How governments can reset the relationship between the centre and the edge

A movement for public sector reform, and a shift in how governments relate to citizens, is gathering strength across the world. Part of this is conscious efforts to shift power and decision-making from the centre to the edge of systems, to unlock innovation and place-based solutions. 

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, including the establishment of the Centre for the Edge – to help government leaders who want to harness and support the energy at the edges. 

In this article, ANZSOG Practice Fellow (Digital Government Strategy and Leadership) Martin Stewart-Weeks looks at efforts to rebalance the relationship between centre and edge, and explores how and why the centre must change.  

The quality of the relationship between the centre and the edge in any organisation, institution or system is always critical.  

How those two pieces line up – or don’t – is crucial to the way the whole system performs.  And it’s certainly a big factor in determining how well the organisation or larger system navigates the drive for innovation and reform.   

Simplifying the story a little, the centre is where rules are made, plans are hatched and power is grown and, often, hoarded. Generally, the pace of life is slower and more deliberate, ponderous even, and connections to the people and places impacted by its decisions are often hard to discern.   

The edge, though, is where much of the energy and hope for change and innovation resides, and where speed, intensity and connectedness define the rhythm of work.  

Of course, nothing in organisations or systems is ever quite that simple or straightforward. But it’s a basic architecture that defines some well understood assumptions and experience and therefore some settled patterns of behaviour.   

The pressing problem though is that the nature of the big public problems – risks and opportunities – that governments are grappling with require a level of agility and rapid learning that privilege the kind of energy and instincts for experimentation that are most usually found at the edge rather than the centre.  

That raises two questions. 

• How is the energy at the edge systematically and purposefully sought out, nurtured and then harnessed? 
• And how does that energy, and the ideas and solutions it fuels, fold back into the larger systems of power and resources over which traditionally the centre has the most control and authority?

Answers to those questions are bubbling up in different places, including Australia, and in different patterns of experimentation, innovation and learning.  That represents a significant investment in fashioning a new set of rules to connect centre and edge in more productive patterns of mutual understanding, interdependence and, above all, trust and respect.  

Driving practical change in Australia and the UK

In Australia, the emerging Partnerships for Local Action and Community Empowerment or PLACE is designed to draw out exactly these sources of local, close-to-the-action energy for innovation and reform.  

The PLACE purpose is well captured in these comments from Chair Sean Gordon AM:  

“Across community, government and philanthropy, there is growing recognition that existing solutions are failing to address entrenched disadvantage. Complex problems demand tailored, holistic solutions best directed and owned by the communities that enact them. PLACE exists because we believe that communities know best what matters to them. Our vision is to support those communities by building local capability, amplifying success, and driving systemic reform.” 

Two things to note. 

One is the notion of locally driven, learning-based innovation as the inescapable currency for contemporary change making. That doesn’t mean it’s the only ingredient for success. There are big responsibilities across the larger systems of purpose, power and resources that need to be wrangled too and into which place-based breakthrough change can be embedded.  

The second is illustrated in the approach the UK is taking in its current public sector reform program. The £100 million “test, learn and grow” program is shaped around these principles: 

1. We’re here to change the centre because that’s where the rules of the game are set 

2. We value hands on experience

3. Participation improves things

4. Relationships, not transactions

5. We deliver in teams

6. We keep learning, always

7. Networks, not hierarchies

8. Outcomes, not technologies

9. We strengthen localities

10. We build for scale and to grow this way of working

11. We improve things quickly

12. We work in the open

13. Solving complex problems needs diverse perspectives

The program has two basic, and linked, features.   

First, it pushes resources and power out from the centre and into the places and local contexts in which problems are being tackled.    

Secondly, the point of that distributed agency is to rapidly discover what it is about the larger system that gets in the way of those local solutions being implemented and sustained.   

This practice-based rapid learning process is intended to send unmissable signals back up the line as a catalyst for system shift – which is the work of the centre, at least primarily. A system shift that not only makes those local solutions easier to implement and grow, but starts to change features of the system to make it easier for other similarly locally-focused innovators to build enduring solutions.   

ANZSOG Visiting Fellow James Plunkett is taking some of these ideas further in his own work (and he’s closely involved with the “test, learn and grow” program too) by establishing a new Centre for the Edge.  

It’s an idea that picks up on a similar initiative that John Hagel led for Deloitte for many years.  But in this case, and working with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the intent is to “help leaders in government who want to support the energy at the edges.”  In other words, it’s focused on resetting rules and relationships to govern a more productive engagement of centre and edge, a way of coming up with an operating model based on their distinctive but complementary roles and functions.  

In James’ words, the Centre will tackle the “barriers that stop the centre from supporting the edges – from narrow standards of evidence to outdated control mechanisms, to mechanistic mental models.”   

In very basic terms, how can leaders meet the needs of the ‘old’ system, while also supporting very different ways of working?  

These shifts herald big changes to aspects of the way government, politics and the public sector work.  Speed, intensity, agility, a taste for rapid learning through experiments (‘test and learn”) are the new order of the day.  The role of the edge becomes more crucial and central.  

That doesn’t mean the centre doesn’t have a role or can’t embed some version of those same attributes.  But it does invite the centre – think PM&C, Premiers, Treasury, Finance, audit and performance review functions – to think deeply about its distinctive contribution. That is partly about adjusting its own behaviour to more systematically “see” the energy and momentum for reform and change close to people and communities (which is where the edge is). But it also means being more thoughtful about how it holds elements of systemic leadership and stewardship to account (including accountability, good process, coherence and linking back to a larger purpose for example).   

Centre and edge need and feed each other as two pieces of a larger puzzle. Solving that puzzle is a rising function of good public management at both the political and bureaucratic level.