Service Design & Business Design Blog

It is very difficult for many people to truly get help in understanding the first rungs of the ladder of Systems Thinking unless you plunge into the theory. This seems to be a hangover of its history; starting in the realms of engineering, systems thinking appears to be rooted in theory through analytical analysis, rather than emergence and holistic understanding. 

So I want to separate Systems Thinking with systems theory. They are both quite different, and I many will first meet with systems theory when embarking on this journey of learning and discovery. Or you might stumble across open-ended global systems thinking discussions. 

A really interesting observation about those who focus on systems theory is the danger of believing that the theory is it. Theory is a rational and reductionist way of looking at anything, academia is not reality. Systems theory, when compared to Systems Thinking in action is different. They cannot really be compared because each are on diffrerent levels of reality. Each is not directly connected to each other, but they are directly linked. 

As an example of theory, when we use a model to describe something, we are not describing that thing directly. It is and always will be an artificial construct that we create to help us understand, and often it is a poor relation to the real thing. Theory might help someone analytically to become a Systems Thinker and for many this is the route for them, but it can also confuse and teach us about structured constructs and models only. Looking at Systems Thinking through a Systems Thinking lens, we would never reduce it to its component parts and then ‘teach’ those. For others it is far better to experience Systems Thinking, and learn from that.

We need methodologies to help others in organisations to learn, but that methodology is not or ever will be Systems Thinking itself. The methodology or approach anyone takes is their way of undergoing a journey of Systems Thinking learning or application.

What is Systems Thinking? I have chickened out and am going to rely on someone else to do this. This is a good place to hear someone talking about systems thinking, and how it fits into Design, Russ Ackoff

When applied to organisations, Systems Thinking should be reversing the impact of reductionist, Taylorism and rigid scientific thinking; it should be pointing us to novel ways of seeing and managing. It could be heralding new benefits that coincide with Design Thinking and its associated mindset and culture. Design Thinking and Systems Thinking go hand in hand. For me, part of the beauty and power of Systems Thinking is its inclusion of everything that incorporates the total aspects of organisations, including human beings and their behaviour.

And as for my journey, I was lucky enough to meet some people who have spent much time analysing theories, but more importantly, to learn from the reality of current organisations and how we operate within them. Putting that theory into practice. For me, the understanding and application of Systems Thinking has developed through experience, a mindset of learning, and the application of ideas and concepts to discover their impact. Design Thinking could have gone down the same sorry path as Systems Thinking, but it luckily got led by those who were open, flexible and understood emergence of thinking through learning.

What do I suggest for others to move forward? I am not exactly sure, and I would welcome suggestions. I would encourage learners to seek out those who they resonate with, and reject those who they dont. Read, connect, visit, and work with those you find attracted to, and move away from those who you find express behaviours and attitudes that repulse. Thats what I did, and it has helped me. Oh, and the most important thing, practice it, do it, make mistakes and apply and learn.

I have found that Systems Thinking that is published is often applied to world problems, or natural systems, or derived from the early days to Engineering. If we look at the models and concepts that are created to communicate that type of application of Systems Thinking, I find that they can be often unhelpful to learn from when looking at services and organisations. I dont recognise the similarity of an organisation being a natural ‘thing’ like a cell or a human body, nor is it a logical robot, and as such perhaps be courageous enough to create your own understanding of organisations when helping yourself to think more systemically.

The way I understand how able someone is to see an organisation through a Systems Thinking lens is to have a conversation with them, and listen to how how they see and therefore speak about that organisation. Their concepts and how they express them will link to their thinking.

This quote by Tim Brown recently describes the shift in Design Thinking activity with organisations that is happening worldwide. The shift is from the initial concept of product design and fitting that into a stable organisation. Now, service designers are increasingly called to integrate their work within the business itself. In his quote Tim Brown specifically refers to the design of the underlying end to end service. For those seasoned practitioners who have been working in Service Design, this should come as no surprise, as it is becoming an increasing reality in our work. 

Is this good? The impact this is having on service designers is less about theoretical discussions about being right or wrong, it is driven by the market demand. And it is being driven by the market because Service Design is maturing into he next stage in its development; it is moving from an innovative and dynamic start-up, to a more accepted mature methodology, slowly becoming integrated into businesses. That in itself is very interesting, as it is another indicator that proves the worth of Service Design through its acceptance by mainstream businesses. So, it perhaps has to be accepted as a positive milestone on the path to providing greater value.

What approach and skills are needed to fulfil this shift? The question has been bounced around conferences and discussion in the last few years, and is being currently tested by those in the thick of the service design workplace. From recent observations with that work that is published and has demonstrates proven success, these are some of the points that are surfacing:

1. Familiarisation with business concepts and skills have to be present when undertaking service design in a business context. 

2. Service Design and business transformation skills and methods have to go hand in hand at various points in application of Design Thinking, and the relationship with the client. 

3. Design Thinking has specific unique principles and characteristics that are central to its definition, and traditional methods of transformation are mostly not aligned to these principles. Therefore additional transformation disciplines have to become realised through approaches and mindsets like Systems Thinking, Teal, and other modern concepts. This will allow Service Designers to leverage their new approaches into business services efficiently and effectively. In fact, efficiency and effectiveness need to become part of Service Design.

How to do this. These three points do not mean that all service designers have to become proficient in them, but designers will be increasingly co-designing their services in collaboration with like-minded team members who have got that proficiency. They have to work with those who share their principles of working and culture. Service Design agencies are already sourcing those contacts into their work.

The Role of Digital. Lastly and perhaps most striking, is that if Design Thinking has to include truly redesigning services, designers have to be able to wean themselves off the single minded focus on Digital as being the only means by which to achieve transformation. The transformation of services is far more about people, behaviours, purpose, and the workflow, than it is about any one specialisation. Why do I say that Digital might have to be not the only design specialism? Well, I deal with plenty of complexity with some services. This is particularly relevant in the public and health sectors, where as soon as we move away from the most simplistic services, we land right in there middle of complexity. And in service design, complexity is often not the best way to deal with that complexity. In England we have plenty of examples of that. If that is widespread, that will certainly push Design Thinking into wider contexts!

A recent example I saw recently, in a London Borough Council, was a new customer system for helping people walking in. It was for Housing. It went like this;

1. you walk in,
2. queue, and the person shows you that you have to go to the computers and register. So,
3. you are presented with a few pages with simple questions and you have to supply your NI number and email.
4. You then have to verify your email address.
5. Then, you can select the option to make an appointment with a housing officers and if you are lucky to get one the next day. OK, that is possible for many of us.
   

But what about the people who are in most need? I watched as homeless people turned up, wandered around and got help on the computer. Had no idea as to their NI number and could not verify their email. They left and returned several days later, in a much worse state than before, with a volunteer to help them - to then get an appointment the next day.

In the week I was there someone was so shocked by the service they were getting and they were in such a mess, that they took an overdose whilst sitting talking to the housing officer. They were in hospital for two days. And no, they did not have severe mental health issues. That same week, in another housing department in the country, a person set themselves alight in the same situation.

Whoever designed that Digital service has lots to learn about SD

​Having just got back from a public sector conference, looking over the day and asking myself the question as to whether or not these gatherings help? The answer is yes, many people discussed good things that teams are doing, and agreeing what we should be doing. But one phrase from the conference really did trouble me; 

And then someone reminded me of something. They showed me a report with this great list of innovative health & social care working principles:

• Holistic approaches and co-production
• Devolved responsibility for decisions about resources to local level with real accountability to families and communities 
• Community work, engaging with the strengths and talents in the neighbourhood and nurturing local voluntary organisations and associations – “helping communities be strong and resourceful”
• Undertaking local social care planning on an inclusive basis

Now imagine the The Health Minister agreeing the above and stating in Parliament;
The theme of the plan is to harness the efforts of the community in both the statutory and voluntary sense. That is very much in line with the Government's view.
Well, this list and this quote is from the Secretary of State for Social Services in 1982! The realisation that dawned on me that we have been there before, and we’ve revisited this several times in the last decades, was a jolt.

Does anyone reading this recognise that those wanting the job to transform health & social care, where after several decades, realise that their work has made no meaningful impact? They all seem to be doing good work, but with almost no real lasting difference.

We try and make improvements, but what about those who work there? What can it be like for them? Imagine that when an NHS nurse gets to work starting their shift, that their manager slaps them in the face, then later on the manager sticks a pin in their leg, so it bleeds. Then at lunchtime, the manager hits the nurse over the head and causes a headache. What would we think of the behaviour of that manager? 

Obviously this account is ridiculous and would never be acceptable. But if so, then why do we accept this behaviour when the abuse does not lead to any obvious physical damage? We encourage nurses and social workers to train, and encourage them to accept low pay with the promise of having a job that really matters. And then, when they start the job, we ensure they can never do a job as they were trained to do, because there is not enough time. And we command them to stop using their brain and follow simple and stupefying instructions, so that they cannot really help the patient in the promised way. And we treat them to the point where they often cry with frustration on their drive home. How have we come to accept this abuse?

This mindset that we have developed leads to ridiculous accepted conclusions; 

1. What is one of the problems of the NHS? We don’t have enough nurses. 
The root cause of the symptom of not enough nurses is that the nurses we train, start work, get abused by the NHS system, and leave. We have always had plenty of nurses being trained, we simply throw the opportunity away, and damage careers in the meantime. Can it be morally right to convince, train and then give someone a job that is not possible to be morally fulfilled? 
​
Taking the same situation but with a plasterer who plasters the walls of old properties, the result of this situation for the plasterer would be a poorly and partially plastered wall. Would anyone simply accept that? Imagine thousands of new houses with partially plastered walls, is a ridiculous outcome to contemplate. But why do we accept this in our public services? Is it because plastering is physical that we can see it so obviously?

Management of Public Services

Managers in the public sector are not one homogeneous mass, but they do seem to behave in a similar way. Whether managing nurses, council officers or road repairs, their answer in a situation where a member of staff cannot complete the task given to them for that day is in many cases a shrug of the shoulders. The one time that a manager has to use their ability to lead and manage operations, they abstain in the worst possible way. 

Managers are paid more, and part of their role is to manage and maintain the operations and delivery of services funded by the public for the public. One hundred years ago the Suffragettes managed to get 50,000 people to march to London; before phones and the internet. They were showing the world that the situation had got to the point that it desperately needed to change. What should our leaders in the public services be doing to highlight an impossible and abusive situation? Certainly not simply shrugging their shoulders - why can't they sit on the steps of Whitehall for a day in demonstration. NHS leaders are somehow subservient to their hierarchical masters, but surely their job is also to push upwards to their bosses? Public sector leaders have a duty to highlight and ensure critical aspects of the organisation, not simply to act as top down mouthpieces. The Windrush issue is an example of managers having to follow and not react to bad culture.

Lastly, what of the impact on the most important group of all - those the services are helping - Us, the public? This could be the subject of another article - but what of those millions of interactions since 1982, that could so easily have different outcomes.

At times, managers can and do get dismissed from their job because they say something that is overheard, published and deemed racist or suchlike. But when managers ignore and take advantage of their staff, there is no public outcry - they carry on with their job. Are a few misplaced comments far more important than peoples livelihoods?

The Cause of the Problem

Enough wringing of hands, and bemoaning the lack of political will. Moving past despondency and looking for hope, lets look for the systemic cause of the problem. Why after 35 years can we not implement real transformation? For me, the answer emerges surprisingly quickly and clearly.

Those who Govern the System
Elected politicians, MPs, on election day are suddenly pushed behind a desk and have to run the public sector. They have to oversee a hugely complex and large organisation. Would they know if Universal Credit is a good idea? You can ask this question to people whose job it is to deliver benefits and half will say yes, and the other half say no. It is a complex issue that can only be answered by understanding the whole system, and how people truly interact with it - understanding it as a real behavioural set of individual workflows. Imagine MPs attempting to make clear judgements in the middle of the myriad of conflicting pressures that they face daily. Its not heir fault, its the situation they find themselves in - needing to make policy decisions before the next minister arrives.

The Structure
The direct imposition of short term political decision-making on the long term nature of public service is an ill-matched structure of control or governance. Politics is an emotional and illogical maelstrom of ideology and decision making, and these characteristics are the opposite of the characteristics required by the structural nature and purpose of the public sector services we expect politicians to be able to oversee. We watch as expectant policies are kept out of the meandering reach of decision-makers; lost opportunities for key decisions, indecision, and fear of election consequences - demonstrating clearly that those decisions that are needed are simply too large and complex for the political environment at that time. MPs or councillors do not control public services, but they do create the environment and governance by which those services operate. A good example of this is how the imposition of austerity has driven the public sector recently. Also, central government has an important task in defining elements of the wider system - like management competence, digitalisation, etc.

So, if it is so difficult to know what to do in the face of a barrage of conflicting information, it is the height of irrationality to expect MPs and the collection of those who report to them, to effectively oversee such complexity. And no, the Civil Service cannot do it either - they are good at bureaucracy and administration and maintaining control, not managing complexity.

If this was a large private sector multi-national, the CEO would put in plans to change the structure and replace leaders with ones that have the correct competence. It could be completed in six months. There is no practical reason why this cannot start to happen in the public sector, if the will was there. And it would free up politicians to do the job that they are good at doing - from a distance.

It seems Incredibly Difficult to Achieve
When I work with managers they are quick to explain the a number of reasons as to why a particular change cannot happen. It is the nature of the culture that we see that the public sector is full of barriers to moving forward. However, when working with certain senior managers it can be demonstrated, and to their great surprise, that these barriers can be overcome. When working with teams to develop new approaches, there always comes a time when making forward progress, the team realise that they have broken the public sector spell of continually struggling in decision quicksand. From that point forward, the team move into a new decision-making paradigm, and we move into new territory of true change.
​
What is the Root Cause?
We actually know how to run public services well, there are islands of examples using innovative methods that have demonstrated a transformation from the old style public sector administrative master-servant relationship. We have seen that services can be transformed so people in need can be guided to get their lives back on track, and communities can rediscover their strength. Many times these fledgeling examples are caught up in larger pressures, that then throttle their existence; they need to have the appropriate underlying long term alignment across the public sector to continue and thrive to other areas.

​What is a Solution?
There are people who know how to understand, and then manage operational complexity. And there are also clever people who can make things happen. Find those with both attributes, and put them in a room together, that also spans a cross-party political landscape - ideology has to take a back seat here. That group then leads that part of the public sector - they decide the structure, what methodologies are most valid based on evidence, manage transformation through proven prototypes, and ensure the appropriate leadership competence is promulgated throughout the sector. So that the transformation can emerge to all parts of the sector. 

Their strategic vision will span 25 years. They could plan for changes in technology and demand, tackling preventative longer term solutions to impact on problematic root causes. And their appointment to the group is neither as elected officials or private sector capitalists. They would be a unique group whose selection has to be decided with caution and transparency.
​
An Example
Using the example of the problem of ‘not enough nurses,’ that group could ensure that nurses are able to do their job by ensuring a minimum number of nurses in given situations, and that the nurses are treated with a level of management attention and approach that is now expected in any other industry. They would define management competence and ensure management suitability to those competencies. Most importantly, they would understand the core journeys service users take through the NHS, and they would ensure the structure and services are designed to match those user journeys.
Political (public) oversight must still be in place, with the ability to ensure that the public leadership group is doing the right job.
So is the systemic answer is that we need a different governance structure?

​The headlines

• A standard approach to workflow design, leads to poor outcomes, creates waste and increases demand.
• Design thinking principles of user centric services does reduce demand and resources, and increase the value for the customer.
• Real transformation is about altering how we think about delivering services, the courage to fundamentally design the workflow, and how well we can remove organisational barriers.
• Transferring power away from the organisation to the person in need, creates fundamentally different behaviours. And people begin to take control of aspects of their lives.

 
What is the context?
In England, as in most countries, local government councils are responsible to allocate housing to those members of the public who are in need of housing. Around 2002 an approach that was copied from The Netherlands, was brought over to England, and tested. It was brought in because the old system of allocating housing was different in each area, and the public had no idea how fair it was. There was also a feeling that the person in need should have the choice as to the location and type of house they could have.
​
The government at the time liked it, and they called it Choice Based Lettings (CBL). This system is still in place for 98% of all local government areas.

 
What’s the story?
The manager and a team of front line staff got together to look at understanding the workflow as experienced buy the service users.

Looking at the start of the workflow, after the initial contact from service users, the majority of further contact was by letter. Just to get past the front door to be accepted took months. Each application generated huge efforts of logging, processing and filing across the three IT systems.

Kim Tugwell, Home Select Case Worker, said that spending all day ‘processing application forms’ felt like being ‘on a treadmill never getting anywhere’. The system also generated hostility and almost 10% of applicants appealed against their banding. For the team, the deeper learning then followed quickly after. 

Audio - ​​This is the team telling us how it worked in reality: 

​The folly of banding 
Banding is the term that means the groups that customers were put into once they had been assessed. There were three categories; gold, silver, and bronze. The first major learning point was that the Gold priority banding did not mean that you would be housed any quicker. It took on average up to 30 months to be housed.

Gold band mean = 675 days, Silver band mean = 750 days, Bronze band mean = 655 days.
 
Housing need 
The next thing that astonished the team was when they began to speak to people on the waiting list. Many of them were not in housing need (56%); they could be removed from the list. Two thirds of all people that were contacted, had out of date records.

More learning came when they began to understand the amount of activity that the CBL process generated. Of the 105 properties advertised 2,600 bids were received. 

​Understanding real need
The next discovery emerged gradually. It is a lesson about closely understanding demand. One housing applicant (Ivy) made contact during the trial. Ivy wanted to move to a one-bedroom bungalow. Her application form included a medical form guaranteeing a higher banding. This would have secured Ivy a silver band classification and allowed her to bid online. One-bedroom bungalows are rare and there were very few in her chosen location. So, she would never be housed adequately and she will remain on the list in the expectation that a house may become available.

So conditioned were the team, that it took a great deal of debate and three phone calls to truly understand what mattered about how a service could best be delivered to Ivy. As the team asked her more questions, they learnt that Ivy actually loved the house she was living in, but could not afford a gardener to maintain the garden. Her mobility was gradually being reduced over time. Her real need was help with her garden and to stay in her home, so the team arranged for a voluntary group to do the gardening for her, allowing her to continue to live in the same property, where she was happy.
 
Solving people’s problems & embrace a flexible approach
The assumption in the workflow design was that everybody who made contact did so because they wanted a house, making the assumed purpose of the service ‘I want a house’. When the team began to listen carefully and ask questions,

what they found was that many people who made contact were actually suitably housed but needed a different housing related problem solved.

The application form and the system design ensured that people making contact never really got to speak to a human being. All demand (100%) got translated into ‘give me a house’.

Previously, all applications were turned into demand for a house. In reality only 15% of that demand had a high housing need. High housing need of itself does not mean that that the solution should be social housing. Often people asking for help only wanted assistance with a deposit, so that they could move into private accommodation, or needed help to solve a dispute involving a private landlord. There are a huge range of solutions that can be tailored to solve each particular problem.

The real demand into the system might even suggest that the housing crisis that we are warned of is perhaps not as bad as it might seem. This knowledge is only possible because staff were free to have conversations and understand what the real problems were and what mattered to service users. Gone are the application forms and the multiple and expensive IT systems that stopped people listening and understanding.

​Even though Great Yarmouth ended the Choice Based Lettings scheme that drove so much failure and cost into the system, and that stopped them from helping the people that they were there to serve. Freeing staff to both understand and then become creative in helping people resolve that problem releases huge energy and creativity. It turns staff from paper shufflers back into human beings. Only people, not IT, has the ability to absorb the huge range of demand that is presented in human service systems.

Over time, the waiting list dropped from 6000 in 2010 to 309 in 2015. The Home Select team have a new purpose now expressed in customer terms: ‘help me solve my housing problem’. 

​Who are the key partners?

Housing allocations and homelessness, financial advice, benefits advice, social care, anti-social behaviour, the third sector, and the community.

What has been the impact?
                                    FROM                                        TO
Waiting list                   6000                                        309
Demand satisfied        30%                                         80%
Failure demand            63%                                         3%
Appeals                        27/ month                                1/ year
Staff numbers             22                                             15
Social impact               encourage dependency        encourage independency

​What have been the key elements of success?

1. The manager and the staff viewing their current work from the service users perspective.
2. Designing a system that dealt with the variety of what was presented.
3. Understanding each service users real needs.
4. Actively transforming the workflow, challenging and removing waste.
5. The increase in real outcomes improved people’s lives, and impacts the public sector as a whole.
6. Decision-making is delegated to staff.
7. The emergence of motivation and enthusiasm of staff.

What has been learned?

The big finding about this is that the service had been inadvertently designed to ration properties and make people do awkward activities in order to prove how in need they were. This was to protect the system from a public who would be devious enough to exaggerate to get a property. It was an inside-out designed system.

The application form was the perfect embodiment of this thinking: a long document that asked questions designed to sift out lies, with little or no relevance to the real problem that people needed help with. In fact the application form acted like a very basic front-end, unresponsive and bureaucratic. The real finding is that people told the truth and they generally wanted help to solve a problem.

​The logic that follows that realisation leads to a dramatic re-orientation of the mind-set of the staff, and most importantly the managers. The team realised that the application form could not be a reliable method for understanding people’s real problems. Only human beings can deal with the variety of demand presented by service users.

Implications for other Councils?

Transformation like this case study is not recommended for every organisation. Each council can examine its own services – and their impact on those in need, then decide themselves how far they want to go in re-designing their services. In Yarmouths’ case, they decided to change every part of the service and remove CBL. That may not be the right solution for your organisation.

Audio - What it is like now

​The Background
A local government council in England decided that they wanted to review the way that they tackled community problems like noise, anti-social behaviour, dog fouling, neighbour disputes and rubbish in gardens. These services are always backed by legislation that defines the limits of what is acceptable, and this drives behaviour and the subsequent rules.

Due to past experience, the Director had a clear understanding that Service Design was the methodology that he wanted to use, and the staff were placed in a new integrated Hub together with the Police.
 
The approach that was taken, follows the classic Service Design approach that shares its principles with Design Thinking. In effect, the project was to go through three main stages:

​The Community Safety project team was set up, and the role of the consultant was to develop the Service Design principles with the team, and give the team the right tools when they needed them. The team then undertook the approach, developed the prototype, and designed the implementation.

These are a few examples of what we found in the first two weeks:

1. The team began to realise that we kept getting repeat calls. The team complained that the public just did not seem to listen. But we had to be fair and give the same service to all.
   
2. The public seemed to react quite badly when we said that we had the power to fine them,  - but we have a procedure to follow. 
   
3. We automatically fined people for throwing some of their rubbish round the corner. We had to treat everyone the same. Some people got very annoyed at this, and this puzzled us.
   

After 4 weeks of investigating, this is what we learned about the service we all had been working in:

• There were many people we dealt with that we just did not help, we made their overall situation worse.
  
• We spent lots of time on things that added no value to anyone.
  
• 70% of demands were investigated, but never resolved.
  
• 75% of the demands changed from what their original demand was.
  
• 60% of people we deal with are recorded on 3 or more separate computer systems.
  
• In 85% of all cases examined, the team have discovered that the person is having additional issues with other council services – in other words the person is complex.
  

 
The team now had hard evidence that how their current procedures worked did not produce a very effective or an efficient service. By this point the team were very enthusiastic to make changes – but were unsure exactly what to do.
 
The Work – Community Safety
To understand the process that the council staff take is not straightforward, because there is no typical problem. Imagine a community – anything that annoys anyone in that community is dealt with by this group. They called themselves Community Safety. But it is how the problem is viewed and resolved that is the key to a better service.
 
Example - A problem with Rubbish
 
This is a story of two people John and Sandra, who both have domestic rubbish accumulating in the garden.
 
John, has accumulated an amount of rubbish on his front garden. And this is the workflow:

1. Someone in the community complains.
2. A call taker, follows a standard procedure, records the details on a system. This becomes a task.
3. The task gets sent to the manager, who after a few days prioritises it and sends it to an officer.
4. The nominated council officer visits the house, knocks on the door and tries to speak to the person inside. But John is at work.
   
5. The officer returns to their office, creates an official letter at their computer, completes the IT system details of the failed visit, and posts the letter.
   
6. John gets an official letter from the council that states that the rubbish contravenes his housing tenancy agreement. It also says that if the rubbish is not moved within a week, a fine will be applied.
   
7. John quickly removes the rubbish, he drives it to the local tip. The subsequent visit by the council officer finds that the waste has been removed, and the council has rightly done their job.
   

 
Looking at John’s situation; he has recently split from his wife, and has let things in his life get out of hand. He has been away visiting relatives for a week, and just got back to work. When he got the letter from the officer, he recognised that he needed to tidy the garden up and did that.
 
Comparing John with Sandra
 
Sandra has accumulated an amount of rubbish on her front garden. And this is her workflow:

1. She gets the same visit, and letter. But Sandra has not moved the rubbish within the week. The council officer visits again and verbally tells Sandra that he now has to fine her. Sandra swears at the officer and slams the door.
   
2. The officer, then goes back to the office and writes up the whole scenario on the IT system. But the officer has been trained to be customer focused, so the officer makes several visits to talk to Sandra in the next weeks – delivering letters when the door is not answered.
   
3. Sandra eventually throws the rubbish over the fence nearby, and the officer is not happy about this.
   
4. Sandra is fined. But because she cannot afford the fine, the council agrees for her to pay small amounts every week.
5. The council go and pick up the rubbish and take it to the tip.

 
Looking at Sandra's situation. Sandra, has an uncle, who was released from prison, stay at her house for several weeks. The uncle sometimes invites strange guests into Sandra’s house. One of Sandra’s children is out of control, and she often screams at the child. Sandra is very unhappy, feels alone and unsupported.
 
Sandra often just cannot cope with the normal things in life that need to be done – it has all got too much. She does what she can to reduce any problems. To cope she tries to live with someone but she has lived with other men in the last three years, and they have sometimes abused her. Because of the extra people in the house, there is more rubbish than fits in the standard waste bin that Sandra has been given.
 
Every time Sandra gets a letter from the council it’s a new problem for her, to add to the already long list. How is she meant to get rid of the rubbish? She does not have a car. So to reduce her daily worry she simply throws all council letters, unopened, in the bin. When she got a letter from the council about her rubbish, she threw it in the bin.
 
The Learning
The current council approach is to treat every case of rubbish in a garden in the same standard way. But we are discovering that different people have got very different needs.

The team spent several weeks learning, taking the next cases that came into the council at random, and tried to perform them in a better way. And for each case, they compared both approaches by measuring what happened, and estimating what would have happened in the old way of working.
 
These are team insights that were then taken forward to design the new approach:

• We can make a big difference to people’s lives, and we have to stop making people’s lives worse. 
• Before doing anything, we need to understand the whole picture about someone; listen, and never judge.
• Ignore departmental boundaries as much as possible.
• The officer who knows most should make the correct outcome happen.
• Take ownership of helping to solve the problem.
• Get support from others if you need to, or pass on ownership to someone else if that is the most appropriate action
• Take each case based on what matters to the person, do not follow a standard course of action.

 
The team analysed the root causes of the issues they dealt with, and they were: low level anxiety, depression, childhood issues, personality issues, and chaotic lifestyles due to lifestyle and family difficulties.
The main activity that was used to help people, was – listen and to give advice.
The team did not use a process anymore, they used a framework to help them understand what to do in different situations. This framework developed from experience in the trial and systems thinking principles.
 
Taking the new approach with Sandra - what the officer would do now:

1. A complaint is made about rubbish in the garden.
2. The officer who picks up the call, records down the location and then searches the system to find out more about Sandra.
   
3. The officer visits Sandra and asks if he can come inside for a chat – but the officer does not mention the rubbish. The officer asks questions about how Sandra is able to pay the rent, and she talks for 20 minutes to the officer about all the problems she is having.
4. The officer then asks Sandra if she has a problem with rubbish, she says yes. The officer sees that the cause of the problem is that she needs an extra bin. Then the officer asks how he can help her get rid of the rubbish. Sandra cries – it’s the first offer of help anyone has given her in weeks. They agree that the council will pick up the existing rubbish from the garden. And the officer then goes to his van and gets an extra bin and gives it to her.
   
5. Sandra cannot thank the officer enough, she feels better for the rest of the day, and she does not shout at her child so much anymore. She feels more confident, and now has a hope that the council might help her in future, rather than give her more problems.
6. The officer returns to the office and records a minimum amount of information against Sandra's record. Importantly, he records the issues of difficulty for Sandra.

 
No recording on the council IT system was required, except for several sentences. Only one visit was needed by the officers and one by others to collect the rubbish.
 
The outcome was achieved with a significant reduction is actual work for the council. And a far better outcome for Sandra.
 
Comparing the Two Approaches
It is difficult to list down the differences between the two approaches, because even in this apparent simple situation, the circumstances are complex. But the description of the old and new approach highlights the difference in outcome for Sandra. Many of the demands coming in were more involved and complex than this one.

​The Outcome of the Trial
The results recorded from the cases taken in the trial, using the new way of working are:

• Visits out of the office are reduced by 50%.
• Letters are almost never sent anymore.
• Internal communication within the council has increased x4.
• Patrols have almost been eliminated, unless they are what is needed.
• Actual cost savings due to reduced activities between 33% - 42%.
• Repeat calls dropped to less than 10%.
• The public loved the new approach.
• The staff began to enjoy their work – it’s much better than being unpopular.

 
Structure
Adult Social Care,  Mental Health and the Police located some of their staff in the new Hub - to take advantage of the integrated way of working. Inappropriate referrals reduced significantly because staff were able to communicate directly with each other face to face, before simply throwing the problem into a 'referral'. 

Team and Management Approach
The team discovered a radically new way of working. In the old way, they all followed a common process. But in the new way, each officer had to understand and decide for themselves what course of action to take. At the start of the process this was very difficult for staff to comprehend, especially for the managers. I had to help them learn new techniques, and they had to gain confidence in their approach and risk. But, for each officer, there came a moment when they suddenly 'got it.'
We created a decision-making framework that helped the officers to structure how to make decisions.
Each person became part of a self-managing team to some extent. 
 
Managers  The managers had to experiment with new approaches that encouraged team learning. They also had to develop new ways of managing and keeping control using empowered and delegated decision-making. This was a challenge, as the old ways were disbanded. I helped managers to learn how to evaluate cases and officers performance. The manager had to relinquish their old methods of control. Often the managers would go out with newer officers, to observe and learn how officers worked with the framework.

A weekly session was created where everyone would give an overview of their work, learning was shared, and issues were aired.

The behaviour and culture of everyone in the department changed. 

Next is a video of an account of the project from a team member, 8 min

End of article

The approach that this piece of work took combined Design Thinking principles with Service Design and System Thinking, with a sprinkling of Lean. Each 'thinking' is woven into the overall method, so that in one morning, the conversations will always start with what matters to the end user,  incorporate an end to end perspective, and talk about the real barriers int he organisation. We challenged everything. 

The Service - Service design focuses on applying design thinking principles to a service, by embracing the needs of the 'customer.' In a local government service, the application of this approach is not quite the same as in a private organisation. The reason is in asking the question what os the service delivery? It has to be the actions of the officers to help someone to fix a problem. Therefore the innovative approach is applied to the whole service delivery approach. That has to include every element that is directly part of the delivery; rules and procedures, staff roles, measures, empowerment, and managers role. That may be why this case study may appear to be different to others.

The Plan was agreed with the client - but they had no experience of this type of approach, so I had show them that a fixed project management approach would be ineffective - the plan had to be part of Understand. But what might be interesting to the reader is that this is really about Transformative change. In this type of change, which is a complex wicked problem; part of the discovery is to find out where we were going to go. I say we, because this involved transforming peoples thinking as well as the service.
​
The team - Transforming thinking is something that happens when people decide to explore and accept other fundamental possibilities. So, the team that went through this had to be officers from the organisation, plus managers. They had to undergo the journey, and the only way to do that was for them to actually do it themselves. 
My role as the consultant was as a facilitator, and as a coach. I would give them the right tools at the right time, and they would develop the outcomes. So, no nice clean diagrams from me, they were all generated by the team.

The managers - two of the managers were involved for about 1-2  days a week. They had to start by being part of the team, and they had to learn. Slowly over time they started to learn new ways of interacting with the team and allowing officers to come up with the solutions. The manager had to learn how to work with an empowered and self managing team. Whats the role of the manager when the team are self managing?

Introduction
Enforcement services are recognised as those public sector services that are designed around stopping people from doing something; littering, noise, anti social behaviour are good examples.
The services are always backed by legislation that defines the limits of what is acceptable, and those in the service often see themselves as having to ‘police’ or defend something.

Typically, for most services this is a warning, then a fine. Interestingly it is often the case that staff wear uniforms of some type.

Below is an example from a Food Safety Team from England, using a service design, Lean and systems thinking approach to challenge their current way of working.

The Details

When looking at food safety if you ask them what their job is, it is to; 

enforce food standards on restaurant owners. 

They have the ability to fine, or even to take the owner to court, if they think it is appropriate. For the restaurant owner, the experience is never one that they enjoy - the officer suddenly turns up at my door, telling me that I am here to inspect you. 

What Used to Happen

• A stern officer arrives suddenly in my restaurant.
• “Please give me a place I can change my clothes”
• I wait, and worry about all the things I have not got right in my kitchen.
• The officer comes into my kitchen all dressed in white, with a clip-board. They ignore me, and look into every corner of my kitchen.
• They ask me for my staff training records, and I have two new staff who have not done the training.
• After 30 minutes, they take me into my office, and they tell me what I am doing wrong.
• The inspector did not see what I was dong right, that I have been very busy this week, and that I am trying my best. I hate them, I try and hide things from them. 

When the officer arrives, they put on a white outfit, and walk around the kitchen inspecting what they want to see. The restaurant owner just has to watch. And the officer usually has a list of items they expect to see; clean surfaces, training records & certificates, proof of inspections, and so on.

At the end of the visit the officer will go back to their office, and type up a reference document that lists all the items that failed the inspection. Each problem will include sections from the legislation, and a warning of when they should be completed. The tone of the letter is very standard and official - and the wording must be written assuming that the letter might be shown in court.

What They do Now
The same group of officers, after they have transformed their approach, did something very different. Firstly, they realised from a systemic perspective, that their purpose was to:

help restaurants create safe food - not to fulfil a pre-determined list of criteria.

• They now first phone me, and ask when it would be a good time to visit.
• They arrive, they get changed, and we have a conversation about what issues I am facing. I tell them about the two new staff, and how busy I have been.
• They go to the kitchen and simply watch what is going on.
• Then, we have a further conversation and they show my staff a few things that they ask about.
• The inspectors write down a few points that I should take care of, and ask me if I need any help with them.

Back in the office, there is the biggest change:

1. Paperwork has reduced by 80%. We only record what we need we need to, and we don’t type formal letters to the restaurants.
2. We are not interested in the old measures, so we don’t need to record each problem on the measures system.
3. The number of activities we used to do in an inspection flow was 134, now it is11.
4. The purpose has changed from checking, to helping people when they need help. Our motivation has gone right up - I enjoy my work.
5. If a restaurant manager has a problem, they will now call up the inspector and ask them for advice.

"We can now do two visits in one day, not just one.

​As an enforcement officer, it is now up to me to decide what I do and how I do it, for each situation I find myself in. It is great to be able to put into practice my knowledge, and help people.
In the office we have regular sessions, where we discuss what were doing, and what techniques we have learned. If any of us ever need help, all of us are there at the end of the phone - but the most helpful person is my manager.

Enforce principles of working - Command & Control principles:

• We follow instructions
• We ignore the individual issues with the person
• This is just a job, managers dont like me.

Help me principles of working - Person centred principles:

• We understand the customer, and their problems
• We adapt and do the right thing for them
• I enjoy my job, it helps people, they like me.

Summary of performance measures

    •    Service improved from requiring special measures to excellent
    •    Service ethos changed from enforcement to helping
    •    Waste reduced by 75%
    •    Cost saving 24% overall
    •    Staff reduced by 2
    •    Nationally recognised transformation 
    •    Customer feedback changed from suspicion to welcoming

The Method - Systems thinking and Service Design
The approach that was used was to take a team of inspectors and the manager through a series of stages of learning and prototyping - they started by understanding what mattered to the restaurant manager. They also mapped out all the activities that they took to complete a visit, it was 134 steps!
​
They then set about experimenting with a new purpose - to help the managers create safe food. The team realised they had little idea how to actually do that, so they worked with one restaurant, and then another, until they had learned a new set of techniques and approaches that became their new way of working. They discarded those activities that they deemed not necessary.
​
The Implications
Think of those public services that are 'enforcement' - that fine, chase, force people to do certain things. Imagine what would be the implications to the community if those services, instead of
we enforce became we help??????
​
The difference was so great, that an article was published by the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health. You can read it here.

The approach that this piece of work took combined Design Thinking principles with Service Design and System Thinking. Each 'thinking' is woven into the overall method, so that in one morning, the conversations will always start with what matters to the end user, and incorporate an end to end perspective. We challenged everything. 

The Plan was agreed with the client - but they already had experience of this type of approach, and they know that they could not rely on a fixed outcome - it had to be part of the Understand. But what might be interesting to the reader is that this is really about Transformative change. In this type of change, which is a wicked problem; part of the discovery is to find out where we were going to go. I say we, because this involved transforming peoples thinking as well as the service.
​
The team - Transforming thinking is something that happens when people decide to explore and accept other possibilities. So, the team that went through this had to be officers from the organisation, plus a manager. They had to undergo the journey, and the only way to do that was for them to actually do it themselves. 
My role as the consultant was as a facilitator, and as a coach. I would give them the right tools at the right time, and they would develop the outcomes. So, no nice clean diagrams form me, they were all generated by the team.
The managers - two of the managers were involved for about 1-2  days a week. They had to start by being part of the team, and they had to learn. Slowly over time they started to learn new ways of interacting with the team and allowing officers to come up with the solutions. The manager had to learn how to work with an empowered and self managing team. Whats the role of the manager when the team are self managing?

Interesting to read this article in the guardian that the issues with the NHS are not just about ‘fixing people’ when they are unwell. But that loneliness has a large impact on people well-being, demonstrated in the figures for 50% less life expectancy to those that are lonely.  

Analysis
When I did some work in the NHS, and we looked at the demand into hospitals and also helping people in the community - going to the GP, or after they have left the hospital. Something about what we were learning about the demand seemed to need further analysis. It is easy to treat different types of demand as common categories - broken leg, diabetes, etc. But when we looked at the time taken to help people get back to a normal life, there was great variation in the resources and time used with the same category.

Complexity
We discovered that certain people absorbed far more resources, visit their GP, or were admitted to hospital far more than others. These people often had a level of complexity to their situation that was not obviously identified when looking at their records. When we analysed a cohort of patients it was obvious to attribute age to the cause of increasing complexity. But looking at each person in detail we discovered the causes were various. And what was the highest cause of complexity? Loneliness.

It surprised everyone around us, that this was the result of the analysis. And how well had this health trust geared itself up to respond to this problem? Well, apart from having weekly public social gatherings, the problem was not on anyones radar as being important.

What we did
What we did was to tackle the loneliness head on, taking a cohort of people that were in the health system. The result was that their interaction with the health system went down, in some cases so dramatically, that they stopped seeing anyone in the NHS.

Its how we view our demand
Prior to this analysis, the NHS had been looking at demand using categories that they had created and defined each person. However, this is a good example of looking at a complex system, and applying system thinking principles and techniques to its analysis and design. Then the demand is understood outside-in,  how people interact with the system, and what matters to them. This simple approach allows an organisation to fundamentally alter their approach to how they deal with people, so that their resourcrs are cut by 30%, and the outcomes are improved. Predefined categories tend to limit our ability to really understand our organisation and the workflow clearly.

Data sharing, often a major stumbling block to joined-up working in the public sector. How to use a systemic approach to thinking about the problem and delivering a different and far easier solution.

Lets start with a real case study and define the problem that this organisation had.

The Problem
I came across a new data sharing issue in a new Hub we were redesigning recently. In this situation local government Council staff were newly sitting next to and working with the Police. The question was:

How do we now share information between us?

This was a project started to develop the workflows, policies and practice in the Hub. The Police, and Council front line staff were in a multi-disciplinary change team, and the managers were connected to that team.

What the Police Did
If anyone works with the Police you will find that they have a quite different way of making decisions than any other type of organisation. In the situation with the Hub, they made a local decision to share data in the way that supervisors on the ground thought was reasonable. However, when they went and asked their Data Controller, and the Controller replied they could not share any of the data. As simple as that! The Police then spent the rest of the three months in this position - frustrated, but unable to proceed.

The Standard Solution
As is usual, the purpose has to be defined or understood. It will be defined by managers, and may be defined something like;

we need a set of rules on how to legally share data between us, that protects people and allows us to work together efficiently.

This is the usual approach in most organisations to solve a problem like this. They will ask a consultant with analytical knowledge to look at this as a project and study the data. They also need to be fully aware of the legislation, so they ask the Data Controller and get a copy of the Data Protection Act, and read it in detail.

This consultant then takes the data types from a data analyst, and attempts to categorise the data into the categories that make sense, and that show different levels of risk. They would look at the job roles of all the people involved and attempt to make a judgement as to the data they are required to view and why. And engage with the Data Controller and put all the collected findings on the table.

The outcome will be a report, that will be approved, and then circulated down through the hierarchy - as each manager makes sure that their particular concern or point is contained in the final report. In some cases this step in the process can take many months and the problem is seen as:

the needs of different stakeholders, which must be taken into account.

Staff groups are put on a schedule to listen to their managers tell them what the new rules are.

The Systemic Approach
Understand
Again, the first step that has to happen is that the problem has to be understood. This is done by going to where the work is. The change team listen to demands coming into the Hub, by actually listening to the conversations. They have to understand the whole problem and what matters to the person making the demand.

The purpose they define for the sharing of information remains undefined.

Redesign.
The next step, after listening to the demand, is to undertake the work - by just doing the work that matters to fix the problem - together with the person.

The Data
So what of the data sharing? Well, the example above is looked at by the team, and the key information that was needed to provide the knowledge required to solve the problem is written down.

The above process is repeated several times, until the team understand enough about the demands and the knowledge. They might do 20 or more demands.

Then the team sit together and analyse what knowledge is needed, and where it is usually held. Interestingly it is quite often held in peoples memories rather than simply in a computer.

The purpose they define for the sharing of information now emerges from the evidence.

The Outcome
This analysis is then used to define the agreement on the sharing of knowledge. If a manager does not like this, or wants to add other rules, then they have to work with the team to demonstrate that the evidence proves that this change should be made.

The word data is not included in any document or discussion. The purpose of this exercise is the sharing of knowledge

From a systems thinking perspective, what is important in this problem is not about data, but pertinent information regarding a council officer about to visit the property of someone. As soon as you make it data you have entered the world of concepts and ideas. Systems thinking has to be firmly rooted in the reality of what the the system is really about.

The solution was surprisingly easy, focus on the information - not the data. When there is a new demand, and the council officer wants to know about the what we know about the person making the demand, then they ask a police officer in-front of a computer if there are any issues I need to be aware of when I visit Mr. Smith.
The officer could respond with;

• no problem,
• maybe you should go with a colleague,
• the mother has  difficulties talking to a official,
• there may be someone staying there illegally,
• talk to Jason, he knows a bit about this family,
• a police officer will go with you as it might be tricky,
• dont go - lets have a conversation...

After the demands were understood, It took about two weeks to define, and make into a workshop for staff.


The Difference Between Systems Thinking and our Usual Approach?
Point 1 - there is are no stakeholder needs, as the person and the demand defines the need.
Point 2 - there is no inflexible set of rules that applies to certain categories of demands.
Point 3 - the managers do not initially define the outcome, the evidence does. Then the managers agree the analysis the team undertook.

What is needed is not the data, its the knowledge I need before the visit and during the process. This real need by-passes all data arguments, as the real basis of data sharing is the sharing of knowledge. The sharing of data can be a side issue to the main principle, that is often used when sharing is between people far away from each other and who are unable to collaborate. If you can collaborate with your colleague in the other service, then the sharing becomes one of knowledge - and a different and much easier problem to fix.

In addition, this approach supports the front line staff and is flexible to every situation. So no detailed procedures or rules are necessary - just the creation of a set of principles to work to in a framework that front-line staff can be coached to use.

This is an real example of using systems thinking to the problem of data sharing. The problem is redefined from data to knowledge - which is should have always been in the first place, if the legislation had been looked at from a systemic perspective then maybe the problem so many public sector organisations are having would be made alot easier.

The data protection act in the UK is actually written to help data sharing and to prevent private organisations from marketing our data. But we tend to see it only as the method of restricting communication. Certainly those who wrote it made a big error in the way that it puts across the central concept of what it is about. But, it really does focus on DATA, and in public sector operations we are far more interested in information.

Just when the news of the Scottish police centralisation of call handlng has shown that there are significant problems with this approach, Mike Penning, a home office minister has stated that the combining of three emergency services will bring significant benefits. This will bring in economies of scale with the sharing of back office services. Efficiency jsut drops out as the answer, doesn't it?

This is not the place to resort to egoistically stating one view over another. No, its time to realise that we, as a nation, relish in stating the obvious. At least, we all think we are stating the obvious, and each of us comes up with the solution that makes sense. Maybe its about time that we stood back a little, and recognise that we keep returning to this style of behaviour like flies around a light bulb.

Its obvious that covering a pan that is boiling over, to stop it from spilling its hot contents is a solution to a problem. But the better solution is to switch off the gas.

Transformation is about doing different things, not doing the same things differently. It is about looking at what we have been doing, and choosing to approach problems from different perspectives. I would suggest to Mike Penning that his good idea, based on common sense, just before he commits millions, to just do a few simple things:

1. Get someone to help you learn how the current system works. Understand its underlying assumptions. Discover the root cause of the issues.

2. Start with a better set of assumptions, and apply a different logic to the problem you have to solve.

3. Start to redesign the system, so that the problem's root causes are eliminated.

4. You end up with a system that works differently than before, will cost less, and performs better.

You need someone to show you how to do it, because it is very difficult to see the system we are in differently, without someone to help us.

Its actually not difficult, and will only take a few weeks to do 1 and 2, but it will save milllions.

Remember this from 2010? The principles were exactly the same...

“FiRecontrol was a project established under the previous Labour Government, and is now being scrapped because it does not work.

“This project has wasted millions of pounds of public money as well as thousands of firefighter hours in trying to bring it to completion.

This is a plea for trying something different, so my tax money will not be wasted again.

I just want to add this about Ian Duncan Smith and Universal Credits. Its the same principle as sharing control centres, related to a process:

"This is the man who is the chief architect of the Universal Credit, which was supposed to have been rolled out in October 2013, and in March 2016 has been rolled out to the grand total of 141,100 people - and by "people", I mean "single men without dependents", the only group whose claims are simple enough to be processed on the Universal Credit."
Stephen Bush, New Statesman

Good grief, look at this! facebook page about universal credit

Isn't it a fact that many people can talk at length about the reasons as to why we, as managers in organisations, are always striving to create a great organisation. We can list the top reasons as to why we need to change, and another list of what needs to change. How about a list showing the characteristics of successful leaders? Does anyone like to count the number of books on this subject?

Yet, when we actually look at what works, and what does not work, actually watch managers manage, what is the one thing that underpins what is REALLY stopping us. Is not the answer, that we all actually know deep down, is us - our own fear of the unknown - of stepping out of our zones of comfort? Its easy to say that we must become bold, etc. Its another to actually feel the wind of uncertainty grip our chests.

Which manager is prepared to take the risk of a new approach, when they are being measured on success, by a room full of grim faced, suited stalwarts. Isn't it easier to follow the tried and tested approaches, that were developed about 80 years ago?

Our real barriers are all in our heads.

Its not easy, but the first step is to recognise our limitations, and be prepared to challenge them. Then find an approach and the right people who share your vision. Then you have a chance to succeed...

So, the Scottish Police centralisation of calls is being put on hold. What is the problem? The problem is that we as decision-makers love to use the same clever principles to make decisions, that on reflection, seem to be plausible.

The problem is that the police service relies heavily on calls into the system. These calls arrive at all times of the day, with varied frequency over the day. At small sites the cost of managing these call handlers, arranging their shifts, and preparing for holidays and sickness is a challenge. So, the solution is to get them all from the smaller sites, put them in a big building, and connect them with technology, back to their original locations. Then, maybe we can recruit cheaper grade staff to answer the calls, based on best practice CRM systems. If we can call India when we talk to a bank, surely its a no-brainer?

It all makes sense to a decision-maker, who is being pushed to make savings, the like that have never been experienced by that leader in the lifetime of the service. The logic and the maths make perfect sense.

The reality is this. The demand that comes in is often complex and fails to follow a pre-determined pattern to resolve. That seemingly simple call about a Facebook spat can turn nasty if not dealt with according to the unique circumstances of what matters to that particular caller. The history of conflict within the facebook issue, shows that those invovled have been warring for some time.

Then, if we do pass on the call to a division, it gets categorised, prioritised, and then sits in a queue until someone in a locality picks it up and reads it. They read what was written by the call handler, not what was actually said, not understanding the intonation in the voice, not hearing the confused shy vulnerable message struggling to be heard over and above the categorisation they are being forced to be placed in.

The call-handler is trained to push away calls deemed not for the police. The unintended consequence is often an escalatin of the incident, until it becomes necessary to respond to with greater attention.

The locality the call eventually gets to, need to call the caller back, to obtain more information that was not detailed on the record. The phone number is tried several times, before contact is remade. The officer who can really help understand and help the caller, finally talks to the person with the problem, and then finally starts the value work of sorting out the problem. Hopefuly it is not too late by then, but it has caused a load of waste activity to ripple through the organisation.

One day someone will come up with the bright idea of in the first instance, getting the caller to talk directly to the person who can help them resolve the problem, and that same manager who set up the big building full of call handlers will find that the cost of doing this is considerably less than the old way. And, as a by product, the service is markedly improved.

It is what happens to all such contact centres if they are analysed in the right way, but it takes so many of us to make the expensive mistake before we learn that lesson. By that time, a new manager has taken the reigns, and they have a great idea to solve the cost of different localities taking their own calls... The wheel goes round again.

Take a systems thinking approach to this problem, and the right solution will be clear.

Scottish policing article from Ian Wiggett

So, you have decided to log demand into the police. Make sure you look at all the demands coming in, they come in on the phone, by email, and into the enquiry counters. And what about when officers are on the beat, and from the phone at enquiry counters, don't forget those...

Then a table is made up of demand. And if youre thinking a little further, you decide to focus using an outside-in perspective, to see what REAL demands are coming in. So split the demand into value and failure demands. Take a systems thinking view of demand.

The demand coming into the police are far more tricky to analyse than transactional based system. Why? well, because these demands are:

1. They are varied. Some demand is a simple questions, some are for requests for police service, and others are just plain calls for help. If you try and combine them together, on a spreadsheet, then you may be working with data that is just too summarised to make any real decisions on. A demand for a shotgun licence, to a call to attend a historic burglary, to a call for a domestic issue, to a call asking about help on a civil matter. Some of those demands will take a great deal of time to answer, and what matters to the caller and the subsequent response is vastly different.

2. In a simpler system, like a bank, a demand is a call for service, and the service delivery follows that demand. With the police a demand may be followed up by subsequent demands, that are of value. They represent communciation that is part of the flow of work. Maybe in these cases it is better to view these demands as in process demands.

If you treat the demands above as the same for computational and analysis purposes, you will aggregate apples and pairs as being the same fruit. And how useful will the information be? Maybe a better way is to look at the police system from an outside in perspective, and group demands into:

a. Transactional demands - that starts as a demand from the public, and the police provide a service or answer, and then it is complete. These transactional demands can then be further categorised.

b. Help me demands - where a member of the public needs help and support. These cases are sometimes complex, sometimes not directly do with the police, and their resolution may be long term.

c. Different types of demands follow different flows of work. If they do, then these demands are different and be wary of aggregating them into statistics.

So, whats the best thing to do with demands into the police? Be very wary of categorising them to any standard apart from that from the outside in perspective, and use what matters as a guide. Then you will create groups of demands that will truly be useful to operations to analyse how to deal with them.

Real Lean, when combined with systems thinking, gives a view of your organisation that is often difficult to view, in todays pressured and prioritised environment. Using it will help you to see why certain issues remain resistant to change, regardless of how many consultants, or how much money is thrown at it.

A link to Joan Donnelly article on Demand, from Policing Insight here

I was reading an article writen by John Bird, he of the Big Issue. In it he talked about the benefits system, the TV programme Benefits Street, and the ability to 'benefit' people. He has hit on a point that has been demonstrated in the last few years, by a few people.

In Stoke on Trent, they have experimented with trying a different way to deal with people who are struggling with something in their lives. This struggle is affecting them in ways like an inability to pay rent, running out of money, needing to get on the waiting list, etc.

What the team did was to take some people in need, and ask them what problems did they have that they needed help with? And whatever they said, the team would go about helping the person to fix that problem. It was that easy.

Chief executives from a range of public sector partners has agreed that the team has the ability to pull on any service they needed to to get the competence to fix the problem. In addition, the action they took and money they needed to put towards helping that person, was available to be spent.

The team took cases, and the first step was to understand the problems the person was facing, and the nature of their problems in the context of their lives. The next step was to then do only what is necessary to help the person resolve their problems.

What was found, was that the people they took, had a range of interdependent problems, that often took time to properly understand. Often, people were wary of this approach from an organsiation they did not trust.

Then, the team found that the problems that were presented with, were not usually solved by taking the standard approach that that service would normally take. For instance, if someone wanted to move, the first thing to do is to understand the reason for the move. It was discivered that most people who wanted to move, actually had problems that could be resolved, that meant that they then did not need to move.

The outcome is that the people with needs to be resolved, actually had their problems fixed, or had ways that they could continue to resolve the issues on their own. The majority of people that went through this system accepted the help, and the outcomes were positive in every situation.

It is difficult, in a short time to view actual financial benefits. However, the team calculated that for seven cases, the difference in the cost of the work done was £104,000 less in the new way. Even understanding that this figure is an estimate, the amount is staggering.

Another outcome, and one that is just as important, is the impact it had on the people. The intervention on each person was aimed at re-balancing them so that they could then continue to live their lives to develop into becoming independent of the welfare system.

The reason I wrote this example now is that John Birds article said that the benefits system should 'benefit' people. Benefit people in need, to help them to fix problems and improve their lives. The work that has been trialled, using a systems thinking approach, shows that this is not only possible, but that it actually reduces the cost to the whole system. The cost further reduces over time, as people are less dependent and more in control of their lives.

We probably have to thank Margaret Thatcher for creating the space in the public sector to embrace outsourcing and commissioning. The idea was to inject private sector thinking in to a local authority. A very good idea... Local authorities are in sore need of being able to manage and view their organsiations differently, especially when there is no real impetus for change.

Did it work? Was it the right thing to do? Well, introducing elements of the private sector is fine as long as they are the right elements, but what have we been left with? Competition! Thats the method that is used in commissioning and outsourcing to drive down costs and improve service. Thats all very well if we can draw parallels between the private sector customer connsumer ethos. But a council does not providing a consumer service, they do something very different.

So the impact of outsourcing and commissioning in a local authority has been to reduce costs for those services from an accounting perspective. However, the impact of outsourcing in reality is being locked to a fixed agreement: unable to change, being charged for additional work, unwillingness to work across other services, and potentially costs not being reduced in the long term. The woes of a service that has been outsourced are legendary.

Universal Credit has outsourcing at its heart, and despite all attempts to 'fix it' the root cause of the flawed design is at its heart.

Today, councils all over the UK have realised that this appropach has largely failed. And they are rapidly taking most of those same services back in-house.

Looking at outsourcing systemically, there are two main aspects of this approach that point to inappropriate design.

1. Outcourcing works by designing services functionally. This also meanas that they have to be defined by standard flows and procedures. Many public sector demands require flexibility, continuity of knowledge, and they change over time. Thiese factors cnnot be served by this standardisation.

2. Dealing with complexity using standard transactionally designed services simply will not work. transactions are defined by tame and linear defined workflows. Complexity is defined by dealing with demands as they present themselves according to their context. This confusion in design  will drive up cost and create a very poor outcome.

In both cases an understanding of systems thinking and complexity will point the way to a design that fits people centred services.

Commissioning and outsourcing can work if you can get agreement based around a common systemic purpose. And the agreement is based on true cost (open book). If not, then you get the problems with commissioning that is destroying the NHS.

As an example, Fareham council is redesigning its services using a systems thinking approach. Their managers have alreasy redesigned their own services, and are continuing to refine their effectiveness. Its only by transformation that any organisation can achieve effective reduction in cost. They have also outsourced where appropriate, but in the main, they have decided to get the right sort of management of their services and deal with most things in-house.