Why Radical Place Leadership stalls: Understanding organisational behaviour under pressure

In this article, Mark Smith and Andrew Laird focus in on the organisational behaviour and instincts which can enable or thwart reform efforts. They argue that the latest iteration of the Changing Futures programme must be more than a time-limited pilot - it must become a catalyst for wider public service reform.

It is very positive news that the government has announced further funding for the Changing Futures programme. This includes a combination of continuing funding for some existing programmes and the start of some new ones.

The Changing Futures Programme has been part of the inspiration for a lot of recent national and local public service reform initiatives, including the Cabinet Office Test, Learn and Grow Programme.                                   

Some of the thinking here builds on a previous article from Prof. Donna Hall and Andrew exploring why large swathes of public services have been experiencing “delivery paralysis” - “What's stopping us?”.

Good words, good intentions…

The language of place, prevention, relational working and community power is now widespread. Yet in many organisations, these ideas struggle to move beyond pilots or bubbles of good practice. Sometimes it gets no further than rhetorical commitment.

The question is not whether leaders believe that empowering local practitioners to use their knowledge of people and place to more effectively help people and ultimately reduce demand. We are increasingly seeing more leaders accepting this with many more accepting that the way things currently are isn’t working. The question is what happens to organisations under pressure that makes this kind of change hard to implement and even harder to sustain.

The biggest blockers are usually not technical. They are patterns of organisational behaviour that emerge under pressure. Beneath many of those behaviours lies one deeper instinct: the fear of losing control.

Under pressure, organisations retreat to control...

When financial pressure increases, demand escalates, and political scrutiny intensifies, organisations often respond by tightening grip. The dreaded “let’s share the burden and take 10% off everything” (whether it’s working or not!) is often heard echoing through Town Hall corridors. This means:

• More escalation and sign-off requirements.

• More demand for certainty - even when less is possible.

• More individual budget protection.

• An obsession with governance and process rather than outcomes.

• A reduction in freedom to innovate for fear of “wasting” any resource.

• Appetite for any experimentation or ambiguity disappears.

The problem is that the real and sustainable reform that will lead to better outcomes and lower demand depends on the opposite conditions: trust, balanced risk taking, shared ownership, local flexibility and learning.

The answer is not naïve looseness or the abandonment of responsible stewardship. However, there is a need to rethink our relationship with control and to know which things we can and should command and the things we simply cannot or should not try and control.

The Serenity Prayer springs to mind here:

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”

...of course, the hardest bit is having the “wisdom to know the difference”!

Those that lead and deliver public services are never fully in control of demand, of outcomes, and certainly not of cost. But we pretend we are.

“When systems are under pressure, the instinct is to grip tighter. More sign‑off, more process, more people asking for certainty. That’s often where change stalls. What I’ve often seen is a response to anxiety of adding more guidance and control, when clarity only really comes from starting somewhere real and doing the work together.

The places that progressed didn’t try to change everything at once. They started in one place, created space to fail (and learn) fast, and allowed understanding to build through real work.” Hannah Szczepanski - Senior Consultant, Mutual Ventures.

Replacing defensive control with trust built through vulnerability and a willingness to say “we don’t have all the answers… nor should we” opens up a world of possibilities that would not otherwise be there. Leaders and practitioners alike need to be comfortable with finding out the answers through giving things a go.  We often do this in our own lives - but when we put our professional hats on, this fact of life often gets lost.

Trust grows when senior leaders are honest about uncertainty and invite others into shared problem-solving rather than pretending to have certainty they do not have.

 Under pressure, organisations fall more deeply into silos

People defend the part of the system they can clearly see and influence - especially when the pressure is on. Budgets, service lines and professional boundaries become places of safety.

Silos are not just structural, they are emotional and behavioural refuges. They offer clarity, defensibility and (critically) identity).

“Let’s run a tight ship” some say - even if it isn’t sailing anywhere useful…

Service silos are a major reform blocker because they do more than organise work under New Public Management norms, they protect people from having to face undeniable uncertainty - even if the certainty a silo provides is often narrow and unrelated to the needs and aspirations of people and communities.

Silos insulate leaders and practitioners from wider system challenges and decisions. People running services that are in a transactional silo are able to make sense of the KPIs and the budget, even if those services don’t end up fulfilling the real reason they exist in the first place.

Silos can cause committed public servants to become one dimensional in their thinking.

A few ideas on what to do about it:

• Create shared forums and knowledge around demand, context and outcomes - not just service performance.

• Use relational budgeting (i.e. budgets which are openly discussed and challenged rather than handed down from “on high”) and collaborative budget sprints (the intense process through which relational budgeting can be enacted) to expose interdependencies.

• Make whole-place stewardship a core competency of what good leadership looks like and insist that leaders own pressures collectively. We often encourage places exploring partnership working to focus on solving problems together that they can't solve alone. For example, no one organisation can claim to be able to solve homelessness without other agencies also bringing their resources and expertise to bear. This provides a starting point everyone can agree on.  

• Develop system-wide, not organisational, outcomes e.g. a reduction in poverty or poor health or closing the gap between the most and the least affluent wards.

• Liberate frontline teams and middle management to design services based on people and how they live rather than remotely commissioned silos. Agreement on this should be a core outcome from a relational budgeting approach.

 Under pressure, middle management becomes cautious rather than enabling

Middle managers are often where the contradiction at the heart of public service reform lands hardest. We have a huge amount of sympathy for Middle Managers. They are often asked to support innovation and relational practice while still being measured through transactional controls and KPIs. Typically, they are asked to:

• Be flexible - but don’t vary process.

• Collaborate - but hit your own targets.

• Prevent future demand - but manage this year’s overspend

• Empower your team - but obviously don’t take any risks…

  
  

This produces caution. Not because middle managers lack commitment - but because the system gives them incompatible instructions.

When the system sends mixed signals, caution becomes the rational response.

A few ideas on what to do about it:

• Leaders need to provide a publicly stated endorsement for teams to work across boundaries, take risks and make well intentioned mistakes which are then learned from.

• Leaders must spend time understanding the work and what it's like to do it. There is no substitute for learning what makes it difficult to do the work we would otherwise choose to do.

• Align performance expectations with relational aims and bolster this with clear learning expectations.

• Remove contradictory KPIs and use measures to learn and improve rather than to “keep score” for someone else (e.g. a regulator or a funding central government department).

• Create the space for middle managers to become system leaders and convenors. The main learning is in ‘the doing’ more than in formal training.

“The impact of relational working on improving the lives of residents is increasingly clear and accepted. What is less widely recognised are the cultural, financial and workforce benefits this approach and mindset can unlock. Without leaders actively enabling teams through resourcing decisions and creating the permission and space for teams to test new ways of working, promising ideas often stall.” Kate Copeland - Senior Consultant, Mutual Ventures.

Under pressure, short-term survival crowds out long-term change

Annual budget cycles, urgent savings requirements and immediate operational pressures make it hard to sustain patient investment in relational and place-based change (i.e. budgeting in the knowledge that the ultimate outcomes might take some time). Organisations end up prioritising the urgent over the important, even when they know the urgent response is not solving the underlying problem.

A few ideas on what to do about it:

• Protect a small number of long-term commitments. This might be the most important point in this article. If too many things are prioritised, then reform becomes too big, too all-encompassing and difficult to grasp and get started on. We suggest being ruthless in limiting priorities for long term effort. These should be the problems that no one organisation can solve alone but cause challenge for all.

• Create a non-conventional “business case” route for prevention and demand reduction activity. This will involve more flexibility on what the ultimate outcome or result will be – it creates space for testing and learning and should be a live exercise not something that is done once at the start and then stuck in a drawer.

• Secure political agreement on the need for patience and longer-term reward. This is easier said than done – but often people are nervous or resistant about involving members in conversations until they have something positive to report. Our experience is that members appreciate the engagement and get that some issues need a longer-term approach.

• Distinguish between short-term financial discipline and long-term strategic drift – be ruthless about which bucket you put each decision into.

“When supporting a council that had identified serious youth violence as a key long‑term priority, it was important to recognise that this was a complex challenge requiring a sustained, long‑term response.

Through fieldwork and workshops, it became clear that serious youth violence could not be addressed through a single initiative or time‑limited project, which would be vulnerable to short‑term funding cycles and political change. Instead, we worked together to identify longer‑term cultural and systemic changes the council could embed, both to reduce serious youth violence over time and to strengthen the fabric of the organisation as a whole.” Elizabeth Roe - Senior Consultant at Mutual Ventures.

Under pressure, risk management becomes reputation management

In stressed organisations, the language of risk can become a cover for avoiding political embarrassment, media challenge, complaints or visible inconsistency.

Organisational culture can become highly sensitive to the risk of doing something different while becoming strangely desensitised to the risk of continuing with a failing model

“In Wigan, at the start of the creation of The Wigan Deal we realised simply managing status quo through austerity would not work. There was a political and managerial appetite for change. We embraced this as a management team and as a cabinet with courage.

 Innovation was encouraged and everything was focussed on listening to frontline staff, the third sector and most importantly citizens. One element of the Deal was “Tell us when we get it wrong” This would have been unheard of in the previous regime and is rare in most organisation – a boldness but also a deep humility”. Professor Donna Hall - Mutual Ventures NED and former CEO at Wigan Council

The biggest risk is not trying something new that might work - but the continued defence of arrangements that no longer work.

A few ideas on what to do about it:

• Reframe risk in whole-system terms. On the sort of cross discipline challenges we are talking about here, understanding risk across the whole-system is the only way of truly understanding the risk. Focusing on risks only through the lens of a single organisation or service will not create a proper understanding.

• Ask what issues and challenges are being created by inaction – “Where is the business case for what we are currently doing?” is a great question to ask.  You need to know how effective things are now.

• Normalise test-and-learn approaches. This requires senior endorsement and commitment and a whole organisation (whole place is better) commitment to accept controlled failure and build capacity to sense-make and iterate. Learning and iteration rather than failure avoidance and blame should be the default response.

Under pressure, engagement becomes performative

Organisations may continue to consult, involve and engage with staff and residents - but if key decisions remain tightly controlled, participation becomes tokenistic rather than real. Communities and partners quickly sense this and trust erodes.

When participation has no influence, it deepens cynicism rather than building trust.

A few ideas on what to do about it:

• Spend real time with front line teams. Leaders should embrace humility and actively seek to learn from staff and communities.

• Devolve some real choices and resources. This is an important general principle but will be a requirement under some key initiatives such as the need for neighbourhood governance under the Pride in Place and Local Government Re-organisation. Doing this and then showing where community input and decisions have had real impact will provide encouragement.

• Invest in community capability (including the local third sector), not just engagement exercises. This is a key enabler of the point above on devolving real choices and resources and will allow councils to confidently put the relationship with communities at the heart of corporate and system strategies.

• Be honest about what is negotiable and what is not. Positive action is far more likely if the parameters are clear. Giving pre-permission within a clear framework is the gold standard. Don’t make people keep coming back for permission or they will run out of enthusiasm. 

“Spending time with frontline teams changes the conversation. You move away from abstract models and assumed solutions and start to see how systems really behave for residents and staff.

Frontline colleagues hold deep, practical insight into what helps, what hinders and can help to shine a light on you what’s often right in front of your nose! Radical Place Leadership only works when leaders create the conditions for that insight to shape decisions, not as consultation after the fact, but as a core input into how priorities, resources and risks are negotiated.” Catriona Moore - Senior Consultant, Mutual Ventures

So what now?

The barriers to radical place leadership are well understood. The language of change fills strategies, speeches and funding bids. The intentions are genuine. Yet the same patterns keep emerging: the grip tightens, silos deepen, middle managers hedge their bets, short-term pressures crowd out long-term ambition, risk becomes reputation management, and communities are consulted rather than trusted.

None of this is inevitable. It is the predictable response of organisations under pressure - and pressure is not going away.

The Changing Futures programme offers a rare window - but funding alone does not change cultures. What changes cultures is having leaders willing to model the behaviours they are asking of others, primarily - sitting with uncertainty, sharing power, protecting space for learning, and resisting the reflex to control.

The places that get this right don't do so because they have better plans. They do so because their leaders made a different kind of commitment - not just to a programme, but to a way of working that puts relationships, trust and genuine community power at the centre of how decisions get made.

The question is not whether radical place leadership works. Evidence says it does. The question is whether we have the courage to stop doing the things that get in its way.

Mark Smith, Visiting Professor of Public Service Innovation at Manchester Metropolitan University

Andrew Laird, Chief Executive, Mutual Ventures

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

If you find these topics interesting, we recommend you check out an emerging series of “18 conversations” where Professor Hannah Hesselgreaves and Mark Smith are working through the key learning from their experience in developing relational and evaluative practices. 18 Conversations – Medium