Take the handbrake off: systems change

Eating well sucks. I’m currently in training season for a marathon and doing my best to put the right fuel in for long Sunday Rundays. I’m also on a continual quest to make my life difficult, it seems, by trying to be the kind of mother who does weekly-ish baking for her kid's lunchboxes. These two visions are not aligned. How many date scones can I run this Sunday? The mind boggles.

The policy wonks among you will be familiar with a ‘nudge’ concept. The rest of you might enjoy reading the Blinkist of the appropriately titled book by Thaler and Sunstein. The basic concept is that it’s much easier to influence people’s behaviour by providing an environment that supports ‘good’ choices than to rely on agency, willpower, or sheer determination. The lesson: stop baking if you want to stop eating scones.

I had a blast co-hosting a Morning Out for The Public Sector in Melbourne yesterday morning. I spoke about the frustration of public sector teams who feel like they’re driving around with the handbrake on.

On the one hand, we’re asked to work toward an exciting aspirational outcome with good at its heart. On the other, every attempt to do this is stymied by policy, process, or bureaucracy.

One of the government agencies I work with has a team that is all about supporting communities in shaping their own futures—putting together their own projects, running their own initiatives, and engaging their people. This is great stuff—until you’re one of the community groups that want to be involved and discover that the red tape requires a formal constitution, charitable status, and $2 million in public liability insurance.

Oops.

Making good stuff happen is hard enough at the best of times. But it’s nearly impossible when how we do business directly contradicts our goals and intentions. Achieving strategic coherence means eliminating all the friction points we can find by examining policies, processes, people, budgets, and systems.

How to...  lift the handbrake

• Ask your team (and customers and stakeholders!) what’s making progress hard – trust me, they know!

• Think outside the budget box. More people or funding won’t make any difference if we continue to work the same way. It will be worse because now you have new people to train and new cost codes to account for. Think about systems, policies and processes first.

• Indulge in some dangerous thinking. What if you started from nothing? What if there were no rules? What are the harms you’re trying to prevent? What would minimum prescription and maximum delegation look like?