Category: notes from JK

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notes from JK

Booklog: The myth of the strong leader

The myth of the strong leader – Archie Brown

On the fundamental argument of this book, I completely agree. In short, Brown’s core argument is that far too much emphasis is placed by the media and political analysts on ‘heroic leaders’ being the source of success and change for their parties and governments. Indeed their influence on election results and delivering change is far less than many think is perhaps the most compelling case made in the book’s opening chapters. Then sadly this thread is lost as the author gives us his potted histories and opinions on a number of world leaders of the last century or so. 

While I found some of these parts to have some interest from a historical perspective, and being well written, they undermine the book’s case by barely mentioning the teams of people that worked with the leaders reviewed. Also the book verges on becoming more of a trot through the 20th century’s geopolitics – as seen by the author – than a book on leadership.

With a third of the pages and a greater focus on the core argument this book would have been far more powerful. Too much time is spent reviewing leaders’ histories and a typology of leaders without doing the leg work of explaining how they were part of much wider teams and collaborations.

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Booklog: Scripts People Live and We Do Things Differently

Scripts People Live – Claude Steiner (2nd ed)

Wow. What a powerful, optimistic book. I wish I had had a chance to meet Claude Steiner as based on this, and his other books I’ve read, he was a humble and clear thinker pushing forward radical ideas. His obituaries give a hint of his impact. 

From some reviews and the introductory chapters one might be lulled into thinking that this is a theoretical work for practitioners, but it most certainly isn’t. It is in many respects a manifesto for helping oneself and others towards living a “good life” based on principles of honesty, equality and cooperation. 

Yes there is theory in there, and a range of common scripts people live, which are fascinating to explore in one’s own life context. But on finishing the book I felt they had just been the necessary building blocks for the concluding sections which argue powerfully for a harmonious way of living in our communities and how to raise children to ensure their autonomy, intuition and judgement. 

We Do Things Differently – Mark Stevenson

At the outset I worried this book could turn into an extended Wired magazine puff piece where a ‘heroic leader’ (nb that’s not a compliment in my lexicon) is going to solve a world problem with nothing but their charisma and amazing startup. There are moments in this book where it could go that way, but Stevenson is wise to such temptations. The book combines a travelogue, potted histories of major developments (e.g energy grids, industrialised agriculture), interviews with genuinely interesting people, new ideas and technologies along with inspirational projects which do give me hope for some of the intractable problems we face today.

Stevenson’s nifty wordsmithing and humility have crafted an uplifting book which manages to romp joyfully through the failings of drug trials by corporate pharma, crowd sourcing cures to TB, boosting rice yields organically, using air for power and cooling, local renewable power generation and storage, urban farming, participatory budgeting and schools reform. I finished the last page feeling uplifted and curious to learn more.

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Booklog: Factfulness and Help

I’ve decided to make more effort reading non-fiction books and thought a booklog (a blog?!) would help me with that goal and also capture some key insights. So here goes…

Factfulness – Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund

A wonderful romp through facts, data, the world as it really is and engaging personal tales of Hans Rosling’s extraordinary life understanding disease in Africa, influencing the rich and powerful whilst also creating the tools and teachings for a better world. 

As the book argues, it is humbling and relaxing to realise that things are getter better but there are still big problems. For understandable reasons the news and campaigners often try to make issues feel more urgent and troubling than they really are. One of the best and most important books I’ve read in a long time.

Help! – Oliver Burkeman

This book, being made up of Burkeman’s columns for the Guardian, reads a bit like a lots of intellectual snacks without ever getting to the main course. Which can feel unsatisfying given that he does touch upon some pretty deep issues around happiness and the meaning of life, but never pauses to explore any of the ideas he raises in anything more than column length. 

Each piece is well constructed – mixing humour, self reflection and a healthy skepticism to provide a solid quick dip into some major areas of life. But given that he had the space of a book, a little bit more exposition and depth would have been welcome. 

All the same I took some inspiration and ideas from it. I was encouraged to try writing a journal again. The section on prioritising was insightful – wherein he argues that there is probably no point having much more than a today and someday set of priorities. 

I also enjoyed the sections poking fun at self-help books which promise change in 28 days whilst also demanding immediate massive action. Burkeman advocates “radical moderation” and recognising that habits probably take more than 60 days to form. 

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Essex County Council: One year on

A Chelmsford Sunset

This month marks a year since I joined Essex County Council. I feel so fortunate that Councillors and our CEO Gavin Jones took a chance on me, a recovering politician, to lead the County Council’s new Corporate Development function. Since being appointed I’ve moved the whole family from Brighton to Chelmsford, our third child has arrived into the world and I’ve learnt a fair bit of Essex geography.

So what have I been working on in the past year? Key things:

  • Restructured most of Corporate Development to focus on multi-disciplinary, agile working with professional guilds of practice, whilst delivering 30% savings;
  • Created an internal Service Design team backed by Full Council approving GDS service standards as core to our 4 year strategy;
  • Brought together Digital and Technology Services into a single new department with a dedicated director;
  • Gained agreement on a new strategy and pipeline of commercialisation work;
  • Launched redesigned web content for Adult social care;
  • Championing working in the open with our new blog platform.

It has been so energising to come in to work every day with so many people carrying the burning fire for change. I’m incredibly lucky that so many teams have such a breadth and depth of talent. They’ve kept the show on the road with lots of benefit delivered for the Council despite so much change all around them. But the progress hasn’t been all smooth nor as fast as I would have liked. Some reflections and challenges…

  • Procurement and contract management is still really hard – Yes GDS/CCS frameworks have made it so much easier for some stuff, but that doesn’t fix legacy contracts nor fields of work their frameworks don’t cover. Often the challenges are emblematic of insufficient risk appetite in the sector or excessive focus on reducing costs. These are hard cultural norms to shift.
  • Recruiting permanent staff is really, really hard – Yes, some of our processes and procedures within the council have room for improvement. But it’s also hard to get heard in the noise out there when we don’t have some of the sparkle and treasure others can offer. Standard recruitment campaigns for in-demand fields just don’t cut it.
  • The words ‘digital’ and ‘transformation’ are so overused in localgov that they now mean nothing. Language matters and we need to be very careful about what we say and what it is heard as meaning.
  • Legacy technology is painful. Obvious really, but the bigger and older the council the more of this stuff will be lying around. Bodges which got us through difficulties in the past become burdensome technical debt. Big suppliers with exciting visions, claiming to have done it all before, often become silent in the face of the custom spaghetti code of integrations which need upgrading and unpicking before the shiny new thing can land. Clean breaks are hard to achieve in a land of so many legacy systems and contracts. It’s a work in progress.

What next? Well just because structures have changed doesn’t mean all of our habits, practices and culture have followed suit so we’re doing lots of work around support, learning, coaching and development to ensure the new ways of working really embed.

We’re aiming to get a public beta for a new essex.gov.uk out in the next 12 months too, it’s critical to unlocking a lot of the service design thinking we want to support with colleagues across so many parts of the council.

Finally there’s huge amounts more thinking and work to do on integrating our our financial and business planning more closely. We also need to do more soon re-imagining our technology investment strategy and then re-aligning the teams in light of this. This stretches across fun like social care case management, ERP and more.

So lot’s more challenge and opportunity ahead!

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What is going on with British politics?

I can’t recall a more extraordinary year for British politics than 2016.  I’m often asked, as someone with a bit of experience in the political sphere, what I make of it. It is hard to make sense of it all, but I had a stab at it with this video for Crunch.

 

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One Year On: Life after politics

In May 2015 I stood down from Brighton & Hove City Council. It had long been my plan to take a break from the council by this point. It was the end of my second term on the council, marking 8 years as a councillor and around 12 years active in local politics.

While I miss working with many of the wonderful people I got to meet working in local politics, I don’t regret my choice. I was ready for a change.

So what I have been doing for the last year? For starters I’ve been able to spend much more time with my family and finally watched all episodes of House of Cards!

In terms of work:

  • I have continued my work with the Local Government Association on supporting councillors and officers to do more thinking and doing around the power of digital for local government and local democracy. This also led to fruitful collaborations with the Department for Communities & Local Government, GeoPlace, TechUK, ADASS and the Leadership Centre. Sadly however in all cases serious permanent funding for local government digital transformation is still all too scarce. I fear sector-wide approach to local government digital transformation remains out of touch at the moment.
  • I worked on the incredible NHS Citizen programme with the Democratic Society and their partners. As a programme for NHS England aiming to enhance patient participation this was a hugely ambitious and worthy cause. We made some progress but I know vast potential remains to be tapped.
  • I also supported the wonderful team DemSoc on some of their other projects, my favourite being the online participatory budgeting work they have been doing for the Scottish Government and councils.

These have all been fantastic, engaging projects to work on. I can’t do them justice in a few bullets, check out the links for more info. Thank you to everyone who invited me to work with them over the last year.

Meanwhile serendipity has been hard at work. Back in February 2015 I was contacted through a mutual friend by the CEO of Crunch. This CEO, Darren Fell, wanted help with planning policy which was putting his fast-growing company’s office space at risk. He thought the Leader of the Council might be able to help.

Unfortunately there was little I could do since the Government had changed the rules around converting offices to residential at a national level. We had tried to seek an exemption for all the key office sites in the city but the Government had only granted a tiny sliver of what we had asked.

Still Darren and I kept talking long after I had explained this, and discovered we had much in common: A passion for how digital tools can transform business and services, common experience in running our own companies and a passion for improving public policy to benefit small and single-person companies.

We kept in touch and come May ’15 we began to collaborate on a campaign to raise awareness in Westminster of the impact the planned rise in dividend taxes would have on lower earning business owners. I blogged extensively about this over on the Crunch blog. This campaigning, combined with all the advice and guides Crunch already provided, was recently launched under the name Chorus. Chorus is a unique new business association exclusively for micro-businesses that is completely free to join.

As time went on I got more and more involved in the business of what Crunch does – which is making things as easy as possible for all types of micro-business whether they are freelancers, sole traders, contractors or small companies. So much so that at the start of this month I changed from being an occasional consultant to a full-time member of the Crunch team as Head of Policy & Public Affairs.

Crunch is a fantastic local company filled with passionate people all working to make a difference. I’m extremely lucky to be part of the Crunchie gang (insert KitKat chocolate-related jokes  here) and can’t wait to show you what we’re working on next. Watch this space!

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last year. How about you?

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Culture, values and accountability: Are network aggregators like Airbnb and Uber really just a middle-man?

The media is ablaze with analysis with what sites like Airbnb, Uber and others mean for the future of work, our economies and local government mandates over regulated services like hotels and taxis[1. Good recent  posts on this include those by Tim O’Reilly, Lauren Smiley, Matt Buchanan.].

Lots of businesses are now being pitched as the ‘Uber for x’ or ‘Airbnb for y’. The sort of network aggregation model they offer is becoming a dominant mental model for many discussions on digital transformation at the moment. So I think it’s worth some further consideration because I don’t think this model in practice is quite as clear-cut as some suggest, though it certainly is disruptive.

In essence the thinking goes that network aggregators are simply making the market more efficient. They connect customers with providers more efficiently than ever before. They lower barriers to entry so that underused resources (homes, cars, drivers etc) can access the market to generate revenue whilst meeting consumer demand. Quite simply the thinking I’m seeing expressed is that they (network aggregators) are like the travel agent matching a holiday package with the customer’s budget and desires with underused airplanes and hotels lowering their prices to attract more demand – but now individuals are the providers using their own cars, homes and time.

Airbnb and Uber often say that they just are making connections between buyers and sellers. They argue that the quality of the service, the accuracy of the service listing, the liability etc all lie with the providers who are categorically not employees of the network aggregator. Yet it’s not quite that simple.

First we have the reviews and verifications these aggregators offer their ‘community’ to assure quality. These can go as far as checking the passports and other identity documents of providers. Then we have the controls on pricing they offer plus the overarching branding they lay on top of the providers similar to a hotel chain or limousine firm. We also have the customer service they end up providing. They try to nudge you into resolving problems directly with the providers but if you can’t then they regularly step in to intervene, to offer refunds and smooth things over, desperate to avoid negative stories sticking to their surging brands[2. I have personal experience of network aggregators forking out hundreds of dollars to leave everyone feeling happy with their brand after things have gone wrong].

So network aggregators aren’t merely aggregating supply and demand, they are building brands and owning customer relationships so much so that they will even extend refunds and credits when the provider won’t. Yet because of their very nature and their legally-driven insistence that they don’t employ the providers they have few ways in which to encourage genuinely better behaviour. We see Uber and Airbnb offering programmes trying to encourage and celebrate their best providers but to me they read like weak cultural change programmes with no oomph.

Because ultimately this comes down to culture, values and accountability. (Well what doesn’t?!) Tom Peters rightly said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. Successful hotel chains like Accor know this – their brand is a promise that wherever in the world you are you will get a good night’s sleep, a comfortable bed, a certain kind of breakfast and service etc. If anything goes wrong they train and incentivise their staff in ways to not just make it right but to leave the customer feeling better about the brand than before. Good taxi and limo firms keep their drivers trained up on serving customers with disabilities, on major works happening in their patch, they trial new vehicles and tools for improved efficiency, safety and access. They get to know particular clients with certain preferences and needs.

Now any individual provider to a network aggregator can and does do those things, I’m sure. Most likely they will even get good reviews. But how does this scale? What kind of experience can Airbnb and Uber promise me? Nothing really. Offering a special badge or annual $100 voucher to their best providers is light years away from the organisational leadership, accountability and values a good firm in any sector can provide.

So where does this take us? Network aggregators almost certainly open up the opportunities for micro businesses to reach more customers than ever before. And for now the big ‘unicorn’ aggregators are willing to spend time and money to retain customers even after bad experiences. They are even financing some of their providers, as Uber do with car loans. But that won’t be able to continue indefinitely, at some point either after launching onto the stockmarket or with a private owner, profits will need to be made. The result will have to be far greater control over providers and/or retreat from the level of support offered to customers.

Are there lesson we can take from the network aggregators? Most certainly but we must do so with caution – recognising that they are not proven, sustainable businesses yet and that they aren’t quite the light-touch networks they like us to think they are.

If one applies this to public services then I believe ultimate accountability will continue to lie with public bodies, even as delivery becomes ever more distributed, digital and networked. Agile and networked we should be, but the need for accountability, culture and values can’t be magicked away in a puff of network aggregation.

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Thoughts on whips and collective responsibility

Whipping, for the uninitiated, is the British term for party discipline. Essentially the party leadership decides if a vote is ‘whipped’ and if it is then all party representatives in the council or Parliament have to vote along the agreed line of the leadership. If they don’t then various forms of discipline are used from simple threats to taking away plum jobs including the extra payments they attract. There have been many tales of the extraordinary and terrible lengths some Whips (those ‘whipping’ their colleagues into voting along party lines) have taken to impose party discipline. This has led to some taking a view that the whipping system is ‘part of the problem’ and should be avoided. Perhaps, but it depends on what purpose you believe parties and elected representatives serve.

Having spent 8 years as a councillor in a party which constitutionally doesn’t allow whips I have some thoughts on this whole issue. I should note that I am no longer involved in party politics and these are just my personal reflections.

So on the matter of purpose – I don’t believe that parties and elected representatives (councillors, MPs, MEPs) are simply delegates of their electorate, party selectorate nor party machinery. Their role is to be representatives who use their best judgement and considered deliberation to come to decisions in the best interests of the collective good for their city, county or country. But of course parties stand for election on a platform, a manifesto of principles and policies. If elected then they are expected to deliver on those promises. So party discipline is understandable in furthering the cause of progressing the promises made to the electorate. There is a natural, unavoidable tension between this need to deliver the party’s platform versus the individual judgement of each representative from a party who may not have entirely agreed with the party’s electoral platform in the first place.

Unfortunately, as I alluded to earlier, party discipline such as through whips, is open to abuse – it can be used to impose ‘government business’ which is in no way a manifesto promise, it can also be used to protect a leader’s position. Whips are not infallible by any means though, parties with the most terrific whips offices still see rebellions happen.

Top-down leadership typified by whipping works in a crisis, for example it’s essential for the emergency services. But in considering the big issues facing public services a more collaborative approach is needed for success. Yet on the other hand no organisation nor political party works if it is merely a collection of individuals. There must be some sense of collective – the greater good, which can logically lead to some way of maintaining that collective through discipline. Tensions abound!

The intentions were good for the system I had to work with in the Green Party: Nobody could be forced to vote against their conscience, a party line couldn’t be imposed. The implication was that deliberation would lead to collective views. Indeed that was what we usually did in the Brighton & Hove Green Group of Councillors. While I was Leader of the Council, I was quite separately the Convenor of the Green Group which I felt to be an important and helpful distinction. I had a clear task to present key issues for the group’s deliberation, to convene colleagues over the big decisions. We would deliberate openly amongst colleagues before taking a vote on what our view was.

Unfortunately, while some felt that they should follow the group’s collective view even if they personally didn’t agree (which was my approach), some felt that the party’s constitutional position allowed them to always break the group’s collective position. Technically I’m sure this was allowed and we had a protocol so that people would let me know they were going to do this. However it made for appearances of a group that was divided and disagreed on too many issues.

Having pondered this at length I think we saw a clash between individualism and collectivism in how colleagues approached our decision-making. Indeed I think we are now seeing this played out in all political parties: Across the political spectrum I see those who feel their personal ideological and political purity trumps a collective party position in pretty much all circumstances. My personal view is that politics and public policy are inherently collective so the individualistic approach holds some irony. But I also understand the pressures to individualism that politicians face when lobby groups challenge each and every vote, towing a party’s collective view can be thankless especially if you don’t understand or agree with the party’s decision-making processes.

Despite the pressures of being without the simplicity of a whip to impose the party line we did manage to deliver over 85% of our manifesto promises in Brighton & Hove. All the same I’m sure one of the challenges of the next decade has to be find ways to avoid politics descending into self-indulgent individualism, to find models and tools for reinforcing the idea of the collective in decision-making and party discipline.

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Some end of term reflections for Local Government Chronicle

LGC asked for some reflections at the end of my term a a council leader. Here’s what I wrote for them:

There are only a couple of weeks left until I step down as both Brighton & Hove City Council’s leader and as a councillor. While, after eight years, I will lose that ‘Cllr’ title I will continue to have a passion for the sector and all that it delivers for citizens. LGC have asked for my reflections having led the UK’s first Green council, albeit a minority administration.

I’m writing this just hours before we launch our end of term report. In that report we show that our administration has delivered on over 85% of the 195 manifesto pledges we made in 2011. Brighton’s economy is booming with a famously vibrant creative digital cluster, we are a top UK seaside destination, a place where people want to come live and work. Our ambition and delivery for Brighton & Hove has been recognised in many ways including as the world’s first One Planet City, the 2014 CIVITAS European City of the Year for Sustainable Transport and part of the UK’s first new UN Biosphere Reserve in over 40 years.

These and our other achievements have only been possible through collaboration. If there ever was an age of heroic leadership, then that time has gone. Collaboration and co-operation are now the only forms of leadership that can deliver the outcomes our citizens deserve. Locally this has meant intense cross-party working and collaboration with partners in all sectors as well as our neighbouring authorities in the Greater Brighton city region that we have founded.

Nationally the learning and co-operation that has developed through the Key Cities group of 26 mid-sized cities have been invaluable. The collective voice, and thinking, we have been able to present to government and other bodies like the Local Government Association has helped move forward the devolution debate whilst also providing mutual support to the challenges each of our areas face.

We are indisputably now in a multi-party age, and I think that’s a good and healthy thing. In some ways I’d argue that we are just catching up with the rest of Europe who have long had to deal with more parties sharing power at local and national levels. This new reality not only requires new ways of organising TV leaders’ debates, but also puts a clear expectation on political leaders. They will have to be far more collaborative with their erstwhile opponents, and civil servants will need to do more to facilitate and support this type of joint working.

Perhaps as the only Green council leader, being a little freer from the traditional political tribes, I have had an advantage in working with anyone from any party. But I do also think local government has already developed more collaborative leadership capacity than we always get or give ourselves credit for: I see cross-party cabinets and committees delivering positive change in areas right across the country.

Here in Brighton & Hove we made an early change to the committee system in 2012, and we haven’t regretted it for a moment. It wasn’t a move backwards, it was a positive choice to a new way of working which involves all members of all parties far more whilst also being open and understandable to citizens. It has been a particular strength in our new Health & Wellbeing Board arrangements which I chaired, providing system leadership with health partners and all parties were represented as major decisions were being taken.

Finally, as someone with a background in technology, I have worked hard to try and support the local government sector in advancing its transformation for the digital age. It hasn’t always been smooth or easy as legacy systems, skills shortages and capacity restraints are real challenges for all of us. But the potential digital provides us to improve services for citizens, to rethink how we work and reduce costs must be pursued aggressively. Again I strongly believe collective action and collaboration are key to overcoming some of those barriers we face. Even after 10th May I will continue to actively support this stream of work and remain a lifelong champion for the power of local government to improve people’s lives. I know hard times are ahead for councils, but I can’t help feeling optimistic that the passion, creativity and collaboration I’ve seen will get us through the trials and tribulations. Thank you for a fantastic eight years. I’m just off to find somewhere to put down my party political hat.

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Is past performance a guide to the future? The Brighton & Hove Green council’s end of term report

I happened to hear a bit of BBC Radio 4’s World at One yesterday. Presenter Martha Kearney was trying to explore the issue of manifesto promises: Does legislating on them help (as per the Conservative’s announcement on taxation yesterday), how often are they broken and do people actually trust the promises made. In service of this topic she interviewed Labour’s Rachel Reeves and the Conservative’s Michael Gove, both senior national parliamentarians for their respective parties. Rachel Reeves spent most of her interview mentioning reams of the promises Labour are making in their 2015 manifesto, while avoiding the questions on her party’s past performance. Meanwhile Michael Gove kept wanting to rehearse in detail his party’s past achievements while avoiding Kearney’s exhortations to expand on the promises they were making for the future.

It seemed a rather odd and unsatisfying set of encounters for a rather key point central to electioneering: the manifesto pledge. Apparently we are seeing huge pledge inflation, more pledges are being made and manifestos are getting fatter than ever. But what value are pledges when future circumstances are likely to change? And can we make any judgements for their future governing based on parties’ past performance? Mr Gove justified his desire to rehearse his party’s record in government on this very basis, that because (in his view) they had delivered on previous promises their future ones could be trusted. Then why legislate your tax pledge was Ms Kearney’s rebuttal.

I don’t think manifesto pledges can be the only part of electioneering, one should also be considering for example the personal values and judgement of future representatives. But past performance, where available, is also a useful metric if not a guarantee of future progress.

So in the spirit of openness I published the Green minority administration’s record last week. On election four years ago we almost immediately began tracking the 195 pledges we’d made in our 2011 manifesto. By our own judgement we are on course to deliver over 85% of those pledges. I think that’s pretty a good result for a minority administration running a council for the first time in our party’s history during a period of unprecedented austerity cuts to our budgets. But I might be biased!

What’s interesting is how few administrations locally or nationally produce such end of term reports, nor do independent bodies provide such analysis either. If we are seeing ever more pledges being made, then that does give ever more opportunity for such progress reporting to be done. Perhaps something for FactCheck, IFS and others to consider for 2020?

You can download the full PDF Brighton & Hove end of term report here.