The one constant in my employed life in the public sector is the amount of time I spend in dull and unproductive meetings with a vague purpose - surrounded by lots of people who say almost nothing.
I have worked in local councils, national agencies and central government. Low productivity and engagement applied across the piece to regular meetings of senior leadership teams, my teams, cross departmental project teams, awaydays, review teams, sessions addressing a complex problem or presentations of the findings of a project to senior leaders and politicians.
As I was increasingly charged with setting up and running these sessions, I experimented with ways to make them more productive and much more fun. I was always on the look out for better ways to do things: methods I could rip off and adapt to my world.
Running engaging and productive group sessions became the heart of my own practice and was highly valued by staff and colleagues. Twenty years later as a spin off from the way I run my regular projects, clients often ask me to help build the capability of their people to work more productively and collaboratively in groups.
Four revelations that changed how I work
Looking back over my career there were four key moments that transformed how I worked.
Vorsprung durch pinpoint
A colleague I recruited to run regeneration programmes in Westminster Council said he’d used a great facilitation tool ‘pinpoint’ when working on projects in Brussels. I bought the basic kit for our team and he ran a session for us – I loved it (even though in retrospect he didn’t use it very well). Its country cousin is the use of ‘post-its’ which if you stick to the key principles and rules can be brilliantly effective – or more often excruciatingly bad with unusable results.
So I went off for a slightly odd two day training course surrounded by sexist old men who worked for a helicopter building company. I learned the full on german way to use pinpoint. At its most basic it’s a very visual method for generating, processing and prioritising ideas in a way that creates shared understanding and keeps everyone engaged. But the full version is a very well designed way of thinking through and running engaging workshops (if a little inflexible - all those german rules). I have introduced it to every place I have worked since as a core part of how we work. I find it is invariably the more junior, or younger, staff who become really quite empowered by the methods, and use it brilliantly in ways never envisaged by the creators.
Get inspired by yoghurt
A few years later another colleague in Westminster’s Planning Department said he’d been on a great ‘how do you innovate’ programme run by the Innovation company (in it its early days) What!If? 15 years later I saw the same principles and methods widely used by Sitra, Design Council, NESTA, IDEO and Policy Labs amongst others. But the core principles were the same: if you want different solutions, you need to work and think differently – and above all expose yourselves to new ideas and different ways of doing things. I took my whole department on the two day training programme.
They were big on using customer perspectives and analogues to help you see things differently, to avoid the default ‘solutions’ and learn instead from unexpected places. The analogues and stimulus was sometimes pretty wacky – reflecting for example on how the concept of muller’s yoghurt with fruit corners might help you think differently about local public services. An insight that stuck with me was that you have to be as careful about who and what you bring into a workshop as you are with the design and facilitation of the session itself.
Turn the coffee breaks into the conference – open space.
One of my roles at Westminster Council was to direct the development of the Council’s first Crime Reduction Strategy. We wanted to engage residents and community, understand their perceptions and priorities. And we wanted to work with them and police to make a difference.
The woman running the project had come across an academic who advocated a different approach to engaging with communities – the open space method. This approach was developed by Harrison Owen, an Episcopal priest, who was struck that the best bit of most conferences was usually the informal and unstructured, like talking to other people in the coffee breaks. So he developed a simple method with a few principles and laws that made the coffee break the conference (spawning the unconference, world cafe etc).
The method creates and works on the agenda that matters most to the people in the room. I found it a brilliant way to demolish the usual hierarchy, and misplaced feelings of superiority or deference amongst diverse attendees. It allows people to shape what matters most to them. Devotees of #OneTeamGov and its unconferences would recognise this method as one of the influences of their approach.
What I liked most was the surprisingly radical feeling created by the ‘law of two feet’ ie: after 10 minutes in a group talking about an issue you are interested in – you can move on to another or stick with it – as you wish. It felt adult and empowering - so much better than being pre-allocated to a crap topic, in a stuffy room, writing gibberish on a flip chart - trapped for 40 minutes. The quality of listening amongst the mix of politicians, residents, voluntary organisations, police and officials was unlike anything I had previously seen. It felt like a shared endeavour - with some proper differences of view and disagreement – but in an atmosphere of respect and openness.
Like all methods it has its limits and works better at some stages of process than others - but it is a brilliant way to make sure you work on the right stuff and engage the people who will need to take action afterwards to make something happen. And you won’t be surprised that those who find this approach most unsettling are those senior leaders who like to control the inputs and outputs of an event to their own agenda! You need some courageous senior leaders to let go if this approach is to thrive.
Accelerate your solutions in Woking
Later on in my career when I was in the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU) in central government I was working with colleagues in the then Immigration and Nationality Directorate. They invited me to a problem solving event looking at the then acute problem of temporary accommodation for asylum seekers. It was designed and delivered by their call-off contract consultants – Cap Gemini. I went along thinking I would stay for an hour or 2 rather than the whole day. But it was brilliant: a high end (and yes pretty expensive) combination of the best of all I have seen before and more, with top notch facilitation. I was so engaged and immersed in the process I stayed the whole day. They had assembled an unusual mix of people from across the system (some of who were angry and disenchanted with government) – but the process got us to the heart of the problem, and secured the necessary acceptance, ownership and commitment from those who held the resources and power to make new solutions happen.
This is the ‘accelerated solutions’ method. Many of the best workshop designers and facilitators worldwide originally worked with Cap Gemini running these types of events. It was eye opening to see how they adapted their approach and choice of methods as the event progressed to reflect where the group was getting to. They worked relentlessly to make sure senior leaders were engaged and brought their leadership to the event. If they did not see enough engagement from senior leaders they would refuse to take on a project.
A couple of years later I used Cap Gemini to run a sequence that culminated in a two day event in Woking with almost a 100 senior civil servants to enable us to co-design the approach to the new Cabinet Secretary’s flagship reform – Capability Reviews. It was the scariest and most stressful two days of my career – but the subsequent success of the programme owed a lot to the quality of engagement and codesign by that group. Ten years later people who were there still talk about ‘Woking’.
Building capability
Over the years I built this mix of approaches and methods into my own practice. I have had some great successes, lots of productive and influential sessions - and a few road crashes. But mainly it has helped me to get my work done in a much more productive and engaging way, creating alignment and understanding needed to make things happen.
The most important thing I did was to systematically equip 100’s of staff who worked in my teams with the core tools for productive working in groups. Initially I would draw on a few external trainers who could help train staff on some of the techniques (like Pinpoint UK and Roffey Park) but increasingly I found I needed a more tailored and blended approach rooted in examples from public service and a deep understanding of our context and challenges. So I developed my own materials and programmes which I have shared widely with my colleagues and clients.
I have found that my most enthusiastic colleagues have in turn taught and coached their teams and staff to use the tools. And they have adapted or extended the core tools - bringing completely new tools to their own practice. You have to keep learning, reflecting and seeking out new methods that other people are trying out. This is the reality of how you create lasting capability in an organisation: in the jargon of the academics who research capability, you help people acquire ‘transformative routines’.
From exceptional to normal?
Even after our best efforts back then we made limited progress encouraging more widespread adoption in central government of productive methods of collaboration and problem solving. It was neither common place nor embedded in staff development and training. And too often departments lacked the willingness to buy the basic few bits of kit that allow the staff who have the appetite to try this stuff to do so. All it takes are a few pinpoint boards, some brown paper, whiteboards, pens and some stationery. I watched as the use of these methods would come and go with the enthusiasts and believers who used them. They remained an occasional shock at an event rather than the normal way to do day to day work better.
But in the last 10 years there has been more systematic use of quality design, innovation and collaboration methodologies – driven by the government digital service, policy lab, and those departments who have invested in customer focused design like DWP and HMRC – all helped by the interest in more open policy making.
The most encouraging development today is the excellent bottom up leadership from the #OneTeamGov movement in the UK Civil Service (and now global). They are spreading many of the core principles and approaches at great pace and energising a wide group of civil servants. Their mantra is to get on and try things and not wait to be asked. Happily there are senior leaders like Clare Moriarty giving them stellar backing.
I hope we are now at a tipping point in making productive engagement and collaboration the way we do things in the UK Civil Service. If so, better policy, better delivery and better government will surely follow.
If you are interested in equipping some of your people with some of these proven tools and the confidence to use them in pursuit of their day to day work – then take a look at the two day programme I have developed. I take a practitioner to practitioner approach - with an endless supply of examples and insights drawn from your world.