The Limits of Delivery: Rethinking what it means to deliver relational public services

Prof. Toby Lowe and Andrew Laird

Intro from Andrew:

In a recent article, Destination: Place-based, relational working – Next stop: Delivery!, I argued that there is now a growing consensus that place-based / neighbourhood working, relational practice and community power have all moved much closer to the mainstream.

There will always be debate about what these things mean in practice - but fewer and fewer public service leaders seriously believe that we can respond to rising demand and increasingly complex needs by simply becoming more efficient at processing people through separate organisational and service silos.

Big pat on the back for all concerned…

The question is increasingly not what needs to change, but how we actually make that change happen. So since writing that piece, I have been talking to Prof. Toby Lowe about what we actually mean when we use the word delivery. You may have listened to our #RadicalReformers podcast conversation.

Delivery is a word we use constantly in public services - Delivery plans, Delivery partners. Delivery milestones. You name it, you can append the word “delivery” to signify action and the promise of achieving great things!

To explore this further, Toby and I got our heads together and have shared some thoughts… We hope you find it useful in framing your own thinking. 

So…what is delivery?

This seems a good place to start! The more we have discussed this question, the more we have wondered whether Andrew let the concept of delivery off rather too lightly in his previous article!

Perhaps the challenge isn't simply that we need to get better at delivering relational, place-based public services. Perhaps our traditional understanding of delivery is itself one of the things we need to rethink.

At its simplest, delivery describes a particular kind of transaction. Someone has something and presents it to somebody else. A parcel is delivered. A speaker delivers a lecture. A trainer delivers a workshop. There is something identifiable that passes, literally or metaphorically, from one party to another.

There are lots of public services where that idea remains perfectly sensible. Councils need to collect bins. The NHS needs to deliver vaccinations or emergency treatment for a broken leg. Benefits need to be processed and paid. Roads need to be repaired. There are plenty of circumstances in which we know broadly what needs to happen and the challenge is to do it reliably, efficiently and well.

But things become more difficult when we transfer the same idea of delivery to complex human outcomes.

Can a council really deliver somebody's independence?

Can the NHS really deliver good health?

And then ultimately, can public services really deliver stronger families, resilient communities or a better life?

This isn't just a slightly pedantic debate about language. There is an important assumption sitting behind the word delivery.

Much of the New Public Management approach relies upon the fact that it is possible for public services to wholly grip and deliver results. It relies on the assumption that you can break a complex social challenge into manageable components, define the intervention, specify what should be provided, allocate responsibility for delivering it and then measure whether delivery happened.

Relational public services start from a very different premise. They recognise that the things that really matter in people's lives are rarely produced by a single intervention or organisation. Public services can contribute enormously to those outcomes. But they cannot simply produce them and hand them over.

Leadership is not an act of delivery – it is an act of creation

Services can be delivered. Outcomes have to be created. That distinction has some profound consequences for how we think about public service leadership.

If relational outcomes cannot be delivered, what is the job of leaders?

One response would be to assume that this argument diminishes the role of leadership. If we cannot specify exactly what needs to happen, perhaps leaders simply have to step back and let public facing workers get on with it.

In fact, relational public services require an enormous amount from leaders – but it also requires leaders to do something different. Traditional delivery approaches place a great deal of emphasis on specification and control. Leaders establish the desired future state, translate that into a programme and monitor implementation. When delivery moves away from the plan, they intervene to bring it back on track.

That approach relies on a crucial assumption - that we know enough at the beginning to describe what successful implementation should look like at the end.

As was explored in Andrew’s original article, that assumption is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain in modern public services. An approach that works brilliantly with one person or in one neighbourhood may work very differently somewhere else.

That does not mean leaders are powerless in the face of this (almost impossible to fathom) complexity. It means their most important contribution is not pretending they can eliminate the complexity. Their job is to create the conditions in which people and organisations can respond intelligently to it and in a relational way.

We don’t intend to rehearse in detail the conditions public services need to work effectively in a relational way– this has been covered at length in many places - but to briefly remind us, they need: trust and permission; staff with the time and freedom to understand people's lives rather than simply process presenting needs; strong relationships across organisational boundaries; psychological safety so that people can be honest when something is not working; governance which supports rather than suffocates judgement; and ways of learning together and mechanisms through which resources can move in response to that learning.

None of these things are the actual relationship between a public facing worker and the person they are supporting. They are the infrastructure that allows that relationship to work and creating that infrastructure is a leadership task.

The absence of this infrastructure is what has led to many promising instances of public facing practice, including some Changing Futures programmes, to ultimately end up trapped in a bubble, unsupported by the system within which they operate - and prone to burst at any moment!

We cannot ask public facing workers to be founded on strong human relationships while the relationships in the system around them are founded on the logic of delivery and control.

Creating the infrastructure for relational working

We have seen enough examples of relational and place-based working to know that it can work. We now know that the bigger problem is sustaining it beyond the pilot funding, beyond the maverick who has sustained it through their personal tenacity and determination.

This is why the leadership task cannot simply be to commission another relational pilot or create another integrated neighbourhood team. The much harder job is to change the surrounding environment so that relational practice no longer requires specific protection from the system. Protecting it becomes the purpose of the system. This obviously requires all leaders (politicians, Chief Executives, Finance Directors) to think differently about their own role.

Instead of specifying everything that needs to happen, and controlling the implementation of that, leaders need to create the system's ability to keep learning what needs to happen. They should stop promising certainty where it does not exist, they need to create the capacity to adapt.

Changing what we hold people accountable for

Accountability… now that’s a word with as much baggage as delivery!

The traditional language of delivery leads naturally to a particular accountability question - “Have you delivered what you promised?”, which on the face of it, is entirely sensible.

The accountability system encourages leaders to reach for a defensible position – was the process followed correctly? So they start by insisting on a business case to secure agreement and investment. That business case usually needs to provide confidence about what will happen. So the writers of the business case are forced to predict the benefits, specify the outputs, establish milestones and put numbers against the improvements they expect to achieve. Those predictions then become commitments and the commitments become measures. And so the accountability mechanism is established.

The problem comes when reality does what reality tends to do and refuses to behave like the business case.

Perhaps one of the assumptions was wrong. Perhaps demand changed -imagine that! At that point, a genuinely learning system should want people to say so. The traditional accountability system encourages the opposite. Nobody wants to explain why the benefits they promised haven't materialized or wants their programme turning red on the corporate dashboard.

So measures are interpreted (ahem) “generously”. Activity is presented as impact. Toby has described this as accountability theatre.

A better accountability

A better form of accountability can only be achieved is there is acceptance that the old system is a fallacy…that’s not an easy thing to get everyone on board with.

Individuals and teams should be accountable for learning honestly and acting on what they learn. Leaders should be commended for explaining what they thought would happen, what actually happened, what they learned from the difference and what they are changing as a result.

This is still a disciplined stewardship of public resources. It’s just a more honest one.

Traditional delivery places the discipline around adherence to the plan. Relational public service places the discipline around purpose, evidence, learning and adaptation. This can be recorded, tracked and accountability made real.

So where do we end up?

There are plenty of things that public services can and should deliver efficiently and consistently. Where something is predictable and repeatable, we should absolutely use the best tools available to manage it well.

Complexity cannot become an excuse for endless experimentation without consequence. “Test and learn” cannot become code for avoiding difficult decisions or failing to demonstrate impact.

Where something can genuinely be specified, controlled and delivered, do that. But where outcomes depend on relationships, behaviour, trust and the interaction of multiple people and organisations, pretending you can create the same level of predictability makes us less rigorous, not more. It means we are choosing to use the wrong tools for the job – like using a ruler to measure trust.

The challenge for leaders is having multiple hats and knowing which one to put on to solve which problem. That requires a different sort of flexible, honest and vulnerable leadership.

In the original article, Andrew wrote that we had won much of the argument about the direction of public service reform but hadn't yet won the delivery. We still think that's true.

But we need to think differently about what winning the delivery actually means.

Relational public services require leaders to create the conditions in which relationships can flourish and people can use their judgement. They require finance and governance that can respond to learning and organisations which are capable of admitting that an assumption was wrong (and welcoming that admission!). Ultimately, relational public services require accountability which care more about what is actually happening in people's lives than whether the original project plan is on track.

That is a much harder thing to put on a Gantt chart - but it may be much closer to what successful public service delivery actually requires. If you’d like to see examples of what this looks like in practice, you can find excellent thinking and practice examples in the ‘Radical Pragmatism’ report, and in the case studies on the Human Learning Systems website. You can also find more on MV’s Radical Place Leadership thinking here.  

And, if you’d like a conversation about any of this, please do get in contact with either Andrew or Toby, or better still, both of us!