Destination: Place-based, relational working - Next stop: Delivery!

Traditional public service reform tries to create the feeling of certainty before acting - even if that certainty isn’t worth the paper the “robust business case” is written on.

Uncertainty is a permanent feature of modern public services and we need to get on with it and adapt and learn as we go.

Over the past three years, working with Prof. Donna Hall and supported by key thinkers and doers such as Georgina Cox, Mark Smith and Hannah Hesselgreaves, the MV team have been developing a set of ideas that we have called “Radical Place Leadership”.

What it’s called is much less important than the principles that sit behind it.

We've explored what it really takes to move beyond siloed public services and create more relational, place-based approaches. We have been supported on this journey by forward thinking councils, NHS organisations and community partners who have worked with us to test these ideas.

We've seen enough success (and learned enough through the challenges) to know that the core idea of a whole council model built on the premise of relational, place-based working is sound.

The question is no longer what needs to change, it's how we deliver it. This next phase is about turning concepts into delivery and ultimately into sustained practice.

We've won the argument. We haven't yet won the delivery

For much of the past decade, public service reform has been dominated by a set of ideas that were once considered radical. Place-based working, prevention, working at neighbourhood level, relational practice, community power and partnership have steadily moved from the margins into the mainstream. Few senior leaders today would argue that complex social challenges can be solved by organisations acting alone or that public services should continue to be designed around institutional boundaries, service silos and tightly focused KPIs rather than the lives people actually lead.

This is not to say more focused, transactional approaches do not have their place. Of course they do. Some (mostly universal) public services will only get better the simpler they are and the less friction they create. Think applying for a universal benefit or something simple like reporting a pothole to a council.

But the language of public service reform has definitely changed. Councils, the NHS, the voluntary sector and government departments all talk about working together around people and place.

Yet despite this growing consensus, something feels unresolved.

The challenge facing public services today is no longer primarily one of ideas, ambition or consensus. The principles underpinning relational public services and place-working are now widely understood. The question has shifted.

It is no longer what needs to change.

It is how we make that change happen.

If we are honest with ourselves (and I include us consultants in this as well as public services), the gap between what we say we believe and what our organisations consistently deliver remains stubbornly wide.

Relational public services still largely exist as isolated pockets of good practice rather than the dominant way in which public services operate. Neighbourhood working frequently depends on a handful of committed individuals rather than becoming the organising principle of the wider system. Promising initiatives remain trapped as time/funding limited pilots or projects rather than reshaping how councils, health services and their partners routinely work together.

The problem is that many of the assumptions, tools and disciplines we still rely on to deliver change were designed for a different kind of world. They assume that public service reform can be planned, controlled and delivered with a level of certainty that no longer exists.

The false certainty of traditional “delivery”

If the challenge is no longer understanding what good public service reform looks like, then why is it proving so difficult to deliver?

Modern public services operate in an environment of almost permanent uncertainty. Demand continues to rise, public expectations rise and evolve, political priorities shift, financial pressures intensify, and people’s lives become ever more complex and interconnected. Every local place experiences these pressures differently, and they continue to change throughout the life of any programme of reform.

Yet the dominant methods of delivering change still assume a world that is far more stable than the one we actually inhabit.

When organisations come under pressure, the instinctive response is entirely understandable. We seek greater certainty. We tighten governance. We ask for more detailed plans, more robust business cases, clearer milestones, stronger risk management and more assurance. Politicians want confidence that public money will deliver results. Finance directors need credible forecasts. Consultants are commissioned to reduce uncertainty and provide a clear route to delivery.

None of these instincts are irrational. In many situations they are entirely appropriate.

The problem is that they also encourage everyone to believe that complex public service reform can be designed in advance and then delivered largely as planned.

Traditional delivery often follows a familiar sequence - some version of the following (it’s just for illustration - you can slice and dice this may ways):

Understand the problem > Develop the business case and expected benefits > Agree milestones > Establish delivery capacity and capability > Deliver and manage risks > Evaluate.

On paper, it is logical. It provides reassurance that change is under control and that outcomes can be predicted with reasonable confidence. The difficulty is that almost every step in this sequence assumes a level of certainty that rarely exists.

How accurately future demand be predicted when demographic change, economic uncertainty and community resilience are constantly shifting? How confidently can the "right" operating model be specified before practitioners have begun working differently? How do we know which interventions will prove most effective before we have seen how people, organisations and communities respond?

The uncomfortable truth is that many of the things we are trying to reform are not predictable systems.

Traditional business cases have begun to perform a role they were never really designed for. Rather than helping us make informed investment/resourcing decisions, they often create an illusion of certainty. They reward confidence over curiosity, prediction over learning, and detailed specification over admitting that we “just don’t know yet”!

None of this is an argument against planning. Public money must be spent responsibly. Governance matters. Accountability matters. Discipline matters. But discipline should not be confused with certainty.

The more complex the challenge, the less likely it is that we can predict exactly how change will unfold. Instead of trying to eliminate uncertainty before we act, we need delivery approaches that acknowledge uncertainty from the outset and learn their way towards better solutions.

That requires a fundamentally different mindset - one that accepts that learning is not something that happens after delivery has finished, but is the primary mechanism through which successful delivery happens in the first place.

Another challenge with the traditional approach to “delivery” is the tendency to work within service silos. As far as most consultancy projects are concerned, the work takes place within a single service silo. Silos are often where the budget and ability to commission support sits.

The delivery credibility and track record which a lot of consultancies have built up is through this type of siloed working. This track record is losing value rapidly. We are now talking about a different type of delivery which must to transcend service siloes.

NB - To be fair to the Treasury, they have updated the Green Book to increase the emphasis on the Strategic case and the importance of place strategy which sits above individual projects as well a reduced reliance on the traditional cost-benefit analysis for stand-alone projects. In addition, the Magenta book now has a Test and Learn annex (which is excellent). However, a recent report from the Demos think tank has argued that this needs to go further – a key recommendation being “Review and amend the Green Book so that it can accommodate and analyse relational or preventative approaches on their own terms.”

The organisational response is always more control

If uncertainty is uncomfortable for individuals, it is even more uncomfortable for organisations.

When councils, health systems and public services come under pressure, their instinct is rarely to become more adaptive. Instead, they (understandably) seek to regain control. Governance becomes tighter. Approval processes become longer. Budgets become more fiercely defended. Performance management intensifies. Leaders ask for more assurance, more reporting and more evidence that risk is being managed.

The difficulty is that many of these responses inadvertently create the very conditions that make transformational change harder.

Innovation slows because permission becomes harder to obtain. Services retreat into organisational silos to protect their own budgets and performance. Staff become less willing to experiment, fearing that failure will be judged more harshly than inaction.

Learning gives way to compliance. Relationships become transactional rather than collaborative.

The challenge is to recognise that some aspects of public service reform simply cannot be controlled into existence. They have to be learned, built and nurtured over time through relationships, trust and shared purpose.

Why Finance Directors should welcome this

Finance Directors should feel comfortable with this approach not because it reduces uncertainty, but because it deals with uncertainty more honestly.

Every medium-term financial strategy already contains assumptions about inflation, demand, workforce pressures, policy changes and economic conditions that no one can accurately predict.

Traditional business cases often create an illusion of certainty by attaching precise numbers and milestones to inherently unpredictable social systems. What we are saying here is make that uncertainty explicit and respond to it differently. Rather than pretending we can accurately forecast the behaviour of complex human systems years in advance, it advocates disciplined experimentation, continuous learning and careful stewardship of public money through evidence gathered in real time. This is not a departure from good financial management, it is a more responsible form of it.

In a world where demand, need and context are constantly changing, the greatest financial risk may no longer be adapting as we learn, but continuing to invest on the basis of certainty that never really existed.

This doesn’t mean this approach shouldn’t have specific ambitions regarding demand reduction and ultimately cost avoidance and savings attached to it. It can and it should.

Public service reform is NOT an “engineering” problem

For much of the past thirty years, we have unconsciously borrowed the language and disciplines of engineering to think about public service reform.

We define target operating models. We produce detailed implementation plans. We identify milestones, dependencies and critical paths. We seek assurance that every risk has been mitigated before implementation begins. Success is often judged by whether the programme delivered what it originally said it would deliver.

These are entirely sensible disciplines if you are building a bridge, constructing a railway or designing a power station.

Engineering works because the variables are largely knowable. Materials behave predictably. Physical laws remain constant. Once the design is complete, successful delivery depends on precision, quality control and disciplined execution.

Many public services exist in an entirely different environment.

They are made up of people, relationships, communities and organisations, each responding to changing circumstances in ways that cannot be fully predicted. Political priorities change. Demand changes. Leadership changes. Communities evolve. People's lives do not stand still simply because a programme plan says they should.

Perhaps most importantly, people themselves change in response to the system around them. Unlike engineering, where steel beams do not alter their behaviour because of the bridge being built, public services involve human beings whose decisions, behaviours and relationships continually reshape the system itself.

This means that cause and effect are rarely straightforward. An intervention that transforms one neighbourhood may have very different results somewhere else. A policy that appears sensible on paper may create entirely unintended consequences once it meets the realities of people's lives.

Yet we continue to search for certainty as though public services behave like engineered systems. We ask for definitive business cases before relationships have formed. We expect operating models to describe a future that has not yet been discovered. We design programmes around predefined outputs when the most valuable learning often emerges only once delivery has begun.

This does not mean planning is futile, nor that discipline should be abandoned. Rather, it requires us to think differently about what successful delivery looks like.

Instead of designing a perfect solution and then implementing it faithfully, we need to create systems capable of learning their way towards better solutions. We need enough structure to provide direction, but enough flexibility to respond to what we discover along the way.

That is not poor programme management. It is good leadership in complex systems.

Relationships are the delivery mechanism

One of the most common misunderstandings about relational practice is that it is primarily about creating warmer, kinder or more compassionate public services.

Whilst it undoubtedly does seek to improve people's experience of public services, that is not the primary reason relationships matter.

Relationships matter because they are how complex systems learn.

Traditional public service reform often treats relationships as something that sits alongside delivery. We build the governance, design the operating model, define the processes and then encourage people to work collaboratively within them.

Relationships are not an addition to delivery.

They are the delivery mechanism.

When frontline practitioners trust one another, they solve problems that no process map could ever anticipate. When neighbourhood teams build strong relationships with communities, they uncover strengths, assets and opportunities that no dataset can fully reveal. When leaders create trusting relationships across organisational boundaries, decisions can be made collectively rather than negotiated defensively.

Learning flows through relationships.

Adaptation flows through relationships.

Innovation flows through relationships.

Without relationships, organisations rely increasingly on rules, processes and escalation.

With strong relationships, they rely more on judgement, shared understanding and collective problem-solving.

This represents a fundamental shift in how we need to think about delivery.

If people experience life through relationships and communities rather than organisational charts, it seems obvious that reform should begin there too. By starting with people and place, rather than services and structures, we create the conditions in which better decisions, better services and ultimately better outcomes can emerge.

This is also why culture should never be dismissed as a "soft" issue.

Culture determines whether people feel trusted enough to act, whether organisations are willing to share power, whether learning is valued over blame, and whether leaders create permission for others to solve problems together.

Once we see relationships and culture in this way, many of the assumptions underpinning traditional transformation begin to crumble. Success is no longer defined simply by whether a programme delivers what it originally promised. Instead, success becomes the creation of a system that is increasingly capable of learning, adapting and improving because the relationships within it continue to strengthen over time.

Learning isn't something you do after delivery

Perhaps the greatest consequence of treating public service reform as an engineering problem is that we also misunderstand the role of learning.

In traditional programme management, learning is something that happens towards the end of a project. We design the solution, implement it, evaluate the results and capture the lessons for next time.

The assumption is that most of the important thinking has already happened before delivery begins. Delivery simply becomes the disciplined execution of a predefined plan.

That approach makes perfect sense if success depends on faithfully implementing a known solution in a completely stable environment. But if we accept that public service reform is taking place within complex, adaptive systems, then the opposite is true.

Some of the most valuable insights only emerge once practitioners start working differently, once communities begin responding in new ways, and once organisations start behaving differently towards one another. The work itself generates the learning.

Delivery therefore becomes an act of discovery as much as implementation.

This requires humility from leaders. It means being willing to say that we do not yet have all the answers and that we expect our understanding to improve as the work progresses.

It requires governance that asks, "What are we learning?" as often as it asks, "Are we on track?"

It also demands a different relationship with evidence.

Evidence should not simply justify decisions that have already been made. It should continually inform new ones. Every conversation with a resident, every neighbourhood initiative, every experiment in frontline practice and every partnership meeting becomes another opportunity to understand the system more deeply.

Why we're increasingly rejecting "pilots"

This brings me to one of the more uncomfortable conclusions we've reached through our own work.

We're becoming increasingly sceptical about the way public services use pilots

That isn't because experimentation is wrong. Quite the opposite.

The problem is that many traditional pilots are not really designed for learning. They are designed for evaluation.

A conventional pilot typically follows a familiar pattern. A model is designed, implemented within tightly defined boundaries, left largely unchanged for a period of time, and then evaluated to determine whether it should be adopted more widely.

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. If you are introducing a new piece of technology or testing a clearly defined process in a stable environment, it can be appropriate.

However…Neighbourhoods evolve. Communities change. Staff learn. Relationships deepen. Local priorities shift.

What appears to work after three months may need adapting after six. What succeeds in one neighbourhood may need to look completely different somewhere else.

Yet the traditional pilot asks us to do something rather unnatural.

It asks us to freeze the model long enough to evaluate it.

In our experience, that is precisely when some of the most valuable learning is being generated - but practices and ideas which are quickly shown to have been mistakes are preserved for the sake of the integrity of the evaluation.

This is why the emerging movement around Test, Learn and Grow is so important.

Testing starts deliberately small, but it does not seek to preserve the original design over time. Instead, it expects adaptation. Every iteration improves understanding. Every adjustment creates a better version than the one before. Learning is not deferred until the end; it is continuous.

The objective is not to prove that Version 1 was correct. The objective is to ensure that Version 10 is immeasurably better than Version 1 could ever have been!

So, instead of asking whether teams are faithfully implementing an original specification, leaders ask whether they are learning quickly enough, sharing those insights widely enough, and using them to improve outcomes.

As a related side note, we have been finding the ability to make in-flight adjustments to our consultancy support (amending our original commission within the same budget envelope) in order to react to the evolving world around us really helpful.

The difficult conversations we are having with public service leaders

Thank you for sticking with me this long – we are nearly there!

If you accept all (or even most) of what you’ve read in this piece so far - then an obvious question follows.

Why isn't every council, NHS organisation and public service already embracing this way of working?

The answer is not that leaders lack vision or ambition.

Over the past few years, we've worked with many thoughtful and committed public service leaders who instinctively understand the limitations of today's public service model. They recognise that rising demand cannot be solved through ever more efficient transactional services. They see the value of place and neighbourhood working, relationships and (ultimately) prevention. Many have experienced first-hand the frustration of seeing promising ideas struggle to move beyond isolated pockets of good practice.

The challenge is that these same leaders are operating under extraordinary pressure. They face immediate savings targets, statutory responsibilities, inspection regimes, political accountability, workforce shortages and growing public expectation. Every year they must balance budgets whilst demand continues to rise.

Against that backdrop, an approach that does not come with absolute certainty (false or not) is asking leaders to consider something profoundly uncomfortable.

It asks leaders to invest time, energy and resource in an approach and in building relationships before all the answers are known.

It asks them to accept uncertainty rather than eliminate it.

It asks them to create space for experimentation, mistakes and learning when every instinct tells them to tighten control.

At the same time, other options inevitably present themselves.

An in-silo service review promises measurable efficiencies within twelve months.

A departmental restructuring offers rationalisation and clearer lines of accountability.

A digital programme promises productivity gains (possibly doing things better rather than doing better things...)

Artificial intelligence offers opportunities to automate transactional work.

None of these approaches are inherently wrong. Indeed, many are necessary and can deliver genuine benefits.

The difficulty is that, on their own, they rarely change the underlying conditions that are driving demand.

This is why our conversations with senior leaders are rarely about convincing them that relationships matter. The real conversation is about whether they are prepared to lead differently when the system itself continues to reward certainty, control and organisational optimisation.

This requires courage to invest in approaches whose greatest benefits may emerge over years rather than months. It requires political and organisational leadership willing to tolerate ambiguity whilst maintaining public accountability. That’s really hard!

Final thought

The biggest change is an acceptance that uncertainty is not a temporary inconvenience to be eliminated (on paper) before delivery starts. It is a permanent feature of modern public services. The challenge is therefore not to remove uncertainty, but to build organisations and change programmes that can respond to it intelligently.

Leadership and governance becomes less about controlling activity and more about enabling learning while maintaining accountability.

Performance becomes less about demonstrating compliance with predetermined plans and more about understanding whether outcomes are improving and why.

Relationships become recognised not as a desirable by-product of successful reform, but as the infrastructure through which learning, adaptation and delivery take place.

Public services have spent decades trying to reduce uncertainty before acting. It’s time to see this for the fallacy it is.

If you would like to discuss any of this further, please drop Andrew a message at andrew@mutualventures.co.uk.