John’s Idea

Listened to a really interesting podcast (Thinking Allowed, Radio 4 with Laurie Taylor) on which Sugata Mitra described the Hole-in-the-Wall research project he started in New Dehli in 1999.  The inspiration behind Slum Dog Millionaire, Sugata describes how children, with no assistance, learn how to use a computer which is literally presented to them in a hole-in-the-wall.  While we are rightly worried about the “digital divide”, the experiment demonstrates to me how technology is destroying the traditional barriers to knowledge.  It also challenges many of our presumptions about the essential requirements for “learning”. Children, from families that can’t afford paper and pens, and armed only with natural curiosity, quickly become expert users of technology.  Also reported is the dramatic impact of the introduction of Google on these children’s performance on subjects where access to books had traditionally been such a sharp differentiator. 

Apart from being an inspirational use of technology what has this got to do with the IDeA and knowledge management.  Well to me it is another demonstration of how knowledge is mediated and, given the extent to which existing forms of mediation are being transformed, how we can’t take anything for granted in terms of the way we work as agents involved in knowledge transfer processes.

Of course you still need access to the “hole-in-the-wall” and, as if anticipating this potential objection, the Indian government last week announced a programme to start distributing a $10 PC.

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.

Capital Ambition, the Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership for London, is developing what I think is a really exciting and ground breaking efficiency peer challenge programme.  The IDeA of course pioneered the concept of peer review but this programme, which is being activity supported by the IDeA, breaks new ground.

Encouraging peer working is a central feature of the IDeA mission and perhaps more than anything else the Agency is known for its peer reviews.  Essentially this involves politicians and managers from around local government reviewing the performance of individual councils against a benchmark which relates to overall or specific service performance.  The IDeA manages the process, including the development of the various benchmarks, recruitment of peers and the management of the specific peer review engagements.  The enduring success of the approach and its progressive adoption by other parts of public sector, is a testament to the value of review by sympathetic and informed colleague practitioners.  The intensity of the reviews themselves untaps a resource, perhaps based on mutuality and a sense of shared responsibility, not available to the more traditional consultancy approach to performance review.

Capital Ambition have taken the concept of mutuality a step further and, in the efficiency space, this means all London boroughs agreeing to have an efficiency challenge over the period of a year.  Mutuality also means senior officers volunteering themselves for peer “duty” over the period of the programme.  This is a Capital Ambition initiated and managed programme but given its potential for use elsewhere the IDeA is supporting it as much as it can.

Its important to note that Capital Ambition are calling the peer engagements “challenges” and not “reviews”.  This aim is to be challenging with peers being even tougher than they would be in a peer review.  Rather than help each other identify areas for performance improvement the aspiration of the peer challenge is help councils, as part of their efficiency programme, deliver real cashable savings.

The challenge, and the aim of real cashable savings, means that a different sort of benchmark is needed.  Working with the Society of London Treasurers a “notepad” has been developed which identifies each key area of spend, defines the sort of practice they would expect to see in that area and the metrics associated with that practice.  Before each challenge London councils will assess their performance against the notepad (”the self-assessment”) and this self assessment will then be unpicked (in a friendly way) by peers in the challenge engagement.

The programme is groundbreaking in a number of ways but its the potential around notepad which is particularly exciting for me.  To be contemporary all benchmarks have to be maintained (otherwise we are benchmarking yesterday’s practice) and although the Society of London Treasurers provide the ideal starting point, the aim of Capital Ambition, working with the IDeA, is to turn the notepad into a really dynamic tool which will be constantly refreshed.  The requirement for constant practitioner based refresh takes the initiative right into the heart of the IDeA’s evolving approach to knowledge management strategy particularly the COP initiative.

Partly based on the Capital Ambition concept the IDeA has been able to secure funds from the CLG for an efficiency knowledge hub and we are now working together to understand how we can make the notepad the dynamic centre piece of that hub.  The most obvious input will be the challenges themselves each of which will provide a reality check on its existing value and new practice.  As well as defining best practice engagement through the peer community the notepad/hub should provide a basis for developing next practice and innovation.  This could involve, for example, the identification of a common obstacle and some sort of shared endeavor to overcome this obstacle.  The shared endeavor could be a common investment or it could be agreement to seek a regulatory change or a cost saving change in procedure by a government department.

A key feature of the opportunity provided by the Capital Ambition Efficiency Challenge is its scale.  A significant group of similar councils are having the same challenge in a fairly tight time frame.  The scale makes the maintenance of a dynamic benchmark worthwhile and generates the potential for a really rapid development of ideas (a buzz!).  While no one wants to run before they can walk there seems the obvious potential to enhance the value of the programme as a whole by adopting it in other parts of the country.

Commentators are now echoing the claim made by the Sun newspaper when it stated that it secured the win in the 1992 General Election for the Conservative Party. Yesterday’s media however has now been replaced by Web 2, and instead of the Conservative Party it’s Barack Obama who is the beneficiary.

There has been lots of analysis on the topic but I found the Guardian’s Tech Podcast particulary helpful.

So did the internet secure an election victory for Barack Obama?

If it did what are the lessons for UK local government and indeed local government improvement?

The basic proposition is that Barack Obama used the internet to manage his campaign. There seems to be at least three elements to this: fund raising; supporter and voter engagement; and voter generated content.

The fund raising element of his success is perhaps his best known use of the internet but remarkable non the less. It’s worth remembering that he was up against what was previously the most powerful fund raising Democratic Party machine, the Clinton family, and the extent of his success meant that against McCain he was completely free of the constraints of federal funding. The internet model meant that, in addition to traditional large funding donations, the campaign benefited from a huge number of small sub-hundred dollar contributions which, in addition to financing, strengthened support and created a sense of ownership. An American friend and contributor testified that once registered in the system you were constantly kept in touch with what was going on with further requests for funding (money bombs) hitting you at specific points in the campaign.

Supporter and voter information is key to the whole process and the very first thing you see when you go the Obama website is the registration page. A limited amount of information is asked for, but it provides the campaign with the essentials for supporter and indeed voter mobilisation. The website is impressive but behind it are a whole series of Web 2 features including: mybarackobama.com; facilities to organise your own local campaigning; and mobile phone sign ups and feeds. All these tools are designed for one thing - to get Barack Obama elected. A supporter can go onto the site and get a list of potential voters and start campaigning. As one contributor to the Guardian podcast pointed out it takes $1.50 to get a voter out using a mobile phone compared to $20 to $30 using traditional methods.

Numbers bear witness to the success of the approach. The site generated 1.5 million members who self organised into 35,000 activist groups. The scale of the success will clearly transform thinking for American elections and will inevitably have a impact worldwide. The opportunities are obvious. New forms of political interaction, liberation from the constraints of traditional media (not least in this country highly centralised media ownership and control) and connecting with a whole generation who, until this election, appeared lost to participative democracy. The threats are also apparent however. While the generation of “digital natives” find the new media appealing its not equally familiar and accessible to all groups. It also provides an obvious and already sadly well used route for groups of extremists not sharing the democratic ideals of the Obama campaign.

The election should provide a boost to the work the IDeA has already done on e-democracy and the work of pioneering authorities like the London Boroughs of Richmond and Redbridge (see Redbridge for a particularly interesting example of what can be achieved in this area).

The new community of practice (COP) based approach to knowledge management is providing the IDeA with a radical stimulus, forcing us to rethink the delivery approach to a number of our core programmes.  A good example is the Beacons Scheme.
 
The Beacons Scheme is now 10 years old and its impact on local government improvement has been significant and quantifiable.  It is however tired in format and interest in it from councils is declining.  While the objectives of the scheme remain relevant; identifying and sharing best practice, the methods used now feel outdated and slow.  The process is linear and involves agreeing improvement themes, developing best practice criteria, inviting bids, evaluating bids, awarding beacons status and then sharing the practice.  It is therefore long winded and expensive both to participate in and administer. 
 
So how do we re-envirogate the scheme and deliver the original objectives more efficiently?
 
What we are proposing is literally a Beacons Scheme “revolution”.  We intend  to completely flip the current process on its head with “shared learning” at the start rather than finish .  To achieve this we intend to make “communities of practice” the central feature of the new scheme.
 
So how will it work?
 
Through Local Area Agreements, and other sources of information, we now have a much better understanding about what council priorities are (see my last blog).  We know which councils are interested in which policy outcomes and these councils can then provide the basis for a COP.  By working with the COP to develop ideas about what constitutes best practice (perhaps using a wiki to develop criteria) we can build practice sharing into the process from the beginning.   While we still want to celebrate and promote best practice, awarding beacons status is an output from the process, almost a by-product, rather than the objective.  The award grant associated with beacons status could then used in a more focused way - perhaps through an “agreement” with the COP - to deliver a programme of practice sharing or even development.

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.

The Local Government Association’s Business Strategy Review is forcing the IDeA to think hard about who it is and what it’s for.  For relief however, and for some interesting comparisons, its worth looking around at the impact of market/technology pressures on some other “knowledge” based businesses.

The Guardian is hosting a conference on the Future of Journalism which in content discusses the various pressures the business is facing and in form demonstrates the nature of the response.

Like most major newspapers the Guardian online business is starting to dominate.  With some 18 million online users (including a significant international readership) the writing is on the wall for the traditional newsprint business. Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian’s editor, anticipates that the current printing press upgrade will be last the paper makes.  Traditional circulation is falling, along with advertising revenue, as readers migrate to the internet and advertising revenue is swept up by Google.

The internet is the new channel for newspapers but the means of communicating through the internet are multi-dimensional and two-way.  Content from the Future of Journalism conference is distributed via the internet through videocasts, podcasts and blogs reflecting the media which are being developed for the rest of the paper.  For the IDeA, developing its expertise in online conferences, there are some clear examples to learn from.

The content itself was also really interesting.  From the perspective of innovation (a growing focus of work for the IDeA) the Jonathan Zittrain talk on the Saving the Web explores for me both how innovation happens and how it can be stifled.  More directly relevant for the IDeA was the contribution (and associated debate) from Arianna Huffington founder of the Huffington Post.  Citizen journalists generate the Huffington Post and apparently, made the two most decisive journalist contributions to the democratic presidential candidate campaign.  Putting aside the potential impact of these developments on the politics of local government with the IDeA’s own drive for “user” generated content is again a really interesting parallel. 

In my first blog (first ever) I talked about the transparency of Web 2 - how the silence can be deafening. So while the registrations to the IDeA communities of practice look really great with over 12,500 registered users, the amount of communication actually happening through those communities is not always as impressive. Given this relative silence, the online conference on customer insight, currently taking place on the IDeA CoP platform feels like a real breakthrough.

Ingrid Koehler, and the others responsible, will no doubt reveal all when it’s finished but from where I’m sitting it seems like they did a number of things right. Firstly the topic is something specific and something which is being grappled with now - its really interesting. Secondly interesting content was lined up both in form of presentations and with the active involvement of the presenters throughout the process. Thirdly, it was promoted upfront to an audience known to be interested - the growing registration list provides information on that audience. Fourthly, Ingrid kept the buzz going throughout the event.

No doubt there will be lessons learnt for the next one and Ingrid will share them - for me the small bit of video worked really well - seeing Mary Tetlow bought the whole presentation to life. It also raised the more general question as to whether we should be using more video on the rest of the web site (only one answer really!).

So massive progress, particularly given that its only the second effort. The concept has really been proved. The challenge now is to both develop the technique and to exploit in the huge range of areas where it has obvious application. I’m particularly keen to see how it could be used to promote the practice emerging from the Beacons scheme - getting the authorities acknowledged as experts to both talk to each other and everyone else online seems such an obvious application.

Looking back on my first blog - well only 4 comments so far - not exactly a ringing endorsement. However a lot of people did send me emails. Hopefully people will share their comments with everyone else next time on the blog.

Social networking, Web 2 etc, provides a really exciting opportunity for an organisation like the IDeA. As local government’s improvement agency we exist to help the people who lead councils, and work in them, help each other to do better. In a nutshell this means helping everyone in local government share experiences and talk to each other. Web 2 was made for us!

Our Community of Practice website is our attempt to bring Web 2 into the improvement world. So far so good. The platform supports over 300 communities and with 11,000 participants already registered new registrations are growing at over 1,000 a month.

While things are moving forward the challenges are also apparent. Web 2 is painfully transparent. Unlike the traditional publishing approach associated with Web 1 you know if people are listening and participating - you can really hear the silence. As “local government” is to an extent a pre-defined “community” you can also tell whether you are hitting or missing your target participants. While the management information generated by the CoP site is brilliant, it does mean that there is not so much hype to hide behind.

So what are the challenges - loosely you can categorise them as supply and demand.

On the supply side the IDeA is trying to make Web 2 an integral part of the way we try and make improvement happen. This is challenging our existing portfolio of techniques for encouraging improvement. Of course we know that learning by doing works and that “action learning” is a really powerful way of sharing practice and encouraging change. Our approach to developing and distributing best practice however is much more traditional and developed in the context of the tools we had to do it. For example like many similiar organisations we have a prediliction for “case studies” which we research and publish (in hard as well as soft copy). Of course what we need to get to is real time experience, generated at source, which provokes real time feed back on its value from “users”.

On the demand side we have to accept that there are constraints on both the pace and extent to which people in local government will take advantage of this sort of approach. There are the general issues associated with the adoption of a new means of communication (this is my first ever blog) and there are specific issues associated with local government. In particular, lets be honest, the demographic doesn’t help. As a smug baby boomer I did feel that having similar cultural tastes meant that the generation gap I had with my parents didn’t exist with my children - given the fundamentally different approach they have to communication I’m no longer so sure. The age profile of local governments (councillors and employees) is significantly older than the population as a whole and the adopters of this style of communication in particular.

So, having taking my own personal plunge into this Web 2 pool with this my first blog, I’m hoping I can encourage other local government staff and councilors to use this medium as an additional channel for dialogue and debate, and that the transparency will serve to illustrate that we are all working towards the same goals of better government and improved services for our citizens.