trustees, the RSA has over the last four years made a concerted effort to engage its Fellows more fully as partners in the delivery of the Society’s charitable mission. This has involved many changes including; the replacement of the former appointed, consultative Council with a new representative and more hands-on Fellowship Council; the creation of a team of dedicated network facilitators developing and supporting Fellows’ activities; encouraging Fellows to form networks at whatever geographical level and around whatever shared interest works best for them; supporting a wide variety of ways for Fellows to engage with each other on-line; the creation of the Catalyst Fund which regularly gives small grants to back Fellow’s initiatives; and a much greater emphasis on engaging Fellows in the Society’s research and development projects.
It is clear now that the faith of Trustees and the hard work of RSA staff is paying off: There are four or five times as many active Fellows’ groups as a few years ago (and that’s just the ones we know about), we have a good flow of bids to the Catalyst Fund and the quality of those bids continues to improve, RSA Fellows are playing a prominent part in key research projects (and this is being increasingly seen by our partners as part of the attraction of working with the Society), and the current Fellowship survey is showing both high levels of satisfaction and a growing enthusiasm for engagement.
Quite apart from all the good things generated by this engagement (many of which I have highlighted in blog posts), it has provided authenticity and distinctiveness to the Society’s mission; in arguing that the 21st century need a new more ambitious model of citizenship we are increasingly able to show how the Society’s Fellows are exemplifying that ideal.
Our pride at what has been achieved is exceeded only by our ambition for what could lie ahead. But, and here’s the rub, at times the process of engagement has been exhausting, dispiriting and even sometimes felt like it might all be a massive error. Among the mistakes we have made have been a lack of realism about how quickly culture can change, raising expectations without having the infrastructure to meet them and under-estimating the fierce resistance to change among those in the Fellowship who prefer a more traditional, hierarchical, model of engagement. Most of all, the process of working out how best – with limited resources – to support a group of busy volunteers to develop good ideas and act on them involves continuous trial and error, learning and self-criticism. If the Trustees and Executive had not seen Fellowship engagement as an essential part of the RSA strategy we may well have lost heart and momentum.
So it is with the welfaer state. Indeed with growing needs, shrinking resources and the requirement of public accountability, the challenges are much greater. In attempts at the engagement of service users and citizens by public service managers and professionals there are invariably times when the whole process feels like more trouble than it’s worth. That’s when engagement is abandoned or more often scaled down to something less ambitious and more manageable. But it is almost better not to try than to enter into a process with a lack of conviction or realism.
Because engagement can be so difficult the public sector is prone to a self-fulfilling prophesy: a half-hearted commitment leads to a failed process which confirms the initial scepticism.
An important reason for that scepticism lies in the bureaucratic/professional culture of public services. To make this point simply (this post is already too long) I go back to an example I gave a few weeks ago: research by Anne Hook and Bernice Andrews found that a significant variable in the effectiveness of psychiatric treatment for depression was whether patients disclosed their true feelings to therapists. Those who hid their feelings – generally because of shame – were much less likely to get a good outcome.
The first lesson is that patients have to use the service responsibly (respecting the therapist’s need for openness) for it to succeed. But – and this is crucial – this lesson can only be learned alongside a second. Over to Dryden Badenoch, who wrote the blog post in which I read of the research:
By illustrating the effect of individual client decisions on therapeutic outcome, Hook and Andrews have furthered the argument for routinely considering the client’s contribution to the effectiveness of psychological therapies, rather than treating the client as a passive recipient of the ‘miracle therapy’ or the attentions of the ‘super-shrink’.
It is not easy for professionals and managers to accept that their success depends not just on their own methods and skills but on the engagement of services users and citizens, and also to accept that this engagement is only likely to work if they give up some of their own authority and power. The combination of professional resistance and the sheer difficulty and effort involved provides a high barrier to reconceiving public services as reciprocal and collaborative. Which is why people like me have been banging on about this for so long but making so little progress.
It is my great privilege and good fortune to have been able to test the theory out on the RSA and to see our amazing Fellows generating such exciting results. What organisations do is a more powerful influence than what they say. Hopefully, by sticking the course and showing how genuine engagement pays off, we can inspire others in the third and public sector to follow our lead.
The more you put in, the more you get out?
Welfare reform exhibits a well-known ‘trilemma’: out of the three main goals of policy – helping the poorest, incentivising work and saving, and containing expenditure – it is possible to choose any two but never all three. This, in essence, is why the contributory principle, which was only ever partially embedded in the welfare state, has been consistently eroded by governments of all parties. As John Hills, perhaps the UK’s leading welfare expert, argued in a paper back in 2003:
‘ under governments of the Left, arguments in favour of inclusion have been predominant, non-contributory benefits expanded and contribution conditions softened; under those of the Right, the emphasis has been on focussing limited resources on the poorest through means-testing’
Those on the political right are particularly prone to criticise what they allege to be a ‘something for nothing’ welfare culture. The celebration of Margaret Thatcher’s reign occasioned by the release of a biopic may therefore be somewhat tempered by the recognition that reforms to pensions and benefits during her time in office were a major assault on the contributory principle. The current Government is making further inroads into what is left. The Employment and Support Allowance is in part a form of insurance against losing employment through ill health. Those who have paid into National Insurance were implicitly buying this protection, but now it is being cut back.
The idea that what you get out of the welfare state might in some way reflect what you put in is not, however, something which should be consigned to history. Reviving this idea might be part of addressing ‘the paradox of entitlement’, the subject of several of my recent posts.
Yesterday saw an alliance of organisations (including the RSA) representing a wide array of interests and views calling on the Government and opposition to work swiftly towards a new funding regime for social care. The Coalition appeared to knock the recommendations of the Dilnot Commission on Social Care funding into the long grass when they were published last July, but talks are forthcoming to try to develop a new cross party consensus on reform.
Social care is in crisis and – as I have suggested in past posts – it may now represent the first major area of welfare provision since the creation of the modern welfare state demonstrably to deteriorate. Many in the sector argue that a new funding regime is the essential prerequisite for creating a more stable system capable of providing decency to all in frail old age.
In a sense the Dilnot package includes a modern form of the contributory principle. The Commission proposed a state guarantee to pick up all social care costs above a fixed limit (£35,000 was suggested by the Commission). As well as addressing the perceived unfairness of older people giving up lifetime’s assets to pay for care, through capping the total an individual can be asked to pay this proposal seeks to create the basis for a market in social care insurance. Dilnot also proposed that the means test limit below which people are not required to pay for any care should be significantly increased.
Some on the left criticised Dilnot on the grounds that his package was more geared to helping the middle class than the poor. But any attempt to create a financially sustainable system in which all have a stake involves combining a universal safety net with a partnership between the state and those who can afford to meet some of their care costs.
Another response to an ageing society is the auto-enrolment pensions system designed by Labour but from later this year being gradually rolled out by the Coalition. Indeed in combining individual contributions, employer contributions and a Government contribution (through a tax break) the new system echoes one of the first manifestations of the modern welfare state: Lloyd George’s famous ‘Ninepence for Fourpence’ health insurance scheme unveiled in 1911.
The student loan system too is a form of contributory welfare. Students’ courses are funded by a combination of direct funding and underwriting of loans by the state and income contingent student contributions.
It is well understood that the classic Beveridge model contributory system has largely withered away. It is less often noted that new models and proposals for state-individual contributory partnerships are emerging. Squeezed budgets and rising costs mean that new contributory arrangements are necessary – indeed inevitable - if universal entitlements (including core public services) are to be protected.
An important task for politicians and thought leaders is to explore the rationale, values and expectations necessary to underpin a new contributory principle.
Going through the levels
Yesterday I sat in on a conversation about social care involving about twenty people, mainly practitioners from Leicester. They were an impressive group; committed, thoughtful, optimistic about what could be achieved but very aware of the limitations of existing provision.
Personalisation was a recurrent theme of the conversation. Speaker after speaker described the importance of fully understanding someone’s needs. A typical story involved a person with severe learning difficulties who started continually hitting his head against a wall. The behaviour was treated as a regrettable but inexplicable symptom of mental incapacity until a nurse noticed that the person always hit the same side of his head. It was only then that a quick examination revealed a severe but treatable ear infection.
Government strategy on personalisation has for several years revolved around the development of individual budgets. Currently, about a third of eligible social care clients have taken up individualised funding (either through direct payments or managed personal budgets) but take-up has been by far highest amongst those with physical disabilities. Extending individual budgets to people with learning difficulties, mental illness or dementia is much more challenging, though it will often be the carer who is the budget holder. Evaluation of individual budgets is limited but positive. But just because more people have individual budgets doesn’t mean services will necessarily be better, even from the perspective of the service user. The quality of care will depend enormously on the amount of money allocated and what services are available to be purchased.
A key question is how individual budgets might develop to facilitate a reframing of social care. As I listened to the conversation I could distinguish four levels of ambition for publicly funded interventions. Level one – the traditional system – simply involves the bureaucratic allocation of available services to the identified client group. Level two is what is conventionally meant by personalisation: allowing individuals to use allocated resources to choose their own care packages. This is fine for individuals, but many clients need support in making choices, and unless clients and carers come together to commission services, their choices may be very limited. So level three involves working with clients and carers to identify a set of interventions, which in the context of people’s wider personal resources and needs, will offer them the greatest empowerment and wellbeing. An example here is a group of people with physical disabilities and learning difficulties who collectively commissioned fitness classes which are not only tailored to their needs but also offer the opportunity for sociability for both clients and carers.
Level four is the most challenging but arguably the most necessary. This involves exploring the latent resources of care, altruism and ingenuity which exist within a client’s family, friends and wider community and then asking what interventions might best release these resources. This is the kind of thing being explored by a variety of RSA projects ranging from work on social networks and wellbeing to a whole person recovery approach to people in rehabilitation from drug and alcohol dependency.
There is no inherent reason why this social asset approach can’t be pursued within the context of individual budgets. The fact that individuals have to buy into services is a useful discipline to ensure those services are effective and relevant. But without co-ordination and collaboration the danger is that individual budgets end up buying tiny parcels of care from large impersonal providers while local public agencies retreat into a focus on resource allocation and risk management.
As resources are squeezed and needs grow the ambition should be that individual budgets are seen not simply as a way of paying for services but as a means to leveraging collective action and civic commitment. A new deal for social care rests on reframing the relationship at its core from professional and client to community and citizen.
The epistemological failings of the state
A couple of weeks ago the RSA was contacted by Rohan Silva, a senior Downing Street special advisor and asked at short notice to hold an event featuring Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The event was packed out and Rohan as chair was at pains to emphasise the powerful influence of Taleb’s ideas on Government thinking. In essence Taleb’s argument – based on a fascinating, but occasionally somewhat opaque, mixture of philosophy, statistics and metaphors – is that big systems are much more prone to catastrophic failure (or in some cases sensational success) than small devolved ones. From bankers to planners to politicians, a combination of ignorance, complacency and self-interest leads to a systematic underestimation of the inherent risk of large complex systems.
On Monday the RSA jointly hosted an event with OFSTED to discuss our report on satisfactory schools. In the course of the conversation a different Government special advisor was asked about the idea that a national agency – perhaps OFSTED, perhaps the National College for School Leadership – might be tasked with helping schools that were finding it difficult to move above satisfactory status. In expressing opposition he said he had very little faith in national strategies overseen by national agencies. Instead, he said, we should rely on a combination of devolved governance and greater public accountability to drive improvement. Yes, there would be some schools which would fail to improve but this was also true of a top-down national strategy and the latter approach had many other adverse externalities ranging from cost to stifling innovation.
In interpreting Government policy it is important to understand the right’s epistemological critique of the state. From this perspective the size, complexity and reflexivity of the modern world make it impossible for state planners to be able to predict accurately how their interventions will impact. Unintended consequences are inevitable but instead of planners learning from their mistakes, these consequences simply provide the pretext for more interventions leading to an ever more intrusive state and an ever less free society.
Taleb applies this idea to the modern financial system arguing that its size and complexity makes it inevitable that it will be subject to extreme events (black swans). Corporate bankers and state regulators, who have a vested interest in maintaining the system fundamentally as it is, connive to pretend that risk can be abolished.
Scepticism and hostility towards big state planning goes way back in right of centre thinking and has had powerful exponents including Hayek and Oakeshott. Team Cameron see Taleb as the Oakeshott of the twenty first century.
These ideas are commonplace among right of centre thinkers, but Conservative politicians tend not to put so much emphasis on them in public, perhaps because they are seen as overly intellectual or vulnerable to being portrayed as extreme. I sense this is changing.
There are two obvious reasons why ministers might feel more empowered to reveal that their scepticism towards the state is philosophical as well as pragmatic. First, while the emerging data on Labour’s record in improving economic and social outcomes is more positive than the current public view, there is no doubting that most votors think the New Labour’s statist experiment failed. Second, austerity gives philosophical predisposition the impetus of practical necessity. Many of the public entitlements which Labour used the state to guarantee are simply unaffordable.
But regardless of the economic cycle, the right’s theory of social knowledge is also strengthened by the ever greater complexity of the modern world. If Oakeshott thought national planning was bound to fail in the more ordered, slower moving, more deferential world of the late 1940s imagine how futile he would see it as being today.
If the right does become more intellectually explicit it will face some challenging questions. Here are just two: why is a democratically accountable and relatively weak organisation like a local education authority portrayed by ministers as the kind of overbearing power that needs to be broken up while Tesco (to take just one example) is left free to grow even more powerful and major Academy chains, massive welfare to work providers and various other large scale private sector providers are encouraged? Second, given that Government has to govern, how can we distinguish between national policy which reflects an understanding of the limits of state knowledge and efficacy and that which doesn’t? I heard this morning that the Autumn Statement contained twenty announcements on policy in the FE sector alone; were these all about lifting the burden of state interference?
In the immediate context of austerity much debate is about what welfare and which public services can be afforded. But the gap between what we aspire to and what we can afford is likely to grow over the long term as is the complexity of society. So we should also welcome the right’s invitation to a more fundamental debate about the kinds of things the central state can and can’t do (should and shouldn’t) do.
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