LGA Group Development Strategy
The Local Government Association Group Development Strategy is forcing everyone in the LGA Group to think hard about how we help Councils. One Strategy concept which is central to our thinking at the IDeA is “experience to advocacy”. Advocacy is fundamentally about getting a better deal from the stakeholders, in particular Government, who impact local government’s ability to operate. Advocacy is more powerful if it is informed directly by the experience of Councils.
How do make the experience advocacy transmission belt work?
A couple of key things have emerged from our thinking. Firstly we need a tighter understanding across the LGA family of what local government’s policy priorities are. Secondly we need a more coherent approach to how we engage with practitioners in the enabling sector experience to be articulated.
On the policy priorities a number of things have happened that help. The new performance framework between central and local government involves a set of agreed outcomes (Local Area Agreements) and these outcomes can be used to identify policy priorities. Of course it is not completely straightforward but the LGA “family” is now moving towards agreeing a shared set of priorities based on real evidence of what Councils are trying to achieve.
We are also to simplifying the approach to engagement. From the IDeA’s point of view this has involved boiling down the description of “what we do” to three core activities:
· Practice development – working with practitioners to develop best and next practice;
· Practice challenge – getting those practitioners to challenge each others performance using that best and next practice;
· Practice support – where councils are struggling with practice finding practitioners who are willing to help them.
Perhaps the key unifying theme is the approach to experience or knowledge. All the work involves working with practitioners (politicians and staff). Building on the IDeA communities of practice approach we can now be much more ambitious about how we engage with practitioners to share experience which can then be used in real time to inform advocacy.
A real example of this, albeit a little esoteric, is the work the IDeA has engaged with around National Indicator 14; the indicator on “avoidable contact”. In terms of the development of both the indicator and the associated guidance, the IDeA engaged in a fairly traditional way with officials from across government and practitioners from across local authorities on how the indicator might work. In July we pushed the boat out and organised an online conference on the CoP engaging directly with some 500 people across local government. This community (and we know which Council’s are not involved as well as those which are) is now exchanging information on a continuous basis and is real-time resource for the LGA in its advocacy role in all things impacting on Council customer service functions.
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Another example of both sharing the practice and supporting advocacy is the recent call for examples around the ways that councils are supporting communities during this economic downturn. Last week we called for examples through the Policy and Performance community of practice for urgent work that the LGA is doing, examples were shared in the CoP and sent directly to the LGA. We’re still collecting examples to share and to be worked up into more formal case studies for the Partnership and Places Library
I’m very pleased to see that CoPs are becoming more integral to the emerging strategy being developed by IDeA and the LGA Group. It could be said that the possibilities and opportunities presented by CoPs for sharing practice and supporting advocay have been slow to gain traction, given they (CoPs) have been around for two years. I’d like to see the IDeA doing more active promotion and marketing of the CoP platform with local authorites, rather than relying primarily on word of mouth and viral marketing. Interestingly enough, most of the news item links to the IDeA CoP platform come from my blog (http://steve-dale.net). It would be good to see the balance tilt more towards links from the LGA family of websites. They must surely have more resources for promotional work than I do!
[...] enouraged by the recent blog from John Hayes (Director of Services at the IDeA) regarding the LGA Group Development Strategy. John recognises the increasingly important role of local government Communities of Practice (CoPs) [...]
I guess as a council widely using communities of practice we are more on the “experience to knowledge” and “knowledge to collaboration”, so hats off to the IDeA for purusing this effort.
I like the ‘experience advocacy transmission belt’. It’s a way of more effectively using evidence from sector-led improvement to inform lobbying and to support councils’ work with their communities.
But I think advocacy will be less effective if it doesn’t bring into play a broad understanding of the improvement (and failure) taking place in councils. Improvement activity also risks becoming reactive to single issues, if not built on a deeper understanding of the direction of improvement. I’d call that thought leadership -which I think oils the wheels of the belt.