John’s Idea

Fantastic evening with colleagues at the National e-Government Award Ceremony.  The best bit was definitely that opening the envelop moment and the announcement that the IDeA COP initiative had won in the Leadership and Professionalism category.  Absolutely fantastic - Steve Dale and Micheal Norton could hardly control themselves.   Fortunately I wasn’t asked to make an acceptance speech - it would have been hideously embarrassing.  The core band of enthusiasts know who they are and the 26,000 people now registered on the network bear witness to their achievement.   I guess if forced to single out one person it would be Lawrence Hall,  largely because he had enough confidence in the programme to submit it for competition.  Lawrence is the one holding the award in the picture.

I must admit its much more fun going to an awards ceremony when you have a chance of winning something.  As a director at the IDeA I go to quite a few, but not as a competitor.  Its easy to be cynical about awards ceremonies but they definitely are an opportunity to confirm that something has been achieved and to celebrate it.

COPs are not the IDeA’s only social media success.  The National Graduate Development Programme has also just won a recruitment industry award (the top award) for its video content on the recruitment web site. 

The concept of “action learning” has always been central to the design of IDeA improvement programmes.  A search on IDeA Knowledge pulls up 102 references and the Agency supports, or has supported, numerous action learning “sets” as part of its work.

Action learning advocates that people learn through self reflection and that self reflection can be helped by a group of people asking the right sort of questions.  The group asking the questions is the learning set.  The theory of action learning was developed by Professor Reginald Revans who promoted the idea that, for adults in particular, learning comes from people learning with and from others.

The concept is important for the IDeA and provides an intellectual underpinning to the central role of peers in sector (local government) self improvement.   In a peer review councillors and officers challenge colleagues in other councils, and indeed action learning questioning styles are encouraged as part of the process.  In a review both the challenged and challengers benefit and in some situations the peers seem to gain as much from the process as the people being reviewed. 

Hard evidence that self-reflection generates improvement is provided by the research Warwick Business School did into the impact of the Beacon Scheme.  While the Beacon Scheme is designed to identify, celebrate and disseminate best practice, the research established that Beacon Councils, and the staff involved, improved as a consequence of articulating to others why they were good.  Constantly doing this, and a number of councils constantly apply for Beacons Status, encourages an organisational culture of self reflection enhancing the overall capacity for improvement

An area we are starting to reflect on is our approach to working with the sector to generate “best practice”.  Beacons and action learning theory suggest that the process of developing a practice may be as important as the outcome itself.  If we focus on the “case study” or the “tool kit” and forget about how the case study is generated we may be missing an improvement trick.  By commissioning consultants to write the case study its possible to miss some of the self reflection potential associated with  practitioners doing it for themselves.