Building culture for co-production - Chapter 3. Improving processes

There is increasing evidence that being in nature can improve our comprehension, thinking and decision making, as well as making a substantial contribution to our wider health and wellbeing. Here are 4 ways to try it for yourself:

Walk your ideas out

When you have been sat at the desk with your head down while concentrating hard, give yourself a break. Take yourself for a short mindful walk and bring your creative, strategic mind back into the office with you.

Be active in one-to-one meetings

“When I managed staff, I held a number of meetings with them outside. With one of them, they sometimes came into work quite edgy and surly, so I used to take them down the avenue and back again and let them get it off their chest. They found that very beneficial and we agreed that all one-on-one meetings arranged between us would be held outside where practical. They told me that holding meetings like that made it appear less formal and that they felt more comfortable and able to open up. My manager was fine with this approach, as they too saw the benefits it provided. A separate member of my team didn’t feel so comfortable with that approach, so we reverted to meetings in the workplace. Another member of my team was happy for us to have our performance management conversations outside.”

Take a team thinking walk

“We are a strategic team who look at data, charts and ‘sectors’ all day, every day. As part of our team building, we try to circulate meetings between the different office locations occupied by the team. For the team meeting in Pembrokeshire, I decided we needed to get outdoors and look at the landscapes and the way people are using the landscapes that we talk about in our work.

We planned a two hour walk. The first hour was our wellbeing hour, where we walked and talked, looked at the landscape and did some botany, as one of the team is knowledgeable about the coastal flowers that were beginning to bloom.

For the second part of the walk, we looked at the historical evidence of how people had used the landscape in the past. From a good vantage point, we could start to look at modern day uses of natural resources including habitats, farming, communities and tourism. As this was a seascape as well, we were able to think about fishing and power generation. Although we did not come to immediate conclusions, just looking at the landscape and how closely linked all the activities are to each other, really helped to put our work into context and brought into focus the practicalities of the activities we talk about every day.

Feedback from the team was very positive; bringing to life the issues we are working on, understanding how landscapes function as a complex system and reconnecting with what we are trying to achieve and understand in our work.”

"We strive for consistency to ensure that people can have the same expectations and experience of walking alongside a Local Area Coordinator no matter which community they live in. But also recognise the variations in every person, every team member, every community and the subsequent relationships between them all. Which means there can rarely be standardisation. The points below have helped me understand it in these terms.”

Ronan Ruddy

Consistency does not mean standardisation.

Projects, services, reports and actions will look and feel different in different places.

We achieve consistency through:

• peer review to create assurance
• having an emergent plan that is clear on the core objectives and first steps yet allows responsiveness and flexibility
• everyone signing up to the plan, sharing learning and reviewing progress together at regular intervals
• returning to sharing our purpose and motivations regularly

Over time, this will create consistency in:

• process (core areas and flexibility)
• accuracy
• style of language (hard and soft)
• internal challenge
• honesty and saying it how it is
• use of specific wording and terminology

Which is enhanced by:

• sharing ‘lines to take’ (creating a bullet point list together)
• when asked by stakeholders and you don’t know the answer, it’s ok to say: “I don’t know; I’ll find out” or “I don’t know; what do you think?”
• asking questions, telling people what you feel or notice and asking them about their questions, thoughts and feelings, so that you can understand what to ask of each other next
• valuing and appreciating diversity; harmonise rather than standardise!

We are gradually realising just how increasingly turbulent, uncertain, novel and ambiguous (TUNA) our world really is. It is no longer possible or desirable to plan in comprehensive, time bound, target-based ways. We have to develop more agile, flexible planning mechanisms. One way to do this is to establish and use emergent planning.

“It is definitely a less stressful way of working (even for someone who likes to plan like me!) It is likely to lead to less procrastination, delay and lack of confidence.”

How does emergent planning differ from what we used to do?

We still gather and consider a wide range of information, together with others.

We still pause to consider this information deeply and engage our creativity.

But…

We only identify and describe the first few (one to three) steps that we will take.

We regroup at regular intervals during these steps to consider progress, share learning and agree next steps, making adaptations to steps, or agreeing a small number of relatively immediate new steps.

We love scrutiny – creating a clear audit trail as we go, gathering feedback, considering it carefully and rapidly taking new ideas on board.

…and repeat….

For more details, see:

From hammer to dance

Governance

What principles can be helpful?

Funding streams that are long term and outcome focused.

Collaboration and sharing of different (apparently irrelevant) information.

Making connections and drawing new people into our discussions.

Putting the emphasis on relationship building through learning by doing.

Making time to get feedback from the edges of the system in which we are working.

Getting started

Often, we are faced with multiple complex potential future scenarios. There may be a large number of distinctive ways in which the future might develop.

Look across what you know about all these possibilities.

What are the ‘do anyway’ actions?

These are the (very) few steps that, if you were to take them, would most likely help in all of the identified scenarios.

Then aim to create a prototype that brings these together.

“You need two things to get started: an outcome and a first step.”

Anon.

There is your outcome, vision or hope for the future and then there is your prototype.

A prototype is a practical, testable action, focused on learning.

A prototype translates an idea into a concrete first step. It is not the final product but an experiment which allows us to generate valuable feedback. This feedback will then help us refine our understanding and develop second, and third stage prototypes.

Prototypes work on the principle of ‘failing early to learn quickly’.

A prototype is not a pilot. Unlike a pilot, our expectation is not to 'scale up later' but, rather to 'inspire across during', both being inspired by others' learning and inspiring them with what we are learning.

“Geographically circumscribed and time-limited pilots can often fail to reveal unintended consequences that arise as a result of scale, duration, or context. There is also a tendency to conduct pilots with partners who are highly committed and comfortable with innovation. Success in a pilot therefore does not necessarily indicate that a policy will be successful at a larger scale.”

The Best Laid Plans? Avoiding unintended consequences in public policymaking, by Lindsay Iversen, Stephen Whitehead and Robin Wilkinson, Arium 2011 (unpublished)

Choosing a prototype: 7R criteria

Prepare: if working alone use these questions to identify, consider, or develop your ideas, maybe journal your thoughts in response to each question. Then discuss with a friend, coach, or colleague and commit to creating your first prototype.

If you are working as a team, you could read these out to the team while asking them to complete the simple table overleaf. Then discuss how each of your prototypes might fit together to make a whole.

1. Is it relevant?
   • Personally?
   • For the organisations involved?
   • For the communities most affected?
2. Is it (potentially) revolutionary?
   • Is it new?
   • Could it be transformative for the system?
3. Is it rapid?
   • Can you begin it quickly?
   • Can you start experimenting right away in order to get feedback and iterate?
4. Is it rough?
   • Can you do it on a small scale?
   • Is this the lowest possible scale you can do it on to allow for meaningful experimentation?
5. Is it right?
   • Does this idea allow you to put the spotlight on the most meaningful variables?
6. Is it relationally effective?
   • Does it leverage the strengths, competencies and resources of existing networks and communities?
7. Is it replicable?
   • Can you scale it?
   • How will we inspire across?

Share: If you are working on more than one prototype – why not share and compare them? Ask each person:

• what’s the big idea?
• why does it matter? (systemic impact)
• who needs to be involved? (stakeholders)
• how can you translate your big idea into a small actionable prototype?
• where do you need help?

Pause

Getting under way

Who will you work with to make this prototype real?

From whom and how will you generate feedback?

When and where will you reflect and review our progress?

What will you do in the next 24 hours to make a start?

For more on prototyping and Theory U, see Leading from the emerging future

“When reviewing the lessons learned from our project we spotted an interesting pattern. Several of the things that had slowed us down were due to a similar mistake and it went like this.

A team member (1) goes to a manager (2) to ask for advice. In response, the manager quotes another manager or stakeholder (3 = the third party). The words of the third party are relevant and the team member then goes away ‘to make it so’.

What we hadn’t spotted was that we had inadvertently cut off the discussion by accidentally ‘pulling rank’ on the team member by mentioning the third party who was not present.

When we discussed it later, we discovered that team members had possessed additional information that they had not shared because they felt under instruction to fulfil the third party’s vision. This additional information would almost certainly have helped us to make a better decision, saving time and energy.

Individually each of us has made a personal commitment not to quote third parties and instead to:

• listen carefully
• share our own views (which might include ideas we have taken on board from others)
• ask people to speak directly with others to get their views (even when we think we know what they will say)
• remain alert to subconscious biases in ourselves and others.”

“All of us need to reframe feedback as being a useful set of data as opposed to a criticism that we take personally and ruminate on. It’s that “getting comfortable with being uncomfortable” stuff!”

Welsh Government official trying this for themselves.

Future, Engage, Deliver supports and challenges us to improve through the underlining philosophy which is one of:

• helping everyone to be their best; through people being their best, they help others to be their best by understanding who they are, their background and experiences and the existing (unfair) social and historical constructs in which we live
• valuing everyone; everyone matters and can be a leader; leadership can come from every level of the organisation
• believing that leadership happens inside mutually respectful relationships, and that through building bigger relationships people not only are helped to be their best, but also deliver bigger and better results.

Managing your impact felt is key to building bigger relationships, to being in partnership with people - to involvement, equity and valuing diversity.

• First get clear on your impact intended - ask yourself the question; How do I want people to feel around me?
• Then think about your leadership behaviour that will have people feel that they matter – how will you create involvement, equity and diversity? Which of your strengths will you bring to this task?
• Ask people for their felt experience of you, make it easy for them – “What is it like around me on a good day?”, ”What's it like around me on a bad day?”, ”What helps you feel involved and in partnership with me?”, ”What could I do more of, less of, or differently?”
• Pause: You may not like what you hear. Do not comment on what has been said.
• Thank them for their feedback - remember, it is important data! It is their felt experience of you.
• Create a space and time to reflect on the feedback you received. Keep an open mind. Be honest with yourself. Work with a coach or mutual mentor. What new information do you have about yourself? What can you learn?

Here are some questions to ask yourself in a reflective moment. Some of them might be suitable to work on as a team as well:

• how could you spend your life learning to be yourself more effectively?
• how can you be clear about your values(you will need to spend time working out what they actually are)? What does it mean not to compromise them? How can you find ways to consistently apply and engage with them?
• how can you seek to understand before seeking to be understood?
• You are a powerful role model and people will have “names” for you (including when you are not in the room). Do you leave people with more or less energy? What’s it like to be on the receiving end of me (you can only know if you seek and get honest feedback)? Does the room light up when you enter it or when you leave it?
• what you permit, you promote. What are you permitting?
• clear is kind, unclear is unkind (Brene Brown). How clear are you?
• if we want to change ourselves, change our attitude. If we want to change others, change their environment. What sort of environment can you create?

Here are some topics for a team conversation or maybe for 1-2-1 check-ins.

• Consider “in your shoes” sessions with staff. What does a good day with me look like? What does a bad day look like? How can we have more good days together?
• What’s our mutual understanding? What am I getting? What are you getting?
• What is our collective sense of purpose? Where does our individual sense of purpose overlap?
• Reflect on “what does a good day for me look like?” How does it look for each of you?
• “Here’s what I’ve understood. What have I missed?”
• “If something isn’t working, tell me and then let’s talk about it.”
• “Tell me what’s gone well and what I could do better.”
• “Are you getting what you need from me and if not, what do you need?”

For more on Impact Intended and Impact Felt and Future Engage Deliver, see Leadership Plain and Simple by Steve Radcliffe, edited by Anthony Landale.

Perhaps it is counter intuitive but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that our maximum productivity and strategic edge come, not from working as fast and hard as possible but, from balancing and pacing our lives. See also five ways to wellbeing.

Are you working ‘in flow’ or ‘at pace’ or ‘on tilt’?

In flow

A ‘flow’ state (also known as being ‘in the zone’) is the mental and physical state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energised focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. Flow is characterised by complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting loss in one's sense of space and time.

It is not usually possible to remain in a flow state for long periods but it is possible to develop a continuous practice of repeated use of flow in sports, music or work, etc. Flow states can be highly productive, effective and creative.

At pace

When you are working ‘at pace’, you are working hard and fast for good reasons. There may be a crisis of some sort, a series of rapid external deadlines or continuous or increasing delivery pressures.

You are aware of your overarching strategic purpose.

You have built in ‘team time’ that allows the team to talk about purpose, personal motivation and emotions, as well as practicalities and tactics. Your secret weapon is the diversity on your team; everyone is appreciated for their unique talents, and you use ‘bird table’ or other mechanisms to ensure that you are all well informed and focused on the right tasks. Everyone is comfortable to ask for help. You work together to ensure that each individual has built in personal recovery time between bouts of ‘full on’ engagement and you use re-entry after recovery (holidays, training courses, etc.) as an opportunity to spot and act on improvement opportunities.

On tilt

Everything is going very fast! You are beginning to feel out of control, or you may have for some time. There are self-imposed and external deadlines, but it is hard to tell which are which. The goal posts seem to move around. You cannot remember the last time you discussed your purpose or strategic aims.

No one is asking you how you really are, and you haven’t got time to ask anyone else. Delivery pressures are continuous and increasing with no time to assess your progress. Introducing short spacious and caring practices could make a big difference, but it is hard to see how to fit these in.

Summary

As long as you have built in reflective periods and learning time, ‘in flow’ or ‘at pace’ are likely to see you succeed. ‘On tilt’ will always hold you back from your best results.

It is possible to shift between these states.

What can you do to shift your working patterns from tilt to pace to flow?

Afterthought

What would happen if every moment where you felt resistance to the work at hand or weren’t in the flow, you put your pen down, closed your laptop, and meditated?

What if you made it your priority to listen to your intuition and reconsider before continuing? What if this were policy? And everyone did it? What if it were the norm to say: “I really feel this isn’t the best use of my energy”?

How can we enable the people of Wales to use their strengths and energy well? How can we encourage good collaboration where people do what they enjoy doing and do it well, continuously learning and providing their flow in service to others?