A movement for public sector reform, and a shift in how governments relate to citizens, is gathering strength across the world. ANZSOG Visiting Fellow James Plunkett, a UK-based thinker on government, recently visited Australia for a series of high-level roundtables exploring the changes happening in Britain, and the shift towards more human, de-centred modes of governing that stand a better chance of dealing successfully with complex problems.
In this article, ANZSOG Practice Fellow (Digital Government Strategy and Leadership) Martin Stewart-Weeks looks at the Kinship Works movement and how a broad range of actors are applying themselves to the task of making society better by reforming government.
Public sector reform is usually associated with major initiatives of change conceived and driven by government itself. For the most part, they involve large, complex programs of planning, investment and implementation driven by government and the public sector with activities across many fronts.
Perhaps this has always been true, even if it isn’t always widely recognised, but the reality is that much of the work of deep reform happens as a function of wider, less well-defined movements that connect ideas, people and energy working in more diffuse networks across the community.
That is certainly true at the moment. It’s a phenomenon worth delving into as a way of understanding the shifting dynamics of power and agency in pursuit of some urgent priorities for change across the work of government, policy and public service delivery.
In the UK, a new movement for public sector reform, Kinship Works, has kicked off – led in part by ANZSOG Visiting Fellow James Plunkett and with the active support of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation among others.
So what is it?
Kinship Works, as James explains, is “a network of people working to mature and spread more human ways of making society better.” Two things worth noting about that description. It’s a public sector – or “public work” – reform movement that isn’t about public sector reform so much as “governing human”. And its ambition isn’t public sector reform (although it is); its “making society better”. Definitions matter.
The movement “will give a front door people can come to, but it will act and feel more like a collective – a group of people who share the diagnosis, and work in a similar spirit, and who bring different skills to the table.”
And what’s the problem the movement’s “similar spirit” is aimed at?
In blunt terms: “It’s no longer contentious to say that the old institutions of the public and social sector are struggling to rise to the moment. It’s clear bureaucracies find it hard to cope with the complex social challenges that now dominate our landscape, from chronic health conditions, to care and ageing, to loneliness and entrenched disadvantage. More generally, our large public institutions seem to be brittle and slow to adapt. Together this is wasting significant amounts of effort, time, and money.”
The movement will have four themes or domains of interest into which it will connect people, institutions and experiments – supporting, learning, spreading and reforming.
Few punches are pulled in the way this movement has defined its intention backed by clear-eyed analysis of the deeper cultural and structural dimensions of the task.
If “governing human” is the underlying philosophy, it’s worth asking for example why it is so hard “to use human methods in a bureaucratic operating environment, since you often get stuck in rigid, mechanistic governance.”
The answer is it’s hard on purpose. It’s a feature, not a bug. As James explains, “part of the original point of bureaucracy was to make institutions less human, in the sense of making leaders less capricious, and decisions less biased (we achieved fairness through standard procedures). “
Which perhaps was both necessary and fair in the face of the broadly industrial and technical challenges governments in the 19th and 20th centuries were trying to fix. But as a contemporary working model and a set of underlying assumptions, it’s less apt now.
Why?
Well, at least in part, “it’s hard to be holistic when you work in a silo; it’s hard to listen and respond quickly to a person’s needs when you need permission from the hierarchy; it’s hard to feel moral purpose in your work when you have no discretion; and it’s hard to adapt your response to the person in front of you when deviation is seen as risky, and variation is seen as unfair.”
The rules of the game have shifted. So the players in the game – especially government and the public sector – need to find the right “theory of the business” that tracks those new rules.
It will be interesting to watch how Kinship Works builds momentum, direction and practical results.
But it’s clear that the work of public sector and government reform is now firmly the business of a much wider and more diverse set of players – organisations, new institutions, older and emerging social movements – whose collective intelligence and energy need to be harnessed in clever and pragmatic ways. Indeed, a large part of the work of reform from within government and the public sector is learning how to wield the new tools of persuasion, purpose and performance from which more complex combinations of skill, expertise and energy can be wrangled for better results and long-term impact.
These are some examples of people and organisations we know are already active in that growing movement for change:
In the UK, the current wave of public sector reform is centred around a £100 million “test, learn and grow” program to connect local and place-based innovation into wider systemic impact.
In NSW, some early work is being done to codify a “mode B” way of working that gives public servants and their partners permission to match tools and methods to the dimensions of the problems they’re trying to solve.
There is a growing interest in the work of ‘leading through and in transitions’ impacting the economy, society and culture.
Experiments with new institutional forms and structures are bubbling up as people and communities try out different ways of arranging assets and expertise that can adapt to a rapidly changing world.
There are new tools and practices emerging for public innovation and the challenge of harnessing technology to strengthen democracy and citizen engagement.
The focus on place and people-in-community has taken on a new lease of life here in Australia and elsewhere as a vital lens through which to view not just the problems but the nature and spread of possible solutions.
And new thinking and practice is shaping the way we tackle a “system shift” imperative energised by the growing realisation that nothing will change unless we find better ways to shift underlying conditions, attitudes, structures and processes.
There’s plenty more of these kinds of outbreaks of energy and action that are now front and centre in government and public sector reform. And they don’t just bring energy and skill. They are ushering in unsettling new patterns of power, authority and accountability that align better with a reform and innovation agenda across government and society.